pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DreamGarden: A Designer Assistant for Growing Games from a Single Prompt
Authors: Sam Earle, Samyak Parajuli, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Coding assistants are increasingly leveraged in game design, both generating code and making high-level plans. To what degree can these tools align with developer workflows, and what new modes of human-computer interaction can emerge from their use? We present DreamGarden, an AI system capable of assisting with the development of diverse game environments in Unreal Engine. At the core of our method is an LLM-driven planner, capable of breaking down a single, high-level prompt -- a dream, memory, or imagined scenario provided by a human user -- into a hierarchical action plan, which is then distributed across specialized submodules facilitating concrete implementation. This system is presented to the user as a garden of plans and actions, both growing independently and responding to user intervention via seed prompts, pruning, and feedback. Through a user study, we explore design implications of this system, charting courses for future work in semi-autonomous assistants and open-ended simulation design.
Investigating on RLHF methodology
Authors: Alexey Kutalev, Sergei Markoff
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

In this article, we investigate the alignment of Large Language Models according to human preferences. We discuss the features of training a Preference Model, which simulates human preferences, and the methods and details we found essential for achieving the best results. We also discuss using Reinforcement Learning to fine-tune Large Language Models and describe the challenges we faced and the ways to overcome them. Additionally, we present our experience with the Direct Preference Optimization method, which enables us to align a Large Language Model with human preferences without creating a separate Preference Model. As our contribution, we introduce the approach for collecting a preference dataset through perplexity filtering, which makes the process of creating such a dataset for a specific Language Model much easier and more cost-effective.
Open-RAG: Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning with Open-Source Large Language Models
Authors: Shayekh Bin Islam, Md Asib Rahman, K S M Tozammel Hossain, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty, Md Rizwan Parvez
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Navigate, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been shown to enhance the factual accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs), but existing methods often suffer from limited reasoning capabilities in effectively using the retrieved evidence, particularly when using open-source LLMs. To mitigate this gap, we introduce a novel framework, Open-RAG, designed to enhance reasoning capabilities in RAG with open-source LLMs. Our framework transforms an arbitrary dense LLM into a parameter-efficient sparse mixture of experts (MoE) model capable of handling complex reasoning tasks, including both single- and multi-hop queries. Open-RAG uniquely trains the model to navigate challenging distractors that appear relevant but are misleading. As a result, Open-RAG leverages latent learning, dynamically selecting relevant experts and integrating external knowledge effectively for more accurate and contextually relevant responses. In addition, we propose a hybrid adaptive retrieval method to determine retrieval necessity and balance the trade-off between performance gain and inference speed. Experimental results show that the Llama2-7B-based Open-RAG outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs and RAG models such as ChatGPT, Self-RAG, and Command R+ in various knowledge-intensive tasks. We open-source our code and models at https://openragmoe.github.io/
Social Conjuring: Multi-User Runtime Collaboration with AI in Building Virtual 3D Worlds
Authors: Amina Kobenova, Cyan DeVeaux, Samyak Parajuli, Andrzej Banburski-Fahey, Judith Amores Fernandez, Jaron Lanier
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning

Generative artificial intelligence has shown promise in prompting virtual worlds into existence, yet little attention has been given to understanding how this process unfolds as social interaction. We present Social Conjurer, a framework for AI-augmented dynamic 3D scene co-creation, where multiple users collaboratively build and modify virtual worlds in real-time. Through an expanded set of interactions, including social and tool-based engagements as well as spatial reasoning, our framework facilitates the creation of rich, diverse virtual environments. Findings from a preliminary user study (N=12) provide insight into the user experience of this approach, how social contexts shape the prompting of spatial environments, and perspective on social applications of prompt-based 3D co-creation. In addition to highlighting the potential of AI-supported multi-user world creation and offering new pathways for AI-augmented creative processes in VR, this article presents a set of implications for designing human-centered interfaces that incorporate AI models into 3D content generation.
Composing Global Optimizers to Reasoning Tasks via Algebraic Objects in Neural Nets
Authors: Yuandong Tian
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

We prove rich algebraic structures of the solution space for 2-layer neural networks with quadratic activation and $L_2$ loss, trained on reasoning tasks in Abelian group (e.g., modular addition). Such a rich structure enables analytical construction of global optimal solutions from partial solutions that only satisfy part of the loss, despite its high nonlinearity. We coin the framework as CoGO (Composing Global Optimizers). Specifically, we show that the weight space over different numbers of hidden nodes of the 2-layer network is equipped with a semi-ring algebraic structure, and the loss function to be optimized consists of monomial potentials, which are ring homomorphism, allowing partial solutions to be composed into global ones by ring addition and multiplication. Our experiments show that around $95\%$ of the solutions obtained by gradient descent match exactly our theoretical constructions. Although the global optimizers constructed only required a small number of hidden nodes, our analysis on gradient dynamics shows that over-parameterization asymptotically decouples training dynamics and is beneficial. We further show that training dynamics favors simpler solutions under weight decay, and thus high-order global optimizers such as perfect memorization are unfavorable. Code can be found at https://github.com/facebookresearch/luckmatters/tree/yuandong3/ssl/real-dataset.
DeFine: Enhancing LLM Decision-Making with Factor Profiles and Analogical Reasoning
Authors: Yebowen Hu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Yiming Lu, Daoan Zhang, Hassan Foroosh, Dong Yu, Fei Liu
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

LLMs are ideal for decision-making due to their ability to reason over long contexts and identify critical factors. However, challenges arise when processing transcripts of spoken speech describing complex scenarios. These transcripts often contain ungrammatical or incomplete sentences, repetitions, hedging, and vagueness. For example, during a company's earnings call, an executive might project a positive revenue outlook to reassure investors, despite significant uncertainty regarding future earnings. It is crucial for LLMs to incorporate this uncertainty systematically when making decisions. In this paper, we introduce DeFine, a new framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios. DeFine then integrates these profiles with analogical reasoning, leveraging insights from similar past experiences to guide LLMs in making critical decisions in novel situations. Our framework separates the tasks of quantifying uncertainty in complex scenarios and incorporating it into LLM decision-making. This approach is particularly useful in fields such as medical consultations, negotiations, and political debates, where making decisions under uncertainty is vital.
Mimicking Human Intuition: Cognitive Belief-Driven Q-Learning
Authors: Xingrui Gu, Guanren Qiao, Chuyi Jiang, Tianqing Xia, Hangyu Mao
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Q-Learning

Reinforcement learning encounters challenges in various environments related to robustness and explainability. Traditional Q-learning algorithms cannot effectively make decisions and utilize the historical learning experience. To overcome these limitations, we propose Cognitive Belief-Driven Q-Learning (CBDQ), which integrates subjective belief modeling into the Q-learning framework, enhancing decision-making accuracy by endowing agents with human-like learning and reasoning capabilities. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, our method maintains a subjective belief distribution over the expectation of actions, leveraging a cluster-based subjective belief model that enables agents to reason about the potential probability associated with each decision. CBDQ effectively mitigates overestimated phenomena and optimizes decision-making policies by integrating historical experiences with current contextual information, mimicking the dynamics of human decision-making. We evaluate the proposed method on discrete control benchmark tasks in various complicate environments. The results demonstrate that CBDQ exhibits stronger adaptability, robustness, and human-like characteristics in handling these environments, outperforming other baselines. We hope this work will give researchers a fresh perspective on understanding and explaining Q-learning.
VitaGlyph: Vitalizing Artistic Typography with Flexible Dual-branch Diffusion Models
Authors: Kailai Feng, Yabo Zhang, Haodong Yu, Zhilong Ji, Jinfeng Bai, Hongzhi Zhang, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Artistic typography is a technique to visualize the meaning of input character in an imaginable and readable manner. With powerful text-to-image diffusion models, existing methods directly design the overall geometry and texture of input character, making it challenging to ensure both creativity and legibility. In this paper, we introduce a dual-branch and training-free method, namely VitaGlyph, enabling flexible artistic typography along with controllable geometry change to maintain the readability. The key insight of VitaGlyph is to treat input character as a scene composed of Subject and Surrounding, followed by rendering them under varying degrees of geometry transformation. The subject flexibly expresses the essential concept of input character, while the surrounding enriches relevant background without altering the shape. Specifically, we implement VitaGlyph through a three-phase framework: (i) Knowledge Acquisition leverages large language models to design text descriptions of subject and surrounding. (ii) Regional decomposition detects the part that most matches the subject description and divides input glyph image into subject and surrounding regions. (iii) Typography Stylization firstly refines the structure of subject region via Semantic Typography, and then separately renders the textures of Subject and Surrounding regions through Controllable Compositional Generation. Experimental results demonstrate that VitaGlyph not only achieves better artistry and readability, but also manages to depict multiple customize concepts, facilitating more creative and pleasing artistic typography generation. Our code will be made publicly at https://github.com/Carlofkl/VitaGlyph.
Evaluating Robustness of Reward Models for Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Sunghwan Kim, Dongjin Kang, Taeyoon Kwon, Hyungjoo Chae, Jungsoo Won, Dongha Lee, Jinyoung Yeo
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Reward models are key in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) systems, aligning the model behavior with human preferences. Particularly in the math domain, there have been plenty of studies using reward models to align policies for improving reasoning capabilities. Recently, as the importance of reward models has been emphasized, RewardBench is proposed to understand their behavior. However, we figure out that the math subset of RewardBench has different representations between chosen and rejected completions, and relies on a single comparison, which may lead to unreliable results as it only see an isolated case. Therefore, it fails to accurately present the robustness of reward models, leading to a misunderstanding of its performance and potentially resulting in reward hacking. In this work, we introduce a new design for reliable evaluation of reward models, and to validate this, we construct RewardMATH, a benchmark that effectively represents the robustness of reward models in mathematical reasoning tasks. We demonstrate that the scores on RewardMATH strongly correlate with the results of optimized policy and effectively estimate reward overoptimization, whereas the existing benchmark shows almost no correlation. The results underscore the potential of our design to enhance the reliability of evaluation, and represent the robustness of reward model. We make our code and data publicly available.
Auto-Demo Prompting: Leveraging Generated Outputs as Demonstrations for Enhanced Batch Prompting
Authors: Longyu Feng, Mengze Hong, Chen Jason Zhang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Few-Shot Learning

Batch prompting is a common technique in large language models (LLMs) used to process multiple inputs simultaneously, aiming to improve computational efficiency. However, as batch sizes increase, performance degradation often occurs due to the model's difficulty in handling lengthy context inputs. Existing methods that attempt to mitigate these issues rely solely on batch data arrangement and majority voting rather than improving the design of the batch prompt itself. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing "Auto-Demo Prompting," a novel approach that leverages the question-output pairs from earlier questions within a batch as demonstrations for subsequent answer inference. We provide a formal theoretical analysis of how Auto-Demo Prompting functions within the autoregressive generation process of LLMs, illustrating how it utilizes prior outputs to optimize the model's internal representations. Our method effectively bridges the gap between batch prompting and few-shot prompting, enhancing performance with only a slight compromise in token usage. Experimental results across five NLP tasks demonstrate its effectiveness in mitigating performance degradation and occasionally outperforming single prompts. Furthermore, it opens new avenues for applying few-shot learning techniques, such as demonstration selection, within batch prompting, making it a robust solution for real-world applications.
Towards a Theoretical Understanding of Synthetic Data in LLM Post-Training: A Reverse-Bottleneck Perspective
Authors: Zeyu Gan, Yong liu
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation

Synthetic data has become a pivotal resource in post-training tasks for large language models (LLMs) due to the scarcity of high-quality, specific data. While various methods have been developed to generate synthetic data, there remains a discernible gap between the practical effects of synthetic data and our theoretical comprehension. To address this challenge, we commence by presenting a detailed modeling of the prevalent synthetic data generation process. Building upon this modeling, we demonstrate that the generalization capability of the post-trained model is critically determined by the information gain derived from the generative model, as analyzed from a novel reverse-bottleneck perspective. Moreover, we introduce the concept of Generalization Gain via Mutual Information (GGMI) and elucidate the relationship between generalization gain and information gain. This analysis serves as a theoretical foundation for synthetic data generation and further highlights its connection with the generalization capability of post-trained models, offering an understanding about the design of synthetic data generation techniques and the optimization of the post-training process. We open source our code at https://github.com/ZyGan1999/Towards-a-Theoretical-Understanding-of-Synthetic-Data-in-LLM-Post-Training.
Sable: a Performant, Efficient and Scalable Sequence Model for MARL
Authors: Omayma Mahjoub, Sasha Abramowitz, Ruan de Kock, Wiem Khlifi, Simon du Toit, Jemma Daniel, Louay Ben Nessir, Louise Beyers, Claude Formanek, Liam Clark, Arnu Pretorius
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

As multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) progresses towards solving larger and more complex problems, it becomes increasingly important that algorithms exhibit the key properties of (1) strong performance, (2) memory efficiency, and (3) scalability. In this work, we introduce Sable, a performant, memory-efficient, and scalable sequence modeling approach to MARL. Sable works by adapting the retention mechanism in Retentive Networks (Sun et al., 2023) to achieve computationally efficient processing of multi-agent observations with long context memory for temporal reasoning. Through extensive evaluations across six diverse environments, we demonstrate how Sable is able to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in a large number of diverse tasks (34 out of 45 tested). Furthermore, Sable maintains performance as we scale the number of agents, handling environments with more than a thousand agents while exhibiting a linear increase in memory usage. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to isolate the source of Sable's performance gains and confirm its efficient computational memory usage.
CreDes: Causal Reasoning Enhancement and Dual-End Searching for Solving Long-Range Reasoning Problems using LLMs
Authors: Kangsheng Wang, Xiao Zhang, Hao liu, Songde Han, Huimin Ma, Tianyu Hu
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated limitations in handling combinatorial optimization problems involving long-range reasoning, partially due to causal hallucinations and huge search space. As for causal hallucinations, i.e., the inconsistency between reasoning and corresponding state transition, this paper introduces the Causal Relationship Enhancement (CRE) mechanism combining cause-effect interventions and the Individual Treatment Effect (ITE) to guarantee the solid causal rightness between each step of reasoning and state transition. As for the long causal range and huge search space limiting the performances of existing models featuring single-direction search, a Dual-End Searching (DES) approach is proposed to seek solutions by simultaneously starting from both the initial and goal states on the causal probability tree. By integrating CRE and DES (CreDes), our model has realized simultaneous multi-step reasoning, circumventing the inefficiencies from cascading multiple one-step reasoning like the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Experiments demonstrate that CreDes significantly outperforms existing State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) solutions in long-range reasoning tasks in terms of both accuracy and time efficiency.
From Prohibition to Adoption: How Hong Kong Universities Are Navigating ChatGPT in Academic Workflows
Authors: Junjun Huang, Jifan Wu, Qing Wang, Kemeng Yuan, Jiefeng Li, Di Lu
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

This paper aims at comparing the time when Hong Kong universities used to ban ChatGPT to the current periods where it has become integrated in the academic processes. Bolted by concerns of integrity and ethical issues in technologies, institutions have adapted by moving towards the center adopting AI literacy and responsibility policies. This study examines new paradigms which have been developed to help implement these positives while preventing negative effects on academia. Keywords: ChatGPT, Academic Integrity, AI Literacy, Ethical AI Use, Generative AI in Education, University Policy, AI Integration in Academia, Higher Education and Technology
U-shaped and Inverted-U Scaling behind Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
Authors: Tung-Yu Wu, Pei-Yu Lo
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit emergent abilities in some downstream tasks, where performance seems to stagnate at first and then improve sharply and unpredictably with scale beyond a threshold. By dividing questions in the datasets according to difficulty level by average performance, we observe U-shaped scaling for hard questions, and inverted-U scaling followed by steady improvement for easy questions. Moreover, the emergence threshold roughly coincides with the point at which performance on easy questions reverts from inverse scaling to standard scaling. Capitalizing on the observable though opposing scaling trend on easy and hard questions, we propose a simple yet effective pipeline, called Slice-and-Sandwich, to predict both the emergence threshold and model performance beyond the threshold.
FactAlign: Long-form Factuality Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Chao-Wei Huang, Yun-Nung Chen
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Hallucination, Sentence

Large language models have demonstrated significant potential as the next-generation information access engines. However, their reliability is hindered by issues of hallucination and generating non-factual content. This is particularly problematic in long-form responses, where assessing and ensuring factual accuracy is complex. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing FactAlign, a novel alignment framework designed to enhance the factuality of LLMs' long-form responses while maintaining their helpfulness. We introduce fKTO, a fine-grained, sentence-level alignment algorithm that extends the Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) alignment method. Leveraging recent advances in automatic factuality evaluation, FactAlign utilizes fine-grained factuality assessments to guide the alignment process. Our experiments on open-domain prompts and information-seeking questions demonstrate that FactAlign significantly improves the factual accuracy of LLM responses while also improving their helpfulness. Further analyses identify that FactAlign is capable of training LLMs to provide more information without losing factual precision, thus improving the factual F1 score. Our source code, datasets, and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/MiuLab/FactAlign