Boosting Tool Use of Large Language Models via Iterative Reinforced Fine-Tuning

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools is a promising approach to enhance their capabilities. Effectively leveraging this potential for complex tasks hinges crucially on improving their ability to use tools. Synthesizing tool use data by simulating the real world is an effective approach. Nevertheless, our investigation reveals that training gains significantly decay as the scale of these data increases. The primary factor is the model's poor performance (a.k.a deficiency) in complex scenarios, which hinders learning from data using SFT. Driven by this objective, we propose an iterative reinforced fine-tuning strategy to continually guide the model to alleviate it. Specifically, we first identify deficiency-related data based on feedback from the policy model, then perform a Monte Carlo Tree Search to collect fine-grained preference pairs to pinpoint deficiencies. Subsequently, we update the policy model using preference optimization to align with ground truth and misalign with deficiencies. This process can be iterated. Moreover, before the iteration, we propose an easy-to-hard warm-up SFT strategy to facilitate learning from challenging data. The experiments demonstrate our models go beyond the same parametric models, outperforming many larger open-source and closed-source models. Additionally, it has achieved notable training gains in complex tool use scenarios.

Supervised Fine-Tuning: An Activation Pattern Optimization Process for Attention Heads

Though demonstrating promising potential, LLMs' performance on complex tasks, such as advanced mathematics and complex disease diagnosis is still unsatisfactory. A key issue is the present LLMs learn in a data-driven schema, while the instruction dataset about these complex tasks is both scarce and hard to collect or construct. On the contrary, a prominent phenomenon is that LLMs can learn rather fast on those simpler tasks with adequate prior knowledge captured during pretraining stage. Thus, if the prerequisite and mechanism of such rapid generalization could be elucidated, it could be highly beneficial in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the LLM's ability to learn complex tasks. Thus, in this paper, we employ a gradient-based method, to dissect the process that the SFT process adapts LLMs to downstream tasks via the perspective of attention patterns. We find that: (1) LLMs selectively activate task-specific attention heads during SFT; (2) activation patterns for complex tasks are combinations of basic task patterns; and (3) changes in a few parameters can significantly impact activation patterns after SFT on a small number of samples. Based on these insights, we conduct experiments to examine whether these conclusions could effectively enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of SFT, particularly in handling complex tasks and when instructional resources are scarce. Our research not only uncovers the underlying reasons behind LLMs' rapid learning and generalization mechanisms but also provides practical solutions for addressing data challenges in complex and specialized tasks.

Causal-Guided Active Learning for Debiasing Large Language Models

Although achieving promising performance, recent analyses show that current generative large language models (LLMs) may still capture dataset biases and utilize them for generation, leading to poor generalizability and harmfulness of LLMs. However, due to the diversity of dataset biases and the over-optimization problem, previous prior-knowledge-based debiasing methods and fine-tuning-based debiasing methods may not be suitable for current LLMs. To address this issue, we explore combining active learning with the causal mechanisms and propose a casual-guided active learning (CAL) framework, which utilizes LLMs itself to automatically and autonomously identify informative biased samples and induce the bias patterns. Then a cost-effective and efficient in-context learning based method is employed to prevent LLMs from utilizing dataset biases during generation. Experimental results show that CAL can effectively recognize typical biased instances and induce various bias patterns for debiasing LLMs.

Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are versatile and demonstrate impressive generalization ability by mining and learning information from extensive unlabeled text. However, they still exhibit reasoning mistakes, often stemming from knowledge deficiencies, which can affect their trustworthiness and reliability. Although users can provide diverse and comprehensive queries, obtaining sufficient and effective feedback is demanding. Furthermore, evaluating LLMs comprehensively with limited labeled samples is difficult. This makes it a challenge to diagnose and remedy the deficiencies of LLMs through rich label-free user queries. To tackle this challenge, we propose a label-free curricular meaningful learning framework (LaMer). LaMer first employs relative entropy to automatically diagnose and quantify the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs in a label-free setting. Next, to remedy the diagnosed knowledge deficiencies, we apply curricular meaningful learning: first, we adopt meaningful learning to adaptively synthesize augmentation data according to the severity of the deficiencies, and then design a curricular deficiency remedy strategy to remedy the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs progressively. Experiments show that LaMer efficiently and effectively diagnoses and remedies knowledge deficiencies in LLMs, improving various LLMs across seven out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning and language understanding benchmarks, achieving comparable results to baselines with just 40\% training data. LaMer even surpasses methods that rely on labeled datasets for deficiency diagnosis. In application, our label-free method can offer an effective knowledge deficiency diagnostic tool for efficient LLM development.

Enhancing Complex Causality Extraction via Improved Subtask Interaction and Knowledge Fusion

Event Causality Extraction (ECE) aims at extracting causal event pairs from texts. Despite ChatGPT's recent success, fine-tuning small models remains the best approach for the ECE task. However, existing fine-tuning based ECE methods cannot address all three key challenges in ECE simultaneously: 1) Complex Causality Extraction, where multiple causal-effect pairs occur within a single sentence; 2) Subtask~ Interaction, which involves modeling the mutual dependence between the two subtasks of ECE, i.e., extracting events and identifying the causal relationship between extracted events; and 3) Knowledge Fusion, which requires effectively fusing the knowledge in two modalities, i.e., the expressive pretrained language models and the structured knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose a unified ECE framework (UniCE to address all three issues in ECE simultaneously. Specifically, we design a subtask interaction mechanism to enable mutual interaction between the two ECE subtasks. Besides, we design a knowledge fusion mechanism to fuse knowledge in the two modalities. Furthermore, we employ separate decoders for each subtask to facilitate complex causality extraction. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms ChatGPT with a margin of at least 30% F1-score. More importantly, our model can also be used to effectively improve the ECE performance of ChatGPT via in-context learning.

Self-Evolving GPT: A Lifelong Autonomous Experiential Learner

To improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), researchers have explored providing LLMs with textual task-solving experience via prompts. However, they rely on manual efforts to acquire and apply such experience for each task, which is not feasible for the growing demand for LLMs and the variety of user questions. To address this issue, we design a lifelong autonomous experiential learning framework based on LLMs to explore whether LLMs can imitate human ability for learning and utilizing experience. It autonomously learns and accumulates experience through experience transfer and induction, categorizing the types of input questions to select which accumulated experience to employ for them. Experimental results on six widely used NLP datasets show that our framework performs reliably in each intermediate step and effectively improves the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. This validates the feasibility of using LLMs to mimic human experiential learning and application capabilities. Additionally, we provide a detailed analysis of the behavior of our framework at each step.

On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey

Within the evolving landscape of deep learning, the dilemma of data quantity and quality has been a long-standing problem. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a data-centric solution to alleviate the limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. However, current investigations into this field lack a unified framework and mostly stay on the surface. Therefore, this paper provides an organization of relevant studies based on a generic workflow of synthetic data generation. By doing so, we highlight the gaps within existing research and outline prospective avenues for future study. This work aims to shepherd the academic and industrial communities towards deeper, more methodical inquiries into the capabilities and applications of LLMs-driven synthetic data generation.

Towards Generalizable and Faithful Logic Reasoning over Natural Language via Resolution Refutation

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance in various natural language reasoning tasks. However, they still struggle with performing first-order logic reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. This is because the previous LLMs-based reasoning systems have the theoretical incompleteness issue. As a result, it can only address a limited set of simple reasoning problems, which significantly decreases their generalization ability. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, named Generalizable and Faithful Reasoner (GFaiR), which introduces the paradigm of resolution refutation. Resolution refutation has the capability to solve all first-order logic reasoning problems by extending reasoning rules and employing the principle of proof by contradiction, so our system's completeness can be improved by introducing resolution refutation. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms previous works by achieving state-of-the-art performances in complex scenarios while maintaining performances in simple scenarios. Besides, we observe that GFaiR is faithful to its reasoning process.

RU22Fact: Optimizing Evidence for Multilingual Explainable Fact-Checking on Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Fact-checking is the task of verifying the factuality of a given claim by examining the available evidence. High-quality evidence plays a vital role in enhancing fact-checking systems and facilitating the generation of explanations that are understandable to humans. However, the provision of both sufficient and relevant evidence for explainable fact-checking systems poses a challenge. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method based on a Large Language Model to automatically retrieve and summarize evidence from the Web. Furthermore, we construct RU22Fact, a novel multilingual explainable fact-checking dataset on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 of 16K samples, each containing real-world claims, optimized evidence, and referenced explanation. To establish a baseline for our dataset, we also develop an end-to-end explainable fact-checking system to verify claims and generate explanations. Experimental results demonstrate the prospect of optimized evidence in increasing fact-checking performance and also indicate the possibility of further progress in the end-to-end claim verification and explanation generation tasks.

Meaningful Learning: Advancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance

Large language models (LLMs) have developed impressive performance and strong explainability across various reasoning scenarios, marking a significant stride towards mimicking human-like intelligence. Despite this, when tasked with simple questions supported by a generic fact, LLMs often fail to provide consistent and precise answers, indicating a deficiency in abstract reasoning abilities. This has sparked a vigorous debate about whether LLMs are genuinely reasoning or merely memorizing. In light of this, we design a preliminary study to quantify and delve into the abstract reasoning abilities of existing LLMs. Our findings reveal a substantial discrepancy between their general reasoning and abstract reasoning performances. To relieve this problem, we tailor an abstract reasoning dataset (AbsR) together with a meaningful learning paradigm to teach LLMs how to leverage generic facts for reasoning purposes. The results show that our approach not only boosts the general reasoning performance of LLMs but also makes considerable strides towards their capacity for abstract reasoning, moving beyond simple memorization or imitation to a more nuanced understanding and application of generic facts.