Step-by-Step Mastery: Enhancing Soft Constraint Following Ability of Large Language Models

It is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions that involve multiple constraints. However, soft constraints are semantically related and difficult to verify through automated methods. These constraints remain a significant challenge for LLMs. To enhance the ability of LLMs to follow soft constraints, we initially design a pipeline to obtain high-quality outputs automatically. Additionally, to fully utilize the acquired data, we introduce a training paradigm based on curriculum learning. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of our methods in improving LLMs' soft constraint following ability and analyze the factors driving the improvements. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Rainier-rq/FollowSoftConstraints.

What's Wrong with Your Code Generated by Large Language Models? An Extensive Study

The increasing development of large language models (LLMs) in code generation has drawn significant attention among researchers. To enhance LLM-based code generation ability, current efforts are predominantly directed towards collecting high-quality datasets and leveraging diverse training technologies. However, there is a notable lack of comprehensive studies examining the limitations and boundaries of these existing methods. To bridge this gap, we conducted an extensive empirical study evaluating the performance of three leading closed-source LLMs and four popular open-source LLMs on three commonly used benchmarks. Our investigation, which evaluated the length, cyclomatic complexity and API number of the generated code, revealed that these LLMs face challenges in generating successful code for more complex problems, and tend to produce code that is shorter yet more complicated as compared to canonical solutions. Additionally, we developed a taxonomy of bugs for incorrect codes that includes three categories and 12 sub-categories, and analyze the root cause for common bug types. Furthermore, to better understand the performance of LLMs in real-world projects, we manually created a real-world benchmark comprising 140 code generation tasks. Our analysis highlights distinct differences in bug distributions between actual scenarios and existing benchmarks. Finally, we propose a novel training-free iterative method that introduces self-critique, enabling LLMs to critique and correct their generated code based on bug types and compiler feedback. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly mitigate bugs and increase the passing rate by 29.2% after two iterations, indicating substantial potential for LLMs to handle more complex problems.

Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. Recently, Attributed Text Generation (ATG) has attracted growing attention, which provides citations to support the model's responses in RAG, so as to enhance the credibility of LLM-generated content and facilitate verification. Prior methods mainly adopt coarse-grained attributions, linking to passage-level references or providing paragraph-level citations. However, these methods still fall short in verifiability and require certain time costs for fact checking. This paper proposes a fine-grained ATG method called ReClaim(Refer & Claim), which alternates the generation of references and answers step by step. Unlike traditional coarse-grained attribution, ReClaim allows the model to add sentence-level fine-grained citations to each answer sentence in long-form question-answering tasks. Our experiments encompass various training and inference methods and multiple LLMs, verifying the effectiveness of our approach.

EasyJailbreak: A Unified Framework for Jailbreaking Large Language Models

Jailbreak attacks are crucial for identifying and mitigating the security vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are designed to bypass safeguards and elicit prohibited outputs. However, due to significant differences among various jailbreak methods, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which limits comprehensive security evaluations. This paper introduces EasyJailbreak, a unified framework simplifying the construction and evaluation of jailbreak attacks against LLMs. It builds jailbreak attacks using four components: Selector, Mutator, Constraint, and Evaluator. This modular framework enables researchers to easily construct attacks from combinations of novel and existing components. So far, EasyJailbreak supports 11 distinct jailbreak methods and facilitates the security validation of a broad spectrum of LLMs. Our validation across 10 distinct LLMs reveals a significant vulnerability, with an average breach probability of 60% under various jailbreaking attacks. Notably, even advanced models like GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 exhibit average Attack Success Rates (ASR) of 57% and 33%, respectively. We have released a wealth of resources for researchers, including a web platform, PyPI published package, screencast video, and experimental outputs.

Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model

Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. However, pretraining has recently shifted toward larger models and larger data, and this has resulted in significant computational and energy costs. In this paper, we propose Influence Subset Selection (ISS) for language model, which explicitly utilizes end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of the pretraining corpus. Specifically, the ISS selects the samples that will provide the most positive influence on the performance of the end-task. Furthermore, we design a gradient matching based influence estimation method, which can drastically reduce the computation time of influence. With only 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost, ISS outperformed pretrained models (e.g., RoBERTa) on eight datasets covering four domains.

PaLM 2 Technical Report

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.

InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction

Large language models have unlocked strong multi-task capabilities from reading instructive prompts. However, recent studies have shown that existing large models still have difficulty with information extraction tasks. For example, gpt-3.5-turbo achieved an F1 score of 18.22 on the Ontonotes dataset, which is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we propose InstructUIE, a unified information extraction framework based on instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various information extraction tasks and capture the inter-task dependency. To validate the proposed method, we introduce IE INSTRUCTIONS, a benchmark of 32 diverse information extraction datasets in a unified text-to-text format with expert-written instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to Bert in supervised settings and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and gpt3.5 in zero-shot settings.