Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. To make the CPT approach more traceable, this paper presents a technical report for continually pre-training Llama-3 (8B), which significantly enhances the Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of the backbone model. To enhance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, we design specific data mixture and curriculum strategies by utilizing existing datasets and synthesizing high-quality datasets. Specifically, we synthesize multidisciplinary scientific question and answer (QA) pairs based on related web pages, and subsequently incorporate these synthetic data to improve the scientific reasoning ability of Llama-3. We refer to the model after CPT as Llama-3-SynE (Synthetic data Enhanced Llama-3). We also present the tuning experiments with a relatively small model -- TinyLlama, and employ the derived findings to train the backbone model. Extensive experiments on a number of evaluation benchmarks show that our approach can largely improve the performance of the backbone models, including both the general abilities (+8.81 on C-Eval and +6.31 on CMMLU) and the scientific reasoning abilities (+12.00 on MATH and +4.13 on SciEval), without hurting the original capacities. Our model, data, and codes are available at https://github.com/RUC-GSAI/Llama-3-SynE.

Mix-CPT: A Domain Adaptation Framework via Decoupling Knowledge Learning and Format Alignment

Adapting general large language models (LLMs) to specialized domains presents great challenges due to varied data distributions. This adaptation typically requires continual pre-training on massive domain-specific corpora to facilitate knowledge memorization, followed by training to apply this knowledge following human instructions and preferences. However, this method may result in inefficient knowledge memorization due to a lack of awareness of knowledge utilization and imposes substantial demands on LLMs to simultaneously learn knowledge utilization and format alignment with limited training samples. To facilitate the domain adaptation of LLM, we revise this process and propose a new domain adaptation framework including domain knowledge learning and general format alignment, called Mix-CPT. Specifically, we first conduct a knowledge mixture continual pre-training that concurrently focuses on knowledge memorization and utilization, allowing for mutual reinforcement. To avoid catastrophic forgetting during the continual pre-training process, we further incorporate a logit swap self-distillation constraint. Subsequently, leveraging the knowledge and capabilities acquired during continual pre-training, we efficiently perform instruction tuning and alignment with a few general training samples to achieve format alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed Mix-CPT framework can simultaneously improve the task-solving capabilities of LLMs on the target and general domains compared to the traditional adaptation methods.

KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph

In this paper, we aim to improve the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) over knowledge graphs (KGs) to answer complex questions. Inspired by existing methods that design the interaction strategy between LLMs and KG, we propose an autonomous LLM-based agent framework, called KG-Agent, which enables a small LLM to actively make decisions until finishing the reasoning process over KGs. In KG-Agent, we integrate the LLM, multifunctional toolbox, KG-based executor, and knowledge memory, and develop an iteration mechanism that autonomously selects the tool then updates the memory for reasoning over KG. To guarantee the effectiveness, we leverage program language to formulate the multi-hop reasoning process over the KG, and synthesize a code-based instruction dataset to fine-tune the base LLM. Extensive experiments demonstrate that only using 10K samples for tuning LLaMA-7B can outperform state-of-the-art methods using larger LLMs or more data, on both in-domain and out-domain datasets. Our code and data will be publicly released.

ReasoningLM: Enabling Structural Subgraph Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) aims to seek answer entities for the natural language question from a large-scale Knowledge Graph~(KG). To better perform reasoning on KG, recent work typically adopts a pre-trained language model~(PLM) to model the question, and a graph neural network~(GNN) based module to perform multi-hop reasoning on the KG. Despite the effectiveness, due to the divergence in model architecture, the PLM and GNN are not closely integrated, limiting the knowledge sharing and fine-grained feature interactions. To solve it, we aim to simplify the above two-module approach, and develop a more capable PLM that can directly support subgraph reasoning for KGQA, namely ReasoningLM. In our approach, we propose a subgraph-aware self-attention mechanism to imitate the GNN for performing structured reasoning, and also adopt an adaptation tuning strategy to adapt the model parameters with 20,000 subgraphs with synthesized questions. After adaptation, the PLM can be parameter-efficient fine-tuned on downstream tasks. Experiments show that ReasoningLM surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin, even with fewer updated parameters and less training data. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ReasoningLM}.

StructGPT: A General Framework for Large Language Model to Reason over Structured Data

In this paper, we study how to improve the zero-shot reasoning ability of large language models~(LLMs) over structured data in a unified way. Inspired by the study on tool augmentation for LLMs, we develop an \emph{Iterative Reading-then-Reasoning~(IRR)} approach for solving question answering tasks based on structured data, called \textbf{StructGPT}. In our approach, we construct the specialized function to collect relevant evidence from structured data (\ie \emph{reading}), and let LLMs concentrate the reasoning task based on the collected information (\ie \emph{reasoning}). Specially, we propose an \emph{invoking-linearization-generation} procedure to support LLMs in reasoning on the structured data with the help of the external interfaces. By iterating this procedures with provided interfaces, our approach can gradually approach the target answer to a given query. Extensive experiments conducted on three types of structured data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can significantly boost the performance of ChatGPT and achieve comparable performance against the full-data supervised-tuning baselines. Our codes and data are publicly available at~\url{https://github.com/RUCAIBox/StructGPT}.

A Survey of Large Language Models

Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.

UniKGQA: Unified Retrieval and Reasoning for Solving Multi-hop Question Answering Over Knowledge Graph

Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graph~(KGQA) aims to find the answer entities that are multiple hops away from the topic entities mentioned in a natural language question on a large-scale Knowledge Graph (KG). To cope with the vast search space, existing work usually adopts a two-stage approach: it firstly retrieves a relatively small subgraph related to the question and then performs the reasoning on the subgraph to accurately find the answer entities. Although these two stages are highly related, previous work employs very different technical solutions for developing the retrieval and reasoning models, neglecting their relatedness in task essence. In this paper, we propose UniKGQA, a novel approach for multi-hop KGQA task, by unifying retrieval and reasoning in both model architecture and parameter learning. For model architecture, UniKGQA consists of a semantic matching module based on a pre-trained language model~(PLM) for question-relation semantic matching, and a matching information propagation module to propagate the matching information along the edges on KGs. For parameter learning, we design a shared pre-training task based on question-relation matching for both retrieval and reasoning models, and then propose retrieval- and reasoning-oriented fine-tuning strategies. Compared with previous studies, our approach is more unified, tightly relating the retrieval and reasoning stages. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method on the multi-hop KGQA task. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/UniKGQA.

Great Truths are Always Simple: A Rather Simple Knowledge Encoder for Enhancing the Commonsense Reasoning Capacity of Pre-Trained Models

Commonsense reasoning in natural language is a desired ability of artificial intelligent systems. For solving complex commonsense reasoning tasks, a typical solution is to enhance pre-trained language models~(PTMs) with a knowledge-aware graph neural network~(GNN) encoder that models a commonsense knowledge graph~(CSKG). Despite the effectiveness, these approaches are built on heavy architectures, and can't clearly explain how external knowledge resources improve the reasoning capacity of PTMs. Considering this issue, we conduct a deep empirical analysis, and find that it is indeed relation features from CSKGs (but not node features) that mainly contribute to the performance improvement of PTMs. Based on this finding, we design a simple MLP-based knowledge encoder that utilizes statistical relation paths as features. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which also largely reduces the parameters for encoding CSKGs. Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/SAFE.

Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: A Survey

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Early studies mainly focused on answering simple questions over KBs and achieved great success. However, their performance on complex questions is still far from satisfactory. Therefore, in recent years, researchers propose a large number of novel methods, which looked into the challenges of answering complex questions. In this survey, we review recent advances on KBQA with the focus on solving complex questions, which usually contain multiple subjects, express compound relations, or involve numerical operations. In detail, we begin with introducing the complex KBQA task and relevant background. Then, we describe benchmark datasets for complex KBQA task and introduce the construction process of these datasets. Next, we present two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. Specifically, we illustrate their procedures with flow designs and discuss their major differences and similarities. After that, we summarize the challenges that these two categories of methods encounter when answering complex questions, and explicate advanced solutions and techniques used in existing work. Finally, we conclude and discuss several promising directions related to complex KBQA for future research.

A Survey on Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering: Methods, Challenges and Solutions

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer a question over a knowledge base (KB). Recently, a large number of studies focus on semantically or syntactically complicated questions. In this paper, we elaborately summarize the typical challenges and solutions for complex KBQA. We begin with introducing the background about the KBQA task. Next, we present the two mainstream categories of methods for complex KBQA, namely semantic parsing-based (SP-based) methods and information retrieval-based (IR-based) methods. We then review the advanced methods comprehensively from the perspective of the two categories. Specifically, we explicate their solutions to the typical challenges. Finally, we conclude and discuss some promising directions for future research.