A Survey on LLM-Based Agents: Common Workflows and Reusable LLM-Profiled Components

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of sophisticated frameworks for developing LLM-based agents. However, the complexity of these frameworks r poses a hurdle for nuanced differentiation at a granular level, a critical aspect for enabling efficient implementations across different frameworks and fostering future research. Hence, the primary purpose of this survey is to facilitate a cohesive understanding of diverse recently proposed frameworks by identifying common workflows and reusable LLM-Profiled Components (LMPCs).

A Survey on LLM-Based Agentic Workflows and LLM-Profiled Components

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed the development of sophisticated agentic workflows, offering improvements over traditional single-path, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting techniques. This survey summarize the common workflows, with the particular focus on LLM-Profiled Components (LMPCs) and ignorance of non-LLM components. The reason behind such exploration is to facilitate a clearer understanding of LLM roles and see how reusabile of the LMPCs.

Rethinking ChatGPT's Success: Usability and Cognitive Behaviors Enabled by Auto-regressive LLMs' Prompting

Over the last decade, a wide range of training and deployment strategies for Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged. Among these, the prompting paradigms of Auto-regressive LLMs (AR-LLMs) have catalyzed a significant surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This paper aims to emphasize the significance of utilizing free-form modalities (forms of input and output) and verbal free-form contexts as user-directed channels (methods for transforming modalities) for downstream deployment. Specifically, we analyze the structure of modalities within both two types of LLMs and six task-specific channels during deployment. From the perspective of users, our analysis introduces and applies the analytical metrics of task customizability, transparency, and complexity to gauge their usability, highlighting the superior nature of AR-LLMs' prompting paradigms. Moreover, we examine the stimulation of diverse cognitive behaviors in LLMs through the adoption of free-form text and verbal contexts, mirroring human linguistic expressions of such behaviors. We then detail four common cognitive behaviors to underscore how AR-LLMs' prompting successfully imitate human-like behaviors using this free-form modality and channel. Lastly, the potential for improving LLM deployment, both as autonomous agents and within multi-agent systems, is identified via cognitive behavior concepts and principles.

GRAMMAR: Grounded and Modular Methodology for Assessment of Domain-Specific Retrieval-Augmented Language Model

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) systems have been actively studied and deployed across various industries to query on domain-specific knowledge base. However, evaluating these systems presents unique challenges due to the scarcity of domain-specific queries and corresponding ground truths, as well as a lack of systematic approaches to diagnosing the cause of failure cases -- whether they stem from knowledge deficits or issues related to system robustness. To address these challenges, we introduce GRAMMAR (GRounded And Modular Methodology for Assessment of RAG), an evaluation framework comprising two key elements: 1) a data generation process that leverages relational databases and LLMs to efficiently produce scalable query-answer pairs. This method facilitates the separation of query logic from linguistic variations for enhanced debugging capabilities; and 2) an evaluation framework that differentiates knowledge gaps from robustness and enables the identification of defective modules. Our empirical results underscore the limitations of current reference-free evaluation approaches and the reliability of GRAMMAR to accurately identify model vulnerabilities.

One-for-All: Towards Universal Domain Translation with a Single StyleGAN

In this paper, we propose a novel translation model, UniTranslator, for transforming representations between visually distinct domains under conditions of limited training data and significant visual differences. The main idea behind our approach is leveraging the domain-neutral capabilities of CLIP as a bridging mechanism, while utilizing a separate module to extract abstract, domain-agnostic semantics from the embeddings of both the source and target realms. Fusing these abstract semantics with target-specific semantics results in a transformed embedding within the CLIP space. To bridge the gap between the disparate worlds of CLIP and StyleGAN, we introduce a new non-linear mapper, the CLIP2P mapper. Utilizing CLIP embeddings, this module is tailored to approximate the latent distribution in the P space, effectively acting as a connector between these two spaces. The proposed UniTranslator is versatile and capable of performing various tasks, including style mixing, stylization, and translations, even in visually challenging scenarios across different visual domains. Notably, UniTranslator generates high-quality translations that showcase domain relevance, diversity, and improved image quality. UniTranslator surpasses the performance of existing general-purpose models and performs well against specialized models in representative tasks. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.

Make Text Unlearnable: Exploiting Effective Patterns to Protect Personal Data

This paper addresses the ethical concerns arising from the use of unauthorized public data in deep learning models and proposes a novel solution. Specifically, building on the work of Huang et al. (2021), we extend their bi-level optimization approach to generate unlearnable text using a gradient-based search technique. However, although effective, this approach faces practical limitations, including the requirement of batches of instances and model architecture knowledge that is not readily accessible to ordinary users with limited access to their own data. Furthermore, even with semantic-preserving constraints, unlearnable noise can alter the text's semantics. To address these challenges, we extract simple patterns from unlearnable text produced by bi-level optimization and demonstrate that the data remains unlearnable for unknown models. Additionally, these patterns are not instance- or dataset-specific, allowing users to readily apply them to text classification and question-answering tasks, even if only a small proportion of users implement them on their public content. We also open-source codes to generate unlearnable text and assess unlearnable noise to benefit the public and future studies.

Can Pretrained Language Models Derive Correct Semantics from Corrupt Subwords under Noise?

For Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), their susceptibility to noise has recently been linked to subword segmentation. However, it is unclear which aspects of segmentation affect their understanding. This study assesses the robustness of PLMs against various disrupted segmentation caused by noise. An evaluation framework for subword segmentation, named Contrastive Lexical Semantic (CoLeS) probe, is proposed. It provides a systematic categorization of segmentation corruption under noise and evaluation protocols by generating contrastive datasets with canonical-noisy word pairs. Experimental results indicate that PLMs are unable to accurately compute word meanings if the noise introduces completely different subwords, small subword fragments, or a large number of additional subwords, particularly when they are inserted within other subwords.

A Survey on Out-of-Distribution Evaluation of Neural NLP Models

Adversarial robustness, domain generalization and dataset biases are three active lines of research contributing to out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation on neural NLP models. However, a comprehensive, integrated discussion of the three research lines is still lacking in the literature. In this survey, we 1) compare the three lines of research under a unifying definition; 2) summarize the data-generating processes and evaluation protocols for each line of research; and 3) emphasize the challenges and opportunities for future work.

Learning to Self-Train for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification

Few-shot classification (FSC) is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled training data (e.g. only one labeled data point per class). Meta-learning has shown to achieve promising results by learning to initialize a classification model for FSC. In this paper we propose a novel semi-supervised meta-learning method called learning to self-train (LST) that leverages unlabeled data and specifically meta-learns how to cherry-pick and label such unsupervised data to further improve performance. To this end, we train the LST model through a large number of semi-supervised few-shot tasks. On each task, we train a few-shot model to predict pseudo labels for unlabeled data, and then iterate the self-training steps on labeled and pseudo-labeled data with each step followed by fine-tuning. We additionally learn a soft weighting network (SWN) to optimize the self-training weights of pseudo labels so that better ones can contribute more to gradient descent optimization. We evaluate our LST method on two ImageNet benchmarks for semi-supervised few-shot classification and achieve large improvements over the state-of-the-art.

Graph Correspondence Transfer for Person Re-identification

In this paper, we propose a graph correspondence transfer (GCT) approach for person re-identification. Unlike existing methods, the GCT model formulates person re-identification as an off-line graph matching and on-line correspondence transferring problem. In specific, during training, the GCT model aims to learn off-line a set of correspondence templates from positive training pairs with various pose-pair configurations via patch-wise graph matching. During testing, for each pair of test samples, we select a few training pairs with the most similar pose-pair configurations as references, and transfer the correspondences of these references to test pair for feature distance calculation. The matching score is derived by aggregating distances from different references. For each probe image, the gallery image with the highest matching score is the re-identifying result. Compared to existing algorithms, our GCT can handle spatial misalignment caused by large variations in view angles and human poses owing to the benefits of patch-wise graph matching. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks including VIPeR, Road, PRID450S, 3DPES and CUHK01 evidence the superior performance of GCT model over other state-of-the-art methods.