Hammer: Robust Function-Calling for On-Device Language Models via Function Masking

Large language models have demonstrated impressive value in performing as autonomous agents when equipped with external tools and API calls. Nonetheless, effectively harnessing their potential for executing complex tasks crucially relies on enhancements in their function calling capabilities. This paper identifies a critical gap in existing function calling models, where performance varies significantly across benchmarks, often due to being misled by specific naming conventions. To address such an issue, we introduce Hammer, a novel family of foundation models specifically engineered for on-device function calling. Hammer employs an augmented dataset that enhances models' sensitivity to irrelevant functions and incorporates function masking techniques to minimize misleading. Our empirical evaluations reveal that Hammer not only outperforms larger models but also demonstrates robust generalization across diverse benchmarks, achieving sota results. Our open source contributions include a specialized dataset for irrelevance detection, a tuning framework for enhanced generalization, and the Hammer models, establishing a new standard for function calling performance.

A Framework to Implement 1+N Multi-task Fine-tuning Pattern in LLMs Using the CGC-LORA Algorithm

With the productive evolution of large language models (LLMs) in the field of natural language processing (NLP), tons of effort has been made to effectively fine-tune common pre-trained LLMs to fulfill a variety of tasks in one or multiple specific domain. In practice, there are two prevailing ways, in which the adaptation can be achieved: (i) Multiple Independent Models: Pre-trained LLMs are fine-tuned a few times independently using the corresponding training samples from each task. (ii) An Integrated Model: Samples from all tasks are employed to fine-tune a pre-trianed LLM unitedly. To address the high computing cost and seesawing issue simultaneously, we propose a unified framework that implements a 1 + N mutli-task fine-tuning pattern in LLMs using a novel Customized Gate Control (CGC) Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) algorithm. Our work aims to take an advantage of both MTL (i.e., CGC) and PEFT (i.e., LoRA) scheme. For a given cluster of tasks, we design an innovative layer that contains two types of experts as additional trainable parameters to make LoRA be compatible with MTL. To comprehensively evaluate the proposed framework, we conduct well-designed experiments on two public datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the unified framework with CGC-LoRA modules achieves higher evaluation scores than all benchmarks on both two datasets.