Instruction following refers to the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate outputs that satisfy all specified constraints. Existing research has primarily focused on constraint categories, offering limited evaluation dimensions and little guidance for improving instruction-following abilities. To address this gap, we introduce MulDimIF, a multi-dimensional constraint framework encompassing three constraint patterns, four constraint categories, and four difficulty levels. Based on this framework, we design a controllable instruction generation pipeline. Through constraint expansion, conflict detection, and instruction rewriting, we construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples. We evaluate 18 LLMs from six model families and find marked performance differences across constraint settings. For instance, average accuracy decreases from 80.82% at Level I to 36.76% at Level IV. Moreover, training with data generated by our framework significantly improves instruction following without compromising general performance. In-depth analysis indicates that these gains stem largely from parameter updates in attention modules, which strengthen constraint recognition and adherence. Code and data are available in https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/MulDimIF.

Tool-use capabilities are vital for Large Language Models (LLMs) in finance, a domain characterized by massive investment targets and data-intensive inquiries. However, existing data synthesis methods typically rely on a reverse synthesis paradigm, generating user queries from pre-sampled tools. This approach inevitably introduces artificial explicitness, yielding queries that fail to capture the implicit, event-driven nature of real-world needs. Moreover, its reliance on static tool sets overlooks the dynamic retrieval process required to navigate massive tool spaces. To address these challenges, we introduce FinToolSyn, a forward synthesis framework designed to generate high-quality financial dialogues. Progressing from persona instruction and atomic tool synthesis to dynamic retrieval dialogue generation, our pipeline constructs a repository of 43,066 tools and synthesizes over 148k dialogue instances, incorporating dynamic retrieval to emulate the noisy candidate sets typical of massive tool spaces. We also establish a dedicated benchmark to evaluate tool-calling capabilities in realistic financial scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on FinToolSyn achieve a 21.06% improvement, providing a robust foundation for tool learning in financial scenarios.

Prompting shows promising results in few-shot scenarios. However, its strength for multilingual/cross-lingual problems has not been fully exploited. hao and Schütze (2021) made initial explorations in this direction by presenting that cross-lingual prompting outperforms cross-lingual finetuning. In this paper, we conduct an empirical exploration on the effect of each component in cross-lingual prompting and derive Universal Prompting, which helps alleviate the discrepancies between source-language training and target-language inference. Based on this, we propose DPA, a dual prompt augmentation framework, aiming at relieving the data scarcity issue in few-shot cross-lingual prompting. Notably, for XNLI, our method achieves 46.54% with only 16 English training examples per class, significantly better than 34.99% of fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/DPA.

Text classification is a widely studied problem and has broad applications. In many real-world problems, the number of texts for training classification models is limited, which renders these models prone to overfitting. To address this problem, we propose SSL-Reg, a data-dependent regularization approach based on self-supervised learning (SSL). SSL (Devlin et al., 2019a) is an unsupervised learning approach that defines auxiliary tasks on input data without using any human-provided labels and learns data representations by solving these auxiliary tasks. In SSL-Reg, a supervised classification task and an unsupervised SSL task are performed simultaneously. The SSL task is unsupervised, which is defined purely on input texts without using any human- provided labels. Training a model using an SSL task can prevent the model from being overfitted to a limited number of class labels in the classification task. Experiments on 17 text classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/SSReg.

Under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVID19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. Because of the shortage of medical professionals, many people cannot receive online consultations timely. To address this problem, we aim to develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations. We collected two dialog datasets – CovidDialog – (in English and Chinese respectively) containing conversations between doctors and patients about COVID-19. While the largest of their kind, these two datasets are still relatively small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. Training complex dialog generation models on small datasets bears high risk of overfitting. To alleviate overfitting, we develop a multi-task learning approach, which regularizes the data-deficient dialog generation task with a masked token prediction task. Experiments on the CovidDialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We perform both human evaluation and automatic evaluation of dialogs generated by our method. Results show that the generated responses are promising in being doctor-like, relevant to conversation history, clinically informative and correct. The code and the data are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/COVID-Dialogue.

Medical dialogue systems are promising in assisting in telemedicine to increase access to healthcare services, improve the quality of patient care, and reduce medical costs. To facilitate the research and development of medical dialogue systems, we build large-scale medical dialogue datasets – MedDialog, which contain 1) a Chinese dataset with 3.4 million conversations between patients and doctors, 11.3 million utterances, 660.2 million tokens, covering 172 specialties of diseases, and 2) an English dataset with 0.26 million conversations, 0.51 million utterances, 44.53 million tokens, covering 96 specialties of diseases. To our best knowledge, MedDialog is the largest medical dialogue dataset to date. We pretrain several dialogue generation models on the Chinese MedDialog dataset, including Transformer, GPT, BERT-GPT, and compare their performance. It is shown that models trained on MedDialog are able to generate clinically correct and doctor-like medical dialogues. We also study the transferability of models trained on MedDialog to low-resource medical dialogue generation tasks. It is shown that via transfer learning which finetunes the models pretrained on MedDialog, the performance on medical dialogue generation tasks with small datasets can be greatly improved, as shown in human evaluation and automatic evaluation. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/UCSD-AI4H/Medical-Dialogue-System