Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. This may lead to suboptimal data efficiency and model performance. In response, we propose uncertainty-aware learning (UAL) to improve the model alignment of different task scenarios, by introducing the sample uncertainty (elicited from more capable LLMs). We implement UAL in a simple fashion -- adaptively setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. Analysis shows that our UAL indeed facilitates better token clustering in the feature space, validating our hypothesis. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our UAL significantly and consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning. Notably, LLMs aligned in a mixed scenario have achieved an average improvement of 10.62\% on high-entropy tasks (i.e., AlpacaEval leaderboard), and 1.81\% on complex low-entropy tasks (i.e., MetaMath and GSM8K).

LLM-DA: Data Augmentation via Large Language Models for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Despite the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs), their performance on information extraction tasks is still not entirely satisfactory. However, their remarkable rewriting capabilities and extensive world knowledge offer valuable insights to improve these tasks. In this paper, we propose $LLM-DA$, a novel data augmentation technique based on LLMs for the few-shot NER task. To overcome the limitations of existing data augmentation methods that compromise semantic integrity and address the uncertainty inherent in LLM-generated text, we leverage the distinctive characteristics of the NER task by augmenting the original data at both the contextual and entity levels. Our approach involves employing 14 contextual rewriting strategies, designing entity replacements of the same type, and incorporating noise injection to enhance robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing NER model performance with limited data. Furthermore, additional analyses provide further evidence supporting the assertion that the quality of the data we generate surpasses that of other existing methods.

RRescue: Ranking LLM Responses to Enhance Reasoning Over Context

Effectively using a given context is paramount for large language models. A context window can include task specifications, retrieved documents, previous conversations, and even model self-reflections, functioning similarly to episodic memory. While efforts are being made to expand the context window, studies indicate that LLMs do not use their context optimally for response generation. In this paper, we present a novel approach to optimize LLMs using ranking metrics, which teaches LLMs to rank a collection of contextually-grounded candidate responses. Rather than a traditional full ordering, we advocate for a partial ordering. This is because achieving consensus on the perfect order for system responses can be challenging. Our partial ordering is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be acquired through human labelers, heuristic functions, or model distillation. We test our system's improved contextual understanding using the latest benchmarks, including a new multi-document question answering dataset. We conduct ablation studies to understand crucial factors, such as how to gather candidate responses, determine their most suitable order, and balance supervised fine-tuning with ranking metrics. Our approach, named RRescue, suggests a promising avenue for enhancing LLMs' contextual understanding via response ranking.

DDC-PIM: Efficient Algorithm/Architecture Co-design for Doubling Data Capacity of SRAM-based Processing-In-Memory

Processing-in-memory (PIM), as a novel computing paradigm, provides significant performance benefits from the aspect of effective data movement reduction. SRAM-based PIM has been demonstrated as one of the most promising candidates due to its endurance and compatibility. However, the integration density of SRAM-based PIM is much lower than other non-volatile memory-based ones, due to its inherent 6T structure for storing a single bit. Within comparable area constraints, SRAM-based PIM exhibits notably lower capacity. Thus, aiming to unleash its capacity potential, we propose DDC-PIM, an efficient algorithm/architecture co-design methodology that effectively doubles the equivalent data capacity. At the algorithmic level, we propose a filter-wise complementary correlation (FCC) algorithm to obtain a bitwise complementary pair. At the architecture level, we exploit the intrinsic cross-coupled structure of 6T SRAM to store the bitwise complementary pair in their complementary states ($Q/\overline{Q}$), thereby maximizing the data capacity of each SRAM cell. The dual-broadcast input structure and reconfigurable unit support both depthwise and pointwise convolution, adhering to the requirements of various neural networks. Evaluation results show that DDC-PIM yields about $2.84\times$ speedup on MobileNetV2 and $2.69\times$ on EfficientNet-B0 with negligible accuracy loss compared with PIM baseline implementation. Compared with state-of-the-art SRAM-based PIM macros, DDC-PIM achieves up to $8.41\times$ and $2.75\times$ improvement in weight density and area efficiency, respectively.