Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) have excelled in various NLP tasks, including machine translation (MT), yet most studies focus on sentence-level translation. This work investigates the inherent capability of instruction-tuned LLMs for document-level translation (docMT). Unlike prior approaches that require specialized techniques, we evaluate LLMs by directly prompting them to translate entire documents in a single pass. Our results show that this method improves translation quality compared to translating sentences separately, even without document-level fine-tuning. However, this advantage is not reflected in BLEU scores, which often favor sentence-based translations. We propose using the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm for evaluation, where GPT-4 is used to assess document coherence, accuracy, and fluency in a more nuanced way than n-gram-based metrics. Overall, our work demonstrates that instruction-tuned LLMs can effectively leverage document context for translation. However, we caution against using BLEU scores for evaluating docMT, as they often provide misleading outcomes, failing to capture the quality of document-level translation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/BLEUless_DocMT
Abstract:Fine-tuning on agent-environment interaction trajectory data holds significant promise for surfacing generalized agent capabilities in open-source large language models (LLMs). In this work, we introduce AgentBank, by far the largest trajectory tuning data collection featuring more than 50k diverse high-quality interaction trajectories which comprises 16 tasks covering five distinct agent skill dimensions. Leveraging a novel annotation pipeline, we are able to scale the annotated trajectories and generate a trajectory dataset with minimized difficulty bias. Furthermore, we fine-tune LLMs on AgentBank to get a series of agent models, Samoyed. Our comparative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of scaling the interaction trajectory data to acquire generalized agent capabilities. Additional studies also reveal some key observations regarding trajectory tuning and agent skill generalization.
Abstract:In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention from both industry and academia. However, there is still considerable debate on constructing MLLM architectures, particularly regarding the selection of appropriate connectors for perception tasks of varying granularities. This paper systematically investigates the impact of connectors on MLLM performance. Specifically, we classify connectors into feature-preserving and feature-compressing types. Utilizing a unified classification standard, we categorize sub-tasks from three comprehensive benchmarks, MMBench, MME, and SEED-Bench, into three task types: coarse-grained perception, fine-grained perception, and reasoning, and evaluate the performance. Our findings reveal that feature-preserving connectors excel in \emph{fine-grained perception} tasks due to their ability to retain detailed visual information. In contrast, feature-compressing connectors, while less effective in fine-grained perception tasks, offer significant speed advantages and perform comparably in \emph{coarse-grained perception} and \emph{reasoning} tasks. These insights are crucial for guiding MLLM architecture design and advancing the optimization of MLLM architectures.
Abstract:Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training. This study explores whether stronger reward models invariably lead to better language models. In this paper, through experiments on relevance, factuality, and completeness tasks using the QA-FEEDBACK dataset and reward models based on Longformer, we uncover a surprising paradox: language models trained with moderately accurate reward models outperform those guided by highly accurate ones. This challenges the widely held belief that stronger reward models always lead to better language models, and opens up new avenues for future research into the key factors driving model performance and how to choose the most suitable reward models. Code and additional details are available at [https://github.com/EIT-NLP/AccuracyParadox-RLHF](https://github.com/EIT-NLP/AccuracyParadox-RLHF).
Abstract:To reduce the need for human annotations, large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as judges of the quality of other candidate models. LLM judges are typically evaluated by measuring the correlation with human judgments on generation tasks such as summarization or machine translation. In contrast, we study LLM judges on mathematical reasoning tasks. These tasks require multi-step reasoning, and the correctness of their solutions is verifiable, enabling a more objective evaluation. We perform a detailed performance analysis and find that the used judges are mostly unable to improve task performance but are able to pick the better model. Our analysis uncovers a strong correlation between judgment performance and the candidate model task performance. We observe that judges tend to choose the model of higher quality even if its answer is incorrect. Further, we show that it is possible to use statistics, such as the task performances of the individual models, to predict judgment performance. In an ablation, we either swap or mask the candidate answers and observe that judges often keep the original judgment, providing evidence that judges incorporate writing style in their judgments. In summary, we find that regularities in the judgments are quantifiable using statistical measures and provide various angles on exploiting them.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation has gained popularity as a framework to enhance large language models with external knowledge. However, its effectiveness hinges on the retrieval robustness of the model. If the model lacks retrieval robustness, its performance is constrained by the accuracy of the retriever, resulting in significant compromises when the retrieved context is irrelevant. In this paper, we evaluate the "implicit" retrieval robustness of various large language models, instructing them to directly output the final answer without explicitly judging the relevance of the retrieved context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning on a mix of gold and distracting context significantly enhances the model's robustness to retrieval inaccuracies, while still maintaining its ability to extract correct answers when retrieval is accurate. This suggests that large language models can implicitly handle relevant or irrelevant retrieved context by learning solely from the supervision of the final answer in an end-to-end manner. Introducing an additional process for explicit relevance judgment can be unnecessary and disrupts the end-to-end approach.
Abstract:Personality is a fundamental construct in psychology, reflecting an individual's behavior, thinking, and emotional patterns. Previous researches have made some progress in personality detection, primarily by utilizing the whole text to predict personality. However, these studies generally tend to overlook psychological knowledge: they rarely apply the well-established correlations between emotion regulation and personality. Based on this, we propose a new personality detection method called EERPD. This method introduces the use of emotion regulation, a psychological concept highly correlated with personality, for personality prediction. By combining this feature with emotion features, it retrieves few-shot examples and provides process CoTs for inferring labels from text. This approach enhances the understanding of LLM for personality within text and improves the performance in personality detection. Experimental results demonstrate that EERPD significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of personality detection, outperforming previous SOTA by 15.05/4.29 in average F1 on the two benchmark datasets.
Abstract:While large language models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities, they struggle with addressing legal queries due to the intricate complexities and specialized expertise required in the legal field. In this paper, we introduce InternLM-Law, a specialized LLM tailored for addressing diverse legal queries related to Chinese laws, spanning from responding to standard legal questions (e.g., legal exercises in textbooks) to analyzing complex real-world legal situations. We meticulously construct a dataset in the Chinese legal domain, encompassing over 1 million queries, and implement a data filtering and processing pipeline to ensure its diversity and quality. Our training approach involves a novel two-stage process: initially fine-tuning LLMs on both legal-specific and general-purpose content to equip the models with broad knowledge, followed by exclusive fine-tuning on high-quality legal data to enhance structured output generation. InternLM-Law achieves the highest average performance on LawBench, outperforming state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4, on 13 out of 20 subtasks. We make InternLM-Law and our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research in applying LLMs within the legal domain.
Abstract:Effectively handling instructions with extremely long context remains a challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), typically necessitating high-quality long data and substantial computational resources. This paper introduces Step-Skipping Alignment (SkipAlign), a new technique designed to enhance the long-context capabilities of LLMs in the phase of alignment without the need for additional efforts beyond training with original data length. SkipAlign is developed on the premise that long-range dependencies are fundamental to enhancing an LLM's capacity of long context. Departing from merely expanding the length of input samples, SkipAlign synthesizes long-range dependencies from the aspect of positions indices. This is achieved by the strategic insertion of skipped positions within instruction-following samples, which utilizes the semantic structure of the data to effectively expand the context. Through extensive experiments on base models with a variety of context window sizes, SkipAlign demonstrates its effectiveness across a spectrum of long-context tasks. Particularly noteworthy is that with a careful selection of the base model and alignment datasets, SkipAlign with only 6B parameters achieves it's best performance and comparable with strong baselines like GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K on LongBench.
Abstract:Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of all these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 training instances, and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction effectively enables LLMs to translate in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translations into non-English languages. A similar problem arises when noise is introduced into the target side of parallel data, especially when the target language is well-represented in the LLM's pre-training. In contrast, noise in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that attaining successful alignment hinges on teaching the model to maintain a "superficial" focus, thereby avoiding the learning of erroneous biases beyond translation.