Unanswerability Evaluation for Retreival Augmented Generation

Existing evaluation frameworks for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems focus on answerable queries, but they overlook the importance of appropriately rejecting unanswerable requests. In this paper, we introduce UAEval4RAG, a framework designed to evaluate whether RAG systems can handle unanswerable queries effectively. We define a taxonomy with six unanswerable categories, and UAEval4RAG automatically synthesizes diverse and challenging queries for any given knowledge base with unanswered ratio and acceptable ratio metrics. We conduct experiments with various RAG components, including retrieval models, rewriting methods, rerankers, language models, and prompting strategies, and reveal hidden trade-offs in performance of RAG systems. Our findings highlight the critical role of component selection and prompt design in optimizing RAG systems to balance the accuracy of answerable queries with high rejection rates of unanswerable ones. UAEval4RAG provides valuable insights and tools for developing more robust and reliable RAG systems.

Distill-SynthKG: Distilling Knowledge Graph Synthesis Workflow for Improved Coverage and Efficiency

Knowledge graphs (KGs) generated by large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly valuable for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications that require knowledge-intensive reasoning. However, existing KG extraction methods predominantly rely on prompt-based approaches, which are inefficient for processing large-scale corpora. These approaches often suffer from information loss, particularly with long documents, due to the lack of specialized design for KG construction. Additionally, there is a gap in evaluation datasets and methodologies for ontology-free KG construction. To overcome these limitations, we propose SynthKG, a multi-step, document-level ontology-free KG synthesis workflow based on LLMs. By fine-tuning a smaller LLM on the synthesized document-KG pairs, we streamline the multi-step process into a single-step KG generation approach called Distill-SynthKG, substantially reducing the number of LLM inference calls. Furthermore, we re-purpose existing question-answering datasets to establish KG evaluation datasets and introduce new evaluation metrics. Using KGs produced by Distill-SynthKG, we also design a novel graph-based retrieval framework for RAG. Experimental results demonstrate that Distill-SynthKG not only surpasses all baseline models in KG quality -- including models up to eight times larger -- but also consistently excels in retrieval and question-answering tasks. Our proposed graph retrieval framework also outperforms all KG-retrieval methods across multiple benchmark datasets. We release the SynthKG dataset and Distill-SynthKG model publicly to support further research and development.

ReGenesis: LLMs can Grow into Reasoning Generalists via Self-Improvement

Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with explicit reasoning trajectories can enhance their reasoning abilities. However, acquiring such high-quality trajectory data typically demands meticulous supervision from humans or superior models, which can be either expensive or license-constrained. In this paper, we explore how far an LLM can improve its reasoning by self-synthesizing reasoning paths as training data without any additional supervision. Existing self-synthesizing methods, such as STaR, suffer from poor generalization to out-of-domain (OOD) reasoning tasks. We hypothesize it is due to that their self-synthesized reasoning paths are too task-specific, lacking general task-agnostic reasoning guidance. To address this, we propose Reasoning Generalist via Self-Improvement (ReGenesis), a method to self-synthesize reasoning paths as post-training data by progressing from abstract to concrete. More specifically, ReGenesis self-synthesizes reasoning paths by converting general reasoning guidelines into task-specific ones, generating reasoning structures, and subsequently transforming these structures into reasoning paths, without the need for human-designed task-specific examples used in existing methods. We show that ReGenesis achieves superior performance on all in-domain and OOD settings tested compared to existing methods. For six OOD tasks specifically, while previous methods exhibited an average performance decrease of approximately 4.6% after post training, ReGenesis delivers around 6.1% performance improvement. We also conduct in-depth analysis of our framework and show ReGenesis is effective across various LLMs and design choices.

More Than Positive and Negative: Communicating Fine Granularity in Medical Diagnosis

With the advance of deep learning, much progress has been made in building powerful artificial intelligence (AI) systems for automatic Chest X-ray (CXR) analysis. Most existing AI models are trained to be a binary classifier with the aim of distinguishing positive and negative cases. However, a large gap exists between the simple binary setting and complicated real-world medical scenarios. In this work, we reinvestigate the problem of automatic radiology diagnosis. We first observe that there is considerable diversity among cases within the positive class, which means simply classifying them as positive loses many important details. This motivates us to build AI models that can communicate fine-grained knowledge from medical images like human experts. To this end, we first propose a new benchmark on fine granularity learning from medical images. Specifically, we devise a division rule based on medical knowledge to divide positive cases into two subcategories, namely atypical positive and typical positive. Then, we propose a new metric termed AUC$^\text{FG}$ on the two subcategories for evaluation of the ability to separate them apart. With the proposed benchmark, we encourage the community to develop AI diagnosis systems that could better learn fine granularity from medical images. Last, we propose a simple risk modulation approach to this problem by only using coarse labels in training. Empirical results show that despite its simplicity, the proposed method achieves superior performance and thus serves as a strong baseline.

Measuring Trust for Exoskeleton Systems

Wearable robotic systems are a class of robots that have a tight coupling between human and robot movements. Similar to non-wearable robots, it is important to measure the trust a person has that the robot can support achieving the desired goals. While some measures of trust may apply to all potential robotic roles, there are key distinctions between wearable and non-wearable robotic systems. In this paper, we considered the dimensions and sub-dimensions of trust, with example attributes defined for exoskeleton applications. As the research community comes together to discuss measures of trust, it will be important to consider how the selected measures support interpreting trust along different dimensions for the variety of robotic systems that are emerging in the field in a way that leads to actionable outcomes.

Automatic Bug Detection in LLM-Powered Text-Based Games Using LLMs

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing interactive game design, enabling dynamic plotlines and interactions between players and non-player characters (NPCs). However, LLMs may exhibit flaws such as hallucinations, forgetfulness, or misinterpretations of prompts, causing logical inconsistencies and unexpected deviations from intended designs. Automated techniques for detecting such game bugs are still lacking. To address this, we propose a systematic LLM-based method for automatically identifying such bugs from player game logs, eliminating the need for collecting additional data such as post-play surveys. Applied to a text-based game DejaBoom!, our approach effectively identifies bugs inherent in LLM-powered interactive games, surpassing unstructured LLM-powered bug-catching methods and filling the gap in automated detection of logical and design flaws.

Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative

We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve a mystery under a fixed narrative premise, but can freely interact with non-player characters generated by GPT-4, a large language model. We recruit 28 gamers to play the game and use GPT-4 to automatically convert the game logs into a node-graph representing the narrative in the player's gameplay. We find that through their interactions with the non-deterministic behavior of the LLM, players are able to discover interesting new emergent nodes that were not a part of the original narrative but have potential for being fun and engaging. Players that created the most emergent nodes tended to be those that often enjoy games that facilitate discovery, exploration and experimentation.

Dataset Quantization

State-of-the-art deep neural networks are trained with large amounts (millions or even billions) of data. The expensive computation and memory costs make it difficult to train them on limited hardware resources, especially for recent popular large language models (LLM) and computer vision models (CV). Recent popular dataset distillation methods are thus developed, aiming to reduce the number of training samples via synthesizing small-scale datasets via gradient matching. However, as the gradient calculation is coupled with the specific network architecture, the synthesized dataset is biased and performs poorly when used for training unseen architectures. To address these limitations, we present dataset quantization (DQ), a new framework to compress large-scale datasets into small subsets which can be used for training any neural network architectures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DQ is able to generate condensed small datasets for training unseen network architectures with state-of-the-art compression ratios for lossless model training. To the best of our knowledge, DQ is the first method that can successfully distill large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1k with a state-of-the-art compression ratio. Notably, with 60% data from ImageNet and 20% data from Alpaca's instruction tuning data, the models can be trained with negligible or no performance drop for both vision tasks (including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection) as well as language tasks (including instruction tuning tasks such as BBH and DROP).

Thespian: Multi-Character Text Role-Playing Game Agents

Text-adventure games and text role-playing games are grand challenges for reinforcement learning game playing agents. Text role-playing games are open-ended environments where an agent must faithfully play a particular character. We consider the distinction between characters and actors, where an actor agent has the ability to play multiple characters. We present a framework we call a thespian agent that can learn to emulate multiple characters along with a soft prompt that can be used to direct it as to which character to play at any time. We further describe an attention mechanism that allows the agent to learn new characters that are based on previously learned characters in a few-shot fashion. We show that our agent outperforms the state of the art agent framework in multi-character learning and few-shot learning.

Ambient Adventures: Teaching ChatGPT on Developing Complex Stories

Imaginative play is an area of creativity that could allow robots to engage with the world around them in a much more personified way. Imaginary play can be seen as taking real objects and locations and using them as imaginary objects and locations in virtual scenarios. We adopted the story generation capability of large language models (LLMs) to obtain the stories used for imaginary play with human-written prompts. Those generated stories will be simplified and mapped into action sequences that can guide the agent in imaginary play. To evaluate whether the agent can successfully finish the imaginary play, we also designed a text adventure game to simulate a house as the playground for the agent to interact.