LearNAT: Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition for Large Language Models

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has emerged as a critical task for enabling seamless interaction with databases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in this domain. However, existing NL2SQL methods predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs leveraging prompt engineering, while open-source models typically require fine-tuning to acquire domain-specific knowledge. Despite these efforts, open-source LLMs struggle with complex NL2SQL tasks due to the indirect expression of user query objectives and the semantic gap between user queries and database schemas. Inspired by the application of reinforcement learning in mathematical problem-solving to encourage step-by-step reasoning in LLMs, we propose LearNAT (Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition), a novel framework that improves the performance of open-source LLMs on complex NL2SQL tasks through task decomposition and reinforcement learning. LearNAT introduces three key components: (1) a Decomposition Synthesis Procedure that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to guide efficient search and pruning strategies for task decomposition, (2) Margin-aware Reinforcement Learning, which employs fine-grained step-level optimization via DPO with AST margins, and (3) Adaptive Demonstration Reasoning, a mechanism for dynamically selecting relevant examples to enhance decomposition capabilities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that LearNAT enables a 7B-parameter open-source LLM to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4, while offering improved efficiency and accessibility.

GeoEdit: Geometric Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models

Regular updates are essential for maintaining up-to-date knowledge in large language models (LLMs). Consequently, various model editing methods have been developed to update specific knowledge within LLMs. However, training-based approaches often struggle to effectively incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Geometric Knowledge Editing (GeoEdit). GeoEdit utilizes the geometric relationships of parameter updates from fine-tuning to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations. By employing a direction-aware knowledge identification method, we avoid updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model's generalization ability. For the remaining neurons, we integrate both old and new knowledge for aligned directions and apply a "forget-then-learn" editing strategy for opposite directions. Additionally, we introduce an importance-guided task vector fusion technique that filters out redundant information and provides adaptive neuron-level weighting, further enhancing model editing performance. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of GeoEdit over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion for Language Model Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) is crucial for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without costly retraining. While recent model ensemble and model merging methods guided by parameter importance have gained popularity, they often struggle to balance knowledge transfer and forgetting, mainly due to the reliance on static importance estimates during sequential training. In this paper, we present Recurrent-KIF, a novel CL framework for Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion, which enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer. Inspired by human continual learning, Recurrent-KIF employs an inner loop that rapidly adapts to new tasks while identifying important parameters, coupled with an outer loop that globally manages the fusion of new and historical knowledge through redundant knowledge pruning and key knowledge merging. These inner-outer loops iteratively perform multiple rounds of fusion, allowing Recurrent-KIF to leverage intermediate training information and adaptively adjust fusion strategies based on evolving importance distributions. Extensive experiments on two CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B) demonstrate that Recurrent-KIF effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer.

DRESSing Up LLM: Efficient Stylized Question-Answering via Style Subspace Editing

We introduce DRESS, a novel approach for generating stylized large language model (LLM) responses through representation editing. Existing methods like prompting and fine-tuning are either insufficient for complex style adaptation or computationally expensive, particularly in tasks like NPC creation or character role-playing. Our approach leverages the over-parameterized nature of LLMs to disentangle a style-relevant subspace within the model's representation space to conduct representation editing, ensuring a minimal impact on the original semantics. By applying adaptive editing strengths, we dynamically adjust the steering vectors in the style subspace to maintain both stylistic fidelity and semantic integrity. We develop two stylized QA benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness of DRESS, and the results demonstrate significant improvements compared to baseline methods such as prompting and ITI. In short, DRESS is a lightweight, train-free solution for enhancing LLMs with flexible and effective style control, making it particularly useful for developing stylized conversational agents. Codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/ArthurLeoM/DRESS-LLM.

Enhancing Topic Interpretability for Neural Topic Modeling through Topic-wise Contrastive Learning

Data mining and knowledge discovery are essential aspects of extracting valuable insights from vast datasets. Neural topic models (NTMs) have emerged as a valuable unsupervised tool in this field. However, the predominant objective in NTMs, which aims to discover topics maximizing data likelihood, often lacks alignment with the central goals of data mining and knowledge discovery which is to reveal interpretable insights from large data repositories. Overemphasizing likelihood maximization without incorporating topic regularization can lead to an overly expansive latent space for topic modeling. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to NTMs that addresses this misalignment by introducing contrastive learning measures to assess topic interpretability. We propose a novel NTM framework, named ContraTopic, that integrates a differentiable regularizer capable of evaluating multiple facets of topic interpretability throughout the training process. Our regularizer adopts a unique topic-wise contrastive methodology, fostering both internal coherence within topics and clear external distinctions among them. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three diverse datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently produces topics with superior interpretability compared to state-of-the-art NTMs.

RAGraph: A General Retrieval-Augmented Graph Learning Framework

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become essential in interpreting relational data across various domains, yet, they often struggle to generalize to unseen graph data that differs markedly from training instances. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework called General Retrieval-Augmented Graph Learning (RAGraph), which brings external graph data into the general graph foundation model to improve model generalization on unseen scenarios. On the top of our framework is a toy graph vector library that we established, which captures key attributes, such as features and task-specific label information. During inference, the RAGraph adeptly retrieves similar toy graphs based on key similarities in downstream tasks, integrating the retrieved data to enrich the learning context via the message-passing prompting mechanism. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that RAGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art graph learning methods in multiple tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification across both dynamic and static datasets. Furthermore, extensive testing confirms that RAGraph consistently maintains high performance without the need for task-specific fine-tuning, highlighting its adaptability, robustness, and broad applicability.

Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective solution to the issues faced by Large Language Models (LLMs) in hallucination generation and knowledge obsolescence by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge. However, due to potential conflicts between internal and external knowledge, as well as retrieval noise, LLMs often struggle to effectively integrate external evidence, leading to a decline in performance. Although existing methods attempt to tackle these challenges, they often struggle to strike a balance between model adherence and robustness, resulting in significant learning variance. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose Parenting, a novel framework that decouples adherence and robustness within the parameter space of LLMs. Specifically, Parenting utilizes a key parameter mining method based on forward activation gain to identify and isolate the crucial parameter units that are strongly linked to adherence and robustness. Then, Parenting employs a type-guided tailored tuning strategy, applying specific and appropriate fine-tuning methods to parameter units representing different capabilities, aiming to achieve a balanced enhancement of adherence and robustness. Extensive experiments on various datasets and models validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our methods.

3DS: Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection's Case Study on LLM Medical Domain Adaptation

Large Language Models(LLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle in specialized domains like healthcare due to limited domain-specific knowledge.Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT) data construction for domain adaptation often relies on heuristic methods, such as GPT-4 annotation or manual data selection, with a data-centric focus on presumed diverse, high-quality datasets. However, these methods overlook the model's inherent knowledge distribution, introducing noise, redundancy, and irrelevant data, leading to a mismatch between the selected data and the model's learning task, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage model-centric data selection framework, Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection (3DS), which aligns data with the model's knowledge distribution for optimized adaptation. In Stage1, we apply Prompt-Driven Data Selection via Explicit Alignment, where the the model filters irrelevant or redundant data based on its internal knowledge. In Stage2, we perform Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection, where data selection is guided by our defined difficulty decomposition, using three metrics: Instruction Understanding, Response Confidence, and Response Correctness. Additionally, an attention-based importance weighting mechanism captures token importance for more accurate difficulty calibration. This two-stage approach ensures the selected data is not only aligned with the model's knowledge and preferences but also appropriately challenging for the model to learn, leading to more effective and targeted domain adaptation. In the case study of the medical domain, our extensive experiments on real-world healthcare datasets demonstrate the superiority of 3DS over exisiting methods in accuracy by over 5.29%. Our dataset and code will be open-sourced at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/3DS-E67F.

TPO: Aligning Large Language Models with Multi-branch & Multi-step Preference Trees

In the domain of complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning, recent advancements have proposed the use of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to suppress output of dispreferred responses, thereby enhancing the long-chain reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). To this end, these studies employed LLMs to generate preference trees via Tree-of-thoughts (ToT) and sample the paired preference responses required by the DPO algorithm. However, the DPO algorithm based on binary preference optimization is unable to learn multiple responses with varying degrees of preference/dispreference that provided by the preference trees, resulting in incomplete preference learning. In this work, we introduce Tree Preference Optimization (TPO), that does not sample paired preference responses from the preference tree; instead, it directly learns from the entire preference tree during the fine-tuning. Specifically, TPO formulates the language model alignment as a Preference List Ranking problem, where the policy can potentially learn more effectively from a ranked preference list of responses given the prompt. In addition, to further assist LLMs in identifying discriminative steps within long-chain reasoning and increase the relative reward margin in the preference list, TPO utilizes Adaptive Step Reward to adjust the reward values of each step in trajectory for performing fine-grained preference optimization. We carry out extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks to evaluate TPO. The experimental results indicate that TPO consistently outperforms DPO across three public large language models on four datasets.

ColaCare: Enhancing Electronic Health Record Modeling through Large Language Model-Driven Multi-Agent Collaboration

We introduce ColaCare, a framework that enhances Electronic Health Record (EHR) modeling through multi-agent collaboration driven by Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach seamlessly integrates domain-specific expert models with LLMs to bridge the gap between structured EHR data and text-based reasoning. Inspired by clinical consultations, ColaCare employs two types of agents: DoctorAgent and MetaAgent, which collaboratively analyze patient data. Expert models process and generate predictions from numerical EHR data, while LLM agents produce reasoning references and decision-making reports within the collaborative consultation framework. We additionally incorporate the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy (MSD) medical guideline within a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) module for authoritative evidence support. Extensive experiments conducted on four distinct EHR datasets demonstrate ColaCare's superior performance in mortality prediction tasks, underscoring its potential to revolutionize clinical decision support systems and advance personalized precision medicine. The code, complete prompt templates, more case studies, etc. are publicly available at the anonymous link: https://colacare.netlify.app.