Automatic Instruction Optimization for Open-source LLM Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of high-quality instruction datasets is costly, leading to the adoption of automatic generation of instruction pairs by LLMs as a popular alternative in the training of open-source LLMs. To ensure the high quality of LLM-generated instruction datasets, several approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing methods either compromise dataset integrity by filtering a large proportion of samples, or are unsuitable for industrial applications. In this paper, instead of discarding low-quality samples, we propose CoachLM, a novel approach to enhance the quality of instruction datasets through automatic revisions on samples in the dataset. CoachLM is trained from the samples revised by human experts and significantly increases the proportion of high-quality samples in the dataset from 17.7% to 78.9%. The effectiveness of CoachLM is further assessed on various real-world instruction test sets. The results show that CoachLM improves the instruction-following capabilities of the instruction-tuned LLM by an average of 29.9%, which even surpasses larger LLMs with nearly twice the number of parameters. Furthermore, CoachLM is successfully deployed in a data management system for LLMs at Huawei, resulting in an efficiency improvement of up to 20% in the cleaning of 40k real-world instruction pairs. We release the training data and code of CoachLM (https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

Missing Modality meets Meta Sampling (M3S): An Efficient Universal Approach for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modality

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) is an important way of observing mental activities with the help of data captured from multiple modalities. However, due to the recording or transmission error, some modalities may include incomplete data. Most existing works that address missing modalities usually assume a particular modality is completely missing and seldom consider a mixture of missing across multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective meta-sampling approach for multimodal sentiment analysis with missing modalities, namely Missing Modality-based Meta Sampling (M3S). To be specific, M3S formulates a missing modality sampling strategy into the modal agnostic meta-learning (MAML) framework. M3S can be treated as an efficient add-on training component on existing models and significantly improve their performances on multimodal data with a mixture of missing modalities. We conduct experiments on IEMOCAP, SIMS and CMU-MOSI datasets, and superior performance is achieved compared with recent state-of-the-art methods.

Deep Reinforcement Learning in Portfolio Management

In this paper, we implement two state-of-art continuous reinforcement learning algorithms, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in portfolio management. Both of them are widely-used in game playing and robot control. What's more, PPO has appealing theoretical propeties which is hopefully potential in portfolio management. We present the performances of them under different settings, including different learning rate, objective function, markets, feature combinations, in order to provide insights for parameter tuning, features selection and data preparation.