Beyond IID: Optimizing Instruction Learning from the Perspective of Instruction Interaction and Dependency

With the availability of various instruction datasets, a pivotal challenge is how to effectively select and integrate these instructions to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Previous research mainly focuses on selecting individual high-quality instructions. However, these works overlooked the joint interactions and dependencies between different categories of instructions, leading to suboptimal selection strategies. Moreover, the nature of these interaction patterns remains largely unexplored, let alone optimize the instruction set with regard to them. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we: (1) systemically investigate interaction and dependency patterns between different categories of instructions, (2) manage to optimize the instruction set concerning the interaction patterns using a linear programming-based method, and optimize the learning schema of SFT using an instruction dependency taxonomy guided curriculum learning. Experimental results across different LLMs demonstrate improved performance over strong baselines on widely adopted benchmarks.

AquilaMoE: Efficient Training for MoE Models with Scale-Up and Scale-Out Strategies

In recent years, with the rapid application of large language models across various fields, the scale of these models has gradually increased, and the resources required for their pre-training have grown exponentially. Training an LLM from scratch will cost a lot of computation resources while scaling up from a smaller model is a more efficient approach and has thus attracted significant attention. In this paper, we present AquilaMoE, a cutting-edge bilingual 8*16B Mixture of Experts (MoE) language model that has 8 experts with 16 billion parameters each and is developed using an innovative training methodology called EfficientScale. This approach optimizes performance while minimizing data requirements through a two-stage process. The first stage, termed Scale-Up, initializes the larger model with weights from a pre-trained smaller model, enabling substantial knowledge transfer and continuous pretraining with significantly less data. The second stage, Scale-Out, uses a pre-trained dense model to initialize the MoE experts, further enhancing knowledge transfer and performance. Extensive validation experiments on 1.8B and 7B models compared various initialization schemes, achieving models that maintain and reduce loss during continuous pretraining. Utilizing the optimal scheme, we successfully trained a 16B model and subsequently the 8*16B AquilaMoE model, demonstrating significant improvements in performance and training efficiency.

SpikeLM: Towards General Spike-Driven Language Modeling via Elastic Bi-Spiking Mechanisms

Towards energy-efficient artificial intelligence similar to the human brain, the bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs) have advantages of biological plausibility, event-driven sparsity, and binary activation. Recently, large-scale language models exhibit promising generalization capability, making it a valuable issue to explore more general spike-driven models. However, the binary spikes in existing SNNs fail to encode adequate semantic information, placing technological challenges for generalization. This work proposes the first fully spiking mechanism for general language tasks, including both discriminative and generative ones. Different from previous spikes with {0,1} levels, we propose a more general spike formulation with bi-directional, elastic amplitude, and elastic frequency encoding, while still maintaining the addition nature of SNNs. In a single time step, the spike is enhanced by direction and amplitude information; in spike frequency, a strategy to control spike firing rate is well designed. We plug this elastic bi-spiking mechanism in language modeling, named SpikeLM. It is the first time to handle general language tasks with fully spike-driven models, which achieve much higher accuracy than previously possible. SpikeLM also greatly bridges the performance gap between SNNs and ANNs in language modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xingrun-Xing/SpikeLM.

KLoB: a Benchmark for Assessing Knowledge Locating Methods in Language Models

Recently, Locate-Then-Edit paradigm has emerged as one of the main approaches in changing factual knowledge stored in the Language models. However, there is a lack of research on whether present locating methods can pinpoint the exact parameters embedding the desired knowledge. Moreover, although many researchers have questioned the validity of locality hypothesis of factual knowledge, no method is provided to test the a hypothesis for more in-depth discussion and research. Therefore, we introduce KLoB, a benchmark examining three essential properties that a reliable knowledge locating method should satisfy. KLoB can serve as a benchmark for evaluating existing locating methods in language models, and can contributes a method to reassessing the validity of locality hypothesis of factual knowledge. Our is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/juyiming/KLoB}.

Unsupervised Text Style Transfer with Deep Generative Models

We present a general framework for unsupervised text style transfer with deep generative models. The framework models each sentence-label pair in the non-parallel corpus as partially observed from a complete quadruplet which additionally contains two latent codes representing the content and style, respectively. These codes are learned by exploiting dependencies inside the observed data. Then a sentence is transferred by manipulating them. Our framework is able to unify previous embedding and prototype methods as two special forms. It also provides a principled perspective to explain previously proposed techniques in the field such as aligned encoder and adversarial training. We further conduct experiments on three benchmarks. Both automatic and human evaluation results show that our methods achieve better or competitive results compared to several strong baselines.

Generating Hierarchical Explanations on Text Classification Without Connecting Rules

The opaqueness of deep NLP models has motivated the development of methods for interpreting how deep models predict. Recently, work has introduced hierarchical attribution, which produces a hierarchical clustering of words, along with an attribution score for each cluster. However, existing work on hierarchical attribution all follows the connecting rule, limiting the cluster to a continuous span in the input text. We argue that the connecting rule as an additional prior may undermine the ability to reflect the model decision process faithfully. To this end, we propose to generate hierarchical explanations without the connecting rule and introduce a framework for generating hierarchical clusters. Experimental results and further analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed method in providing high-quality explanations for reflecting model predicting process.

The Logic Traps in Evaluating Post-hoc Interpretations

Post-hoc interpretation aims to explain a trained model and reveal how the model arrives at a decision. Though research on post-hoc interpretations has developed rapidly, one growing pain in this field is the difficulty in evaluating interpretations. There are some crucial logic traps behind existing evaluation methods, which are ignored by most works. In this opinion piece, we summarize four kinds evaluation methods and point out the corresponding logic traps behind them. We argue that we should be clear about these traps rather than ignore them and draw conclusions assertively.