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Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance after the critical &quot;emergent phase&quot;. In preliminary experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. This motivates FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training, specifically blending general corpora with code data to accurately represent the common necessity. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

EMNLP 2024

Predicting Downstream Performance in LLMs

downstream performance

llms

scaling laws

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2022

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance after the critical "emergent phase". In preliminary experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. This motivates FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training, specifically blending general corpora with code data to accurately represent the common necessity. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

## 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.

Argument Generation is proposed, a prompting method that allows for better performance in smaller models. Additional tests show that surprisingly, prompting methods do not always elicit higher gains in larger models.

“Let’s Argue Both Sides”: Argument Generation Can Force Small Models to Utilize Previously Inaccessible Reasoning Capabilities

Accurate product categorization in e-commerce is critical for delivering a satisfactory online shopping experience to customers. With the vast number of available products and the numerous potential categories, it becomes crucial to develop a classification system capable of assigning products to their correct categories with high accuracy. We present a dual-expert classification system that utilizes the power of large language models (LLMs). This framework integrates domain-specific knowledge and pre-trained LLM’s general knowledge through effective model fine-tuning and prompting techniques. First, the fine-tuned domain-specific expert recommends top K candidate categories for a given input product. Then, the more general LLM-based expert, through prompting techniques, analyzes the nuanced differences between candidate categories and selects the most suitable target category. We introduce a new in-context learning approach that utilizes LLM self-generated summarization to provide clearer instructions and enhance its performance. Experiments on e-commerce datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our LLM-based Dual-Expert classification system.

E-Commerce Product Categorization with LLM-based Dual-Expert Classification Paradigm

Working within specific NLP subdomains presents significant challenges, primarily due to a persistent deficit of data. Stringent privacy concerns and limited data accessibility often drive this shortage. Additionally, the medical domain demands high accuracy, where even marginal improvements in model performance can have profound impacts. In this study, we investigate the potential of vocabulary transfer to enhance model performance in biomedical NLP tasks. Specifically, we focus on vocabulary extension, a technique that involves expanding the target vocabulary to incorporate domain-specific biomedical terms. Our findings demonstrate that vocabulary extension, leads to measurable improvements in both downstream model performance and inference time.

Vocabulary Transfer for Biomedical Texts: Add Tokens if You Can Not Add Data

The concept of persona, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (e.g., personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) LLM Role-Playing, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) LLM Personalization, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors.

Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs), the focus in Conversational AI has shifted from merely generating coherent and relevant responses to tackling more complex challenges, such as personalizing dialogue systems. In an effort to enhance user engagement, chatbots are often designed to mimic human behaviour, responding within a defined emotional spectrum and aligning to a set of values. In this paper, we aim to simulate personal traits according to the Big Five model with the use of LLMs. Our research showed that generating personality-related texts is still a challenging task for the models. As a result, we present a dataset of generated texts with the predefined Big Five characteristics and provide an analytical framework for testing LLMs on a simulation of personality skills.

Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models to Simulate Personality

Few-shot learning benchmarks are critical for evaluating modern NLP techniques. It is possible, however, that benchmarks favor methods which easily make use of unlabeled text, because researchers can use unlabeled text from the test set to pretrain their models. Given the dearth of research on this potential problem, we run experiments to quantify the bias caused by pretraining on unlabeled test set text instead of on unlabeled, independently drawn text. Controlled few-shot and zero-shot experiments on 25 classification tasks and 3 language models -- BERT, GPT-2, and Mistral 7B -- do not find evidence of overoptimism. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of repeated subsampling when studying few-shot text classification, and recommend that few-shot learning benchmarks include multiple training folds. Code and data are available here: https:// github.com/kddubey/pretrain-on-test/.

Evaluating the fairness of task-adaptive pretraining on unlabeled test data before few-shot text classification

Language models are now capable of solving tasks that require dealing with long sequences consisting of hundreds of thousands of tokens. However, they often fail on tasks that require repetitive use of simple rules, even on sequences that are much shorter than those seen during training. For example, state-of-the-art LLMs can find common items in two lists with up to 20 items but fail when lists have 80 items. In this paper, we introduce MLissard, a multilingual benchmark designed to evaluate models' abilities to process and generate texts of varied lengths and offers a mechanism for controlling sequence complexity. Our evaluation of open-source and proprietary models show a consistent decline in performance across all models and languages as the complexity of the sequence increases. Surprisingly, the use of in-context examples in languages other than English helps increase extrapolation performance significantly.

MLissard: Multilingual Long and Simple Sequential Reasoning Benchmarks

Foundation models (FMs) have achieved significant success across various tasks, leading to research on benchmarks for reasoning abilities. However, there is a lack of studies on FMs performance in exceptional scenarios, which we define as out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning tasks. This paper is the first to address these cases, developing a novel dataset for evaluation of FMs across multiple modalities, including graphic novels, calligraphy, news articles, and lyrics. It includes tasks for instance classification, character recognition, token prediction, and text generation. The paper also proposes prompt engineering techniques like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and CoT+Few-Shot to enhance performance. Validation of FMs using various methods revealed improvements. The code repository is accessible at: this https URL

Benchmarking Foundation Models on Exceptional Cases: Dataset Creation and Validation

Inferences from adjective-noun combinations like "Is artificial intelligence still intelligence?" provide a good test bed for LLMs' understanding of meaning and compositional generalization capability, since there are many combinations which are novel to both humans and LLMs but nevertheless elicit convergent human judgments. We study a range of LLMs and find that the largest models we tested are able to draw human-like inferences when the inference is determined by context and can generalize to unseen adjective-noun combinations. We also propose three methods to evaluate LLMs on these inferences out of context, where there is a distribution of human-like answers rather than a single correct answer. We find that LLMs show a human-like distribution on at most 75% of our dataset, which is promising but still leaves room for improvement.

Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution

The evaluation of generative models in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) presents distinct difficulties, as traditional metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR, Exact Match, and F1 score often struggle to capture the nuanced and diverse responses. While embedding-based metrics such as BERTScore and BARTScore focus on semantic similarity, they still fail to fully address aspects such as recognizing additional helpful information and rewarding contextual faithfulness. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) based metrics offer more fine-grained evaluations, but challenges such as score clustering remain. This paper introduces a multi-aspect evaluation framework, CHIE, incorporating aspects of \textbf{C}orrectness, \textbf{H}elpfulness, \textbf{I}rrelevance, and \textbf{E}xtraneousness. Our approach, which uses binary categorical values rather than continuous rating scales, aligns well with human judgments, indicating its potential as a comprehensive and effective evaluation method.

Next from EMNLP 2024

“Let’s Argue Both Sides”: Argument Generation Can Force Small Models to Utilize Previously Inaccessible Reasoning Capabilities

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