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Adult learning is increasingly recognized as a crucial way for personal development and societal progress. It however is challenging, and adult learners face unique challenges such as balancing education with other life responsibilities. Collecting feedback from adult learners is effective in understanding their concerns and improving learning experiences, and social networks provide a rich source of real-time sentiment data from adult learners. Machine learning technologies especially large language models (LLMs) perform well in automating sentiment analysis. However, none of such models is specialized for adult learning with accurate sentiment understanding. In this paper, we present A-Learn, which enhances adult learning sentiment analysis by customizing existing general-purpose LLMs with domain-specific datasets for adult learning. We collect adult learners' comments from social networks and label the sentiment of each comment with an existing LLM to form labelled datasets tailored for adult learning. The datasets are used to customize A-Learn from several base LLMs. We conducted experimental studies and the results reveal A-Learn's competitive sentiment analysis performance, achieving up to 91.3% accuracy with 20% improvement over the base LLM. A-Learn is also employed for word cloud analysis to identify key concerns of adult learners. The research outcome of this study highlights the importance of applying machine learning with educational expertise for teaching improvement and educational innovations that benefit adult learning and adult learners., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

Analogical reasoning is a unique ability of humans to address unfamiliar challenges by transferring strategies from relevant past experiences. One key finding in psychology is that compared with irrelevant past experiences, recalling relevant ones can help humans better handle new tasks. Coincidentally, the NLP community has also recently found that self-generating relevant examples in the context can help large language models (LLMs) better solve a given problem than hand-crafted prompts. However, it is yet not clear whether relevance is the key factor eliciting such capability, i.e., can LLMs benefit more from self-generated relevant examples than irrelevant ones? In this work, we systematically explore whether LLMs can truly perform analogical reasoning on a diverse set of reasoning tasks. With extensive experiments and analysis, we show that self-generated random examples can surprisingly achieve comparable or even better performance, e.g., 4% performance boost on GSM8K with random biological examples. We find that the accuracy of self-generated examples is the key factor and subsequently design two improved methods with significantly reduced inference costs. Overall, we aim to advance a deeper understanding of LLM analogical reasoning and hope this work stimulates further research in the design of self-generated contexts.

With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, abundant new opportunities are emerging, but also new challenges, among which contamination is quickly becoming critical. Business applications and fundraising in AI have reached a scale at which a few percentage points gained on popular question-answering benchmarks could translate into dozens of millions of dollars, placing high pressure on model integrity. At the same time, it is becoming harder and harder to keep track of the data that LLMs have seen; if not impossible with closed-source models like GPT-4 and Claude-3 not divulging any information on the training set. As a result, contamination becomes a major issue: LLMs' performance may not be reliable anymore, as the high performance may be at least partly due to their previous exposure to the data. This limitation jeopardizes the entire progress in the field of NLP, yet, there remains a lack of methods on how to efficiently detect contamination.In this paper, we survey all recent work on contamination detection with LLMs, and help the community track contamination levels of LLMs by releasing an open-source Python library named LLMSanitize implementing major contamination detection algorithms., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, 1 table

In the rapidly evolving field of large language models (LLMs), data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a pivotal technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. This survey explores the transformative impact of LLMs on DA, particularly addressing the unique challenges and opportunities they present in the context of natural language processing (NLP) and beyond. From both data and learning perspectives, we examine various strategies that utilize LLMs for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for diverse forms of further training. Additionally, this paper highlights the primary open challenges faced in this domain, ranging from controllable data augmentation to multi-modal data augmentation. This survey highlights a paradigm shift introduced by LLMs in DA, and aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive few-shot generalization on many tasks via in-context learning (ICL). Despite their success in showing such emergent abilities, the scale and complexity of larger models also lead to unprecedentedly high computational demands and deployment challenges. In reaction, researchers explore transferring the powerful capabilities of larger models to more efficient and compact models by typically aligning the output of smaller (student) models with that of larger (teacher) models. Existing methods either train student models on the generated outputs of teacher models or imitate their token-level probability distributions. However, these distillation methods pay little to no attention to the input, which also plays a crucial role in ICL. Based on the finding that the performance of ICL is highly sensitive to the selection of demonstration examples, we propose Bidirectional Alignment (BiAlign) to fully leverage the models' preferences for ICL examples to improve the ICL abilities of student models. Specifically, we introduce the alignment of input preferences between student and teacher models by incorporating a novel ranking loss, in addition to aligning the token-level output distribution. With extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that BiAlign can consistently outperform existing baselines on a variety of tasks involving language understanding, reasoning, and coding.

Existing efforts to improve logical reasoning ability of language models have predominantly relied on supervised fine-tuning, hindering generalization to new domains and/or tasks. The development of Large Langauge Models (LLMs) has demonstrated the capacity of compressing abundant knowledge into a single proxy, enabling them to tackle multiple tasks effectively. Our preliminary experiments, nevertheless, show that LLMs do not show capability on logical reasoning. The performance of LLMs on logical reasoning benchmarks is far behind the existing state-of-the-art baselines. In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate the feasibility of incorporating logical knowledge through self-supervised post-training, and activating it via in-context learning, which we termed as LogicLLM. Specifically, we devise an auto-regressive objective variant of MERIt and integrate it with two LLM series, i.e., FLAN-T5 and LLaMA, with parameter size ranging from 3 billion to 13 billion. The results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of LogicLLM. Besides, we conduct extensive ablation studies to analyze the key factors in designing logic-oriented proxy tasks., Comment: 16 pages, NAACL 2024

We present chain-of-knowledge (CoK), a novel framework that augments large language models (LLMs) by dynamically incorporating grounding information from heterogeneous sources. It results in more factual rationales and reduced hallucination in generation. Specifically, CoK consists of three stages: reasoning preparation, dynamic knowledge adapting, and answer consolidation. Given a knowledge-intensive question, CoK first prepares several preliminary rationales and answers while identifying the relevant knowledge domains. If there is no majority consensus among the answers from samples, CoK corrects the rationales step by step by adapting knowledge from the identified domains. These corrected rationales can plausibly serve as a better foundation for the final answer consolidation. Unlike prior studies that primarily use unstructured data, CoK also leverages structured knowledge sources such as Wikidata and tables that provide more reliable factual information. To access both unstructured and structured knowledge sources in the dynamic knowledge adapting stage, we propose an adaptive query generator that allows the generation of queries for various types of query languages, including SPARQL, SQL, and natural sentences. Moreover, to minimize error propagation between rationales, CoK corrects the rationales progressively using preceding corrected rationales to generate and correct subsequent rationales. Extensive experiments show that CoK consistently improves the performance of LLMs on knowledge-intensive tasks across different domains., Comment: Accepted by ICLR 2024

This project focuses on enhancing open-source large language models through instruction-tuning and providing comprehensive evaluations of their performance. We explore how various training data factors, such as quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, influence the performance of instruction-tuned models trained on publicly accessible high-quality instruction datasets for both English and Chinese languages. Our goal is to supplement evaluation with quantitative analyses, providing valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Our model, data, and code are publicly available for others to use and build upon.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become popular, there emerged an important trend of using multimodality to augment the LLMs' generation ability, which enables LLMs to better interact with the world. However, there lacks a unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. In this survey, we review methods that assist and augment generative models by retrieving multimodal knowledge, whose formats range from images, codes, tables, graphs, to audio. Such methods offer a promising solution to important concerns such as factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness. By providing an in-depth review, this survey is expected to provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods' applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs.

Although large conversational AI models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT have demonstrated great potential, we question whether such models can guarantee factual accuracy. Recently, technology companies such as Microsoft and Google have announced new services which aim to combine search engines with conversational AI. However, we have found numerous mistakes in the public demonstrations that suggest we should not easily trust the factual claims of the AI models. Rather than criticizing specific models or companies, we hope to call on researchers and developers to improve AI models' transparency and factual correctness.

Data annotation is the process of labeling data that could be used to train machine learning models. Having high-quality annotation is crucial, as it allows the model to learn the relationship between the input data and the desired output. GPT-3, a large-scale language model developed by OpenAI, has demonstrated impressive zero- and few-shot performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. It is therefore natural to wonder whether it can be used to effectively annotate data for NLP tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3 as a data annotator by comparing it with traditional data annotation methods and analyzing its output on a range of tasks. Through this analysis, we aim to provide insight into the potential of GPT-3 as a general-purpose data annotator in NLP., Comment: Accepted by ACL 2023

Much recent progress in task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems has been driven by available annotation data across multiple domains for training. Over the last few years, there has been a move towards data curation for multilingual ToD systems that are applicable to serve people speaking different languages. However, existing multilingual ToD datasets either have a limited coverage of languages due to the high cost of data curation, or ignore the fact that dialogue entities barely exist in countries speaking these languages. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a novel data curation method that generates GlobalWoZ -- a large-scale multilingual ToD dataset globalized from an English ToD dataset for three unexplored use cases. Our method is based on translating dialogue templates and filling them with local entities in the target-language countries. We release our dataset as well as a set of strong baselines to encourage research on learning multilingual ToD systems for real use cases.

Adapter-based tuning has recently arisen as an alternative to fine-tuning. It works by adding light-weight adapter modules to a pretrained language model (PrLM) and only updating the parameters of adapter modules when learning on a downstream task. As such, it adds only a few trainable parameters per new task, allowing a high degree of parameter sharing. Prior studies have shown that adapter-based tuning often achieves comparable results to fine-tuning. However, existing work only focuses on the parameter-efficient aspect of adapter-based tuning while lacking further investigation on its effectiveness. In this paper, we study the latter. We first show that adapter-based tuning better mitigates forgetting issues than fine-tuning since it yields representations with less deviation from those generated by the initial PrLM. We then empirically compare the two tuning methods on several downstream NLP tasks and settings. We demonstrate that 1) adapter-based tuning outperforms fine-tuning on low-resource and cross-lingual tasks; 2) it is more robust to overfitting and less sensitive to changes in learning rates., Comment: Accepted by ACL 2021 (long paper)

Data augmentation techniques have been widely used to improve machine learning performance as they enhance the generalization capability of models. In this work, to generate high quality synthetic data for low-resource tagging tasks, we propose a novel augmentation method with language models trained on the linearized labeled sentences. Our method is applicable to both supervised and semi-supervised settings. For the supervised settings, we conduct extensive experiments on named entity recognition (NER), part of speech (POS) tagging and end-to-end target based sentiment analysis (E2E-TBSA) tasks. For the semi-supervised settings, we evaluate our method on the NER task under the conditions of given unlabeled data only and unlabeled data plus a knowledge base. The results show that our method can consistently outperform the baselines, particularly when the given gold training data are less., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2020