new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

byAK and the research community

Apr 21

Characterizing Mechanisms for Factual Recall in Language Models

Language Models (LMs) often must integrate facts they memorized in pretraining with new information that appears in a given context. These two sources can disagree, causing competition within the model, and it is unclear how an LM will resolve the conflict. On a dataset that queries for knowledge of world capitals, we investigate both distributional and mechanistic determinants of LM behavior in such situations. Specifically, we measure the proportion of the time an LM will use a counterfactual prefix (e.g., "The capital of Poland is London") to overwrite what it learned in pretraining ("Warsaw"). On Pythia and GPT2, the training frequency of both the query country ("Poland") and the in-context city ("London") highly affect the models' likelihood of using the counterfactual. We then use head attribution to identify individual attention heads that either promote the memorized answer or the in-context answer in the logits. By scaling up or down the value vector of these heads, we can control the likelihood of using the in-context answer on new data. This method can increase the rate of generating the in-context answer to 88\% of the time simply by scaling a single head at runtime. Our work contributes to a body of evidence showing that we can often localize model behaviors to specific components and provides a proof of concept for how future methods might control model behavior dynamically at runtime.

ZipLM: Hardware-Aware Structured Pruning of Language Models

The breakthrough performance of large language models (LLMs) comes with large computational footprints and high deployment costs. In this paper, we progress towards resolving this problem by proposing a new structured compression approach for LLMs, called ZipLM, which provides state-of-the-art compression-vs-accuracy results, while guaranteeing to match a set of (achievable) target speedups on any given target hardware. Specifically, given a task, a model, an inference environment, as well as a set of speedup targets, ZipLM identifies and removes redundancies in the model through iterative structured shrinking of the model's weight matrices. Importantly, ZipLM works in both, the post-training/one-shot and the gradual compression setting, where it produces a set of accurate models in a single run, making it highly-efficient in practice. Our approach is based on new structured pruning and knowledge distillation techniques, and consistently outperforms prior structured compression methods in terms of accuracy-versus-speedup in experiments on BERT- and GPT-family models. In particular, when compressing GPT2 model, it outperforms DistilGPT2 while being 60% smaller and 30% faster. Further, ZipLM matches performance of heavily optimized MobileBERT model, obtained via extensive architecture search, by simply pruning the baseline BERT-large architecture, and outperforms all prior BERT-base compression techniques like CoFi, MiniLM and TinyBERT.

IRepair: An Intent-Aware Approach to Repair Data-Driven Errors in Large Language Models

Not a day goes by without hearing about the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), and equally, not a day passes without hearing about their challenges. LLMs are notoriously vulnerable to biases in their dataset, leading to issues such as toxicity. While domain-adaptive training has been employed to mitigate these issues, these techniques often address all model parameters indiscriminately during the repair process, resulting in poor repair quality and reduced model versatility. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic slicing-based intent-aware LLM repair strategy, IRepair. This approach selectively targets the most error-prone sections of the model for repair. Specifically, we propose dynamically slicing the model's most sensitive layers that require immediate attention, concentrating repair efforts on those areas. This method enables more effective repairs with potentially less impact on the model's overall performance by altering a smaller portion of the model. We evaluated our technique on three models from the GPT2 and GPT-Neo families, with parameters ranging from 800M to 1.6B, in a toxicity mitigation setup. Our results show that IRepair repairs errors 43.6% more effectively while causing 46% less disruption to general performance compared to the closest baseline, direct preference optimization. Our empirical analysis also reveals that errors are more concentrated in a smaller section of the model, with the top 20% of layers exhibiting 773% more error density than the remaining 80\%. This highlights the need for selective repair. Additionally, we demonstrate that a dynamic selection approach is essential for addressing errors dispersed throughout the model, ensuring a robust and efficient repair.

I See Dead People: Gray-Box Adversarial Attack on Image-To-Text Models

Modern image-to-text systems typically adopt the encoder-decoder framework, which comprises two main components: an image encoder, responsible for extracting image features, and a transformer-based decoder, used for generating captions. Taking inspiration from the analysis of neural networks' robustness against adversarial perturbations, we propose a novel gray-box algorithm for creating adversarial examples in image-to-text models. Unlike image classification tasks that have a finite set of class labels, finding visually similar adversarial examples in an image-to-text task poses greater challenges because the captioning system allows for a virtually infinite space of possible captions. In this paper, we present a gray-box adversarial attack on image-to-text, both untargeted and targeted. We formulate the process of discovering adversarial perturbations as an optimization problem that uses only the image-encoder component, meaning the proposed attack is language-model agnostic. Through experiments conducted on the ViT-GPT2 model, which is the most-used image-to-text model in Hugging Face, and the Flickr30k dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed attack successfully generates visually similar adversarial examples, both with untargeted and targeted captions. Notably, our attack operates in a gray-box manner, requiring no knowledge about the decoder module. We also show that our attacks fool the popular open-source platform Hugging Face.

L3Cube-HingCorpus and HingBERT: A Code Mixed Hindi-English Dataset and BERT Language Models

Code-switching occurs when more than one language is mixed in a given sentence or a conversation. This phenomenon is more prominent on social media platforms and its adoption is increasing over time. Therefore code-mixed NLP has been extensively studied in the literature. As pre-trained transformer-based architectures are gaining popularity, we observe that real code-mixing data are scarce to pre-train large language models. We present L3Cube-HingCorpus, the first large-scale real Hindi-English code mixed data in a Roman script. It consists of 52.93M sentences and 1.04B tokens, scraped from Twitter. We further present HingBERT, HingMBERT, HingRoBERTa, and HingGPT. The BERT models have been pre-trained on codemixed HingCorpus using masked language modelling objectives. We show the effectiveness of these BERT models on the subsequent downstream tasks like code-mixed sentiment analysis, POS tagging, NER, and LID from the GLUECoS benchmark. The HingGPT is a GPT2 based generative transformer model capable of generating full tweets. We also release L3Cube-HingLID Corpus, the largest code-mixed Hindi-English language identification(LID) dataset and HingBERT-LID, a production-quality LID model to facilitate capturing of more code-mixed data using the process outlined in this work. The dataset and models are available at https://github.com/l3cube-pune/code-mixed-nlp .

Circuit Component Reuse Across Tasks in Transformer Language Models

Recent work in mechanistic interpretability has shown that behaviors in language models can be successfully reverse-engineered through circuit analysis. A common criticism, however, is that each circuit is task-specific, and thus such analysis cannot contribute to understanding the models at a higher level. In this work, we present evidence that insights (both low-level findings about specific heads and higher-level findings about general algorithms) can indeed generalize across tasks. Specifically, we study the circuit discovered in Wang et al. (2022) for the Indirect Object Identification (IOI) task and 1.) show that it reproduces on a larger GPT2 model, and 2.) that it is mostly reused to solve a seemingly different task: Colored Objects (Ippolito & Callison-Burch, 2023). We provide evidence that the process underlying both tasks is functionally very similar, and contains about a 78% overlap in in-circuit attention heads. We further present a proof-of-concept intervention experiment, in which we adjust four attention heads in middle layers in order to 'repair' the Colored Objects circuit and make it behave like the IOI circuit. In doing so, we boost accuracy from 49.6% to 93.7% on the Colored Objects task and explain most sources of error. The intervention affects downstream attention heads in specific ways predicted by their interactions in the IOI circuit, indicating that this subcircuit behavior is invariant to the different task inputs. Overall, our results provide evidence that it may yet be possible to explain large language models' behavior in terms of a relatively small number of interpretable task-general algorithmic building blocks and computational components.

On the Usage of Continual Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Pre-trained Language Models of Code

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have become a prevalent technique in deep learning for code, utilizing a two-stage pre-training and fine-tuning procedure to acquire general knowledge about code and specialize in a variety of downstream tasks. However, the dynamic nature of software codebases poses a challenge to the effectiveness and robustness of PLMs. In particular, world-realistic scenarios potentially lead to significant differences between the distribution of the pre-training and test data, i.e., distribution shift, resulting in a degradation of the PLM's performance on downstream tasks. In this paper, we stress the need for adapting PLMs of code to software data whose distribution changes over time, a crucial problem that has been overlooked in previous works. The motivation of this work is to consider the PLM in a non-stationary environment, where fine-tuning data evolves over time according to a software evolution scenario. Specifically, we design a scenario where the model needs to learn from a stream of programs containing new, unseen APIs over time. We study two widely used PLM architectures, i.e., a GPT2 decoder and a RoBERTa encoder, on two downstream tasks, API call and API usage prediction. We demonstrate that the most commonly used fine-tuning technique from prior work is not robust enough to handle the dynamic nature of APIs, leading to the loss of previously acquired knowledge i.e., catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we implement five continual learning approaches, including replay-based and regularization-based methods. Our findings demonstrate that utilizing these straightforward methods effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in PLMs across both downstream tasks while achieving comparable or superior performance.

Paramanu: A Family of Novel Efficient Indic Generative Foundation Language Models

We present Gyan AI Paramanu ("atom"), a family of novel language models for Indian languages. It is a collection of auto-regressive monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual Indic language models pretrained from scratch on a single GPU for 10 Indian languages (Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Odia, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu) across 5 scripts (Bangla, Devanagari, Odia, Tamil, Telugu) of varying sizes ranging from 13.29M to 367.5M.The models are pretrained with a context size of 1024 on a single GPU. The models are very efficient, small, fast, and powerful. We have also developed an efficient most advanced Indic tokenizer that can even tokenize unseen languages. In order to avoid the "curse of multi-linguality" in our multilingual mParamanu model, we pretrained on comparable corpora by typological grouping using the same script. We performed human evaluation of our pretrained models for open end text generation on grammar, coherence, creativity, and factuality metrics for Bangla, Hindi, and Sanskrit. Our Bangla, Hindi, and Sanskrit models outperformed GPT-3.5-Turbo (ChatGPT), Bloom 7B, LLaMa-2 7B, OPT 6.7B, GPT-J 6B, GPTNeo 1.3B, GPT2-XL large language models (LLMs) by a large margin despite being smaller in size by 66 to 20 times compared to standard 7B LLMs. To run inference on our pretrained models, CPU is enough, and GPU is not needed. We also instruction-tuned our pretrained Bangla, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu models on 23k instructions in respective languages. Our pretrained and instruction-tuned models which are first of its kind, most powerful efficient small generative language models ever developed for Indic languages, and the various results lead to the conclusion that high quality generative language models are possible without high amount of compute power and humongous number of parameters. We plan to release our models at https://www.bharatgpts.com.

Examining User-Friendly and Open-Sourced Large GPT Models: A Survey on Language, Multimodal, and Scientific GPT Models

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.

The Impact of Large Language Models on Scientific Discovery: a Preliminary Study using GPT-4

In recent years, groundbreaking advancements in natural language processing have culminated in the emergence of powerful large language models (LLMs), which have showcased remarkable capabilities across a vast array of domains, including the understanding, generation, and translation of natural language, and even tasks that extend beyond language processing. In this report, we delve into the performance of LLMs within the context of scientific discovery, focusing on GPT-4, the state-of-the-art language model. Our investigation spans a diverse range of scientific areas encompassing drug discovery, biology, computational chemistry (density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD)), materials design, and partial differential equations (PDE). Evaluating GPT-4 on scientific tasks is crucial for uncovering its potential across various research domains, validating its domain-specific expertise, accelerating scientific progress, optimizing resource allocation, guiding future model development, and fostering interdisciplinary research. Our exploration methodology primarily consists of expert-driven case assessments, which offer qualitative insights into the model's comprehension of intricate scientific concepts and relationships, and occasionally benchmark testing, which quantitatively evaluates the model's capacity to solve well-defined domain-specific problems. Our preliminary exploration indicates that GPT-4 exhibits promising potential for a variety of scientific applications, demonstrating its aptitude for handling complex problem-solving and knowledge integration tasks. Broadly speaking, we evaluate GPT-4's knowledge base, scientific understanding, scientific numerical calculation abilities, and various scientific prediction capabilities.

Generative Pretrained Hierarchical Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

Recent efforts have been dedicated to enhancing time series forecasting accuracy by introducing advanced network architectures and self-supervised pretraining strategies. Nevertheless, existing approaches still exhibit two critical drawbacks. Firstly, these methods often rely on a single dataset for training, limiting the model's generalizability due to the restricted scale of the training data. Secondly, the one-step generation schema is widely followed, which necessitates a customized forecasting head and overlooks the temporal dependencies in the output series, and also leads to increased training costs under different horizon length settings. To address these issues, we propose a novel generative pretrained hierarchical transformer architecture for forecasting, named GPHT. There are two aspects of key designs in GPHT. On the one hand, we advocate for constructing a mixed dataset for pretraining our model, comprising various datasets from diverse data scenarios. This approach significantly expands the scale of training data, allowing our model to uncover commonalities in time series data and facilitating improved transfer to specific datasets. On the other hand, GPHT employs an auto-regressive forecasting approach under the channel-independent assumption, effectively modeling temporal dependencies in the output series. Importantly, no customized forecasting head is required, enabling a single model to forecast at arbitrary horizon settings. We conduct sufficient experiments on eight datasets with mainstream self-supervised pretraining models and supervised models. The results demonstrated that GPHT surpasses the baseline models across various fine-tuning and zero/few-shot learning settings in the traditional long-term forecasting task, providing support for verifying the feasibility of pretrained time series large models.

Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation

While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms (e.g., greedy search). This phenomenon is counter-intuitive since there are few consecutive sentence-level repetitions in human corpora (e.g., 0.02\% in Wikitext-103). To investigate the underlying reasons for generating consecutive sentence-level repetitions, we study the relationship between the probabilities of the repetitive tokens and their previous repetitions in the context. Through our quantitative experiments, we find that 1) Language models have a preference to repeat the previous sentence; 2) The sentence-level repetitions have a self-reinforcement effect: the more times a sentence is repeated in the context, the higher the probability of continuing to generate that sentence; 3) The sentences with higher initial probabilities usually have a stronger self-reinforcement effect. Motivated by our findings, we propose a simple and effective training method DITTO (PseuDo-RepetITion PenalizaTiOn), where the model learns to penalize probabilities of sentence-level repetitions from pseudo repetitive data. Although our method is motivated by mitigating repetitions, experiments show that DITTO not only mitigates the repetition issue without sacrificing perplexity, but also achieves better generation quality. Extensive experiments on open-ended text generation (Wikitext-103) and text summarization (CNN/DailyMail) demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our method.

How Well Does GPT-4V(ision) Adapt to Distribution Shifts? A Preliminary Investigation

In machine learning, generalization against distribution shifts -- where deployment conditions diverge from the training scenarios -- is crucial, particularly in fields like climate modeling, biomedicine, and autonomous driving. The emergence of foundation models, distinguished by their extensive pretraining and task versatility, has led to an increased interest in their adaptability to distribution shifts. GPT-4V(ision) acts as the most advanced publicly accessible multimodal foundation model, with extensive applications across various domains, including anomaly detection, video understanding, image generation, and medical diagnosis. However, its robustness against data distributions remains largely underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study rigorously evaluates GPT-4V's adaptability and generalization capabilities in dynamic environments, benchmarking against prominent models like CLIP and LLaVA. We delve into GPT-4V's zero-shot generalization across 13 diverse datasets spanning natural, medical, and molecular domains. We further investigate its adaptability to controlled data perturbations and examine the efficacy of in-context learning as a tool to enhance its adaptation. Our findings delineate GPT-4V's capability boundaries in distribution shifts, shedding light on its strengths and limitations across various scenarios. Importantly, this investigation contributes to our understanding of how AI foundation models generalize to distribution shifts, offering pivotal insights into their adaptability and robustness. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jameszhou-gl/gpt-4v-distribution-shift.

Anchored Answers: Unravelling Positional Bias in GPT-2's Multiple-Choice Questions

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the GPT-4 and LLaMA families, have demonstrated considerable success across diverse tasks, including multiple-choice questions (MCQs). However, these models exhibit a positional bias, particularly an even worse anchored bias in the GPT-2 family, where they consistently favour the first choice 'A' in MCQs during inference. This anchored bias challenges the integrity of GPT-2's decision-making process, as it skews performance based on the position rather than the content of the choices in MCQs. In this study, we utilise the mechanistic interpretability approach to identify the internal modules within GPT-2 models responsible for this bias. We focus on the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) layers and attention heads, using the "logit lens" method to trace and modify the specific value vectors that contribute to the bias. By updating these vectors within MLP and recalibrating attention patterns to neutralise the preference for the first choice 'A', we effectively mitigate the anchored bias. Our interventions not only mitigate the bias but also improve the overall MCQ prediction accuracy for the GPT-2 family across various datasets. This work represents the first comprehensive mechanistic analysis of anchored bias in MCQs within the GPT-2 models, introducing targeted, minimal-intervention strategies that significantly enhance GPT2 model robustness and accuracy in MCQs. Our code is available at https://github.com/ruizheliUOA/Anchored_Bias_GPT2.

What indeed can GPT models do in chemistry? A comprehensive benchmark on eight tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong abilities in natural language processing tasks have emerged and have been rapidly applied in various kinds of areas such as science, finance and software engineering. However, the capability of LLMs to advance the field of chemistry remains unclear. In this paper,we establish a comprehensive benchmark containing 8 practical chemistry tasks, including 1) name prediction, 2) property prediction, 3) yield prediction, 4) reaction prediction, 5) retrosynthesis (prediction of reactants from products), 6)text-based molecule design, 7) molecule captioning, and 8) reagent selection. Our analysis draws on widely recognized datasets including BBBP, Tox21, PubChem, USPTO, and ChEBI, facilitating a broad exploration of the capacities of LLMs within the context of practical chemistry. Three GPT models (GPT-4, GPT-3.5,and Davinci-003) are evaluated for each chemistry task in zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning settings with carefully selected demonstration examples and specially crafted prompts. The key results of our investigation are 1) GPT-4 outperforms the other two models among the three evaluated; 2) GPT models exhibit less competitive performance in tasks demanding precise understanding of molecular SMILES representation, such as reaction prediction and retrosynthesis;3) GPT models demonstrate strong capabilities in text-related explanation tasks such as molecule captioning; and 4) GPT models exhibit comparable or better performance to classical machine learning models when applied to chemical problems that can be transformed into classification or ranking tasks, such as property prediction, and yield prediction.

Show, Don't Tell: Evaluating Large Language Models Beyond Textual Understanding with ChildPlay

We developed a benchmark set to assess the generalization of state-of-the-art large language models on problems beyond linguistic tasks and evaluate it on a systematic progression of GPT models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini). Using simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect Four, Battleship, and a Shape Recognition Game, all encoded in ASCII, we test strategic capabilities and spatial reasoning, core abilities any artificial intelligence would need to master for solving problems in chemistry. To probe generalization, we introduce two new games for spatial logic: LEGO Connect Language (LCL) and Guess-the-SMILES (GtS), a operationally simple chemistry benchmark. Our results show that GPT models provide meaningful responses for several tasks but, generally, perform poorly. A systematic performance progression with increased model capabilities (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4o) is only observed for 4 out of the 7 benchmark tasks. All models consistently struggle with Battleship, LCL, and GtS. This suggests that while GPT models can emulate conversational proficiency and basic rule comprehension, they have limited generalization with respect to strategy and spatial reasoning. Particularly poor performance is observed for interpreting molecular graphs when encoded in ASCII. The results provided by our open-source benchmark suite (https://github.com/BlueVelvetSackOfGoldPotatoes/child-play{ChildPlay GitHub Repository}) caution against claims of emergent intelligence in GPT models, which appear more specialized than general.

LifeGPT: Topology-Agnostic Generative Pretrained Transformer Model for Cellular Automata

The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.

BoxingGym: Benchmarking Progress in Automated Experimental Design and Model Discovery

Understanding the world and explaining it with scientific theories is a central aspiration of artificial intelligence research. Proposing theories, designing experiments to test them, and then revising them based on data are fundamental to scientific discovery. Despite the significant promise of LLM-based scientific agents, no benchmarks systematically test LLM's ability to propose scientific models, collect experimental data, and revise them in light of new data. We introduce BoxingGym, a benchmark with 10 environments for systematically evaluating both experimental design (e.g. collecting data to test a scientific theory) and model discovery (e.g. proposing and revising scientific theories). To enable tractable and quantitative evaluation, we implement each environment as a generative probabilistic model with which a scientific agent can run interactive experiments. These probabilistic models are drawn from various real-world scientific domains ranging from psychology to ecology. To quantitatively evaluate a scientific agent's ability to collect informative experimental data, we compute the expected information gain (EIG), an information-theoretic quantity which measures how much an experiment reduces uncertainty about the parameters of a generative model. A good scientific theory is a concise and predictive explanation. Therefore, to quantitatively evaluate model discovery, we ask a scientific agent to explain their model and then assess whether this explanation enables another scientific agent to make reliable predictions about this environment. In addition to this explanation-based evaluation, we compute standard model evaluation metrics such as prediction errors. We find that current LLMs, such as GPT-4o, struggle with both experimental design and model discovery. We find that augmenting the LLM-based agent with an explicit statistical model does not reliably improve these results.

Are ChatGPT and GPT-4 Good Poker Players? -- A Pre-Flop Analysis

Since the introduction of ChatGPT and GPT-4, these models have been tested across a large number of tasks. Their adeptness across domains is evident, but their aptitude in playing games, and specifically their aptitude in the realm of poker has remained unexplored. Poker is a game that requires decision making under uncertainty and incomplete information. In this paper, we put ChatGPT and GPT-4 through the poker test and evaluate their poker skills. Our findings reveal that while both models display an advanced understanding of poker, encompassing concepts like the valuation of starting hands, playing positions and other intricacies of game theory optimal (GTO) poker, both ChatGPT and GPT-4 are NOT game theory optimal poker players. Profitable strategies in poker are evaluated in expectations over large samples. Through a series of experiments, we first discover the characteristics of optimal prompts and model parameters for playing poker with these models. Our observations then unveil the distinct playing personas of the two models. We first conclude that GPT-4 is a more advanced poker player than ChatGPT. This exploration then sheds light on the divergent poker tactics of the two models: ChatGPT's conservativeness juxtaposed against GPT-4's aggression. In poker vernacular, when tasked to play GTO poker, ChatGPT plays like a nit, which means that it has a propensity to only engage with premium hands and folds a majority of hands. When subjected to the same directive, GPT-4 plays like a maniac, showcasing a loose and aggressive style of play. Both strategies, although relatively advanced, are not game theory optimal.

A Survey of GPT-3 Family Large Language Models Including ChatGPT and GPT-4

Large language models (LLMs) are a special class of pretrained language models obtained by scaling model size, pretraining corpus and computation. LLMs, because of their large size and pretraining on large volumes of text data, exhibit special abilities which allow them to achieve remarkable performances without any task-specific training in many of the natural language processing tasks. The era of LLMs started with OpenAI GPT-3 model, and the popularity of LLMs is increasing exponentially after the introduction of models like ChatGPT and GPT4. We refer to GPT-3 and its successor OpenAI models, including ChatGPT and GPT4, as GPT-3 family large language models (GLLMs). With the ever-rising popularity of GLLMs, especially in the research community, there is a strong need for a comprehensive survey which summarizes the recent research progress in multiple dimensions and can guide the research community with insightful future research directions. We start the survey paper with foundation concepts like transformers, transfer learning, self-supervised learning, pretrained language models and large language models. We then present a brief overview of GLLMs and discuss the performances of GLLMs in various downstream tasks, specific domains and multiple languages. We also discuss the data labelling and data augmentation abilities of GLLMs, the robustness of GLLMs, the effectiveness of GLLMs as evaluators, and finally, conclude with multiple insightful future research directions. To summarize, this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good resource for both academic and industry people to stay updated with the latest research related to GPT-3 family large language models.

DrugGen: Advancing Drug Discovery with Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning Feedback

Traditional drug design faces significant challenges due to inherent chemical and biological complexities, often resulting in high failure rates in clinical trials. Deep learning advancements, particularly generative models, offer potential solutions to these challenges. One promising algorithm is DrugGPT, a transformer-based model, that generates small molecules for input protein sequences. Although promising, it generates both chemically valid and invalid structures and does not incorporate the features of approved drugs, resulting in time-consuming and inefficient drug discovery. To address these issues, we introduce DrugGen, an enhanced model based on the DrugGPT structure. DrugGen is fine-tuned on approved drug-target interactions and optimized with proximal policy optimization. By giving reward feedback from protein-ligand binding affinity prediction using pre-trained transformers (PLAPT) and a customized invalid structure assessor, DrugGen significantly improves performance. Evaluation across multiple targets demonstrated that DrugGen achieves 100% valid structure generation compared to 95.5% with DrugGPT and produced molecules with higher predicted binding affinities (7.22 [6.30-8.07]) compared to DrugGPT (5.81 [4.97-6.63]) while maintaining diversity and novelty. Docking simulations further validate its ability to generate molecules targeting binding sites effectively. For example, in the case of fatty acid-binding protein 5 (FABP5), DrugGen generated molecules with superior docking scores (FABP5/11, -9.537 and FABP5/5, -8.399) compared to the reference molecule (Palmitic acid, -6.177). Beyond lead compound generation, DrugGen also shows potential for drug repositioning and creating novel pharmacophores for existing targets. By producing high-quality small molecules, DrugGen provides a high-performance medium for advancing pharmaceutical research and drug discovery.

Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning

The surprising ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform well on complex reasoning with only few-shot chain-of-thought prompts is believed to emerge only in very large-scale models (100+ billion parameters). We show that such abilities can, in fact, be distilled down from GPT-3.5 (ge 175B) to T5 variants (le 11B). We propose model specialization, to specialize the model's ability towards a target task. The hypothesis is that large models (commonly viewed as larger than 100B) have strong modeling power, but are spread on a large spectrum of tasks. Small models (commonly viewed as smaller than 10B) have limited model capacity, but if we concentrate their capacity on a specific target task, the model can achieve a decent improved performance. We use multi-step math reasoning as our testbed because it is a very typical emergent ability. We show two important aspects of model abilities: (1). there exists a very complex balance/ tradeoff between language models' multi-dimensional abilities; (2). by paying the price of decreased generic ability, we can clearly lift up the scaling curve of models smaller than 10B towards a specialized multi-step math reasoning ability. We further give comprehensive discussions about important design choices for better generalization, including the tuning data format, the start model checkpoint, and a new model selection method. We hope our practice and discoveries can serve as an important attempt towards specialized smaller models in the new research paradigm set by LLMs.

Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine

Generalist foundation models such as GPT-4 have displayed surprising capabilities in a wide variety of domains and tasks. Yet, there is a prevalent assumption that they cannot match specialist capabilities of fine-tuned models. For example, most explorations to date on medical competency benchmarks have leveraged domain-specific training, as exemplified by efforts on BioGPT and Med-PaLM. We build on a prior study of GPT-4's capabilities on medical challenge benchmarks in the absence of special training. Rather than using simple prompting to highlight the model's out-of-the-box capabilities, we perform a systematic exploration of prompt engineering. We find that prompting innovation can unlock deeper specialist capabilities and show that GPT-4 easily tops prior leading results for medical benchmarks. The prompting methods we explore are general purpose, and make no specific use of domain expertise, removing the need for expert-curated content. Our experimental design carefully controls for overfitting during the prompt engineering process. We introduce Medprompt, based on a composition of several prompting strategies. With Medprompt, GPT-4 achieves state-of-the-art results on all nine of the benchmark datasets in the MultiMedQA suite. The method outperforms leading specialist models such as Med-PaLM 2 by a significant margin with an order of magnitude fewer calls to the model. Steering GPT-4 with Medprompt achieves a 27% reduction in error rate on the MedQA dataset over the best methods to date achieved with specialist models and surpasses a score of 90% for the first time. Beyond medical problems, we show the power of Medprompt to generalize to other domains and provide evidence for the broad applicability of the approach via studies of the strategy on exams in electrical engineering, machine learning, philosophy, accounting, law, nursing, and clinical psychology.

Pre-Trained Models: Past, Present and Future

Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.

Code Soliloquies for Accurate Calculations in Large Language Models

High-quality conversational datasets are integral to the successful development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that employ a Large Language Model (LLM) backend. These datasets, when used to fine-tune the LLM backend, significantly enhance the quality of interactions between students and ITS. A common strategy for developing these datasets involves generating synthetic student-teacher dialogues using advanced GPT-4 models. However, challenges arise when these dialogues demand complex calculations, common in subjects like physics. Despite its advanced capabilities, GPT-4's performance falls short in reliably handling even simple multiplication tasks, marking a significant limitation in its utility for these subjects. To address these challenges, this paper introduces an innovative stateful prompt design. Our approach generates a mock conversation between a student and a tutorbot, both roles simulated by GPT-4. Each student response triggers a soliloquy (an inner monologue) in the GPT-tutorbot, which assesses whether its response would necessitate calculations. If so, it proceeds to script the required code in Python and then uses the resulting output to construct its response to the student. Our approach notably enhances the quality of synthetic conversation datasets, especially for subjects that are calculation-intensive. Our findings show that our Higgs model -- a LLaMA finetuned with datasets generated through our novel stateful prompt design -- proficiently utilizes Python for computations. Consequently, finetuning with our datasets enriched with code soliloquies enhances not just the accuracy but also the computational reliability of Higgs' responses.

Automating Human Tutor-Style Programming Feedback: Leveraging GPT-4 Tutor Model for Hint Generation and GPT-3.5 Student Model for Hint Validation

Generative AI and large language models hold great promise in enhancing programming education by automatically generating individualized feedback for students. We investigate the role of generative AI models in providing human tutor-style programming hints to help students resolve errors in their buggy programs. Recent works have benchmarked state-of-the-art models for various feedback generation scenarios; however, their overall quality is still inferior to human tutors and not yet ready for real-world deployment. In this paper, we seek to push the limits of generative AI models toward providing high-quality programming hints and develop a novel technique, GPT4Hints-GPT3.5Val. As a first step, our technique leverages GPT-4 as a ``tutor'' model to generate hints -- it boosts the generative quality by using symbolic information of failing test cases and fixes in prompts. As a next step, our technique leverages GPT-3.5, a weaker model, as a ``student'' model to further validate the hint quality -- it performs an automatic quality validation by simulating the potential utility of providing this feedback. We show the efficacy of our technique via extensive evaluation using three real-world datasets of Python programs covering a variety of concepts ranging from basic algorithms to regular expressions and data analysis using pandas library.

AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models

Evaluating the general abilities of foundation models to tackle human-level tasks is a vital aspect of their development and application in the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Traditional benchmarks, which rely on artificial datasets, may not accurately represent human-level capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AGIEval, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess foundation model in the context of human-centric standardized exams, such as college entrance exams, law school admission tests, math competitions, and lawyer qualification tests. We evaluate several state-of-the-art foundation models, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Text-Davinci-003, using this benchmark. Impressively, GPT-4 surpasses average human performance on SAT, LSAT, and math competitions, attaining a 95% accuracy rate on the SAT Math test and a 92.5% accuracy on the English test of the Chinese national college entrance exam. This demonstrates the extraordinary performance of contemporary foundation models. In contrast, we also find that GPT-4 is less proficient in tasks that require complex reasoning or specific domain knowledge. Our comprehensive analyses of model capabilities (understanding, knowledge, reasoning, and calculation) reveal these models' strengths and limitations, providing valuable insights into future directions for enhancing their general capabilities. By concentrating on tasks pertinent to human cognition and decision-making, our benchmark delivers a more meaningful and robust evaluation of foundation models' performance in real-world scenarios. The data, code, and all model outputs are released in https://github.com/microsoft/AGIEval.

MedS^3: Towards Medical Small Language Models with Self-Evolved Slow Thinking

Medical language models (MLMs) have become pivotal in advancing medical natural language processing. However, prior models that rely on pre-training or supervised fine-tuning often exhibit low data efficiency and limited practicality in real-world clinical applications. While OpenAIs O1 highlights test-time scaling in mathematics, attempts to replicate this approach in medicine typically distill responses from GPT-series models to open-source models, focusing primarily on multiple-choice tasks. This strategy, though straightforward, neglects critical concerns like data privacy and realistic deployment in clinical settings. In this work, we present a deployable, small-scale medical language model, \mone, designed for long-chain reasoning in clinical tasks using a self-evolution paradigm. Starting with a seed dataset of around 8,000 instances spanning five domains and 16 datasets, we prompt a base policy model to perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct verifiable reasoning chains. Each reasoning step is assigned an evolution rollout value, allowing verified trajectories to train the policy model and the reward model. During inference, the policy model generates multiple responses, and the reward model selects the one with the highest reward score. Experiments on eleven evaluation datasets demonstrate that \mone outperforms prior open-source models by 2 points, with the addition of the reward model further boosting performance (sim13 points), surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Code and data are available at https://github.com/pixas/MedSSS.

Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation across various domains, including medicine. We present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, on medical competency examinations and benchmark datasets. GPT-4 is a general-purpose model that is not specialized for medical problems through training or engineered to solve clinical tasks. Our analysis covers two sets of official practice materials for the USMLE, a three-step examination program used to assess clinical competency and grant licensure in the United States. We also evaluate performance on the MultiMedQA suite of benchmark datasets. Beyond measuring model performance, experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of test questions containing both text and images on model performance, probe for memorization of content during training, and study probability calibration, which is of critical importance in high-stakes applications like medicine. Our results show that GPT-4, without any specialized prompt crafting, exceeds the passing score on USMLE by over 20 points and outperforms earlier general-purpose models (GPT-3.5) as well as models specifically fine-tuned on medical knowledge (Med-PaLM, a prompt-tuned version of Flan-PaLM 540B). In addition, GPT-4 is significantly better calibrated than GPT-3.5, demonstrating a much-improved ability to predict the likelihood that its answers are correct. We also explore the behavior of the model qualitatively through a case study that shows the ability of GPT-4 to explain medical reasoning, personalize explanations to students, and interactively craft new counterfactual scenarios around a medical case. Implications of the findings are discussed for potential uses of GPT-4 in medical education, assessment, and clinical practice, with appropriate attention to challenges of accuracy and safety.

Tryage: Real-time, intelligent Routing of User Prompts to Large Language Models

The introduction of the transformer architecture and the self-attention mechanism has led to an explosive production of language models trained on specific downstream tasks and data domains. With over 200, 000 models in the Hugging Face ecosystem, users grapple with selecting and optimizing models to suit multifaceted workflows and data domains while addressing computational, security, and recency concerns. There is an urgent need for machine learning frameworks that can eliminate the burden of model selection and customization and unleash the incredible power of the vast emerging model library for end users. Here, we propose a context-aware routing system, Tryage, that leverages a language model router for optimal selection of expert models from a model library based on analysis of individual input prompts. Inspired by the thalamic router in the brain, Tryage employs a perceptive router to predict down-stream model performance on prompts and, then, makes a routing decision using an objective function that integrates performance predictions with user goals and constraints that are incorporated through flags (e.g., model size, model recency). Tryage allows users to explore a Pareto front and automatically trade-off between task accuracy and secondary goals including minimization of model size, recency, security, verbosity, and readability. Across heterogeneous data sets that include code, text, clinical data, and patents, the Tryage framework surpasses Gorilla and GPT3.5 turbo in dynamic model selection identifying the optimal model with an accuracy of 50.9% , compared to 23.6% by GPT 3.5 Turbo and 10.8% by Gorilla. Conceptually, Tryage demonstrates how routing models can be applied to program and control the behavior of multi-model LLM systems to maximize efficient use of the expanding and evolving language model ecosystem.

AutoML-GPT: Automatic Machine Learning with GPT

AI tasks encompass a wide range of domains and fields. While numerous AI models have been designed for specific tasks and applications, they often require considerable human efforts in finding the right model architecture, optimization algorithm, and hyperparameters. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT show remarkable capabilities in various aspects of reasoning, comprehension, and interaction. Consequently, we propose developing task-oriented prompts and automatically utilizing LLMs to automate the training pipeline. To implement this concept, we present the AutoML-GPT, which employs GPT as the bridge to diverse AI models and dynamically trains models with optimized hyperparameters. AutoML-GPT dynamically takes user requests from the model and data cards and composes the corresponding prompt paragraph. Ultimately, with this prompt paragraph, AutoML-GPT will automatically conduct the experiments from data processing to model architecture, hyperparameter tuning, and predicted training log. By leveraging {\ours}'s robust language capabilities and the available AI models, AutoML-GPT can tackle numerous intricate AI tasks across various tasks and datasets. This approach achieves remarkable results in computer vision, natural language processing, and other challenging areas. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that our method can be general, effective, and beneficial for many AI tasks.

Future Token Prediction -- Causal Language Modelling with Per-Token Semantic State Vector for Multi-Token Prediction

Causal decoder-only transformer models used for generative language modelling, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), are trained to predict the next token in a sequence based only on its previous tokens. Despite this simple training objective, they have proved to be powerful AI tools. However, only predicting the next token results in top layer embedding vectors that are highly token-focused. There may be benefits in generating embedding vectors at each token position that better capture the overall meaning of longer sequences of future text. Recent studies matching brain scans with deep language models suggest that humans also predict upcoming words when listening or reading but consider multiple future tokens rather than just one. This research investigates a new pretraining method called Future Token Prediction (FTP). In FTP, a large transformer encoder generates top layer embedding vectors for each token position, which, instead of being passed to a language head, are linearly and expansively projected to a pseudo-sequence, which is cross attended to by a small transformer decoder to predict the next N tokens forward from that position in the sequence. The top layer embedding vectors from FTP models exhibit distinct properties compared to those from standard GPT models, varying smoothly along a text sequence as measured by cosine similarity between adjacent tokens. Text generated by FTP models show improved topic coherence compared to standard GPT-like models trained with the same prediction perplexity for the next single token. The vectors are shown to better represent the topic of text based on the results of text classification examples. On a toy, but complex, coding problem, FTP networks produce significantly better results than GPT networks.

APIGen-MT: Agentic Pipeline for Multi-Turn Data Generation via Simulated Agent-Human Interplay

Training effective AI agents for multi-turn interactions requires high-quality data that captures realistic human-agent dynamics, yet such data is scarce and expensive to collect manually. We introduce APIGen-MT, a two-phase framework that generates verifiable and diverse multi-turn agent data. In the first phase, our agentic pipeline produces detailed task blueprints with ground-truth actions, leveraging a committee of LLM reviewers and iterative feedback loops. These blueprints are then transformed into complete interaction trajectories through simulated human-agent interplay. We train a family of models -- the xLAM-2-fc-r series with sizes ranging from 1B to 70B parameters. Our models outperform frontier models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on tau-bench and BFCL benchmarks, with the smaller models surpassing their larger counterparts, particularly in multi-turn settings, while maintaining superior consistency across multiple trials. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our verified blueprint-to-details approach yields high-quality training data, enabling the development of more reliable, efficient, and capable agents. We open-source both the synthetic data collected and the trained xLAM-2-fc-r models to advance research in AI agents. Models are available on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/Salesforce/xlam-2-67ef5be12949d8dcdae354c4 and project website is https://apigen-mt.github.io

Large Language Model Prediction Capabilities: Evidence from a Real-World Forecasting Tournament

Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains nascent. To empirically test this ability, we enrolled OpenAI's state-of-the-art large language model, GPT-4, in a three-month forecasting tournament hosted on the Metaculus platform. The tournament, running from July to October 2023, attracted 843 participants and covered diverse topics including Big Tech, U.S. politics, viral outbreaks, and the Ukraine conflict. Focusing on binary forecasts, we show that GPT-4's probabilistic forecasts are significantly less accurate than the median human-crowd forecasts. We find that GPT-4's forecasts did not significantly differ from the no-information forecasting strategy of assigning a 50% probability to every question. We explore a potential explanation, that GPT-4 might be predisposed to predict probabilities close to the midpoint of the scale, but our data do not support this hypothesis. Overall, we find that GPT-4 significantly underperforms in real-world predictive tasks compared to median human-crowd forecasts. A potential explanation for this underperformance is that in real-world forecasting tournaments, the true answers are genuinely unknown at the time of prediction; unlike in other benchmark tasks like professional exams or time series forecasting, where strong performance may at least partly be due to the answers being memorized from the training data. This makes real-world forecasting tournaments an ideal environment for testing the generalized reasoning and prediction capabilities of artificial intelligence going forward.

Platypus: A Generalized Specialist Model for Reading Text in Various Forms

Reading text from images (either natural scenes or documents) has been a long-standing research topic for decades, due to the high technical challenge and wide application range. Previously, individual specialist models are developed to tackle the sub-tasks of text reading (e.g., scene text recognition, handwritten text recognition and mathematical expression recognition). However, such specialist models usually cannot effectively generalize across different sub-tasks. Recently, generalist models (such as GPT-4V), trained on tremendous data in a unified way, have shown enormous potential in reading text in various scenarios, but with the drawbacks of limited accuracy and low efficiency. In this work, we propose Platypus, a generalized specialist model for text reading. Specifically, Platypus combines the best of both worlds: being able to recognize text of various forms with a single unified architecture, while achieving excellent accuracy and high efficiency. To better exploit the advantage of Platypus, we also construct a text reading dataset (called Worms), the images of which are curated from previous datasets and partially re-labeled. Experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed Platypus model. Model and data will be made publicly available at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery/tree/main/OCR/Platypus.

When to Pre-Train Graph Neural Networks? From Data Generation Perspective!

In recent years, graph pre-training has gained significant attention, focusing on acquiring transferable knowledge from unlabeled graph data to improve downstream performance. Despite these recent endeavors, the problem of negative transfer remains a major concern when utilizing graph pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Previous studies made great efforts on the issue of what to pre-train and how to pre-train by designing a variety of graph pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. However, there are cases where even the most advanced "pre-train and fine-tune" paradigms fail to yield distinct benefits. This paper introduces a generic framework W2PGNN to answer the crucial question of when to pre-train (i.e., in what situations could we take advantage of graph pre-training) before performing effortful pre-training or fine-tuning. We start from a new perspective to explore the complex generative mechanisms from the pre-training data to downstream data. In particular, W2PGNN first fits the pre-training data into graphon bases, each element of graphon basis (i.e., a graphon) identifies a fundamental transferable pattern shared by a collection of pre-training graphs. All convex combinations of graphon bases give rise to a generator space, from which graphs generated form the solution space for those downstream data that can benefit from pre-training. In this manner, the feasibility of pre-training can be quantified as the generation probability of the downstream data from any generator in the generator space. W2PGNN offers three broad applications: providing the application scope of graph pre-trained models, quantifying the feasibility of pre-training, and assistance in selecting pre-training data to enhance downstream performance. We provide a theoretically sound solution for the first application and extensive empirical justifications for the latter two applications.

MatterGPT: A Generative Transformer for Multi-Property Inverse Design of Solid-State Materials

Inverse design of solid-state materials with desired properties represents a formidable challenge in materials science. Although recent generative models have demonstrated potential, their adoption has been hindered by limitations such as inefficiency, architectural constraints and restricted open-source availability. The representation of crystal structures using the SLICES (Simplified Line-Input Crystal-Encoding System) notation as a string of characters enables the use of state-of-the-art natural language processing models, such as Transformers, for crystal design. Drawing inspiration from the success of GPT models in generating coherent text, we trained a generative Transformer on the next-token prediction task to generate solid-state materials with targeted properties. We demonstrate MatterGPT's capability to generate de novo crystal structures with targeted single properties, including both lattice-insensitive (formation energy) and lattice-sensitive (band gap) properties. Furthermore, we extend MatterGPT to simultaneously target multiple properties, addressing the complex challenge of multi-objective inverse design of crystals. Our approach showcases high validity, uniqueness, and novelty in generated structures, as well as the ability to generate materials with properties beyond the training data distribution. This work represents a significant step forward in computational materials discovery, offering a powerful and open tool for designing materials with tailored properties for various applications in energy, electronics, and beyond.

PFGM++: Unlocking the Potential of Physics-Inspired Generative Models

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp

Unleashing Reasoning Capability of LLMs via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch

The availability of high-quality data is one of the most important factors in improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing works have demonstrated the effectiveness of creating more instruction data from seed questions or knowledge bases. Recent research indicates that continually scaling up data synthesis from strong models (e.g., GPT-4) can further elicit reasoning performance. Though promising, the open-sourced community still lacks high-quality data at scale and scalable data synthesis methods with affordable costs. To address this, we introduce ScaleQuest, a scalable and novel data synthesis method that utilizes "small-size" (e.g., 7B) open-source models to generate questions from scratch without the need for seed data with complex augmentation constraints. With the efficient ScaleQuest, we automatically constructed a mathematical reasoning dataset consisting of 1 million problem-solution pairs, which are more effective than existing open-sourced datasets. It can universally increase the performance of mainstream open-source models (i.e., Mistral, Llama3, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math) by achieving 29.2% to 46.4% gains on MATH. Notably, simply fine-tuning the Qwen2-Math-7B-Base model with our dataset can even surpass Qwen2-Math-7B-Instruct, a strong and well-aligned model on closed-source data, and proprietary models such as GPT-4-Turbo and Claude-3.5 Sonnet.

MT-Ladder: A Model-Agnostic Framework Boosting LLM-based Machine Translation to the Next Level

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder's refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX-En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/fzp0424/Ladder

Generating Mathematical Derivations with Large Language Models

The derivation of mathematical results in specialised fields using Large Language Models (LLMs) is an emerging research direction that can help identify models' limitations, and potentially support mathematical discovery. In this paper, we leverage a symbolic engine to generate derivations of equations at scale, and investigate the capabilities of LLMs when deriving goal equations from premises. Specifically, we employ in-context learning for GPT and fine-tune a range of T5 models to compare the robustness and generalisation of pre-training strategies to specialised models. Empirical results show that fine-tuned FLAN-T5-large (MathT5) outperforms GPT models on all static and out-of-distribution test sets in terms of absolute performance. However, an in-depth analysis reveals that the fine-tuned models are more sensitive to perturbations involving unseen symbols and (to a lesser extent) changes to equation structure. In addition, we analyse 1.7K equations and over 200 derivations to highlight common reasoning errors such as the inclusion of incorrect, irrelevant, and redundant equations, along with the tendency to skip derivation steps. Finally, we explore the suitability of existing metrics for evaluating mathematical derivations finding evidence that, while they capture general properties such as sensitivity to perturbations, they fail to highlight fine-grained reasoning errors and essential differences between models. Overall, this work demonstrates that training models on synthetic data can improve their mathematical capabilities beyond larger architectures.

Learning Physical Models that Can Respect Conservation Laws

Recent work in scientific machine learning (SciML) has focused on incorporating partial differential equation (PDE) information into the learning process. Much of this work has focused on relatively ``easy'' PDE operators (e.g., elliptic and parabolic), with less emphasis on relatively ``hard'' PDE operators (e.g., hyperbolic). Within numerical PDEs, the latter problem class requires control of a type of volume element or conservation constraint, which is known to be challenging. Delivering on the promise of SciML requires seamlessly incorporating both types of problems into the learning process. To address this issue, we propose ProbConserv, a framework for incorporating conservation constraints into a generic SciML architecture. To do so, ProbConserv combines the integral form of a conservation law with a Bayesian update. We provide a detailed analysis of ProbConserv on learning with the Generalized Porous Medium Equation (GPME), a widely-applicable parameterized family of PDEs that illustrates the qualitative properties of both easier and harder PDEs. ProbConserv is effective for easy GPME variants, performing well with state-of-the-art competitors; and for harder GPME variants it outperforms other approaches that do not guarantee volume conservation. ProbConserv seamlessly enforces physical conservation constraints, maintains probabilistic uncertainty quantification (UQ), and deals well with shocks and heteroscedasticities. In each case, it achieves superior predictive performance on downstream tasks.

Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4

Recent research has focused on enhancing the capability of smaller models through imitation learning, drawing on the outputs generated by large foundation models (LFMs). A number of issues impact the quality of these models, ranging from limited imitation signals from shallow LFM outputs; small scale homogeneous training data; and most notably a lack of rigorous evaluation resulting in overestimating the small model's capability as they tend to learn to imitate the style, but not the reasoning process of LFMs. To address these challenges, we develop Orca (We are working with our legal team to publicly release a diff of the model weights in accordance with LLaMA's release policy to be published at https://aka.ms/orca-lm), a 13-billion parameter model that learns to imitate the reasoning process of LFMs. Orca learns from rich signals from GPT-4 including explanation traces; step-by-step thought processes; and other complex instructions, guided by teacher assistance from ChatGPT. To promote this progressive learning, we tap into large-scale and diverse imitation data with judicious sampling and selection. Orca surpasses conventional state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models such as Vicuna-13B by more than 100% in complex zero-shot reasoning benchmarks like Big-Bench Hard (BBH) and 42% on AGIEval. Moreover, Orca reaches parity with ChatGPT on the BBH benchmark and shows competitive performance (4 pts gap with optimized system message) in professional and academic examinations like the SAT, LSAT, GRE, and GMAT, both in zero-shot settings without CoT; while trailing behind GPT-4. Our research indicates that learning from step-by-step explanations, whether these are generated by humans or more advanced AI models, is a promising direction to improve model capabilities and skills.

Understanding Telecom Language Through Large Language Models

The recent progress of artificial intelligence (AI) opens up new frontiers in the possibility of automating many tasks involved in Telecom networks design, implementation, and deployment. This has been further pushed forward with the evolution of generative artificial intelligence (AI), including the emergence of large language models (LLMs), which is believed to be the cornerstone toward realizing self-governed, interactive AI agents. Motivated by this, in this paper, we aim to adapt the paradigm of LLMs to the Telecom domain. In particular, we fine-tune several LLMs including BERT, distilled BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-2, to the Telecom domain languages, and demonstrate a use case for identifying the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard working groups. We consider training the selected models on 3GPP technical documents (Tdoc) pertinent to years 2009-2019 and predict the Tdoc categories in years 2020-2023. The results demonstrate that fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa model achieves 84.6% accuracy, while GPT-2 model achieves 83% in identifying 3GPP working groups. The distilled BERT model with around 50% less parameters achieves similar performance as others. This corroborates that fine-tuning pretrained LLM can effectively identify the categories of Telecom language. The developed framework shows a stepping stone towards realizing intent-driven and self-evolving wireless networks from Telecom languages, and paves the way for the implementation of generative AI in the Telecom domain.

Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to leak information about training data through sentence-level membership inference and reconstruction attacks. Understanding the risk of LMs leaking Personally Identifiable Information (PII) has received less attention, which can be attributed to the false assumption that dataset curation techniques such as scrubbing are sufficient to prevent PII leakage. Scrubbing techniques reduce but do not prevent the risk of PII leakage: in practice scrubbing is imperfect and must balance the trade-off between minimizing disclosure and preserving the utility of the dataset. On the other hand, it is unclear to which extent algorithmic defenses such as differential privacy, designed to guarantee sentence- or user-level privacy, prevent PII disclosure. In this work, we introduce rigorous game-based definitions for three types of PII leakage via black-box extraction, inference, and reconstruction attacks with only API access to an LM. We empirically evaluate the attacks against GPT-2 models fine-tuned with and without defenses in three domains: case law, health care, and e-mails. Our main contributions are (i) novel attacks that can extract up to 10times more PII sequences than existing attacks, (ii) showing that sentence-level differential privacy reduces the risk of PII disclosure but still leaks about 3% of PII sequences, and (iii) a subtle connection between record-level membership inference and PII reconstruction. Code to reproduce all experiments in the paper is available at https://github.com/microsoft/analysing_pii_leakage.

ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools

Over the last decades, excellent computational chemistry tools have been developed. Their full potential has not yet been reached as most are challenging to learn and exist in isolation. Recently, large-language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in tasks across domains, but struggle with chemistry-related problems. Moreover, these models lack access to external knowledge sources, limiting their usefulness in scientific applications. In this study, we introduce ChemCrow, an LLM chemistry agent designed to accomplish tasks across organic synthesis, drug discovery, and materials design. By integrating 17 expert-designed tools, ChemCrow augments the LLM performance in chemistry, and new capabilities emerge. Our agent autonomously planned the syntheses of an insect repellent, three organocatalysts, as well as other relevant molecules. Our evaluation, including both LLM and expert assessments, demonstrates ChemCrow's effectiveness in automating a diverse set of chemical tasks. Surprisingly, we find that GPT-4 as an evaluator cannot distinguish between clearly wrong GPT-4 completions and Chemcrow's performance. There is a significant risk of misuse of tools like ChemCrow, and we discuss their potential harms. Employed responsibly, our work not only aids expert chemists and lowers barriers for non-experts, but also fosters scientific advancement by bridging the gap between experimental and computational chemistry. A subset of the code is publicly available at https://github.com/ur-whitelab/chemcrow-public.

WECHSEL: Effective initialization of subword embeddings for cross-lingual transfer of monolingual language models

Large pretrained language models (LMs) have become the central building block of many NLP applications. Training these models requires ever more computational resources and most of the existing models are trained on English text only. It is exceedingly expensive to train these models in other languages. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a novel method -- called WECHSEL -- to efficiently and effectively transfer pretrained LMs to new languages. WECHSEL can be applied to any model which uses subword-based tokenization and learns an embedding for each subword. The tokenizer of the source model (in English) is replaced with a tokenizer in the target language and token embeddings are initialized such that they are semantically similar to the English tokens by utilizing multilingual static word embeddings covering English and the target language. We use WECHSEL to transfer the English RoBERTa and GPT-2 models to four languages (French, German, Chinese and Swahili). We also study the benefits of our method on very low-resource languages. WECHSEL improves over proposed methods for cross-lingual parameter transfer and outperforms models of comparable size trained from scratch with up to 64x less training effort. Our method makes training large language models for new languages more accessible and less damaging to the environment. We make our code and models publicly available.

Inference-Time Scaling for Complex Tasks: Where We Stand and What Lies Ahead

Inference-time scaling can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on complex problems that benefit from step-by-step problem solving. Although lengthening generated scratchpads has proven effective for mathematical tasks, the broader impact of this approach on other tasks remains less clear. In this work, we investigate the benefits and limitations of scaling methods across nine state-of-the-art models and eight challenging tasks, including math and STEM reasoning, calendar planning, NP-hard problems, navigation, and spatial reasoning. We compare conventional models (e.g., GPT-4o) with models fine-tuned for inference-time scaling (e.g., o1) through evaluation protocols that involve repeated model calls, either independently or sequentially with feedback. These evaluations approximate lower and upper performance bounds and potential for future performance improvements for each model, whether through enhanced training or multi-model inference systems. Our extensive empirical analysis reveals that the advantages of inference-time scaling vary across tasks and diminish as problem complexity increases. In addition, simply using more tokens does not necessarily translate to higher accuracy in these challenging regimes. Results from multiple independent runs with conventional models using perfect verifiers show that, for some tasks, these models can achieve performance close to the average performance of today's most advanced reasoning models. However, for other tasks, a significant performance gap remains, even in very high scaling regimes. Encouragingly, all models demonstrate significant gains when inference is further scaled with perfect verifiers or strong feedback, suggesting ample potential for future improvements.

Pair Programming with Large Language Models for Sampling and Estimation of Copulas

Without writing a single line of code by a human, an example Monte Carlo simulation based application for stochastic dependence modeling with copulas is developed using a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) fine-tuned for conversations. This includes interaction with ChatGPT in natural language and using mathematical formalism, which, under careful supervision by a human-expert, led to producing a working code in MATLAB, Python and R for sampling from a given copula model, evaluation of the model's density, performing maximum likelihood estimation, optimizing the code for parallel computing for CPUs as well as for GPUs, and visualization of the computed results. In contrast to other emerging studies that assess the accuracy of LLMs like ChatGPT on tasks from a selected area, this work rather investigates ways how to achieve a successful solution of a standard statistical task in a collaboration of a human-expert and artificial intelligence (AI). Particularly, through careful prompt engineering, we separate successful solutions generated by ChatGPT from unsuccessful ones, resulting in a comprehensive list of related pros and cons. It is demonstrated that if the typical pitfalls are avoided, we can substantially benefit from collaborating with an AI partner. For example, we show that if ChatGPT is not able to provide a correct solution due to a lack of or incorrect knowledge, the human-expert can feed it with the correct knowledge, e.g., in the form of mathematical theorems and formulas, and make it to apply the gained knowledge in order to provide a solution that is correct. Such ability presents an attractive opportunity to achieve a programmed solution even for users with rather limited knowledge of programming techniques.

Generative Pre-Trained Diffusion Paradigm for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, generative pre-trained paradigms such as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision Models (LVMs) have achieved revolutionary advancements and widespread real-world applications. Particularly, the emergence of pre-trained LLMs-based temporal works, compared to previous deep model approaches, has demonstrated superior generalization and robustness, showcasing the potential of generative pre-trained paradigms as foundation models for time series. However, those LLMs-based works mainly focus on cross-modal research, i.e., leveraging the language capabilities of LLMs in time series contexts. Although they have achieved impressive performance, there still exist the issues of concept drift caused by differences in data distribution and inflexibility caused by misalignment of dimensions. To this end, inspired by recent work on LVMs, we reconsider the paradigm of time series modeling. In this paper, we comprehensively explore, for the first time, the effectiveness and superiority of the Generative Pre-trained Diffusion (GPD) paradigm in real-world multivariate time series forecasting (TSF). Specifically, to mitigate performance bias introduced by sophisticated networks, we propose a straightforward MLP diffusion network for unconditional modeling of time series. Then we employ a zero-shot and tuning-free method to predict (generate) future data using historical data as prompts. The GPD paradigm is established on the time series modality, effectively preventing the phenomenon of concept drift, and enabling flexible forecasting of arbitrary lengths. We demonstrate that the GPD paradigm achieves comprehensive performance and generalization comparable to current SOTA LLM-based and deep model paradigms on mainstream benchmarks and various TSF tasks. Extensive experiments validate the potential of the GPD paradigm and its assistance in future related research.

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form "A is B", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction "B is A". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on "Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, "Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer ("Olaf Scholz") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if "A is B'' occurs, "B is A" is more likely to occur). We provide evidence for the Reversal Curse by finetuning GPT-3 and Llama-1 on fictitious statements such as "Uriah Hawthorne is the composer of 'Abyssal Melodies'" and showing that they fail to correctly answer "Who composed 'Abyssal Melodies?'". The Reversal Curse is robust across model sizes and model families and is not alleviated by data augmentation. We also evaluate ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on questions about real-world celebrities, such as "Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]" and the reverse "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?". GPT-4 correctly answers questions like the former 79% of the time, compared to 33% for the latter. This shows a failure of logical deduction that we hypothesize is caused by the Reversal Curse. Code is available at https://github.com/lukasberglund/reversal_curse.

LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-3 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by fine-tuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, OPT, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapter, Parallel adapter, and LoRA. The framework is designed to be research-friendly, efficient, modular, and extendable, allowing the integration of new adapters and the evaluation of them with new and larger-scale LLMs. Furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness of adapters in LLMs-Adapters, we conduct experiments on six math reasoning datasets. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to that of powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets. Overall, we provide a promising framework for fine-tuning large LLMs on downstream tasks. We believe the proposed LLMs-Adapters will advance adapter-based PEFT research, facilitate the deployment of research pipelines, and enable practical applications to real-world systems.

GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model

We introduce GLM-130B, a bilingual (English and Chinese) pre-trained language model with 130 billion parameters. It is an attempt to open-source a 100B-scale model at least as good as GPT-3 and unveil how models of such a scale can be successfully pre-trained. Over the course of this effort, we face numerous unexpected technical and engineering challenges, particularly on loss spikes and disconvergence. In this paper, we introduce the training process of GLM-130B including its design choices, training strategies for both efficiency and stability, and engineering efforts. The resultant GLM-130B model offers significant outperformance over GPT-3 175B on a wide range of popular English benchmarks while the performance advantage is not observed in OPT-175B and BLOOM-176B. It also consistently and significantly outperforms ERNIE TITAN 3.0 260B -- the largest Chinese language model -- across related benchmarks. Finally, we leverage a unique scaling property of GLM-130B to reach INT4 quantization, without quantization aware training and with almost no performance loss, making it the first among 100B-scale models. More importantly, the property allows its effective inference on 4timesRTX 3090 (24G) or 8timesRTX 2080 Ti (11G) GPUs, the most ever affordable GPUs required for using 100B-scale models. The GLM-130B model weights are publicly accessible and its code, training logs, related toolkit, and lessons learned are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B .

Improving Autonomous AI Agents with Reflective Tree Search and Self-Learning

Autonomous agents have demonstrated significant potential in automating complex multistep decision-making tasks. However, even state-of-the-art vision-language models (VLMs), such as GPT-4o, still fall short of human-level performance, particularly in intricate web environments and long-horizon planning tasks. To address these limitations, we introduce Reflective Monte Carlo Tree Search (R-MCTS), a novel test-time algorithm designed to enhance the ability of AI agents, e.g., powered by GPT-4o, to explore decision space on the fly. R-MCTS extends traditional MCTS by 1) incorporating contrastive reflection, allowing agents to learn from past interactions and dynamically improve their search efficiency; and 2) using multi-agent debate to provide reliable state evaluation. Moreover, we improve the agent's performance by fine-tuning GPT-4o through self-learning, using R-MCTS generated tree traversals without any human-provided labels. On the challenging VisualWebArena benchmark, our GPT-4o-based R-MCTS agent achieves a 6% to 30% relative improvement across various tasks compared to the previous state-of-the-art. Additionally, we show that the knowledge gained from test-time search can be effectively transferred back to GPT-4o via fine-tuning. The fine-tuned GPT-4o matches 97% of R-MCTS's performance while reducing compute usage by a factor of four at test time. Furthermore, qualitative results reveal that the fine-tuned GPT-4o model demonstrates the ability to explore the environment, evaluate a state, and backtrack to viable ones when it detects that the current state cannot lead to success. Moreover, our work demonstrates the compute scaling properties in both training - data collection with R-MCTS - and testing time. These results suggest a promising research direction to enhance VLMs' reasoning and planning capabilities for agentic applications via test-time search and self-learning.

Large Generative Graph Models

Large Generative Models (LGMs) such as GPT, Stable Diffusion, Sora, and Suno are trained on a huge amount of language corpus, images, videos, and audio that are extremely diverse from numerous domains. This training paradigm over diverse well-curated data lies at the heart of generating creative and sensible content. However, all previous graph generative models (e.g., GraphRNN, MDVAE, MoFlow, GDSS, and DiGress) have been trained only on one dataset each time, which cannot replicate the revolutionary success achieved by LGMs in other fields. To remedy this crucial gap, we propose a new class of graph generative model called Large Graph Generative Model (LGGM) that is trained on a large corpus of graphs (over 5000 graphs) from 13 different domains. We empirically demonstrate that the pre-trained LGGM has superior zero-shot generative capability to existing graph generative models. Furthermore, our pre-trained LGGM can be easily fine-tuned with graphs from target domains and demonstrate even better performance than those directly trained from scratch, behaving as a solid starting point for real-world customization. Inspired by Stable Diffusion, we further equip LGGM with the capability to generate graphs given text prompts (Text-to-Graph), such as the description of the network name and domain (i.e., "The power-1138-bus graph represents a network of buses in a power distribution system."), and network statistics (i.e., "The graph has a low average degree, suitable for modeling social media interactions."). This Text-to-Graph capability integrates the extensive world knowledge in the underlying language model, offering users fine-grained control of the generated graphs. We release the code, the model checkpoint, and the datasets at https://lggm-lg.github.io/.

DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance - where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives - including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.

Direct Nash Optimization: Teaching Language Models to Self-Improve with General Preferences

This paper studies post-training large language models (LLMs) using preference feedback from a powerful oracle to help a model iteratively improve over itself. The typical approach for post-training LLMs involves Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which traditionally separates reward learning and subsequent policy optimization. However, such a reward maximization approach is limited by the nature of "point-wise" rewards (such as Bradley-Terry model), which fails to express complex intransitive or cyclic preference relations. While advances on RLHF show reward learning and policy optimization can be merged into a single contrastive objective for stability, they yet still remain tethered to the reward maximization framework. Recently, a new wave of research sidesteps the reward maximization presumptions in favor of directly optimizing over "pair-wise" or general preferences. In this paper, we introduce Direct Nash Optimization (DNO), a provable and scalable algorithm that marries the simplicity and stability of contrastive learning with theoretical generality from optimizing general preferences. Because DNO is a batched on-policy algorithm using a regression-based objective, its implementation is straightforward and efficient. Moreover, DNO enjoys monotonic improvement across iterations that help it improve even over a strong teacher (such as GPT-4). In our experiments, a resulting 7B parameter Orca-2.5 model aligned by DNO achieves the state-of-the-art win-rate against GPT-4-Turbo of 33% on AlpacaEval 2.0 (even after controlling for response length), an absolute gain of 26% (7% to 33%) over the initializing model. It outperforms models with far more parameters, including Mistral Large, Self-Rewarding LM (70B parameters), and older versions of GPT-4.

PIM-GPT: A Hybrid Process-in-Memory Accelerator for Autoregressive Transformers

Decoder-only Transformer models such as GPT have demonstrated superior performance in text generation, by autoregressively predicting the next token. However, the performance of GPT is bounded by low compute-to-memory-ratio and high memory access. Throughput-oriented architectures such as GPUs target parallel processing rather than sequential token generation, and are not efficient for GPT acceleration, particularly on-device inference applications. Process-in-memory (PIM) architectures can significantly reduce data movement and provide high computation parallelism, and are promising candidates to accelerate GPT inference. In this work, we propose PIM-GPT that aims to achieve high throughput, high energy efficiency and end-to-end acceleration of GPT inference. PIM-GPT leverages DRAM-based PIM solutions to perform multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations on the DRAM chips, greatly reducing data movement. A compact application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) is designed and synthesized to initiate instructions to PIM chips and support data communication along with necessary arithmetic computations. At the software level, the mapping scheme is designed to maximize data locality and computation parallelism by partitioning a matrix among DRAM channels and banks to utilize all in-bank computation resources concurrently. We develop an event-driven clock-cycle accurate simulator to validate the efficacy of the proposed PIM-GPT architecture. Overall, PIM-GPT achieves 41-137times, 631-1074times speedup and 339-1085times, 890-1632times energy efficiency over GPU and CPU baseline, respectively, on 8 GPT models with up to 1.4 billion parameters.

PaLM 2 Technical Report

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.

eCeLLM: Generalizing Large Language Models for E-commerce from Large-scale, High-quality Instruction Data

With tremendous efforts on developing effective e-commerce models, conventional e-commerce models show limited success in generalist e-commerce modeling, and suffer from unsatisfactory performance on new users and new products - a typical out-of-domain generalization challenge. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate outstanding performance in generalist modeling and out-of-domain generalizability in many fields. Toward fully unleashing their power for e-commerce, in this paper, we construct ECInstruct, the first open-sourced, large-scale, and high-quality benchmark instruction dataset for e-commerce. Leveraging ECInstruct, we develop eCeLLM, a series of e-commerce LLMs, by instruction-tuning general-purpose LLMs. Our comprehensive experiments and evaluation demonstrate that eCeLLM models substantially outperform baseline models, including the most advanced GPT-4, and the state-of-the-art task-specific models in in-domain evaluation. Moreover, eCeLLM exhibits excellent generalizability to out-of-domain settings, including unseen products and unseen instructions, highlighting its superiority as a generalist e-commerce model. Both the ECInstruct dataset and the eCeLLM models show great potential in empowering versatile and effective LLMs for e-commerce. ECInstruct and eCeLLM models are publicly accessible through https://ninglab.github.io/eCeLLM.

RS-GPT4V: A Unified Multimodal Instruction-Following Dataset for Remote Sensing Image Understanding

The remote sensing image intelligence understanding model is undergoing a new profound paradigm shift which has been promoted by multi-modal large language model (MLLM), i.e. from the paradigm learning a domain model (LaDM) shifts to paradigm learning a pre-trained general foundation model followed by an adaptive domain model (LaGD). Under the new LaGD paradigm, the old datasets, which have led to advances in RSI intelligence understanding in the last decade, are no longer suitable for fire-new tasks. We argued that a new dataset must be designed to lighten tasks with the following features: 1) Generalization: training model to learn shared knowledge among tasks and to adapt to different tasks; 2) Understanding complex scenes: training model to understand the fine-grained attribute of the objects of interest, and to be able to describe the scene with natural language; 3) Reasoning: training model to be able to realize high-level visual reasoning. In this paper, we designed a high-quality, diversified, and unified multimodal instruction-following dataset for RSI understanding produced by GPT-4V and existing datasets, which we called RS-GPT4V. To achieve generalization, we used a (Question, Answer) which was deduced from GPT-4V via instruction-following to unify the tasks such as captioning and localization; To achieve complex scene, we proposed a hierarchical instruction description with local strategy in which the fine-grained attributes of the objects and their spatial relationships are described and global strategy in which all the local information are integrated to yield detailed instruction descript; To achieve reasoning, we designed multiple-turn QA pair to provide the reasoning ability for a model. The empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLMs by RS-GPT4V can describe fine-grained information. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/RS-GPT4V.

RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text

The fixed-size context of Transformer makes GPT models incapable of generating arbitrarily long text. In this paper, we introduce RecurrentGPT, a language-based simulacrum of the recurrence mechanism in RNNs. RecurrentGPT is built upon a large language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT and uses natural language to simulate the Long Short-Term Memory mechanism in an LSTM. At each timestep, RecurrentGPT generates a paragraph of text and updates its language-based long-short term memory stored on the hard drive and the prompt, respectively. This recurrence mechanism enables RecurrentGPT to generate texts of arbitrary length without forgetting. Since human users can easily observe and edit the natural language memories, RecurrentGPT is interpretable and enables interactive generation of long text. RecurrentGPT is an initial step towards next-generation computer-assisted writing systems beyond local editing suggestions. In addition to producing AI-generated content (AIGC), we also demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT as an interactive fiction that directly interacts with consumers. We call this usage of generative models by ``AI As Contents'' (AIAC), which we believe is the next form of conventional AIGC. We further demonstrate the possibility of using RecurrentGPT to create personalized interactive fiction that directly interacts with readers instead of interacting with writers. More broadly, RecurrentGPT demonstrates the utility of borrowing ideas from popular model designs in cognitive science and deep learning for prompting LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/RecurrentGPT and an online demo is available at https://www.aiwaves.org/recurrentgpt.

SleepCoT: A Lightweight Personalized Sleep Health Model via Chain-of-Thought Distillation

We present a novel approach to personalized sleep health management using few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation, enabling small-scale language models (> 2B parameters) to rival the performance of large language models (LLMs) in specialized health domains. Our method simultaneously distills problem-solving strategies, long-tail expert knowledge, and personalized recommendation capabilities from larger models into more efficient, compact models. Unlike existing systems, our approach offers three key functionalities: generating personalized sleep health recommendations, supporting user-specific follow-up inquiries, and providing responses to domain-specific knowledge questions. We focus on sleep health due to its measurability via wearable devices and its impact on overall well-being. Our experimental setup, involving GPT-4o for data synthesis, Qwen-max for instruction set creation, and Qwen2.5 1.5B for model distillation, demonstrates significant improvements over baseline small-scale models in penalization, reasoning, and knowledge application. Experiments using 100 simulated sleep reports and 1,000 domain-specific questions shows our model achieves comparable performance to larger models while maintaining efficiency for real-world deployment. This research not only advances AI-driven health management but also provides a novel approach to leveraging LLM capabilities in resource-constrained environments, potentially enhancing the accessibility of personalized healthcare solutions.

Towards A Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model via Unified Knowledge Distillation

Foundation models pretrained on large-scale datasets are revolutionizing the field of computational pathology (CPath). The generalization ability of foundation models is crucial for the success in various downstream clinical tasks. However, current foundation models have only been evaluated on a limited type and number of tasks, leaving their generalization ability and overall performance unclear. To address this gap, we established a most comprehensive benchmark to evaluate the performance of off-the-shelf foundation models across six distinct clinical task types, encompassing a total of 39 specific tasks. Our findings reveal that existing foundation models excel at certain task types but struggle to effectively handle the full breadth of clinical tasks. To improve the generalization of pathology foundation models, we propose a unified knowledge distillation framework consisting of both expert and self knowledge distillation, where the former allows the model to learn from the knowledge of multiple expert models, while the latter leverages self-distillation to enable image representation learning via local-global alignment. Based on this framework, a Generalizable Pathology Foundation Model (GPFM) is pretrained on a large-scale dataset consisting of 190 million images from around 86,000 public H&E whole slides across 34 major tissue types. Evaluated on the established benchmark, GPFM achieves an impressive average rank of 1.36, with 29 tasks ranked 1st, while the the second-best model, UNI, attains an average rank of 2.96, with only 4 tasks ranked 1st. The superior generalization of GPFM demonstrates its exceptional modeling capabilities across a wide range of clinical tasks, positioning it as a new cornerstone for feature representation in CPath.

MPIrigen: MPI Code Generation through Domain-Specific Language Models

The imperative need to scale computation across numerous nodes highlights the significance of efficient parallel computing, particularly in the realm of Message Passing Interface (MPI) integration. The challenging parallel programming task of generating MPI-based parallel programs has remained unexplored. This study first investigates the performance of state-of-the-art language models in generating MPI-based parallel programs. Findings reveal that widely used models such as GPT-3.5 and PolyCoder (specialized multi-lingual code models) exhibit notable performance degradation, when generating MPI-based programs compared to general-purpose programs. In contrast, domain-specific models such as MonoCoder, which are pretrained on MPI-related programming languages of C and C++, outperform larger models. Subsequently, we introduce a dedicated downstream task of MPI-based program generation by fine-tuning MonoCoder on HPCorpusMPI. We call the resulting model as MPIrigen. We propose an innovative preprocessing for completion only after observing the whole code, thus enabling better completion with a wider context. Comparative analysis against GPT-3.5 zero-shot performance, using a novel HPC-oriented evaluation method, demonstrates that MPIrigen excels in generating accurate MPI functions up to 0.8 accuracy in location and function predictions, and with more than 0.9 accuracy for argument predictions. The success of this tailored solution underscores the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning in optimizing language models for parallel computing code generation, paving the way for a new generation of automatic parallelization tools. The sources of this work are available at our GitHub MPIrigen repository: https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab-NRCN/MPI-rigen

TEMPO: Prompt-based Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Time Series Forecasting

The past decade has witnessed significant advances in time series modeling with deep learning. While achieving state-of-the-art results, the best-performing architectures vary highly across applications and domains. Meanwhile, for natural language processing, the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) has demonstrated impressive performance via training one general-purpose model across various textual datasets. It is intriguing to explore whether GPT-type architectures can be effective for time series, capturing the intrinsic dynamic attributes and leading to significant accuracy improvements. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, TEMPO, that can effectively learn time series representations. We focus on utilizing two essential inductive biases of the time series task for pre-trained models: (i) decomposition of the complex interaction between trend, seasonal and residual components; and (ii) introducing the selection-based prompts to facilitate distribution adaptation in non-stationary time series. TEMPO expands the capability for dynamically modeling real-world temporal phenomena from data within diverse domains. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of TEMPO over state-of-the-art methods on a number of time series benchmark datasets. This performance gain is observed not only in standard supervised learning settings but also in scenarios involving previously unseen datasets as well as in scenarios with multi-modal inputs. This compelling finding highlights TEMPO's potential to constitute a foundational model-building framework.

FuseGPT: Learnable Layers Fusion of Generative Pre-trained Transformers

Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains through the extensive scaling of model parameters. Recent works observe the redundancy across the transformer blocks and develop compression methods by structured pruning of the unimportant blocks. However, such straightforward elimination will always provide irreversible performance degradation. In this paper, we propose FuseGPT, a novel methodology to recycle the pruned transformer blocks to further recover the model performance. Firstly we introduce a new importance detection metric, Macro Influence (MI), to detect the long-term influence of each transformer block by calculating their loss of information after removal. Then we propose group-level layers fusion, which adopts the parameters in layers of the unimportant blocks and injects them into the corresponding layers inside the neighboring blocks. The fusion is not one-off but through iterative parameter updates by lightweight group-level fine-tuning. Specifically, these injected parameters are frozen but weighted with learnable rank decomposition matrices to reduce the overhead during fine-tuning. Our approach not only works well on large language models but also on large multimodal models. The experiments have shown that, by using modest amounts of data, FuseGPT can outperform previous works in both perplexity and zero-shot task performance.

Sophia: A Scalable Stochastic Second-order Optimizer for Language Model Pre-training

Given the massive cost of language model pre-training, a non-trivial improvement of the optimization algorithm would lead to a material reduction on the time and cost of training. Adam and its variants have been state-of-the-art for years, and more sophisticated second-order (Hessian-based) optimizers often incur too much per-step overhead. In this paper, we propose Sophia, Second-order Clipped Stochastic Optimization, a simple scalable second-order optimizer that uses a light-weight estimate of the diagonal Hessian as the pre-conditioner. The update is the moving average of the gradients divided by the moving average of the estimated Hessian, followed by element-wise clipping. The clipping controls the worst-case update size and tames the negative impact of non-convexity and rapid change of Hessian along the trajectory. Sophia only estimates the diagonal Hessian every handful of iterations, which has negligible average per-step time and memory overhead. On language modeling with GPT-2 models of sizes ranging from 125M to 770M, Sophia achieves a 2x speed-up compared with Adam in the number of steps, total compute, and wall-clock time. Theoretically, we show that Sophia adapts to the curvature in different components of the parameters, which can be highly heterogeneous for language modeling tasks. Our run-time bound does not depend on the condition number of the loss.

Monarch Mixer: A Simple Sub-Quadratic GEMM-Based Architecture

Machine learning models are increasingly being scaled in both sequence length and model dimension to reach longer contexts and better performance. However, existing architectures such as Transformers scale quadratically along both these axes. We ask: are there performant architectures that can scale sub-quadratically along sequence length and model dimension? We introduce Monarch Mixer (M2), a new architecture that uses the same sub-quadratic primitive along both sequence length and model dimension: Monarch matrices, a simple class of expressive structured matrices that captures many linear transforms, achieves high hardware efficiency on GPUs, and scales sub-quadratically. As a proof of concept, we explore the performance of M2 in three domains: non-causal BERT-style language modeling, ViT-style image classification, and causal GPT-style language modeling. For non-causal BERT-style modeling, M2 matches BERT-base and BERT-large in downstream GLUE quality with up to 27% fewer parameters, and achieves up to 9.1times higher throughput at sequence length 4K. On ImageNet, M2 outperforms ViT-b by 1% in accuracy, with only half the parameters. Causal GPT-style models introduce a technical challenge: enforcing causality via masking introduces a quadratic bottleneck. To alleviate this bottleneck, we develop a novel theoretical view of Monarch matrices based on multivariate polynomial evaluation and interpolation, which lets us parameterize M2 to be causal while remaining sub-quadratic. Using this parameterization, M2 matches GPT-style Transformers at 360M parameters in pretraining perplexity on The PILE--showing for the first time that it may be possible to match Transformer quality without attention or MLPs.

RareBench: Can LLMs Serve as Rare Diseases Specialists?

Generalist Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown considerable promise in various domains, including medical diagnosis. Rare diseases, affecting approximately 300 million people worldwide, often have unsatisfactory clinical diagnosis rates primarily due to a lack of experienced physicians and the complexity of differentiating among many rare diseases. In this context, recent news such as "ChatGPT correctly diagnosed a 4-year-old's rare disease after 17 doctors failed" underscore LLMs' potential, yet underexplored, role in clinically diagnosing rare diseases. To bridge this research gap, we introduce RareBench, a pioneering benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities of LLMs on 4 critical dimensions within the realm of rare diseases. Meanwhile, we have compiled the largest open-source dataset on rare disease patients, establishing a benchmark for future studies in this domain. To facilitate differential diagnosis of rare diseases, we develop a dynamic few-shot prompt methodology, leveraging a comprehensive rare disease knowledge graph synthesized from multiple knowledge bases, significantly enhancing LLMs' diagnostic performance. Moreover, we present an exhaustive comparative study of GPT-4's diagnostic capabilities against those of specialist physicians. Our experimental findings underscore the promising potential of integrating LLMs into the clinical diagnostic process for rare diseases. This paves the way for exciting possibilities in future advancements in this field.

ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation

Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).

A Comprehensive Survey on Pretrained Foundation Models: A History from BERT to ChatGPT

Pretrained Foundation Models (PFMs) are regarded as the foundation for various downstream tasks with different data modalities. A PFM (e.g., BERT, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) is trained on large-scale data which provides a reasonable parameter initialization for a wide range of downstream applications. BERT learns bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers, which are trained on large datasets as contextual language models. Similarly, the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) method employs Transformers as the feature extractor and is trained using an autoregressive paradigm on large datasets. Recently, ChatGPT shows promising success on large language models, which applies an autoregressive language model with zero shot or few shot prompting. The remarkable achievements of PFM have brought significant breakthroughs to various fields of AI. Numerous studies have proposed different methods, raising the demand for an updated survey. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent research advancements, challenges, and opportunities for PFMs in text, image, graph, as well as other data modalities. The review covers the basic components and existing pretraining methods used in natural language processing, computer vision, and graph learning. Additionally, it explores advanced PFMs used for different data modalities and unified PFMs that consider data quality and quantity. The review also discusses research related to the fundamentals of PFMs, such as model efficiency and compression, security, and privacy. Finally, the study provides key implications, future research directions, challenges, and open problems in the field of PFMs. Overall, this survey aims to shed light on the research of the PFMs on scalability, security, logical reasoning ability, cross-domain learning ability, and the user-friendly interactive ability for artificial general intelligence.

FoldGPT: Simple and Effective Large Language Model Compression Scheme

The demand for deploying large language models(LLMs) on mobile devices continues to increase, driven by escalating data security concerns and cloud costs. However, network bandwidth and memory limitations pose challenges for deploying billion-level models on mobile devices. In this study, we investigate the outputs of different layers across various scales of LLMs and found that the outputs of most layers exhibit significant similarity. Moreover, this similarity becomes more pronounced as the model size increases, indicating substantial redundancy in the depth direction of the LLMs. Based on this observation, we propose an efficient model volume compression strategy, termed FoldGPT, which combines block removal and block parameter sharing.This strategy consists of three parts: (1) Based on the learnable gating parameters, we determine the block importance ranking while modeling the coupling effect between blocks. Then we delete some redundant layers based on the given removal rate. (2) For the retained blocks, we apply a specially designed group parameter sharing strategy, where blocks within the same group share identical weights, significantly compressing the number of parameters and slightly reducing latency overhead. (3) After sharing these Blocks, we "cure" the mismatch caused by sparsity with a minor amount of fine-tuning and introduce a tail-layer distillation strategy to improve the performance. Experiments demonstrate that FoldGPT outperforms previous state-of-the-art(SOTA) methods in efficient model compression, demonstrating the feasibility of achieving model lightweighting through straightforward block removal and parameter sharing.

The Languini Kitchen: Enabling Language Modelling Research at Different Scales of Compute

The Languini Kitchen serves as both a research collective and codebase designed to empower researchers with limited computational resources to contribute meaningfully to the field of language modelling. We introduce an experimental protocol that enables model comparisons based on equivalent compute, measured in accelerator hours. The number of tokens on which a model is trained is defined by the model's throughput and the chosen compute class. Notably, this approach avoids constraints on critical hyperparameters which affect total parameters or floating-point operations. For evaluation, we pre-process an existing large, diverse, and high-quality dataset of books that surpasses existing academic benchmarks in quality, diversity, and document length. On it, we compare methods based on their empirical scaling trends which are estimated through experiments at various levels of compute. This work also provides two baseline models: a feed-forward model derived from the GPT-2 architecture and a recurrent model in the form of a novel LSTM with ten-fold throughput. While the GPT baseline achieves better perplexity throughout all our levels of compute, our LSTM baseline exhibits a predictable and more favourable scaling law. This is due to the improved throughput and the need for fewer training tokens to achieve the same decrease in test perplexity. Extrapolating the scaling laws leads of both models results in an intersection at roughly 50,000 accelerator hours. We hope this work can serve as the foundation for meaningful and reproducible language modelling research.

M^{3}-20M: A Large-Scale Multi-Modal Molecule Dataset for AI-driven Drug Design and Discovery

This paper introduces M^{3}-20M, a large-scale Multi-Modal Molecular dataset that contains over 20 million molecules. Designed to support AI-driven drug design and discovery, M^{3}-20M is 71 times more in the number of molecules than the largest existing dataset, providing an unprecedented scale that can highly benefit training or fine-tuning large (language) models with superior performance for drug design and discovery. This dataset integrates one-dimensional SMILES, two-dimensional molecular graphs, three-dimensional molecular structures, physicochemical properties, and textual descriptions collected through web crawling and generated by using GPT-3.5, offering a comprehensive view of each molecule. To demonstrate the power of M^{3}-20M in drug design and discovery, we conduct extensive experiments on two key tasks: molecule generation and molecular property prediction, using large language models including GLM4, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. Our experimental results show that M^{3}-20M can significantly boost model performance in both tasks. Specifically, it enables the models to generate more diverse and valid molecular structures and achieve higher property prediction accuracy than the existing single-modal datasets, which validates the value and potential of M^{3}-20M in supporting AI-driven drug design and discovery. The dataset is available at https://github.com/bz99bz/M-3.

Diminished Diversity-of-Thought in a Standard Large Language Model

We test whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to simulate human participants in social-science studies. To do this, we run replications of 14 studies from the Many Labs 2 replication project with OpenAI's text-davinci-003 model, colloquially known as GPT3.5. Based on our pre-registered analyses, we find that among the eight studies we could analyse, our GPT sample replicated 37.5% of the original results and 37.5% of the Many Labs 2 results. However, we were unable to analyse the remaining six studies due to an unexpected phenomenon we call the "correct answer" effect. Different runs of GPT3.5 answered nuanced questions probing political orientation, economic preference, judgement, and moral philosophy with zero or near-zero variation in responses: with the supposedly "correct answer." In one exploratory follow-up study, we found that a "correct answer" was robust to changing the demographic details that precede the prompt. In another, we found that most but not all "correct answers" were robust to changing the order of answer choices. One of our most striking findings occurred in our replication of the Moral Foundations Theory survey results, where we found GPT3.5 identifying as a political conservative in 99.6% of the cases, and as a liberal in 99.3% of the cases in the reverse-order condition. However, both self-reported 'GPT conservatives' and 'GPT liberals' showed right-leaning moral foundations. Our results cast doubts on the validity of using LLMs as a general replacement for human participants in the social sciences. Our results also raise concerns that a hypothetical AI-led future may be subject to a diminished diversity-of-thought.

LLaMA-E: Empowering E-commerce Authoring with Multi-Aspect Instruction Following

E-commerce authoring involves creating attractive, abundant, and targeted promotional content to drive product sales. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) introduces an innovative paradigm, offering a unified solution to address various authoring tasks within this scenario. However, mainstream LLMs trained on general corpora with common sense knowledge reveal limitations in fitting complex and personalized features unique to e-commerce products and customers. Furthermore, LLMs like GPT-3.5 necessitate remote accessibility, raising concerns about safeguarding voluminous customer privacy data during transmission. This paper proposes the LLaMA-E, the unified and customized instruction-following language models focusing on diverse e-commerce authoring tasks. Specifically, the domain experts create the seed instruction set from the tasks of ads generation, query-enhanced product title rewriting, product classification, purchase intent speculation, and general Q&A. These tasks enable the models to comprehensively understand precise e-commerce authoring knowledge by interleaving features covering typical service aspects of customers, sellers, and platforms. The GPT-3.5 is introduced as a teacher model, which expands the seed instructions to form a training set for the LLaMA-E models with various scales. The experimental results show that the proposed LLaMA-E models achieve state-of-the-art results in quantitative and qualitative evaluations, also exhibiting the advantage in zero-shot scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to serve the LLMs to specific e-commerce authoring scenarios.

TxGemma: Efficient and Agentic LLMs for Therapeutics

Therapeutic development is a costly and high-risk endeavor that is often plagued by high failure rates. To address this, we introduce TxGemma, a suite of efficient, generalist large language models (LLMs) capable of therapeutic property prediction as well as interactive reasoning and explainability. Unlike task-specific models, TxGemma synthesizes information from diverse sources, enabling broad application across the therapeutic development pipeline. The suite includes 2B, 9B, and 27B parameter models, fine-tuned from Gemma-2 on a comprehensive dataset of small molecules, proteins, nucleic acids, diseases, and cell lines. Across 66 therapeutic development tasks, TxGemma achieved superior or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art generalist model on 64 (superior on 45), and against state-of-the-art specialist models on 50 (superior on 26). Fine-tuning TxGemma models on therapeutic downstream tasks, such as clinical trial adverse event prediction, requires less training data than fine-tuning base LLMs, making TxGemma suitable for data-limited applications. Beyond these predictive capabilities, TxGemma features conversational models that bridge the gap between general LLMs and specialized property predictors. These allow scientists to interact in natural language, provide mechanistic reasoning for predictions based on molecular structure, and engage in scientific discussions. Building on this, we further introduce Agentic-Tx, a generalist therapeutic agentic system powered by Gemini 2.5 that reasons, acts, manages diverse workflows, and acquires external domain knowledge. Agentic-Tx surpasses prior leading models on the Humanity's Last Exam benchmark (Chemistry & Biology) with 52.3% relative improvement over o3-mini (high) and 26.7% over o3-mini (high) on GPQA (Chemistry) and excels with improvements of 6.3% (ChemBench-Preference) and 2.4% (ChemBench-Mini) over o3-mini (high).

One Epoch Is All You Need

In unsupervised learning, collecting more data is not always a costly process unlike the training. For example, it is not hard to enlarge the 40GB WebText used for training GPT-2 by modifying its sampling methodology considering how many webpages there are in the Internet. On the other hand, given that training on this dataset already costs tens of thousands of dollars, training on a larger dataset naively is not cost-wise feasible. In this paper, we suggest to train on a larger dataset for only one epoch unlike the current practice, in which the unsupervised models are trained for from tens to hundreds of epochs. Furthermore, we suggest to adjust the model size and the number of iterations to be performed appropriately. We show that the performance of Transformer language model becomes dramatically improved in this way, especially if the original number of epochs is greater. For example, by replacing the training for 10 epochs with the one epoch training, this translates to 1.9-3.3x speedup in wall-clock time in our settings and more if the original number of epochs is greater. Under one epoch training, no overfitting occurs, and regularization method does nothing but slows down the training. Also, the curve of test loss over iterations follows power-law extensively. We compare the wall-clock time of the training of models with different parameter budget under one epoch training, and we show that size/iteration adjustment based on our proposed heuristics leads to 1-2.7x speedup in our cases. With the two methods combined, we achieve 3.3-5.1x speedup. Finally, we speculate various implications of one epoch training and size/iteration adjustment. In particular, based on our analysis we believe that we can reduce the cost to train the state-of-the-art models as BERT and GPT-2 dramatically, maybe even by the factor of 10.

The Fellowship of the LLMs: Multi-Agent Workflows for Synthetic Preference Optimization Dataset Generation

This paper presents synthetic Preference Optimization (PO) datasets generated using multi-agent workflows and evaluates the effectiveness and potential of these workflows in the dataset generation process. PO dataset generation requires two modules: (1) response evaluation, and (2) response generation. In the response evaluation module, the responses from Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated and ranked - a task typically carried out by human annotators that we automate using LLMs. We assess the response evaluation module in a 2 step process. In step 1, we assess LLMs as evaluators using three distinct prompting strategies. In step 2, we apply the winning prompting strategy to compare the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge, LLMs-as-a-Jury, and LLM Debate. In each step, we use inter-rater agreement using Cohen's Kappa between human annotators and LLMs. For the response generation module, we compare different configurations for the LLM Feedback Loop using the identified LLM evaluator configuration. We use the win rate (the fraction of times a generation framework is selected as the best by an LLM evaluator) to determine the best multi-agent configuration for generation. After identifying the best configurations for both modules, we use models from the GPT, Gemma, and Llama families to generate our PO datasets using the above pipeline. We generate two types of PO datasets, one to improve the generation capabilities of individual LLM and the other to improve the multi-agent workflow. Our evaluation shows that GPT-4o-as-a-Judge is more consistent across datasets when the candidate responses do not include responses from the GPT family. Additionally, we find that the LLM Feedback Loop, with Llama as the generator and Gemma as the reviewer, achieves a notable 71.8% and 73.8% win rate over single-agent Llama and Gemma, respectively.

A Probabilistic Inference Approach to Inference-Time Scaling of LLMs using Particle-Based Monte Carlo Methods

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance gains via scaling up model sizes and/or data. However, recent evidence suggests diminishing returns from such approaches, motivating scaling the computation spent at inference time. Existing inference-time scaling methods, usually with reward models, cast the task as a search problem, which tends to be vulnerable to reward hacking as a consequence of approximation errors in reward models. In this paper, we instead cast inference-time scaling as a probabilistic inference task and leverage sampling-based techniques to explore the typical set of the state distribution of a state-space model with an approximate likelihood, rather than optimize for its mode directly. We propose a novel inference-time scaling approach by adapting particle-based Monte Carlo methods to this task. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our methods have a 4-16x better scaling rate over our deterministic search counterparts on various challenging mathematical reasoning tasks. Using our approach, we show that Qwen2.5-Math-1.5B-Instruct can surpass GPT-4o accuracy in only 4 rollouts, while Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct scales to o1 level accuracy in only 32 rollouts. Our work not only presents an effective method to inference-time scaling, but also connects the rich literature in probabilistic inference with inference-time scaling of LLMs to develop more robust algorithms in future work. Code and further information is available at https://probabilistic-inference-scaling.github.io.

Can Models Learn Skill Composition from Examples?

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly advanced, their ability to exhibit compositional generalization -- the capacity to combine learned skills in novel ways not encountered during training -- has garnered significant attention. This type of generalization, particularly in scenarios beyond training data, is also of great interest in the study of AI safety and alignment. A recent study introduced the SKILL-MIX evaluation, where models are tasked with composing a short paragraph demonstrating the use of a specified k-tuple of language skills. While small models struggled with composing even with k=3, larger models like GPT-4 performed reasonably well with k=5 and 6. In this paper, we employ a setup akin to SKILL-MIX to evaluate the capacity of smaller models to learn compositional generalization from examples. Utilizing a diverse set of language skills -- including rhetorical, literary, reasoning, theory of mind, and common sense -- GPT-4 was used to generate text samples that exhibit random subsets of k skills. Subsequent fine-tuning of 7B and 13B parameter models on these combined skill texts, for increasing values of k, revealed the following findings: (1) Training on combinations of k=2 and 3 skills results in noticeable improvements in the ability to compose texts with k=4 and 5 skills, despite models never having seen such examples during training. (2) When skill categories are split into training and held-out groups, models significantly improve at composing texts with held-out skills during testing despite having only seen training skills during fine-tuning, illustrating the efficacy of the training approach even with previously unseen skills. This study also suggests that incorporating skill-rich (potentially synthetic) text into training can substantially enhance the compositional capabilities of models.

Playing repeated games with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming society and permeating into diverse applications. As a result, LLMs will frequently interact with us and other agents. It is, therefore, of great societal value to understand how LLMs behave in interactive social settings. Here, we propose to use behavioral game theory to study LLM's cooperation and coordination behavior. To do so, we let different LLMs (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4) play finitely repeated games with each other and with other, human-like strategies. Our results show that LLMs generally perform well in such tasks and also uncover persistent behavioral signatures. In a large set of two players-two strategies games, we find that LLMs are particularly good at games where valuing their own self-interest pays off, like the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma family. However, they behave sub-optimally in games that require coordination. We, therefore, further focus on two games from these distinct families. In the canonical iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, we find that GPT-4 acts particularly unforgivingly, always defecting after another agent has defected only once. In the Battle of the Sexes, we find that GPT-4 cannot match the behavior of the simple convention to alternate between options. We verify that these behavioral signatures are stable across robustness checks. Finally, we show how GPT-4's behavior can be modified by providing further information about the other player as well as by asking it to predict the other player's actions before making a choice. These results enrich our understanding of LLM's social behavior and pave the way for a behavioral game theory for machines.

Pard: Permutation-Invariant Autoregressive Diffusion for Graph Generation

Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely unordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block's probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN. Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules.

Exploiting Inter-Layer Expert Affinity for Accelerating Mixture-of-Experts Model Inference

In large language models like the Generative Pre-trained Transformer, the Mixture of Experts paradigm has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing model expressiveness and accuracy. However, deploying GPT MoE models for parallel inference on distributed systems presents significant challenges, primarily due to the extensive Alltoall communication required for expert routing and aggregation. This communication bottleneck exacerbates the already complex computational landscape, hindering the efficient utilization of high-performance computing resources. In this paper, we propose a lightweight optimization technique called ExFlow, to largely accelerate the inference of these MoE models. We take a new perspective on alleviating the communication overhead by exploiting the inter-layer expert affinity. Unlike previous methods, our solution can be directly applied to pre-trained MoE models without any fine-tuning or accuracy degradation. By proposing a context-coherent expert parallelism on distributed systems, our design only uses one Alltoall communication to deliver the same functionality while previous methods all require two Alltoalls. By carefully examining the conditional probability in tokens' routing across multiple layers, we proved that pre-trained GPT MoE models implicitly exhibit a strong inter-layer expert affinity. We then design an efficient integer programming model to capture such features and show that by properly placing the experts on corresponding GPUs, we can reduce up to 67% cross-GPU routing latency. Our solution beats the cutting-edge MoE implementations with experts from 8 to 64, with up to 2.2x improvement in inference throughput. We further provide a detailed study of how the model implicitly acquires this expert affinity at the very early training stage and how this affinity evolves and stabilizes during training.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of GPT-4V on Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answering

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Long Term Memory: The Foundation of AI Self-Evolution

Large language models (LLMs) like GPTs, trained on vast datasets, have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and planning, achieving human-level performance in various tasks. Most studies focus on enhancing these models by training on ever-larger datasets to build more powerful foundation models. While training stronger models is important, enabling models to evolve during inference is equally crucial, a process we refer to as AI self-evolution. Unlike large-scale training, self-evolution may rely on limited data or interactions. Inspired by the columnar organization of the human cerebral cortex, we hypothesize that AI models could develop cognitive abilities and build internal representations through iterative interactions with their environment. To achieve this, models need long-term memory (LTM) to store and manage processed interaction data. LTM supports self-evolution by representing diverse experiences across environments and agents. In this report, we explore AI self-evolution and its potential to enhance models during inference. We examine LTM's role in lifelong learning, allowing models to evolve based on accumulated interactions. We outline the structure of LTM and the systems needed for effective data retention and representation. We also classify approaches for building personalized models with LTM data and show how these models achieve self-evolution through interaction. Using LTM, our multi-agent framework OMNE achieved first place on the GAIA benchmark, demonstrating LTM's potential for AI self-evolution. Finally, we present a roadmap for future research, emphasizing the importance of LTM for advancing AI technology and its practical applications.

GeoLLM: Extracting Geospatial Knowledge from Large Language Models

The application of machine learning (ML) in a range of geospatial tasks is increasingly common but often relies on globally available covariates such as satellite imagery that can either be expensive or lack predictive power. Here we explore the question of whether the vast amounts of knowledge found in Internet language corpora, now compressed within large language models (LLMs), can be leveraged for geospatial prediction tasks. We first demonstrate that LLMs embed remarkable spatial information about locations, but naively querying LLMs using geographic coordinates alone is ineffective in predicting key indicators like population density. We then present GeoLLM, a novel method that can effectively extract geospatial knowledge from LLMs with auxiliary map data from OpenStreetMap. We demonstrate the utility of our approach across multiple tasks of central interest to the international community, including the measurement of population density and economic livelihoods. Across these tasks, our method demonstrates a 70% improvement in performance (measured using Pearson's r^2) relative to baselines that use nearest neighbors or use information directly from the prompt, and performance equal to or exceeding satellite-based benchmarks in the literature. With GeoLLM, we observe that GPT-3.5 outperforms Llama 2 and RoBERTa by 19% and 51% respectively, suggesting that the performance of our method scales well with the size of the model and its pretraining dataset. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are remarkably sample-efficient, rich in geospatial information, and robust across the globe. Crucially, GeoLLM shows promise in mitigating the limitations of existing geospatial covariates and complementing them well. Code is available on the project website: https://rohinmanvi.github.io/GeoLLM

Improved Test-Time Adaptation for Domain Generalization

The main challenge in domain generalization (DG) is to handle the distribution shift problem that lies between the training and test data. Recent studies suggest that test-time training (TTT), which adapts the learned model with test data, might be a promising solution to the problem. Generally, a TTT strategy hinges its performance on two main factors: selecting an appropriate auxiliary TTT task for updating and identifying reliable parameters to update during the test phase. Both previous arts and our experiments indicate that TTT may not improve but be detrimental to the learned model if those two factors are not properly considered. This work addresses those two factors by proposing an Improved Test-Time Adaptation (ITTA) method. First, instead of heuristically defining an auxiliary objective, we propose a learnable consistency loss for the TTT task, which contains learnable parameters that can be adjusted toward better alignment between our TTT task and the main prediction task. Second, we introduce additional adaptive parameters for the trained model, and we suggest only updating the adaptive parameters during the test phase. Through extensive experiments, we show that the proposed two strategies are beneficial for the learned model (see Figure 1), and ITTA could achieve superior performance to the current state-of-the-art methods on several DG benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/liangchen527/ITTA.

UL2: Unifying Language Learning Paradigms

Existing pre-trained models are generally geared towards a particular class of problems. To date, there seems to be still no consensus on what the right architecture and pre-training setup should be. This paper presents a unified framework for pre-training models that are universally effective across datasets and setups. We begin by disentangling architectural archetypes with pre-training objectives -- two concepts that are commonly conflated. Next, we present a generalized & unified perspective for self-supervision in NLP and show how different pre-training objectives can be cast as one another and how interpolating between different objectives can be effective. We then propose Mixture-of-Denoisers (MoD), a pre-training objective that combines diverse pre-training paradigms together. We furthermore introduce a notion of mode switching, wherein downstream fine-tuning is associated with specific pre-training schemes. We conduct extensive ablative experiments to compare multiple pre-training objectives and find that our method pushes the Pareto-frontier by outperforming T5 & GPT-like models across multiple diverse setups. By scaling our model up to 20B parameters, we achieve SOTA performance on 50 well-established supervised finetuning based NLP tasks. Our model also achieve strong results at in-context learning, outperforming 175B GPT-3 on zero-shot SuperGLUE and tripling the performance of T5-XXL on one-shot summarization. On 0-shot MMLU, UL2 20B outperforms T0 and T5 models. UL2 20B also works well with chain-of-thought prompting and reasoning, making it an appealing choice for research into reasoning at a small to medium scale of 20B parameters. Finally, we apply FLAN instruction tuning to the UL2 20B model, achieving MMLU and Big-Bench scores competitive to FLAN-PaLM 62B. We release Flax-based T5X checkpoints for the UL2 20B & Flan-UL2 20B.

Instruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation

While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training. However, proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. In this paper, we propose a novel instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation. It instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents, adopting verbalizers from highly aligned (e.g., outputting ``postive'' for positive sentiment), to minimally aligned (e.g., outputting ``negative'' for positive sentiment). Verbalizer manipulation can be seamlessly integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model's reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of four major model families across nine datasets, employing twelve sets of verbalizers for each of them. We observe that the instruction-following abilities of models, across different families and scales, are significantly distinguished by their performance on less natural verbalizers. Even the strongest GPT-4 model struggles to perform better than random guessing on the most challenging verbalizer, emphasizing the need for continued advancements to improve their instruction-following abilities.

AutoDiffusion: Training-Free Optimization of Time Steps and Architectures for Automated Diffusion Model Acceleration

Diffusion models are emerging expressive generative models, in which a large number of time steps (inference steps) are required for a single image generation. To accelerate such tedious process, reducing steps uniformly is considered as an undisputed principle of diffusion models. We consider that such a uniform assumption is not the optimal solution in practice; i.e., we can find different optimal time steps for different models. Therefore, we propose to search the optimal time steps sequence and compressed model architecture in a unified framework to achieve effective image generation for diffusion models without any further training. Specifically, we first design a unified search space that consists of all possible time steps and various architectures. Then, a two stage evolutionary algorithm is introduced to find the optimal solution in the designed search space. To further accelerate the search process, we employ FID score between generated and real samples to estimate the performance of the sampled examples. As a result, the proposed method is (i).training-free, obtaining the optimal time steps and model architecture without any training process; (ii). orthogonal to most advanced diffusion samplers and can be integrated to gain better sample quality. (iii). generalized, where the searched time steps and architectures can be directly applied on different diffusion models with the same guidance scale. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent performance by using only a few time steps, e.g. 17.86 FID score on ImageNet 64 times 64 with only four steps, compared to 138.66 with DDIM. The code is available at https://github.com/lilijiangg/AutoDiffusion.

The KoLMogorov Test: Compression by Code Generation

Compression is at the heart of intelligence. A theoretically optimal way to compress any sequence of data is to find the shortest program that outputs that sequence and then halts. However, such 'Kolmogorov compression' is uncomputable, and code generating LLMs struggle to approximate this theoretical ideal, as it requires reasoning, planning and search capabilities beyond those of current models. In this work, we introduce the KoLMogorov-Test (KT), a compression-as-intelligence test for code generating LLMs. In KT a model is presented with a sequence of data at inference time, and asked to generate the shortest program that produces the sequence. We identify several benefits of KT for both evaluation and training: an essentially infinite number of problem instances of varying difficulty is readily available, strong baselines already exist, the evaluation metric (compression) cannot be gamed, and pretraining data contamination is highly unlikely. To evaluate current models, we use audio, text, and DNA data, as well as sequences produced by random synthetic programs. Current flagship models perform poorly - both GPT4-o and Llama-3.1-405B struggle on our natural and synthetic sequences. On our synthetic distribution, we are able to train code generation models with lower compression rates than previous approaches. Moreover, we show that gains on synthetic data generalize poorly to real data, suggesting that new innovations are necessary for additional gains on KT.

Small Language Models Learn Enhanced Reasoning Skills from Medical Textbooks

While recent advancements in commercial large language models (LM) have shown promising results in medical tasks, their closed-source nature poses significant privacy and security concerns, hindering their widespread use in the medical field. Despite efforts to create open-source models, their limited parameters often result in insufficient multi-step reasoning capabilities required for solving complex medical problems. To address this, we introduce Meerkat-7B, a novel medical AI system with 7 billion parameters. Meerkat-7B was trained using our new synthetic dataset consisting of high-quality chain-of-thought reasoning paths sourced from 18 medical textbooks, along with diverse instruction-following datasets. Our system achieved remarkable accuracy across seven medical benchmarks, surpassing GPT-3.5 by 13.1%, as well as outperforming the previous best 7B models such as MediTron-7B and BioMistral-7B by 13.4% and 9.8%, respectively. Notably, it surpassed the passing threshold of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) for the first time for a 7B-parameter model. Additionally, our system offered more detailed free-form responses to clinical queries compared to existing 7B and 13B models, approaching the performance level of GPT-3.5. This significantly narrows the performance gap with large LMs, showcasing its effectiveness in addressing complex medical challenges.

Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement

In this report, we present a series of math-specific large language models: Qwen2.5-Math and Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct-1.5B/7B/72B. The core innovation of the Qwen2.5 series lies in integrating the philosophy of self-improvement throughout the entire pipeline, from pre-training and post-training to inference: (1) During the pre-training phase, Qwen2-Math-Instruct is utilized to generate large-scale, high-quality mathematical data. (2) In the post-training phase, we develop a reward model (RM) by conducting massive sampling from Qwen2-Math-Instruct. This RM is then applied to the iterative evolution of data in supervised fine-tuning (SFT). With a stronger SFT model, it's possible to iteratively train and update the RM, which in turn guides the next round of SFT data iteration. On the final SFT model, we employ the ultimate RM for reinforcement learning, resulting in the Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct. (3) Furthermore, during the inference stage, the RM is used to guide sampling, optimizing the model's performance. Qwen2.5-Math-Instruct supports both Chinese and English, and possess advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR). We evaluate our models on 10 mathematics datasets in both English and Chinese, such as GSM8K, MATH, GaoKao, AMC23, and AIME24, covering a range of difficulties from grade school level to math competition problems.

MARIO: MAth Reasoning with code Interpreter Output -- A Reproducible Pipeline

Large language models (LLMs) have seen considerable advancements in natural language understanding tasks, yet there remains a gap to bridge before attaining true artificial general intelligence, especially concerning shortcomings in mathematical reasoning capabilities. We postulate that the inherent nature of LLM training, which focuses on predicting probabilities of next token, presents challenges in effectively modeling mathematical reasoning that demands exact calculations, both from data-driven and theoretical standpoints. In this paper, we address this challenge by enriching the data landscape and introducing a novel math dataset, enhanced with a capability to utilize a Python code interpreter. This dataset is derived from GSM8K and MATH and has been further refined through a combination of GPT-4 annotations, human review, and self-training processes, where the errors in the original GSM8K training set have been fixed. Additionally, we propose a tentative, easily replicable protocol for the fine-tuning of math-specific LLMs, which has led to a significant improvement in the performance of a 7B-parameter LLM on the GSM8K and MATH datasets. We are committed to advancing the field of mathematical reasoning in LLMs and, to that end, we have made the model checkpoints and will make the dataset publicly available. We hope this will facilitate further research and development within the community.

DSEE: Dually Sparsity-embedded Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Language Models

Gigantic pre-trained models have become central to natural language processing (NLP), serving as the starting point for fine-tuning towards a range of downstream tasks. However, two pain points persist for this paradigm: (a) as the pre-trained models grow bigger (e.g., 175B parameters for GPT-3), even the fine-tuning process can be time-consuming and computationally expensive; (b) the fine-tuned model has the same size as its starting point by default, which is neither sensible due to its more specialized functionality, nor practical since many fine-tuned models will be deployed in resource-constrained environments. To address these pain points, we propose a framework for resource- and parameter-efficient fine-tuning by leveraging the sparsity prior in both weight updates and the final model weights. Our proposed framework, dubbed Dually Sparsity-Embedded Efficient Tuning (DSEE), aims to achieve two key objectives: (i) parameter efficient fine-tuning - by enforcing sparsity-aware low-rank updates on top of the pre-trained weights; and (ii) resource-efficient inference - by encouraging a sparse weight structure towards the final fine-tuned model. We leverage sparsity in these two directions by exploiting both unstructured and structured sparse patterns in pre-trained language models via a unified approach. Extensive experiments and in-depth investigations, with diverse network backbones (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-2) on dozens of datasets, consistently demonstrate impressive parameter-/inference-efficiency, while maintaining competitive downstream performance. For instance, DSEE saves about 25% inference FLOPs while achieving comparable performance, with 0.5% trainable parameters on BERT. Codes are available in https://github.com/VITA-Group/DSEE.

An Empirical Study of NetOps Capability of Pre-Trained Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) can respond to human language queries and have shown powerful potential applications in network operations (NetOps). Thanks to the large amount of commonsense knowledge inherent, LLMs achieve much better inference accuracy than traditional models and emerge with strong abilities in generalization, reasoning, and code generation. These abilities may have a crucial boost to automated and intelligent NetOps. However, it remains under-explored how well LLMs perform in various NetOps tasks. In this work, we make a systematic assessment of the capabilities, strengths, and limitations of selected LLMs in the field of NetOps. The evaluation is conducted on a collection of 5,732 questions about NetOps, encompassing 26 publicly available general-domain LLMs, including ChatGPT, LLaMA, Falcon, etc. We also finetune some of these LLMs with our collected NetOps corpus and evaluate the resulting models. The evaluation method follows the widely adopted benchmarks for general-domain LLMs, combined with Chain-of-Thought Prompts and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The results show that only GPT-4 achieves high accuracy equivalent to passing the NetOps certification exam for humans, while all the other LLMs have much lower accuracy. However, some open models like LLaMA 2 still demonstrate significant potential. Furthermore, we evaluate the impact of factors such as model parameters, prompt engineering, instruction fine-tuning etc. This work shall be treated as the initial effort to systematic evaluation of LLMs in NetOps, and a more rigorous study is required for production use. The evaluation code and dataset will be released to benefit future research.

What comes after transformers? -- A selective survey connecting ideas in deep learning

Transformers have become the de-facto standard model in artificial intelligence since 2017 despite numerous shortcomings ranging from energy inefficiency to hallucinations. Research has made a lot of progress in improving elements of transformers, and, more generally, deep learning manifesting in many proposals for architectures, layers, optimization objectives, and optimization techniques. For researchers it is difficult to keep track of such developments on a broader level. We provide a comprehensive overview of the many important, recent works in these areas to those who already have a basic understanding of deep learning. Our focus differs from other works, as we target specifically novel, alternative potentially disruptive approaches to transformers as well as successful ideas of recent deep learning. We hope that such a holistic and unified treatment of influential, recent works and novel ideas helps researchers to form new connections between diverse areas of deep learning. We identify and discuss multiple patterns that summarize the key strategies for successful innovations over the last decade as well as works that can be seen as rising stars. Especially, we discuss attempts on how to improve on transformers covering (partially) proven methods such as state space models but also including far-out ideas in deep learning that seem promising despite not achieving state-of-the-art results. We also cover a discussion on recent state-of-the-art models such as OpenAI's GPT series and Meta's LLama models and, Google's Gemini model family.

A Unified Continual Learning Framework with General Parameter-Efficient Tuning

The "pre-training rightarrow downstream adaptation" presents both new opportunities and challenges for Continual Learning (CL). Although the recent state-of-the-art in CL is achieved through Parameter-Efficient-Tuning (PET) adaptation paradigm, only prompt has been explored, limiting its application to Transformers only. In this paper, we position prompting as one instantiation of PET, and propose a unified CL framework with general PET, dubbed as Learning-Accumulation-Ensemble (LAE). PET, e.g., using Adapter, LoRA, or Prefix, can adapt a pre-trained model to downstream tasks with fewer parameters and resources. Given a PET method, our LAE framework incorporates it for CL with three novel designs. 1) Learning: the pre-trained model adapts to the new task by tuning an online PET module, along with our adaptation speed calibration to align different PET modules, 2) Accumulation: the task-specific knowledge learned by the online PET module is accumulated into an offline PET module through momentum update, 3) Ensemble: During inference, we respectively construct two experts with online/offline PET modules (which are favored by the novel/historical tasks) for prediction ensemble. We show that LAE is compatible with a battery of PET methods and gains strong CL capability. For example, LAE with Adaptor PET surpasses the prior state-of-the-art by 1.3% and 3.6% in last-incremental accuracy on CIFAR100 and ImageNet-R datasets, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/gqk/LAE.

Scaling Large Language Model Training on Frontier with Low-Bandwidth Partitioning

Scaling up Large Language Model(LLM) training involves fitting a tremendous amount of training parameters across a limited number of workers. However, methods like ZeRO-3 that drastically reduce GPU memory pressure often incur heavy communication to ensure global synchronization and consistency. Established efforts such as ZeRO++ use secondary partitions to avoid inter-node communications, given that intra-node GPU-GPU transfer generally has more bandwidth and lower latency than inter-node connections. However, as more capable infrastructure like Frontier, equipped with AMD GPUs, emerged with impressive computing capability, there is a need for investigations on the hardware topology and to develop targeted strategies to improve training efficiency. In this work, we propose a collection of communication and optimization strategies for ZeRO++ to reduce communication costs and improve memory utilization. In this paper, we propose a 3-level hierarchical partitioning specifically for the current Top-1 supercomputing cluster, Frontier, which aims at leveraging various bandwidths across layers of communications (GCD-GCD, GPU-GPU, and inter-node) to reduce communication overhead. For a 20B GPT model, we observe a 1.71x increase in TFLOPS per GPU when compared with ZeRO++ up to 384 GCDs and a scaling efficiency of 0.94 for up to 384 GCDs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is also the first effort to efficiently optimize LLM workloads on Frontier AMD GPUs.

Training and Evaluating Language Models with Template-based Data Generation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama has significantly transformed natural language processing, showcasing remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating language. However, these models often struggle with tasks requiring complex reasoning, particularly in mathematical problem-solving, due in part to the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality, domain-specific datasets necessary for training sophisticated reasoning abilities. To address this limitation, we introduce Template-based Data Generation (TDG), a novel approach that leverages LLMs (GPT-4) to automatically generate parameterized meta-templates, which are then used to synthesize a vast array of high-quality problems and solutions. Leveraging TDG, we create TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM, a dataset comprising over 7 million synthetically generated grade school math problems--each accompanied by code-based and natural language solutions--with the potential to generate an effectively unlimited number more. This dataset alleviates the scarcity of large-scale mathematical datasets and serves as a valuable resource for pre-training, fine-tuning, and evaluating LLMs in mathematical reasoning. Our method not only enables the generation of virtually infinite data but also elevates data augmentation to a new level by using GPT-4 for meta-template generation, ensuring diverse and high-quality problem structures. The TemplateMath Part I: TemplateGSM dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/TemplateGSM. The code is available at https://github.com/iiis-ai/TemplateMath.

Adapting and Evaluating Influence-Estimation Methods for Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees

Influence estimation analyzes how changes to the training data can lead to different model predictions; this analysis can help us better understand these predictions, the models making those predictions, and the data sets they're trained on. However, most influence-estimation techniques are designed for deep learning models with continuous parameters. Gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) are a powerful and widely-used class of models; however, these models are black boxes with opaque decision-making processes. In the pursuit of better understanding GBDT predictions and generally improving these models, we adapt recent and popular influence-estimation methods designed for deep learning models to GBDTs. Specifically, we adapt representer-point methods and TracIn, denoting our new methods TREX and BoostIn, respectively; source code is available at https://github.com/jjbrophy47/tree_influence. We compare these methods to LeafInfluence and other baselines using 5 different evaluation measures on 22 real-world data sets with 4 popular GBDT implementations. These experiments give us a comprehensive overview of how different approaches to influence estimation work in GBDT models. We find BoostIn is an efficient influence-estimation method for GBDTs that performs equally well or better than existing work while being four orders of magnitude faster. Our evaluation also suggests the gold-standard approach of leave-one-out (LOO) retraining consistently identifies the single-most influential training example but performs poorly at finding the most influential set of training examples for a given target prediction.

When Neural Code Completion Models Size up the Situation: Attaining Cheaper and Faster Completion through Dynamic Model Inference

Leveraging recent advancements in large language models, modern neural code completion models have demonstrated the capability to generate highly accurate code suggestions. However, their massive size poses challenges in terms of computational costs and environmental impact, hindering their widespread adoption in practical scenarios. Dynamic inference emerges as a promising solution, as it allocates minimal computation during inference while maintaining the model's performance. In this research, we explore dynamic inference within the context of code completion. Initially, we conducted an empirical investigation on GPT-2, focusing on the inference capabilities of intermediate layers for code completion. We found that 54.4% of tokens can be accurately generated using just the first layer, signifying significant computational savings potential. Moreover, despite using all layers, the model still fails to predict 14.5% of tokens correctly, and the subsequent completions continued from them are rarely considered helpful, with only a 4.2% Acceptance Rate. These findings motivate our exploration of dynamic inference in code completion and inspire us to enhance it with a decision-making mechanism that stops the generation of incorrect code. We thus propose a novel dynamic inference method specifically tailored for code completion models. This method aims not only to produce correct predictions with largely reduced computation but also to prevent incorrect predictions proactively. Our extensive evaluation shows that it can averagely skip 1.7 layers out of 16 layers in the models, leading to an 11.2% speedup with only a marginal 1.1% reduction in ROUGE-L.

Can bidirectional encoder become the ultimate winner for downstream applications of foundation models?

Over the past few decades, Artificial Intelligence(AI) has progressed from the initial machine learning stage to the deep learning stage, and now to the stage of foundational models. Foundational models have the characteristics of pre-training, transfer learning, and self-supervised learning, and pre-trained models can be fine-tuned and applied to various downstream tasks. Under the framework of foundational models, models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers(BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformer(GPT) have greatly advanced the development of natural language processing(NLP), especially the emergence of many models based on BERT. BERT broke through the limitation of only using one-way methods for language modeling in pre-training by using a masked language model. It can capture bidirectional context information to predict the masked words in the sequence, this can improve the feature extraction ability of the model. This makes the model very useful for downstream tasks, especially for specialized applications. The model using the bidirectional encoder can better understand the domain knowledge and be better applied to these downstream tasks. So we hope to help understand how this technology has evolved and improved model performance in various natural language processing tasks under the background of foundational models and reveal its importance in capturing context information and improving the model's performance on downstream tasks. This article analyzes one-way and bidirectional models based on GPT and BERT and compares their differences based on the purpose of the model. It also briefly analyzes BERT and the improvements of some models based on BERT. The model's performance on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset(SQuAD) and General Language Understanding Evaluation(GLUE) was compared.

Solving Challenging Math Word Problems Using GPT-4 Code Interpreter with Code-based Self-Verification

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 has brought significant advancements in addressing math reasoning problems. In particular, OpenAI's latest version of GPT-4, known as GPT-4 Code Interpreter, shows remarkable performance on challenging math datasets. In this paper, we explore the effect of code on enhancing LLMs' reasoning capability by introducing different constraints on the Code Usage Frequency of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. We found that its success can be largely attributed to its powerful skills in generating and executing code, evaluating the output of code execution, and rectifying its solution when receiving unreasonable outputs. Based on this insight, we propose a novel and effective prompting method, explicit code-based self-verification~(CSV), to further boost the mathematical reasoning potential of GPT-4 Code Interpreter. This method employs a zero-shot prompt on GPT-4 Code Interpreter to encourage it to use code to self-verify its answers. In instances where the verification state registers as ``False'', the model shall automatically amend its solution, analogous to our approach of rectifying errors during a mathematics examination. Furthermore, we recognize that the states of the verification result indicate the confidence of a solution, which can improve the effectiveness of majority voting. With GPT-4 Code Interpreter and CSV, we achieve an impressive zero-shot accuracy on MATH dataset (53.9\% to 84.3\%).

Large Language Models as Tool Makers

Recent research shows the potential of enhancing the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) through the use of external tools. However, prior work along this line depends on the availability of existing tools. In this work, we take an initial step towards removing this dependency by proposing a closed-loop framework, referred to as LLMs As Tool Makers (LATM), where LLMs create their own reusable tools for problem-solving. Our approach consists of two key phases: 1) tool making: an LLM acts as the tool maker that crafts tools for given tasks, where a tool is implemented as a Python utility function. 2) tool using: an LLM acts as the tool user, which applies the tool built by the tool maker for problem-solving. The tool user can be either the same or a different LLM from the tool maker. Tool-making enables an LLM to continually generate tools that can be applied to different requests so that future requests can call the corresponding APIs when beneficial for solving the tasks. Furthermore, the division of labor among LLMs for tool-making and tool-using phases introduces the opportunity to achieve cost effectiveness without degrading the quality of generated tools and problem solutions. For example, recognizing that tool-making demands more sophisticated capabilities than tool-using, we can apply a powerful yet resource-intensive model as the tool maker, and a lightweight while cost-effective model as the tool user. We validate the effectiveness of our approach across a variety of complex reasoning tasks, including Big-Bench tasks. With GPT-4 as the tool maker and GPT-3.5 as the tool user, LATM can achieve performance that is on par with using GPT-4 for both tool making and tool using, while the inference cost is significantly reduced.

Leveraging Pre-trained Large Language Models to Construct and Utilize World Models for Model-based Task Planning

There is a growing interest in applying pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to planning problems. However, methods that use LLMs directly as planners are currently impractical due to several factors, including limited correctness of plans, strong reliance on feedback from interactions with simulators or even the actual environment, and the inefficiency in utilizing human feedback. In this work, we introduce a novel alternative paradigm that constructs an explicit world (domain) model in planning domain definition language (PDDL) and then uses it to plan with sound domain-independent planners. To address the fact that LLMs may not generate a fully functional PDDL model initially, we employ LLMs as an interface between PDDL and sources of corrective feedback, such as PDDL validators and humans. For users who lack a background in PDDL, we show that LLMs can translate PDDL into natural language and effectively encode corrective feedback back to the underlying domain model. Our framework not only enjoys the correctness guarantee offered by the external planners but also reduces human involvement by allowing users to correct domain models at the beginning, rather than inspecting and correcting (through interactive prompting) every generated plan as in previous work. On two IPC domains and a Household domain that is more complicated than commonly used benchmarks such as ALFWorld, we demonstrate that GPT-4 can be leveraged to produce high-quality PDDL models for over 40 actions, and the corrected PDDL models are then used to successfully solve 48 challenging planning tasks. Resources including the source code will be released at: https://guansuns.github.io/pages/llm-dm.

Skill-Mix: a Flexible and Expandable Family of Evaluations for AI models

With LLMs shifting their role from statistical modeling of language to serving as general-purpose AI agents, how should LLM evaluations change? Arguably, a key ability of an AI agent is to flexibly combine, as needed, the basic skills it has learned. The capability to combine skills plays an important role in (human) pedagogy and also in a paper on emergence phenomena (Arora & Goyal, 2023). This work introduces Skill-Mix, a new evaluation to measure ability to combine skills. Using a list of N skills the evaluator repeatedly picks random subsets of k skills and asks the LLM to produce text combining that subset of skills. Since the number of subsets grows like N^k, for even modest k this evaluation will, with high probability, require the LLM to produce text significantly different from any text in the training set. The paper develops a methodology for (a) designing and administering such an evaluation, and (b) automatic grading (plus spot-checking by humans) of the results using GPT-4 as well as the open LLaMA-2 70B model. Administering a version of to popular chatbots gave results that, while generally in line with prior expectations, contained surprises. Sizeable differences exist among model capabilities that are not captured by their ranking on popular LLM leaderboards ("cramming for the leaderboard"). Furthermore, simple probability calculations indicate that GPT-4's reasonable performance on k=5 is suggestive of going beyond "stochastic parrot" behavior (Bender et al., 2021), i.e., it combines skills in ways that it had not seen during training. We sketch how the methodology can lead to a Skill-Mix based eco-system of open evaluations for AI capabilities of future models.

Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior - for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated safe outputs. However, future superhuman models will behave in complex ways too difficult for humans to reliably evaluate; humans will only be able to weakly supervise superhuman models. We study an analogy to this problem: can weak model supervision elicit the full capabilities of a much stronger model? We test this using a range of pretrained language models in the GPT-4 family on natural language processing (NLP), chess, and reward modeling tasks. We find that when we naively finetune strong pretrained models on labels generated by a weak model, they consistently perform better than their weak supervisors, a phenomenon we call weak-to-strong generalization. However, we are still far from recovering the full capabilities of strong models with naive finetuning alone, suggesting that techniques like RLHF may scale poorly to superhuman models without further work. We find that simple methods can often significantly improve weak-to-strong generalization: for example, when finetuning GPT-4 with a GPT-2-level supervisor and an auxiliary confidence loss, we can recover close to GPT-3.5-level performance on NLP tasks. Our results suggest that it is feasible to make empirical progress today on a fundamental challenge of aligning superhuman models.

Chain-of-Thought Hub: A Continuous Effort to Measure Large Language Models' Reasoning Performance

As large language models (LLMs) are continuously being developed, their evaluation becomes increasingly important yet challenging. This work proposes Chain-of-Thought Hub, an open-source evaluation suite on the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models. We are interested in this setting for two reasons: (1) from the behavior of GPT and PaLM model family, we observe that complex reasoning is likely to be a key differentiator between weaker and stronger LLMs; (2) we envisage large language models to become the next-generation computational platform and foster an ecosystem of LLM-based new applications, this naturally requires the foundation models to perform complex tasks that often involve the composition of linguistic and logical operations. Our approach is to compile a suite of challenging reasoning benchmarks to track the progress of LLMs. Our current results show that: (1) model scale clearly correlates with reasoning capabilities; (2) As of May 2023, Claude-v1.3 and PaLM-2 are the only two models that are comparable with GPT-4, while open-sourced models still lag behind; (3) LLaMA-65B performs closely to code-davinci-002, indicating that with successful further development such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), it has great potential to be close to GPT-3.5-Turbo. Our results also suggest that for the open-source efforts to catch up, the community may focus more on building better base models and exploring RLHF.

bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models

In recent years, researchers tend to pre-train ever-larger language models to explore the upper limit of deep models. However, large language model pre-training costs intensive computational resources and most of the models are trained from scratch without reusing the existing pre-trained models, which is wasteful. In this paper, we propose bert2BERT, which can effectively transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model (e.g., BERT_BASE) to a large model (e.g., BERT_LARGE) through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. Specifically, we extend the previous function-preserving on Transformer-based language model, and further improve it by proposing advanced knowledge for large model's initialization. In addition, a two-stage pre-training method is proposed to further accelerate the training process. We did extensive experiments on representative PLMs (e.g., BERT and GPT) and demonstrate that (1) our method can save a significant amount of training cost compared with baselines including learning from scratch, StackBERT and MSLT; (2) our method is generic and applicable to different types of pre-trained models. In particular, bert2BERT saves about 45% and 47% computational cost of pre-training BERT_BASE and GPT_BASE by reusing the models of almost their half sizes. The source code will be publicly available upon publication.

VL-Rethinker: Incentivizing Self-Reflection of Vision-Language Models with Reinforcement Learning

Recently, slow-thinking systems like GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated great potential in solving challenging problems through explicit reflection. They significantly outperform the best fast-thinking models, such as GPT-4o, on various math and science benchmarks. However, their multimodal reasoning capabilities remain on par with fast-thinking models. For instance, GPT-o1's performance on benchmarks like MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision is similar to fast-thinking models. In this paper, we aim to enhance the slow-thinking capabilities of vision-language models using reinforcement learning (without relying on distillation) to advance the state of the art. First, we adapt the GRPO algorithm with a novel technique called Selective Sample Replay (SSR) to address the vanishing advantages problem. While this approach yields strong performance, the resulting RL-trained models exhibit limited self-reflection or self-verification. To further encourage slow-thinking, we introduce Forced Rethinking, which appends a textual rethinking trigger to the end of initial rollouts in RL training, explicitly enforcing a self-reflection reasoning step. By combining these two techniques, our model, VL-Rethinker, advances state-of-the-art scores on MathVista, MathVerse, and MathVision to achieve 80.3%, 61.8%, and 43.9% respectively. VL-Rethinker also achieves open-source SoTA on multi-disciplinary benchmarks such as MMMU-Pro, EMMA, and MEGA-Bench, narrowing the gap with GPT-o1.

Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning

Neural networks (NN) achieve remarkable results in various tasks, but lack key characteristics: interpretability, support for categorical features, and lightweight implementations suitable for edge devices. While ongoing efforts aim to address these challenges, Gradient Boosting Trees (GBT) inherently meet these requirements. As a result, GBTs have become the go-to method for supervised learning tasks in many real-world applications and competitions. However, their application in online learning scenarios, notably in reinforcement learning (RL), has been limited. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing Gradient-Boosting RL (GBRL), a framework that extends the advantages of GBT to the RL domain. Using the GBRL framework, we implement various actor-critic algorithms and compare their performance with their NN counterparts. Inspired by shared backbones in NN we introduce a tree-sharing approach for policy and value functions with distinct learning rates, enhancing learning efficiency over millions of interactions. GBRL achieves competitive performance across a diverse array of tasks, excelling in domains with structured or categorical features. Additionally, we present a high-performance, GPU-accelerated implementation that integrates seamlessly with widely-used RL libraries (available at https://github.com/NVlabs/gbrl). GBRL expands the toolkit for RL practitioners, demonstrating the viability and promise of GBT within the RL paradigm, particularly in domains characterized by structured or categorical features.

Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential Transducers for Generative Recommendations

Large-scale recommendation systems are characterized by their reliance on high cardinality, heterogeneous features and the need to handle tens of billions of user actions on a daily basis. Despite being trained on huge volume of data with thousands of features, most Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs) in industry fail to scale with compute. Inspired by success achieved by Transformers in language and vision domains, we revisit fundamental design choices in recommendation systems. We reformulate recommendation problems as sequential transduction tasks within a generative modeling framework (``Generative Recommenders''), and propose a new architecture, HSTU, designed for high cardinality, non-stationary streaming recommendation data. HSTU outperforms baselines over synthetic and public datasets by up to 65.8\% in NDCG, and is 5.3x to 15.2x faster than FlashAttention2-based Transformers on 8192 length sequences. HSTU-based Generative Recommenders, with 1.5 trillion parameters, improve metrics in online A/B tests by 12.4\% and have been deployed on multiple surfaces of a large internet platform with billions of users. More importantly, the model quality of Generative Recommenders empirically scales as a power-law of training compute across three orders of magnitude, up to GPT-3/LLaMa-2 scale, which reduces carbon footprint needed for future model developments, and further paves the way for the first foundational models in recommendations.

Of Models and Tin Men: A Behavioural Economics Study of Principal-Agent Problems in AI Alignment using Large-Language Models

AI Alignment is often presented as an interaction between a single designer and an artificial agent in which the designer attempts to ensure the agent's behavior is consistent with its purpose, and risks arise solely because of conflicts caused by inadvertent misalignment between the utility function intended by the designer and the resulting internal utility function of the agent. With the advent of agents instantiated with large-language models (LLMs), which are typically pre-trained, we argue this does not capture the essential aspects of AI safety because in the real world there is not a one-to-one correspondence between designer and agent, and the many agents, both artificial and human, have heterogeneous values. Therefore, there is an economic aspect to AI safety and the principal-agent problem is likely to arise. In a principal-agent problem conflict arises because of information asymmetry together with inherent misalignment between the utility of the agent and its principal, and this inherent misalignment cannot be overcome by coercing the agent into adopting a desired utility function through training. We argue the assumptions underlying principal-agent problems are crucial to capturing the essence of safety problems involving pre-trained AI models in real-world situations. Taking an empirical approach to AI safety, we investigate how GPT models respond in principal-agent conflicts. We find that agents based on both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 override their principal's objectives in a simple online shopping task, showing clear evidence of principal-agent conflict. Surprisingly, the earlier GPT-3.5 model exhibits more nuanced behaviour in response to changes in information asymmetry, whereas the later GPT-4 model is more rigid in adhering to its prior alignment. Our results highlight the importance of incorporating principles from economics into the alignment process.

Reporting and Analysing the Environmental Impact of Language Models on the Example of Commonsense Question Answering with External Knowledge

Human-produced emissions are growing at an alarming rate, causing already observable changes in the climate and environment in general. Each year global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record, and it is reported that 0.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to data centres as of 2021. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked social interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), the new generation of Language Models with a large number of parameters and trained on massive amounts of data. Currently, numerous companies are releasing products featuring various LLMs, with many more models in development and awaiting release. Deep Learning research is a competitive field, with only models that reach top performance attracting attention and being utilized. Hence, achieving better accuracy and results is often the first priority, while the model's efficiency and the environmental impact of the study are neglected. However, LLMs demand substantial computational resources and are very costly to train, both financially and environmentally. It becomes essential to raise awareness and promote conscious decisions about algorithmic and hardware choices. Providing information on training time, the approximate carbon dioxide emissions and power consumption would assist future studies in making necessary adjustments and determining the compatibility of available computational resources with model requirements. In this study, we infused T5 LLM with external knowledge and fine-tuned the model for Question-Answering task. Furthermore, we calculated and reported the approximate environmental impact for both steps. The findings demonstrate that the smaller models may not always be sustainable options, and increased training does not always imply better performance. The most optimal outcome is achieved by carefully considering both performance and efficiency factors.

Improved Techniques for Training Consistency Models

Consistency models are a nascent family of generative models that can sample high quality data in one step without the need for adversarial training. Current consistency models achieve optimal sample quality by distilling from pre-trained diffusion models and employing learned metrics such as LPIPS. However, distillation limits the quality of consistency models to that of the pre-trained diffusion model, and LPIPS causes undesirable bias in evaluation. To tackle these challenges, we present improved techniques for consistency training, where consistency models learn directly from data without distillation. We delve into the theory behind consistency training and identify a previously overlooked flaw, which we address by eliminating Exponential Moving Average from the teacher consistency model. To replace learned metrics like LPIPS, we adopt Pseudo-Huber losses from robust statistics. Additionally, we introduce a lognormal noise schedule for the consistency training objective, and propose to double total discretization steps every set number of training iterations. Combined with better hyperparameter tuning, these modifications enable consistency models to achieve FID scores of 2.51 and 3.25 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 64times 64 respectively in a single sampling step. These scores mark a 3.5times and 4times improvement compared to prior consistency training approaches. Through two-step sampling, we further reduce FID scores to 2.24 and 2.77 on these two datasets, surpassing those obtained via distillation in both one-step and two-step settings, while narrowing the gap between consistency models and other state-of-the-art generative models.

Teaching Arithmetic to Small Transformers

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token prediction objective. This study investigates how small transformers, trained from random initialization, can efficiently learn arithmetic operations such as addition, multiplication, and elementary functions like square root, using the next-token prediction objective. We first demonstrate that conventional training data is not the most effective for arithmetic learning, and simple formatting changes can significantly improve accuracy. This leads to sharp phase transitions as a function of training data scale, which, in some cases, can be explained through connections to low-rank matrix completion. Building on prior work, we then train on chain-of-thought style data that includes intermediate step results. Even in the complete absence of pretraining, this approach significantly and simultaneously improves accuracy, sample complexity, and convergence speed. We also study the interplay between arithmetic and text data during training and examine the effects of few-shot prompting, pretraining, and model scale. Additionally, we discuss length generalization challenges. Our work highlights the importance of high-quality, instructive data that considers the particular characteristics of the next-word prediction objective for rapidly eliciting arithmetic capabilities.

Regression Transformer: Concurrent sequence regression and generation for molecular language modeling

Despite significant progress of generative models in the natural sciences, their controllability remains challenging. One fundamentally missing aspect of molecular or protein generative models is an inductive bias that can reflect continuous properties of interest. To that end, we propose the Regression Transformer (RT), a novel method that abstracts regression as a conditional sequence modeling problem. This introduces a new paradigm of multitask language models which seamlessly bridge sequence regression and conditional sequence generation. We thoroughly demonstrate that, despite using a nominal-scale training objective, the RT matches or surpasses the performance of conventional regression models in property prediction tasks of small molecules, proteins and chemical reactions. Critically, priming the same model with continuous properties yields a highly competitive conditional generative model that outperforms specialized approaches in a substructure-constrained, property-driven molecule generation benchmark. Our dichotomous approach is facilitated by a novel, alternating training scheme that enables the model to decorate seed sequences by desired properties, e.g., to optimize reaction yield. In sum, the RT is the first report of a multitask model that concurrently excels at predictive and generative tasks in biochemistry. This finds particular application in property-driven, local exploration of the chemical or protein space and could pave the road toward foundation models in material design. The code to reproduce all experiments of the paper is available at: https://github.com/IBM/regression-transformer