ReFF: Reinforcing Format Faithfulness in Language Models across Varied Tasks

Following formatting instructions to generate well-structured content is a fundamental yet often unmet capability for large language models (LLMs). To study this capability, which we refer to as format faithfulness, we present FormatBench, a comprehensive format-related benchmark. Compared to previous format-related benchmarks, FormatBench involves a greater variety of tasks in terms of application scenes (traditional NLP tasks, creative works, autonomous agency tasks), human-LLM interaction styles (single-turn instruction, multi-turn chat), and format types (inclusion, wrapping, length, coding). Moreover, each task in FormatBench is attached with a format checker program. Extensive experiments on the benchmark reveal that state-of-the-art open- and closed-source LLMs still suffer from severe deficiency in format faithfulness. By virtue of the decidable nature of formats, we propose to Reinforce Format Faithfulness (ReFF) to help LLMs generate formatted output as instructed without compromising general quality. Without any annotated data, ReFF can substantially improve the format faithfulness rate (e.g., from 21.6% in original LLaMA3 to 95.0% on caption segmentation task), while keep the general quality comparable (e.g., from 47.3 to 46.4 in F1 scores). Combined with labeled training data, ReFF can simultaneously improve both format faithfulness (e.g., from 21.6% in original LLaMA3 to 75.5%) and general quality (e.g., from 47.3 to 61.6 in F1 scores). We further offer an interpretability analysis to explain how ReFF improves both format faithfulness and general quality.

Optimizing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Tackling Arranging Bottleneck via Plan Augmentation

Multi-step reasoning ability of large language models is crucial in tasks such as math and tool utilization. Current researches predominantly focus on enhancing model performance in these multi-step reasoning tasks through fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) steps, yet these methods tend to be heuristic, without exploring nor resolving the bottleneck. In this study, we subdivide CoT reasoning into two parts: arranging and executing, and identify that the bottleneck of models mainly lies in arranging rather than executing. Based on this finding, we propose a plan-based training and reasoning method that guides models to generate arranging steps through abstract plans. We experiment on both math (GSM8k) and tool utilization (ToolBench) benchmarks. Results show that compared to fine-tuning directly with CoT data, our approach achieves a better performance on alleviating arranging bottleneck, particularly excelling in long-distance reasoning generalization.

FAME: Towards Factual Multi-Task Model Editing

Large language models (LLMs) embed extensive knowledge and utilize it to perform exceptionally well across various tasks. Nevertheless, outdated knowledge or factual errors within LLMs can lead to misleading or incorrect responses, causing significant issues in practical applications. To rectify the fatal flaw without the necessity for costly model retraining, various model editing approaches have been proposed to correct inaccurate knowledge within LLMs in a cost-efficient way. To evaluate these model editing methods, previous work introduced a series of datasets. However, most of the previous datasets only contain fabricated data in a single format, which diverges from real-world model editing scenarios, raising doubts about their usability in practice. To facilitate the application of model editing in real-world scenarios, we propose the challenge of practicality. To resolve such challenges and effectively enhance the capabilities of LLMs, we present FAME, an factual, comprehensive, and multi-task dataset, which is designed to enhance the practicality of model editing. We then propose SKEME, a model editing method that uses a novel caching mechanism to ensure synchronization with the real world. The experiments demonstrate that SKEME performs excellently across various tasks and scenarios, confirming its practicality.

Deterministic Reversible Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation

Data augmentation is an effective way to diversify corpora in machine translation, but previous methods may introduce semantic inconsistency between original and augmented data because of irreversible operations and random subword sampling procedures. To generate both symbolically diverse and semantically consistent augmentation data, we propose Deterministic Reversible Data Augmentation (DRDA), a simple but effective data augmentation method for neural machine translation. DRDA adopts deterministic segmentations and reversible operations to generate multi-granularity subword representations and pulls them closer together with multi-view techniques. With no extra corpora or model changes required, DRDA outperforms strong baselines on several translation tasks with a clear margin (up to 4.3 BLEU gain over Transformer) and exhibits good robustness in noisy, low-resource, and cross-domain datasets.

Medical Dialogue: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges

This paper surveys and organizes research works on medical dialog systems, which is an important yet challenging task. Although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from an application perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous technical perspective has to date remained noticeably absent. As a result, an overview of the categories, methods, and evaluation of medical dialogue systems remain limited and underspecified, hindering the further improvement of this area. To fill this gap, we investigate an initial pool of 325 papers from well-known computer science, and natural language processing conferences and journals, and make an overview. Recently, large language models have shown strong model capacity on downstream tasks, which also reshaped medical dialog systems' foundation. Despite the alluring practical application value, current medical dialogue systems still suffer from problems. To this end, this paper lists the grand challenges of medical dialog systems, especially of large language models.

CBSiMT: Mitigating Hallucination in Simultaneous Machine Translation with Weighted Prefix-to-Prefix Training

Simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) is a challenging task that requires starting translation before the full source sentence is available. Prefix-to-prefix framework is often applied to SiMT, which learns to predict target tokens using only a partial source prefix. However, due to the word order difference between languages, misaligned prefix pairs would make SiMT models suffer from serious hallucination problems, i.e. target outputs that are unfaithful to source inputs. Such problems can not only produce target tokens that are not supported by the source prefix, but also hinder generating the correct translation by receiving more source words. In this work, we propose a Confidence-Based Simultaneous Machine Translation (CBSiMT) framework, which uses model confidence to perceive hallucination tokens and mitigates their negative impact with weighted prefix-to-prefix training. Specifically, token-level and sentence-level weights are calculated based on model confidence and acted on the loss function. We explicitly quantify the faithfulness of the generated target tokens using the token-level weight, and employ the sentence-level weight to alleviate the disturbance of sentence pairs with serious word order differences on the model. Experimental results on MuST-C English-to-Chinese and WMT15 German-to-English SiMT tasks demonstrate that our method can consistently improve translation quality at most latency regimes, with up to 2 BLEU scores improvement at low latency.

Improving Underwater Visual Tracking With a Large Scale Dataset and Image Enhancement

This paper presents a new dataset and general tracker enhancement method for Underwater Visual Object Tracking (UVOT). Despite its significance, underwater tracking has remained unexplored due to data inaccessibility. It poses distinct challenges; the underwater environment exhibits non-uniform lighting conditions, low visibility, lack of sharpness, low contrast, camouflage, and reflections from suspended particles. Performance of traditional tracking methods designed primarily for terrestrial or open-air scenarios drops in such conditions. We address the problem by proposing a novel underwater image enhancement algorithm designed specifically to boost tracking quality. The method has resulted in a significant performance improvement, of up to 5.0% AUC, of state-of-the-art (SOTA) visual trackers. To develop robust and accurate UVOT methods, large-scale datasets are required. To this end, we introduce a large-scale UVOT benchmark dataset consisting of 400 video segments and 275,000 manually annotated frames enabling underwater training and evaluation of deep trackers. The videos are labelled with several underwater-specific tracking attributes including watercolor variation, target distractors, camouflage, target relative size, and low visibility conditions. The UVOT400 dataset, tracking results, and the code are publicly available on: https://github.com/BasitAlawode/UWVOT400.

Rethinking the Reasonability of the Test Set for Simultaneous Machine Translation

Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) models start translation before the end of the source sentence, making the translation monotonically aligned with the source sentence. However, the general full-sentence translation test set is acquired by offline translation of the entire source sentence, which is not designed for SimulMT evaluation, making us rethink whether this will underestimate the performance of SimulMT models. In this paper, we manually annotate a monotonic test set based on the MuST-C English-Chinese test set, denoted as SiMuST-C. Our human evaluation confirms the acceptability of our annotated test set. Evaluations on three different SimulMT models verify that the underestimation problem can be alleviated on our test set. Further experiments show that finetuning on an automatically extracted monotonic training set improves SimulMT models by up to 3 BLEU points.

Underwater Image Enhancement Using Pre-trained Transformer

The goal of this work is to apply a denoising image transformer to remove the distortion from underwater images and compare it with other similar approaches. Automatic restoration of underwater images plays an important role since it allows to increase the quality of the images, without the need for more expensive equipment. This is a critical example of the important role of the machine learning algorithms to support marine exploration and monitoring, reducing the need for human intervention like the manual processing of the images, thus saving time, effort, and cost. This paper is the first application of the image transformer-based approach called "Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer" to underwater images. This approach is tested on the UFO-120 dataset, containing 1500 images with the corresponding clean images.

Mengzi: Towards Lightweight yet Ingenious Pre-trained Models for Chinese

Although pre-trained models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable improvements in a wide range of NLP tasks, they are expensive in terms of time and resources. This calls for the study of training more efficient models with less computation but still ensures impressive performance. Instead of pursuing a larger scale, we are committed to developing lightweight yet more powerful models trained with equal or less computation and friendly to rapid deployment. This technical report releases our pre-trained model called Mengzi, which stands for a family of discriminative, generative, domain-specific, and multimodal pre-trained model variants, capable of a wide range of language and vision tasks. Compared with public Chinese PLMs, Mengzi is simple but more powerful. Our lightweight model has achieved new state-of-the-art results on the widely-used CLUE benchmark with our optimized pre-training and fine-tuning techniques. Without modifying the model architecture, our model can be easily employed as an alternative to existing PLMs. Our sources are available at https://github.com/Langboat/Mengzi.