Chen Qian


2024

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Towards Tracing Trustworthiness Dynamics: Revisiting Pre-training Period of Large Language Models
Chen Qian | Jie Zhang | Wei Yao | Dongrui Liu | Zhenfei Yin | Yu Qiao | Yong Liu | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Ensuring the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs) is crucial. Most studies concentrate on fully pre-trained LLMs to better understand and improve LLMs’ trustworthiness. In this paper, to reveal the untapped potential of pre-training, we pioneer the exploration of LLMs’ trustworthiness during this period, focusing on five key dimensions: reliability, privacy, toxicity, fairness, and robustness. To begin with, we apply linear probing to LLMs. The high probing accuracy suggests that LLMs in early pre-training can already distinguish concepts in each trustworthiness dimension. Therefore, to further uncover the hidden possibilities of pre-training, we extract steering vectors from a LLM’s pre-training checkpoints to enhance the LLM’s trustworthiness. Finally, inspired by the theoretical result that mutual information estimation is bounded by linear probing accuracy, we also probe LLMs with mutual information to investigate the dynamics of trustworthiness during pre-training. We are the first to observe a similar two-phase phenomenon: fitting and compression. This research provides an initial exploration of trustworthiness modeling during LLM pre-training, seeking to unveil new insights and spur further developments in the field.

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Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents
Chen Qian | Yufan Dang | Jiahao Li | Wei Liu | Zihao Xie | YiFei Wang | Weize Chen | Cheng Yang | Xin Cong | Xiaoyin Che | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where LLM agents demonstrate efficient collaboration, task division, and assurance of software quality, markedly reducing the need for manual involvement. However, these agents frequently perform a variety of tasks independently, without benefiting from past experiences, which leads to repeated mistakes and inefficient attempts in multi-step task execution. To this end, we introduce Experiential Co-Learning, a novel LLM-agent learning framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for future task execution. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. We anticipate that our insights will guide LLM agents towards enhanced autonomy and contribute to their evolutionary growth in cooperative learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

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ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development
Chen Qian | Wei Liu | Hongzhang Liu | Nuo Chen | Yufan Dang | Jiahao Li | Cheng Yang | Weize Chen | Yusheng Su | Xin Cong | Juyuan Xu | Dahai Li | Zhiyuan Liu | Maosong Sun
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Software development is a complex task that necessitates cooperation among multiple members with diverse skills. Numerous studies used deep learning to improve specific phases in a waterfall model, such as design, coding, and testing. However, the deep learning model in each phase requires unique designs, leading to technical inconsistencies across various phases, which results in a fragmented and ineffective development process. In this paper, we introduce ChatDev, a chat-powered software development framework in which specialized agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are guided in what to communicate (via chat chain) and how to communicate (via communicative dehallucination). These agents actively contribute to the design, coding, and testing phases through unified language-based communication, with solutions derived from their multi-turn dialogues. We found their utilization of natural language is advantageous for system design, and communicating in programming language proves helpful in debugging. This paradigm demonstrates how linguistic communication facilitates multi-agent collaboration, establishing language as a unifying bridge for autonomous task-solving among LLM agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.

2021

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Counterfactual Inference for Text Classification Debiasing
Chen Qian | Fuli Feng | Lijie Wen | Chunping Ma | Pengjun Xie
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Today’s text classifiers inevitably suffer from unintended dataset biases, especially the document-level label bias and word-level keyword bias, which may hurt models’ generalization. Many previous studies employed data-level manipulations or model-level balancing mechanisms to recover unbiased distributions and thus prevent models from capturing the two types of biases. Unfortunately, they either suffer from the extra cost of data collection/selection/annotation or need an elaborate design of balancing strategies. Different from traditional factual inference in which debiasing occurs before or during training, counterfactual inference mitigates the influence brought by unintended confounders after training, which can make unbiased decisions with biased observations. Inspired by this, we propose a model-agnostic text classification debiasing framework – Corsair, which can effectively avoid employing data manipulations or designing balancing mechanisms. Concretely, Corsair first trains a base model on a training set directly, allowing the dataset biases ‘poison’ the trained model. In inference, given a factual input document, Corsair imagines its two counterfactual counterparts to distill and mitigate the two biases captured by the poisonous model. Extensive experiments demonstrate Corsair’s effectiveness, generalizability and fairness.