Retrieval-Enhanced Knowledge Editing for Multi-Hop Question Answering in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in question-answering tasks but often struggle to integrate real-time knowledge updates, leading to potentially outdated or inaccurate responses. This problem becomes even more challenging when dealing with multi-hop questions since they require LLMs to update and integrate multiple knowledge pieces relevant to the questions. To tackle the problem, we propose the Retrieval-Augmented model Editing (RAE) framework tailored for multi-hop question answering. RAE first retrieves edited facts and then refines the language model through in-context learning. Specifically, our retrieval approach, based on mutual information maximization, leverages the reasoning abilities of LLMs to identify chain facts that na\"ive similarity-based searches might miss. Additionally, our framework incorporates a pruning strategy to eliminate redundant information from the retrieved facts, which enhances the editing accuracy and mitigates the hallucination problem. Our framework is supported by theoretical justification for its fact retrieval efficacy. Finally, comprehensive evaluation across various LLMs validates RAE's ability in providing accurate answers with updated knowledge.

Usable XAI: 10 Strategies Towards Exploiting Explainability in the LLM Era

Explainable AI (XAI) refers to techniques that provide human-understandable insights into the workings of AI models. Recently, the focus of XAI is being extended towards Large Language Models (LLMs) which are often criticized for their lack of transparency. This extension calls for a significant transformation in XAI methodologies because of two reasons. First, many existing XAI methods cannot be directly applied to LLMs due to their complexity advanced capabilities. Second, as LLMs are increasingly deployed across diverse industry applications, the role of XAI shifts from merely opening the "black box" to actively enhancing the productivity and applicability of LLMs in real-world settings. Meanwhile, unlike traditional machine learning models that are passive recipients of XAI insights, the distinct abilities of LLMs can reciprocally enhance XAI. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Usable XAI in the context of LLMs by analyzing (1) how XAI can benefit LLMs and AI systems, and (2) how LLMs can contribute to the advancement of XAI. We introduce 10 strategies, introducing the key techniques for each and discussing their associated challenges. We also provide case studies to demonstrate how to obtain and leverage explanations. The code used in this paper can be found at: https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/UsableXAI_LLM.

InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models

This paper introduces the Decomposed Requirements Following Ratio (DRFR), a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to follow instructions. Addressing a gap in current methodologies, DRFR breaks down complex instructions into simpler criteria, facilitating a detailed analysis of LLMs' compliance with various aspects of tasks. Alongside this metric, we present InFoBench, a benchmark comprising 500 diverse instructions and 2,250 decomposed questions across multiple constraint categories. Our experiments compare DRFR with traditional scoring methods and explore annotation sources, including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4. The findings demonstrate DRFR's higher reliability and the effectiveness of using GPT-4 as a cost-efficient annotator. The evaluation of several advanced LLMs using this framework reveals their strengths and areas needing improvement, particularly in complex instruction-following. This study contributes a novel metric and benchmark, offering insights for future LLM development and evaluation.

Applying Large Language Models and Chain-of-Thought for Automatic Scoring

This study investigates the application of large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with Chain-of-Though (CoT)in the automatic scoring of student-written responses to science assessments. We focused on overcoming the challenges of accessibility, technical complexity, and lack of explainability that have previously limited the use of automatic assessment tools among researchers and educators. We used a testing dataset comprising six assessment tasks (three binomial and three trinomial) with 1,650 student responses. We employed six prompt engineering strategies, combining zero-shot or few-shot learning with CoT, either alone or alongside item stem and scoring rubrics. Results indicated that few-shot (acc = .67) outperformed zero-shot learning (acc = .60), with 12.6\% increase. CoT, when used without item stem and scoring rubrics, did not significantly affect scoring accuracy (acc = .60). However, CoT prompting paired with contextual item stems and rubrics proved to be a significant contributor to scoring accuracy (13.44\% increase for zero-shot; 3.7\% increase for few-shot). Using a novel approach PPEAS, we found a more balanced accuracy across different proficiency categories, highlighting the importance of domain-specific reasoning in enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs in scoring tasks. Additionally, we also found that GPT-4 demonstrated superior performance over GPT-3.5 in various scoring tasks, showing 8.64\% difference. The study revealed that the single-call strategy with GPT-4, particularly using greedy sampling, outperformed other approaches, including ensemble voting strategies. This study demonstrates the potential of LLMs in facilitating automatic scoring, emphasizing that CoT enhances accuracy, particularly when used with item stem and scoring rubrics.

From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, demonstrating powerful instruction-following capabilities across diverse tasks. Instruction fine-tuning is critical in enabling LLMs to align with user intentions and effectively follow instructions. In this work, we investigate how instruction fine-tuning modifies pre-trained models, focusing on two perspectives: instruction recognition and knowledge evolution. To study the behavior shift of LLMs, we employ a suite of local and global explanation methods, including a gradient-based approach for input-output attribution and techniques for interpreting patterns and concepts in self-attention and feed-forward layers. Our findings reveal three significant impacts of instruction fine-tuning: 1) It empowers LLMs to better recognize the instruction parts from user prompts, thereby facilitating high-quality response generation and addressing the ``lost-in-the-middle'' issue observed in pre-trained models; 2) It aligns the knowledge stored in feed-forward layers with user-oriented tasks, exhibiting minimal shifts across linguistic levels. 3) It facilitates the learning of word-word relations with instruction verbs through the self-attention mechanism, particularly in the lower and middle layers, indicating enhanced recognition of instruction words. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the behavior shifts in LLMs after instruction fine-tuning and lay the groundwork for future research aimed at interpreting and optimizing LLMs for various applications. We will release our code and data soon.

Towards Personalized Cold-Start Recommendation with Prompts

Recommender systems play a crucial role in helping users discover information that aligns with their interests based on their past behaviors. However, developing personalized recommendation systems becomes challenging when historical records of user-item interactions are unavailable, leading to what is known as the system cold-start recommendation problem. This issue is particularly prominent in start-up businesses or platforms with insufficient user engagement history. Previous studies focus on user or item cold-start scenarios, where systems could make recommendations for new users or items but are still trained with historical user-item interactions in the same domain, which cannot solve our problem. To bridge the gap, our research introduces an innovative and effective approach, capitalizing on the capabilities of pre-trained language models. We transform the recommendation process into sentiment analysis of natural languages containing information of user profiles and item attributes, where the sentiment polarity is predicted with prompt learning. By harnessing the extensive knowledge housed within language models, the prediction can be made without historical user-item interaction records. A benchmark is also introduced to evaluate the proposed method under the cold-start setting, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to tackle the system cold-start recommendation problem. The benchmark and implementation of the method are available at https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/PromptRec.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for Education

Artificial general intelligence (AGI) has gained global recognition as a future technology due to the emergence of breakthrough large language models and chatbots such as GPT-4 and ChatGPT, respectively. AGI aims to replicate human intelligence through computer systems, which is one of the critical technologies having the potential to revolutionize the field of education. Compared to conventional AI models, typically designed for a limited range of tasks, demand significant amounts of domain-specific data for training and may not always consider intricate interpersonal dynamics in education. AGI, driven by the recent large pre-trained models, represents a significant leap in the capability of machines to perform tasks that require human-level intelligence, such as reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and even understanding human emotions and social interactions. This work reviews AGI's key concepts, capabilities, scope, and potential within future education, including setting educational goals, designing pedagogy and curriculum, and performing assessments. We also provide rich discussions over various ethical issues in education faced by AGI and how AGI will affect human educators. The development of AGI necessitates interdisciplinary collaborations between educators and AI engineers to advance research and application efforts.

Black-box Backdoor Defense via Zero-shot Image Purification

Backdoor attacks inject poisoned data into the training set, resulting in misclassification of the poisoned samples during model inference. Defending against such attacks is challenging, especially in real-world black-box settings where only model predictions are available. In this paper, we propose a novel backdoor defense framework that can effectively defend against various attacks through zero-shot image purification (ZIP). Our proposed framework can be applied to black-box models without requiring any internal information about the poisoned model or any prior knowledge of the clean/poisoned samples. Our defense framework involves a two-step process. First, we apply a linear transformation on the poisoned image to destroy the trigger pattern. Then, we use a pre-trained diffusion model to recover the missing semantic information removed by the transformation. In particular, we design a new reverse process using the transformed image to guide the generation of high-fidelity purified images, which can be applied in zero-shot settings. We evaluate our ZIP backdoor defense framework on multiple datasets with different kinds of attacks. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our ZIP framework compared to state-of-the-art backdoor defense baselines. We believe that our results will provide valuable insights for future defense methods for black-box models.

A Survey of Graph Prompting Methods: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges

While deep learning has achieved great success on various tasks, the task-specific model training notoriously relies on a large volume of labeled data. Recently, a new training paradigm of ``pre-train, prompt, predict'' has been proposed to improve model generalization ability with limited labeled data. The main idea is that, based on a pre-trained model, the prompting function uses a template to augment input samples with indicative context and reformalizes the target task to one of the pre-training tasks. In this survey, we provide a unique review of prompting methods from the graph perspective. Graph data has served as structured knowledge repositories in various systems by explicitly modeling the interaction between entities. Compared with traditional methods, graph prompting functions could induce task-related context and apply templates with structured knowledge. The pre-trained model is then adaptively generalized for future samples. In particular, we introduce the basic concepts of graph prompt learning, organize the existing work of designing graph prompting functions, and describe their applications and challenges to a variety of machine learning problems. This survey attempts to bridge the gap between structured graphs and prompt design to facilitate future methodology development.

NoPPA: Non-Parametric Pairwise Attention Random Walk Model for Sentence Representation

We propose a novel non-parametric/un-trainable language model, named Non-Parametric Pairwise Attention Random Walk Model (NoPPA), to generate sentence embedding only with pre-trained word embedding and pre-counted word frequency. To the best we know, this study is the first successful attempt to break the constraint on bag-of-words assumption with a non-parametric attention mechanism. We evaluate our method on eight different downstream classification tasks. The experiment results show that NoPPA outperforms all kinds of bag-of-words-based methods in each dataset and provides a comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art non-parametric methods on average. Furthermore, visualization supports that NoPPA can understand contextual topics, common phrases, and word causalities. Our model is available at https://github.com/JacksonWuxs/NoPPA.