Is Factuality Decoding a Free Lunch for LLMs? Evaluation on Knowledge Editing Benchmark

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) enables them to convey factual knowledge in a more human-like fashion. Extensive efforts have been made to reduce factual hallucinations by modifying LLMs with factuality decoding. However, they also pose risks of hindering knowledge updates, as they make models overly confident in known facts. In this work, we first revisite the current factuality decoding methods and verified their effectiveness in enhancing factual accuracy. Subsequently, we conduct further evaluation of several strong factuality decoding methods on the knowledge editing benchmark. All these decoding methods significantly diminish the performance of llama2 models compared to their original decoding, with the largest decrease being a staggering 81.3\%. This further indicates that the current existing decoding methods still cannot perfectly address the factual hallucinations, as they overlook the importance of preserving the flexibility for knowledge editing. Therefore, our work suggests that research into factual alignment should simultaneously focus on the effectiveness of knowledge editing.

LPNL: Scalable Link Prediction with Large Language Models

Exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) to graph learning is a emerging endeavor. However, the vast amount of information inherent in large graphs poses significant challenges to this process. This work focuses on the link prediction task and introduces $\textbf{LPNL}$ (Link Prediction via Natural Language), a framework based on large language models designed for scalable link prediction on large-scale heterogeneous graphs. We design novel prompts for link prediction that articulate graph details in natural language. We propose a two-stage sampling pipeline to extract crucial information from the graphs, and a divide-and-conquer strategy to control the input tokens within predefined limits, addressing the challenge of overwhelming information. We fine-tune a T5 model based on our self-supervised learning designed for link prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LPNL outperforms multiple advanced baselines in link prediction tasks on large-scale graphs.

SLANG: New Concept Comprehension of Large Language Models

The dynamic nature of language, particularly evident in the realm of slang and memes on the Internet, poses serious challenges to the adaptability of large language models (LLMs). Traditionally anchored to static datasets, these models often struggle to keep up with the rapid linguistic evolution characteristic of online communities. This research aims to bridge this gap by enhancing LLMs' comprehension of the evolving new concepts on the Internet, without the high cost of continual retraining. In pursuit of this goal, we propose a new benchmark $\textbf{SLANG}$, which can autonomously integrates novel data to stay dataset up-to-date, to assess LLMs' capability in comprehending emerging concepts and an approach $\textbf{FOCUS}$, which uses causal inference to enhance LLMs to understand new phrases and their colloquial context. Our benchmark and approach involves digesting real-world instances of linguistic shifts, serving as contextual beacons, to form more precise and contextually relevant connections between newly emerging expressions and their meanings. The empirical analysis shows that our causal inference-based approach outperforms the traditional models in terms of precision and relevance in the comprehension of Internet slang and memes.

Scalable Link Prediction on Large-Scale Heterogeneous Graphs with Large Language Models

Exploring the application of large-scale language models to graph learning is a novel endeavor. However, the vast amount of information inherent in large graphs poses significant challenges to this process. This paper focuses on the link prediction task and introduces LPNL (Link Prediction via Natural Language), a framework based on a large language model designed for scalable link prediction on large-scale heterogeneous graphs.We design novel prompts for link prediction that articulate graph details in natural language. We propose a two-stage sampling pipeline to extract crucial information from large-scale heterogeneous graphs, and a divide-and-conquer strategy to control the input token count within predefined limits, addressing the challenge of overwhelming information. We fine-tune a T5 model based on our self-supervised learning designed for for link prediction. Extensive experiments on a large public heterogeneous graphs demonstrate that LPNL outperforms various advanced baselines, highlighting its remarkable performance in link prediction tasks on large-scale graphs.

DeepEdit: Knowledge Editing as Decoding with Constraints

We develop a new perspective of knowledge editing for large language models (LLMs) as decoding with constraints. We propose DeepEdit (Depth-first Search based Progressive Decoding for Knowledge Editing), a neuro-symbolic method that improves knowledge editing with better coherence of reasoning, relevance to the question, and awareness of updated knowledge. DeepEdit can be flexibly applied to all black-box LLMs: it does not require any access to the model parameters, representations, or output vocabulary distributions. DeepEdit progressively produces the high-quality reasoning steps towards effective knowledge editing. It utilizes a depth-first search to revise the LLMs' output, which improves the output's informativeness to the input question and awareness of the updated knowledge. Qualitatively, DeepEdit effectively controls LLMs to produce more succinct reasoning in accord with knowledge editing. Quantitatively, DeepEdit yields significant gains on MQuaKE, a challenging multi-hop question-answering dataset with knowledge editing. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/DeepEdit.

Speak Like a Native: Prompting Large Language Models in a Native Style

Existing work has found that the prompt engineering heavily influences the performance of large language models (LLMs). Chain-of-thought (CoT), as a popular prompt engineering technique, prompted LLMs using in-context examples with reasoning steps. In current studies, the few-shot examples of CoT are generally handcrafted by humans. However, how the text style of in-context examples influence the outputs of LLMs still remains under-explored. This paper presents a novel and effective approach, named \textbf{AlignCoT}, to improve the reasoning capability of LLMs by aligning the in-context examples with the native style of LLMs. ``Native'' refers to the inherent characteristic style of LLMs which can be probed by original zero-shot scenarios. AlignCoT is orthogonal to other prompt engineering methods, making it easy to combine with state-of-the-art techniques to further improve the LLMs' performance. We conduct extensive and comprehensive experiments on several benchmarks. The empirical results demonstrate that our AlignCoTsignificantly improves performance over the carefully handcrafted in-context examples. For instance, with GPT-3.5-turbo, we observed a +2.5\% improvement on GSM8K. Furthermore, our AlignCoT consistently improve the performance when combined with other state-of-the-art prompt engineering methods. The source code and dataset will be available at \href{https://github.com/yangzhch6/AlignCoT}{https://github.com/yangzhch6/AlignCoT}.

Primacy Effect of ChatGPT

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have led to promising zero-shot performance in discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. This involves querying the LLM using a prompt containing the question, and the candidate labels to choose from. The question-answering capabilities of ChatGPT arise from its pre-training on large amounts of human-written text, as well as its subsequent fine-tuning on human preferences, which motivates us to ask: Does ChatGPT also inherits humans' cognitive biases? In this paper, we study the primacy effect of ChatGPT: the tendency of selecting the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We have two main findings: i) ChatGPT's decision is sensitive to the order of labels in the prompt; ii) ChatGPT has a clearly higher chance to select the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide additional insights into building more reliable ChatGPT-based solutions. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/PrimacyEffectGPT.

LargeST: A Benchmark Dataset for Large-Scale Traffic Forecasting

Traffic forecasting plays a critical role in smart city initiatives and has experienced significant advancements thanks to the power of deep learning in capturing non-linear patterns of traffic data. However, the promising results achieved on current public datasets may not be applicable to practical scenarios due to limitations within these datasets. First, the limited sizes of them may not reflect the real-world scale of traffic networks. Second, the temporal coverage of these datasets is typically short, posing hurdles in studying long-term patterns and acquiring sufficient samples for training deep models. Third, these datasets often lack adequate metadata for sensors, which compromises the reliability and interpretability of the data. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce the LargeST benchmark dataset. It encompasses a total number of 8,600 sensors with a 5-year time coverage and includes comprehensive metadata. Using LargeST, we perform in-depth data analysis to extract data insights, benchmark well-known baselines in terms of their performance and efficiency, and identify challenges as well as opportunities for future research. We release the datasets and baseline implementations at: https://github.com/liuxu77/LargeST.

A Causal View of Entity Bias in (Large) Language Models

Entity bias widely affects pretrained (large) language models, causing them to excessively rely on (biased) parametric knowledge to make unfaithful predictions. Although causality-inspired methods have shown great potential to mitigate entity bias, it is hard to precisely estimate the parameters of underlying causal models in practice. The rise of black-box LLMs also makes the situation even worse, because of their inaccessible parameters and uncalibrated logits. To address these problems, we propose a specific structured causal model (SCM) whose parameters are comparatively easier to estimate. Building upon this SCM, we propose causal intervention techniques to mitigate entity bias for both white-box and black-box settings. The proposed causal intervention perturbs the original entity with neighboring entities. This intervention reduces specific biasing information pertaining to the original entity while still preserving sufficient common predictive information from similar entities. When evaluated on the relation extraction task, our training-time intervention significantly improves the F1 score of RoBERTa by 5.7 points on EntRED, in which spurious shortcuts between entities and labels are removed. Meanwhile, our in-context intervention effectively reduces the knowledge conflicts between parametric knowledge and contextual knowledge in GPT-3.5 and improves the F1 score by 9.14 points on a challenging test set derived from Re-TACRED.