Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations

Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems - systems that are conversational, explainable, and controllable. However, existing literature primarily concentrates on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy, often neglecting the ability to follow instructions. To address this gap, we initially introduce a collection of supervised learning tasks, augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model, aimed at explicitly improving LLMs' proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. Subsequently, we develop a reinforcement learning-based alignment procedure to further strengthen LLMs' aptitude in responding to users' intentions and mitigating formatting errors. Through extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, our method markedly advances the capability of LLMs to comply with instructions within recommender systems, while sustaining a high level of accuracy performance.

ERBench: An Entity-Relationship based Automatically Verifiable Hallucination Benchmark for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performance in various applications, yet their evaluation remains a critical issue. Existing hallucination benchmarks are either static or lack adjustable complexity for thorough analysis. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks due to their accurate knowledge description via functional dependencies. We propose ERBench to automatically convert any relational database into a benchmark based on the entity-relationship (ER) model. Our key idea is to construct questions using the database schema, records, and functional dependencies such that they can be automatically verified. In addition, we use foreign key constraints to join relations and construct multihop questions, which can be arbitrarily complex and used to debug the intermediate answers of LLMs. Finally, ERBench supports continuous evaluation, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct an LLM benchmark using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We observe that better LLMs like GPT-4 can handle a larger variety of question types, but are by no means perfect. Also, correct answers do not necessarily imply correct rationales, which is an important evaluation that ERBench does better than other benchmarks for various question types. Code is available at https: //github.com/DILAB-KAIST/ERBench.

GraphInstruct: Empowering Large Language Models with Graph Understanding and Reasoning Capability

Evaluating and enhancing the general capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has been an important research topic. Graph is a common data structure in the real world, and understanding graph data is a crucial part for advancing general intelligence. To evaluate and enhance the graph understanding abilities of LLMs, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named GraphInstruct, which comprehensively includes 21 classical graph reasoning tasks, providing diverse graph generation pipelines and detailed reasoning steps. Based on GraphInstruct, we further construct GraphLM through efficient instruction-tuning, which shows prominent graph understanding capability. In order to enhance the LLM with graph reasoning capability as well, we propose a step mask training strategy, and construct a model named GraphLM+. As one of the pioneering efforts to enhance the graph understanding and reasoning abilities of LLMs, extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of GraphLM and GraphLM+ over other LLMs. We look forward to more researchers exploring the potential of LLMs in the graph data mining domain through GraphInstruct. Our code for generating GraphInstruct is released publicly at: https://github.com/CGCL-codes/GraphInstruct.

On the Essence and Prospect: An Investigation of Alignment Approaches for Big Models

Big models have achieved revolutionary breakthroughs in the field of AI, but they might also pose potential concerns. Addressing such concerns, alignment technologies were introduced to make these models conform to human preferences and values. Despite considerable advancements in the past year, various challenges lie in establishing the optimal alignment strategy, such as data cost and scalable oversight, and how to align remains an open question. In this survey paper, we comprehensively investigate value alignment approaches. We first unpack the historical context of alignment tracing back to the 1920s (where it comes from), then delve into the mathematical essence of alignment (what it is), shedding light on the inherent challenges. Following this foundation, we provide a detailed examination of existing alignment methods, which fall into three categories: Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Fine-Tuning, and In-context Learning, and demonstrate their intrinsic connections, strengths, and limitations, helping readers better understand this research area. In addition, two emerging topics, personal alignment, and multimodal alignment, are also discussed as novel frontiers in this field. Looking forward, we discuss potential alignment paradigms and how they could handle remaining challenges, prospecting where future alignment will go.

Negating Negatives: Alignment without Human Positive Samples via Distributional Dispreference Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the role of AI, yet also pose potential risks of propagating unethical content. Alignment technologies have been introduced to steer LLMs towards human preference, gaining increasing attention. Despite notable breakthroughs in this direction, existing methods heavily rely on high-quality positive-negative training pairs, suffering from noisy labels and the marginal distinction between preferred and dispreferred response data. Given recent LLMs' proficiency in generating helpful responses, this work pivots towards a new research focus: achieving alignment using solely human-annotated negative samples, preserving helpfulness while reducing harmfulness. For this purpose, we propose Distributional Dispreference Optimization (D$^2$O), which maximizes the discrepancy between the generated responses and the dispreferred ones to effectively eschew harmful information. We theoretically demonstrate that D$^2$O is equivalent to learning a distributional instead of instance-level preference model reflecting human dispreference against the distribution of negative responses. Besides, D$^2$O integrates an implicit Jeffrey Divergence regularization to balance the exploitation and exploration of reference policies and converges to a non-negative one during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable generation quality and surpasses the latest baselines in producing less harmful and more informative responses with better training stability and faster convergence.

Aligning Language Models for Versatile Text-based Item Retrieval

This paper addresses the gap between general-purpose text embeddings and the specific demands of item retrieval tasks. We demonstrate the shortcomings of existing models in capturing the nuances necessary for zero-shot performance on item retrieval tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose generate in-domain dataset from ten tasks tailored to unlocking models' representation ability for item retrieval. Our empirical studies demonstrate that fine-tuning embedding models on the dataset leads to remarkable improvements in a variety of retrieval tasks. We also illustrate the practical application of our refined model in a conversational setting, where it enhances the capabilities of LLM-based Recommender Agents like Chat-Rec. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/RecAI.

ToolNet: Connecting Large Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Graph

While achieving remarkable progress in a broad range of tasks, large language models (LLMs) remain significantly limited in properly using massive external tools. Existing in-context learning approaches simply format tools into a list of plain text descriptions and input them to LLMs, from which, LLMs generate a sequence of tool calls to solve problems step by step. Such a paradigm ignores the intrinsic dependency between tools and offloads all reasoning loads to LLMs, making them restricted to a limited number of specifically designed tools. It thus remains challenging for LLMs to operate on a library of massive tools, casting a great limitation when confronted with real-world scenarios. This paper proposes ToolNet, a plug-and-play framework that scales up the number of tools to thousands with a moderate increase in token consumption. ToolNet organizes tools into a directed graph. Each node represents a tool, and weighted edges denote tool transition. Starting from an initial tool node, an LLM navigates in the graph by iteratively choosing the next one from its successors until the task is resolved. Extensive experiments show that ToolNet can achieve impressive results in challenging multi-hop tool learning datasets and is resilient to tool failures.

High-Frequency-aware Hierarchical Contrastive Selective Coding for Representation Learning on Text-attributed Graphs

We investigate node representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs), where nodes are associated with text information. Although recent studies on graph neural networks (GNNs) and pretrained language models (PLMs) have exhibited their power in encoding network and text signals, respectively, less attention has been paid to delicately coupling these two types of models on TAGs. Specifically, existing GNNs rarely model text in each node in a contextualized way; existing PLMs can hardly be applied to characterize graph structures due to their sequence architecture. To address these challenges, we propose HASH-CODE, a High-frequency Aware Spectral Hierarchical Contrastive Selective Coding method that integrates GNNs and PLMs into a unified model. Different from previous "cascaded architectures" that directly add GNN layers upon a PLM, our HASH-CODE relies on five self-supervised optimization objectives to facilitate thorough mutual enhancement between network and text signals in diverse granularities. Moreover, we show that existing contrastive objective learns the low-frequency component of the augmentation graph and propose a high-frequency component (HFC)-aware contrastive learning objective that makes the learned embeddings more distinctive. Extensive experiments on six real-world benchmarks substantiate the efficacy of our proposed approach. In addition, theoretical analysis and item embedding visualization provide insights into our model interoperability.

KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models

Automatic evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are hindered by data contamination, leading to inflated assessments of their effectiveness. Existing strategies, which aim to detect contaminated texts, focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. In this paper, we introduce KIEval, a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework, which incorporates an LLM-powered "interactor" role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. Starting with a question in a conventional LLM benchmark involving domain-specific knowledge, KIEval utilizes dynamically generated, multi-round, and knowledge-focused dialogues to determine whether a model's response is merely a recall of benchmark answers or demonstrates a deep comprehension to apply knowledge in more complex conversations. Extensive experiments on seven leading LLMs across five datasets validate KIEval's effectiveness and generalization. We also reveal that data contamination brings no contribution or even negative effect to models' real-world applicability and understanding, and existing contamination detection methods for LLMs can only identify contamination in pre-training but not during supervised fine-tuning.

DyVal 2: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models by Meta Probing Agents

Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has raised great concerns in the community due to the issue of data contamination. Existing work designed evaluation protocols using well-defined algorithms for specific tasks, which cannot be easily extended to diverse scenarios. Moreover, current evaluation benchmarks can only provide the overall benchmark results and cannot support a fine-grained and multifaceted analysis of LLMs' abilities. In this paper, we propose meta probing agents (MPA), a general dynamic evaluation protocol inspired by psychometrics to evaluate LLMs. MPA is the key component of DyVal 2, which naturally extends the previous DyVal~\citep{zhu2023dyval}. MPA designs the probing and judging agents to automatically transform an original evaluation problem into a new one following psychometric theory on three basic cognitive abilities: language understanding, problem solving, and domain knowledge. These basic abilities are also dynamically configurable, allowing multifaceted analysis. We conducted extensive evaluations using MPA and found that most LLMs achieve poorer performance, indicating room for improvement. Our multifaceted analysis demonstrated the strong correlation between the basic abilities and an implicit Matthew effect on model size, i.e., larger models possess stronger correlations of the abilities. MPA can also be used as a data augmentation approach to enhance LLMs.