MetaTool Benchmark for Large Language Models: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to Use

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Recently, many studies have focused on the tool utilization ability of LLMs. They primarily investigated how LLMs effectively collaborate with given specific tools. However, in scenarios where LLMs serve as intelligent agents, as seen in applications like AutoGPT and MetaGPT, LLMs are expected to engage in intricate decision-making processes that involve deciding whether to employ a tool and selecting the most suitable tool(s) from a collection of available tools to fulfill user requests. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MetaTool, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether LLMs have tool usage awareness and can correctly choose tools. Specifically, we create a dataset called ToolE within the benchmark. This dataset contains various types of user queries in the form of prompts that trigger LLMs to use tools, including both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Subsequently, we set the tasks for both tool usage awareness and tool selection. We define four subtasks from different perspectives in tool selection, including tool selection with similar choices, tool selection in specific scenarios, tool selection with possible reliability issues, and multi-tool selection. We conduct experiments involving nine popular LLMs and find that the majority of them still struggle to effectively select tools, highlighting the existing gaps between LLMs and genuine intelligent agents. However, through the error analysis, we found there is still significant room for improvement. Finally, we conclude with insights for tool developers that follow ChatGPT to provide detailed descriptions that can enhance the tool selection performance of LLMs.

MetaTool Benchmark: Deciding Whether to Use Tools and Which to Use

Large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their impressive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. Recently, many studies have focused on the tool utilization ability of LLMs. They primarily investigated how LLMs effectively collaborate with given specific tools. However, in scenarios where LLMs serve as intelligent agents, as seen in applications like AutoGPT and MetaGPT, LLMs are expected to engage in intricate decision-making processes that involve deciding whether to employ a tool and selecting the most suitable tool(s) from a collection of available tools to fulfill user requests. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce MetaTool, a benchmark designed to evaluate whether LLMs have tool usage awareness and can correctly choose tools. Specifically, we create a dataset called ToolE within the benchmark. This dataset contains various types of user queries in the form of prompts that trigger LLMs to use tools, including both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios. Subsequently, we set the tasks for both tool usage awareness and tool selection. We define four subtasks from different perspectives in tool selection, including tool selection with similar choices, tool selection in specific scenarios, tool selection with possible reliability issues, and multi-tool selection. We conduct experiments involving nine popular LLMs and find that the majority of them still struggle to effectively select tools, highlighting the existing gaps between LLMs and genuine intelligent agents. However, through the error analysis, we found there is still significant room for improvement. Finally, we conclude with insights for tool developers that follow ChatGPT to provide detailed descriptions that can enhance the tool selection performance of LLMs.

Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables

Question answering on tabular data (a.k.a TableQA), which aims at generating answers to questions grounded on a provided table, has gained significant attention recently. Prior work primarily produces concise factual responses through information extraction from individual or limited table cells, lacking the ability to reason across diverse table cells. Yet, the realm of free-form TableQA, which demands intricate strategies for selecting relevant table cells and the sophisticated integration and inference of discrete data fragments, remains mostly unexplored. To this end, this paper proposes a generalized three-stage approach: Table-to- Graph conversion and cell localizing, external knowledge retrieval, and the fusion of table and text (called TAG-QA), to address the challenge of inferring long free-form answers in generative TableQA. In particular, TAG-QA (1) locates relevant table cells using a graph neural network to gather intersecting cells between relevant rows and columns, (2) leverages external knowledge from Wikipedia, and (3) generates answers by integrating both tabular data and natural linguistic information. Experiments showcase the superior capabilities of TAG-QA in generating sentences that are both faithful and coherent, particularly when compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, TAG-QA surpasses the robust pipeline-based baseline TAPAS by 17% and 14% in terms of BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively. Furthermore, TAG-QA outperforms the end-to-end model T5 by 16% and 12% on BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively.

Named Entity Recognition via Machine Reading Comprehension: A Multi-Task Learning Approach

Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to extract and classify entity mentions in the text into pre-defined types (e.g., organization or person name). Recently, many works have been proposed to shape the NER as a machine reading comprehension problem (also termed MRC-based NER), in which entity recognition is achieved by answering the formulated questions related to pre-defined entity types through MRC, based on the contexts. However, these works ignore the label dependencies among entity types, which are critical for precisely recognizing named entities. In this paper, we propose to incorporate the label dependencies among entity types into a multi-task learning framework for better MRC-based NER. We decompose MRC-based NER into multiple tasks and use a self-attention module to capture label dependencies. Comprehensive experiments on both nested NER and flat NER datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed Multi-NER. Experimental results show that Multi-NER can achieve better performance on all datasets.

Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Diverse Title Generation for Stack Overflow Posts with Multiple Sampling Enhanced Transformer

Stack Overflow is one of the most popular programming communities where developers can seek help for their encountered problems. Nevertheless, if inexperienced developers fail to describe their problems clearly, it is hard for them to attract sufficient attention and get the anticipated answers. We propose M$_3$NSCT5, a novel approach to automatically generate multiple post titles from the given code snippets. Developers may use the generated titles to find closely related posts and complete their problem descriptions. M$_3$NSCT5 employs the CodeT5 backbone, which is a pre-trained Transformer model having an excellent language understanding and generation ability. To alleviate the ambiguity issue that the same code snippets could be aligned with different titles under varying contexts, we propose the maximal marginal multiple nucleus sampling strategy to generate multiple high-quality and diverse title candidates at a time for the developers to choose from. We build a large-scale dataset with 890,000 question posts covering eight programming languages to validate the effectiveness of M$_3$NSCT5. The automatic evaluation results on the BLEU and ROUGE metrics demonstrate the superiority of M$_3$NSCT5 over six state-of-the-art baseline models. Moreover, a human evaluation with trustworthy results also demonstrates the great potential of our approach for real-world application.

Collaborative Knowledge Graph Fusion by Exploiting the Open Corpus

To alleviate the challenges of building Knowledge Graphs (KG) from scratch, a more general task is to enrich a KG using triples from an open corpus, where the obtained triples contain noisy entities and relations. It is challenging to enrich a KG with newly harvested triples while maintaining the quality of the knowledge representation. This paper proposes a system to refine a KG using information harvested from an additional corpus. To this end, we formulate our task as two coupled sub-tasks, namely join event extraction (JEE) and knowledge graph fusion (KGF). We then propose a Collaborative Knowledge Graph Fusion Framework to allow our sub-tasks to mutually assist one another in an alternating manner. More concretely, the explorer carries out the JEE supervised by both the ground-truth annotation and an existing KG provided by the supervisor. The supervisor then evaluates the triples extracted by the explorer and enriches the KG with those that are highly ranked. To implement this evaluation, we further propose a Translated Relation Alignment Scoring Mechanism to align and translate the extracted triples to the prior KG. Experiments verify that this collaboration can both improve the performance of the JEE and the KGF.

CODE-MVP: Learning to Represent Source Code from Multiple Views with Contrastive Pre-Training

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in code representation learning, which aims to represent the semantics of source code into distributed vectors. Currently, various works have been proposed to represent the complex semantics of source code from different views, including plain text, Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), and several kinds of code graphs (e.g., Control/Data Flow Graph). However, most of them only consider a single view of source code independently, ignoring the correspondences among different views. In this paper, we propose to integrate different views with the natural-language description of source code into a unified framework with Multi-View contrastive Pre-training, and name our model as CODE-MVP. Specifically, we first extract multiple code views using compiler tools, and learn the complementary information among them under a contrastive learning framework. Inspired by the type checking in compilation, we also design a fine-grained type inference objective in the pre-training. Experiments on three downstream tasks over five datasets demonstrate the superiority of CODE-MVP when compared with several state-of-the-art baselines. For example, we achieve 2.4/2.3/1.1 gain in terms of MRR/MAP/Accuracy metrics on natural language code retrieval, code similarity, and code defect detection tasks, respectively.

Reinforced MOOCs Concept Recommendation in Heterogeneous Information Networks

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which provide a large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web, are becoming a modish way for online and distance education. To help users have a better study experience, many MOOC platforms have provided the services of recommending courses to users. However, we argue that directly recommending a course to users will ignore the expertise levels of different users. To fill this gap, this paper studies the problem of concept recommendation in a more fine-grained view. We propose a novel Heterogeneous Information Networks based Concept Recommender with Reinforcement Learning (HinCRec-RL) incorporated for concept recommendation in MOOCs. Specifically, we first formulate the concept recommendation in MOOCs as a reinforcement learning problem to better model the dynamic interaction among users and knowledge concepts. In addition, to mitigate the data sparsity issue which also exists in many other recommendation tasks, we consider a heterogeneous information network (HIN) among users, courses, videos and concepts, to better learn the semantic representation of users. In particular, we use the meta-paths on HIN to guide the propagation of users' preferences and propose a heterogeneous graph attention network to represent the meta-paths. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments on a real-world dataset from XuetangX, a popular MOOC platform from China. The promising results show that our proposed approach can outperform other baselines.