Agent Fine-tuning through Distillation for Domain-specific LLMs in Microdomains

Agentic large language models (LLMs) have become prominent for autonomously interacting with external environments and performing multi-step reasoning tasks. Most approaches leverage these capabilities via in-context learning with few-shot prompts, but this often results in lengthy inputs and higher computational costs. Agent fine-tuning offers an alternative by enabling LLMs to internalize procedural reasoning and domain-specific knowledge through training on relevant data and demonstration trajectories. While prior studies have focused on general domains, their effectiveness in specialized technical microdomains remains unclear. This paper explores agent fine-tuning for domain adaptation within Hitachi's JP1 middleware, a microdomain for specialized IT operations. We fine-tuned LLMs using JP1-specific datasets derived from domain manuals and distilled reasoning trajectories generated by LLMs themselves, enhancing decision making accuracy and search efficiency. During inference, we used an agentic prompt with retrieval-augmented generation and introduced a context-answer extractor to improve information relevance. On JP1 certification exam questions, our method achieved a 14% performance improvement over the base model, demonstrating the potential of agent fine-tuning for domain-specific reasoning in complex microdomains.

Web Page Classification using LLMs for Crawling Support

A web crawler is a system designed to collect web pages, and efficient crawling of new pages requires appropriate algorithms. While website features such as XML sitemaps and the frequency of past page updates provide important clues for accessing new pages, their universal application across diverse conditions is challenging. In this study, we propose a method to efficiently collect new pages by classifying web pages into two types, "Index Pages" and "Content Pages," using a large language model (LLM), and leveraging the classification results to select index pages as starting points for accessing new pages. We construct a dataset with automatically annotated web page types and evaluate our approach from two perspectives: the page type classification performance and coverage of new pages. Experimental results demonstrate that the LLM-based method outperformed baseline methods in both evaluation metrics.

Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Principled Synthetic Logic Corpus

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving a wide range of tasks, yet they have struggled with reasoning. To address this, we propose $\textbf{Additional Logic Training (ALT)}$, which aims to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities by program-generated logical reasoning samples. We first establish principles for designing high-quality samples by integrating symbolic logic theory and previous empirical insights. Then, based on these principles, we construct a synthetic corpus named $\textbf{Formal Logic Deduction Diverse}$ ($\textbf{FLD}$$^{\times 2}$), comprising numerous samples of multi-step deduction with unknown facts, diverse reasoning rules, diverse linguistic expressions, and challenging distractors. Finally, we empirically show that ALT on FLD$^{\times2}$ substantially enhances the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3.1-70B. Improvements include gains of up to 30 points on logical reasoning benchmarks, up to 10 points on math and coding benchmarks, and 5 points on the benchmark suite BBH.

Layout Generation Agents with Large Language Models

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for customizable 3D virtual spaces. Due to the significant human effort required to create these virtual spaces, there is a need for efficiency in virtual space creation. While existing studies have proposed methods for automatically generating layouts such as floor plans and furniture arrangements, these methods only generate text indicating the layout structure based on user instructions, without utilizing the information obtained during the generation process. In this study, we propose an agent-driven layout generation system using the GPT-4V multimodal large language model and validate its effectiveness. Specifically, the language model manipulates agents to sequentially place objects in the virtual space, thus generating layouts that reflect user instructions. Experimental results confirm that our proposed method can generate virtual spaces reflecting user instructions with a high success rate. Additionally, we successfully identified elements contributing to the improvement in behavior generation performance through ablation study.

Text Retrieval with Multi-Stage Re-Ranking Models

The text retrieval is the task of retrieving similar documents to a search query, and it is important to improve retrieval accuracy while maintaining a certain level of retrieval speed. Existing studies have reported accuracy improvements using language models, but many of these do not take into account the reduction in search speed that comes with increased performance. In this study, we propose three-stage re-ranking model using model ensembles or larger language models to improve search accuracy while minimizing the search delay. We ranked the documents by BM25 and language models, and then re-ranks by a model ensemble or a larger language model for documents with high similarity to the query. In our experiments, we train the MiniLM language model on the MS-MARCO dataset and evaluate it in a zero-shot setting. Our proposed method achieves higher retrieval accuracy while reducing the retrieval speed decay.

LARCH: Large Language Model-based Automatic Readme Creation with Heuristics

Writing a readme is a crucial aspect of software development as it plays a vital role in managing and reusing program code. Though it is a pain point for many developers, automatically creating one remains a challenge even with the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), because it requires generating an abstract description from thousands of lines of code. In this demo paper, we show that LLMs are capable of generating a coherent and factually correct readmes if we can identify a code fragment that is representative of the repository. Building upon this finding, we developed LARCH (LLM-based Automatic Readme Creation with Heuristics) which leverages representative code identification with heuristics and weak supervision. Through human and automated evaluations, we illustrate that LARCH can generate coherent and factually correct readmes in the majority of cases, outperforming a baseline that does not rely on representative code identification. We have made LARCH open-source and provided a cross-platform Visual Studio Code interface and command-line interface, accessible at https://github.com/hitachi-nlp/larch. A demo video showcasing LARCH's capabilities is available at https://youtu.be/ZUKkh5ED-O4.

Learning Deductive Reasoning from Synthetic Corpus based on Formal Logic

We study a synthetic corpus-based approach for language models (LMs) to acquire logical deductive reasoning ability. The previous studies generated deduction examples using specific sets of deduction rules. However, these rules were limited or otherwise arbitrary. This can limit the generalizability of acquired deductive reasoning ability. We rethink this and adopt a well-grounded set of deduction rules based on formal logic theory, which can derive any other deduction rules when combined in a multistep way. We empirically verify that LMs trained on the proposed corpora, which we name $\textbf{FLD}$ ($\textbf{F}$ormal $\textbf{L}$ogic $\textbf{D}$eduction), acquire more generalizable deductive reasoning ability. Furthermore, we identify the aspects of deductive reasoning ability on which deduction corpora can enhance LMs and those on which they cannot. Finally, on the basis of these results, we discuss the future directions for applying deduction corpora or other approaches for each aspect. We release the code, data, and models.

How do different tokenizers perform on downstream tasks in scriptio continua languages?: A case study in Japanese

This paper investigates the effect of tokenizers on the downstream performance of pretrained language models (PLMs) in scriptio continua languages where no explicit spaces exist between words, using Japanese as a case study. The tokenizer for such languages often consists of a morphological analyzer and a subword tokenizer, requiring us to conduct a comprehensive study of all possible pairs. However, previous studies lack this comprehensiveness. We therefore train extensive sets of tokenizers, build a PLM using each, and measure the downstream performance on a wide range of tasks. Our results demonstrate that each downstream task has a different optimal morphological analyzer, and that it is better to use Byte-Pair-Encoding or Unigram rather than WordPiece as a subword tokenizer, regardless of the type of task.

How does the task complexity of masked pretraining objectives affect downstream performance?

Masked language modeling (MLM) is a widely used self-supervised pretraining objective, where a model needs to predict an original token that is replaced with a mask given contexts. Although simpler and computationally efficient pretraining objectives, e.g., predicting the first character of a masked token, have recently shown comparable results to MLM, no objectives with a masking scheme actually outperform it in downstream tasks. Motivated by the assumption that their lack of complexity plays a vital role in the degradation, we validate whether more complex masked objectives can achieve better results and investigate how much complexity they should have to perform comparably to MLM. Our results using GLUE, SQuAD, and Universal Dependencies benchmarks demonstrate that more complicated objectives tend to show better downstream results with at least half of the MLM complexity needed to perform comparably to MLM. Finally, we discuss how we should pretrain a model using a masked objective from the task complexity perspective.

Controlling keywords and their positions in text generation

One of the challenges in text generation is to control generation as intended by a user. Previous studies have proposed to specify the keywords that should be included in the generated text. However, this is insufficient to generate text which reflect the user intent. For example, placing the important keyword beginning of the text would helps attract the reader's attention, but existing methods do not enable such flexible control. In this paper, we tackle a novel task of controlling not only keywords but also the position of each keyword in the text generation. To this end, we show that a method using special tokens can control the relative position of keywords. Experimental results on summarization and story generation tasks show that the proposed method can control keywords and their positions. We also demonstrate that controlling the keyword positions can generate summary texts that are closer to the user's intent than baseline. We release our code.