Learnable Sequence Augmenter for Triplet Contrastive Learning in Sequential Recommendation

Most existing contrastive learning-based sequential recommendation (SR) methods rely on random operations (e.g., crop, reorder, and substitute) to generate augmented sequences. These methods often struggle to create positive sample pairs that closely resemble the representations of the raw sequences, potentially disrupting item correlations by deleting key items or introducing noisy iterac, which misguides the contrastive learning process. To address this limitation, we propose Learnable sequence Augmentor for triplet Contrastive Learning in sequential Recommendation (LACLRec). Specifically, the self-supervised learning-based augmenter can automatically delete noisy items from sequences and insert new items that better capture item transition patterns, generating a higher-quality augmented sequence. Subsequently, we randomly generate another augmented sequence and design a ranking-based triplet contrastive loss to differentiate the similarities between the raw sequence, the augmented sequence from augmenter, and the randomly augmented sequence, providing more fine-grained contrastive signals. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that both the sequence augmenter and the triplet contrast contribute to improving recommendation accuracy. LACLRec significantly outperforms the baseline model CL4SRec, and demonstrates superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art sequential recommendation algorithms.

UIPE: Enhancing LLM Unlearning by Removing Knowledge Related to Forgetting Targets

Large Language Models (LLMs) inevitably acquire harmful information during training on massive datasets. LLM unlearning aims to eliminate the influence of such harmful information while maintaining the model's overall performance. Existing unlearning methods, represented by gradient ascent-based approaches, primarily focus on forgetting target data while overlooking the crucial impact of logically related knowledge on the effectiveness of unlearning. In this paper, through both theoretical and experimental analyses, we first demonstrate that a key reason for the suboptimal unlearning performance is that models can reconstruct the target content through reasoning with logically related knowledge. To address this issue, we propose Unlearning Improvement via Parameter Extrapolation (UIPE), a method that removes knowledge highly correlated with the forgetting targets. Experimental results show that UIPE significantly enhances the performance of various mainstream LLM unlearning methods on the TOFU benchmark.

Retrieval Models Aren't Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models

Tool learning aims to augment large language models (LLMs) with diverse tools, enabling them to act as agents for solving practical tasks. Due to the limited context length of tool-using LLMs, adopting information retrieval (IR) models to select useful tools from large toolsets is a critical initial step. However, the performance of IR models in tool retrieval tasks remains underexplored and unclear. Most tool-use benchmarks simplify this step by manually pre-annotating a small set of relevant tools for each task, which is far from the real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose ToolRet, a heterogeneous tool retrieval benchmark comprising 7.6k diverse retrieval tasks, and a corpus of 43k tools, collected from existing datasets. We benchmark six types of models on ToolRet. Surprisingly, even the models with strong performance in conventional IR benchmarks, exhibit poor performance on ToolRet. This low retrieval quality degrades the task pass rate of tool-use LLMs. As a further step, we contribute a large-scale training dataset with over 200k instances, which substantially optimizes the tool retrieval ability of IR models.

ASLoRA: Adaptive Sharing Low-Rank Adaptation Across Layers

As large language models (LLMs) grow in size, traditional full fine-tuning becomes increasingly impractical due to its high computational and storage costs. Although popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, such as LoRA, have significantly reduced the number of tunable parameters, there is still room for further optimization. In this work, we propose ASLoRA, a cross-layer parameter-sharing strategy combining global sharing with partial adaptive sharing. Specifically, we share the low-rank matrix A across all layers and adaptively merge matrix B during training. This sharing mechanism not only mitigates overfitting effectively but also captures inter-layer dependencies, significantly enhancing the model's representational capability. We conduct extensive experiments on various NLP tasks, showing that ASLoRA outperforms LoRA while using less than 25% of the parameters, highlighting its flexibility and superior parameter efficiency. Furthermore, in-depth analyses of the adaptive sharing strategy confirm its significant advantages in enhancing both model flexibility and task adaptability.

Uncovering Overfitting in Large Language Model Editing

Knowledge editing has been proposed as an effective method for updating and correcting the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing editing methods often struggle with complex tasks, such as multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we identify and investigate the phenomenon of Editing Overfit, where edited models assign disproportionately high probabilities to the edit target, hindering the generalization of new knowledge in complex scenarios. We attribute this issue to the current editing paradigm, which places excessive emphasis on the direct correspondence between the input prompt and the edit target for each edit sample. To further explore this issue, we introduce a new benchmark, EVOKE (EValuation of Editing Overfit in Knowledge Editing), along with fine-grained evaluation metrics. Through comprehensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that Editing Overfit is prevalent in current editing methods and that common overfitting mitigation strategies are of limited effectiveness in knowledge editing. To overcome this, inspired by LLMs' knowledge recall mechanisms, we propose a new plug-and-play strategy called Learn to Inference (LTI), which introduce a Multi-stage Inference Constraint module to guide the edited models in recalling new knowledge similarly to how unedited LLMs leverage knowledge through in-context learning. Extensive experimental results across a wide range of tasks validate the effectiveness of LTI in mitigating Editing Overfit.

MACPO: Weak-to-Strong Alignment via Multi-Agent Contrastive Preference Optimization

As large language models (LLMs) are rapidly advancing and achieving near-human capabilities, aligning them with human values is becoming more urgent. In scenarios where LLMs outperform humans, we face a weak-to-strong alignment problem where we need to effectively align strong student LLMs through weak supervision generated by weak teachers. Existing alignment methods mainly focus on strong-to-weak alignment and self-alignment settings, and it is impractical to adapt them to the much harder weak-to-strong alignment setting. To fill this gap, we propose a multi-agent contrastive preference optimization (MACPO) framework. MACPO facilitates weak teachers and strong students to learn from each other by iteratively reinforcing unfamiliar positive behaviors while penalizing familiar negative ones. To get this, we devise a mutual positive behavior augmentation strategy to encourage weak teachers and strong students to learn from each other's positive behavior and further provide higher quality positive behavior for the next iteration. Additionally, we propose a hard negative behavior construction strategy to induce weak teachers and strong students to generate familiar negative behavior by fine-tuning on negative behavioral data. Experimental results on the HH-RLHF and PKU-SafeRLHF datasets, evaluated using both automatic metrics and human judgments, demonstrate that MACPO simultaneously improves the alignment performance of strong students and weak teachers. Moreover, as the number of weak teachers increases, MACPO achieves better weak-to-strong alignment performance through more iteration optimization rounds.

Enhancing Multi-hop Reasoning through Knowledge Erasure in Large Language Model Editing

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges with internal knowledge inaccuracies and outdated information. Knowledge editing has emerged as a pivotal approach to mitigate these issues. Although current knowledge editing techniques exhibit promising performance in single-hop reasoning tasks, they show limitations when applied to multi-hop reasoning. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience and the operational mechanisms of LLMs, we hypothesize that the residual single-hop knowledge after editing causes edited models to revert to their original answers when processing multi-hop questions, thereby undermining their performance in multihop reasoning tasks. To validate this hypothesis, we conduct a series of experiments that empirically confirm our assumptions. Building on the validated hypothesis, we propose a novel knowledge editing method that incorporates a Knowledge Erasure mechanism for Large language model Editing (KELE). Specifically, we design an erasure function for residual knowledge and an injection function for new knowledge. Through joint optimization, we derive the optimal recall vector, which is subsequently utilized within a rank-one editing framework to update the parameters of targeted model layers. Extensive experiments on GPT-J and GPT-2 XL demonstrate that KELE substantially enhances the multi-hop reasoning capability of edited LLMs.

Beyond Local Views: Global State Inference with Diffusion Models for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In partially observable multi-agent systems, agents typically only have access to local observations. This severely hinders their ability to make precise decisions, particularly during decentralized execution. To alleviate this problem and inspired by image outpainting, we propose State Inference with Diffusion Models (SIDIFF), which uses diffusion models to reconstruct the original global state based solely on local observations. SIDIFF consists of a state generator and a state extractor, which allow agents to choose suitable actions by considering both the reconstructed global state and local observations. In addition, SIDIFF can be effortlessly incorporated into current multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms to improve their performance. Finally, we evaluated SIDIFF on different experimental platforms, including Multi-Agent Battle City (MABC), a novel and flexible multi-agent reinforcement learning environment we developed. SIDIFF achieved desirable results and outperformed other popular algorithms.

Chain-of-Strategy Planning with LLMs: Aligning the Generation of Psychotherapy Dialogue with Strategy in Motivational Interviewing

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating psychotherapeutic dialogues, especially in Motivational Interviewing (MI). However, how to employ strategies, a set of motivational interviewing (MI) skills, to generate therapeutic-adherent conversations with explainability is underexplored. We propose an approach called strategy-aware dialogue generation with Chain-of-Strategy (CoS) planning, which first predicts MI strategies as reasoning and utilizes these strategies to guide the subsequent dialogue generation. It brings the potential for controllable and explainable generation in psychotherapy by aligning the generated MI dialogues with therapeutic strategies. Extensive experiments including automatic and human evaluations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the MI strategy. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in producing strategically aligned dialogues and suggest directions for practical applications in psychotherapeutic settings.

Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks present a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the intensive knowledge required. Current solutions, like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, typically retrieve potential documents from an external corpus to read an answer. However, the performance of this retrieve-then-read paradigm is constrained by the retriever and the inevitable noise in the retrieved documents. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel generate-then-ground (GenGround) framework, synergizing the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. GenGround empowers LLMs to alternate two phases until the final answer is derived: (1) formulate a simpler, single-hop question and directly generate the answer; (2) ground the question-answer pair in retrieved documents, amending any wrong predictions in the answer. We also propose an instructional grounding distillation method to generalize our method into smaller models. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets illustrate the superiority of our method.