High-entropy Advantage in Neural Networks' Generalizability

While the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics ignites a worldwide discussion on the origins of neural networks and their foundational links to physics, modern machine learning research predominantly focuses on computational and algorithmic advancements, overlooking a picture of physics. Here we introduce the concept of entropy into neural networks by reconceptualizing them as hypothetical physical systems where each parameter is a non-interacting 'particle' within a one-dimensional space. By employing a Wang-Landau algorithms, we construct the neural networks' (with up to 1 million parameters) entropy landscapes as functions of training loss and test accuracy (or loss) across four distinct machine learning tasks, including arithmetic question, real-world tabular data, image recognition, and language modeling. Our results reveal the existence of \textit{entropy advantage}, where the high-entropy states generally outperform the states reached via classical training optimizer like stochastic gradient descent. We also find this advantage is more pronounced in narrower networks, indicating a need of different training optimizers tailored to different sizes of neural networks.

DiffPO: Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization for Efficient Inference-Time Alignment of Large Language Models

Inference-time alignment provides an efficient alternative for aligning LLMs with humans. However, these approaches still face challenges, such as limited scalability due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference phase. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization (\model), which provides an efficient and policy-agnostic solution for aligning LLMs with humans. By directly performing alignment at sentence level, \model~avoids the time latency associated with token-level generation. Designed as a plug-and-play module, \model~can be seamlessly integrated with various base models to enhance their alignment. Extensive experiments on AlpacaEval 2, MT-bench, and HH-RLHF demonstrate that \model~achieves superior alignment performance across various settings, achieving a favorable trade-off between alignment quality and inference-time latency. Furthermore, \model~demonstrates model-agnostic scalability, significantly improving the performance of large models such as Llama-3-70B.

Exploring Intrinsic Normal Prototypes within a Single Image for Universal Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection (AD) is essential for industrial inspection, yet existing methods typically rely on ``comparing'' test images to normal references from a training set. However, variations in appearance and positioning often complicate the alignment of these references with the test image, limiting detection accuracy. We observe that most anomalies manifest as local variations, meaning that even within anomalous images, valuable normal information remains. We argue that this information is useful and may be more aligned with the anomalies since both the anomalies and the normal information originate from the same image. Therefore, rather than relying on external normality from the training set, we propose INP-Former, a novel method that extracts Intrinsic Normal Prototypes (INPs) directly from the test image. Specifically, we introduce the INP Extractor, which linearly combines normal tokens to represent INPs. We further propose an INP Coherence Loss to ensure INPs can faithfully represent normality for the testing image. These INPs then guide the INP-Guided Decoder to reconstruct only normal tokens, with reconstruction errors serving as anomaly scores. Additionally, we propose a Soft Mining Loss to prioritize hard-to-optimize samples during training. INP-Former achieves state-of-the-art performance in single-class, multi-class, and few-shot AD tasks across MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD, positioning it as a versatile and universal solution for AD. Remarkably, INP-Former also demonstrates some zero-shot AD capability. Code is available at:https://github.com/luow23/INP-Former.

PAD: Personalized Alignment at Decoding-Time

Aligning with personalized preferences, which vary significantly across cultural, educational, and political differences, poses a significant challenge due to the computational costs and data demands of traditional alignment methods. In response, this paper presents Personalized Alignment at Decoding-time (PAD), a novel framework designed to align LLM outputs with diverse personalized preferences during the inference phase, eliminating the need for additional training. By introducing a unique personalized reward modeling strategy, this framework decouples the text generation process from personalized preferences, facilitating the generation of generalizable token-level personalized rewards. The PAD algorithm leverages these rewards to guide the decoding process, dynamically tailoring the base model's predictions to personalized preferences. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that PAD not only outperforms existing training-based alignment methods in terms of aligning with diverse preferences but also shows significant generalizability to preferences unseen during training and scalability across different base models. This work advances the capability of LLMs to meet user needs in real-time applications, presenting a substantial step forward in personalized LLM alignment.

Does Correction Remain A Problem For Large Language Models?

As large language models, such as GPT, continue to advance the capabilities of natural language processing (NLP), the question arises: does the problem of correction still persist? This paper investigates the role of correction in the context of large language models by conducting two experiments. The first experiment focuses on correction as a standalone task, employing few-shot learning techniques with GPT-like models for error correction. The second experiment explores the notion of correction as a preparatory task for other NLP tasks, examining whether large language models can tolerate and perform adequately on texts containing certain levels of noise or errors. By addressing these experiments, we aim to shed light on the significance of correction in the era of large language models and its implications for various NLP applications.

Multijugate Dual Learning for Low-Resource Task-Oriented Dialogue System

Dialogue data in real scenarios tend to be sparsely available, rendering data-starved end-to-end dialogue systems trained inadequately. We discover that data utilization efficiency in low-resource scenarios can be enhanced by mining alignment information uncertain utterance and deterministic dialogue state. Therefore, we innovatively implement dual learning in task-oriented dialogues to exploit the correlation of heterogeneous data. In addition, the one-to-one duality is converted into a multijugate duality to reduce the influence of spurious correlations in dual training for generalization. Without introducing additional parameters, our method could be implemented in arbitrary networks. Extensive empirical analyses demonstrate that our proposed method improves the effectiveness of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems under multiple benchmarks and obtains state-of-the-art results in low-resource scenarios.

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks; however, their efficacy in more challenging and domain-specific tasks remains less explored. This paper introduces the GAOKAO-Benchmark (GAOKAO-Bench), an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese Gaokao examination as test samples for evaluating large language models.In order to align the evaluation results with humans as much as possible, we designed a method based on zero-shot prompts to analyze the accuracy and scoring rate of the model by dividing the questions into subjective and objective types. We evaluated the ChatGPT model on GAOKAO-Benchmark performance.Our findings reveal that the ChatGPT model excels in tackling objective questions, while also shedding light on its shortcomings and areas for improvement. To further scrutinize the model's responses, we incorporate human evaluations.In conclusion, this research contributes a robust evaluation benchmark for future large-scale language models and offers valuable insights into the limitations of such models.

Learning Global-Local Correspondence with Semantic Bottleneck for Logical Anomaly Detection

This paper presents a novel framework, named Global-Local Correspondence Framework (GLCF), for visual anomaly detection with logical constraints. Visual anomaly detection has become an active research area in various real-world applications, such as industrial anomaly detection and medical disease diagnosis. However, most existing methods focus on identifying local structural degeneration anomalies and often fail to detect high-level functional anomalies that involve logical constraints. To address this issue, we propose a two-branch approach that consists of a local branch for detecting structural anomalies and a global branch for detecting logical anomalies. To facilitate local-global feature correspondence, we introduce a novel semantic bottleneck enabled by the visual Transformer. Moreover, we develop feature estimation networks for each branch separately to detect anomalies. Our proposed framework is validated using various benchmarks, including industrial datasets, Mvtec AD, Mvtec Loco AD, and the Retinal-OCT medical dataset. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing methods, particularly in detecting logical anomalies.

Investigating Glyph Phonetic Information for Chinese Spell Checking: What Works and What's Next

While pre-trained Chinese language models have demonstrated impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, the Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task remains a challenge. Previous research has explored using information such as glyphs and phonetics to improve the ability to distinguish misspelled characters, with good results. However, the generalization ability of these models is not well understood: it is unclear whether they incorporate glyph-phonetic information and, if so, whether this information is fully utilized. In this paper, we aim to better understand the role of glyph-phonetic information in the CSC task and suggest directions for improvement. Additionally, we propose a new, more challenging, and practical setting for testing the generalizability of CSC models. All code is made publicly available.

SDCL: Self-Distillation Contrastive Learning for Chinese Spell Checking

Due to the ambiguity of homophones, Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) has widespread applications. Existing systems typically utilize BERT for text encoding. However, CSC requires the model to account for both phonetic and graphemic information. To adapt BERT to the CSC task, we propose a token-level self-distillation contrastive learning method. We employ BERT to encode both the corrupted and corresponding correct sentence. Then, we use contrastive learning loss to regularize corrupted tokens' hidden states to be closer to counterparts in the correct sentence. On three CSC datasets, we confirmed our method provides a significant improvement above baselines.