Abstract:Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely adopted offline preference optimization algorithm, aims to align large language models (LLMs) with human-desired behaviors using pairwise preference data. However, the winning response and the losing response within pairwise data are generated isolatedly, leading to weak correlations between them as well as suboptimal alignment performance. To address this issue, we propose an effective framework named BMC, for bridging and modeling correlations in pairwise data. Firstly, we increase the consistency and informativeness of the pairwise preference signals by targeted modifications, synthesizing a pseudo winning response through improving the losing response based on the winning response. Secondly, we identify that DPO alone is insufficient to model these correlations and capture nuanced variations. Therefore, we propose learning token-level correlations by dynamically leveraging the policy model's confidence during training. Comprehensive experiments on QA, math, and instruction-following tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, significantly surpassing competitive baselines, including DPO. Additionally, our in-depth quantitative analysis reveals the reasons behind our method's superior performance over DPO and showcases its versatility to other DPO variants.
Abstract:Knowledge editing techniques, aiming to efficiently modify a minor proportion of knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without negatively impacting performance across other inputs, have garnered widespread attention. However, existing methods predominantly rely on memorizing the updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. To this end, we propose a Learning to Edit (LTE) framework, focusing on teaching LLMs to apply updated knowledge into input questions, inspired by the philosophy of "Teach a man to fish." LTE features a two-phase process: (i) the Alignment Phase, which fine-tunes LLMs on a meticulously curated parallel dataset to make reliable, in-scope edits while preserving out-of-scope information and linguistic proficiency; and (ii) the Inference Phase, which employs a retrieval-based mechanism for real-time and mass knowledge editing. By comparing our approach with seven advanced baselines across four popular knowledge editing benchmarks and two LLM architectures, we demonstrate LTE's superiority in knowledge editing performance, robustness in both batch and sequential editing, minimal interference on general tasks, and rapid editing speeds. The data and code are available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/LTE.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for complex multi-turn conversations across diverse real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on single-turn evaluations, overlooking the models' capabilities in multi-turn interactions. To address this gap, we introduce MT-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate multi-turn conversational abilities. By analyzing human-LLM conversations, we categorize interaction patterns into four types: recollection, expansion, refinement, and follow-up. We construct multi-turn queries for each category either by augmenting existing datasets or by creating new examples with GPT-4 to avoid data leakage. To study the factors impacting multi-turn abilities, we create single-turn versions of the 1170 multi-turn queries and compare performance. Our evaluation of 11 well-known LLMs shows that while closed-source models generally surpass open-source ones, certain open-source models exceed GPT-3.5-Turbo in specific tasks. We observe significant performance degradation in multi-turn settings compared to single-turn settings in most models, which is not correlated with the models' fundamental capabilities. Moreover, we identify the distance to relevant content and susceptibility to error propagation as the key factors influencing multi-turn performance. MT-Eval is released publicly to encourage future research towards more robust conversational models.
Abstract:3D object detection in Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) space has recently emerged as a prevalent approach in the field of autonomous driving. Despite the demonstrated improvements in accuracy and velocity estimation compared to perspective view methods, the deployment of BEV-based techniques in real-world autonomous vehicles remains challenging. This is primarily due to their reliance on vision-transformer (ViT) based architectures, which introduce quadratic complexity with respect to the input resolution. To address this issue, we propose an efficient BEV-based 3D detection framework called BEVENet, which leverages a convolutional-only architectural design to circumvent the limitations of ViT models while maintaining the effectiveness of BEV-based methods. Our experiments show that BEVENet is 3$\times$ faster than contemporary state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on the NuScenes challenge, achieving a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.456 and a nuScenes detection score (NDS) of 0.555 on the NuScenes validation dataset, with an inference speed of 47.6 frames per second. To the best of our knowledge, this study stands as the first to achieve such significant efficiency improvements for BEV-based methods, highlighting their enhanced feasibility for real-world autonomous driving applications.
Abstract:The ability to follow instructions is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle various real-world applications. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we propose FollowBench, a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs. FollowBench comprehensively includes five different types (i.e., Content, Situation, Style, Format, and Example) of fine-grained constraints. To enable a precise constraint following estimation on diverse difficulties, we introduce a Multi-level mechanism that incrementally adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. To assess whether LLMs' outputs have satisfied every individual constraint, we propose to prompt strong LLMs with constraint-evolution paths to handle challenging open-ended instructions. By evaluating ten closed-source and open-source popular LLMs on FollowBench, we highlight the weaknesses of LLMs in instruction following and point towards potential avenues for future work. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/FollowBench.
Abstract:Automatic high-quality rendering of anime scenes from complex real-world images is of significant practical value. The challenges of this task lie in the complexity of the scenes, the unique features of anime style, and the lack of high-quality datasets to bridge the domain gap. Despite promising attempts, previous efforts are still incompetent in achieving satisfactory results with consistent semantic preservation, evident stylization, and fine details. In this study, we propose Scenimefy, a novel semi-supervised image-to-image translation framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach guides the learning with structure-consistent pseudo paired data, simplifying the pure unsupervised setting. The pseudo data are derived uniquely from a semantic-constrained StyleGAN leveraging rich model priors like CLIP. We further apply segmentation-guided data selection to obtain high-quality pseudo supervision. A patch-wise contrastive style loss is introduced to improve stylization and fine details. Besides, we contribute a high-resolution anime scene dataset to facilitate future research. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both perceptual quality and quantitative performance.
Abstract:Definition modeling is an important task in advanced natural language applications such as understanding and conversation. Since its introduction, it focus on generating one definition for a target word or phrase in a given context, which we refer to as Single Definition Modeling (SDM). However, this approach does not adequately model the correlations and patterns among different contexts and definitions of words. In addition, the creation of a training dataset for SDM requires significant human expertise and effort. In this paper, we carefully design a new task called Multiple Definition Modeling (MDM) that pool together all contexts and definition of target words. We demonstrate the ease of creating a model as well as multiple training sets automatically. % In the experiments, we demonstrate and analyze the benefits of MDM, including improving SDM's performance by using MDM as the pretraining task and its comparable performance in the zero-shot setting.
Abstract:The practice of transferring knowledge from a sophisticated, closed-source large language model (LLM) to a compact, open-source LLM has garnered considerable attention. Previous works have focused on a unidirectional knowledge distillation way by aligning the responses of the student model with those of the teacher model to a set of instructions. Nevertheless, they overlooked the possibility of incorporating any reciprocal "feedback"--identifying challenging instructions where the student model's performance falls short--to boost the student model's proficiency iteratively. To this end, we propose a novel adversarial distillation framework for a more efficient knowledge transfer. Leveraging the versatile role adaptability of LLMs, we prompt the closed-source model to identify "hard" instructions and generate new "hard" instructions for the student model, creating a three-stage adversarial loop of imitation, discrimination, and generation. By applying this adversarial framework, we successfully transfer knowledge from ChatGPT to a 7B student model (named Lion), achieving nearly 95% capability approximation using a mere 70k training data. We aspire that this proposed model may serve as the baseline to reflect the performance of ChatGPT, especially the open-source instruction-following language model baseline for our community.
Abstract:This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT's promising performance across various tasks, we conduct extensive evaluations on the whole test sets of 13 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based and dialogue-based discourse relations, and downstream applications on discourse understanding. To achieve reliable results, we adopt three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. We find that ChatGPT exhibits strong performance in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, while it may not be proficient in identifying the temporal order between two events. It can recognize most discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, but the implicit discourse relation still remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, ChatGPT performs poorly in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.
Abstract:Masked Language Modeling (MLM) is widely used to pretrain language models. The standard random masking strategy in MLM causes the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to be biased toward high-frequency tokens. Representation learning of rare tokens is poor and PLMs have limited performance on downstream tasks. To alleviate this frequency bias issue, we propose two simple and effective Weighted Sampling strategies for masking tokens based on the token frequency and training loss. We apply these two strategies to BERT and obtain Weighted-Sampled BERT (WSBERT). Experiments on the Semantic Textual Similarity benchmark (STS) show that WSBERT significantly improves sentence embeddings over BERT. Combining WSBERT with calibration methods and prompt learning further improves sentence embeddings. We also investigate fine-tuning WSBERT on the GLUE benchmark and show that Weighted Sampling also improves the transfer learning capability of the backbone PLM. We further analyze and provide insights into how WSBERT improves token embeddings.