In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language generation. Compared to previous small-scale models, they are capable of generating fluent output based on the provided prefix or prompt. However, one critical challenge — the *hallucination* problem — remains to be resolved. Generally, the community refers to the undetected hallucination scenario where the LLMs generate text unrelated to the input text or facts. In this study, we intend to model the distributional distance between the regular conditional output and the unconditional output, which is generated without a given input text. Based upon Taylor Expansion for this distance at the output probability space, our approach manages to leverage the embedding and first-order gradient information. The resulting approach is plug-and-play that can be easily adapted to any autoregressive LLM. On the hallucination benchmarks HADES and other datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for reconstructing and understanding the physical world based solely on textual knowledge. It explores the impact of model performance on spatial understanding abilities by introducing a set of geometric conventions and developing a workflow based on multi-layer graphs and multi-agent systems. The study examines how LLMs achieve multi-step and multi-objective geometric inference in a spatial environment, using unified geometric conventions and a graph-driven framework. A genetic algorithm, inspired by large-scale model knowledge, is employed to solve geometric constraint problems, enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This work innovatively explores the feasibility of using text-based LLMs as builders of the physical world and designs a workflow to enhance their spatial comprehension and construction capabilities.

Prompt recovery in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding how LLMs work and addressing concerns regarding privacy, copyright, etc. The trend towards inference-only APIs complicates this task by restricting access to essential outputs for recovery. To tackle this challenge, we extract prompt-related information from limited outputs and identify a strong(negative) correlation between output probability-based uncertainty and the success of prompt recovery.This finding led to the development of Deliberative PrOmpt RecoverY (DORY), our novel approach that leverages uncertainty to recover prompts accurately. DORY involves reconstructing drafts from outputs, refining these with hints, and filtering out noise based on uncertainty. Our evaluation shows that DORY outperforms existing baselines across diverse LLMs and prompt benchmarks, improving performance by approximately 10.82% and establishing a new state-of-the-art record in prompt recovery tasks. Significantly, DORY operates using a single LLM without any external resources or model, offering a cost-effective, user-friendly prompt recovery solution.

The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we propose a holistic method named Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) along with a new to-be-released dataset to detect the contaminated data and diminish the contamination effect. PAC extends the popular MIA (Membership Inference Attack) — from machine learning community — by forming a more global target at detecting training data to Clarify invisible training data. As a pioneering work, PAC is very much plug-and-play that can be integrated with most (if not all) current white- and black-box LLMs. By extensive experiments, PAC outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5%, towards data contamination detection on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. Besides, our application in real-world scenarios highlights the prominent presence of contamination and related issues.

In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), the process of instruction tuning serves as an essential step. Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning was proposed to reduce the training data size in this process, aiming at selecting high-quality instructional data. Nevertheless, we argue that most current data-efficient instruction-tuning methods are highly dependent on the quality of the original instruction-tuning dataset. When it comes to datasets synthesized by LLMs, a common scenario in this field, dirty samples will even be selected with a higher probability than other samples. To address these challenges, we utilized external knowledge (relevant examples or paragraphs) to evaluate those samples synthesized by LLMs with an in-context-based relative predictive entropy. Based on the new metric, we proposed a framework, dubbed as RECOST, which integrates external-knowledge-base re-ranking and diversity-consistent sampling into a single pipeline. Through extensive experiments on several synthetic datasets (Alpaca and Alpaca-gpt4), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieve even better results with only 1% of the full dataset.

Within the evolving landscape of deep learning, the dilemma of data quantity and quality has been a long-standing problem. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a data-centric solution to alleviate the limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. However, current investigations into this field lack a unified framework and mostly stay on the surface. Therefore, this paper provides an organization of relevant studies based on a generic workflow of synthetic data generation. By doing so, we highlight the gaps within existing research and outline prospective avenues for future study. This work aims to shepherd the academic and industrial communities towards deeper, more methodical inquiries into the capabilities and applications of LLMs-driven synthetic data generation.

LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.

New intent discovery (NID) is an important problem for deploying practical dialogue systems, which trains intent classifiers on a semi-supervised corpus where unlabeled user utterances contain both known and novel intents. Most existing NID algorithms place hope on the sample similarity to cluster unlabeled corpus to known or new samples. Lacking supervision on new intents, we experimentally find the intent classifier fails to fully distinguish new intents since they tend to assemble into intertwined centers.To address this problem, we propose a novel GeoID framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. Specifically, we are motivated by the recent findings on Neural Collapse (NC) in classification tasks to derive optimal intent center structure. Meanwhile, we devise a dual pseudo-labeling strategy based on optimal transport assignments and semi-supervised clustering, ensuring proper utterances-to-center arrangement.Extensive results show that our GeoID method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance, achieving a +3.49% average accuracy improvement on three standardized benchmarking datasets. We also verify its usefulness in assisting large language models for improved in-context performance.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs), such as GPTs, have attained great impact worldwide. However, how to adapt these LLMs to better suit the vertical domain-specific tasks by utilizing external knowledge remains not completely solved. Indeed, there have emerged a few works on this line where most of them rely on an alignment heuristic that is built to inject the corresponding knowledge tuple into the associated text sample. However, despite the promise, we identify a pivotal problem in this work ubiquitously. Simply put, we find that injecting unaligned (i.e., random) knowledge tuple into the LLMs achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than the aligned knowledge being injected. We therefore take a thorough investigation of this frustrating finding on a variety of related prior work and further provide a chain of potential interpretations for the phenomenon. Based on all that, we offer a simple remediated technique. Briefly, the core of this technique roots in an ideological emphasis on the pruning and purification of the external knowledge base to be injected into LLMs. At last, we show that by integrating this technique into most (if not all) knowledge injection frameworks and recent LLMs, it manages to overcome the aforementioned sanity problem and further pushes the boundary of the performance of the domain-adaptive LLMs.

The prompt-based learning paradigm, which bridges the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, achieves state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot settings. Despite being widely applied, prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Textual backdoor attacks are designed to introduce targeted vulnerabilities into models by poisoning a subset of training samples through trigger injection and label modification. However, they suffer from flaws such as abnormal natural language expressions resulting from the trigger and incorrect labeling of poisoned samples. In this study, we propose ProAttack, a novel and efficient method for performing clean-label backdoor attacks based on the prompt, which uses the prompt itself as a trigger. Our method does not require external triggers and ensures correct labeling of poisoned samples, improving the stealthy nature of the backdoor attack. With extensive experiments on rich-resource and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate ProAttack’s competitive performance in textual backdoor attacks. Notably, in the rich-resource setting, ProAttack achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates in the clean-label backdoor attack benchmark without external triggers.

Collecting high-quality labeled data for model training is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive for various NLP tasks. While copious solutions, such as active learning for small language models (SLMs) and prevalent in-context learning in the era of large language models (LLMs), have been proposed and alleviate the labeling burden to some extent, their performances are still subject to human intervention. It is still underexplored how to reduce the annotation cost in the LLMs era. To bridge this, we revolutionize traditional active learning and propose an innovative collaborative learning framework FreeAL to interactively distill and filter the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. During collaborative training, an LLM serves as an active annotator inculcating its coarse-grained knowledge, while a downstream SLM is incurred as a student to filter out high-quality in-context samples to feedback LLM for the subsequent label refinery. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreeAL largely enhances the zero-shot performances for both SLM and LLM without any human supervision.

The aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained task that aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards targeted aspect terms occurring in the sentence. The development of the ABSA task is very much hindered by the lack of annotated data. To tackle this, the prior works have studied the possibility of utilizing the sentiment analysis (SA) datasets to assist in training the ABSA model, primarily via pretraining or multi-task learning. In this article, we follow this line, and for the first time, we manage to apply the Pseudo-Label (PL) method to merge the two homogeneous tasks. While it seems straightforward to use generated pseudo labels to handle this case of label granularity unification for two highly related tasks, we identify its major challenge in this paper and propose a novel framework, dubbed as Dual-granularity Pseudo Labeling (DPL). Further, similar to PL, we regard the DPL as a general framework capable of combining other prior methods in the literature. Through extensive experiments, DPL has achieved state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks surpassing the prior work significantly.