Large Vision-Language Model Alignment and Misalignment: A Survey Through the Lens of Explainability

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in processing both visual and textual information. However, the critical challenge of alignment between visual and linguistic representations is not fully understood. This survey presents a comprehensive examination of alignment and misalignment in LVLMs through an explainability lens. We first examine the fundamentals of alignment, exploring its representational and behavioral aspects, training methodologies, and theoretical foundations. We then analyze misalignment phenomena across three semantic levels: object, attribute, and relational misalignment. Our investigation reveals that misalignment emerges from challenges at multiple levels: the data level, the model level, and the inference level. We provide a comprehensive review of existing mitigation strategies, categorizing them into parameter-frozen and parameter-tuning approaches. Finally, we outline promising future research directions, emphasizing the need for standardized evaluation protocols and in-depth explainability studies.

MALoRA: Mixture of Asymmetric Low-Rank Adaptation for Enhanced Multi-Task Learning

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like LoRA have significantly improved the adaptation of LLMs to downstream tasks in a resource-efficient manner. However, in multi-task scenarios, challenges such as training imbalance and the seesaw effect frequently emerge. Mixture-of-LoRA (MoLoRA), which combines LoRA with sparse Mixture-of-Experts, mitigates some of these issues by promoting task-specific learning across experts. Despite this, MoLoRA remains inefficient in terms of training speed, parameter utilization, and overall multi-task performance. In this paper, we propose Mixture of Asymmetric Low-Rank Adaptaion (MALoRA), a flexible fine-tuning framework that leverages asymmetric optimization across LoRA experts. MALoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters by 30% to 48%, increases training speed by 1.2x, and matches the computational efficiency of single-task LoRA models. Additionally, MALoRA addresses overfitting issues commonly seen in high-rank configurations, enhancing performance stability. Extensive experiments across diverse multi-task learning scenarios demonstrate that MALoRA consistently outperforms all baseline methods in both inter-domain and intra-domain tasks.

Exploring LLM-based Data Annotation Strategies for Medical Dialogue Preference Alignment

This research examines the use of Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) techniques to improve healthcare dialogue models, with the aim of tackling the challenges of preference-aligned data annotation while reducing the reliance on medical experts. We argue that the primary challenges in current RLAIF research for healthcare are the limitations of automated evaluation methods and the difficulties in accurately representing physician preferences. To address these challenges, we present a new evaluation framework based on standardized patient examinations. This framework is designed to objectively assess the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in guiding users and following instructions, enabling a comprehensive comparison across different models. Furthermore, our investigation of effective ways to express physician preferences using Constitutional AI algorithms highlighted the particular effectiveness of flowcharts. Utilizing this finding, we introduce an innovative agent-based approach for annotating preference data. This approach autonomously creates medical dialogue flows tailored to the patient's condition, demonstrates strong generalization abilities, and reduces the need for expert involvement. Our results show that the agent-based approach outperforms existing RLAIF annotation methods in standardized patient examinations and surpasses current open source medical dialogue LLMs in various test scenarios.

Exploring Multilingual Probing in Large Language Models: A Cross-Language Analysis

Probing techniques for large language models (LLMs) have primarily focused on English, overlooking the vast majority of the world's languages. In this paper, we extend these probing methods to a multilingual context, investigating the behaviors of LLMs across diverse languages. We conduct experiments on several open-source LLM models, analyzing probing accuracy, trends across layers, and similarities between probing vectors for multiple languages. Our key findings reveal: (1) a consistent performance gap between high-resource and low-resource languages, with high-resource languages achieving significantly higher probing accuracy; (2) divergent layer-wise accuracy trends, where high-resource languages show substantial improvement in deeper layers similar to English; and (3) higher representational similarities among high-resource languages, with low-resource languages demonstrating lower similarities both among themselves and with high-resource languages. These results highlight significant disparities in LLMs' multilingual capabilities and emphasize the need for improved modeling of low-resource languages.

A new approach for encoding code and assisting code understanding

Some companies(e.g., Microsoft Research and Google DeepMind) have discovered some of the limitations of GPTs autoregressive paradigm next-word prediction, manifested in the model lack of planning, working memory, backtracking, and reasoning skills. GPTs rely on a local and greedy process of generating the next word, without a global understanding of the task or the output.We have confirmed the above limitations through specialized empirical studies of code comprehension. Although GPT4 is good at producing fluent and coherent text, it cannot handle complex logic and generate new code that haven not been seen, and it relies too much on the formatting of the prompt to generate the correct code.We propose a new paradigm for code understanding that goes beyond the next-word prediction paradigm, inspired by the successful application of diffusion techniques to image generation(Dalle2, Sora) and protein structure generation(AlphaFold3), which have no autoregressive constraints.Instead of encoding the code in a form that mimics natural language, we encode the code as a heterogeneous image paradigm with a memory of global information that mimics both images and protein structures.We then refer to Sora's CLIP upstream text-to-image encoder model to design a text-to-code encoder model that can be applied to various downstream code understanding tasks.The model learns the global understanding of code under the new paradigm heterogeneous image, connects the encoding space of text and code, and encodes the input of text into the vector of code most similar to it.Using self-supervised comparative learning on 456,360 text-code pairs, the model achieved a zero-shot prediction of new data. This work is the basis for future work on code generation using diffusion techniques under a new paradigm to avoid autoregressive limitations.

DABL: Detecting Semantic Anomalies in Business Processes Using Large Language Models

Detecting anomalies in business processes is crucial for ensuring operational success. While many existing methods rely on statistical frequency to detect anomalies, it's important to note that infrequent behavior doesn't necessarily imply undesirability. To address this challenge, detecting anomalies from a semantic viewpoint proves to be a more effective approach. However, current semantic anomaly detection methods treat a trace (i.e., process instance) as multiple event pairs, disrupting long-distance dependencies. In this paper, we introduce DABL, a novel approach for detecting semantic anomalies in business processes using large language models (LLMs). We collect 143,137 real-world process models from various domains. By generating normal traces through the playout of these process models and simulating both ordering and exclusion anomalies, we fine-tune Llama 2 using the resulting log. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DABL surpasses existing state-of-the-art semantic anomaly detection methods in terms of both generalization ability and learning of given processes. Users can directly apply DABL to detect semantic anomalies in their own datasets without the need for additional training. Furthermore, DABL offers the capability to interpret the causes of anomalies in natural language, providing valuable insights into the detected anomalies.

A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Models

Event reasoning is a fundamental ability that underlies many applications. It requires event schema knowledge to perform global reasoning and needs to deal with the diversity of the inter-event relations and the reasoning paradigms. How well LLMs accomplish event reasoning on various relations and reasoning paradigms remains unknown. To mitigate this disparity, we comprehensively evaluate the abilities of event reasoning of LLMs. We introduce a novel benchmark EV2 for EValuation of EVent reasoning. EV2 consists of two levels of evaluation of schema and instance and is comprehensive in relations and reasoning paradigms. We conduct extensive experiments on EV2. We find that LLMs have abilities to accomplish event reasoning but their performances are far from satisfactory. We also notice the imbalance of event reasoning abilities in LLMs. Besides, LLMs have event schema knowledge, however, they're not aligned with humans on how to utilize the knowledge. Based on these findings, we introduce two methods to guide the LLMs to utilize the event schema knowledge. Both methods achieve improvements.

EVIT: Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning for Event Reasoning

Events refer to specific occurrences, incidents, or happenings that take place under a particular background. Event reasoning aims to infer events according to certain relations and predict future events. The cutting-edge techniques for event reasoning play a crucial role in various natural language processing applications. Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in event reasoning owing to their wealth of knowledge and reasoning capabilities. However, smaller instruction-tuned models currently in use do not consistently demonstrate exceptional proficiency in managing these tasks. This discrepancy arises from the absence of explicit modeling of events and the interconnections of them within their instruction data. Consequently, these models face challenges in comprehending event structures and semantics while struggling to bridge the gap between their interpretations and human understanding of events. Additionally, their limitations in grasping event relations lead to constrained event reasoning abilities to effectively deduce and incorporate pertinent event knowledge. In this paper, we propose Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning (EvIT) to train our LLM. Specifically, we first propose a novel structure named event quadruple which contains the structure and semantics of events and is complete in the event representation. We then design event-relation learning based on the structures. We encapsulate the learning into the instruction-tuning formulation to better stimulate the event reasoning capacity of our model. We design a heuristic unsupervised method to mine event quadruple from a large-scale corpus. At last, we finetune a Llama model on our Event-Oriented Instruction Tuning. We conduct extensive experiments on event reasoning tasks on several datasets. Automatic and human evaluations demonstrate EvIT achieves competitive performances on event reasoning.

MEEL: Multi-Modal Event Evolution Learning

Multi-modal Event Reasoning (MMER) endeavors to endow machines with the ability to comprehend intricate event relations across diverse data modalities. MMER is fundamental and underlies a wide broad of applications. Despite extensive instruction fine-tuning, current multi-modal large language models still fall short in such ability. The disparity stems from that existing models are insufficient to capture underlying principles governing event evolution in various scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Modal Event Evolution Learning (MEEL) to enable the model to grasp the event evolution mechanism, yielding advanced MMER ability. Specifically, we commence with the design of event diversification to gather seed events from a rich spectrum of scenarios. Subsequently, we employ ChatGPT to generate evolving graphs for these seed events. We propose an instruction encapsulation process that formulates the evolving graphs into instruction-tuning data, aligning the comprehension of event reasoning to humans. Finally, we observe that models trained in this way are still struggling to fully comprehend event evolution. In such a case, we propose the guiding discrimination strategy, in which models are trained to discriminate the improper evolution direction. We collect and curate a benchmark M-EV2 for MMER. Extensive experiments on M-EV2 validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing competitive performance in open-source multi-modal LLMs.

Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge at Different Layers?

This paper studies the phenomenon that different concepts are learned in different layers of large language models, i.e. more difficult concepts are fully acquired with deeper layers. We define the difficulty of concepts by the level of abstraction, and here it is crudely categorized by factual, emotional, and inferential. Each category contains a spectrum of tasks, arranged from simple to complex. For example, within the factual dimension, tasks range from lie detection to categorizing mathematical problems. We employ a probing technique to extract representations from different layers of the model and apply these to classification tasks. Our findings reveal that models tend to efficiently classify simpler tasks, indicating that these concepts are learned in shallower layers. Conversely, more complex tasks may only be discernible at deeper layers, if at all. This paper explores the implications of these findings for our understanding of model learning processes and internal representations. Our implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/Luckfort/CD}.