Abstract:The performance differential of large language models (LLM) between languages hinders their effective deployment in many regions, inhibiting the potential economic and societal value of generative AI tools in many communities. However, the development of functional LLMs in many languages (\ie, multilingual LLMs) is bottlenecked by the lack of high-quality evaluation resources in languages other than English. Moreover, current practices in multilingual benchmark construction often translate English resources, ignoring the regional and cultural knowledge of the environments in which multilingual systems would be used. In this work, we construct an evaluation suite of 197,243 QA pairs from local exam sources to measure the capabilities of multilingual LLMs in a variety of regional contexts. Our novel resource, INCLUDE, is a comprehensive knowledge- and reasoning-centric benchmark across 44 written languages that evaluates multilingual LLMs for performance in the actual language environments where they would be deployed.
Abstract:This paper investigates the rationality of large language models (LLMs) in strategic decision-making contexts, specifically within the framework of game theory. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs across a spectrum of complete-information and incomplete-information games. Our findings reveal that LLMs frequently deviate from rational strategies, particularly as the complexity of the game increases with larger payoff matrices or deeper sequential trees. To address these limitations, we design multiple game-theoretic workflows that guide the reasoning and decision-making processes of LLMs. These workflows aim to enhance the models' ability to compute Nash Equilibria and make rational choices, even under conditions of uncertainty and incomplete information. Experimental results demonstrate that the adoption of these workflows significantly improves the rationality and robustness of LLMs in game-theoretic tasks. Specifically, with the workflow, LLMs exhibit marked improvements in identifying optimal strategies, achieving near-optimal allocations in negotiation scenarios, and reducing susceptibility to exploitation during negotiations. Furthermore, we explore the meta-strategic considerations of whether it is rational for agents to adopt such workflows, recognizing that the decision to use or forgo the workflow constitutes a game-theoretic issue in itself. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding of LLMs' decision-making capabilities in strategic contexts and provides insights into enhancing their rationality through structured workflows. The findings have implications for the development of more robust and strategically sound AI agents capable of navigating complex interactive environments. Code and data supporting this study are available at \url{https://github.com/Wenyueh/game_theory}.
Abstract:Despite the proven utility of large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications, there remains a lack of understanding regarding how they leverage their large-scale pretraining text corpora to achieve such capabilities. In this work, we investigate the interplay between generalization and memorization in pretrained LLMs at scale, through a comprehensive $n$-gram analysis of their training data. Our experiments focus on three general task types: translation, question-answering, and multiple-choice reasoning. With various sizes of open-source LLMs and their pretraining corpora, we observe that as the model size increases, the task-relevant $n$-gram pair data becomes increasingly important, leading to improved task performance, decreased memorization, stronger generalization, and emergent abilities. Our results support the hypothesis that LLMs' capabilities emerge from a delicate balance of memorization and generalization with sufficient task-related pretraining data, and point the way to larger-scale analyses that could further improve our understanding of these models.
Abstract:To enhance Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities, multi-agent debates have been introduced, where multiple LLMs discuss solutions to a problem over several rounds of debate. However, LLMs often produce incorrect responses that appear deceptively confident, which can mislead other agents. This is partly because agents do not express their confidence levels during standard debates. To address this, we introduce DebUnc, a multi-agent debate framework that uses uncertainty metrics to assess agent confidence levels. We adapted the LLM attention mechanism to adjust token weights based on confidence levels and also explored using textual prompts to convey confidence. Our evaluations across various benchmarks show that attention-based methods are particularly effective, and that as uncertainty metrics evolve, performance will continue to increase. The code is available at https://github.com/lukeyoffe/debunc
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results on current benchmarks when working individually. The advancement in their capabilities, along with a reduction in parameter size and inference times, has facilitated the use of these models as agents, enabling interactions among multiple models to execute complex tasks. Such collaborations offer several advantages, including the use of specialized models (e.g. coding), improved confidence through multiple computations, and enhanced divergent thinking, leading to more diverse outputs. Thus, the collaborative use of language models is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary. We introduce pertinent metrics to assess the adversary's effectiveness, focusing on system accuracy and model agreement. Our findings highlight the importance of a model's persuasive ability in influencing others. Additionally, we explore inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments and evaluate the potential of prompt-based mitigation as a defensive strategy.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on code generation tasks. A recent application of LLMs for code generation is iterative code repair, where a model fixes an incorrect program by rationalizing about errors and generating a new program. However, code repair is primarily studied on high-resource languages like Python, and the framework's efficacy is under-explored on low-resource languages. To apply code repair for low-resource languages, we propose Distilling Low-Resource Repairs (DistiLRR), an approach that transfers the reasoning and code generation ability from a teacher model to a student model. Our results show that DistiLRR consistently outperforms baselines on low-resource languages, but has similar performance on high-resource languages. To investigate this behavior, we perform a further analysis and find that the correlation between rationale quality and code correctness is weaker than previously perceived. We hypothesize this weakness is magnified in low-resource settings where base models lack deep knowledge of a programming language, leading to wavering benefits of code repair between high-resource and low-resource languages.
Abstract:Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we propose that we can view an LM as deriving new conclusions by aggregating indirect reasoning paths seen at pre-training time. We found this perspective effective in two important cases of reasoning: logic reasoning with knowledge graphs (KGs) and math reasoning with math word problems (MWPs). More specifically, we formalize the reasoning paths as random walk paths on the knowledge/reasoning graphs. Analyses of learned LM distributions suggest that a weighted sum of relevant random walk path probabilities is a reasonable way to explain how LMs reason. Experiments and analysis on multiple KG and MWP datasets reveal the effect of training on random walk paths and suggest that augmenting unlabeled random walk reasoning paths can improve real-world multi-step reasoning performance.
Abstract:This paper investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of understanding their own knowledge and measuring their uncertainty. We argue this is an important feature for mitigating hallucinations. Specifically, we focus on addressing \textit{known-unknown} questions, characterized by high uncertainty due to the absence of definitive answers. To facilitate our study, we collect a dataset with new Known-Unknown Questions (KUQ) and propose a novel categorization scheme to elucidate the sources of uncertainty. Subsequently, we assess the LLMs' ability to differentiate between known and unknown questions and classify them accordingly. Moreover, we evaluate the quality of their answers in an Open-Ended QA setting. To quantify the uncertainty expressed in the answers, we create a semantic evaluation method that measures the model's accuracy in expressing uncertainty between known vs unknown questions.
Abstract:Reasoning is a fundamental problem for computers and deeply studied in Artificial Intelligence. In this paper, we specifically focus on answering multi-hop logical queries on Knowledge Graphs (KGs). This is a complicated task because, in real-world scenarios, the graphs tend to be large and incomplete. Most previous works have been unable to create models that accept full First-Order Logical (FOL) queries, which include negative queries, and have only been able to process a limited set of query structures. Additionally, most methods present logic operators that can only perform the logical operation they are made for. We introduce a set of models that use Neural Networks to create one-point vector embeddings to answer the queries. The versatility of neural networks allows the framework to handle FOL queries with Conjunction ($\wedge$), Disjunction ($\vee$) and Negation ($\neg$) operators. We demonstrate experimentally the performance of our model through extensive experimentation on well-known benchmarking datasets. Besides having more versatile operators, the models achieve a 10\% relative increase over the best performing state of the art and more than 30\% over the original method based on single-point vector embeddings.
Abstract:Training datasets for machine learning often have some form of missingness. For example, to learn a model for deciding whom to give a loan, the available training data includes individuals who were given a loan in the past, but not those who were not. This missingness, if ignored, nullifies any fairness guarantee of the training procedure when the model is deployed. Using causal graphs, we characterize the missingness mechanisms in different real-world scenarios. We show conditions under which various distributions, used in popular fairness algorithms, can or can not be recovered from the training data. Our theoretical results imply that many of these algorithms can not guarantee fairness in practice. Modeling missingness also helps to identify correct design principles for fair algorithms. For example, in multi-stage settings where decisions are made in multiple screening rounds, we use our framework to derive the minimal distributions required to design a fair algorithm. Our proposed algorithm decentralizes the decision-making process and still achieves similar performance to the optimal algorithm that requires centralization and non-recoverable distributions.