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Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on supervision signals to evaluate previous responses, making it difficult to assess output quality in more open-ended scenarios effectively. Additionally, these methods are typically designed for specific tasks, which limits their generalization to new domains. To address these limitations, we propose Progressive Thought Refinement (PTR), a framework that enables LLMs to refine their responses progressively. PTR operates in two phases: (1) Thought data construction stage: We propose a weak and strong model collaborative selection strategy to build a high-quality progressive refinement dataset to ensure logical consistency from thought to answers, and the answers are gradually refined in each round. (2) Thought-Mask Fine-Tuning Phase: We design a training structure to mask the "thought" and adjust loss weights to encourage LLMs to refine prior thought, teaching them to implicitly understand "how to improve" rather than "what is correct." Experimental results show that PTR significantly enhances LLM performance across ten diverse tasks (avg. from 49.6% to 53.5%) without task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, in more open-ended tasks, LLMs also demonstrate substantial improvements in the quality of responses beyond mere accuracy, suggesting that PTR truly teaches LLMs to self-improve over time., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures

Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) have proven valuable for various downstream tasks. However, scaling them up is challenging because building large-scale MMKGs often introduces mismatched images (i.e., noise). Most entities in KGs belong to the long tail, meaning there are few images of them available online. This scarcity makes it difficult to determine whether a found image matches the entity. To address this, we draw on the Triangle of Reference Theory and suggest enhancing vision-language models with concept guidance. Specifically, we introduce COG, a two-stage framework with COncept-Guided vision-language models. The framework comprises a Concept Integration module, which effectively identifies image-text pairs of long-tailed entities, and an Evidence Fusion module, which offers explainability and enables human verification. To demonstrate the effectiveness of COG, we create a dataset of 25k image-text pairs of long-tailed entities. Our comprehensive experiments show that COG not only improves the accuracy of recognizing long-tailed image-text pairs compared to baselines but also offers flexibility and explainability.

It is imperative for Large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions with elaborate requirements (i.e. Complex Instructions Following). Yet, it remains under-explored how to enhance the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially study what training data is effective in enhancing complex constraints following abilities. We found that training LLMs with instructions containing multiple constraints enhances their understanding of complex instructions, especially those with lower complexity levels. The improvement can even generalize to compositions of out-of-domain constraints. Additionally, we further propose methods addressing how to obtain and utilize the effective training data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of our methods in terms of overall performance and training efficiency. We also demonstrate that our methods improve models' ability to follow instructions generally and generalize effectively across out-of-domain, in-domain, and adversarial settings, while maintaining general capabilities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but they still struggle with some complicated reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. One non-negligible reason for LLMs' suboptimal performance on logical reasoning is their overlooking of understanding logical fallacies correctly. To evaluate LLMs' capability of logical fallacy understanding (LFU), we propose five concrete tasks from three cognitive dimensions of WHAT, WHY, and HOW in this paper. Towards these LFU tasks, we have successfully constructed a new dataset LFUD based on GPT-4 accompanied by a little human effort. Our extensive experiments justify that our LFUD can be used not only to evaluate LLMs' LFU capability, but also to fine-tune LLMs to obtain significantly enhanced performance on logical reasoning.

Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. Definition bias in information extraction appears not only across datasets from different domains but also within datasets sharing the same domain. We identify two types of definition bias in IE: bias among information extraction datasets and bias between information extraction datasets and instruction tuning datasets. To systematically investigate definition bias, we conduct three probing experiments to quantitatively analyze it and discover the limitations of unified information extraction and large language models in solving definition bias. To mitigate definition bias in information extraction, we propose a multi-stage framework consisting of definition bias measurement, bias-aware fine-tuning, and task-specific bias mitigation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in addressing definition bias. Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/EZ-hwh/definition-bias, Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

Current language models have demonstrated their capability to develop basic reasoning, but struggle in more complicated reasoning tasks that require a combination of atomic skills, such as math word problem requiring skills like arithmetic and unit conversion. Previous methods either do not improve the inherent atomic skills of models or not attempt to generalize the atomic skills to complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we first propose a probing framework to investigate whether the atomic skill can spontaneously generalize to complex reasoning tasks. Then, we introduce a hierarchical curriculum learning training strategy to achieve better skill generalization. In our experiments, we find that atomic skills can not spontaneously generalize to compositional tasks. By leveraging hierarchical curriculum learning, we successfully induce generalization, significantly improve the performance of open-source LMs on complex reasoning tasks. Promisingly, the skill generalization exhibit effective in cross-dataset and cross-domain scenarios. Complex reasoning can also help enhance atomic skills. Our findings offer valuable guidance for designing better training strategies for complex reasoning tasks.

Generative Language Models (LMs) such as ChatGPT have exhibited remarkable performance across various downstream tasks. Nevertheless, one of their most prominent drawbacks is generating inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. Previous studies have devised sophisticated pipelines and prompts to induce large LMs to exhibit the capability for self-correction. However, large LMs are explicitly prompted to verify and modify its answers separately rather than completing all steps spontaneously like humans. Moreover, these complex prompts are extremely challenging for small LMs to follow. In this paper, we introduce the \underline{I}ntrinsic \underline{S}elf-\underline{C}orrection (ISC) in generative language models, aiming to correct the initial output of LMs in a self-triggered manner, even for those small LMs with 6 billion parameters. Specifically, we devise a pipeline for constructing self-correction data and propose Partial Answer Masking (PAM), aiming to endow the model with the capability for intrinsic self-correction through fine-tuning. We conduct experiments using LMs with parameters sizes ranging from 6 billion to 13 billion in two tasks, including commonsense reasoning and factual knowledge reasoning. Our experiments demonstrate that the outputs generated using ISC outperform those generated without self-correction. We believe that the output quality of even small LMs can be further improved by empowering them with the ability to intrinsic self-correct.

Quantities are distinct and critical components of texts that characterize the magnitude properties of entities, providing a precise perspective for the understanding of natural language, especially for reasoning tasks. In recent years, there has been a flurry of research on reasoning tasks based on large language models (LLMs), most of which solely focus on numerical values, neglecting the dimensional concept of quantities with units despite its importance. We argue that the concept of dimension is essential for precisely understanding quantities and of great significance for LLMs to perform quantitative reasoning. However, the lack of dimension knowledge and quantity-related benchmarks has resulted in low performance of LLMs. Hence, we present a framework to enhance the quantitative reasoning ability of language models based on dimension perception. We first construct a dimensional unit knowledge base (DimUnitKB) to address the knowledge gap in this area. We propose a benchmark DimEval consisting of seven tasks of three categories to probe and enhance the dimension perception skills of LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methods, we propose a quantitative reasoning task and conduct experiments. The experimental results show that our dimension perception method dramatically improves accuracy (43.55%->50.67%) on quantitative reasoning tasks compared to GPT-4., Comment: Accepted in the 40th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2024)

Large language models (LLMs) can understand human instructions, showing their potential for pragmatic applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. However, they still struggle with complex instructions, which can be either complex task descriptions that require multiple tasks and constraints, or complex input that contains long context, noise, heterogeneous information and multi-turn format. Due to these features, LLMs often ignore semantic constraints from task descriptions, generate incorrect formats, violate length or sample count constraints, and be unfaithful to the input text. Existing benchmarks are insufficient to assess LLMs' ability to understand complex instructions, as they are close-ended and simple. To bridge this gap, we propose CELLO, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions systematically. We design eight features for complex instructions and construct a comprehensive evaluation dataset from real-world scenarios. We also establish four criteria and develop corresponding metrics, as current ones are inadequate, biased or too strict and coarse-grained. We compare the performance of representative Chinese-oriented and English-oriented models in following complex instructions through extensive experiments. Resources of CELLO are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/CELLO.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive impact in the field of natural language processing, but they still struggle with several issues regarding, such as completeness, timeliness, faithfulness and adaptability. While recent efforts have focuses on connecting LLMs with external knowledge sources, the integration of knowledge bases (KBs) remains understudied and faces several challenges. In this paper, we introduce KnowledGPT, a comprehensive framework to bridge LLMs with various knowledge bases, facilitating both the retrieval and storage of knowledge. The retrieval process employs the program of thought prompting, which generates search language for KBs in code format with pre-defined functions for KB operations. Besides retrieval, KnowledGPT offers the capability to store knowledge in a personalized KB, catering to individual user demands. With extensive experiments, we show that by integrating LLMs with KBs, KnowledGPT properly answers a broader range of questions requiring world knowledge compared with vanilla LLMs, utilizing both knowledge existing in widely-known KBs and extracted into personalized KBs., Comment: 21 pages, 10 figures

Similes play an imperative role in creative writing such as story and dialogue generation. Proper evaluation metrics are like a beacon guiding the research of simile generation (SG). However, it remains under-explored as to what criteria should be considered, how to quantify each criterion into metrics, and whether the metrics are effective for comprehensive, efficient, and reliable SG evaluation. To address the issues, we establish HAUSER, a holistic and automatic evaluation system for the SG task, which consists of five criteria from three perspectives and automatic metrics for each criterion. Through extensive experiments, we verify that our metrics are significantly more correlated with human ratings from each perspective compared with prior automatic metrics.

New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management. We anticipate Xiezhi will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of LLMs, and the benchmark is released in~\url{https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark}., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2024

Domain knowledge refers to the in-depth understanding, expertise, and familiarity with a specific subject, industry, field, or area of special interest. The existing benchmarks are all lack of an overall design for domain knowledge evaluation. Holding the belief that the real ability of domain language understanding can only be fairly evaluated by an comprehensive and in-depth benchmark, we introduces the Domma, a Domain Mastery Benchmark. DomMa targets at testing Large Language Models (LLMs) on their domain knowledge understanding, it features extensive domain coverage, large data volume, and a continually updated data set based on Chinese 112 first-level subject classifications. DomMa consist of 100,000 questions in both Chinese and English sourced from graduate entrance examinations and undergraduate exams in Chinese college. We have also propose designs to make benchmark and evaluation process more suitable to LLMs., Comment: The paper is updated, but we make a mistake that submit a new arxiv paper but not replace this one, the new version is in arXiv:2306.05783

To advance Chinese financial natural language processing (NLP), we introduce BBT-FinT5, a new Chinese financial pre-training language model based on the T5 model. To support this effort, we have built BBT-FinCorpus, a large-scale financial corpus with approximately 300GB of raw text from four different sources. In general domain NLP, comprehensive benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE have driven significant advancements in language model pre-training by enabling head-to-head comparisons among models. Drawing inspiration from these benchmarks, we propose BBT-CFLEB, a Chinese Financial Language understanding and generation Evaluation Benchmark, which includes six datasets covering both understanding and generation tasks. Our aim is to facilitate research in the development of NLP within the Chinese financial domain. Our model, corpus and benchmark are released at https://github.com/ssymmetry/BBT-FinCUGE-Applications. Our work belongs to the Big Bang Transformer (BBT), a large-scale pre-trained language model project., Comment: Changed author order

The ability to understand and generate similes is an imperative step to realize human-level AI. However, there is still a considerable gap between machine intelligence and human cognition in similes, since deep models based on statistical distribution tend to favour high-frequency similes. Hence, a large-scale symbolic knowledge base of similes is required, as it contributes to the modeling of diverse yet unpopular similes while facilitating additional evaluation and reasoning. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel framework for large-scale simile knowledge base construction, as well as two probabilistic metrics which enable an improved understanding of simile phenomena in natural language. Overall, we construct MAPS-KB, a million-scale probabilistic simile knowledge base, covering 4.3 million triplets over 0.4 million terms from 70 GB corpora. We conduct sufficient experiments to justify the effectiveness and necessity of the methods of our framework. We also apply MAPS-KB on three downstream tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, further demonstrating the value of MAPS-KB., Comment: Accepted to AAAI 2023

Knowledge embeddings (KE) represent a knowledge graph (KG) by embedding entities and relations into continuous vector spaces. Existing methods are mainly structure-based or description-based. Structure-based methods learn representations that preserve the inherent structure of KGs. They cannot well represent abundant long-tail entities in real-world KGs with limited structural information. Description-based methods leverage textual information and language models. Prior approaches in this direction barely outperform structure-based ones, and suffer from problems like expensive negative sampling and restrictive description demand. In this paper, we propose LMKE, which adopts Language Models to derive Knowledge Embeddings, aiming at both enriching representations of long-tail entities and solving problems of prior description-based methods. We formulate description-based KE learning with a contrastive learning framework to improve efficiency in training and evaluation. Experimental results show that LMKE achieves state-of-the-art performance on KE benchmarks of link prediction and triple classification, especially for long-tail entities., Comment: This revision corrects some texts after fixing a data leakage issue

Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. Nowadays, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many tasks. However, it remains under-explored whether PLMs can interpret similes or not. In this paper, we investigate the ability of PLMs in simile interpretation by designing a novel task named Simile Property Probing, i.e., to let the PLMs infer the shared properties of similes. We construct our simile property probing datasets from both general textual corpora and human-designed questions, containing 1,633 examples covering seven main categories. Our empirical study based on the constructed datasets shows that PLMs can infer similes' shared properties while still underperforming humans. To bridge the gap with human performance, we additionally design a knowledge-enhanced training objective by incorporating the simile knowledge into PLMs via knowledge embedding methods. Our method results in a gain of 8.58% in the probing task and 1.37% in the downstream task of sentiment classification. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/PLMs-Interpret-Simile., Comment: Accepted at ACL 2022 main conference