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The alignment of reasoning abilities between smaller and larger Language Models are largely conducted via supervised fine-tuning using demonstrations generated from robust Large Language Models (LLMs). Although these approaches deliver more performant models, they do not show sufficiently strong generalization ability as the training only relies on the provided demonstrations.

In this paper, we propose the Self-refine Instruction-tuning method that elicits Smaller Language Models to self-improve their abilities.
Our approach is based on a two-stage process, where reasoning abilities are first transferred between LLMs and Small Language Models (SLMs) via Instruction-tuning on synthetic demonstrations provided by LLMs, and then the instructed models self-improve their abilities through preference optimization strategies.
In particular, the second phase operates refinement heuristics based on Direct Preference Optimization, where the SLMs are elicited to deliver a series of reasoning paths by automatically sampling the generated responses and providing rewards using ground truths from the LLMs.
Results obtained on commonsense and math reasoning tasks show that this approach consistently outperforms Instruction-tuning in both in-domain and out-domain scenarios, aligning the reasoning abilities of Smaller and Larger language models.

EMNLP 2024

Self-Refine Instruction-Tuning for Aligning Reasoning in Language Models

knowledge discovering/inducing

hardness of samples

probing

robustness

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Comprehensively understanding and accurately predicting the performance of large language models across diverse downstream tasks has emerged as a pivotal challenge in NLP research. The pioneering scaling law on downstream works demonstrated intrinsic similarities within model families and utilized such similarities for performance prediction. However, they tend to overlook the similarities between model families and only consider design factors listed in the original scaling law. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework, Collaborative Performance Prediction (CPP), which significantly enhances prediction accuracy by leveraging the historical performance of various models on downstream tasks and other design factors for both model and task. We also collect a collaborative data sourced from online platforms containing both historical performance and additional design factors. With the support of the collaborative data, CPP not only surpasses traditional scaling laws in predicting the performance of scaled LLMs but also facilitates a detailed analysis of factor importance, an area previously overlooked.

Collaborative Performance Prediction for Large Language Models

Identifying important neurons for final predictions is essential for understanding the mechanisms of large language models. Due to computational constraints, current attribution techniques struggle to operate at neuron level. In this paper, we propose a static method for pinpointing significant neurons. Compared to seven other methods, our approach demonstrates superior performance across three metrics. Additionally, since most static methods typically only identify "value neurons" directly contributing to the final prediction, we propose a method for identifying "query neurons" which activate these "value neurons". Finally, we apply our methods to analyze six types of knowledge across both attention and feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Our method and analysis are helpful for understanding the mechanisms of knowledge storage and set the stage for future research in knowledge editing. The code is available on https://github.com/zepingyu0512/neuron-attribution.

Neuron-Level Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models

We investigate the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on sentence classification tasks with semantically-unrelated labels ("foo"/"bar"). We find intervening in only 1\% heads (named "in-context heads") significantly affects ICL accuracy from 87.6\% to 24.4\%. To understand this phenomenon, we analyze the value-output vectors in these heads and discover that the vectors at each label position contain substantial information about the corresponding labels. Furthermore, we observe that the prediction shift from "foo" to "bar" is due to the respective reduction and increase in these heads' attention scores at "foo" and "bar" positions. Therefore, we propose a hypothesis for ICL: in in-context heads, the value-output matrices extract label features, while the query-key matrices compute the similarity between the features at the last position and those at each label position. The query and key matrices can be considered as two towers that learn the similarity metric between the last position's features and each demonstration at label positions. Using this hypothesis, we explain the majority label bias and recency bias in ICL and propose two methods to reduce these biases by 22\% and 17\%, respectively.

How do Large Language Models Learn In-Context? Query and Key Matrices of In-Context Heads are Two Towers for Metric Learning

Fine-grained category discovery using only coarse-grained supervision is a cost-effective yet challenging task. Previous training methods focus on aligning query samples with positive samples and distancing them from negatives. They often neglect intra-category and inter-category semantic similarities of fine-grained categories when navigating sample distributions in the embedding space. Furthermore, some evaluation techniques that rely on pre-collected test samples are inadequate for real-time applications. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a method that successfully detects fine-grained clusters of semantically similar texts guided by a novel objective function. The method uses semantic similarities in a logarithmic space to guide sample distributions in the Euclidean space and to form distinct clusters that represent fine-grained categories. We also propose a centroid inference mechanism to support real-time applications. The efficacy of the method is both theoretically justified and empirically confirmed on three benchmark tasks. The proposed objective function is integrated in multiple contrastive learning based neural models. Its results surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Accuracy, Adjusted Rand Index and Normalized Mutual Information of the detected fine-grained categories. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/changtianluckyforever/F-grained-STAR.

A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts

For extremely weak-supervised text classification, pioneer research generates pseudo labels by mining texts similar to the class names from the raw corpus, which may end up with very limited or even no samples for the minority classes. Recent works have started to generate the relevant texts by prompting LLMs using the class names or definitions; however, there is a high risk that LLMs cannot generate in-distribution (i.e., similar to the corpus where the text classifier will be applied) data, leading to ungeneralizable classifiers. In this paper, we combine the advantages of these two approaches and propose to bridge the gap via a novel framework, \emph{text grafting}, which aims to obtain clean and near-distribution weak supervision for minority classes. Specifically, we first use LLM-based logits to mine masked templates from the raw corpus, which have a high potential for data synthesis into the target minority class. Then, the templates are filled by state-of-the-art LLMs to synthesize near-distribution texts falling into minority classes. Text grafting shows significant improvement over direct mining or synthesis on minority classes. We also use analysis and case studies to comprehend the property of text grafting.

Text Grafting: Near-Distribution Weak Supervision for Minority Classes in Text Classification

In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) lead to pioneer attempts to individually generate texts for each class via prompting. In this paper, we propose Incubator, the first framework that can handle complicated and even mutually dependent classes (e.g., "\emph{TED Talk given by Educator}" and "\emph{Other}"). Specifically, our Incubator is a fine-tuned LLM that takes the instruction of all class definitions as input, and in each inference, it can jointly generate one sample for every class. First, we tune Incubator on the instruction-to-data mappings that we obtained from classification datasets and descriptions on Hugging Face together with in-context augmentation by GPT-4. To emphasize the uniformity and diversity in generations, we refine Incubator by fine-tuning with the cluster centers of semantic textual embeddings of the generated samples. We compare Incubator on various classification tasks with strong baselines such as direct LLM-based inference and training data generation by prompt engineering. Experiments show Incubator is able to (1) outperform previous methods on traditional benchmarks, (2) take label interdependency and user preference into consideration, and (3) enable logical text mining by incubating multiple classifiers

Incubating Text Classifiers Following User Instruction with Nothing but LLM

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for Text-to-SQL tasks, exhibiting remarkable reasoning capabilities. Different from tasks such as math word problem and commonsense reasoning, SQL solutions have a relatively fixed pattern. This facilitates the investigation of whether LLMs can benefit from categorical thinking, mirroring how humans acquire knowledge through inductive reasoning based on comparable examples. In this study, we propose that employing query group partitioning allows LLMs to focus on learning the thought processes specific to a single problem type, consequently enhancing their reasoning abilities across diverse difficulty levels and problem categories. Our experiments reveal that multiple advanced LLMs, when equipped with PTD-SQL, can either surpass or match previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the Spider and BIRD datasets. Intriguingly, models with varying initial performances have exhibited significant improvements mainly at the boundary of their capabilities after targeted drilling, suggesting a parallel with human progress. Code is available at https://github.com/lrlbbzl/PTD-SQL.

PTD-SQL: Partitioning and Targeted Drilling with LLMs in Text-to-SQL

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in leveraging diverse knowledge sources. This study investigates how nine widely used LLMs allocate knowledge between local context and global parameters when answering open-ended questions in knowledge-consistent scenarios. We introduce a novel dataset, WikiAtomic, and systematically vary context sizes to analyze how LLMs prioritize and utilize the provided information and their parametric knowledge in knowledge-consistent scenarios. Additionally, we also study their tendency to hallucinate under varying context sizes. Our findings reveal consistent patterns across models, including a consistent reliance on both contextual (around 70%) and parametric (around 30%) knowledge, and a decrease in hallucinations with increasing context. These insights highlight the importance of more effective context organization and developing models that use input more deterministically for robust performance.

Contextual and Parametric Knowledge: More Context, More Focus

While existing alignment paradigms have been integral in developing large language models (LLMs), LLMs often learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. We propose Modular Pluralism, a modular framework based on multi-LLM collaboration for pluralistic alignment: it "plugs into" a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to flexibility support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. Modular Pluralism is uniquely compatible with black-box LLMs and offers the modular control of adding new community LMs for previously underrepresented communities. We evaluate Modular Pluralism with six tasks and four datasets featuring questions/instructions with value-laden and perspective-informed responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Modular Pluralism advances the three pluralism objectives across six black-box and open-source LLMs. Further analysis reveals that LLMs are generally faithful to the inputs from smaller community LLMs, allowing seamless patching by adding a new community LM to better cover previously underrepresented communities.

Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the promise to revolutionize computing broadly, but their complexity and extensive training data also expose significant privacy vulnerabilities. One of the simplest privacy risks associated with LLMs is their susceptibility to membership inference attacks (MIAs), wherein an adversary aims to determine whether a specific data point was part of the model’s training set. 
Although this is a known risk, state of the art methodologies for MIAs rely on training multiple computationally costly 'shadow models', making risk evaluation prohibitive for large models. Here we adapt a recent line of work which uses quantile regression to mount membership inference attacks; we extend this work by proposing a low-cost MIA that leverages an ensemble of small quantile regression models to determine if a document belongs to the model's training set or not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on fine-tuned LLMs of varying families (OPT, Pythia, Llama) and across multiple datasets. Across all scenarios we obtain comparable or improved accuracy compared to state of the art `shadow model' approaches, with as little as 6\% of their computation budget. We demonstrate increased effectiveness across multi-epoch trained target models, and architecture miss-specification robustness, that is, we can mount an effective attack against a model using a different tokenizer and architecture, without requiring knowledge on the target model.

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Collaborative Performance Prediction for Large Language Models

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Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoning