Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey

Although large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge, leading to undesired behaviors such as generating untruthful and inaccurate responses. This highlights the critical need to understand the knowledge boundary of LLMs, a concept that remains inadequately defined in existing research. In this survey, we propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types. Using this foundation, we systematically review the field through three key lenses: the motivation for studying LLM knowledge boundaries, methods for identifying these boundaries, and strategies for mitigating the challenges they present. Finally, we discuss open challenges and potential research directions in this area. We aim for this survey to offer the community a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM knowledge research.

LLMs for Doctors: Leveraging Medical LLMs to Assist Doctors, Not Replace Them

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has had a significant impact on the healthcare field, providing patients with medical advice, diagnostic information, and more. However, due to a lack of professional medical knowledge, patients are easily misled by generated erroneous information from LLMs, which may result in serious medical problems. To address this issue, we focus on tuning the LLMs to be medical assistants who collaborate with more experienced doctors. We first conduct a two-stage survey by inspiration-feedback to gain a broad understanding of the real needs of doctors for medical assistants. Based on this, we construct a Chinese medical dataset called DoctorFLAN to support the entire workflow of doctors, which includes 92K Q\&A samples from 22 tasks and 27 specialists. Moreover, we evaluate LLMs in doctor-oriented scenarios by constructing the DoctorFLAN-\textit{test} containing 550 single-turn Q\&A and DotaBench containing 74 multi-turn conversations. The evaluation results indicate that being a medical assistant still poses challenges for existing open-source models, but DoctorFLAN can help them significantly. It demonstrates that the doctor-oriented dataset and benchmarks we construct can complement existing patient-oriented work and better promote medical LLMs research.

LLMs Could Autonomously Learn Without External Supervision

In the quest for super-human performance, Large Language Models (LLMs) have traditionally been tethered to human-annotated datasets and predefined training objectives-a process that is both labor-intensive and inherently limited. This paper presents a transformative approach: Autonomous Learning for LLMs, a self-sufficient learning paradigm that frees models from the constraints of human supervision. This method endows LLMs with the ability to self-educate through direct interaction with text, akin to a human reading and comprehending literature. Our approach eliminates the reliance on annotated data, fostering an Autonomous Learning environment where the model independently identifies and reinforces its knowledge gaps. Empirical results from our comprehensive experiments, which utilized a diverse array of learning materials and were evaluated against standard public quizzes, reveal that Autonomous Learning outstrips the performance of both Pre-training and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), as well as retrieval-augmented methods. These findings underscore the potential of Autonomous Learning to not only enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of LLM training but also to pave the way for the development of more advanced, self-reliant AI systems.

MLLM-Bench, Evaluating Multi-modal LLMs using GPT-4V

In the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the integration of vision in language models has marked a significant milestone. The advent of vision-language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V have expanded AI applications, aligning with the multi-modal capabilities of the human brain. However, evaluating the efficacy of MLLMs poses a substantial challenge due to the subjective nature of tasks that lack definitive answers. Existing automatic evaluation methodologies on multi-modal large language models rely on objective queries that have standard answers, inadequately addressing the nuances of creative and associative multi-modal tasks. To address this, we introduce MLLM-Bench, an innovative benchmark inspired by Vicuna, spanning a diverse array of scenarios, including Perception, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creation along with the ethical consideration. MLLM-Bench is designed to reflect user experience more accurately and provide a more holistic assessment of model performance. Comparative evaluations indicate a significant performance gap between existing open-source models and GPT-4V. We posit that MLLM-Bench will catalyze progress in the open-source community towards developing user-centric vision-language models that meet a broad spectrum of real-world applications. See online leaderboard in \url{https://mllm-bench.llmzoo.com}.

HuatuoGPT-II, One-stage Training for Medical Adaption of LLMs

Adapting a language model into a specific domain, a.k.a `domain adaption', is a common practice when specialized knowledge, e.g. medicine, is not encapsulated in a general language model like Llama2. The challenge lies in the heterogeneity of data across the two training stages, as it varies in languages, genres, or formats. To tackle this and simplify the learning protocol, we propose to transform heterogeneous data, from the both pre-training and supervised stages, into a unified, simple input-output pair format. We validate the new protocol in the domains where proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT perform relatively poorly, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine. The developed model, HuatuoGPT-II, has shown state-of-the-art performance in Chinese medicine domain on a number of benchmarks, e.g. medical licensing exams. It even outperforms proprietary models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 in some aspects, especially in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Expert manual evaluations further validate HuatuoGPT-II's advantages over existing LLMs. Notably, HuatuoGPT-II was benchmarked in a fresh Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination where it achieved the best performance, showcasing not only its effectiveness but also its generalization capabilities.

Coarse-to-fine Hybrid 3D Mapping System with Co-calibrated Omnidirectional Camera and Non-repetitive LiDAR

This paper presents a novel 3D mapping robot with an omnidirectional field-of-view (FoV) sensor suite composed of a non-repetitive LiDAR and an omnidirectional camera. Thanks to the non-repetitive scanning nature of the LiDAR, an automatic targetless co-calibration method is proposed to simultaneously calibrate the intrinsic parameters for the omnidirectional camera and the extrinsic parameters for the camera and LiDAR, which is crucial for the required step in bringing color and texture information to the point clouds in surveying and mapping tasks. Comparisons and analyses are made to target-based intrinsic calibration and mutual information (MI)-based extrinsic calibration, respectively. With this co-calibrated sensor suite, the hybrid mapping robot integrates both the odometry-based mapping mode and stationary mapping mode. Meanwhile, we proposed a new workflow to achieve coarse-to-fine mapping, including efficient and coarse mapping in a global environment with odometry-based mapping mode; planning for viewpoints in the region-of-interest (ROI) based on the coarse map (relies on the previous work); navigating to each viewpoint and performing finer and more precise stationary scanning and mapping of the ROI. The fine map is stitched with the global coarse map, which provides a more efficient and precise result than the conventional stationary approaches and the emerging odometry-based approaches, respectively.