In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest from the research community due to their broad applicability in many language-oriented tasks, and are now widely used in numerous areas of production and daily life. One source of the powerful capabilities of LLMs is the massive scale of their pre-training dataset. However, these pre-training datasets contain many outdated, harmful, and personally sensitive information, which inevitably becomes memorized by LLM during the pre-training process. Eliminating this undesirable data is crucial for ensuring the model’s safety and enhancing the user experience. However, the cost of extensively cleaning the pre-training dataset and retraining the model from scratch is very high. In this work, we propose ULMR , a unlearning framework for LLMs , which first uses carefully designed prompts to rewrite the instructions in the specified dataset, and generate corresponding negative responses. Subsequently, to ensure that the model does not excessively deviate post-training, we perform model parameter averaging to preserve the performance of the original LLM. We conducted experiments on two public datasets, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrating that our method can effectively forget specified information while retaining the capabilities of the original LLM.

Learning on noisy datasets is a challenging problem when pre-trained language models are applied to real-world text classification tasks. In numerous industrial applications, acquiring task-specific datasets with 100% accurate labels is difficult, thus many datasets are accompanied by label noise at different levels. Previous work has shown that existing noise-handling methods could not improve the peak performance of BERT on noisy datasets, and might even deteriorate it. In this paper, we propose SaFER, a robust and efficient fine-tuning framework for BERT-based text classifiers, combating label noises without access to any clean data for training or validation. Utilizing a label-agnostic early-stopping strategy and self-supervised learning, our proposed framework achieves superior performance in terms of both accuracy and speed on multiple text classification benchmarks. The trained model is finally fully deployed in several industrial biomedical literature mining tasks and demonstrates high effectiveness and efficiency.

Instruction fine-tuning has conventionally been employed to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) to a variety of diverse tasks. Nonetheless, this technique often necessitates substantial computational resources, making it impractical for deployment by individuals or small-scale entities. Recently, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a promising alternative, offering tuning capabilities with reduced resource overhead. However, attaining satisfactory performance through the fine-tuning of LoRA is a non-trivial challenge. In this paper, we propose PILLOW, which aims to improve LoRA’s performance by leveraging LLM’s in-context learning capability through prompt matching via reinforcement learning in resource-constrained environments. Specifically, PILLOW incorporates a matching network that selects prompts from a user-defined pool, concatenates the optimal prompts given the user instruction, and performs inference using the LoRA-fine-tuned LLMs. Compared with typical instruction fine-tuning methods, PILLOW exhibits commensurate performance on various evaluation metrics, utilizing only consumer-grade GPU resources and exhibiting a large increase in training efficiency.

Recently, there has been a notable surge in the significance of large language models (LLMs) that engage in conversational-style interactions, such as ChatGPT and Claude, as they contribute significantly to the progress of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Typically, these models undergo a two-phase fine-tuning process: instruction fine-tuning (IF) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These methods aim to align the LLMs to be helpful, honest, and harmless (HHH). However, RLHF, which incorporates independent reward models trained on high-quality human feedback datasets, incurs high costs in terms of hardware resources and human efforts. Therefore, we explore the possibility of aligning LLMs with their own understanding of HHH through IF and in-context learning (ICL). In this study, we propose a novel framework called Self-Criticism, which allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH based on the definition they learned from a large-scale text corpus. We begin by employing IF on a given instruction set and learning HHH discrimination through few-shot ICL. Subsequently, the LLMs evaluate their own generated responses and learn to produce “better” responses based on self-judgment. Finally, the model is retrained based on the self-generated responses to distill the whole process. By analyzing our proposed method, we also find interesting connections between Self-Criticism and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves nearly identical performance to RLHF in terms of both human evaluation and evaluation by other LLMs, with only a minimal alignment tax.

Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) is a task to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese natural language. Existing methods have made attempts to incorporate the similarity knowledge between Chinese characters. However, they take the similarity knowledge as either an external input resource or just heuristic rules. This paper proposes to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into language models for CSC via a specialized graph convolutional network (SpellGCN). The model builds a graph over the characters, and SpellGCN is learned to map this graph into a set of inter-dependent character classifiers. These classifiers are applied to the representations extracted by another network, such as BERT, enabling the whole network to be end-to-end trainable. Experiments are conducted on three human-annotated datasets. Our method achieves superior performance against previous models by a large margin.

Numerical reasoning over texts, such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting, is a challenging machine reading comprehension task, since it requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation. To address this challenge, we propose a heterogeneous graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for such reasoning, and design a question directed graph attention network to drive multi-step numerical reasoning over this context graph. Our model, which combines deep learning and graph reasoning, achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP.