Are Human Interactions Replicable by Generative Agents? A Case Study on Pronoun Usage in Hierarchical Interactions

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance in their capabilities, researchers have increasingly employed them for social simulation. In this paper, we investigate whether interactions among LLM agents resemble those of humans. Specifically, we focus on the pronoun usage difference between leaders and non-leaders, examining whether the simulation would lead to human-like pronoun usage patterns during the LLMs' interactions. Our evaluation reveals the significant discrepancies between LLM-based simulations and human pronoun usage, with prompt-based or specialized agents failing to demonstrate human-like pronoun usage patterns. In addition, we reveal that even if LLMs understand the human pronoun usage patterns, they fail to demonstrate them in the actual interaction process. Our study highlights the limitations of social simulations based on LLM agents, urging caution in using such social simulation in practitioners' decision-making process.

Towards Better Understanding Table Instruction Tuning: Decoupling the Effects from Data versus Models

Recent advances in natural language processing have leveraged instruction tuning to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) for table-related tasks. However, previous works train different base models with different training data, lacking an apples-to-apples comparison across the result table LLMs. To address this, we fine-tune base models from the Mistral, OLMo, and Phi families on existing public training datasets. Our replication achieves performance on par with or surpassing existing table LLMs, establishing new state-of-the-art performance on Hitab, a table question-answering dataset. More importantly, through systematic out-of-domain evaluation, we decouple the contributions of training data and the base model, providing insight into their individual impacts. In addition, we assess the effects of table-specific instruction tuning on general-purpose benchmarks, revealing trade-offs between specialization and generalization.

Rethinking Table Instruction Tuning

Recent advances in table understanding have focused on instruction-tuning large language models (LLMs) for table-related tasks. However, existing research has overlooked the impact of hyperparameter choices and lacks a comprehensive evaluation of the out-of-domain table understanding ability and the general capabilities of these table LLMs. In this paper, we evaluate these abilities in existing table LLMs, and reveal significant declines in both out-of-domain table understanding and general capabilities compared to their base models. Through systematic analysis, we show that hyperparameters, such as learning rate, can significantly influence both table-specific and general capabilities. Contrary to the existing table instruction-tuning works, we demonstrate that smaller learning rates and fewer training instances can enhance table understanding while preserving general capabilities. Based on our findings, we introduce TAMA, a TAble LLM instruction-tuned from LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct, which achieves performance on par with, or surpassing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on table tasks, while maintaining strong out-of-domain generalization and general capabilities. Our findings highlight the potential for reduced data annotation costs and more efficient model development through careful hyperparameter selection.

Table as Thought: Exploring Structured Thoughts in LLM Reasoning

Large language models' reasoning abilities benefit from methods that organize their thought processes, such as chain-of-thought prompting, which employs a sequential structure to guide the reasoning process step-by-step. However, existing approaches focus primarily on organizing the sequence of thoughts, leaving structure in individual thought steps underexplored. To address this gap, we propose Table as Thought, a framework inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories on human thought. Table as Thought organizes reasoning within a tabular schema, where rows represent sequential thought steps and columns capture critical constraints and contextual information to enhance reasoning. The reasoning process iteratively populates the table until self-verification ensures completeness and correctness. Our experiments show that Table as Thought excels in planning tasks and demonstrates a strong potential for enhancing LLM performance in mathematical reasoning compared to unstructured thought baselines. This work provides a novel exploration of refining thought representation within LLMs, paving the way for advancements in reasoning and AI cognition.

Chumor 2.0: Towards Benchmarking Chinese Humor Understanding

Existing humor datasets and evaluations predominantly focus on English, leaving limited resources for culturally nuanced humor in non-English languages like Chinese. To address this gap, we construct Chumor, the first Chinese humor explanation dataset that exceeds the size of existing humor datasets. Chumor is sourced from Ruo Zhi Ba, a Chinese Reddit-like platform known for sharing intellectually challenging and culturally specific jokes. We test ten LLMs through direct and chain-of-thought prompting, revealing that Chumor poses significant challenges to existing LLMs, with their accuracy slightly above random and far below human. In addition, our analysis highlights that human-annotated humor explanations are significantly better than those generated by GPT-4o and ERNIE-4-turbo. We release Chumor at https://huggingface.co/datasets/dnaihao/Chumor, our project page is at https://dnaihao.github.io/Chumor-dataset/, our leaderboard is at https://huggingface.co/spaces/dnaihao/Chumor, and our codebase is at https://github.com/dnaihao/Chumor-dataset.

Chumor 1.0: A Truly Funny and Challenging Chinese Humor Understanding Dataset from Ruo Zhi Ba

Existing humor datasets and evaluations predominantly focus on English, lacking resources for culturally nuanced humor in non-English languages like Chinese. To address this gap, we construct Chumor, a dataset sourced from Ruo Zhi Ba (RZB), a Chinese Reddit-like platform dedicated to sharing intellectually challenging and culturally specific jokes. We annotate explanations for each joke and evaluate human explanations against two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4o and ERNIE Bot, through A/B testing by native Chinese speakers. Our evaluation shows that Chumor is challenging even for SOTA LLMs, and the human explanations for Chumor jokes are significantly better than explanations generated by the LLMs.

Tables as Images? Exploring the Strengths and Limitations of LLMs on Multimodal Representations of Tabular Data

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. We introduce for the first time the assessment of LLMs' performance on image-based table representations. Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, demonstrating the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. Our study provides insights into the effective use of LLMs on table-related tasks.

SQL-CRAFT: Text-to-SQL through Interactive Refinement and Enhanced Reasoning

Modern LLMs have become increasingly powerful, but they are still facing challenges in specialized tasks such as Text-to-SQL. We propose SQL-CRAFT, a framework to advance LLMs' SQL generation Capabilities through inteRActive reFinemenT and enhanced reasoning. We leverage an Interactive Correction Loop (IC-Loop) for LLMs to interact with databases automatically, as well as Python-enhanced reasoning. We conduct experiments on two Text-to-SQL datasets, Spider and Bird, with performance improvements of up to 5.7% compared to the naive prompting method. Moreover, our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art on the Spider Leaderboard, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

HI-TOM: A Benchmark for Evaluating Higher-Order Theory of Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to reason about one's own and others' mental states. ToM plays a critical role in the development of intelligence, language understanding, and cognitive processes. While previous work has primarily focused on first and second-order ToM, we explore higher-order ToM, which involves recursive reasoning on others' beliefs. We introduce HI-TOM, a Higher Order Theory of Mind benchmark. Our experimental evaluation using various Large Language Models (LLMs) indicates a decline in performance on higher-order ToM tasks, demonstrating the limitations of current LLMs. We conduct a thorough analysis of different failure cases of LLMs, and share our thoughts on the implications of our findings on the future of NLP.

Enhancing Long-form Text Generation Efficacy with Task-adaptive Tokenization

We propose task-adaptive tokenization as a way to adapt the generation pipeline to the specifics of a downstream task and enhance long-form generation in mental health. Inspired by insights from cognitive science, our task-adaptive tokenizer samples variable segmentations from multiple outcomes, with sampling probabilities optimized based on task-specific data. We introduce a strategy for building a specialized vocabulary and introduce a vocabulary merging protocol that allows for the integration of task-specific tokens into the pre-trained model's tokenization step. Through extensive experiments on psychological question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English, we find that our task-adaptive tokenization approach brings a significant improvement in generation performance while using up to 60% fewer tokens. Preliminary experiments point to promising results when using our tokenization approach with very large language models.