It is imperative for Large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions with elaborate requirements (i.e. Complex Instructions Following). Yet, it remains under-explored how to enhance the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially study what training data is effective in enhancing complex constraints following abilities. We found that training LLMs with instructions containing multiple constraints enhances their understanding of complex instructions, especially those with lower complexity levels. The improvement can even generalize to compositions of out-of-domain constraints. Additionally, we further propose methods addressing how to obtain and utilize the effective training data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of our methods in terms of overall performance, training efficiency, and generalization abilities under four settings.
Web automation is a significant technique that accomplishes complicated web tasks by automating common web actions, enhancing operational efficiency, and reducing the need for manual intervention. Traditional methods, such as wrappers, suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. On the other hand, generative agents empowered by large language models (LLMs) exhibit poor performance and reusability in open-world scenarios. In this work, we introduce a crawler generation task for vertical information web pages and the paradigm of combining LLMs with crawlers, which helps crawlers handle diverse and changing web environments more efficiently. We propose AutoCrawler, a two-stage framework that leverages the hierarchical structure of HTML for progressive understanding. Through top-down and step-back operations, AutoCrawler can learn from erroneous actions and continuously prune HTML for better action generation. We conduct comprehensive experiments with multiple LLMs and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Resources of this paper can be found at \url{https://github.com/EZ-hwh/AutoCrawler}
Can Large Language Models substitute humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of LLMs to role-play assigned personas, mimicking their knowledge and linguistic habits. However, imitative decision-making requires a more nuanced understanding of personas. In this paper, we benchmark the ability of LLMs in persona-driven decision-making. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can predict characters' decisions provided with the preceding stories in high-quality novels. Leveraging character analyses written by literary experts, we construct a dataset LIFECHOICE comprising 1,401 character decision points from 395 books. Then, we conduct comprehensive experiments on LIFECHOICE, with various LLMs and methods for LLM role-playing. The results demonstrate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit promising capabilities in this task, yet there is substantial room for improvement. Hence, we further propose the CHARMAP method, which achieves a 6.01% increase in accuracy via persona-based memory retrieval. We will make our datasets and code publicly available.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various downstream tasks, but they may generate inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. One of the possible solutions is to empower the LLM confidence expression capability, in which the confidence expressed can be well-aligned with the true probability of the generated answer being correct. However, leveraging the intrinsic ability of LLMs or the signals from the output logits of answers proves challenging in accurately capturing the response uncertainty in LLMs. Therefore, drawing inspiration from cognitive diagnostics, we propose a method of Learning from Past experience (LePe) to enhance the capability for confidence expression. Specifically, we first identify three key problems: (1) How to capture the inherent confidence of the LLM? (2) How to teach the LLM to express confidence? (3) How to evaluate the confidence expression of the LLM? Then we devise three stages in LePe to deal with these problems. Besides, to accurately capture the confidence of an LLM when constructing the training data, we design a complete pipeline including question preparation and answer sampling. We also conduct experiments using the Llama family of LLMs to verify the effectiveness of our proposed method on four datasets.
Relation triple extraction, which outputs a set of triples from long sentences, plays a vital role in knowledge acquisition. Large language models can accurately extract triples from simple sentences through few-shot learning or fine-tuning when given appropriate instructions. However, they often miss out when extracting from complex sentences. In this paper, we design an evaluation-filtering framework that integrates large language models with small models for relational triple extraction tasks. The framework includes an evaluation model that can extract related entity pairs with high precision. We propose a simple labeling principle and a deep neural network to build the model, embedding the outputs as prompts into the extraction process of the large model. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that the proposed method can assist large language models in obtaining more accurate extraction results, especially from complex sentences containing multiple relational triples. Our evaluation model can also be embedded into traditional extraction models to enhance their extraction precision from complex sentences.
In recent years, the fine-tuned generative models have been proven more powerful than the previous tagging-based or span-based models on named entity recognition (NER) task. It has also been found that the information related to entities, such as entity types, can prompt a model to achieve NER better. However, it is not easy to determine the entity types indeed existing in the given sentence in advance, and inputting too many potential entity types would distract the model inevitably. To exploit entity types' merit on promoting NER task, in this paper we propose a novel NER framework, namely ToNER based on a generative model. In ToNER, a type matching model is proposed at first to identify the entity types most likely to appear in the sentence. Then, we append a multiple binary classification task to fine-tune the generative model's encoder, so as to generate the refined representation of the input sentence. Moreover, we add an auxiliary task for the model to discover the entity types which further fine-tunes the model to output more accurate results. Our extensive experiments on some NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in ToNER that are oriented towards entity types' exploitation.
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in various downstream tasks. However, they may still generate incorrect responses in certain scenarios due to the knowledge deficiencies and the flawed pre-training data. Continual Learning (CL) is a commonly used method to address this issue. Traditional CL is task-oriented, using novel or factually accurate data to retrain LLMs from scratch. However, this method requires more task-related training data and incurs expensive training costs. To address this challenge, we propose the Continue Evolving from Mistakes (CEM) method, inspired by the 'summarize mistakes' learning skill, to achieve iterative refinement of LLMs. Specifically, the incorrect responses of LLMs indicate knowledge deficiencies related to the questions. Therefore, we collect corpora with these knowledge from multiple data sources and follow it up with iterative supplementary training for continuous, targeted knowledge updating and supplementation. Meanwhile, we developed two strategies to construct supplementary training sets to enhance the LLM's understanding of the corpus and prevent catastrophic forgetting. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of this CL method. In the best case, our method resulted in a 17.00\% improvement in the accuracy of the LLM.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but they still struggle with some complicated reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. One non-negligible reason for LLMs' suboptimal performance on logical reasoning is their overlooking of understanding logical fallacies correctly. To evaluate LLMs' capability of logical fallacy understanding (LFU), we propose five concrete tasks from three cognitive dimensions of WHAT, WHY, and HOW in this paper. Towards these LFU tasks, we have successfully constructed a new dataset LFUD based on GPT-4 accompanied by a little human effort. Our extensive experiments justify that our LFUD can be used not only to evaluate LLMs' LFU capability, but also to fine-tune LLMs to obtain significantly enhanced performance on logical reasoning.
Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. Definition bias in information extraction appears not only across datasets from different domains but also within datasets sharing the same domain. We identify two types of definition bias in IE: bias among information extraction datasets and bias between information extraction datasets and instruction tuning datasets. To systematically investigate definition bias, we conduct three probing experiments to quantitatively analyze it and discover the limitations of unified information extraction and large language models in solving definition bias. To mitigate definition bias in information extraction, we propose a multi-stage framework consisting of definition bias measurement, bias-aware fine-tuning, and task-specific bias mitigation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in addressing definition bias. Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/EZ-hwh/definition-bias
Current language models have demonstrated their capability to develop basic reasoning, but struggle in more complicated reasoning tasks that require a combination of atomic skills, such as math word problem requiring skills like arithmetic and unit conversion. Previous methods either do not improve the inherent atomic skills of models or not attempt to generalize the atomic skills to complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we first propose a probing framework to investigate whether the atomic skill can spontaneously generalize to complex reasoning tasks. Then, we introduce a hierarchical curriculum learning training strategy to achieve better skill generalization. In our experiments, we find that atomic skills can not spontaneously generalize to compositional tasks. By leveraging hierarchical curriculum learning, we successfully induce generalization, significantly improve the performance of open-source LMs on complex reasoning tasks. Promisingly, the skill generalization exhibit effective in cross-dataset and cross-domain scenarios. Complex reasoning can also help enhance atomic skills. Our findings offer valuable guidance for designing better training strategies for complex reasoning tasks.