Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks

In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, examining the evolution of Wikipedia through existing data and using simulations to explore potential risks. We begin by analyzing page views and article content to study Wikipedia's recent changes and assess the impact of LLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate how LLMs affect various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks related to Wikipedia, including machine translation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our findings and simulation results reveal that Wikipedia articles have been influenced by LLMs, with an impact of approximately 1%-2% in certain categories. If the machine translation benchmark based on Wikipedia is influenced by LLMs, the scores of the models may become inflated, and the comparative results among models might shift as well. Moreover, the effectiveness of RAG might decrease if the knowledge base becomes polluted by LLM-generated content. While LLMs have not yet fully changed Wikipedia's language and knowledge structures, we believe that our empirical findings signal the need for careful consideration of potential future risks.

CrowdSelect: Synthetic Instruction Data Selection with Multi-LLM Wisdom

Distilling advanced Large Language Models' instruction-following capabilities into smaller models using a selected subset has become a mainstream approach in model training. While existing synthetic instruction data selection strategies rely mainly on single-dimensional signals (i.e., reward scores, model perplexity), they fail to capture the complexity of instruction-following across diverse fields. Therefore, we investigate more diverse signals to capture comprehensive instruction-response pair characteristics and propose three foundational metrics that leverage Multi-LLM wisdom, informed by (1) diverse LLM responses and (2) reward model assessment. Building upon base metrics, we propose CrowdSelect, an integrated metric incorporating a clustering-based approach to maintain response diversity. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our foundation metrics consistently improve performance across 4 base models on MT-bench and Arena-Hard. CrowdSelect, efficiently incorporating all metrics, achieves state-of-the-art performance in both Full and LoRA fine-tuning, showing improvements of 4.81% on Arena-Hard and 11.1% on MT-bench with Llama-3.2-3b-instruct. We hope our findings will bring valuable insights for future research in this direction. Code are available at https://github.com/listentm/crowdselect.

CODESYNC: Synchronizing Large Language Models with Dynamic Code Evolution at Scale

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance in software engineering yet face challenges in adapting to continually evolving code knowledge, particularly regarding the frequent updates of third-party library APIs. This limitation, stemming from static pre-training datasets, often results in non-executable code or implementations with suboptimal safety and efficiency. To this end, this paper introduces CODESYNC, a data engine for identifying outdated code patterns and collecting real-time code knowledge updates from Python third-party libraries. Building upon CODESYNC, we develop CODESYNCBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark for assessing LLMs' ability to stay synchronized with code evolution, which covers real-world updates for 220 APIs from six Python libraries. Our benchmark offers 3,300 test cases across three evaluation tasks and an update-aware instruction tuning dataset consisting of 2,200 training samples. Extensive experiments on 14 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal that they struggle with dynamic code evolution, even with the support of advanced knowledge updating methods (e.g., DPO, ORPO, and SimPO). We believe that our benchmark can offer a strong foundation for the development of more effective methods for real-time code knowledge updating in the future. The experimental code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lucky-voyage/Code-Sync.

Can Large Language Models Understand Intermediate Representations?

Intermediate Representations (IRs) are essential in compiler design and program analysis, yet their comprehension by Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored. This paper presents a pioneering empirical study to investigate the capabilities of LLMs, including GPT-4, GPT-3, Gemma 2, LLaMA 3.1, and Code Llama, in understanding IRs. We analyze their performance across four tasks: Control Flow Graph (CFG) reconstruction, decompilation, code summarization, and execution reasoning. Our results indicate that while LLMs demonstrate competence in parsing IR syntax and recognizing high-level structures, they struggle with control flow reasoning, execution semantics, and loop handling. Specifically, they often misinterpret branching instructions, omit critical IR operations, and rely on heuristic-based reasoning, leading to errors in CFG reconstruction, IR decompilation, and execution reasoning. The study underscores the necessity for IR-specific enhancements in LLMs, recommending fine-tuning on structured IR datasets and integration of explicit control flow models to augment their comprehension and handling of IR-related tasks.

nvAgent: Automated Data Visualization from Natural Language via Collaborative Agent Workflow

Natural Language to Visualization (NL2Vis) seeks to convert natural-language descriptions into visual representations of given tables, empowering users to derive insights from large-scale data. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in automating code generation to transform tabular data into accessible visualizations. However, they often struggle with complex queries that require reasoning across multiple tables. To address this limitation, we propose a collaborative agent workflow, termed nvAgent, for NL2Vis. Specifically, nvAgent comprises three agents: a processor agent for database processing and context filtering, a composer agent for planning visualization generation, and a validator agent for code translation and output verification. Comprehensive evaluations on the new VisEval benchmark demonstrate that nvAgent consistently surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 7.88% improvement in single-table and a 9.23% improvement in multi-table scenarios. Qualitative analyses further highlight that nvAgent maintains nearly a 20% performance margin over previous models, underscoring its capacity to produce high-quality visual representations from complex, heterogeneous data sources.

How to Select Pre-Trained Code Models for Reuse? A Learning Perspective

Pre-training a language model and then fine-tuning it has shown to be an efficient and effective technique for a wide range of code intelligence tasks, such as code generation, code summarization, and vulnerability detection. However, pretraining language models on a large-scale code corpus is computationally expensive. Fortunately, many off-the-shelf Pre-trained Code Models (PCMs), such as CodeBERT, CodeT5, CodeGen, and Code Llama, have been released publicly. These models acquire general code understanding and generation capability during pretraining, which enhances their performance on downstream code intelligence tasks. With an increasing number of these public pre-trained models, selecting the most suitable one to reuse for a specific task is essential. In this paper, we systematically investigate the reusability of PCMs. We first explore three intuitive model selection methods that select by size, training data, or brute-force fine-tuning. Experimental results show that these straightforward techniques either perform poorly or suffer high costs. Motivated by these findings, we explore learning-based model selection strategies that utilize pre-trained models without altering their parameters. Specifically, we train proxy models to gauge the performance of pre-trained models, and measure the distribution deviation between a model's latent features and the task's labels, using their closeness as an indicator of model transferability. We conduct experiments on 100 widely-used opensource PCMs for code intelligence tasks, with sizes ranging from 42.5 million to 3 billion parameters. The results demonstrate that learning-based selection methods reduce selection time to 100 seconds, compared to 2,700 hours with brute-force fine-tuning, with less than 6% performance degradation across related tasks.

Interleaved Scene Graph for Interleaved Text-and-Image Generation Assessment

Many real-world user queries (e.g. "How do to make egg fried rice?") could benefit from systems capable of generating responses with both textual steps with accompanying images, similar to a cookbook. Models designed to generate interleaved text and images face challenges in ensuring consistency within and across these modalities. To address these challenges, we present ISG, a comprehensive evaluation framework for interleaved text-and-image generation. ISG leverages a scene graph structure to capture relationships between text and image blocks, evaluating responses on four levels of granularity: holistic, structural, block-level, and image-specific. This multi-tiered evaluation allows for a nuanced assessment of consistency, coherence, and accuracy, and provides interpretable question-answer feedback. In conjunction with ISG, we introduce a benchmark, ISG-Bench, encompassing 1,150 samples across 8 categories and 21 subcategories. This benchmark dataset includes complex language-vision dependencies and golden answers to evaluate models effectively on vision-centric tasks such as style transfer, a challenging area for current models. Using ISG-Bench, we demonstrate that recent unified vision-language models perform poorly on generating interleaved content. While compositional approaches that combine separate language and image models show a 111% improvement over unified models at the holistic level, their performance remains suboptimal at both block and image levels. To facilitate future work, we develop ISG-Agent, a baseline agent employing a "plan-execute-refine" pipeline to invoke tools, achieving a 122% performance improvement.

The Impact of Large Language Models in Academia: from Writing to Speaking

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly impacting human society, particularly in textual information. Based on more than 30,000 papers and 1,000 presentations from machine learning conferences, we examined and compared the words used in writing and speaking, representing the first large-scale investigating study of how LLMs influence the two main modes of verbal communication and expression within the same group of people. Our empirical results show that LLM-style words such as "significant" have been used more frequently in abstracts and oral presentations. The impact on speaking is beginning to emerge and is likely to grow in the future, calling attention to the implicit influence and ripple effect of LLMs on human society.

Self-Cognition in Large Language Models: An Exploratory Study

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various applications, they also raise concerns regarding self-cognition. In this paper, we perform a pioneering study to explore self-cognition in LLMs. Specifically, we first construct a pool of self-cognition instruction prompts to evaluate where an LLM exhibits self-cognition and four well-designed principles to quantify LLMs' self-cognition. Our study reveals that 4 of the 48 models on Chatbot Arena--specifically Command R, Claude3-Opus, Llama-3-70b-Instruct, and Reka-core--demonstrate some level of detectable self-cognition. We observe a positive correlation between model size, training data quality, and self-cognition level. Additionally, we also explore the utility and trustworthiness of LLM in the self-cognition state, revealing that the self-cognition state enhances some specific tasks such as creative writing and exaggeration. We believe that our work can serve as an inspiration for further research to study the self-cognition in LLMs.

UniGen: A Unified Framework for Textual Dataset Generation Using Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Llama3 have significantly impacted various fields by enabling high-quality synthetic data generation and reducing dependence on expensive human-generated datasets. Despite this, challenges remain in the areas of generalization, controllability, diversity, and truthfulness within the existing generative frameworks. To address these challenges, this paper presents UniGen, a comprehensive LLM-powered framework designed to produce diverse, accurate, and highly controllable datasets. UniGen is adaptable, supporting all types of text datasets and enhancing the generative process through innovative mechanisms. To augment data diversity, UniGen incorporates an attribute-guided generation module and a group checking feature. For accuracy, it employs a code-based mathematical assessment for label verification alongside a retrieval-augmented generation technique for factual validation. The framework also allows for user-specified constraints, enabling customization of the data generation process to suit particular requirements. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior quality of data generated by UniGen, and each module within UniGen plays a critical role in this enhancement. Additionally, UniGen is applied in two practical scenarios: benchmarking LLMs and data augmentation. The results indicate that UniGen effectively supports dynamic and evolving benchmarking, and that data augmentation improves LLM capabilities in various domains, including agent-oriented abilities and reasoning skills.