pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LiLiuM: eBay's Large Language Models for e-commerce
Authors: Christian Herold, Michael Kozielski, Leonid Ekimov, Pavel Petrushkov, Pierre-Yves Vandenbussche, Shahram Khadivi
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding, Text Generation, Translation

We introduce the LiLiuM series of large language models (LLMs): 1B, 7B, and 13B parameter models developed 100% in-house to fit eBay's specific needs in the e-commerce domain. This gives eBay full control over all aspects of the models including license, data, vocabulary, and architecture. We expect these models to be used as a foundation for fine-tuning and instruction-tuning, eliminating dependencies to external models. The LiLiuM LLMs have been trained on 3 trillion tokens of multilingual text from general and e-commerce domain. They perform similar to the popular LLaMA-2 models on English natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks. At the same time, we outperform LLaMA-2 on non-English NLU tasks, machine translation and on e-commerce specific downstream tasks. As part of our data mixture, we utilize the newly released RedPajama-V2 dataset for training and share our insights regarding data filtering and deduplication. We also discuss in detail how to serialize structured data for use in autoregressive language modeling. We provide insights on the effects of including code and parallel machine translation data in pre-training. Furthermore, we develop our own tokenizer and model vocabulary, customized towards e-commerce. This way, we can achieve up to 34% speed-up in text generation on eBay-specific downstream tasks compared to LLaMA-2. Finally, in relation to LLM pretraining, we show that checkpoint averaging can further improve over the best individual model checkpoint.
Sparsity-Constraint Optimization via Splicing Iteration
Authors: Zezhi Wang, Jin Zhu, Junxian Zhu, Borui Tang, Hongmei Lin, Xueqin Wang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

Sparsity-constraint optimization has wide applicability in signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. Existing fast algorithms must burdensomely tune parameters, such as the step size or the implementation of precise stop criteria, which may be challenging to determine in practice. To address this issue, we develop an algorithm named Sparsity-Constraint Optimization via sPlicing itEration (SCOPE) to optimize nonlinear differential objective functions with strong convexity and smoothness in low dimensional subspaces. Algorithmically, the SCOPE algorithm converges effectively without tuning parameters. Theoretically, SCOPE has a linear convergence rate and converges to a solution that recovers the true support set when it correctly specifies the sparsity. We also develop parallel theoretical results without restricted-isometry-property-type conditions. We apply SCOPE's versatility and power to solve sparse quadratic optimization, learn sparse classifiers, and recover sparse Markov networks for binary variables. The numerical results on these specific tasks reveal that SCOPE perfectly identifies the true support set with a 10--1000 speedup over the standard exact solver, confirming SCOPE's algorithmic and theoretical merits. Our open-source Python package skscope based on C++ implementation is publicly available on GitHub, reaching a ten-fold speedup on the competing convex relaxation methods implemented by the cvxpy library.
Prefixing Attention Sinks can Mitigate Activation Outliers for Large Language Model Quantization
Authors: Seungwoo Son, Wonpyo Park, Woohyun Han, Kyuyeun Kim, Jaeho Lee
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Quantization

Despite recent advances in LLM quantization, activation quantization remains to be challenging due to the activation outliers. Conventional remedies, e.g., mixing precisions for different channels, introduce extra overhead and reduce the speedup. In this work, we develop a simple yet effective strategy to facilitate per-tensor activation quantization by preventing the generation of problematic tokens. Precisely, we propose a method to find a set of key-value cache, coined CushionCache, which mitigates outliers in subsequent tokens when inserted as a prefix. CushionCache works in two steps: First, we greedily search for a prompt token sequence that minimizes the maximum activation values in subsequent tokens. Then, we further tune the token cache to regularize the activations of subsequent tokens to be more quantization-friendly. The proposed method successfully addresses activation outliers of LLMs, providing a substantial performance boost for per-tensor activation quantization methods. We thoroughly evaluate our method over a wide range of models and benchmarks and find that it significantly surpasses the established baseline of per-tensor W8A8 quantization and can be seamlessly integrated with the recent activation quantization method.
The Benefits and Risks of Transductive Approaches for AI Fairness
Authors: Muhammed Razzak, Andreas Kirsch, Yarin Gal
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Holdout Set, Transductive Learning

Recently, transductive learning methods, which leverage holdout sets during training, have gained popularity for their potential to improve speed, accuracy, and fairness in machine learning models. Despite this, the composition of the holdout set itself, particularly the balance of sensitive sub-groups, has been largely overlooked. Our experiments on CIFAR and CelebA datasets show that compositional changes in the holdout set can substantially influence fairness metrics. Imbalanced holdout sets exacerbate existing disparities, while balanced holdouts can mitigate issues introduced by imbalanced training data. These findings underline the necessity of constructing holdout sets that are both diverse and representative.
QC-Forest: a Classical-Quantum Algorithm to Provably Speedup Retraining of Random Forest
Authors: Romina Yalovetzky, Niraj Kumar, Changhao Li, Marco Pistoia
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-class Classification

Random Forest (RF) is a popular tree-ensemble method for supervised learning, prized for its ease of use and flexibility. Online RF models require to account for new training data to maintain model accuracy. This is particularly important in applications where data is periodically and sequentially generated over time in data streams, such as auto-driving systems, and credit card payments. In this setting, performing periodic model retraining with the old and new data accumulated is beneficial as it fully captures possible drifts in the data distribution over time. However, this is unpractical with state-of-the-art classical algorithms for RF as they scale linearly with the accumulated number of samples. We propose QC-Forest, a classical-quantum algorithm designed to time-efficiently retrain RF models in the streaming setting for multi-class classification and regression, achieving a runtime poly-logarithmic in the total number of accumulated samples. QC-Forest leverages Des-q, a quantum algorithm for single tree construction and retraining proposed by Kumar et al. by expanding to multi-class classification, as the original proposal was limited to binary classes, and introducing an exact classical method to replace an underlying quantum subroutine incurring a finite error, while maintaining the same poly-logarithmic dependence. Finally, we showcase that QC-Forest achieves competitive accuracy in comparison to state-of-the-art RF methods on widely used benchmark datasets with up to 80,000 samples, while significantly speeding up the model retrain.
Modeling, Inference, and Prediction in Mobility-Based Compartmental Models for Epidemiology
Authors: Ning Jiang, Weiqi Chu, Yao Li
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology, Time Series

Classical compartmental models in epidemiology often assume a homogeneous population for simplicity, which neglects the inherent heterogeneity among individuals. This assumption frequently leads to inaccurate predictions when applied to real-world data. For example, evidence has shown that classical models overestimate the final pandemic size in the H1N1-2009 and COVID-19 outbreaks. To address this issue, we introduce individual mobility as a key factor in disease transmission and control. We characterize disease dynamics using mobility distribution functions for each compartment and propose a mobility-based compartmental model that incorporates population heterogeneity. Our results demonstrate that, for the same basic reproduction number, our mobility-based model predicts a smaller final pandemic size compared to the classical models, effectively addressing the common overestimation problem. Additionally, we infer mobility distributions from the time series of the infected population. We provide sufficient conditions for uniquely identifying the mobility distribution from a dataset and propose a machine-learning-based approach to learn mobility from both synthesized and real-world data.
Delay Embedding Theory of Neural Sequence Models
Authors: Mitchell Ostrow, Adam Eisen, Ila Fiete
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, State Space Models, Time Series

To generate coherent responses, language models infer unobserved meaning from their input text sequence. One potential explanation for this capability arises from theories of delay embeddings in dynamical systems, which prove that unobserved variables can be recovered from the history of only a handful of observed variables. To test whether language models are effectively constructing delay embeddings, we measure the capacities of sequence models to reconstruct unobserved dynamics. We trained 1-layer transformer decoders and state-space sequence models on next-step prediction from noisy, partially-observed time series data. We found that each sequence layer can learn a viable embedding of the underlying system. However, state-space models have a stronger inductive bias than transformers-in particular, they more effectively reconstruct unobserved information at initialization, leading to more parameter-efficient models and lower error on dynamics tasks. Our work thus forges a novel connection between dynamical systems and deep learning sequence models via delay embedding theory.
Transcoders Find Interpretable LLM Feature Circuits
Authors: Jacob Dunefsky, Philippe Chlenski, Neel Nanda
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

A key goal in mechanistic interpretability is circuit analysis: finding sparse subgraphs of models corresponding to specific behaviors or capabilities. However, MLP sublayers make fine-grained circuit analysis on transformer-based language models difficult. In particular, interpretable features -- such as those found by sparse autoencoders (SAEs) -- are typically linear combinations of extremely many neurons, each with its own nonlinearity to account for. Circuit analysis in this setting thus either yields intractably large circuits or fails to disentangle local and global behavior. To address this we explore transcoders, which seek to faithfully approximate a densely activating MLP layer with a wider, sparsely-activating MLP layer. We introduce a novel method for using transcoders to perform weights-based circuit analysis through MLP sublayers. The resulting circuits neatly factorize into input-dependent and input-invariant terms. We then successfully train transcoders on language models with 120M, 410M, and 1.4B parameters, and find them to perform at least on par with SAEs in terms of sparsity, faithfulness, and human-interpretability. Finally, we apply transcoders to reverse-engineer unknown circuits in the model, and we obtain novel insights regarding the "greater-than circuit" in GPT2-small. Our results suggest that transcoders can prove effective in decomposing model computations involving MLPs into interpretable circuits. Code is available at https://github.com/jacobdunefsky/transcoder_circuits/.
Long-time asymptotics of noisy SVGD outside the population limit
Authors: Victor Priser, Pascal Bianchi, Adil Salim
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a widely used sampling algorithm that has been successfully applied in several areas of Machine Learning. SVGD operates by iteratively moving a set of interacting particles (which represent the samples) to approximate the target distribution. Despite recent studies on the complexity of SVGD and its variants, their long-time asymptotic behavior (i.e., after numerous iterations ) is still not understood in the finite number of particles regime. We study the long-time asymptotic behavior of a noisy variant of SVGD. First, we establish that the limit set of noisy SVGD for large is well-defined. We then characterize this limit set, showing that it approaches the target distribution as increases. In particular, noisy SVGD provably avoids the variance collapse observed for SVGD. Our approach involves demonstrating that the trajectories of noisy SVGD closely resemble those described by a McKean-Vlasov process.
What Are the Odds? Language Models Are Capable of Probabilistic Reasoning
Authors: Akshay Paruchuri, Jake Garrison, Shun Liao, John Hernandez, Jacob Sunshine, Tim Althoff, Xin Liu, Daniel McDuff
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

Language models (LM) are capable of remarkably complex linguistic tasks; however, numerical reasoning is an area in which they frequently struggle. An important but rarely evaluated form of reasoning is understanding probability distributions. In this paper, we focus on evaluating the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of LMs using idealized and real-world statistical distributions. We perform a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art LMs on three tasks: estimating percentiles, drawing samples, and calculating probabilities. We evaluate three ways to provide context to LMs 1) anchoring examples from within a distribution or family of distributions, 2) real-world context, 3) summary statistics on which to base a Normal approximation. Models can make inferences about distributions, and can be further aided by the incorporation of real-world context, example shots and simplified assumptions, even if these assumptions are incorrect or misspecified. To conduct this work, we developed a comprehensive benchmark distribution dataset with associated question-answer pairs that we have released publicly.
Can Large Language Models Always Solve Easy Problems if They Can Solve Harder Ones?
Authors: Zhe Yang, Yichang Zhang, Tianyu Liu, Jian Yang, Junyang Lin, Chang Zhou, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues (e.g. LLMs can react differently to disturbances like rephrasing or inconsequential order change). In addition to these inconsistencies, we also observe that LLMs, while capable of solving hard problems, can paradoxically fail at easier ones. To evaluate this hard-to-easy inconsistency, we develop the ConsisEval benchmark, where each entry comprises a pair of questions with a strict order of difficulty. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of consistency score to quantitatively measure this inconsistency and analyze the potential for improvement in consistency by relative consistency score. Based on comprehensive experiments across a variety of existing models, we find: (1) GPT-4 achieves the highest consistency score of 92.2\% but is still inconsistent to specific questions due to distraction by redundant information, misinterpretation of questions, etc.; (2) models with stronger capabilities typically exhibit higher consistency, but exceptions also exist; (3) hard data enhances consistency for both fine-tuning and in-context learning. Our data and code will be publicly available on GitHub.
ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools
Authors: Team GLM, :, Aohan Zeng, Bin Xu, Bowen Wang, Chenhui Zhang, Da Yin, Dan Zhang, Diego Rojas, Guanyu Feng, Hanlin Zhao, Hanyu Lai, Hao Yu, Hongning Wang, Jiadai Sun, Jiajie Zhang, Jiale Cheng, Jiayi Gui, Jie Tang, Jing Zhang, Jingyu Sun, Juanzi Li, Lei Zhao, Lindong Wu, Lucen Zhong, Mingdao Liu, Minlie Huang, Peng Zhang, Qinkai Zheng, Rui Lu, Shuaiqi Duan, Shudan Zhang, Shulin Cao, Shuxun Yang, Weng Lam Tam, Wenyi Zhao, Xiao Liu, Xiao Xia, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaotao Gu, Xin Lv, Xinghan Liu, Xinyi Liu, Xinyue Yang, Xixuan Song, Xunkai Zhang, Yifan An, Yifan Xu, Yilin Niu, Yuantao Yang, Yueyan Li, Yushi Bai, Yuxiao Dong, Zehan Qi, Zhaoyu Wang, Zhen Yang, Zhengxiao Du, Zhenyu Hou, Zihan Wang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All, GSM8K, HumanEval, Instruction Following, Math, MMLU

We introduce ChatGLM, an evolving family of large language models that we have been developing over time. This report primarily focuses on the GLM-4 language series, which includes GLM-4, GLM-4-Air, and GLM-4-9B. They represent our most capable models that are trained with all the insights and lessons gained from the preceding three generations of ChatGLM. To date, the GLM-4 models are pre-trained on ten trillions of tokens mostly in Chinese and English, along with a small set of corpus from 24 languages, and aligned primarily for Chinese and English usage. The high-quality alignment is achieved via a multi-stage post-training process, which involves supervised fine-tuning and learning from human feedback. Evaluations show that GLM-4 1) closely rivals or outperforms GPT-4 in terms of general metrics such as MMLU, GSM8K, MATH, BBH, GPQA, and HumanEval, 2) gets close to GPT-4-Turbo in instruction following as measured by IFEval, 3) matches GPT-4 Turbo (128K) and Claude 3 for long context tasks, and 4) outperforms GPT-4 in Chinese alignments as measured by AlignBench. The GLM-4 All Tools model is further aligned to understand user intent and autonomously decide when and which tool(s) touse -- including web browser, Python interpreter, text-to-image model, and user-defined functions -- to effectively complete complex tasks. In practical applications, it matches and even surpasses GPT-4 All Tools in tasks like accessing online information via web browsing and solving math problems using Python interpreter. Over the course, we have open-sourced a series of models, including ChatGLM-6B (three generations), GLM-4-9B (128K, 1M), GLM-4V-9B, WebGLM, and CodeGeeX, attracting over 10 million downloads on Hugging face in the year 2023 alone. The open models can be accessed through https://github.com/THUDM and https://huggingface.co/THUDM.
Generating Educational Materials with Different Levels of Readability using LLMs
Authors: Chieh-Yang Huang, Jing Wei, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, Text Generation

This study introduces the leveled-text generation task, aiming to rewrite educational materials to specific readability levels while preserving meaning. We assess the capability of GPT-3.5, LLaMA-2 70B, and Mixtral 8x7B, to generate content at various readability levels through zero-shot and few-shot prompting. Evaluating 100 processed educational materials reveals that few-shot prompting significantly improves performance in readability manipulation and information preservation. LLaMA-2 70B performs better in achieving the desired difficulty range, while GPT-3.5 maintains original meaning. However, manual inspection highlights concerns such as misinformation introduction and inconsistent edit distribution. These findings emphasize the need for further research to ensure the quality of generated educational content.
UBENCH: Benchmarking Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Multiple Choice Questions
Authors: Xunzhi Wang, Zhuowei Zhang, Qiongyu Li, Gaonan Chen, Mengting Hu, Zhiyu Li, Bitong Luo, Hang Gao, Zhixin Han, Haotian Wang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Multiple-choice

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has shown promising practical results. However, their low interpretability often leads to errors in unforeseen circumstances, limiting their utility. Many works have focused on creating comprehensive evaluation systems, but previous benchmarks have primarily assessed problem-solving abilities while neglecting the response's uncertainty, which may result in unreliability. Recent methods for measuring LLM reliability are resource-intensive and unable to test black-box models. To address this, we propose UBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLM reliability. UBENCH includes 3,978 multiple-choice questions covering knowledge, language, understanding, and reasoning abilities. Experimental results show that UBENCH has achieved state-of-the-art performance, while its single-sampling method significantly saves computational resources compared to baseline methods that require multiple samplings. Additionally, based on UBENCH, we evaluate the reliability of 15 popular LLMs, finding GLM4 to be the most outstanding, closely followed by GPT-4. We also explore the impact of Chain-of-Thought prompts, role-playing prompts, option order, and temperature on LLM reliability, analyzing the varying effects on different LLMs.
Composited-Nested-Learning with Data Augmentation for Nested Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Xingming Liao, Nankai Lin, Haowen Li, Lianglun Cheng, Zhuowei Wang, Chong Chen
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Nested Named Entity Recognition

Nested Named Entity Recognition (NNER) focuses on addressing overlapped entity recognition. Compared to Flat Named Entity Recognition (FNER), annotated resources are scarce in the corpus for NNER. Data augmentation is an effective approach to address the insufficient annotated corpus. However, there is a significant lack of exploration in data augmentation methods for NNER. Due to the presence of nested entities in NNER, existing data augmentation methods cannot be directly applied to NNER tasks. Therefore, in this work, we focus on data augmentation for NNER and resort to more expressive structures, Composited-Nested-Label Classification (CNLC) in which constituents are combined by nested-word and nested-label, to model nested entities. The dataset is augmented using the Composited-Nested-Learning (CNL). In addition, we propose the Confidence Filtering Mechanism (CFM) for a more efficient selection of generated data. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach results in improvements in ACE2004 and ACE2005 and alleviates the impact of sample imbalance.
Hopping Too Late: Exploring the Limitations of Large Language Models on Multi-Hop Queries
Authors: Eden Biran, Daniela Gottesman, Sohee Yang, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step problems, but little is known about how these computations are implemented internally. Motivated by this, we study how LLMs answer multi-hop queries such as "The spouse of the performer of Imagine is". These queries require two information extraction steps: a latent one for resolving the first hop ("the performer of Imagine") into the bridge entity (John Lennon), and another for resolving the second hop ("the spouse of John Lennon") into the target entity (Yoko Ono). Understanding how the latent step is computed internally is key to understanding the overall computation. By carefully analyzing the internal computations of transformer-based LLMs, we discover that the bridge entity is resolved in the early layers of the model. Then, only after this resolution, the two-hop query is solved in the later layers. Because the second hop commences in later layers, there could be cases where these layers no longer encode the necessary knowledge for correctly predicting the answer. Motivated by this, we propose a novel "back-patching" analysis method whereby a hidden representation from a later layer is patched back to an earlier layer. We find that in up to 66% of previously incorrect cases there exists a back-patch that results in the correct generation of the answer, showing that the later layers indeed sometimes lack the needed functionality. Overall, our methods and findings open further opportunities for understanding and improving latent reasoning in transformer-based LLMs.