Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs

We introduce MPLSandbox, an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). It can automatically identify the programming language of the code, compiling and executing it within an isolated sub-sandbox to ensure safety and stability. In addition, MPLSandbox also integrates both traditional and LLM-based code analysis tools, providing a comprehensive analysis of generated code. MPLSandbox can be effortlessly integrated into the training and deployment of LLMs to improve the quality and correctness of their generated code. It also helps researchers streamline their workflows for various LLM-based code-related tasks, reducing the development cost. To validate the effectiveness of MPLSandbox, we integrate it into training and deployment approaches, and also employ it to optimize workflows for a wide range of real-world code-related tasks. Our goal is to enhance researcher productivity on LLM-based code-related tasks by simplifying and automating workflows through delegation to MPLSandbox.

RM-Bench: Benchmarking Reward Models of Language Models with Subtlety and Style

Reward models are critical in techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Inference Scaling Laws, where they guide language model alignment and select optimal responses. Despite their importance, existing reward model benchmarks often evaluate models by asking them to distinguish between responses generated by models of varying power. However, this approach fails to assess reward models on subtle but critical content changes and variations in style, resulting in a low correlation with policy model performance. To this end, we introduce RM-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate reward models based on their sensitivity to subtle content differences and resistance to style biases. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RM-Bench strongly correlates with policy model performance, making it a reliable reference for selecting reward models to align language models effectively. We evaluate nearly 40 reward models on RM-Bench. Our results reveal that even state-of-the-art models achieve an average performance of only 46.6%, which falls short of random-level accuracy (50%) when faced with style bias interference. These findings highlight the significant room for improvement in current reward models. Related code and data are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/RM-Bench.

ChartifyText: Automated Chart Generation from Data-Involved Texts via LLM

Text documents with numerical values involved are widely used in various applications such as scientific research, economy, public health and journalism. However, it is difficult for readers to quickly interpret such data-involved texts and gain deep insights. To fill this research gap, this work aims to automatically generate charts to accurately convey the underlying data and ideas to readers, which is essentially a challenging task. The challenges originate from text ambiguities, intrinsic sparsity and uncertainty of data in text documents, and subjective sentiment differences. Specifically, we propose ChartifyText, a novel fully-automated approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert complex data-involved texts to expressive charts. It consists of two major modules: tabular data inference and expressive chart generation. The tabular data inference module employs systematic prompt engineering to guide the LLM (e.g., GPT-4) to infer table data, where data ranges, uncertainties, missing data values and corresponding subjective sentiments are explicitly considered. The expressive chart generation module augments standard charts with intuitive visual encodings and concise texts to accurately convey the underlying data and insights. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of ChartifyText on real-world data-involved text documents through case studies, in-depth interviews with three visualization experts, and a carefully-designed user study with 15 participants. The results demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of ChartifyText in helping readers efficiently and effectively make sense of data-involved texts.

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in coarse-grained video understanding, however, they struggle with fine-grained temporal grounding. In this paper, we introduce Grounded-VideoLLM, a novel Video-LLM adept at perceiving and reasoning over specific video moments in a fine-grained manner. We identify that current Video-LLMs have limitations for fine-grained video understanding since they lack effective temporal modeling and timestamp representation. In light of this, we sharpen our model by incorporating (1) an additional temporal stream to encode the relationships between frames and (2) discrete temporal tokens enriched with specific time knowledge to represent timestamps. To optimize the training of Grounded-VideoLLM, we employ a multi-stage training scheme, beginning with simple video-captioning tasks and progressively introducing video temporal grounding tasks of increasing complexity. To further enhance Grounded-VideoLLM's temporal reasoning capability, we also curate a grounded VideoQA dataset by an automatic annotation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Grounded-VideoLLM not only excels in fine-grained grounding tasks such as temporal sentence grounding, dense video captioning, and grounded VideoQA, but also shows great potential as a versatile video assistant for general video understanding.

Knowledge Graph Embedding by Normalizing Flows

A key to knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is to choose a proper representation space, e.g., point-wise Euclidean space and complex vector space. In this paper, we propose a unified perspective of embedding and introduce uncertainty into KGE from the view of group theory. Our model can incorporate existing models (i.e., generality), ensure the computation is tractable (i.e., efficiency) and enjoy the expressive power of complex random variables (i.e., expressiveness). The core idea is that we embed entities/relations as elements of a symmetric group, i.e., permutations of a set. Permutations of different sets can reflect different properties of embedding. And the group operation of symmetric groups is easy to compute. In specific, we show that the embedding of many existing models, point vectors, can be seen as elements of a symmetric group. To reflect uncertainty, we first embed entities/relations as permutations of a set of random variables. A permutation can transform a simple random variable into a complex random variable for greater expressiveness, called a normalizing flow. We then define scoring functions by measuring the similarity of two normalizing flows, namely NFE. We construct several instantiating models and prove that they are able to learn logical rules. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of introducing uncertainty and our model. The code is available at https://github.com/changyi7231/NFE.

Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation

This study presents a novel evaluation framework for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task. It aims to diagnose current models for various instruction categories at a finer-grained level. The framework is structured around the context-free grammar (CFG) of the task. The CFG serves as the basis for the problem decomposition and the core premise of the instruction categories design. We propose a semi-automatic method for CFG construction with the help of Large-Language Models (LLMs). Then, we induct and generate data spanning five principal instruction categories (i.e. direction change, landmark recognition, region recognition, vertical movement, and numerical comprehension). Our analysis of different models reveals notable performance discrepancies and recurrent issues. The stagnation of numerical comprehension, heavy selective biases over directional concepts, and other interesting findings contribute to the development of future language-guided navigation systems.

S$^3$c-Math: Spontaneous Step-level Self-correction Makes Large Language Models Better Mathematical Reasoners

Self-correction is a novel method that can stimulate the potential reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It involves detecting and correcting errors during the inference process when LLMs solve reasoning problems. However, recent works do not regard self-correction as a spontaneous and intrinsic capability of LLMs. Instead, such correction is achieved through post-hoc generation, external knowledge introduction, multi-model collaboration, and similar techniques. In this paper, we propose a series of mathematical LLMs called S$^3$c-Math, which are able to perform Spontaneous Step-level Self-correction for Mathematical reasoning. This capability helps LLMs to recognize whether their ongoing inference tends to contain errors and simultaneously correct these errors to produce a more reliable response. We proposed a method, which employs a step-level sampling approach to construct step-wise self-correction data for achieving such ability. Additionally, we implement a training strategy that uses above constructed data to equip LLMs with spontaneous step-level self-correction capacities. Our data and methods have been demonstrated to be effective across various foundation LLMs, consistently showing significant progress in evaluations on GSM8K, MATH, and other mathematical benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the spontaneous step-level self-correction ability of LLMs in mathematical reasoning.

Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are versatile and demonstrate impressive generalization ability by mining and learning information from extensive unlabeled text. However, they still exhibit reasoning mistakes, often stemming from knowledge deficiencies, which can affect their trustworthiness and reliability. Although users can provide diverse and comprehensive queries, obtaining sufficient and effective feedback is demanding. Furthermore, evaluating LLMs comprehensively with limited labeled samples is difficult. This makes it a challenge to diagnose and remedy the deficiencies of LLMs through rich label-free user queries. To tackle this challenge, we propose a label-free curricular meaningful learning framework (LaMer). LaMer first employs relative entropy to automatically diagnose and quantify the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs in a label-free setting. Next, to remedy the diagnosed knowledge deficiencies, we apply curricular meaningful learning: first, we adopt meaningful learning to adaptively synthesize augmentation data according to the severity of the deficiencies, and then design a curricular deficiency remedy strategy to remedy the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs progressively. Experiments show that LaMer efficiently and effectively diagnoses and remedies knowledge deficiencies in LLMs, improving various LLMs across seven out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning and language understanding benchmarks, achieving comparable results to baselines with just 40\% training data. LaMer even surpasses methods that rely on labeled datasets for deficiency diagnosis. In application, our label-free method can offer an effective knowledge deficiency diagnostic tool for efficient LLM development.

MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations

Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement

This paper introduces the innovative "LLMs-as-Instructors" framework, which leverages the advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously enhance the training of smaller target models. Inspired by the theory of "Learning from Errors", this framework employs an instructor LLM to meticulously analyze the specific errors within a target model, facilitating targeted and efficient training cycles. Within this framework, we implement two strategies: "Learning from Error," which focuses solely on incorrect responses to tailor training data, and "Learning from Error by Contrast", which uses contrastive learning to analyze both correct and incorrect responses for a deeper understanding of errors. Our empirical studies, conducted with several open-source models, demonstrate significant improvements across multiple benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, coding abilities, and factual knowledge. Notably, the refined Llama-3-8b-Instruction has outperformed ChatGPT, illustrating the effectiveness of our approach. By leveraging the strengths of both strategies, we have attained a more balanced performance improvement on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Our code can be found at https://yingjiahao14.github.io/LLMs-as-Instructors-pages/.