Abstract:Large language model agents have demonstrated remarkable advancements across various complex tasks. Recent works focus on optimizing the agent team or employing self-reflection to iteratively solve complex tasks. Since these agents are all based on the same LLM, only conducting self-evaluation or removing underperforming agents does not substantively enhance the capability of the agents. We argue that a comprehensive evaluation and accumulating experience from evaluation feedback is an effective approach to improving system performance. In this paper, we propose Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360{\deg} Assessment (360{\deg}REA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework inspired by corporate organizational practices. The framework employs a novel 360{\deg} performance assessment method for multi-perspective performance evaluation with fine-grained assessment. To enhance the capability of agents in addressing complex tasks, we introduce dual-level experience pool for agents to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment. Extensive experiments on complex task datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of 360{\deg}REA.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance in generative scenarios and have attracted widespread attention. Among them, stylized dialogue generation is essential in the context of LLMs for building intelligent and engaging dialogue agent. However the ability of LLMs is data-driven and limited by data bias, leading to poor performance on specific tasks. In particular, stylized dialogue generation suffers from a severe lack of supervised data. Furthermore, although many prompt-based methods have been proposed to accomplish specific tasks, their performance in complex real-world scenarios involving a wide variety of dialog styles further enhancement. In this work, we first introduce a stylized dialogue dataset StyleEval with 38 styles by leveraging the generative power of LLMs comprehensively, which has been carefully constructed with rigorous human-led quality control. Based on this, we propose the stylized dialogue framework StyleChat via recitation-augmented memory strategy and multi-task style learning strategy to promote generalization ability. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we created a test benchmark that included both a generation task and a choice task to comprehensively evaluate trained models and assess whether styles and preferences are remembered and understood. Experimental results show that our proposed framework StyleChat outperforms all the baselines and helps to break the style boundary of LLMs.
Abstract:Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with handling dialogues with long contexts due to efficiency and consistency issues. According to our observation, dialogue contexts are highly structured, and the special token of \textit{End-of-Utterance} (EoU) in dialogues has the potential to aggregate information. We refer to the EoU tokens as ``conversational attention sinks'' (conv-attn sinks). Accordingly, we introduce StreamingDialogue, which compresses long dialogue history into conv-attn sinks with minimal losses, and thus reduces computational complexity quadratically with the number of sinks (i.e., the number of utterances). Current LLMs already demonstrate the ability to handle long context window, e.g., a window size of 200k or more. To this end, by compressing utterances into EoUs, our method has the potential to handle more than 200k of utterances, resulting in a prolonged dialogue learning. In order to minimize information losses from reconstruction after compression, we design two learning strategies of short-memory reconstruction (SMR) and long-memory reactivation (LMR). Our method outperforms strong baselines in dialogue tasks and achieves a 4 $\times$ speedup while reducing memory usage by 18 $\times$ compared to dense attention recomputation.
Abstract:Personalized dialogue systems have gained significant attention in recent years for their ability to generate responses in alignment with different personas. However, most existing approaches rely on pre-defined personal profiles, which are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive to create but also lack flexibility. We propose In-Dialogue Learning (IDL), a fine-tuning framework that enhances the ability of pre-trained large language models to leverage dialogue history to characterize persona for completing personalized dialogue generation tasks without pre-defined profiles. Our experiments on three datasets demonstrate that IDL brings substantial improvements, with BLEU and ROUGE scores increasing by up to 200% and 247%, respectively. Additionally, the results of human evaluations further validate the efficacy of our proposed method.
Abstract:Most existing news recommendation methods tackle this task by conducting semantic matching between candidate news and user representation produced by historical clicked news. However, they overlook the high-level connections among different news articles and also ignore the profound relationship between these news articles and users. And the definition of these methods dictates that they can only deliver news articles as-is. On the contrary, integrating several relevant news articles into a coherent narrative would assist users in gaining a quicker and more comprehensive understanding of events. In this paper, we propose a novel generative news recommendation paradigm that includes two steps: (1) Leveraging the internal knowledge and reasoning capabilities of the Large Language Model (LLM) to perform high-level matching between candidate news and user representation; (2) Generating a coherent and logically structured narrative based on the associations between related news and user interests, thus engaging users in further reading of the news. Specifically, we propose GNR to implement the generative news recommendation paradigm. First, we compose the dual-level representation of news and users by leveraging LLM to generate theme-level representations and combine them with semantic-level representations. Next, in order to generate a coherent narrative, we explore the news relation and filter the related news according to the user preference. Finally, we propose a novel training method named UIFT to train the LLM to fuse multiple news articles in a coherent narrative. Extensive experiments show that GNR can improve recommendation accuracy and eventually generate more personalized and factually consistent narratives.
Abstract:Recently, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized generative agents. Among them, Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs) attract considerable attention due to their ability to emotionally engage users. However, the absence of a comprehensive benchmark impedes progress in this field. To bridge this gap, we introduce CharacterEval, a Chinese benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment, complemented by a tailored high-quality dataset. The dataset comprises 1,785 multi-turn role-playing dialogues, encompassing 23,020 examples and featuring 77 characters derived from Chinese novels and scripts. It was carefully constructed, beginning with initial dialogue extraction via GPT-4, followed by rigorous human-led quality control, and enhanced with in-depth character profiles sourced from Baidu Baike. CharacterEval employs a multifaceted evaluation approach, encompassing thirteen targeted metrics on four dimensions. Comprehensive experiments on CharacterEval demonstrate that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in Chinese role-playing conversation. Source code, data source and reward model will be publicly accessible at https://github.com/morecry/CharacterEval.
Abstract:Recent studies have highlighted a phenomenon in large language models (LLMs) known as "the reversal curse," in which the order of knowledge entities in the training data biases the models' comprehension. For example, if a model is trained on sentences where entity A consistently appears before entity B, it can respond to queries about A by providing B as the answer. However, it may encounter confusion when presented with questions concerning B. We contend that the reversal curse is partially a result of specific model training objectives, particularly evident in the prevalent use of the next-token prediction within most causal language models. For the next-token prediction, models solely focus on a token's preceding context, resulting in a restricted comprehension of the input. In contrast, we illustrate that the GLM, trained using the autoregressive blank infilling objective where tokens to be predicted have access to the entire context, exhibits better resilience against the reversal curse. We propose a novel training method, BIdirectional Casual language modeling Optimization (BICO), designed to mitigate the reversal curse when fine-tuning pretrained causal language models on new data. BICO modifies the causal attention mechanism to function bidirectionally and employs a mask denoising optimization. In the task designed to assess the reversal curse, our approach improves Llama's accuracy from the original 0% to around 70%. We hope that more attention can be focused on exploring and addressing these inherent weaknesses of the current LLMs, in order to achieve a higher level of intelligence.
Abstract:The emergence of large-scale pretrained language models has revolutionized the capabilities of new AI application, especially in the realm of crafting chatbots with distinct personas. Given the "stimulus-response" nature of chatbots, this paper unveils an innovative open-ended interview-style approach for personality assessment on role-playing chatbots, which offers a richer comprehension of their intrinsic personalities. We conduct personality assessments on 32 role-playing chatbots created by the ChatHaruhi library, across both the Big Five and MBTI dimensions, and measure their alignment with human perception. Evaluation results underscore that modern role-playing chatbots based on LLMs can effectively portray personality traits of corresponding characters, with an alignment rate of 82.8% compared with human-perceived personalities. Besides, we also suggest potential strategies for shaping chatbots' personalities. Hence, this paper serves as a cornerstone study for role-playing chatbots that intersects computational linguistics and psychology. Our resources are available at https://github.com/LC1332/Chat-Haruhi-Suzumiya
Abstract:Language models trained on large-scale corpus often generate content that is harmful, toxic, or contrary to human preferences, making their alignment with human values a critical concern. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with algorithms like PPO is a prevalent approach for alignment but is often complex, unstable, and resource-intensive. Recently, ranking-based alignment methods have emerged, offering stability and effectiveness by replacing the RL framework with supervised fine-tuning, but they are costly due to the need for annotated data. Considering that existing large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are already relatively well-aligned and cost-friendly, researchers have begun to align the language model with human preference from AI feedback. The common practices, which unidirectionally distill the instruction-following responses from LLMs, are constrained by their bottleneck. Thus we introduce CycleAlign to distill alignment capabilities from parameter-invisible LLMs (black-box) to a parameter-visible model (white-box) in an iterative manner. With in-context learning (ICL) as the core of the cycle, the black-box models are able to rank the model-generated responses guided by human-craft instruction and demonstrations about their preferences. During iterative interaction, the white-box models also have a judgment about responses generated by them. Consequently, the agreement ranking could be viewed as a pseudo label to dynamically update the in-context demonstrations and improve the preference ranking ability of black-box models. Through multiple interactions, the CycleAlign framework could align the white-box model with the black-box model effectively in a low-resource way. Empirical results illustrate that the model fine-tuned by CycleAlign remarkably exceeds existing methods, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in alignment with human value.
Abstract:In our modern, fast-paced, and interconnected world, the importance of mental well-being has grown into a matter of great urgency. However, traditional methods such as Emotional Support Conversations (ESC) face challenges in effectively addressing a diverse range of individual personalities. In response, we introduce the Social Support Conversation (S2Conv) framework. It comprises a series of support agents and the interpersonal matching mechanism, linking individuals with persona-compatible virtual supporters. Utilizing persona decomposition based on the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), we have created the MBTI-1024 Bank, a group that of virtual characters with distinct profiles. Through improved role-playing prompts with behavior preset and dynamic memory, we facilitate the development of the MBTI-S2Conv dataset, which contains conversations between the characters in the MBTI-1024 Bank. Building upon these foundations, we present CharacterChat, a comprehensive S2Conv system, which includes a conversational model driven by personas and memories, along with an interpersonal matching plugin model that dispatches the optimal supporters from the MBTI-1024 Bank for individuals with specific personas. Empirical results indicate the remarkable efficacy of CharacterChat in providing personalized social support and highlight the substantial advantages derived from interpersonal matching. The source code is available in \url{https://github.com/morecry/CharacterChat}.