EXAONE 3.5: Series of Large Language Models for Real-world Use Cases

This technical report introduces the EXAONE 3.5 instruction-tuned language models, developed and released by LG AI Research. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are offered in three configurations: 32B, 7.8B, and 2.4B. These models feature several standout capabilities: 1) exceptional instruction following capabilities in real-world scenarios, achieving the highest scores across seven benchmarks, 2) outstanding long-context comprehension, attaining the top performance in four benchmarks, and 3) competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open models of similar sizes across nine general benchmarks. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are open to anyone for research purposes and can be downloaded from https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE. For commercial use, please reach out to the official contact point of LG AI Research: contact_us@lgresearch.ai.

EXAONE 3.0 7.8B Instruction Tuned Language Model

We introduce EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned language model, the first open model in the family of Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by LG AI Research. Among different model sizes, we publicly release the 7.8B instruction-tuned model to promote open research and innovations. Through extensive evaluations across a wide range of public and in-house benchmarks, EXAONE 3.0 demonstrates highly competitive real-world performance with instruction-following capability against other state-of-the-art open models of similar size. Our comparative analysis shows that EXAONE 3.0 excels particularly in Korean, while achieving compelling performance across general tasks and complex reasoning. With its strong real-world effectiveness and bilingual proficiency, we hope that EXAONE keeps contributing to advancements in Expert AI. Our EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned model is available at https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-3.0-7.8B-Instruct

Instruction Matters, a Simple yet Effective Task Selection Approach in Instruction Tuning for Specific Tasks

Instruction tuning has shown its ability to not only enhance zero-shot generalization across various tasks but also its effectiveness in improving the performance of specific tasks. A crucial aspect in instruction tuning for a particular task is a strategic selection of related tasks that offer meaningful supervision, thereby enhancing efficiency and preventing performance degradation from irrelevant tasks. Our research reveals that leveraging instruction information \textit{alone} enables the identification of pertinent tasks for instruction tuning. This approach is notably simpler compared to traditional methods that necessitate complex measurements of pairwise transferability between tasks or the creation of data samples for the target task. Furthermore, by additionally learning the unique instructional template style of the meta-dataset, we observe an improvement in task selection accuracy, which contributes to enhanced overall performance. Experimental results demonstrate that training on a small set of tasks, chosen solely based on the instructions, leads to substantial performance improvements on benchmarks like P3, Big-Bench, NIV2, and Big-Bench Hard. Significantly, these improvements exceed those achieved by prior task selection methods, highlighting the efficacy of our approach.

AutoGuide: Automated Generation and Selection of State-Aware Guidelines for Large Language Model Agents

The primary limitation of large language models (LLMs) is their restricted understanding of the world. This poses significant difficulties for LLM-based agents, particularly in domains where pre-trained LLMs lack sufficient knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, called AutoGuide, that bridges the knowledge gap in pre-trained LLMs by leveraging implicit knowledge in offline experiences. Specifically, AutoGuide effectively extracts knowledge embedded in offline data by extracting a set of state-aware guidelines. Importantly, each state-aware guideline is expressed in concise natural language and follows a conditional structure, clearly describing the state where it is applicable. As such, the resulting guidelines enable a principled way to provide helpful knowledge pertinent to an agent's current decision-making process. We show that our approach outperforms competitive LLM-based baselines by a large margin in sequential decision-making benchmarks.

ReConPatch : Contrastive Patch Representation Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is crucial to the advanced identification of product defects such as incorrect parts, misaligned components, and damages in industrial manufacturing. Due to the rare observations and unknown types of defects, anomaly detection is considered to be challenging in machine learning. To overcome this difficulty, recent approaches utilize the common visual representations from natural image datasets and distill the relevant features. However, existing approaches still have the discrepancy between the pre-trained feature and the target data, or require the input augmentation which should be carefully designed particularly for the industrial dataset. In this paper, we introduce ReConPatch, which constructs discriminative features for anomaly detection by training a linear modulation attached to a pre-trained model. ReConPatch employs contrastive representation learning to collect and distribute features in a way that produces a target-oriented and easily separable representation. To address the absence of labeled pairs for the contrastive learning, we utilize two similarity measures, pairwise and contextual similarities, between data representations as a pseudo-label. Unlike previous work, ReConPatch achieves robust anomaly detection performance without extensive input augmentation. Our method achieves the state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance (99.72%) for the widely used and challenging MVTec AD dataset.

Significantly improving zero-shot X-ray pathology classification via fine-tuning pre-trained image-text encoders

Deep neural networks have been successfully adopted to diverse domains including pathology classification based on medical images. However, large-scale and high-quality data to train powerful neural networks are rare in the medical domain as the labeling must be done by qualified experts. Researchers recently tackled this problem with some success by taking advantage of models pre-trained on large-scale general domain data. Specifically, researchers took contrastive image-text encoders (e.g., CLIP) and fine-tuned it with chest X-ray images and paired reports to perform zero-shot pathology classification, thus completely removing the need for pathology-annotated images to train a classification model. Existing studies, however, fine-tuned the pre-trained model with the same contrastive learning objective, and failed to exploit the multi-labeled nature of medical image-report pairs. In this paper, we propose a new fine-tuning strategy based on sentence sampling and positive-pair loss relaxation for improving the downstream zero-shot pathology classification performance, which can be applied to any pre-trained contrastive image-text encoders. Our method consistently showed dramatically improved zero-shot pathology classification performance on four different chest X-ray datasets and 3 different pre-trained models (5.77% average AUROC increase). In particular, fine-tuning CLIP with our method showed much comparable or marginally outperformed to board-certified radiologists (0.619 vs 0.625 in F1 score and 0.530 vs 0.544 in MCC) in zero-shot classification of five prominent diseases from the CheXpert dataset.

ANNA: Enhanced Language Representation for Question Answering

Pre-trained language models have brought significant improvements in performance in a variety of natural language processing tasks. Most existing models performing state-of-the-art results have shown their approaches in the separate perspectives of data processing, pre-training tasks, neural network modeling, or fine-tuning. In this paper, we demonstrate how the approaches affect performance individually, and that the language model performs the best results on a specific question answering task when those approaches are jointly considered in pre-training models. In particular, we propose an extended pre-training task, and a new neighbor-aware mechanism that attends neighboring tokens more to capture the richness of context for pre-training language modeling. Our best model achieves new state-of-the-art results of 95.7\% F1 and 90.6\% EM on SQuAD 1.1 and also outperforms existing pre-trained language models such as RoBERTa, ALBERT, ELECTRA, and XLNet on the SQuAD 2.0 benchmark.

L-Verse: Bidirectional Generation Between Image and Text

Far beyond learning long-range interactions of natural language, transformers are becoming the de-facto standard for many vision tasks with their power and scalabilty. Especially with cross-modal tasks between image and text, vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs) are widely used to make a raw RGB image into a sequence of feature vectors. To better leverage the correlation between image and text, we propose L-Verse, a novel architecture consisting of feature-augmented variational autoencoder (AugVAE) and bidirectional auto-regressive transformer (BiART) for text-to-image and image-to-text generation. Our AugVAE shows the state-of-the-art reconstruction performance on ImageNet1K validation set, along with the robustness to unseen images in the wild. Unlike other models, BiART can distinguish between image (or text) as a conditional reference and a generation target. L-Verse can be directly used for image-to-text or text-to-image generation tasks without any finetuning or extra object detection frameworks. In quantitative and qualitative experiments, L-Verse shows impressive results against previous methods in both image-to-text and text-to-image generation on MS-COCO Captions. We furthermore assess the scalability of L-Verse architecture on Conceptual Captions and present the initial results of bidirectional vision-language representation learning on general domain.

Explaining Convolutional Neural Networks through Attribution-Based Input Sampling and Block-Wise Feature Aggregation

As an emerging field in Machine Learning, Explainable AI (XAI) has been offering remarkable performance in interpreting the decisions made by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To achieve visual explanations for CNNs, methods based on class activation mapping and randomized input sampling have gained great popularity. However, the attribution methods based on these techniques provide lower resolution and blurry explanation maps that limit their explanation power. To circumvent this issue, visualization based on various layers is sought. In this work, we collect visualization maps from multiple layers of the model based on an attribution-based input sampling technique and aggregate them to reach a fine-grained and complete explanation. We also propose a layer selection strategy that applies to the whole family of CNN-based models, based on which our extraction framework is applied to visualize the last layers of each convolutional block of the model. Moreover, we perform an empirical analysis of the efficacy of derived lower-level information to enhance the represented attributions. Comprehensive experiments conducted on shallow and deep models trained on natural and industrial datasets, using both ground-truth and model-truth based evaluation metrics validate our proposed algorithm by meeting or outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in terms of explanation ability and visual quality, demonstrating that our method shows stability regardless of the size of objects or instances to be explained.