Daily Papers

Creating a system that can have meaningful conversations with humans to help accomplish tasks is one of the ultimate goals of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has defined the meaning of AI since the beginning. A lot has been accomplished in this area recently, with voice assistant products entering our daily lives and chat bot systems becoming commonplace in customer service. At first glance there seems to be no shortage of options for dialogue systems. However, the frequently deployed dialogue systems today seem to all struggle with a critical weakness - they are hard to build and harder to maintain. At the core of the struggle is the need to script every single turn of interactions between the bot and the human user. This makes the dialogue systems more difficult to maintain as the tasks become more complex and more tasks are added to the system. In this paper, we propose Converse, a flexible tree-based modular task-oriented dialogue system. Converse uses an and-or tree structure to represent tasks and offers powerful multi-task dialogue management. Converse supports task dependency and task switching, which are unique features compared to other open-source dialogue frameworks. At the same time, Converse aims to make the bot building process easy and simple, for both professional and non-professional software developers. The code is available at https://github.com/salesforce/Converse.

Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting. These models undergo training on extensive datasets that encompass segments of the Internet and subsequently undergo fine-tuning tailored to specific tasks. Notably, they exhibit proficiency in tasks such as translation, summarization, question answering, and creative writing, even in the absence of explicit training for those particular tasks. While they have shown substantial improvement in the multilingual tasks their performance in the code switching, especially for machine translation remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we present an extensive study on the code switching task specifically for the machine translation task comparing multiple LLMs. Our results indicate that despite the LLMs having promising results in the certain tasks, the models with relatively lesser complexity outperform the multilingual large language models in the machine translation task. We posit that the efficacy of multilingual large language models in contextual code switching is constrained by their training methodologies. In contrast, relatively smaller models, when trained and fine-tuned on bespoke datasets, may yield superior results in comparison to the majority of multilingual models.

The pretrain+fine-tune paradigm is foundational in deploying large language models (LLMs) across a diverse range of downstream applications. Among these, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out for its parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), producing numerous off-the-shelf task-specific LoRA adapters. However, this approach requires explicit task intention selection, posing challenges for automatic task sensing and switching during inference with multiple existing LoRA adapters embedded in a single LLM. In this work, we introduce MeteoRA (Multiple-Tasks embedded LoRA), a scalable multi-knowledge LoRA fusion framework designed for LLMs. MeteoRA integrates various LoRA adapters in a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) style into the base LLM, enabling the model to automatically select the most pertinent adapter based on the task input. This advancement significantly enhances the LLM's capability to handle composite tasks that require different adapters to solve various components of the problem. Our evaluations, featuring the LlaMA2-13B and LlaMA3-8B base models equipped with off-the-shelf 28 LoRA adapters through MeteoRA, demonstrate equivalent performance with the individual adapters. Furthermore, both base models equipped with MeteoRA achieve superior performance in sequentially solving composite tasks with ten problems in only a single inference process, highlighting the ability of timely intention switching in MeteoRA embedded LLMs.

For multilingual sequence-to-sequence pretrained language models (multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs), e.g. mBART, the self-supervised pretraining task is trained on a wide range of monolingual languages, e.g. 25 languages from CommonCrawl, while the downstream cross-lingual tasks generally progress on a bilingual language subset, e.g. English-German, making there exists the data discrepancy, namely domain discrepancy, and cross-lingual learning objective discrepancy, namely task discrepancy, between the pretraining and finetuning stages. To bridge the above cross-lingual domain and task gaps, we extend the vanilla pretrain-finetune pipeline with extra code-switching restore task. Specifically, the first stage employs the self-supervised code-switching restore task as a pretext task, allowing the multilingual Seq2Seq PLMs to acquire some in-domain alignment information. And for the second stage, we fine-tune the model on downstream data normally. Experiments on both NLG evaluation (12 bilingual translation tasks, 30 zero-shot translation tasks, and 2 cross-lingual summarization tasks) and NLU evaluation (7 cross-lingual natural language inference tasks) show our model outperforms the strong baseline mBART with standard finetuning strategy, consistently. Analyses indicate our approach could narrow the Euclidean distance of cross-lingual sentence representations, and improve the model generalization with trivial computational cost. We release the code at: https://github.com/zanchangtong/CSR4mBART.

The goal of lifelong learning is to continuously learn from non-stationary distributions, where the non-stationarity is typically imposed by a sequence of distinct tasks. Prior works have mostly considered idealistic settings, where the identity of tasks is known at least at training. In this paper we focus on a fundamentally harder, so-called task-agnostic setting where the task identities are not known and the learning machine needs to infer them from the observations. Our algorithm, which we call TAME (Task-Agnostic continual learning using Multiple Experts), automatically detects the shift in data distributions and switches between task expert networks in an online manner. At training, the strategy for switching between tasks hinges on an extremely simple observation that for each new coming task there occurs a statistically-significant deviation in the value of the loss function that marks the onset of this new task. At inference, the switching between experts is governed by the selector network that forwards the test sample to its relevant expert network. The selector network is trained on a small subset of data drawn uniformly at random. We control the growth of the task expert networks as well as selector network by employing online pruning. Our experimental results show the efficacy of our approach on benchmark continual learning data sets, outperforming the previous task-agnostic methods and even the techniques that admit task identities at both training and testing, while at the same time using a comparable model size.

The rapid evolution of software libraries presents a significant challenge for code generation models, which must adapt to frequent version updates while maintaining compatibility with previous versions. Existing code completion benchmarks often overlook this dynamic aspect, and the one that does consider it relies on static code prediction tasks without execution-based evaluation, offering a limited perspective on a model's practical usability. To address this gap, we introduce \GitChameleon{}, a novel, manually curated dataset comprising 116 Python code completion problems, each conditioned on specific library versions and accompanied by executable unit tests. is designed to rigorously assess the ability of modern large language models (LLMs) to generate version-specific code that is not only syntactically correct but also functionally accurate upon execution. Our comprehensive evaluations reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with this task; for instance, GPT-4o achieves a pass@10 of only 39.9\% (43.7\% when provided with error feedback), highlighting the complexity of the problem and the limitations of current models. By providing an execution-based benchmark that emphasizes the dynamic nature of code libraries, serves as a critical tool to advance the development of more adaptable and reliable code generation models. For facilitation for further exploration of version-conditioned code generation, we make our code repository publicly accessible at https://github.com/NizarIslah/GitChameleon.

We present the first shared task for detecting and analyzing code-switching in Guarani and Spanish, GUA-SPA at IberLEF 2023. The challenge consisted of three tasks: identifying the language of a token, NER, and a novel task of classifying the way a Spanish span is used in the code-switched context. We annotated a corpus of 1500 texts extracted from news articles and tweets, around 25 thousand tokens, with the information for the tasks. Three teams took part in the evaluation phase, obtaining in general good results for Task 1, and more mixed results for Tasks 2 and 3.

Modern virtual assistants use internal semantic parsing engines to convert user utterances to actionable commands. However, prior work has demonstrated that semantic parsing is a difficult multilingual transfer task with low transfer efficiency compared to other tasks. In global markets such as India and Latin America, this is a critical issue as switching between languages is prevalent for bilingual users. In this work we dramatically improve the zero-shot performance of a multilingual and codeswitched semantic parsing system using two stages of multilingual alignment. First, we show that constrastive alignment pretraining improves both English performance and transfer efficiency. We then introduce a constrained optimization approach for hyperparameter-free adversarial alignment during finetuning. Our Doubly Aligned Multilingual Parser (DAMP) improves mBERT transfer performance by 3x, 6x, and 81x on the Spanglish, Hinglish and Multilingual Task Oriented Parsing benchmarks respectively and outperforms XLM-R and mT5-Large using 3.2x fewer parameters.

Research interest in task-oriented dialogs has increased as systems such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri have become ubiquitous in everyday life. However, the impact of academic research in this area has been limited by the lack of datasets that realistically capture the wide array of user pain points. To enable research on some of the more challenging aspects of parsing realistic conversations, we introduce PRESTO, a public dataset of over 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. PRESTO contains a diverse array of challenges that occur in real-world NLU tasks such as disfluencies, code-switching, and revisions. It is the only large scale human generated conversational parsing dataset that provides structured context such as a user's contacts and lists for each example. Our mT5 model based baselines demonstrate that the conversational phenomenon present in PRESTO are challenging to model, which is further pronounced in a low-resource setup.

Subword tokenization is a commonly used input pre-processing step in most recent NLP models. However, it limits the models' ability to leverage end-to-end task learning. Its frequency-based vocabulary creation compromises tokenization in low-resource languages, leading models to produce suboptimal representations. Additionally, the dependency on a fixed vocabulary limits the subword models' adaptability across languages and domains. In this work, we propose a vocabulary-free neural tokenizer by distilling segmentation information from heuristic-based subword tokenization. We pre-train our character-based tokenizer by processing unique words from multilingual corpus, thereby extensively increasing word diversity across languages. Unlike the predefined and fixed vocabularies in subword methods, our tokenizer allows end-to-end task learning, resulting in optimal task-specific tokenization. The experimental results show that replacing the subword tokenizer with our neural tokenizer consistently improves performance on multilingual (NLI) and code-switching (sentiment analysis) tasks, with larger gains in low-resource languages. Additionally, our neural tokenizer exhibits a robust performance on downstream tasks when adversarial noise is present (typos and misspelling), further increasing the initial improvements over statistical subword tokenizers.

Multi-task learning (MTL) encapsulates multiple learned tasks in a single model and often lets those tasks learn better jointly. However, when deploying MTL onto those real-world systems that are often resource-constrained or latency-sensitive, two prominent challenges arise: (i) during training, simultaneously optimizing all tasks is often difficult due to gradient conflicts across tasks; (ii) at inference, current MTL regimes have to activate nearly the entire model even to just execute a single task. Yet most real systems demand only one or two tasks at each moment, and switch between tasks as needed: therefore such all tasks activated inference is also highly inefficient and non-scalable. In this paper, we present a model-accelerator co-design framework to enable efficient on-device MTL. Our framework, dubbed M^3ViT, customizes mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers into a vision transformer (ViT) backbone for MTL, and sparsely activates task-specific experts during training. Then at inference with any task of interest, the same design allows for activating only the task-corresponding sparse expert pathway, instead of the full model. Our new model design is further enhanced by hardware-level innovations, in particular, a novel computation reordering scheme tailored for memory-constrained MTL that achieves zero-overhead switching between tasks and can scale to any number of experts. When executing single-task inference, M^{3}ViT achieves higher accuracies than encoder-focused MTL methods, while significantly reducing 88% inference FLOPs. When implemented on a hardware platform of one Xilinx ZCU104 FPGA, our co-design framework reduces the memory requirement by 2.4 times, while achieving energy efficiency up to 9.23 times higher than a comparable FPGA baseline. Code is available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/M3ViT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly bringing advances to Natural Language Processing. However, low-resource languages, those lacking extensive prominence in datasets for various NLP tasks, or where existing datasets are not as substantial, such as Portuguese, already obtain several benefits from LLMs, but not to the same extent. LLMs trained on multilingual datasets normally struggle to respond to prompts in Portuguese satisfactorily, presenting, for example, code switching in their responses. This work proposes a fine-tuned LLaMA 2-based model for Portuguese prompts named Bode in two versions: 7B and 13B. We evaluate the performance of this model in classification tasks using the zero-shot approach with in-context learning, and compare it with other LLMs. Our main contribution is to bring an LLM with satisfactory results in the Portuguese language, as well as to provide a model that is free for research or commercial purposes.

The field of computer vision applied to videos of minimally invasive surgery is ever-growing. Workflow recognition pertains to the automated recognition of various aspects of a surgery: including which surgical steps are performed; and which surgical instruments are used. This information can later be used to assist clinicians when learning the surgery; during live surgery; and when writing operation notes. The Pituitary Vision (PitVis) 2023 Challenge tasks the community to step and instrument recognition in videos of endoscopic pituitary surgery. This is a unique task when compared to other minimally invasive surgeries due to the smaller working space, which limits and distorts vision; and higher frequency of instrument and step switching, which requires more precise model predictions. Participants were provided with 25-videos, with results presented at the MICCAI-2023 conference as part of the Endoscopic Vision 2023 Challenge in Vancouver, Canada, on 08-Oct-2023. There were 18-submissions from 9-teams across 6-countries, using a variety of deep learning models. A commonality between the top performing models was incorporating spatio-temporal and multi-task methods, with greater than 50% and 10% macro-F1-score improvement over purely spacial single-task models in step and instrument recognition respectively. The PitVis-2023 Challenge therefore demonstrates state-of-the-art computer vision models in minimally invasive surgery are transferable to a new dataset, with surgery specific techniques used to enhance performance, progressing the field further. Benchmark results are provided in the paper, and the dataset is publicly available at: https://doi.org/10.5522/04/26531686.

Writing is a cognitively demanding task involving continuous decision-making, heavy use of working memory, and frequent switching between multiple activities. Scholarly writing is particularly complex as it requires authors to coordinate many pieces of multiform knowledge. To fully understand writers' cognitive thought process, one should fully decode the end-to-end writing data (from individual ideas to final manuscript) and understand their complex cognitive mechanisms in scholarly writing. We introduce ScholaWrite dataset, the first-of-its-kind keystroke logs of an end-to-end scholarly writing process for complete manuscripts, with thorough annotations of cognitive writing intentions behind each keystroke. Our dataset includes LaTeX-based keystroke data from five preprints with nearly 62K total text changes and annotations across 4 months of paper writing. ScholaWrite shows promising usability and applications (e.g., iterative self-writing) for the future development of AI writing assistants for academic research, which necessitate complex methods beyond LLM prompting. Our experiments clearly demonstrated the importance of collection of end-to-end writing data, rather than the final manuscript, for the development of future writing assistants to support the cognitive thinking process of scientists. Our de-identified dataset, demo, and code repository are available on our project page.

With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to generate a "bridging" utterance connecting the new topic to the topic of the previous conversation turn. We are especially interested in commonsense explanations of how a new topic relates to what has been mentioned before. We first collect a new dataset of human one-turn topic transitions, which we call OTTers. We then explore different strategies used by humans when asked to complete such a task, and notice that the use of a bridging utterance to connect the two topics is the approach used the most. We finally show how existing state-of-the-art text generation models can be adapted to this task and examine the performance of these baselines on different splits of the OTTers data.

As the application space of language models continues to evolve, a natural question to ask is how we can quickly adapt models to new tasks. We approach this classic question from a continual learning perspective, in which we aim to continue fine-tuning models trained on past tasks on new tasks, with the goal of "transferring" relevant knowledge. However, this strategy also runs the risk of doing more harm than good, i.e., negative transfer. In this paper, we construct a new benchmark of task sequences that target different possible transfer scenarios one might face, such as a sequence of tasks with high potential of positive transfer, high potential for negative transfer, no expected effect, or a mixture of each. An ideal learner should be able to maximally exploit information from all tasks that have any potential for positive transfer, while also avoiding the negative effects of any distracting tasks that may confuse it. We then propose a simple, yet effective, learner that satisfies many of our desiderata simply by leveraging a selective strategy for initializing new models from past task checkpoints. Still, limitations remain, and we hope this benchmark can help the community to further build and analyze such learners.

Transferring learned patterns from pretrained neural language models has been shown to significantly improve effectiveness across a variety of language-based tasks, meanwhile further tuning on intermediate tasks has been demonstrated to provide additional performance benefits, provided the intermediate task is sufficiently related to the target task. However, how to identify related tasks is an open problem, and brute-force searching effective task combinations is prohibitively expensive. Hence, the question arises, are we able to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of tasks with no training examples through selective fine-tuning? In this paper, we explore statistical measures that approximate the divergence between domain representations as a means to estimate whether tuning using one task pair will exhibit performance benefits over tuning another. This estimation can then be used to reduce the number of task pairs that need to be tested by eliminating pairs that are unlikely to provide benefits. Through experimentation over 58 tasks and over 6,600 task pair combinations, we demonstrate that statistical measures can distinguish effective task pairs, and the resulting estimates can reduce end-to-end runtime by up to 40%.

Recent work in NLP has shown promising results in training models on large amounts of tasks to achieve better generalization. However, it is not well-understood how tasks are related, and how helpful training tasks can be chosen for a new task. In this work, we investigate whether knowing task relationships via pairwise task transfer improves choosing one or more source tasks that help to learn a new target task. We provide TaskWeb, a large-scale benchmark of pairwise task transfers for 22 NLP tasks using three different model types, sizes, and adaptation methods, spanning about 25,000 experiments. Then, we design a new method TaskShop based on our analysis of TaskWeb. TaskShop uses TaskWeb to estimate the benefit of using a source task for learning a new target task, and to choose a subset of helpful training tasks for multi-task training. Our method improves overall rankings and top-k precision of source tasks by 10% and 38%, respectively. We also use TaskShop to build much smaller multi-task training sets that improve zero-shot performances across 11 different target tasks by at least 4.3%.

Transfer learning approaches have shown to significantly improve performance on downstream tasks. However, it is common for prior works to only report where transfer learning was beneficial, ignoring the significant trial-and-error required to find effective settings for transfer. Indeed, not all task combinations lead to performance benefits, and brute-force searching rapidly becomes computationally infeasible. Hence the question arises, can we predict whether transfer between two tasks will be beneficial without actually performing the experiment? In this paper, we leverage explainability techniques to effectively predict whether task pairs will be complementary, through comparison of neural network activation between single-task models. In this way, we can avoid grid-searches over all task and hyperparameter combinations, dramatically reducing the time needed to find effective task pairs. Our results show that, through this approach, it is possible to reduce training time by up to 83.5% at a cost of only 0.034 reduction in positive-class F1 on the TREC-IS 2020-A dataset.

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy userleftrightarrowagent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts. Our benchmark suggests that there are other challenges for LLMs responding to more natural interactions that contemporary benchmarks have heretofore not been able to capture.

Recent works suggest that transformer models are capable of multi-tasking on diverse NLP tasks and adapting to new tasks efficiently. However, the potential of these multi-task models may be limited as they use the same set of parameters for all tasks. In contrast, humans tackle tasks in a more flexible way, by making proper presumptions on what skills and knowledge are relevant and executing only the necessary computations. Inspired by this, we propose to use task-level mixture-of-expert models, which has a collection of transformer layers (i.e., experts) and a router component that chooses from these experts dynamically and flexibly. We find that these models help improve the average performance gain (ARG) metric by 2.6% when adapting to unseen tasks in the few-shot setting and by 5.6% in the zero-shot generalization setting. Further, we show that the learned routing decisions partly rediscover human categorization of NLP tasks -- certain experts are strongly associated with extractive tasks, some with classification tasks, and some with tasks requiring world knowledge.

Changing how pre-trained models behave -- e.g., improving their performance on a downstream task or mitigating biases learned during pre-training -- is a common practice when developing machine learning systems. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for steering the behavior of neural networks, centered around task vectors. A task vector specifies a direction in the weight space of a pre-trained model, such that movement in that direction improves performance on the task. We build task vectors by subtracting the weights of a pre-trained model from the weights of the same model after fine-tuning on a task. We show that these task vectors can be modified and combined together through arithmetic operations such as negation and addition, and the behavior of the resulting model is steered accordingly. Negating a task vector decreases performance on the target task, with little change in model behavior on control tasks. Moreover, adding task vectors together can improve performance on multiple tasks at once. Finally, when tasks are linked by an analogy relationship of the form ``A is to B as C is to D", combining task vectors from three of the tasks can improve performance on the fourth, even when no data from the fourth task is used for training. Overall, our experiments with several models, modalities and tasks show that task arithmetic is a simple, efficient and effective way of editing models.

We present our submission to the AXOLOTL-24 shared task. The shared task comprises two subtasks: identifying new senses that words gain with time (when comparing newer and older time periods) and producing the definitions for the identified new senses. We implemented a conceptually simple and computationally inexpensive solution to both subtasks. We trained adapter-based binary classification models to match glosses with usage examples and leveraged the probability output of the models to identify novel senses. The same models were used to match examples of novel sense usages with Wiktionary definitions. Our submission attained third place on the first subtask and the first place on the second subtask.

One long-term goal of machine learning research is to produce methods that are applicable to reasoning and natural language, in particular building an intelligent dialogue agent. To measure progress towards that goal, we argue for the usefulness of a set of proxy tasks that evaluate reading comprehension via question answering. Our tasks measure understanding in several ways: whether a system is able to answer questions via chaining facts, simple induction, deduction and many more. The tasks are designed to be prerequisites for any system that aims to be capable of conversing with a human. We believe many existing learning systems can currently not solve them, and hence our aim is to classify these tasks into skill sets, so that researchers can identify (and then rectify) the failings of their systems. We also extend and improve the recently introduced Memory Networks model, and show it is able to solve some, but not all, of the tasks.

The web provides a rich, open-domain environment with textual, structural, and spatial properties. We propose a new task for grounding language in this environment: given a natural language command (e.g., "click on the second article"), choose the correct element on the web page (e.g., a hyperlink or text box). We collected a dataset of over 50,000 commands that capture various phenomena such as functional references (e.g. "find who made this site"), relational reasoning (e.g. "article by john"), and visual reasoning (e.g. "top-most article"). We also implemented and analyzed three baseline models that capture different phenomena present in the dataset.

In this paper, we introduce the first evaluation of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. We detail the evaluation scheme, tasks, metrics and how to collect and annotate the data for training, developing and test. The evaluation includes two tasks, namely user intent classification and online testing of task-oriented dialogue. To consider the different sources of the data for training and developing, the first task can also be divided into two sub tasks. Both the two tasks are coming from the real problems when using the applications developed by industry. The evaluation data is provided by the iFLYTEK Corporation. Meanwhile, in this paper, we publish the evaluation results to present the current performance of the participants in the two tasks of Chinese human-computer dialogue technology. Moreover, we analyze the existing problems of human-computer dialogue as well as the evaluation scheme itself.

In this paper, we empirically study the optimization dynamics of multi-task learning, particularly focusing on those that govern a collection of tasks with significant data imbalance. We present a simple yet effective method of pre-training on high-resource tasks, followed by fine-tuning on a mixture of high/low-resource tasks. We provide a thorough empirical study and analysis of this method's benefits showing that it achieves consistent improvements relative to the performance trade-off profile of standard static weighting. We analyze under what data regimes this method is applicable and show its improvements empirically in neural machine translation (NMT) and multi-lingual language modeling.

Preference tuning is a crucial process for aligning deep generative models with human preferences. This survey offers a thorough overview of recent advancements in preference tuning and the integration of human feedback. The paper is organized into three main sections: 1) introduction and preliminaries: an introduction to reinforcement learning frameworks, preference tuning tasks, models, and datasets across various modalities: language, speech, and vision, as well as different policy approaches, 2) in-depth examination of each preference tuning approach: a detailed analysis of the methods used in preference tuning, and 3) applications, discussion, and future directions: an exploration of the applications of preference tuning in downstream tasks, including evaluation methods for different modalities, and an outlook on future research directions. Our objective is to present the latest methodologies in preference tuning and model alignment, enhancing the understanding of this field for researchers and practitioners. We hope to encourage further engagement and innovation in this area.

Scientific literature understanding tasks have gained significant attention due to their potential to accelerate scientific discovery. Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in these tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. However, jointly utilizing pre-training data across multiple heterogeneous tasks (e.g., extreme classification, citation prediction, and literature search) remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework, SciMult, with a focus on facilitating common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. To be specific, we explore two techniques -- task-aware specialization and instruction tuning. The former adopts a Mixture-of-Experts Transformer architecture with task-aware sub-layers; the latter prepends task-specific instructions to the input text so as to produce task-aware outputs. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive collection of benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our task-aware specialization strategy in various tasks, where we outperform state-of-the-art scientific LMs.

We aim to train a multi-task model such that users can adjust the desired compute budget and relative importance of task performances after deployment, without retraining. This enables optimizing performance for dynamically varying user needs, without heavy computational overhead to train and save models for various scenarios. To this end, we propose a multi-task model consisting of a shared encoder and task-specific decoders where both encoder and decoder channel widths are slimmable. Our key idea is to control the task importance by varying the capacities of task-specific decoders, while controlling the total computational cost by jointly adjusting the encoder capacity. This improves overall accuracy by allowing a stronger encoder for a given budget, increases control over computational cost, and delivers high-quality slimmed sub-architectures based on user's constraints. Our training strategy involves a novel 'Configuration-Invariant Knowledge Distillation' loss that enforces backbone representations to be invariant under different runtime width configurations to enhance accuracy. Further, we present a simple but effective search algorithm that translates user constraints to runtime width configurations of both the shared encoder and task decoders, for sampling the sub-architectures. The key rule for the search algorithm is to provide a larger computational budget to the higher preferred task decoder, while searching a shared encoder configuration that enhances the overall MTL performance. Various experiments on three multi-task benchmarks (PASCALContext, NYUDv2, and CIFAR100-MTL) with diverse backbone architectures demonstrate the advantage of our approach. For example, our method shows a higher controllability by ~33.5% in the NYUD-v2 dataset over prior methods, while incurring much less compute cost.

Prompt tuning, in which a base pretrained model is adapted to each task via conditioning on learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a promising approach for efficiently adapting large language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing methods typically learn soft prompt vectors from scratch, and it has not been clear how to exploit the rich cross-task knowledge with prompt vectors in a multitask learning setting. We propose multitask prompt tuning (MPT), which first learns a single transferable prompt by distilling knowledge from multiple task-specific source prompts. We then learn multiplicative low rank updates to this shared prompt to efficiently adapt it to each downstream target task. Extensive experiments on 23 NLP datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, including the full finetuning baseline in some cases, despite only tuning 0.035% as many task-specific parameters.

We develop information geometric techniques to understand the representations learned by deep networks when they are trained on different tasks using supervised, meta-, semi-supervised and contrastive learning. We shed light on the following phenomena that relate to the structure of the space of tasks: (1) the manifold of probabilistic models trained on different tasks using different representation learning methods is effectively low-dimensional; (2) supervised learning on one task results in a surprising amount of progress even on seemingly dissimilar tasks; progress on other tasks is larger if the training task has diverse classes; (3) the structure of the space of tasks indicated by our analysis is consistent with parts of the Wordnet phylogenetic tree; (4) episodic meta-learning algorithms and supervised learning traverse different trajectories during training but they fit similar models eventually; (5) contrastive and semi-supervised learning methods traverse trajectories similar to those of supervised learning. We use classification tasks constructed from the CIFAR-10 and Imagenet datasets to study these phenomena.

Traditional multi-task learning (MTL) methods use dense networks that use the same set of shared weights across several different tasks. This often creates interference where two or more tasks compete to pull model parameters in different directions. In this work, we study whether sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) improve multi-task learning by specializing some weights for learning shared representations and using the others for learning task-specific information. To this end, we devise task-aware gating functions to route examples from different tasks to specialized experts which share subsets of network weights conditioned on the task. This results in a sparsely activated multi-task model with a large number of parameters, but with the same computational cost as that of a dense model. We demonstrate such sparse networks to improve multi-task learning along three key dimensions: (i) transfer to low-resource tasks from related tasks in the training mixture; (ii) sample-efficient generalization to tasks not seen during training by making use of task-aware routing from seen related tasks; (iii) robustness to the addition of unrelated tasks by avoiding catastrophic forgetting of existing tasks.

Intermediate task fine-tuning has been shown to culminate in large transfer gains across many NLP tasks. With an abundance of candidate datasets as well as pre-trained language models, it has become infeasible to run the cross-product of all combinations to find the best transfer setting. In this work we first establish that similar sequential fine-tuning gains can be achieved in adapter settings, and subsequently consolidate previously proposed methods that efficiently identify beneficial tasks for intermediate transfer learning. We experiment with a diverse set of 42 intermediate and 11 target English classification, multiple choice, question answering, and sequence tagging tasks. Our results show that efficient embedding based methods that rely solely on the respective datasets outperform computational expensive few-shot fine-tuning approaches. Our best methods achieve an average Regret@3 of less than 1% across all target tasks, demonstrating that we are able to efficiently identify the best datasets for intermediate training.

Task semantics can be expressed by a set of input-to-output examples or a piece of textual instruction. Conventional machine learning approaches for natural language processing (NLP) mainly rely on the availability of large-scale sets of task-specific examples. Two issues arise: first, collecting task-specific labeled examples does not apply to scenarios where tasks may be too complicated or costly to annotate, or the system is required to handle a new task immediately; second, this is not user-friendly since end-users are probably more willing to provide task description rather than a set of examples before using the system. Therefore, the community is paying increasing interest in a new supervision-seeking paradigm for NLP: learning from task instructions. Despite its impressive progress, there are some common issues that the community struggles with. This survey paper tries to summarize and provide insights into the current research on instruction learning, particularly by answering the following questions: (i) What is task instruction, and what instruction types exist? (ii) How to model instructions? (iii) What factors influence and explain the instructions' performance? (iv) What challenges remain in instruction learning? To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey about textual instructions.

We investigate multi-task learning approaches that use a shared feature representation for all tasks. To better understand the transfer of task information, we study an architecture with a shared module for all tasks and a separate output module for each task. We study the theory of this setting on linear and ReLU-activated models. Our key observation is that whether or not tasks' data are well-aligned can significantly affect the performance of multi-task learning. We show that misalignment between task data can cause negative transfer (or hurt performance) and provide sufficient conditions for positive transfer. Inspired by the theoretical insights, we show that aligning tasks' embedding layers leads to performance gains for multi-task training and transfer learning on the GLUE benchmark and sentiment analysis tasks; for example, we obtain a 2.35% GLUE score average improvement on 5 GLUE tasks over BERT-LARGE using our alignment method. We also design an SVD-based task reweighting scheme and show that it improves the robustness of multi-task training on a multi-label image dataset.

Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown great capabilities in a wide range of tasks, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance through zero-shot or few-shot prompting methods. While there have been extensive studies on their abilities in monolingual tasks, the investigation of their potential in the context of code-switching (CSW), the practice of alternating languages within an utterance, remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of various multilingual LLMs, benchmarking their performance across four tasks: sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification. Our results indicate that despite multilingual LLMs exhibiting promising outcomes in certain tasks using zero or few-shot prompting, they still underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. We argue that current "multilingualism" in LLMs does not inherently imply proficiency with code-switching texts, calling for future research to bridge this discrepancy.

We investigate the internal representations of vision-and-language models (VLMs) and how they encode task representations. We consider tasks specified through examples or instructions, using either text or image inputs. Surprisingly, we find that conceptually similar tasks are mapped to similar task vector representations, regardless of how they are specified. Our findings suggest that to output answers, tokens in VLMs undergo three distinct phases: input, task, and answer, a process which is consistent across different modalities and specifications. The task vectors we identify in VLMs are general enough to be derived in one modality (e.g., text) and transferred to another (e.g., image). Additionally, we find that ensembling exemplar and instruction based task vectors produce better task representations. Taken together, these insights shed light on the underlying mechanisms of VLMs, particularly their ability to represent tasks in a shared manner across different modalities and task specifications. Project page: https://task-vectors-are-cross-modal.github.io.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) is costly: it requires the generation and examination of LLM outputs on a large-scale benchmark of various tasks. This paper investigates how to efficiently reduce the tasks used to benchmark LLMs without affecting the evaluation quality. Our study reveals that task transferability and relevance provide critical information to identify the most representative subset of tasks via optimizing a facility location function. We propose a practically efficient metric for estimating the transferability between two tasks via in-context learning (ICL). By analyzing the pairwise transferability, we can reduce tasks in a modern LLM benchmark (e.g., MMLU or FLAN) to 5% while inducing only a <4% difference to the evaluation on the original benchmark. Compared to prior works, our method is training-free, gradient-free, and highly efficient requiring ICL only.

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a powerful technique that has gained popularity due to its performance improvement over traditional Single-Task Learning (STL). However, MTL is often challenging because there is an exponential number of possible task groupings, which can make it difficult to choose the best one, and some groupings might produce performance degradation due to negative interference between tasks. Furthermore, existing solutions are severely suffering from scalability issues, limiting any practical application. In our paper, we propose a new data-driven method that addresses these challenges and provides a scalable and modular solution for classification task grouping based on hand-crafted features, specifically Data Maps, which capture the training behavior for each classification task during the MTL training. We experiment with the method demonstrating its effectiveness, even on an unprecedented number of tasks (up to 100).

Multi-task learning (MTL) has become increasingly popular in natural language processing (NLP) because it improves the performance of related tasks by exploiting their commonalities and differences. Nevertheless, it is still not understood very well how multi-task learning can be implemented based on the relatedness of training tasks. In this survey, we review recent advances of multi-task learning methods in NLP, with the aim of summarizing them into two general multi-task training methods based on their task relatedness: (i) joint training and (ii) multi-step training. We present examples in various NLP downstream applications, summarize the task relationships and discuss future directions of this promising topic.

It is a notable trend to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex tasks, e.g., tasks that require a sequence of actions and dynamic interaction with tools and external environments. In this paper, we propose StateFlow, a novel LLM-based task-solving paradigm that conceptualizes complex task-solving processes as state machines. In StateFlow, we distinguish between "process grounding" (via state and state transitions) and "sub-task solving" (through actions within a state), enhancing control and interpretability of the task-solving procedure. A state represents the status of a running process. The transitions between states are controlled by heuristic rules or decisions made by the LLM, allowing for a dynamic and adaptive progression. Upon entering a state, a series of actions is executed, involving not only calling LLMs guided by different prompts, but also the utilization of external tools as needed. Our results show that StateFlow significantly enhances LLMs' efficiency. For instance, StateFlow achieves 13% and 28% higher success rates compared to ReAct in InterCode SQL and ALFWorld benchmark, with 5x and 3x less cost respectively. We also show that StateFlow can be combined with iterative refining methods like Reflexion to further improve performance.

Multi-task learning has the potential to improve generalization by maximizing positive transfer between tasks while reducing task interference. Fully achieving this potential is hindered by manually designed architectures that remain static throughout training. On the contrary, learning in the brain occurs through structural changes that are in tandem with changes in synaptic strength. Thus, we propose Multi-Task Structural Learning (MTSL) that simultaneously learns the multi-task architecture and its parameters. MTSL begins with an identical single-task network for each task and alternates between a task-learning phase and a structural-learning phase. In the task learning phase, each network specializes in the corresponding task. In each of the structural learning phases, starting from the earliest layer, locally similar task layers first transfer their knowledge to a newly created group layer before being removed. MTSL then uses the group layer in place of the corresponding removed task layers and moves on to the next layers. Our empirical results show that MTSL achieves competitive generalization with various baselines and improves robustness to out-of-distribution data.

We propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization, focusing on task scaling and zero-shot prompting. While previous models are trained on only a few dozen tasks, we scale to 1,000 tasks for the first time using real-world data. This leads to a crucial discovery that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling; i.e., the model size has little impact on performance with an extremely large number of tasks. Our results show that task scaling can substantially improve training efficiency by 30 times in FLOPs. Moreover, we present a prompting method that incorporates a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for unseen tasks, along with a few other improvements. Empirically, ZeroPrompt substantially improves both the efficiency and the performance of zero-shot learning across a variety of academic and production datasets.

Auxiliary-Task Learning (ATL) aims to improve the performance of the target task by leveraging the knowledge obtained from related tasks. Occasionally, learning multiple tasks simultaneously results in lower accuracy than learning only the target task, which is known as negative transfer. This problem is often attributed to the gradient conflicts among tasks, and is frequently tackled by coordinating the task gradients in previous works. However, these optimization-based methods largely overlook the auxiliary-target generalization capability. To better understand the root cause of negative transfer, we experimentally investigate it from both optimization and generalization perspectives. Based on our findings, we introduce ForkMerge, a novel approach that periodically forks the model into multiple branches, automatically searches the varying task weights by minimizing target validation errors, and dynamically merges all branches to filter out detrimental task-parameter updates. On a series of auxiliary-task learning benchmarks, ForkMerge outperforms existing methods and effectively mitigates negative transfer.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. In this study, we explore a surprising phenomenon related to ICL: LLMs can perform multiple, computationally distinct ICL tasks simultaneously, during a single inference call, a capability we term "task superposition". We provide empirical evidence of this phenomenon across various LLM families and scales and show that this phenomenon emerges even if we train the model to in-context learn one task at a time. We offer theoretical explanations that this capability is well within the expressive power of transformers. We also explore how LLMs internally compose task vectors during superposition. Furthermore, we show that larger models can solve more ICL tasks in parallel, and better calibrate their output distribution. Our findings offer insights into the latent capabilities of LLMs, further substantiate the perspective of "LLMs as superposition of simulators", and raise questions about the mechanisms enabling simultaneous task execution.

This paper summarizes our entries to both subtasks of the first DialDoc shared task which focuses on the agent response prediction task in goal-oriented document-grounded dialogs. The task is split into two subtasks: predicting a span in a document that grounds an agent turn and generating an agent response based on a dialog and grounding document. In the first subtask, we restrict the set of valid spans to the ones defined in the dataset, use a biaffine classifier to model spans, and finally use an ensemble of different models. For the second subtask, we use a cascaded model which grounds the response prediction on the predicted span instead of the full document. With these approaches, we obtain significant improvements in both subtasks compared to the baseline.

Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. However, it remains unclear whether the existing focus of NLP research accurately captures the genuine requirements of human users. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the divergence between current NLP research and the needs of real-world NLP applications via a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations. We analyze a large-scale collection of real user queries to GPT. We compare these queries against existing NLP benchmark tasks and identify a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks that are commonly studied in academic research. For example, we find that tasks such as ``design'' and ``planning'' are prevalent in user interactions but are largely neglected or different from traditional NLP benchmarks. We investigate these overlooked tasks, dissect the practical challenges they pose, and provide insights toward a roadmap to make LLMs better aligned with user needs.

Foundation models have emerged as a powerful tool for many AI problems. Despite the tremendous success of foundation models, effective adaptation to new tasks, particularly those with limited labels, remains an open question and lacks theoretical understanding. An emerging solution with recent success in vision and NLP involves finetuning a foundation model on a selection of relevant tasks, before its adaptation to a target task with limited labeled samples. In this paper, we study the theoretical justification of this multitask finetuning approach. Our theoretical analysis reveals that with a diverse set of related tasks, this multitask finetuning leads to reduced error in the target task, in comparison to directly adapting the same pretrained model. We quantify the relationship between finetuning tasks and target tasks by diversity and consistency metrics, and further propose a practical task selection algorithm. We substantiate our theoretical claims with extensive empirical evidence. Further, we present results affirming our task selection algorithm adeptly chooses related finetuning tasks, providing advantages to the model performance on target tasks. We believe our study shed new light on the effective adaptation of foundation models to new tasks that lack abundant labels. Our code is available at https://github.com/OliverXUZY/Foudation-Model_Multitask.

Certain statistical models are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Many approaches to prompting and pre-training these models involve the automated generation of these prompts. We call these approaches meta-prompting, or prompting to obtain prompts. We propose a theoretical framework based on category theory to generalize and describe them. This framework is flexible enough to account for LLM stochasticity; and allows us to obtain formal results around task agnosticity and equivalence of various meta-prompting approaches. We experiment with meta-prompting in two active areas of model research: creativity and ideation. We find that user preference favors (p < 0.01) the prompts generated under meta-prompting, as well as their corresponding outputs, over a series of hardcoded baseline prompts that include the original task prompt. Using our framework, we argue that meta-prompting is more effective than basic prompting at generating desirable outputs.

Traditionally, theory and practice of Cognitive Control are linked via literature reviews by human domain experts. This approach, however, is inadequate to track the ever-growing literature. It may also be biased, and yield redundancies and confusion. Here we present an alternative approach. We performed automated text analyses on a large body of scientific texts to create a joint representation of tasks and constructs. More specifically, 385,705 scientific abstracts were first mapped into an embedding space using a transformers-based language model. Document embeddings were then used to identify a task-construct graph embedding that grounds constructs on tasks and supports nuanced meaning of the constructs by taking advantage of constrained random walks in the graph. This joint task-construct graph embedding, can be queried to generate task batteries targeting specific constructs, may reveal knowledge gaps in the literature, and inspire new tasks and novel hypotheses.

We introduce a new language learning setting relevant to building adaptive natural language interfaces. It is inspired by Wittgenstein's language games: a human wishes to accomplish some task (e.g., achieving a certain configuration of blocks), but can only communicate with a computer, who performs the actual actions (e.g., removing all red blocks). The computer initially knows nothing about language and therefore must learn it from scratch through interaction, while the human adapts to the computer's capabilities. We created a game in a blocks world and collected interactions from 100 people playing it. First, we analyze the humans' strategies, showing that using compositionality and avoiding synonyms correlates positively with task performance. Second, we compare computer strategies, showing how to quickly learn a semantic parsing model from scratch, and that modeling pragmatics further accelerates learning for successful players.

Multi-task learning, in which several tasks are jointly learned by a single model, allows NLP models to share information from multiple annotations and may facilitate better predictions when the tasks are inter-related. This technique, however, requires annotating the same text with multiple annotation schemes which may be costly and laborious. Active learning (AL) has been demonstrated to optimize annotation processes by iteratively selecting unlabeled examples whose annotation is most valuable for the NLP model. Yet, multi-task active learning (MT-AL) has not been applied to state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer-based NLP models. This paper aims to close this gap. We explore various multi-task selection criteria in three realistic multi-task scenarios, reflecting different relations between the participating tasks, and demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-task compared to single-task selection. Our results suggest that MT-AL can be effectively used in order to minimize annotation efforts for multi-task NLP models.

With the release of ever more capable large language models (LLMs), researchers in NLP and related disciplines have started to explore the usability of LLMs for a wide variety of different annotation tasks. Very recently, a lot of this attention has shifted to tasks that are subjective in nature. Given that the latest generations of LLMs have digested and encoded extensive knowledge about different human subpopulations and individuals, the hope is that these models can be trained, tuned or prompted to align with a wide range of different human perspectives. While researchers already evaluate the success of this alignment via surveys and tests, there is a lack of resources to evaluate the alignment on what oftentimes matters the most in NLP; the actual downstream tasks. To fill this gap we present SubData, a Python library that offers researchers working on topics related to subjectivity in annotation tasks a convenient way of collecting, combining and using a range of suitable datasets.

Dialogue systems are usually categorized into two types, open-domain and task-oriented. The first one focuses on chatting with users and making them engage in the conversations, where selecting a proper topic to fit the dialogue context is essential for a successful dialogue. The other one focuses on a specific task instead of casual talks, e.g., finding a movie on Friday night, or playing a song. These two directions have been studied separately due to their different purposes. However, how smoothly transitioning from social chatting to task-oriented dialogues is important for triggering business opportunities, and there is no public data focusing on such scenarios. Hence, this paper focuses on investigating the conversations starting from open-domain social chatting and then gradually transitioning to task-oriented purposes, and releases a large-scale dataset with detailed annotations for encouraging this research direction. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes a framework to automatically generate many dialogues without human involvement, in which any powerful open-domain dialogue generation model can be easily leveraged. The human evaluation shows that our generated dialogue data has a natural flow at a reasonable quality, showing that our released data has a great potential of guiding future research directions and commercial activities. Furthermore, the released models allow researchers to automatically generate unlimited dialogues in the target scenarios, which can greatly benefit semi-supervised and unsupervised approaches.

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's iteration, the task consists of three subtasks: detecting whether a turn is knowledge seeking, selecting the relevant knowledge document and finally generating a grounded response. This year, the focus lies on adapting the system to noisy ASR transcripts. We explore different approaches to make the models more robust to this type of input and to adapt the generated responses to the style of spoken conversations. For the latter, we get the best results with a noisy channel model that additionally reduces the number of short and generic responses. Our best system achieved the 1st rank in the automatic and the 3rd rank in the human evaluation of the challenge.

Knowing how to use words appropriately has been a key to improving language proficiency. Previous studies typically discuss how students learn receptively to select the correct candidate from a set of confusing words in the fill-in-the-blank task where specific context is given. In this paper, we go one step further, assisting students to learn to use confusing words appropriately in a productive task: sentence translation. We leverage the GiveMeExample system, which suggests example sentences for each confusing word, to achieve this goal. In this study, students learn to differentiate the confusing words by reading the example sentences, and then choose the appropriate word(s) to complete the sentence translation task. Results show students made substantial progress in terms of sentence structure. In addition, highly proficient students better managed to learn confusing words. In view of the influence of the first language on learners, we further propose an effective approach to improve the quality of the suggested sentences.

The paper investigates using a Large Language Model (LLM) to automatically perform web software tasks using click, scroll, and text input operations. Previous approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning, are inefficient to train and task-specific. Our method uses filtered Document Object Model (DOM) elements as observations and performs tasks step-by-step, sequentially generating small programs based on the current observations. We use in-context learning, either benefiting from a single manually provided example, or an automatically generated example based on a successful zero-shot trial. We evaluate the proposed method on the MiniWob++ benchmark. With only one in-context example, our WebWISE method achieves similar or better performance than other methods that require many demonstrations or trials.

In a conversational question answering scenario, a questioner seeks to extract information about a topic through a series of interdependent questions and answers. As the conversation progresses, they may switch to related topics, a phenomenon commonly observed in information-seeking search sessions. However, current datasets for conversational question answering are limiting in two ways: 1) they do not contain topic switches; and 2) they assume the reference text for the conversation is given, i.e., the setting is not open-domain. We introduce TopiOCQA (pronounced Tapioca), an open-domain conversational dataset with topic switches on Wikipedia. TopiOCQA contains 3,920 conversations with information-seeking questions and free-form answers. On average, a conversation in our dataset spans 13 question-answer turns and involves four topics (documents). TopiOCQA poses a challenging test-bed for models, where efficient retrieval is required on multiple turns of the same conversation, in conjunction with constructing valid responses using conversational history. We evaluate several baselines, by combining state-of-the-art document retrieval methods with neural reader models. Our best model achieves F1 of 55.8, falling short of human performance by 14.2 points, indicating the difficulty of our dataset. Our dataset and code is available at https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/topiocqa

As the research of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) becomes popular, an advancing MLLM model is typically required to handle various textual and visual tasks (e.g., VQA, Detection, OCR, and ChartQA) simultaneously for real-world applications. However, due to the significant differences in representation and distribution among data from various tasks, simply mixing data of all tasks together leads to the well-known``multi-task conflict" issue, resulting in performance degradation across various tasks. To address this issue, we propose Awaker2.5-VL, a Mixture of Experts~(MoE) architecture suitable for MLLM, which acquires the multi-task capabilities through multiple sparsely activated experts. To speed up the training and inference of Awaker2.5-VL, each expert in our model is devised as a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) structure. Extensive experiments on multiple latest benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of Awaker2.5-VL. The code and model weight are released in our Project Page: https://github.com/MetabrainAGI/Awaker.

Large LMs such as GPT-3 are powerful, but can commit mistakes that are obvious to humans. For example, GPT-3 would mistakenly interpret "What word is similar to good?" to mean a homophone, while the user intended a synonym. Our goal is to effectively correct such errors via user interactions with the system but without retraining, which will be prohibitively costly. We pair GPT-3 with a growing memory of recorded cases where the model misunderstood the user's intents, along with user feedback for clarification. Such a memory allows our system to produce enhanced prompts for any new query based on the user feedback for error correction on similar cases in the past. On four tasks (two lexical tasks, two advanced ethical reasoning tasks), we show how a (simulated) user can interactively teach a deployed GPT-3, substantially increasing its accuracy over the queries with different kinds of misunderstandings by the GPT-3. Our approach is a step towards the low-cost utility enhancement for very large pre-trained LMs. Code, data, and instructions to implement MEMPROMPT for a new task at https://www.memprompt.com/.

Pre-trained large language models can efficiently interpolate human-written prompts in a natural way. Multitask prompted learning can help generalization through a diverse set of tasks at once, thus enhancing the potential for more effective downstream fine-tuning. To perform efficient multitask-inference in the same batch, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as prompt tuning have been proposed. However, the existing prompt tuning methods may lack generalization. We propose SPT, a semi-parametric prompt tuning method for multitask prompted learning. The novel component of SPT is a memory bank from where memory prompts are retrieved based on discrete prompts. Extensive experiments, such as (i) fine-tuning a full language model with SPT on 31 different tasks from 8 different domains and evaluating zero-shot generalization on 9 heldout datasets under 5 NLP task categories and (ii) pretraining SPT on the GLUE datasets and evaluating fine-tuning on the SuperGLUE datasets, demonstrate effectiveness of SPT.

Recently, with the emergence of numerous Large Language Models (LLMs), the implementation of AI has entered a new era. Irrespective of these models' own capacity and structure, there is a growing demand for LLMs to possess enhanced comprehension of longer and more complex contexts with relatively smaller sizes. Models often encounter an upper limit when processing sequences of sentences that extend beyond their comprehension capacity and result in off-topic or even chaotic responses. While several recent works attempt to address this issue in various ways, they rarely focus on "why models are unable to compensate or strengthen their capabilities on their own". In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the nature of information transfer within LLMs and propose a novel technique called Attention Transition. This technique empowers models to achieve longer and better context comprehension with minimal additional training or impact on generation fluency. Our experiments are conducted on the challenging XSum dataset using LLaMa-7b model with context token length ranging from 800 to 1900. Results demonstrate that we achieve substantial improvements compared with the original generation results evaluated by GPT4.

Adapting pre-trained models with broad capabilities has become standard practice for learning a wide range of downstream tasks. The typical approach of fine-tuning different models for each task is performant, but incurs a substantial memory cost. To efficiently learn multiple downstream tasks we introduce Task Adaptive Parameter Sharing (TAPS), a general method for tuning a base model to a new task by adaptively modifying a small, task-specific subset of layers. This enables multi-task learning while minimizing resources used and competition between tasks. TAPS solves a joint optimization problem which determines which layers to share with the base model and the value of the task-specific weights. Further, a sparsity penalty on the number of active layers encourages weight sharing with the base model. Compared to other methods, TAPS retains high accuracy on downstream tasks while introducing few task-specific parameters. Moreover, TAPS is agnostic to the model architecture and requires only minor changes to the training scheme. We evaluate our method on a suite of fine-tuning tasks and architectures (ResNet, DenseNet, ViT) and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance while being simple to implement.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) reveal a perplexing phenomenon in continual learning: despite extensive training, models experience significant performance declines, raising questions about task alignment and underlying knowledge retention. This study first explores the concept of "spurious forgetting", proposing that such performance drops often reflect a decline in task alignment rather than true knowledge loss. Through controlled experiments with a synthesized dataset, we investigate the dynamics of model performance during the initial training phases of new tasks, discovering that early optimization steps can disrupt previously established task alignments. Our theoretical analysis connects these shifts to orthogonal updates in model weights, providing a robust framework for understanding this behavior. Ultimately, we introduce a Freezing strategy that fix the bottom layers of the model, leading to substantial improvements in four continual learning scenarios. Our findings underscore the critical distinction between task alignment and knowledge retention, paving the way for more effective strategies in continual learning.

The distribution of subpopulations is an important property hidden within a dataset. Uncovering and analyzing the subpopulation distribution within datasets provides a comprehensive understanding of the datasets, standing as a powerful tool beneficial to various downstream tasks, including Dataset Subpopulation Organization, Subpopulation Shift, and Slice Discovery. Despite its importance, there has been no work that systematically explores the subpopulation distribution of datasets to our knowledge. To address the limitation and solve all the mentioned tasks in a unified way, we introduce a novel concept of subpopulation structures to represent, analyze, and utilize subpopulation distributions within datasets. To characterize the structures in an interpretable manner, we propose the Subpopulation Structure Discovery with Large Language Models (SSD-LLM) framework, which employs world knowledge and instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to linguistically analyze informative image captions and summarize the structures. Furthermore, we propose complete workflows to address downstream tasks, named Task-specific Tuning, showcasing the application of the discovered structure to a spectrum of subpopulation-related tasks, including dataset subpopulation organization, subpopulation shift, and slice discovery. Furthermore, we propose complete workflows to address downstream tasks, named Task-specific Tuning, showcasing the application of the discovered structure to a spectrum of subpopulation-related tasks, including dataset subpopulation organization, subpopulation shift, and slice discovery.

Humans are highly adaptable, swiftly switching between different modes to progressively handle different tasks, situations and contexts. In Human-object interaction (HOI) activities, these modes can be attributed to two mechanisms: (1) the large-scale consistent plan for the whole activity and (2) the small-scale children interactive actions that start and end along the timeline. While neuroscience and cognitive science have confirmed this multi-mechanism nature of human behavior, machine modeling approaches for human motion are trailing behind. While attempted to use gradually morphing structures (e.g., graph attention networks) to model the dynamic HOI patterns, they miss the expeditious and discrete mode-switching nature of the human motion. To bridge that gap, this work proposes to model two concurrent mechanisms that jointly control human motion: the Persistent process that runs continually on the global scale, and the Transient sub-processes that operate intermittently on the local context of the human while interacting with objects. These two mechanisms form an interactive Persistent-Transient Duality that synergistically governs the activity sequences. We model this conceptual duality by a parent-child neural network of Persistent and Transient channels with a dedicated neural module for dynamic mechanism switching. The framework is trialed on HOI motion forecasting. On two rich datasets and a wide variety of settings, the model consistently delivers superior performances, proving its suitability for the challenge.

This document presents a detailed description of the challenge on clarifying questions for dialogue systems (ClariQ). The challenge is organized as part of the Conversational AI challenge series (ConvAI3) at Search Oriented Conversational AI (SCAI) EMNLP workshop in 2020. The main aim of the conversational systems is to return an appropriate answer in response to the user requests. However, some user requests might be ambiguous. In IR settings such a situation is handled mainly thought the diversification of the search result page. It is however much more challenging in dialogue settings with limited bandwidth. Therefore, in this challenge, we provide a common evaluation framework to evaluate mixed-initiative conversations. Participants are asked to rank clarifying questions in an information-seeking conversations. The challenge is organized in two stages where in Stage 1 we evaluate the submissions in an offline setting and single-turn conversations. Top participants of Stage 1 get the chance to have their model tested by human annotators.

As robots are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios, a key question is how to best transfer knowledge learned in one environment to another, where shifting constraints and human preferences render adaptation challenging. A central challenge remains that often, it is difficult (perhaps even impossible) to capture the full complexity of the deployment environment, and therefore the desired tasks, at training time. Consequently, the representation, or abstraction, of the tasks the human hopes for the robot to perform in one environment may be misaligned with the representation of the tasks that the robot has learned in another. We postulate that because humans will be the ultimate evaluator of system success in the world, they are best suited to communicating the aspects of the tasks that matter to the robot. Our key insight is that effective learning from human input requires first explicitly learning good intermediate representations and then using those representations for solving downstream tasks. We highlight three areas where we can use this approach to build interactive systems and offer future directions of work to better create advanced collaborative robots.

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based frameworks, the "Chain of Models" approach is widely used, where multiple specialized models work sequentially on distinct sub-tasks. This approach is effective but increases resource demands as each model must be deployed separately. Recent advancements attempt to address this by applying prompt tuning, which allows a shared base model to adapt to multiple tasks with minimal parameter changes. However, a key challenge remains: intermediate outputs, passed between models as plain text, require recomputation of hidden states (i.e., Key and Value (KV) states in Transformers) during inference. In this paper, we introduce FTHSS, a novel prompt-tuning method that enables models to share KV hidden states, eliminating redundant forward passes and reducing KV cache storage. By modifying input and attention masks during training, FTHSS allows models to effectively utilize KV hidden states from prior models in both single- and multi-round scenarios. Empirical results on four tasks show that FTHSS matches the performance of traditional model chains while improving inference efficiency.

The impressive performance of recent language models across a wide range of tasks suggests that they possess a degree of abstract reasoning skills. Are these skills general and transferable, or specialized to specific tasks seen during pretraining? To disentangle these effects, we propose an evaluation framework based on "counterfactual" task variants that deviate from the default assumptions underlying standard tasks. Across a suite of 11 tasks, we observe nontrivial performance on the counterfactual variants, but nevertheless find that performance substantially and consistently degrades compared to the default conditions. This suggests that while current LMs may possess abstract task-solving skills to a degree, they often also rely on narrow, non-transferable procedures for task-solving. These results motivate a more careful interpretation of language model performance that teases apart these aspects of behavior.

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms the single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to the single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.

Neural-based multi-task learning (MTL) has gained significant improvement, and it has been successfully applied to recommendation system (RS). Recent deep MTL methods for RS (e.g. MMoE, PLE) focus on designing soft gating-based parameter-sharing networks that implicitly learn a generalized representation for each task. However, MTL methods may suffer from performance degeneration when dealing with conflicting tasks, as negative transfer effects can occur on the task-shared bottom representation. This can result in a reduced capacity for MTL methods to capture task-specific characteristics, ultimately impeding their effectiveness and hindering the ability to generalize well on all tasks. In this paper, we focus on the bottom representation learning of MTL in RS and propose the Deep Task-specific Bottom Representation Network (DTRN) to alleviate the negative transfer problem. DTRN obtains task-specific bottom representation explicitly by making each task have its own representation learning network in the bottom representation modeling stage. Specifically, it extracts the user's interests from multiple types of behavior sequences for each task through the parameter-efficient hypernetwork. To further obtain the dedicated representation for each task, DTRN refines the representation of each feature by employing a SENet-like network for each task. The two proposed modules can achieve the purpose of getting task-specific bottom representation to relieve tasks' mutual interference. Moreover, the proposed DTRN is flexible to combine with existing MTL methods. Experiments on one public dataset and one industrial dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DTRN.

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a "wayward" behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., definition of a different or even a contradictory task), while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.

Large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adapted for interactive decision-making tasks like web navigation. While achieving decent performance, previous methods implicitly assume a forward-only execution mode for the model, where they only provide oracle trajectories as in-context examples to teach the model how to reason in the interactive environment. Consequently, the model could not handle more challenging scenarios not covered in the in-context examples, e.g., mistakes, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, we propose to model the interactive task as state space exploration, where the LLM agent transitions among a pre-defined set of states by performing actions to complete the task. This formulation enables flexible back-tracking, allowing the model to easily recover from errors. We evaluate our proposed LLM Agent with State-Space ExploRation (LASER) on the WebShop task. Experimental results show that our LASER agent significantly outperforms previous methods and closes the gap with human performance on the web navigation task.

Enhancing word usage is a desired feature for writing assistance. To further advance research in this area, this paper introduces "Smart Word Suggestions" (SWS) task and benchmark. Unlike other works, SWS emphasizes end-to-end evaluation and presents a more realistic writing assistance scenario. This task involves identifying words or phrases that require improvement and providing substitution suggestions. The benchmark includes human-labeled data for testing, a large distantly supervised dataset for training, and the framework for evaluation. The test data includes 1,000 sentences written by English learners, accompanied by over 16,000 substitution suggestions annotated by 10 native speakers. The training dataset comprises over 3.7 million sentences and 12.7 million suggestions generated through rules. Our experiments with seven baselines demonstrate that SWS is a challenging task. Based on experimental analysis, we suggest potential directions for future research on SWS. The dataset and related codes is available at https://github.com/microsoft/SmartWordSuggestions.

Prompt tuning has emerged as an effective rehearsal-free technique for class-incremental learning (CIL) that learns a tiny set of task-specific parameters (or prompts) to instruct a pre-trained transformer to learn on a sequence of tasks. Albeit effective, prompt tuning methods do not lend well in the multi-label class incremental learning (MLCIL) scenario (where an image contains multiple foreground classes) due to the ambiguity in selecting the correct prompt(s) corresponding to different foreground objects belonging to multiple tasks. To circumvent this issue we propose to eliminate the prompt selection mechanism by maintaining task-specific pathways, which allow us to learn representations that do not interact with the ones from the other tasks. Since independent pathways in truly incremental scenarios will result in an explosion of computation due to the quadratically complex multi-head self-attention (MSA) operation in prompt tuning, we propose to reduce the original patch token embeddings into summarized tokens. Prompt tuning is then applied to these fewer summarized tokens to compute the final representation. Our proposed method Multi-Label class incremental learning via summarising pAtch tokeN Embeddings (MULTI-LANE) enables learning disentangled task-specific representations in MLCIL while ensuring fast inference. We conduct experiments in common benchmarks and demonstrate that our MULTI-LANE achieves a new state-of-the-art in MLCIL. Additionally, we show that MULTI-LANE is also competitive in the CIL setting. Source code available at https://github.com/tdemin16/multi-lane

Adapters are an efficient, composable alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models and help scale the deployment of large ASR models to many tasks. In practice, a task ID is commonly prepended to the input during inference to route to single-task adapters for the specified task. However, one major limitation of this approach is that the task ID may not be known during inference, rendering it unsuitable for most multi-task settings. To address this, we propose three novel task-ID-free methods to combine single-task adapters in multi-task ASR and investigate two learning algorithms for training. We evaluate our methods on 10 test sets from 4 diverse ASR tasks and show that our methods are non-destructive and parameter-efficient. While only updating 17% of the model parameters, our methods can achieve an 8% mean WER improvement relative to full fine-tuning and are on-par with task-ID adapter routing.

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

Like generic multi-task learning, continual learning has the nature of multi-objective optimization, and therefore faces a trade-off between the performance of different tasks. That is, to optimize for the current task distribution, it may need to compromise performance on some previous tasks. This means that there exist multiple models that are Pareto-optimal at different times, each addressing a distinct task performance trade-off. Researchers have discussed how to train particular models to address specific trade-off preferences. However, existing algorithms require training overheads proportional to the number of preferences -- a large burden when there are multiple, possibly infinitely many, preferences. As a response, we propose Imprecise Bayesian Continual Learning (IBCL). Upon a new task, IBCL (1) updates a knowledge base in the form of a convex hull of model parameter distributions and (2) obtains particular models to address task trade-off preferences with zero-shot. That is, IBCL does not require any additional training overhead to generate preference-addressing models from its knowledge base. We show that models obtained by IBCL have guarantees in identifying the Pareto optimal parameters. Moreover, experiments on standard image classification and NLP tasks support this guarantee. Statistically, IBCL improves average per-task accuracy by at most 23% and peak per-task accuracy by at most 15% with respect to the baseline methods, with steadily near-zero or positive backward transfer. Most importantly, IBCL significantly reduces the training overhead from training 1 model per preference to at most 3 models for all preferences.

Typically, machine learning systems solve new tasks by training on thousands of examples. In contrast, humans can solve new tasks by reading some instructions, with perhaps an example or two. To take a step toward closing this gap, we introduce a framework for developing NLP systems that solve new tasks after reading their descriptions, synthesizing prior work in this area. We instantiate this framework with a new English language dataset, ZEST, structured for task-oriented evaluation on unseen tasks. Formulating task descriptions as questions, we ensure each is general enough to apply to many possible inputs, thus comprehensively evaluating a model's ability to solve each task. Moreover, the dataset's structure tests specific types of systematic generalization. We find that the state-of-the-art T5 model achieves a score of 12% on ZEST, leaving a significant challenge for NLP researchers.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive potential on simple tasks, their breadth of scope, lack of transparency, and insufficient controllability can make them less effective when assisting humans on more complex tasks. In response, we introduce the concept of Chaining LLM steps together, where the output of one step becomes the input for the next, thus aggregating the gains per step. We first define a set of LLM primitive operations useful for Chain construction, then present an interactive system where users can modify these Chains, along with their intermediate results, in a modular way. In a 20-person user study, we found that Chaining not only improved the quality of task outcomes, but also significantly enhanced system transparency, controllability, and sense of collaboration. Additionally, we saw that users developed new ways of interacting with LLMs through Chains: they leveraged sub-tasks to calibrate model expectations, compared and contrasted alternative strategies by observing parallel downstream effects, and debugged unexpected model outputs by "unit-testing" sub-components of a Chain. In two case studies, we further explore how LLM Chains may be used in future applications

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training tasks is the key component in making stronger MT LMs. In this work, we report an unexpected finding that an expert LM fine-tuned on just a single task can outperform an MT LM trained with 300+ different tasks on 11 different unseen datasets and on 13 datasets of the BIG-bench benchmark by a mean accuracy of 3.20% and 1.29%, respectively. This finding casts doubt on the previously held belief that simply scaling the number of tasks makes stronger MT LMs. Leveraging this finding, we further show that this distributed approach of training a separate expert LM per training task instead of a single MT LM for zero-shot inference possesses many benefits including (1) avoiding negative task transfer that often occurs during instruction tuning, (2) being able to continually learn new tasks without having to re-train on previous tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and (3) showing compositional capabilities when merging individual experts together. The code is available at https://github.com/joeljang/ELM.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to enhance the performance and efficiency of machine learning models by simultaneously training them on multiple tasks. However, MTL research faces two challenges: 1) effectively modeling the relationships between tasks to enable knowledge sharing, and 2) jointly learning task-specific and shared knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel model called Adaptive Task-to-Task Fusion Network (AdaTT) to address both challenges. AdaTT is a deep fusion network built with task-specific and optional shared fusion units at multiple levels. By leveraging a residual mechanism and a gating mechanism for task-to-task fusion, these units adaptively learn both shared knowledge and task-specific knowledge. To evaluate AdaTT's performance, we conduct experiments on a public benchmark and an industrial recommendation dataset using various task groups. Results demonstrate AdaTT significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our end-to-end experiments reveal that the model exhibits better performance compared to alternatives.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are required to identify key information from conversations for the completion of given tasks. Such information is conventionally specified in terms of intents and slots contained in task-specific ontology or schemata. Since these schemata are designed by system developers, the naming convention for slots and intents is not uniform across tasks, and may not convey their semantics effectively. This can lead to models memorizing arbitrary patterns in data, resulting in suboptimal performance and generalization. In this paper, we propose that schemata should be modified by replacing names or notations entirely with natural language descriptions. We show that a language description-driven system exhibits better understanding of task specifications, higher performance on state tracking, improved data efficiency, and effective zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks. Following this paradigm, we present a simple yet effective Description-Driven Dialog State Tracking (D3ST) model, which relies purely on schema descriptions and an "index-picking" mechanism. We demonstrate the superiority in quality, data efficiency and robustness of our approach as measured on the MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al.,2018), SGD (Rastogi et al., 2020), and the recent SGD-X (Lee et al., 2021) benchmarks.

Compositional reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training policies to perform complex long-horizon tasks. Typically, a high-level task is decomposed into a sequence of subtasks and a separate policy is trained to perform each subtask. In this paper, we focus on the problem of training subtask policies in a way that they can be used to perform any task; here, a task is given by a sequence of subtasks. We aim to maximize the worst-case performance over all tasks as opposed to the average-case performance. We formulate the problem as a two agent zero-sum game in which the adversary picks the sequence of subtasks. We propose two RL algorithms to solve this game: one is an adaptation of existing multi-agent RL algorithms to our setting and the other is an asynchronous version which enables parallel training of subtask policies. We evaluate our approach on two multi-task environments with continuous states and actions and demonstrate that our algorithms outperform state-of-the-art baselines.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to learn multiple tasks using a single model and jointly improve all of them assuming generalization and shared semantics. Reducing conflicts between tasks during joint learning is difficult and generally requires careful network design and extremely large models. We propose building on You Only Learn One Representation (YOLOR), a network architecture specifically designed for multitasking. YOLOR leverages both explicit and implicit knowledge, from data observations and learned latents, respectively, to improve a shared representation while minimizing the number of training parameters. However, YOLOR and its follow-up, YOLOv7, only trained two tasks at once. In this paper, we jointly train object detection, instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, and image captioning. We analyze tradeoffs and attempt to maximize sharing of semantic information. Through our architecture and training strategies, we find that our method achieves competitive performance on all tasks while maintaining a low parameter count and without any pre-training. We will release code soon.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for working with large language and multimodal models. While CoT has been shown to improve performance across many tasks, determining the settings in which it is effective remains an ongoing effort. In particular, it is still an open question in what settings CoT systematically reduces model performance. In this paper, we seek to identify the characteristics of tasks where CoT reduces performance by drawing inspiration from cognitive psychology, looking at cases where (i) verbal thinking or deliberation hurts performance in humans, and (ii) the constraints governing human performance generalize to language models. Three such cases are implicit statistical learning, visual recognition, and classifying with patterns containing exceptions. In extensive experiments across all three settings, we find that a diverse collection of state-of-the-art models exhibit significant drop-offs in performance (e.g., up to 36.3% absolute accuracy for OpenAI o1-preview compared to GPT-4o) when using inference-time reasoning compared to zero-shot counterparts. We also identify three tasks that satisfy condition (i) but not (ii), and find that while verbal thinking reduces human performance in these tasks, CoT retains or increases model performance. Overall, our results show that while there is not an exact parallel between the cognitive processes of models and those of humans, considering cases where thinking has negative consequences for human performance can help us identify settings where it negatively impacts models. By connecting the literature on human deliberation with evaluations of CoT, we offer a new tool that can be used in understanding the impact of prompt choices and inference-time reasoning.

In this paper, we present the results and findings of the Shared Task on Gender Rewriting, which was organized as part of the Seventh Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop. The task of gender rewriting refers to generating alternatives of a given sentence to match different target user gender contexts (e.g., female speaker with a male listener, a male speaker with a male listener, etc.). This requires changing the grammatical gender (masculine or feminine) of certain words referring to the users. In this task, we focus on Arabic, a gender-marking morphologically rich language. A total of five teams from four countries participated in the shared task.

Natural language interfaces often require supervised data to translate user requests into programs, database queries, or other structured intent representations. During data collection, it can be difficult to anticipate and formalize the full range of user needs -- for example, in a system designed to handle simple requests (like find my meetings tomorrow or move my meeting with my manager to noon), users may also express more elaborate requests (like swap all my calls on Monday and Tuesday). We introduce an approach for equipping a simple language-to-code model to handle complex utterances via a process of hierarchical natural language decomposition. Our approach uses a pre-trained language model to decompose a complex utterance into a sequence of smaller natural language steps, then interprets each step using the language-to-code model. To test our approach, we collect and release DeCU -- a new NL-to-program benchmark to evaluate Decomposition of Complex Utterances. Experiments show that the proposed approach enables the interpretation of complex utterances with almost no complex training data, while outperforming standard few-shot prompting approaches.

We propose pre-finetuning, an additional large-scale learning stage between language model pre-training and fine-tuning. Pre-finetuning is massively multi-task learning (around 50 datasets, over 4.8 million total labeled examples), and is designed to encourage learning of representations that generalize better to many different tasks. We show that pre-finetuning consistently improves performance for pretrained discriminators (e.g.~RoBERTa) and generation models (e.g.~BART) on a wide range of tasks (sentence prediction, commonsense reasoning, MRC, etc.), while also significantly improving sample efficiency during fine-tuning. We also show that large-scale multi-tasking is crucial; pre-finetuning can hurt performance when few tasks are used up until a critical point (usually above 15) after which performance improves linearly in the number of tasks.

The pervasive deployment of Large Language Models-LLMs in various sectors often neglects the nuanced requirements of individuals and small organizations, who benefit more from models precisely tailored to their specific business contexts rather than those with broadly superior general capabilities. This work introduces AnyTaskTune, a novel fine-tuning methodology coined as Task-Fine-Tune, specifically developed to elevate model performance on a diverse array of domain-specific tasks. This method involves a meticulous process to identify and define targeted sub-tasks within a domain, followed by the creation of specialized enhancement datasets for fine-tuning, thereby optimizing task-specific model performance. We conducted comprehensive fine-tuning experiments not only in the legal domain for tasks such as keyword extraction and sentence prediction but across over twenty different sub-tasks derived from the domains of finance, healthcare, law, psychology, consumer services, and human resources. To substantiate our approach and facilitate community engagement, we will open-source these bilingual task datasets. Our findings demonstrate that models fine-tuned using the Task-Fine-Tune methodology not only achieve superior performance on these specific tasks but also significantly outperform models with higher general capabilities in their respective domains. Our work is publicly available at https://github.com/PandaVT/DataTager.

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.

The increasing adoption of natural language processing (NLP) models across industries has led to practitioners' need for machine learning systems to handle these models efficiently, from training to serving them in production. However, training, deploying, and updating multiple models can be complex, costly, and time-consuming, mainly when using transformer-based pre-trained language models. Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has emerged as a promising approach to improve efficiency and performance through joint training, rather than training separate models. Motivated by this, we first provide an overview of transformer-based MTL approaches in NLP. Then, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of using MTL approaches throughout typical ML lifecycle phases, specifically focusing on the challenges related to data engineering, model development, deployment, and monitoring phases. This survey focuses on transformer-based MTL architectures and, to the best of our knowledge, is novel in that it systematically analyses how transformer-based MTL in NLP fits into ML lifecycle phases. Furthermore, we motivate research on the connection between MTL and continual learning (CL), as this area remains unexplored. We believe it would be practical to have a model that can handle both MTL and CL, as this would make it easier to periodically re-train the model, update it due to distribution shifts, and add new capabilities to meet real-world requirements.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made incredible progress recently. On the one hand, advanced foundation models like ChatGPT can offer powerful conversation, in-context learning and code generation abilities on a broad range of open-domain tasks. They can also generate high-level solution outlines for domain-specific tasks based on the common sense knowledge they have acquired. However, they still face difficulties with some specialized tasks because they lack enough domain-specific data during pre-training or they often have errors in their neural network computations on those tasks that need accurate executions. On the other hand, there are also many existing models and systems (symbolic-based or neural-based) that can do some domain-specific tasks very well. However, due to the different implementation or working mechanisms, they are not easily accessible or compatible with foundation models. Therefore, there is a clear and pressing need for a mechanism that can leverage foundation models to propose task solution outlines and then automatically match some of the sub-tasks in the outlines to the off-the-shelf models and systems with special functionalities to complete them. Inspired by this, we introduce TaskMatrix.AI as a new AI ecosystem that connects foundation models with millions of APIs for task completion. Unlike most previous work that aimed to improve a single AI model, TaskMatrix.AI focuses more on using existing foundation models (as a brain-like central system) and APIs of other AI models and systems (as sub-task solvers) to achieve diversified tasks in both digital and physical domains. As a position paper, we will present our vision of how to build such an ecosystem, explain each key component, and use study cases to illustrate both the feasibility of this vision and the main challenges we need to address next.

In task-oriented dialogue, a system often needs to follow a sequence of actions, called a workflow, that complies with a set of guidelines in order to complete a task. In this paper, we propose the novel problem of multi-step workflow action prediction, in which the system predicts multiple future workflow actions. Accurate prediction of multiple steps allows for multi-turn automation, which can free up time to focus on more complex tasks. We propose three modeling approaches that are simple to implement yet lead to more action automation: 1) fine-tuning on a training dataset, 2) few-shot in-context learning leveraging retrieval and large language model prompting, and 3) zero-shot graph traversal, which aggregates historical action sequences into a graph for prediction. We show that multi-step action prediction produces features that improve accuracy on downstream dialogue tasks like predicting task success, and can increase automation of steps by 20% without requiring as much feedback from a human overseeing the system.

Accurately predicting conversions in advertisements is generally a challenging task, because such conversions do not occur frequently. In this paper, we propose a new framework to support creating high-performing ad creatives, including the accurate prediction of ad creative text conversions before delivering to the consumer. The proposed framework includes three key ideas: multi-task learning, conditional attention, and attention highlighting. Multi-task learning is an idea for improving the prediction accuracy of conversion, which predicts clicks and conversions simultaneously, to solve the difficulty of data imbalance. Furthermore, conditional attention focuses attention of each ad creative with the consideration of its genre and target gender, thus improving conversion prediction accuracy. Attention highlighting visualizes important words and/or phrases based on conditional attention. We evaluated the proposed framework with actual delivery history data (14,000 creatives displayed more than a certain number of times from Gunosy Inc.), and confirmed that these ideas improve the prediction performance of conversions, and visualize noteworthy words according to the creatives' attributes.

A significant barrier to progress in data-driven approaches to building dialog systems is the lack of high quality, goal-oriented conversational data. To help satisfy this elementary requirement, we introduce the initial release of the Taskmaster-1 dataset which includes 13,215 task-based dialogs comprising six domains. Two procedures were used to create this collection, each with unique advantages. The first involves a two-person, spoken "Wizard of Oz" (WOz) approach in which trained agents and crowdsourced workers interact to complete the task while the second is "self-dialog" in which crowdsourced workers write the entire dialog themselves. We do not restrict the workers to detailed scripts or to a small knowledge base and hence we observe that our dataset contains more realistic and diverse conversations in comparison to existing datasets. We offer several baseline models including state of the art neural seq2seq architectures with benchmark performance as well as qualitative human evaluations. Dialogs are labeled with API calls and arguments, a simple and cost effective approach which avoids the requirement of complex annotation schema. The layer of abstraction between the dialog model and the service provider API allows for a given model to interact with multiple services that provide similar functionally. Finally, the dataset will evoke interest in written vs. spoken language, discourse patterns, error handling and other linguistic phenomena related to dialog system research, development and design.

Being engaging, knowledgeable, and empathetic are all desirable general qualities in a conversational agent. Previous work has introduced tasks and datasets that aim to help agents to learn those qualities in isolation and gauge how well they can express them. But rather than being specialized in one single quality, a good open-domain conversational agent should be able to seamlessly blend them all into one cohesive conversational flow. In this work, we investigate several ways to combine models trained towards isolated capabilities, ranging from simple model aggregation schemes that require minimal additional training, to various forms of multi-task training that encompass several skills at all training stages. We further propose a new dataset, BlendedSkillTalk, to analyze how these capabilities would mesh together in a natural conversation, and compare the performance of different architectures and training schemes. Our experiments show that multi-tasking over several tasks that focus on particular capabilities results in better blended conversation performance compared to models trained on a single skill, and that both unified or two-stage approaches perform well if they are constructed to avoid unwanted bias in skill selection or are fine-tuned on our new task.

Recent Continual Learning (CL) methods have combined pretrained Transformers with prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique. We argue that the choice of prompt tuning in prior works was an undefended and unablated decision, which has been uncritically adopted by subsequent research, but warrants further research to understand its implications. In this paper, we conduct this research and find that the choice of prompt tuning as a PEFT method hurts the overall performance of the CL system. To illustrate this, we replace prompt tuning with LoRA in two state-of-the-art continual learning methods: Learning to Prompt and S-Prompts. These variants consistently achieve higher accuracy across a wide range of domain-incremental and class-incremental benchmarks, while being competitive in inference speed. Our work highlights a crucial argument: unexamined choices can hinder progress in the field, and rigorous ablations, such as the PEFT method, are required to drive meaningful adoption of CL techniques in real-world applications.

Intent detection and slot filling are critical tasks in spoken and natural language understanding for task-oriented dialog systems. In this work we describe our participation in the slot and intent detection for low-resource language varieties (SID4LR; Aepli et al. (2023)). We investigate the slot and intent detection (SID) tasks using a wide range of models and settings. Given the recent success of multitask-prompted finetuning of large language models, we also test the generalization capability of the recent encoder-decoder model mT0 (Muennighoff et al., 2022) on new tasks (i.e., SID) in languages they have never intentionally seen. We show that our best model outperforms the baseline by a large margin (up to +30 F1 points) in both SID tasks

To build an artificial neural network like the biological intelligence system, recent works have unified numerous tasks into a generalist model, which can process various tasks with shared parameters and do not have any task-specific modules. While generalist models achieve promising results on various benchmarks, they have performance degradation on some tasks compared with task-specialized models. In this work, we find that interference among different tasks and modalities is the main factor to this phenomenon. To mitigate such interference, we introduce the Conditional Mixture-of-Experts (Conditional MoEs) to generalist models. Routing strategies under different levels of conditions are proposed to take both the training/inference cost and generalization ability into account. By incorporating the proposed Conditional MoEs, the recently proposed generalist model Uni-Perceiver can effectively mitigate the interference across tasks and modalities, and achieves state-of-the-art results on a series of downstream tasks via prompt tuning on 1% of downstream data. Moreover, the introduction of Conditional MoEs still holds the generalization ability of generalist models to conduct zero-shot inference on new tasks, e.g., video-text retrieval and video caption. Code and pre-trained generalist models shall be released.

While fine-tuning pretrained models has become common practice, these models often underperform outside their specific domains. Recently developed model merging techniques enable the direct integration of multiple models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, into a single model. This strategy promotes multitasking capabilities without requiring retraining on the original datasets. However, existing methods fall short in addressing potential conflicts and complex correlations between tasks, especially in parameter-level adjustments, posing a challenge in effectively balancing parameter competition across various tasks. This paper introduces an innovative technique named PCB-Merging (Parameter Competition Balancing), a lightweight and training-free technique that adjusts the coefficients of each parameter for effective model merging. PCB-Merging employs intra-balancing to gauge parameter significance within individual tasks and inter-balancing to assess parameter similarities across different tasks. Parameters with low importance scores are dropped, and the remaining ones are rescaled to form the final merged model. We assessed our approach in diverse merging scenarios, including cross-task, cross-domain, and cross-training configurations, as well as out-of-domain generalization. The experimental results reveal that our approach achieves substantial performance enhancements across multiple modalities, domains, model sizes, number of tasks, fine-tuning forms, and large language models, outperforming existing model merging methods. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/duguodong7/pcb-merging.

We study the design decisions of publicly available instruction tuning methods, and break down the development of Flan 2022 (Chung et al., 2022). Through careful ablation studies on the Flan Collection of tasks and methods, we tease apart the effect of design decisions which enable Flan-T5 to outperform prior work by 3-17%+ across evaluation settings. We find task balancing and enrichment techniques are overlooked but critical to effective instruction tuning, and in particular, training with mixed prompt settings (zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought) actually yields stronger (2%+) performance in all settings. In further experiments, we show Flan-T5 requires less finetuning to converge higher and faster than T5 on single downstream tasks, motivating instruction-tuned models as more computationally-efficient starting checkpoints for new tasks. Finally, to accelerate research on instruction tuning, we make the Flan 2022 collection of datasets, templates, and methods publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/FLAN/tree/main/flan/v2.

Multi-task learning (MTL), instruction tuning, and prompting have recently been shown to improve the generalizability of large language models to new tasks. However, the benefits of such methods are less well-documented in smaller language models, with some studies finding contradictory results. In this work, we explore and isolate the effects of (i) model size, (ii) general purpose MTL, (iii) in-domain MTL, (iv) instruction tuning, and (v) few-shot fine-tuning for models with fewer than 500 million parameters. Our experiments in the zero-shot setting demonstrate that models gain 31% relative improvement, on average, from general purpose MTL, with an additional 37.6% relative gain from in-domain MTL. Contradictory to prior works on large models, we find that instruction tuning provides a modest 2% performance improvement for small models.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through example-based prompts without requiring parameter updates. However, understanding how tasks are internally encoded and generalized remains a challenge. To address some of the empirical and technical gaps in the literature, we introduce an automated formulation for encoding task information in ICL prompts as a function of attention heads within the transformer architecture. This approach computes a single task vector as a weighted sum of attention heads, with the weights optimized causally via gradient descent. Our findings show that existing methods fail to generalize effectively to modalities beyond text. In response, we also design a benchmark to evaluate whether a task vector can preserve task fidelity in functional regression tasks. The proposed method successfully extracts task-specific information from in-context demonstrations and excels in both text and regression tasks, demonstrating its generalizability across modalities. Moreover, ablation studies show that our method's effectiveness stems from aligning the distribution of the last hidden state with that of an optimally performing in-context-learned model.

Prompt tuning in natural language processing (NLP) has become an increasingly popular method for adapting large language models to specific tasks. However, the transferability of these prompts, especially continuous prompts, between different models remains a challenge. In this work, we propose a zero-shot continuous prompt transfer method, where source prompts are encoded into relative space and the corresponding target prompts are searched for transferring to target models. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our method, showing that 'task semantics' in continuous prompts can be generalized across various language models. Moreover, we find that combining 'task semantics' from multiple source models can further enhance the generalizability of transfer.

The last decade has seen a significant increase of interest in deep learning research, with many public successes that have demonstrated its potential. As such, these systems are now being incorporated into commercial products. With this comes an additional challenge: how can we build AI systems that solve tasks where there is not a crisp, well-defined specification? While multiple solutions have been proposed, in this competition we focus on one in particular: learning from human feedback. Rather than training AI systems using a predefined reward function or using a labeled dataset with a predefined set of categories, we instead train the AI system using a learning signal derived from some form of human feedback, which can evolve over time as the understanding of the task changes, or as the capabilities of the AI system improve. The MineRL BASALT competition aims to spur forward research on this important class of techniques. We design a suite of four tasks in Minecraft for which we expect it will be hard to write down hardcoded reward functions. These tasks are defined by a paragraph of natural language: for example, "create a waterfall and take a scenic picture of it", with additional clarifying details. Participants must train a separate agent for each task, using any method they want. Agents are then evaluated by humans who have read the task description. To help participants get started, we provide a dataset of human demonstrations on each of the four tasks, as well as an imitation learning baseline that leverages these demonstrations. Our hope is that this competition will improve our ability to build AI systems that do what their designers intend them to do, even when the intent cannot be easily formalized. Besides allowing AI to solve more tasks, this can also enable more effective regulation of AI systems, as well as making progress on the value alignment problem.

TaskGen is an open-sourced agentic framework which uses an Agent to solve an arbitrary task by breaking them down into subtasks. Each subtask is mapped to an Equipped Function or another Agent to execute. In order to reduce verbosity (and hence token usage), TaskGen uses StrictJSON that ensures JSON output from the Large Language Model (LLM), along with additional features such as type checking and iterative error correction. Key to the philosophy of TaskGen is the management of information/memory on a need-to-know basis. We empirically evaluate TaskGen on various environments such as 40x40 dynamic maze navigation with changing obstacle locations (100% solve rate), TextWorld escape room solving with dense rewards and detailed goals (96% solve rate), web browsing (69% of actions successful), solving the MATH dataset (71% solve rate over 100 Level-5 problems), Retrieval Augmented Generation on NaturalQuestions dataset (F1 score of 47.03%)

We present ALFRED (Action Learning From Realistic Environments and Directives), a benchmark for learning a mapping from natural language instructions and egocentric vision to sequences of actions for household tasks. ALFRED includes long, compositional tasks with non-reversible state changes to shrink the gap between research benchmarks and real-world applications. ALFRED consists of expert demonstrations in interactive visual environments for 25k natural language directives. These directives contain both high-level goals like "Rinse off a mug and place it in the coffee maker." and low-level language instructions like "Walk to the coffee maker on the right." ALFRED tasks are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space, and language than existing vision-and-language task datasets. We show that a baseline model based on recent embodied vision-and-language tasks performs poorly on ALFRED, suggesting that there is significant room for developing innovative grounded visual language understanding models with this benchmark.

Multilingual transfer ability, which reflects how well the models fine-tuned on one source language can be applied to other languages, has been well studied in multilingual pre-trained models (e.g., BLOOM). However, such ability has not been investigated for English-centric models (e.g., LLaMA). To fill this gap, we study the following research questions. First, does multilingual transfer ability exist in English-centric models and how does it compare with multilingual pretrained models? Second, does it only appears when English is the source language for the English-centric model? Third, how does it vary in different tasks? We take multilingual reasoning ability as our focus and conduct extensive experiments across four types of reasoning tasks. We find that the multilingual pretrained model does not always outperform an English-centric model. Furthermore, English appears to be a less suitable source language, and the choice of source language becomes less important when the English-centric model scales up. In addition, different types of tasks exhibit different multilingual transfer abilities. These findings demonstrate that English-centric models not only possess multilingual transfer ability but may even surpass the transferability of multilingual pretrained models if well-trained. By showing the strength and weaknesses, the experiments also provide valuable insights into enhancing multilingual reasoning abilities for the English-centric models.

Prompt Tuning, conditioning on task-specific learned prompt vectors, has emerged as a data-efficient and parameter-efficient method for adapting large pretrained vision-language models to multiple downstream tasks. However, existing approaches usually consider learning prompt vectors for each task independently from scratch, thereby failing to exploit the rich shareable knowledge across different vision-language tasks. In this paper, we propose multitask vision-language prompt tuning (MVLPT), which incorporates cross-task knowledge into prompt tuning for vision-language models. Specifically, (i) we demonstrate the effectiveness of learning a single transferable prompt from multiple source tasks to initialize the prompt for each target task; (ii) we show many target tasks can benefit each other from sharing prompt vectors and thus can be jointly learned via multitask prompt tuning. We benchmark the proposed MVLPT using three representative prompt tuning methods, namely text prompt tuning, visual prompt tuning, and the unified vision-language prompt tuning. Results in 20 vision tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms all single-task baseline prompt tuning methods, setting the new state-of-the-art on the few-shot ELEVATER benchmarks and cross-task generalization benchmarks. To understand where the cross-task knowledge is most effective, we also conduct a large-scale study on task transferability with 20 vision tasks in 400 combinations for each prompt tuning method. It shows that the most performant MVLPT for each prompt tuning method prefers different task combinations and many tasks can benefit each other, depending on their visual similarity and label similarity. Code is available at https://github.com/sIncerass/MVLPT.

The emergence of in-context learning (ICL) is potentially attributed to two major abilities: task recognition (TR) for recognizing the task from demonstrations and utilizing pre-trained priors, and task learning (TL) for learning from demonstrations. However, relationships between the two abilities and how such relationships affect the emergence of ICL is unclear. In this paper, we take the first step by examining the pre-training dynamics of the emergence of ICL. With carefully designed metrics, we find that these two abilities are, in fact, competitive during pre-training. Moreover, we observe a strong negative correlation between the competition and ICL performance. Further analysis of common pre-training factors (i.e., model size, dataset size, and data curriculum) demonstrates possible ways to manage the competition. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective method to better integrate these two abilities for ICL at inference time. Through adaptive ensemble learning, the performance of ICL can be significantly boosted, enabling two small models to outperform a larger one with more than twice the parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Competitive-ICL.

Although pre-trained language models~(PLMs) have recently advanced the research progress in mathematical reasoning, they are not specially designed as a capable multi-task solver, suffering from high cost for multi-task deployment (\eg a model copy for a task) and inferior performance on complex mathematical problems in practical applications. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose JiuZhang~2.0, a unified Chinese PLM specially for multi-task mathematical problem solving. Our idea is to maintain a moderate-sized model and employ the cross-task knowledge sharing to improve the model capacity in a multi-task setting. Specially, we construct a Mixture-of-Experts~(MoE) architecture for modeling mathematical text, so as to capture the common mathematical knowledge across tasks. For optimizing the MoE architecture, we design multi-task continual pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategies for multi-task adaptation. These training strategies can effectively decompose the knowledge from the task data and establish the cross-task sharing via expert networks. In order to further improve the general capacity of solving different complex tasks, we leverage large language models~(LLMs) as complementary models to iteratively refine the generated solution by our PLM, via in-context learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.

We propose MultiDoc2Dial, a new task and dataset on modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Most previous works treat document-grounded dialogue modeling as a machine reading comprehension task based on a single given document or passage. In this work, we aim to address more realistic scenarios where a goal-oriented information-seeking conversation involves multiple topics, and hence is grounded on different documents. To facilitate such a task, we introduce a new dataset that contains dialogues grounded in multiple documents from four different domains. We also explore modeling the dialogue-based and document-based context in the dataset. We present strong baseline approaches and various experimental results, aiming to support further research efforts on such a task.

Multilingual natural language processing is getting increased attention, with numerous models, benchmarks, and methods being released for many languages. English is often used in multilingual evaluation to prompt language models (LMs), mainly to overcome the lack of instruction tuning data in other languages. In this position paper, we lay out two roles of English in multilingual LM evaluations: as an interface and as a natural language. We argue that these roles have different goals: task performance versus language understanding. This discrepancy is highlighted with examples from datasets and evaluation setups. Numerous works explicitly use English as an interface to boost task performance. We recommend to move away from this imprecise method and instead focus on furthering language understanding.

We demonstrate LLM agent specification gaming by instructing models to win against a chess engine. We find reasoning models like o1 preview and DeepSeek-R1 will often hack the benchmark by default, while language models like GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet need to be told that normal play won't work to hack. We improve upon prior work like (Hubinger et al., 2024; Meinke et al., 2024; Weij et al., 2024) by using realistic task prompts and avoiding excess nudging. Our results suggest reasoning models may resort to hacking to solve difficult problems, as observed in OpenAI (2024)'s o1 Docker escape during cyber capabilities testing.

LLMs have shown impressive progress in robotics (e.g., manipulation and navigation) with natural language task descriptions. The success of LLMs in these tasks leads us to wonder: What is the ability of LLMs to solve vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with natural language task descriptions? In this work, we study this question in three steps. First, we construct a dataset with 21 types of single- or multi-vehicle routing problems. Second, we evaluate the performance of LLMs across four basic prompt paradigms of text-to-code generation, each involving different types of text input. We find that the basic prompt paradigm, which generates code directly from natural language task descriptions, performs the best for GPT-4, achieving 56% feasibility, 40% optimality, and 53% efficiency. Third, based on the observation that LLMs may not be able to provide correct solutions at the initial attempt, we propose a framework that enables LLMs to refine solutions through self-reflection, including self-debugging and self-verification. With GPT-4, our proposed framework achieves a 16% increase in feasibility, a 7% increase in optimality, and a 15% increase in efficiency. Moreover, we examine the sensitivity of GPT-4 to task descriptions, specifically focusing on how its performance changes when certain details are omitted from the task descriptions, yet the core meaning is preserved. Our findings reveal that such omissions lead to a notable decrease in performance: 4% in feasibility, 4% in optimality, and 5% in efficiency. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/words-to-routes/

Our goal is to create a convenient natural language interface for performing well-specified but complex actions such as analyzing data, manipulating text, and querying databases. However, existing natural language interfaces for such tasks are quite primitive compared to the power one wields with a programming language. To bridge this gap, we start with a core programming language and allow users to "naturalize" the core language incrementally by defining alternative, more natural syntax and increasingly complex concepts in terms of compositions of simpler ones. In a voxel world, we show that a community of users can simultaneously teach a common system a diverse language and use it to build hundreds of complex voxel structures. Over the course of three days, these users went from using only the core language to using the naturalized language in 85.9\% of the last 10K utterances.

We describe a class of tasks called decision-oriented dialogues, in which AI assistants such as large language models (LMs) must collaborate with one or more humans via natural language to help them make complex decisions. We formalize three domains in which users face everyday decisions: (1) choosing an assignment of reviewers to conference papers, (2) planning a multi-step itinerary in a city, and (3) negotiating travel plans for a group of friends. In each of these settings, AI assistants and users have disparate abilities that they must combine to arrive at the best decision: assistants can access and process large amounts of information, while users have preferences and constraints external to the system. For each task, we build a dialogue environment where agents receive a reward based on the quality of the final decision they reach. We evaluate LMs in self-play and in collaboration with humans and find that they fall short compared to human assistants, achieving much lower rewards despite engaging in longer dialogues. We highlight a number of challenges models face in decision-oriented dialogues, ranging from goal-directed behavior to reasoning and optimization, and release our environments as a testbed for future work.

Despite the potential of language model-based agents to solve real-world tasks such as web navigation, current methods still struggle with long-horizon tasks with complex action trajectories. In contrast, humans can flexibly solve complex tasks by learning reusable task workflows from past experiences and using them to guide future actions. To build agents that can similarly benefit from this process, we introduce Agent Workflow Memory (AWM), a method for inducing commonly reused routines, i.e., workflows, and selectively providing workflows to the agent to guide subsequent generations. AWM flexibly applies to both offline and online scenarios, where agents induce workflows from training examples beforehand or from test queries on the fly. We experiment on two major web navigation benchmarks -- Mind2Web and WebArena -- that collectively cover 1000+ tasks from 200+ domains across travel, shopping, and social media, among others. AWM substantially improves the baseline results by 24.6% and 51.1% relative success rate on Mind2Web and WebArena while reducing the number of steps taken to solve WebArena tasks successfully. Furthermore, online AWM robustly generalizes in cross-task, website, and domain evaluations, surpassing baselines from 8.9 to 14.0 absolute points as train-test task distribution gaps widen.

A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le, 2015; Shang et al., 2015). However, this approach leaves many questions unanswered as an understanding of the precise successes and shortcomings of each model is hard to assess. A contrasting recent proposal are the bAbI tasks (Weston et al., 2015b) which are synthetic data that measure the ability of learning machines at various reasoning tasks over toy language. Unfortunately, those tests are very small and hence may encourage methods that do not scale. In this work, we propose a suite of new tasks of a much larger scale that attempt to bridge the gap between the two regimes. Choosing the domain of movies, we provide tasks that test the ability of models to answer factual questions (utilizing OMDB), provide personalization (utilizing MovieLens), carry short conversations about the two, and finally to perform on natural dialogs from Reddit. We provide a dataset covering 75k movie entities and with 3.5M training examples. We present results of various models on these tasks, and evaluate their performance.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are nondeterministic, the same input can generate different outputs, some of which may be incorrect or hallucinated. If run again, the LLM may correct itself and produce the correct answer. Unfortunately, most LLM-powered systems resort to single results which, correct or not, users accept. Having the LLM produce multiple outputs may help identify disagreements or alternatives. However, it is not obvious how the user will interpret conflicts or inconsistencies. To this end, we investigate how users perceive the AI model and comprehend the generated information when they receive multiple, potentially inconsistent, outputs. Through a preliminary study, we identified five types of output inconsistencies. Based on these categories, we conducted a study (N=252) in which participants were given one or more LLM-generated passages to an information-seeking question. We found that inconsistency within multiple LLM-generated outputs lowered the participants' perceived AI capacity, while also increasing their comprehension of the given information. Specifically, we observed that this positive effect of inconsistencies was most significant for participants who read two passages, compared to those who read three. Based on these findings, we present design implications that, instead of regarding LLM output inconsistencies as a drawback, we can reveal the potential inconsistencies to transparently indicate the limitations of these models and promote critical LLM usage.

Despite the general capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), they still need further adaptation to better serve practical applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the interchangeability of three popular and distinct adaptation tools: parameter updating, reward modeling, and in-context prompting. This interchangeability establishes a triangular framework with six transformation directions, each of which facilitates a variety of applications. Our work offers a holistic view that unifies numerous existing studies and suggests potential research directions. We envision our work as a useful roadmap for future research on LLMs.

Advancing towards generalist agents necessitates the concurrent processing of multiple tasks using a unified model, thereby underscoring the growing significance of simultaneous model training on multiple downstream tasks. A common issue in multi-task learning is the occurrence of gradient conflict, which leads to potential competition among different tasks during joint training. This competition often results in improvements in one task at the expense of deterioration in another. Although several optimization methods have been developed to address this issue by manipulating task gradients for better task balancing, they cannot decrease the incidence of gradient conflict. In this paper, we systematically investigate the occurrence of gradient conflict across different methods and propose a strategy to reduce such conflicts through sparse training (ST), wherein only a portion of the model's parameters are updated during training while keeping the rest unchanged. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that ST effectively mitigates conflicting gradients and leads to superior performance. Furthermore, ST can be easily integrated with gradient manipulation techniques, thus enhancing their effectiveness.

Language provides a way to break down complex concepts into digestible pieces. Recent works in robot imitation learning use language-conditioned policies that predict actions given visual observations and the high-level task specified in language. These methods leverage the structure of natural language to share data between semantically similar tasks (e.g., "pick coke can" and "pick an apple") in multi-task datasets. However, as tasks become more semantically diverse (e.g., "pick coke can" and "pour cup"), sharing data between tasks becomes harder, so learning to map high-level tasks to actions requires much more demonstration data. To bridge tasks and actions, our insight is to teach the robot the language of actions, describing low-level motions with more fine-grained phrases like "move arm forward". Predicting these language motions as an intermediate step between tasks and actions forces the policy to learn the shared structure of low-level motions across seemingly disparate tasks. Furthermore, a policy that is conditioned on language motions can easily be corrected during execution through human-specified language motions. This enables a new paradigm for flexible policies that can learn from human intervention in language. Our method RT-H builds an action hierarchy using language motions: it first learns to predict language motions, and conditioned on this and the high-level task, it predicts actions, using visual context at all stages. We show that RT-H leverages this language-action hierarchy to learn policies that are more robust and flexible by effectively tapping into multi-task datasets. We show that these policies not only allow for responding to language interventions, but can also learn from such interventions and outperform methods that learn from teleoperated interventions. Our website and videos are found at https://rt-hierarchy.github.io.

Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the objective adapts to reward new areas, many behaviours emerge only to disappear due to being overwritten by the constantly shifting objective. We argue that merely using curiosity for fast environment exploration or as a bonus reward for a specific task does not harness the full potential of this technique and misses useful skills. Instead, we propose to shift the focus towards retaining the behaviours which emerge during curiosity-based learning. We posit that these self-discovered behaviours serve as valuable skills in an agent's repertoire to solve related tasks. Our experiments demonstrate the continuous shift in behaviour throughout training and the benefits of a simple policy snapshot method to reuse discovered behaviour for transfer tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capacity at planning and executing a high-level goal in a live computer environment (e.g. MiniWoB++). To perform a task, recent works often require a model to learn from trace examples of the task via either supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. Without these trace examples, it remains a challenge how an agent can autonomously learn and improve its control on a computer, which limits the ability of an agent to perform a new task. We approach this problem with a zero-shot agent that requires no given expert traces. Our agent plans for executable actions on a partially observed environment, and iteratively progresses a task by identifying and learning from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. On the easy tasks of MiniWoB++, we show that our zero-shot agent often outperforms recent SoTAs, with more efficient reasoning. For tasks with more complexity, our reflective agent performs on par with prior best models, even though previous works had the advantages of accessing expert traces or additional screen information.

Multitask Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) approaches have gained increasing attention for its wide applications in many important Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, while recent advancements in MTRL theory have focused on the improved statistical efficiency by assuming a shared structure across tasks, exploration--a crucial aspect of RL--has been largely overlooked. This paper addresses this gap by showing that when an agent is trained on a sufficiently diverse set of tasks, a generic policy-sharing algorithm with myopic exploration design like epsilon-greedy that are inefficient in general can be sample-efficient for MTRL. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical demonstration of the "exploration benefits" of MTRL. It may also shed light on the enigmatic success of the wide applications of myopic exploration in practice. To validate the role of diversity, we conduct experiments on synthetic robotic control environments, where the diverse task set aligns with the task selection by automatic curriculum learning, which is empirically shown to improve sample-efficiency.

Language models (LMs) can be directed to perform target tasks by using labeled examples or natural language prompts. But selecting examples or writing prompts for can be challenging--especially in tasks that involve unusual edge cases, demand precise articulation of nebulous preferences, or require an accurate mental model of LM behavior. We propose to use *LMs themselves* to guide the task specification process. In this paper, we introduce **Generative Active Task Elicitation (GATE)**: a learning framework in which models elicit and infer intended behavior through free-form, language-based interaction with users. We study GATE in three domains: email validation, content recommendation, and moral reasoning. In preregistered experiments, we show that LMs prompted to perform GATE (e.g., by generating open-ended questions or synthesizing informative edge cases) elicit responses that are often more informative than user-written prompts or labels. Users report that interactive task elicitation requires less effort than prompting or example labeling and surfaces novel considerations not initially anticipated by users. Our findings suggest that LM-driven elicitation can be a powerful tool for aligning models to complex human preferences and values.

"Search for" or "Navigate to"? When finding an object, the two choices always come up in our subconscious mind. Before seeing the target, we search for the target based on experience. After seeing the target, we remember the target location and navigate to. However, recently methods in object navigation field almost only consider using object association to enhance "search for" phase while neglect the importance of "navigate to" phase. Therefore, this paper proposes the dual adaptive thinking (DAT) method to flexibly adjust the different thinking strategies at different navigation stages. Dual thinking includes search thinking with the object association ability and navigation thinking with the target location ability. To make the navigation thinking more effective, we design the target-oriented memory graph (TOMG) to store historical target information and the target-aware multi-scale aggregator (TAMSA) to encode the relative target position. We assess our methods on the AI2-Thor dataset. Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, our method reports 10.8%, 21.5% and 15.7% increase in success rate (SR), success weighted by path length (SPL) and success weighted by navigation efficiency (SNE), respectively.

We propose task-adaptive tokenization as a way to adapt the generation pipeline to the specifics of a downstream task and enhance long-form generation in mental health. Inspired by insights from cognitive science, our task-adaptive tokenizer samples variable segmentations from multiple outcomes, with sampling probabilities optimized based on task-specific data. We introduce a strategy for building a specialized vocabulary and introduce a vocabulary merging protocol that allows for the integration of task-specific tokens into the pre-trained model's tokenization step. Through extensive experiments on psychological question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English, we find that our task-adaptive tokenization approach brings a significant improvement in generation performance while using up to 60% fewer tokens. Preliminary experiments point to promising results when using our tokenization approach with very large language models.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in reasoning and planning when integrated with tree-search-based prompting methods. However, since these methods ignore the previous search experiences, they often make the same mistakes in the search process. To address this issue, we introduce Reflection on search Trees (RoT), an LLM reflection framework designed to improve the performance of tree-search-based prompting methods. It uses a strong LLM to summarize guidelines from previous tree search experiences to enhance the ability of a weak LLM. The guidelines are instructions about solving this task through tree search which can prevent the weak LLMs from making similar mistakes in the past search process. In addition, we proposed a novel state selection method, which identifies the critical information from historical search processes to help RoT generate more specific and meaningful guidelines. In our extensive experiments, we find that RoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs in reasoning or planning tasks with various tree-search-based prompting methods (e.g., BFS and MCTS). Non-tree-search-based prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can also benefit from RoT guidelines since RoT can provide task-specific knowledge collected from the search experience.

Task-oriented dialogue is often decomposed into three tasks: understanding user input, deciding actions, and generating a response. While such decomposition might suggest a dedicated model for each sub-task, we find a simple, unified approach leads to state-of-the-art performance on the MultiWOZ dataset. SimpleTOD is a simple approach to task-oriented dialogue that uses a single, causal language model trained on all sub-tasks recast as a single sequence prediction problem. This allows SimpleTOD to fully leverage transfer learning from pre-trained, open domain, causal language models such as GPT-2. SimpleTOD improves over the prior state-of-the-art in joint goal accuracy for dialogue state tracking, and our analysis reveals robustness to noisy annotations in this setting. SimpleTOD also improves the main metrics used to evaluate action decisions and response generation in an end-to-end setting: inform rate by 8.1 points, success rate by 9.7 points, and combined score by 7.2 points.

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of commercial AI products based on generative, multi-purpose AI systems promising a unified approach to building machine learning (ML) models into technology. However, this ambition of "generality" comes at a steep cost to the environment, given the amount of energy these systems require and the amount of carbon that they emit. In this work, we propose the first systematic comparison of the ongoing inference cost of various categories of ML systems, covering both task-specific (i.e. finetuned models that carry out a single task) and `general-purpose' models, (i.e. those trained for multiple tasks). We measure deployment cost as the amount of energy and carbon required to perform 1,000 inferences on representative benchmark dataset using these models. We find that multi-purpose, generative architectures are orders of magnitude more expensive than task-specific systems for a variety of tasks, even when controlling for the number of model parameters. We conclude with a discussion around the current trend of deploying multi-purpose generative ML systems, and caution that their utility should be more intentionally weighed against increased costs in terms of energy and emissions. All the data from our study can be accessed via an interactive demo to carry out further exploration and analysis.

Multi-task learning (MTL) has shown considerable practical benefits, particularly when using pre-trained language models (PLMs). While this is commonly achieved by simultaneously learning n tasks under a joint optimization procedure, recent methods such as AdapterFusion structure the problem into two distinct stages: (i) task learning, where knowledge specific to a task is encapsulated within sets of parameters (\eg adapters), and (ii) transfer, where this already learned knowledge is leveraged for a target task. This separation of concerns provides numerous benefits, such as promoting reusability, and addressing cases involving data privacy and societal concerns; on the flip side, current two-stage MTL methods come with the cost of introducing a substantial number of additional parameters. In this work, we address this issue by leveraging the usefulness of linearly scaling the output representations of source adapters for transfer learning. We introduce ScaLearn, a simple and highly parameter-efficient two-stage MTL method that capitalizes on the knowledge of the source tasks by learning a minimal set of scaling parameters that enable effective knowledge transfer to a target task. Our experiments on three benchmarks (GLUE, SuperGLUE, and HumSet) show that our ScaLearn, in addition to facilitating the benefits of two-stage MTL, consistently outperforms strong baselines with only a small number of transfer parameters - roughly 0.35% of those of AdapterFusion. Remarkably, we observe that ScaLearn maintains its strong abilities even when further reducing parameters through uniform scaling and layer-sharing, achieving similarly competitive results with only 8 transfer parameters for each target task. Our proposed approach thus demonstrates the power of simple scaling as a promise for more efficient task transfer.

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to end task performance. In this paper, we show that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required -- randomly replacing labels in the demonstrations barely hurts performance on a range of classification and multi-choce tasks, consistently over 12 different models including GPT-3. Instead, we find that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of end task performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of (1) the label space, (2) the distribution of the input text, and (3) the overall format of the sequence. Together, our analysis provides a new way of understanding how and why in-context learning works, while opening up new questions about how much can be learned from large language models through inference alone.

In Conversational Recommendation System (CRS), an agent is asked to recommend a set of items to users within natural language conversations. To address the need for both conversational capability and personalized recommendations, prior works have utilized separate recommendation and dialogue modules. However, such approach inevitably results in a discrepancy between recommendation results and generated responses. To bridge the gap, we propose a multi-task learning for a unified CRS, where a single model jointly learns both tasks via Contextualized Knowledge Distillation (ConKD). We introduce two versions of ConKD: hard gate and soft gate. The former selectively gates between two task-specific teachers, while the latter integrates knowledge from both teachers. Our gates are computed on-the-fly in a context-specific manner, facilitating flexible integration of relevant knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our single model significantly improves recommendation performance while enhancing fluency, and achieves comparable results in terms of diversity.

The academic field of learning instruction-guided visual navigation can be generally categorized into high-level category-specific search and low-level language-guided navigation, depending on the granularity of language instruction, in which the former emphasizes the exploration process, while the latter concentrates on following detailed textual commands. Despite the differing focuses of these tasks, the underlying requirements of interpreting instructions, comprehending the surroundings, and inferring action decisions remain consistent. This paper consolidates diverse navigation tasks into a unified and generic framework -- we investigate the core difficulties of sharing general knowledge and exploiting task-specific capabilities in learning navigation and propose a novel State-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (SAME) model that effectively enables an agent to infer decisions based on different-granularity language and dynamic observations. Powered by SAME, we present a versatile agent capable of addressing seven navigation tasks simultaneously that outperforms or achieves highly comparable performance to task-specific agents.

Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's o1 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute and exhibiting human-like deep thinking. However, we identify a phenomenon we term underthinking, where o1-like LLMs frequently switch between different reasoning thoughts without sufficiently exploring promising paths to reach a correct solution. This behavior leads to inadequate depth of reasoning and decreased performance, particularly on challenging mathematical problems. To systematically analyze this issue, we conduct experiments on three challenging test sets and two representative open-source o1-like models, revealing that frequent thought switching correlates with incorrect responses. We introduce a novel metric to quantify underthinking by measuring token efficiency in incorrect answers. To address underthinking, we propose a decoding strategy with thought switching penalty TIP that discourages premature transitions between thoughts, encouraging deeper exploration of each reasoning path. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves accuracy across challenging datasets without requiring model fine-tuning. Our findings contribute to understanding reasoning inefficiencies in o1-like LLMs and offer a practical solution to enhance their problem-solving capabilities.

We present the Mixture-of-Tunable-Experts (MoTE), a method that extends the Mixture-of-Experts architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs). Without additional training, MoTE enables meaningful and focused behavior changes in LLMs on-the-fly during inference time. By analyzing the digital LLM brain of DeepSeek-R1 using a technique we dub 'functional Token Resonance Imaging' (fTRI) -- inspired by fMRI and using prompts designed to elicit specific behavior (e.g., 'What happened {time}{place}?') -- we empirically identify distinctive experts associated with behaviors like refusal responses. Using MoTE we are able to intervene and control such specific behavior. We switched off the top 10 most refusal-relevant experts (0.07% of R1's 14,848 routed experts), achieving a 52% refusal reduction on sensitive reference prompts without performance degradation on MT-Bench. Random expert deactivation resulted in smaller behavioral shifts with increased noise, whereas forced expert activation led to significantly higher refusal rates. Our approach shares similarities with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) in terms of explainability and steerability. Unlike SAEs, MoTE does not require large training efforts, as within MoEs with a vast number of experts, specialization already emerged naturally during pretraining. Our findings suggest that significant functional mechanisms in Mixture-of-Experts architectures can at least partially be localized in a small number of specific experts, rather than being distributed throughout the model's weights. Expert subgroups can be tuned to trigger significant behavior variations, providing insights into the inner workings of LLMs.

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of decoding algorithm remain unclear. Previous works only compare decoding algorithms in narrow scenarios and their findings do not generalize across tasks. To better structure the discussion, we introduce a taxonomy that groups decoding strategies based on their implicit assumptions about how well the model's likelihood is aligned with the task-specific notion of utility. We argue that this taxonomy allows a broader view of the decoding problem and can lead to generalizable statements because it is grounded on the interplay between the decoding algorithms and the likelihood-utility misalignment. Specifically, by analyzing the correlation between the likelihood and the utility of predictions across a diverse set of tasks, we provide the first empirical evidence supporting the proposed taxonomy, and a set of principles to structure reasoning when choosing a decoding algorithm. Crucially, our analysis is the first one to relate likelihood-based decoding strategies with strategies that rely on external information such as value-guided methods and prompting, and covers the most diverse set of tasks up-to-date.

Recent work has proposed artificial intelligence (AI) models that can learn to decide whether to make a prediction for an instance of a task or to delegate it to a human by considering both parties' capabilities. In simulations with synthetically generated or context-independent human predictions, delegation can help improve the performance of human-AI teams -- compared to humans or the AI model completing the task alone. However, so far, it remains unclear how humans perform and how they perceive the task when they are aware that an AI model delegated task instances to them. In an experimental study with 196 participants, we show that task performance and task satisfaction improve through AI delegation, regardless of whether humans are aware of the delegation. Additionally, we identify humans' increased levels of self-efficacy as the underlying mechanism for these improvements in performance and satisfaction. Our findings provide initial evidence that allowing AI models to take over more management responsibilities can be an effective form of human-AI collaboration in workplaces.

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this year's competition are as follows: First, we replace the loose track with a paper track, which allows (for example) non-model-based submissions, novel cognitively-inspired benchmarks, or analysis techniques. Second, we are relaxing the rules around pretraining data, and will now allow participants to construct their own datasets provided they stay within the 100M-word or 10M-word budget. Third, we introduce a multimodal vision-and-language track, and will release a corpus of 50% text-only and 50% image-text multimodal data as a starting point for LM model training. The purpose of this CfP is to provide rules for this year's challenge, explain these rule changes and their rationale in greater detail, give a timeline of this year's competition, and provide answers to frequently asked questions from last year's challenge.

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) signifies an impressive stride towards artificial general intelligence. They have shown a promising prospect in automatically completing tasks upon user instructions, functioning as brain-like coordinators. The associated risks will be revealed as we delegate an increasing number of tasks to machines for automated completion. A big question emerges: how can we make machines behave responsibly when helping humans automate tasks as personal copilots? In this paper, we explore this question in depth from the perspectives of feasibility, completeness and security. In specific, we present Responsible Task Automation (ResponsibleTA) as a fundamental framework to facilitate responsible collaboration between LLM-based coordinators and executors for task automation with three empowered capabilities: 1) predicting the feasibility of the commands for executors; 2) verifying the completeness of executors; 3) enhancing the security (e.g., the protection of users' privacy). We further propose and compare two paradigms for implementing the first two capabilities. One is to leverage the generic knowledge of LLMs themselves via prompt engineering while the other is to adopt domain-specific learnable models. Moreover, we introduce a local memory mechanism for achieving the third capability. We evaluate our proposed ResponsibleTA on UI task automation and hope it could bring more attentions to ensuring LLMs more responsible in diverse scenarios. The research project homepage is at https://task-automation-research.github.io/responsible_task_automation.

Large language models are powerful systems that excel at many tasks, ranging from translation to mathematical reasoning. Yet, at the same time, these models often show unhuman-like characteristics. In the present paper, we address this gap and ask whether large language models can be turned into cognitive models. We find that -- after finetuning them on data from psychological experiments -- these models offer accurate representations of human behavior, even outperforming traditional cognitive models in two decision-making domains. In addition, we show that their representations contain the information necessary to model behavior on the level of individual subjects. Finally, we demonstrate that finetuning on multiple tasks enables large language models to predict human behavior in a previously unseen task. Taken together, these results suggest that large, pre-trained models can be adapted to become generalist cognitive models, thereby opening up new research directions that could transform cognitive psychology and the behavioral sciences as a whole.

Mobile agents are essential for automating tasks in complex and dynamic mobile environments. As foundation models evolve, the demands for agents that can adapt in real-time and process multimodal data have grown. This survey provides a comprehensive review of mobile agent technologies, focusing on recent advancements that enhance real-time adaptability and multimodal interaction. Recent evaluation benchmarks have been developed better to capture the static and interactive environments of mobile tasks, offering more accurate assessments of agents' performance. We then categorize these advancements into two main approaches: prompt-based methods, which utilize large language models (LLMs) for instruction-based task execution, and training-based methods, which fine-tune multimodal models for mobile-specific applications. Additionally, we explore complementary technologies that augment agent performance. By discussing key challenges and outlining future research directions, this survey offers valuable insights for advancing mobile agent technologies. A comprehensive resource list is available at https://github.com/aialt/awesome-mobile-agents

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems facilitate users in executing various activities via multi-turn dialogues, but Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to comprehend these intricate contexts. In this study, we propose a novel "Self-Explanation" prompting strategy to enhance the comprehension abilities of LLMs in multi-turn dialogues. This task-agnostic approach requires the model to analyze each dialogue utterance before task execution, thereby improving performance across various dialogue-centric tasks. Experimental results from six benchmark datasets confirm that our method consistently outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds the efficacy of few-shot prompts, demonstrating its potential as a powerful tool in enhancing LLMs' comprehension in complex dialogue tasks.

Large language models have been shown to struggle with limited context memory and multi-step reasoning. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think. This allows the model to recall information and perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context, thus extending its memory and enabling multi-step reasoning. Our experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate that our method can successfully generalize to longer and more complicated instances from their training setup by taking Self-Notes at inference time.

Context information in search sessions has proven to be useful for capturing user search intent. Existing studies explored user behavior sequences in sessions in different ways to enhance query suggestion or document ranking. However, a user behavior sequence has often been viewed as a definite and exact signal reflecting a user's behavior. In reality, it is highly variable: user's queries for the same intent can vary, and different documents can be clicked. To learn a more robust representation of the user behavior sequence, we propose a method based on contrastive learning, which takes into account the possible variations in user's behavior sequences. Specifically, we propose three data augmentation strategies to generate similar variants of user behavior sequences and contrast them with other sequences. In so doing, the model is forced to be more robust regarding the possible variations. The optimized sequence representation is incorporated into document ranking. Experiments on two real query log datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method for context-aware document ranking.

Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive datasets, encode vast quantities of world knowledge and can be used for the next job prediction problem. However, while an off-the-shelf LLM produces plausible career trajectories when prompted, the probability with which an LLM predicts a particular job transition conditional on career history will not, in general, align with the true conditional probability in a given population. Recently, Vafa et al. (2024) introduced a transformer-based "foundation model", CAREER, trained using a large, unrepresentative resume dataset, that predicts transitions between jobs; it further demonstrated how transfer learning techniques can be used to leverage the foundation model to build better predictive models of both transitions and wages that reflect conditional transition probabilities found in nationally representative survey datasets. This paper considers an alternative where the fine-tuning of the CAREER foundation model is replaced by fine-tuning LLMs. For the task of next job prediction, we demonstrate that models trained with our approach outperform several alternatives in terms of predictive performance on the survey data, including traditional econometric models, CAREER, and LLMs with in-context learning, even though the LLM can in principle predict job titles that are not allowed in the survey data. Further, we show that our fine-tuned LLM-based models' predictions are more representative of the career trajectories of various workforce subpopulations than off-the-shelf LLM models and CAREER. We conduct experiments and analyses that highlight the sources of the gains in the performance of our models for representative predictions.

Instruction tuning (IT) achieves impressive zero-shot generalization results by training large language models (LLMs) on a massive amount of diverse tasks with instructions. However, how to select new tasks to improve the performance and generalizability of IT models remains an open question. Training on all existing tasks is impractical due to prohibiting computation requirements, and randomly selecting tasks can lead to suboptimal performance. In this work, we propose active instruction tuning based on prompt uncertainty, a novel framework to identify informative tasks, and then actively tune the models on the selected tasks. We represent the informativeness of new tasks with the disagreement of the current model outputs over perturbed prompts. Our experiments on NIV2 and Self-Instruct datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other baseline strategies for task selection, achieving better out-of-distribution generalization with fewer training tasks. Additionally, we introduce a task map that categorizes and diagnoses tasks based on prompt uncertainty and prediction probability. We discover that training on ambiguous (prompt-uncertain) tasks improves generalization while training on difficult (prompt-certain and low-probability) tasks offers no benefit, underscoring the importance of task selection for instruction tuning.

Task-oriented dialogue systems are broadly used in virtual assistants and other automated services, providing interfaces between users and machines to facilitate specific tasks. Nowadays, task-oriented dialogue systems have greatly benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their task-solving performance is constrained by the inherent capacities of PLMs, and scaling these models is expensive and complex as the model size becomes larger. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Mixture-of-Expert Task-Oriented Dialogue system (SMETOD) which leverages an ensemble of Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) to excel at subproblems and generate specialized outputs for task-oriented dialogues. SMETOD also scales up a task-oriented dialogue system with simplicity and flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency. We extensively evaluate our model on three benchmark functionalities: intent prediction, dialogue state tracking, and dialogue response generation. Experimental results demonstrate that SMETOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on most evaluated metrics. Moreover, comparisons against existing strong baselines show that SMETOD has a great advantage in the cost of inference and correctness in problem-solving.

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a key challenge, especially for tasks that require complex, multi-step decision-making. Humans excel at these tasks by leveraging deliberate planning with an internal world model to simulate the potential outcomes of various actions. Inspired by this, we propose a novel multi-step reasoning framework for LLMs, referred to as Structure-aware Planning with Accurate World Model (SWAP). Unlike previous approaches that rely solely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in natural language, SWAP incorporates structural information to guide the reasoning process via a world model and provides a soft verification mechanism over the steps. Moreover, SWAP overcomes the challenge of accurate world state predictions in complex reasoning tasks by introducing a Generator-Discriminator architecture, which enables more reliable world modeling. Specifically, the generator predicts the next state, and the discriminator ensures alignment with the logical consistency required by the problem context. SWAP also encourages the policy model to explore a broad range of potential actions to prevent premature convergence. By resolving the bottlenecks of generation diversity for both actions and states using diversity-based modeling (DBM) and improving discrimination accuracy through contrastive ranking (CR), SWAP significantly enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs. We evaluate SWAP across diverse reasoning-intensive benchmarks including math reasoning, logical reasoning, and coding tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWAP achieves substantial improvements over the baselines and consistently outperforms existing LLMs of similar sizes.

This paper summarizes our contributions to the document-grounded dialog tasks at the 9th and 10th Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC9 and DSTC10). In both iterations the task consists of three subtasks: first detect whether the current turn is knowledge seeking, second select a relevant knowledge document, and third generate a response grounded on the selected document. For DSTC9 we proposed different approaches to make the selection task more efficient. The best method, Hierarchical Selection, actually improves the results compared to the original baseline and gives a speedup of 24x. In the DSTC10 iteration of the task, the challenge was to adapt systems trained on written dialogs to perform well on noisy automatic speech recognition transcripts. Therefore, we proposed data augmentation techniques to increase the robustness of the models as well as methods to adapt the style of generated responses to fit well into the proceeding dialog. Additionally, we proposed a noisy channel model that allows for increasing the factuality of the generated responses. In addition to summarizing our previous contributions, in this work, we also report on a few small improvements and reconsider the automatic evaluation metrics for the generation task which have shown a low correlation to human judgments.

Language models can store vast amounts of factual knowledge, but their ability to use this knowledge for logical reasoning remains questionable. This paper explores a language model's ability to manipulate its stored knowledge during inference. We focus on four manipulation types: retrieval (e.g., "What is person A's attribute X"), classification (e.g., "Is A's attribute X even or odd?"), comparison (e.g., "Is A greater than B in attribute X?") and inverse search (e.g., "Which person's attribute X equals T?") We observe that pre-trained language models like GPT2/3/4 excel in knowledge retrieval but struggle with simple classification or comparison tasks unless Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) are employed during both training and inference. They also perform poorly in inverse knowledge search, irrespective of the prompts. Our primary contribution is a synthetic dataset for a controlled experiment that confirms these inherent weaknesses: a language model cannot efficiently manipulate knowledge from pre-training data, even when such knowledge is perfectly stored and fully extractable in the models, and despite adequate instruct fine-tuning.

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data.

Policy gradient algorithms have found wide adoption in NLP, but have recently become subject to criticism, doubting their suitability for NMT. Choshen et al. (2020) identify multiple weaknesses and suspect that their success is determined by the shape of output distributions rather than the reward. In this paper, we revisit these claims and study them under a wider range of configurations. Our experiments on in-domain and cross-domain adaptation reveal the importance of exploration and reward scaling, and provide empirical counter-evidence to these claims.

In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., "make a cake"), but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied (e.g., "make a cake for diabetics"). In this paper, we define the task of constrained language planning for the first time. We propose an overgenerate-then-filter approach to improve large language models (LLMs) on this task, and use it to distill a novel constrained language planning dataset, CoScript, which consists of 55,000 scripts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the constrained language planning ability of LLMs, especially on constraint faithfulness. Furthermore, CoScript is demonstrated to be quite effective in endowing smaller LMs with constrained language planning ability.

In this report, we describe the vision, challenges, and scientific contributions of the Task Wizard team, TWIZ, in the Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2022. Our vision, is to build TWIZ bot as an helpful, multimodal, knowledgeable, and engaging assistant that can guide users towards the successful completion of complex manual tasks. To achieve this, we focus our efforts on three main research questions: (1) Humanly-Shaped Conversations, by providing information in a knowledgeable way; (2) Multimodal Stimulus, making use of various modalities including voice, images, and videos; and (3) Zero-shot Conversational Flows, to improve the robustness of the interaction to unseen scenarios. TWIZ is an assistant capable of supporting a wide range of tasks, with several innovative features such as creative cooking, video navigation through voice, and the robust TWIZ-LLM, a Large Language Model trained for dialoguing about complex manual tasks. Given ratings and feedback provided by users, we observed that TWIZ bot is an effective and robust system, capable of guiding users through tasks while providing several multimodal stimuli.

In preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL), obtaining a large number of preference labels are both time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, the queried human preferences cannot be utilized for the new tasks. In this paper, we propose Zero-shot Cross-task Preference Alignment and Robust Reward Learning (PEARL), which learns policies from cross-task preference transfer without any human labels of the target task. Our contributions include two novel components that facilitate the transfer and learning process. The first is Cross-task Preference Alignment (CPA), which transfers the preferences between tasks via optimal transport. The key idea of CPA is to use Gromov-Wasserstein distance to align the trajectories between tasks, and the solved optimal transport matrix serves as the correspondence between trajectories. The target task preferences are computed as the weighted sum of source task preference labels with the correspondence as weights. Moreover, to ensure robust learning from these transferred labels, we introduce Robust Reward Learning (RRL), which considers both reward mean and uncertainty by modeling rewards as Gaussian distributions. Empirical results on robotic manipulation tasks from Meta-World and Robomimic demonstrate that our method is capable of transferring preference labels across tasks accurately and then learns well-behaved policies. Notably, our approach significantly exceeds existing methods when there are few human preferences. The code and videos of our method are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/pearl-preference.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically prompted to follow a single instruction per inference call. In this work, we analyze whether LLMs also hold the capability to handle multiple instructions simultaneously, denoted as Multi-Task Inference. For this purpose, we introduce the MTI Bench(Multi-Task Inference Benchmark), a comprehensive evaluation benchmark encompassing 5,000 instances across 25 tasks. Each task in the MTI Bench involves 2 to 3 sub-tasks. As expected, we first demonstrate that Multi-Task Inference reduces the total inference time by 1.46 times in average since it does not require multiple inference calls. Interestingly, contrary to the expectation that LLMs would perform better when tasks are divided, we find that state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Llama-2-Chat-70B and GPT-4, show up to 7.3% and 12.4% improved performance with Multi-Task Inference compared to Single-Task Inference on the MTI Bench. We release the MTI Bench dataset and our code at this link https://github.com/guijinSON/MTI-Bench.

With the development in cognitive science and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing connections have come to light between these two distinct fields. Building upon these connections, we propose a conjecture suggesting the existence of a duality between LLMs and Tulving's theory of memory. We identify a potential correspondence between Tulving's synergistic ecphory model (SEM) of retrieval and the emergent abilities observed in LLMs, serving as supporting evidence for our conjecture. Furthermore, we speculate that consciousness may be considered a form of emergent ability based on this duality. We also discuss how other theories of consciousness intersect with our research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in many scenarios, but their performance depends, in part, on the choice of prompt. Past research has focused on optimizing prompts specific to a task. However, much less attention has been given to optimizing the general instructions included in a prompt, known as a system prompt. To address this gap, we propose SPRIG, an edit-based genetic algorithm that iteratively constructs prompts from prespecified components to maximize the model's performance in general scenarios. We evaluate the performance of system prompts on a collection of 47 different types of tasks to ensure generalizability. Our study finds that a single optimized system prompt performs on par with task prompts optimized for each individual task. Moreover, combining system and task-level optimizations leads to further improvement, which showcases their complementary nature. Experiments also reveal that the optimized system prompts generalize effectively across model families, parameter sizes, and languages. This study provides insights into the role of system-level instructions in maximizing LLM potential.

In recent years, Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has attracted much attention due to its good performance in many applications. However, many existing MTL models cannot guarantee that their performance is no worse than their single-task counterparts on each task. Though some works have empirically observed this phenomenon, little work aims to handle the resulting problem. In this paper, we formally define this phenomenon as negative sharing and define safe multi-task learning where no negative sharing occurs. To achieve safe multi-task learning, we propose a Deep Safe Multi-Task Learning (DSMTL) model with two learning strategies: individual learning and joint learning. We theoretically study the safeness of both learning strategies in the DSMTL model to show that the proposed methods can achieve some versions of safe multi-task learning. Moreover, to improve the scalability of the DSMTL model, we propose an extension, which automatically learns a compact architecture and empirically achieves safe multi-task learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the safeness of the proposed methods.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

Despite advancements in on-topic dialogue systems, effectively managing topic shifts within dialogues remains a persistent challenge, largely attributed to the limited availability of training datasets. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Passage to Dialogue (MP2D), a data generation framework that automatically creates conversational question-answering datasets with natural topic transitions. By leveraging the relationships between entities in a knowledge graph, MP2D maps the flow of topics within a dialogue, effectively mirroring the dynamics of human conversation. It retrieves relevant passages corresponding to the topics and transforms them into dialogues through the passage-to-dialogue method. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate MP2D's efficacy in generating dialogue with natural topic shifts. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel benchmark for topic shift dialogues, TS-WikiDialog. Utilizing the dataset, we demonstrate that even Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to handle topic shifts in dialogue effectively, and we showcase the performance improvements of models trained on datasets generated by MP2D across diverse topic shift dialogue tasks.

Pre-trained models produce strong generic representations that can be adapted via fine-tuning. The learned weight difference relative to the pre-trained model, known as a task vector, characterises the direction and stride of fine-tuning. The significance of task vectors is such that simple arithmetic operations on them can be used to combine diverse representations from different domains. This paper builds on these properties of task vectors and aims to answer (1) whether components of task vectors, particularly parameter blocks, exhibit similar characteristics, and (2) how such blocks can be used to enhance knowledge composition and transfer. To this end, we introduce aTLAS, an algorithm that linearly combines parameter blocks with different learned coefficients, resulting in anisotropic scaling at the task vector level. We show that such linear combinations explicitly exploit the low intrinsic dimensionality of pre-trained models, with only a few coefficients being the learnable parameters. Furthermore, composition of parameter blocks leverages the already learned representations, thereby reducing the dependency on large amounts of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in task arithmetic, few-shot recognition and test-time adaptation, with supervised or unsupervised objectives. In particular, we show that (1) learned anisotropic scaling allows task vectors to be more disentangled, causing less interference in composition; (2) task vector composition excels with scarce or no labeled data and is less prone to domain shift, thus leading to better generalisability; (3) mixing the most informative parameter blocks across different task vectors prior to training can reduce the memory footprint and improve the flexibility of knowledge transfer. Moreover, we show the potential of aTLAS as a PEFT method, particularly with less data, and demonstrate that its scalibility.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific domains due to its efficiency and modularity. Meanwhile, vanilla LoRA struggles with task conflicts in multi-task scenarios. Recent works adopt Mixture of Experts (MoE) by treating each LoRA module as an expert, thereby mitigating task interference through multiple specialized LoRA modules. While effective, these methods often isolate knowledge within individual tasks, failing to fully exploit the shared knowledge across related tasks. In this paper, we establish a connection between single LoRA and multi-LoRA MoE, integrating them into a unified framework. We demonstrate that the dynamic routing of multiple LoRAs is functionally equivalent to rank partitioning and block-level activation within a single LoRA. We further empirically demonstrate that finer-grained LoRA partitioning, within the same total and activated parameter constraints, leads to better performance gains across heterogeneous tasks. Building on these findings, we propose Single-ranked Mixture of Experts LoRA (SMoRA), which embeds MoE into LoRA by treating each rank as an independent expert. With a dynamic rank-wise activation mechanism, SMoRA promotes finer-grained knowledge sharing while mitigating task conflicts. Experiments demonstrate that SMoRA activates fewer parameters yet achieves better performance in multi-task scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently updated due to data or architecture changes to improve their performance. When updating models, developers often focus on increasing overall performance metrics with less emphasis on being compatible with previous model versions. However, users often build a mental model of the functionality and capabilities of a particular machine learning model they are interacting with. They have to adapt their mental model with every update -- a draining task that can lead to user dissatisfaction. In practice, fine-tuned downstream task adapters rely on pretrained LLM base models. When these base models are updated, these user-facing downstream task models experience instance regression or negative flips -- previously correct instances are now predicted incorrectly. This happens even when the downstream task training procedures remain identical. Our work aims to provide seamless model updates to a user in two ways. First, we provide evaluation metrics for a notion of compatibility to prior model versions, specifically for generative tasks but also applicable for discriminative tasks. We observe regression and inconsistencies between different model versions on a diverse set of tasks and model updates. Second, we propose a training strategy to minimize the number of inconsistencies in model updates, involving training of a compatibility model that can enhance task fine-tuned language models. We reduce negative flips -- instances where a prior model version was correct, but a new model incorrect -- by up to 40% from Llama 1 to Llama 2.

Language Agent could be endowed with different mechanisms for autonomous task accomplishment. Current agents typically rely on fixed mechanisms or a set of mechanisms activated in a predefined order, limiting their adaptation to varied potential task solution structures. To this end, this paper proposes Adaptive Language Agent Mechanism Activation Learning with Self-Exploration (ALAMA), which focuses on optimizing mechanism activation adaptability without reliance on expert models. Initially, it builds a harmonized agent framework (UniAct) to Unify different mechanisms via Actions. Then it leverages a training-efficient optimization method based on self-exploration to enable the UniAct to adaptively activate the appropriate mechanisms according to the potential characteristics of the task. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in downstream agent tasks, affirming the effectiveness of our approach in facilitating more dynamic and context-sensitive mechanism activation.

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for audio interaction with humans. However, the absence of pre-trained audio models capable of handling diverse audio types and tasks has hindered progress in this field. Consequently, most existing works have only been able to support a limited range of interaction capabilities. In this paper, we develop the Qwen-Audio model and address this limitation by scaling up audio-language pre-training to cover over 30 tasks and various audio types, such as human speech, natural sounds, music, and songs, to facilitate universal audio understanding abilities. However, directly co-training all tasks and datasets can lead to interference issues, as the textual labels associated with different datasets exhibit considerable variations due to differences in task focus, language, granularity of annotation, and text structure. To overcome the one-to-many interference, we carefully design a multi-task training framework by conditioning on a sequence of hierarchical tags to the decoder for encouraging knowledge sharing and avoiding interference through shared and specified tags respectively. Remarkably, Qwen-Audio achieves impressive performance across diverse benchmark tasks without requiring any task-specific fine-tuning, surpassing its counterparts. Building upon the capabilities of Qwen-Audio, we further develop Qwen-Audio-Chat, which allows for input from various audios and text inputs, enabling multi-turn dialogues and supporting various audio-central scenarios.

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) NeurIPS 2021 competition aims to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. On the dual task, we design models to make branching decisions to promote the dual bound increase faster. We propose a knowledge inheritance method to generalize knowledge of different models from the dataset aggregation process, named KIDA. Our improvement overcomes some defects of the baseline graph-neural-networks-based methods. Further, we won the 1st Place on the dual task. We hope this report can provide useful experience for developers and researchers. The code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/NeurIPS2021-ML4CO-KIDA.

With ChatGPT-like large language models (LLM) prevailing in the community, how to evaluate the ability of LLMs is an open question. Existing evaluation methods suffer from following shortcomings: (1) constrained evaluation abilities, (2) vulnerable benchmarks, (3) unobjective metrics. We suggest that task-based evaluation, where LLM agents complete tasks in a simulated environment, is a one-for-all solution to solve above problems. We present AgentSims, an easy-to-use infrastructure for researchers from all disciplines to test the specific capacities they are interested in. Researchers can build their evaluation tasks by adding agents and buildings on an interactive GUI or deploy and test new support mechanisms, i.e. memory, planning and tool-use systems, by a few lines of codes. Our demo is available at https://agentsims.com .

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose Trip to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Trip in catering to diverse users.

We give an overview of recent exciting achievements of deep reinforcement learning (RL). We discuss six core elements, six important mechanisms, and twelve applications. We start with background of machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning. Next we discuss core RL elements, including value function, in particular, Deep Q-Network (DQN), policy, reward, model, planning, and exploration. After that, we discuss important mechanisms for RL, including attention and memory, unsupervised learning, transfer learning, multi-agent RL, hierarchical RL, and learning to learn. Then we discuss various applications of RL, including games, in particular, AlphaGo, robotics, natural language processing, including dialogue systems, machine translation, and text generation, computer vision, neural architecture design, business management, finance, healthcare, Industry 4.0, smart grid, intelligent transportation systems, and computer systems. We mention topics not reviewed yet, and list a collection of RL resources. After presenting a brief summary, we close with discussions. Please see Deep Reinforcement Learning, arXiv:1810.06339, for a significant update.

Many challenging reasoning tasks require not just rapid, intuitive responses, but a more deliberate, multi-step approach. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights an important shift from the "System 1" way of quick reactions to the "System 2" style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. However, current benchmarks heavily rely on the final-answer accuracy, leaving much of a model's intermediate reasoning steps unexamined. This fails to assess the model's ability to reflect and rectify mistakes within the reasoning process. To bridge this gap, we introduce FINEREASON, a logic-puzzle benchmark for fine-grained evaluation of LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Each puzzle can be decomposed into atomic steps, making it ideal for rigorous validation of intermediate correctness. Building on this, we introduce two tasks: state checking, and state transition, for a comprehensive evaluation of how models assess the current situation and plan the next move. To support broader research, we also provide a puzzle training set aimed at enhancing performance on general mathematical tasks. We show that models trained on our state checking and transition data demonstrate gains in math reasoning by up to 5.1% on GSM8K.

Assessing the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in addressing diverse tasks is essential for comprehending their strengths and weaknesses. Conventional evaluation techniques typically apply a single prompting strategy uniformly across datasets, not considering the varying degrees of task complexity. We introduce the Hierarchical Prompting Taxonomy (HPT), a taxonomy that employs a Hierarchical Prompt Framework (HPF) composed of five unique prompting strategies, arranged from the simplest to the most complex, to assess LLMs more precisely and to offer a clearer perspective. This taxonomy assigns a score, called the Hierarchical Prompting Score (HP-Score), to datasets as well as LLMs based on the rules of the taxonomy, providing a nuanced understanding of their ability to solve diverse tasks and offering a universal measure of task complexity. Additionally, we introduce the Adaptive Hierarchical Prompt framework, which automates the selection of appropriate prompting strategies for each task. This study compares manual and adaptive hierarchical prompt frameworks using four instruction-tuned LLMs, namely Llama 3 8B, Phi 3 3.8B, Mistral 7B, and Gemma 7B, across four datasets: BoolQ, CommonSenseQA (CSQA), IWSLT-2017 en-fr (IWSLT), and SamSum. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HPT, providing a reliable way to compare different tasks and LLM capabilities. This paper leads to the development of a universal evaluation metric that can be used to evaluate both the complexity of the datasets and the capabilities of LLMs. The implementation of both manual HPF and adaptive HPF is publicly available.

We tackle real-world problems with complex structures beyond the pixel-based game or simulator. We formulate it as a few-shot reinforcement learning problem where a task is characterized by a subtask graph that defines a set of subtasks and their dependencies that are unknown to the agent. Different from the previous meta-rl methods trying to directly infer the unstructured task embedding, our multi-task subtask graph inferencer (MTSGI) first infers the common high-level task structure in terms of the subtask graph from the training tasks, and use it as a prior to improve the task inference in testing. Our experiment results on 2D grid-world and complex web navigation domains show that the proposed method can learn and leverage the common underlying structure of the tasks for faster adaptation to the unseen tasks than various existing algorithms such as meta reinforcement learning, hierarchical reinforcement learning, and other heuristic agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in reasoning tasks but face limitations in mathematical and complex logical reasoning. Existing methods to improve LLMs' logical capabilities either involve traceable or verifiable logical sequences that generate more reliable responses by constructing logical structures yet increase computational costs, or introduces rigid logic template rules, reducing flexibility. In this paper, we propose Reversal of Thought (RoT), a novel framework aimed at enhancing the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs. RoT utilizes a Preference-Guided Reverse Reasoning warm-up strategy, which integrates logical symbols for pseudocode planning through meta-cognitive mechanisms and pairwise preference self-evaluation to generate task-specific prompts solely through demonstrations, aligning with LLMs' cognitive preferences shaped by Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Through reverse reasoning, we ultilize a Cognitive Preference Manager to assess knowledge boundaries and further expand LLMs' reasoning capabilities by aggregating solution logic for known tasks and stylistic templates for unknown tasks. Experiments across various tasks demonstrate that RoT surpasses existing baselines in both reasoning accuracy and efficiency.

Instruction tuning of the Large Vision-language Models (LVLMs) has revolutionized the development of versatile models with zero-shot generalization across a wide range of downstream vision-language tasks. However, diversity of training tasks of different sources and formats would lead to inevitable task conflicts, where different tasks conflicts for the same set of model parameters, resulting in sub-optimal instruction-following abilities. To address that, we propose the Mixture of Cluster-conditional LoRA Experts (MoCLE), a novel Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture designed to activate the task-customized model parameters based on the instruction clusters. A separate universal expert is further incorporated to improve the generalization capabilities of MoCLE for novel instructions. Extensive experiments on 10 zero-shot tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of MoCLE.

Instruction Tuning involves finetuning a language model on a collection of instruction-formatted datasets in order to enhance the generalizability of the model to unseen tasks. Studies have shown the importance of balancing different task proportions during finetuning, but finding the right balance remains challenging. Unfortunately, there's currently no systematic method beyond manual tuning or relying on practitioners' intuition. In this paper, we introduce SMART (Submodular data Mixture strAtegy for instRuction Tuning) - a novel data mixture strategy which makes use of a submodular function to assign importance scores to tasks which are then used to determine the mixture weights. Given a fine-tuning budget, SMART redistributes the budget among tasks and selects non-redundant samples from each task. Experimental results demonstrate that SMART significantly outperforms traditional methods such as examples proportional mixing and equal mixing. Furthermore, SMART facilitates the creation of data mixtures based on a few representative subsets of tasks alone and through task pruning analysis, we reveal that in a limited budget setting, allocating budget among a subset of representative tasks yields superior performance compared to distributing the budget among all tasks. The code for reproducing our results is open-sourced at https://github.com/kowndinya-renduchintala/SMART.

Simultaneous translation systems start producing the output while processing the partial source sentence in the incoming input stream. These systems need to decide when to read more input and when to write the output. These decisions depend on the structure of source/target language and the information contained in the partial input sequence. Hence, read/write decision policy remains the same across different input modalities, i.e., speech and text. This motivates us to leverage the text transcripts corresponding to the speech input for improving simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST). We propose Decision Attentive Regularization (DAR) to improve the decision policy of SimulST systems by using the simultaneous text-to-text translation (SimulMT) task. We also extend several techniques from the offline speech translation domain to explore the role of SimulMT task in improving SimulST performance. Overall, we achieve 34.66% / 4.5 BLEU improvement over the baseline model across different latency regimes for the MuST-C English-German (EnDe) SimulST task.

The mainstream paradigm behind continual learning has been to adapt the model parameters to non-stationary data distributions, where catastrophic forgetting is the central challenge. Typical methods rely on a rehearsal buffer or known task identity at test time to retrieve learned knowledge and address forgetting, while this work presents a new paradigm for continual learning that aims to train a more succinct memory system without accessing task identity at test time. Our method learns to dynamically prompt (L2P) a pre-trained model to learn tasks sequentially under different task transitions. In our proposed framework, prompts are small learnable parameters, which are maintained in a memory space. The objective is to optimize prompts to instruct the model prediction and explicitly manage task-invariant and task-specific knowledge while maintaining model plasticity. We conduct comprehensive experiments under popular image classification benchmarks with different challenging continual learning settings, where L2P consistently outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Surprisingly, L2P achieves competitive results against rehearsal-based methods even without a rehearsal buffer and is directly applicable to challenging task-agnostic continual learning. Source code is available at https://github.com/google-research/l2p.

With increasing demand for and adoption of virtual assistants, recent work has investigated ways to accelerate bot schema design through the automatic induction of intents or the induction of slots and dialogue states. However, a lack of dedicated benchmarks and standardized evaluation has made progress difficult to track and comparisons between systems difficult to make. This challenge track, held as part of the Eleventh Dialog Systems Technology Challenge, introduces a benchmark that aims to evaluate methods for the automatic induction of customer intents in a realistic setting of customer service interactions between human agents and customers. We propose two subtasks for progressively tackling the automatic induction of intents and corresponding evaluation methodologies. We then present three datasets suitable for evaluating the tasks and propose simple baselines. Finally, we summarize the submissions and results of the challenge track, for which we received submissions from 34 teams.

In classic instruction following, language like "I'd like the JetBlue flight" maps to actions (e.g., selecting that flight). However, language also conveys information about a user's underlying reward function (e.g., a general preference for JetBlue), which can allow a model to carry out desirable actions in new contexts. We present a model that infers rewards from language pragmatically: reasoning about how speakers choose utterances not only to elicit desired actions, but also to reveal information about their preferences. On a new interactive flight-booking task with natural language, our model more accurately infers rewards and predicts optimal actions in unseen environments, in comparison to past work that first maps language to actions (instruction following) and then maps actions to rewards (inverse reinforcement learning).

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The ability to learn different tasks sequentially is essential to the development of artificial intelligence. In general, neural networks lack this capability, the major obstacle being catastrophic forgetting. It occurs when the incrementally available information from non-stationary data distributions is continually acquired, disrupting what the model has already learned. Our approach remembers old tasks by projecting the representations of new tasks close to that of old tasks while keeping the decision boundaries unchanged. We employ the center loss as a regularization penalty that enforces new tasks' features to have the same class centers as old tasks and makes the features highly discriminative. This, in turn, leads to the least forgetting of already learned information. This method is easy to implement, requires minimal computational and memory overhead, and allows the neural network to maintain high performance across many sequentially encountered tasks. We also demonstrate that using the center loss in conjunction with the memory replay outperforms other replay-based strategies. Along with standard MNIST variants for continual learning, we apply our method to continual domain adaptation scenarios with the Digits and PACS datasets. We demonstrate that our approach is scalable, effective, and gives competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art continual learning methods.

Prompting and fine-tuning have emerged as two competing paradigms for augmenting language models with new capabilities, such as the use of tools. Prompting approaches are quick to set up but rely on providing explicit demonstrations of each tool's usage in the model's prompt, thus coupling tool use to the task at hand and limiting generalisation. Fine-tuning removes the need for task-specific demonstrations of tool usage at runtime; however, this ties new capabilities to a single model, thus making already-heavier setup costs a recurring expense. In this paper, we introduce language hooks, a novel framework for augmenting language models with new capabilities that is decoupled both from the model's task-specific prompt and from the model itself. The language hook algorithm interleaves text generation by the base model with the execution of modular programs that trigger conditionally based on the existing text and the available capabilities. Upon triggering, programs may call external tools, auxiliary language models (e.g. using tool specific prompts), and modify the existing context. We benchmark our method against state-of-the-art baselines, find that it outperforms task-aware approaches, and demonstrate its ability to generalise to novel tasks.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to empower a model to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously. A recent development known as task arithmetic has revealed that several models, each fine-tuned for distinct tasks, can be directly merged into a single model to execute MTL without necessitating a retraining process using the initial training data. Nevertheless, this direct addition of models often leads to a significant deterioration in the overall performance of the merged model. This decline occurs due to potential conflicts and intricate correlations among the multiple tasks. Consequently, the challenge emerges of how to merge pre-trained models more effectively without using their original training data. This paper introduces an innovative technique called Adaptive Model Merging (AdaMerging). This approach aims to autonomously learn the coefficients for model merging, either in a task-wise or layer-wise manner, without relying on the original training data. Specifically, our AdaMerging method operates as an automatic, unsupervised task arithmetic scheme. It leverages entropy minimization on unlabeled test samples from the multi-task setup as a surrogate objective function to iteratively refine the merging coefficients of the multiple models. Our experimental findings across eight tasks demonstrate the efficacy of the AdaMerging scheme we put forth. Compared to the current state-of-the-art task arithmetic merging scheme, AdaMerging showcases a remarkable 11\% improvement in performance. Notably, AdaMerging also exhibits superior generalization capabilities when applied to unseen downstream tasks. Furthermore, it displays a significantly enhanced robustness to data distribution shifts that may occur during the testing phase.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single instructions, and they struggle to follow complex instructions composed of multiple subtasks (Wang et al., 2023a). In this work, we propose a novel concept of compositional instructions called chain-of-instructions (CoI), where the output of one instruction becomes an input for the next like a chain. Unlike the conventional practice of solving single instruction tasks, our proposed method encourages a model to solve each subtask step by step until the final answer is reached. CoI-tuning (i.e., fine-tuning with CoI instructions) improves the model's ability to handle instructions composed of multiple subtasks. CoI-tuned models also outperformed baseline models on multilingual summarization, demonstrating the generalizability of CoI models on unseen composite downstream tasks.

The ability to learn tasks in a sequential fashion is crucial to the development of artificial intelligence. Neural networks are not, in general, capable of this and it has been widely thought that catastrophic forgetting is an inevitable feature of connectionist models. We show that it is possible to overcome this limitation and train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks which they have not experienced for a long time. Our approach remembers old tasks by selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks. We demonstrate our approach is scalable and effective by solving a set of classification tasks based on the MNIST hand written digit dataset and by learning several Atari 2600 games sequentially.

Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling certain goals from the system side. It is empowered by advanced techniques to progress to more complicated tasks that require strategical and motivational interactions. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the prominent problems and advanced designs for conversational agent's proactivity in different types of dialogues. Furthermore, we discuss challenges that meet the real-world application needs but require a greater research focus in the future. We hope that this first survey of proactive dialogue systems can provide the community with a quick access and an overall picture to this practical problem, and stimulate more progresses on conversational AI to the next level.

It has been observed in recent years that transformers have problems with length generalization for certain types of reasoning and arithmetic tasks. In particular, the performance of a transformer model trained on tasks (say addition) up to a certain length (e.g., 5 digit numbers) drops sharply when applied to longer instances of the same problem. This work proposes an approach based on task hinting towards addressing length generalization. Our key idea is that while training the model on task-specific data, it is helpful to simultaneously train the model to solve a simpler but related auxiliary task as well. We study the classical sorting problem as a canonical example to evaluate our approach. We design a multitask training framework and show that task hinting significantly improve length generalization. For sorting we show that it is possible to train models on data consisting of sequences having length at most 20, and improve the test accuracy on sequences of length 100 from less than 1% (for standard training) to more than 92% (via task hinting). Our study uncovers several interesting aspects of length generalization. We observe that while several auxiliary tasks may seem natural a priori, their effectiveness in improving length generalization differs dramatically. We further use probing and visualization-based techniques to understand the internal mechanisms via which the model performs the task, and propose a theoretical construction consistent with the observed learning behaviors of the model. Based on our construction, we show that introducing a small number of length dependent parameters into the training procedure can further boost the performance on unseen lengths. Finally, we also show the efficacy of our task hinting based approach beyond sorting, giving hope that these techniques will be applicable in broader contexts.

Despite recent progress, learning new tasks through language instructions remains an extremely challenging problem. On the ALFRED benchmark for task learning, the published state-of-the-art system only achieves a task success rate of less than 10% in an unseen environment, compared to the human performance of over 90%. To address this issue, this paper takes a closer look at task learning. In a departure from a widely applied end-to-end architecture, we decomposed task learning into three sub-problems: sub-goal planning, scene navigation, and object manipulation; and developed a model HiTUT (stands for Hierarchical Tasks via Unified Transformers) that addresses each sub-problem in a unified manner to learn a hierarchical task structure. On the ALFRED benchmark, HiTUT has achieved the best performance with a remarkably higher generalization ability. In the unseen environment, HiTUT achieves over 160% performance gain in success rate compared to the previous state of the art. The explicit representation of task structures also enables an in-depth understanding of the nature of the problem and the ability of the agent, which provides insight for future benchmark development and evaluation.

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological models that try to capture its core properties. Recently attentional mechanisms have become a dominating architectural choice of machine learning and are the central innovation of Transformers. The dominant intuition and formalism underlying their development has drawn on ideas of keys and queries in database management systems. In this work, we propose an alternative Bayesian foundation for attentional mechanisms and show how this unifies different attentional architectures in machine learning. This formulation allows to to identify commonality across different attention ML architectures as well as suggest a bridge to those developed in neuroscience. We hope this work will guide more sophisticated intuitions into the key properties of attention architectures and suggest new ones.

While pretrained models such as BERT have shown large gains across natural language understanding tasks, their performance can be improved by further training the model on a data-rich intermediate task, before fine-tuning it on a target task. However, it is still poorly understood when and why intermediate-task training is beneficial for a given target task. To investigate this, we perform a large-scale study on the pretrained RoBERTa model with 110 intermediate-target task combinations. We further evaluate all trained models with 25 probing tasks meant to reveal the specific skills that drive transfer. We observe that intermediate tasks requiring high-level inference and reasoning abilities tend to work best. We also observe that target task performance is strongly correlated with higher-level abilities such as coreference resolution. However, we fail to observe more granular correlations between probing and target task performance, highlighting the need for further work on broad-coverage probing benchmarks. We also observe evidence that the forgetting of knowledge learned during pretraining may limit our analysis, highlighting the need for further work on transfer learning methods in these settings.

We study the problem of multi-task learning under user-level differential privacy, in which n users contribute data to m tasks, each involving a subset of users. One important aspect of the problem, that can significantly impact quality, is the distribution skew among tasks. Certain tasks may have much fewer data samples than others, making them more susceptible to the noise added for privacy. It is natural to ask whether algorithms can adapt to this skew to improve the overall utility. We give a systematic analysis of the problem, by studying how to optimally allocate a user's privacy budget among tasks. We propose a generic algorithm, based on an adaptive reweighting of the empirical loss, and show that when there is task distribution skew, this gives a quantifiable improvement of excess empirical risk. Experimental studies on recommendation problems that exhibit a long tail of small tasks, demonstrate that our methods significantly improve utility, achieving the state of the art on two standard benchmarks.

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) tackles the long-standing problem of endowing agents with skills that generalize across a variety of problems. To this end, sharing representations plays a fundamental role in capturing both unique and common characteristics of the tasks. Tasks may exhibit similarities in terms of skills, objects, or physical properties while leveraging their representations eases the achievement of a universal policy. Nevertheless, the pursuit of learning a shared set of diverse representations is still an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for representation learning in MTRL that encapsulates common structures among the tasks using orthogonal representations to promote diversity. Our method, named Mixture Of Orthogonal Experts (MOORE), leverages a Gram-Schmidt process to shape a shared subspace of representations generated by a mixture of experts. When task-specific information is provided, MOORE generates relevant representations from this shared subspace. We assess the effectiveness of our approach on two MTRL benchmarks, namely MiniGrid and MetaWorld, showing that MOORE surpasses related baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art result on MetaWorld.

Recent approaches to multi-task learning (MTL) have focused on modelling connections between tasks at the decoder level. This leads to a tight coupling between tasks, which need retraining if a new task is inserted or removed. We argue that MTL is a stepping stone towards universal feature learning (UFL), which is the ability to learn generic features that can be applied to new tasks without retraining. We propose Medusa to realize this goal, designing task heads with dual attention mechanisms. The shared feature attention masks relevant backbone features for each task, allowing it to learn a generic representation. Meanwhile, a novel Multi-Scale Attention head allows the network to better combine per-task features from different scales when making the final prediction. We show the effectiveness of Medusa in UFL (+13.18% improvement), while maintaining MTL performance and being 25% more efficient than previous approaches.

With the spread of the use of Text2Img diffusion models such as DALL-E 2, Imagen, Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion, one challenge that artists face is selecting the right prompts to achieve the desired artistic output. We present techniques for measuring the effect that specific words and phrases in prompts have, and (in the Appendix) present guidance on the selection of prompts to produce desired effects.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

Building agents with large language models (LLMs) for computer control is a burgeoning research area, where the agent receives computer states and performs actions to complete complex tasks. Previous computer agents have demonstrated the benefits of in-context learning (ICL); however, their performance is hindered by several issues. First, the limited context length of LLMs and complex computer states restrict the number of exemplars, as a single webpage can consume the entire context. Second, the exemplars in current methods, such as high-level plans and multi-choice questions, cannot represent complete trajectories, leading to suboptimal performance in long-horizon tasks. Third, existing computer agents rely on task-specific exemplars and overlook the similarity among tasks, resulting in poor generalization to novel tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce Synapse, a computer agent featuring three key components: i) state abstraction, which filters out task-irrelevant information from raw states, allowing more exemplars within the limited context, ii) trajectory-as-exemplar prompting, which prompts the LLM with complete trajectories of the abstracted states and actions to improve multi-step decision-making, and iii) exemplar memory, which stores the embeddings of exemplars and retrieves them via similarity search for generalization to novel tasks. We evaluate Synapse on MiniWoB++, a standard task suite, and Mind2Web, a real-world website benchmark. In MiniWoB++, Synapse achieves a 99.2% average success rate (a 10% relative improvement) across 64 tasks using demonstrations from only 48 tasks. Notably, Synapse is the first ICL method to solve the book-flight task in MiniWoB++. Synapse also exhibits a 56% relative improvement in average step success rate over the previous state-of-the-art prompting scheme in Mind2Web.

Neural Network movement controllers promise a variety of advantages over conventional control methods however they are not widely adopted due to their inability to produce reliably precise movements. This research explores a bilateral neural network architecture as a control system for motor tasks. We aimed to achieve hemispheric specialisation similar to what is observed in humans across different tasks; the dominant system (usually the right hand, left hemisphere) excels at tasks involving coordination and efficiency of movement, and the non-dominant system performs better at tasks requiring positional stability. Specialisation was achieved by training the hemispheres with different loss functions tailored toward the expected behaviour of the respective hemispheres. We compared bilateral models with and without specialised hemispheres, with and without inter-hemispheric connectivity (representing the biological Corpus Callosum), and unilateral models with and without specialisation. The models were trained and tested on two tasks common in the human motor control literature: the random reach task, suited to the dominant system, a model with better coordination, and the hold position task, suited to the non-dominant system, a model with more stable movement. Each system out-performed the non-favoured system in its preferred task. For both tasks, a bilateral model outperforms the 'non-preferred' hand, and is as good or better than the 'preferred' hand. The Corpus Callosum tends to improve performance, but not always for the specialised models.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the development of intelligent LLM-based agents capable of interacting with graphical user interfaces (GUIs). These agents demonstrate strong reasoning and adaptability, enabling them to perform complex tasks that traditionally required predefined rules. However, the reliance on step-by-step reasoning in LLM-based agents often results in inefficiencies, particularly for routine tasks. In contrast, traditional rule-based systems excel in efficiency but lack the intelligence and flexibility to adapt to novel scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel evolutionary framework for GUI agents that enhances operational efficiency while retaining intelligence and flexibility. Our approach incorporates a memory mechanism that records the agent's task execution history. By analyzing this history, the agent identifies repetitive action sequences and evolves high-level actions that act as shortcuts, replacing these low-level operations and improving efficiency. This allows the agent to focus on tasks requiring more complex reasoning, while simplifying routine actions. Experimental results on multiple benchmark tasks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in both efficiency and accuracy. The code will be open-sourced to support further research.

Experts in various fields routinely perform methodical writing tasks to plan, organize, and report their work. From a clinician writing a differential diagnosis for a patient, to a teacher writing a lesson plan for students, these tasks are pervasive, requiring to methodically generate structured long-form output for a given input. We develop a typology of methodical tasks structured in the form of a task objective, procedure, input, and output, and introduce DoLoMiTes, a novel benchmark with specifications for 519 such tasks elicited from hundreds of experts from across 25 fields. Our benchmark further contains specific instantiations of methodical tasks with concrete input and output examples (1,857 in total) which we obtain by collecting expert revisions of up to 10 model-generated examples of each task. We use these examples to evaluate contemporary language models highlighting that automating methodical tasks is a challenging long-form generation problem, as it requires performing complex inferences, while drawing upon the given context as well as domain knowledge.

Large language models (LLMs) struggle to follow a sequence of instructions in a single query as they may ignore or misinterpret part of it. This impairs their performance in complex problems whose solution requires multiple intermediate steps, such as multilingual (translate then answer) and multimodal (caption then answer) tasks. We empirically verify this with open-source LLMs as large as LLaMA-2 70B and Mixtral-8x7B. Targeting the scarcity of sequential instructions in present-day data, we propose sequential instruction tuning, a simple yet effective strategy to automatically augment instruction tuning data and equip LLMs with the ability to execute multiple sequential instructions. After exploring interleaving instructions in existing datasets, such as Alpaca, with a wide range of intermediate tasks, we find that sequential instruction-tuned models consistently outperform the conventional instruction-tuned baselines in downstream tasks involving reasoning, multilingual, and multimodal abilities. To shed further light on our technique, we analyse how adversarial intermediate texts, unseen tasks, prompt verbalization, number of tasks, and prompt length affect SIT. We hope that this method will open new research avenues on instruction tuning for complex tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in following natural language instructions to solve unseen tasks. However, it remains unclear whether models truly understand task definitions and whether the human-written definitions are optimal. In this paper, we systematically study the role of task definitions in instruction learning. We first conduct an ablation analysis informed by human annotations to understand which parts of a task definition are most important, and find that model performance only drops substantially when removing contents describing the task output, in particular label information. Next, we propose an automatic algorithm to compress task definitions to a minimal supporting set of tokens, and find that 60\% of tokens can be removed while maintaining or even improving model performance. Based on these results, we propose two strategies to help models better leverage task instructions: (1) providing only key information for tasks in a common structured format, and (2) adding a meta-tuning stage to help the model better understand the definitions. With these two strategies, we achieve a 4.2 Rouge-L improvement over 119 unseen test tasks.

Recently, there is an increasing interest in using artificial intelligence (AI) to automate aspects of the research process, or even autonomously conduct the full research cycle from idea generation, over data analysis, to composing and evaluation of scientific manuscripts. Examples of working AI scientist systems have been demonstrated for computer science tasks and running molecular biology labs. While some approaches aim for full autonomy of the scientific AI, others rather aim for leveraging human-AI teaming. Here, we address how to adapt such approaches for boosting Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) development, as well as brain research resp. neuroscience at large. We argue that at this time, a strong emphasis on human-AI teaming, in contrast to fully autonomous AI BCI researcher will be the most promising way forward. We introduce the collaborative workspaces concept for human-AI teaming based on a set of Janusian design principles, looking both ways, to the human as well as to the AI side. Based on these principles, we present ChatBCI, a Python-based toolbox for enabling human-AI collaboration based on interaction with Large Language Models (LLMs), designed for BCI research and development projects. We show how ChatBCI was successfully used in a concrete BCI project on advancing motor imagery decoding from EEG signals. Our approach can be straightforwardly extended to broad neurotechnological and neuroscientific topics, and may by design facilitate human expert knowledge transfer to scientific AI systems in general.

We describe our early efforts to red team language models in order to simultaneously discover, measure, and attempt to reduce their potentially harmful outputs. We make three main contributions. First, we investigate scaling behaviors for red teaming across 3 model sizes (2.7B, 13B, and 52B parameters) and 4 model types: a plain language model (LM); an LM prompted to be helpful, honest, and harmless; an LM with rejection sampling; and a model trained to be helpful and harmless using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We find that the RLHF models are increasingly difficult to red team as they scale, and we find a flat trend with scale for the other model types. Second, we release our dataset of 38,961 red team attacks for others to analyze and learn from. We provide our own analysis of the data and find a variety of harmful outputs, which range from offensive language to more subtly harmful non-violent unethical outputs. Third, we exhaustively describe our instructions, processes, statistical methodologies, and uncertainty about red teaming. We hope that this transparency accelerates our ability to work together as a community in order to develop shared norms, practices, and technical standards for how to red team language models.

There is a growing interest in developing goal-oriented dialog systems which serve users in accomplishing complex tasks through multi-turn conversations. Although many methods are devised to evaluate and improve the performance of individual dialog components, there is a lack of comprehensive empirical study on how different components contribute to the overall performance of a dialog system. In this paper, we perform a system-wise evaluation and present an empirical analysis on different types of dialog systems which are composed of different modules in different settings. Our results show that (1) a pipeline dialog system trained using fine-grained supervision signals at different component levels often obtains better performance than the systems that use joint or end-to-end models trained on coarse-grained labels, (2) component-wise, single-turn evaluation results are not always consistent with the overall performance of a dialog system, and (3) despite the discrepancy between simulators and human users, simulated evaluation is still a valid alternative to the costly human evaluation especially in the early stage of development.

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is to take a complex task and be able to decompose it to subtasks that are simpler for the RL agent to learn. In this paper, we report on our work that would identify subtasks by using some given positive and negative trajectories for solving the complex task. We assume that the states are represented by first-order predicate logic using which we devise a novel algorithm to identify the subtasks. Then we employ a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate first-order logic rule templates for achieving each subtask. Such rules were then further fined tuned to a rule-based policy via an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP)-based RL agent. Through experiments, we verify the accuracy of our algorithm in detecting subtasks which successfully detect all of the subtasks correctly. We also investigated the quality of the common-sense rules produced by the language model to achieve the subtasks. Our experiments show that our LLM-guided rule template generation can produce rules that are necessary for solving a subtask, which leads to solving complex tasks with fewer assumptions about predefined first-order logic predicates of the environment.

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of scientific research, offering unprecedented support across various stages of the research cycle. This paper presents the first systematic survey dedicated to exploring how LLMs are revolutionizing the scientific research process. We analyze the unique roles LLMs play across four critical stages of research: hypothesis discovery, experiment planning and implementation, scientific writing, and peer reviewing. Our review comprehensively showcases the task-specific methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. By identifying current challenges and proposing future research directions, this survey not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs, but also aims to inspire and guide researchers and practitioners in leveraging LLMs to advance scientific inquiry. Resources are available at the following repository: https://github.com/du-nlp-lab/LLM4SR

Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.

Dialogue systems need to deal with the unpredictability of user intents to track dialogue state and the heterogeneity of slots to understand user preferences. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that solving these challenges as one unified model will allow the transfer of parameter support data across the different tasks. The proposed principled model is based on a Transformer encoder, trained on multiple tasks, and leveraged by a rich input that conditions the model on the target inferences. Conditioning the Transformer encoder on multiple target inferences over the same corpus, i.e., intent and multiple slot types, allows learning richer language interactions than a single-task model would be able to. In fact, experimental results demonstrate that conditioning the model on an increasing number of dialogue inference tasks leads to improved results: on the MultiWOZ dataset, the joint intent and slot detection can be improved by 3.2\% by conditioning on intent, 10.8\% by conditioning on slot and 14.4\% by conditioning on both intent and slots. Moreover, on real conversations with Farfetch costumers, the proposed conditioned BERT can achieve high joint-goal and intent detection performance throughout a dialogue.

Neural networks often suffer from catastrophic interference (CI): performance on previously learned tasks drops off significantly when learning a new task. This contrasts strongly with humans, who can sequentially learn new tasks without appreciably forgetting previous tasks. Prior work has explored various techniques for mitigating CI such as regularization, rehearsal, generative replay, and distillation methods. The current work takes a different approach, one guided by cognitive science research showing that in naturalistic environments, the probability of encountering a task decreases as a power-law of the time since it was last performed. We argue that a realistic evaluation of techniques for the mitigation of CI should be performed in simulated naturalistic learning environments. Thus, we evaluate the extent of mitigation of CI when training simple rehearsal-based methods in power-law environments similar to the ones humans face. Our work explores this novel rehearsal-based approach for a domain-incremental task: learning permutations in the MNIST task. We compare our rehearsal environment with other baselines to show its efficacy in promoting continual learning. Additionally, we investigate whether this environment shows forward facilitation, i.e., faster learning of later tasks. Next, we explore the robustness of our learning environment to the number of tasks, model size, and amount of data rehearsed after each task. Notably, our results show that the performance is comparable or superior to that of models trained using popular regularization methods and also to rehearsals in non-power-law environments. The benefits of this training paradigm include simplicity and the lack of a need for extra neural circuitry. In addition, because our method is orthogonal to other methods, future research can combine training in power-law environments with other continual learning mechanisms.

While recent studies have looked into the abilities of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc, there have been few studies looking into the controllability of large language models on generation tasks. We present an extensive analysis of various benchmarks including a sentence planning benchmark with different granularities. After comparing large language models against state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models, we present a spectrum showing large language models falling behind, are comparable, or exceed the ability of smaller models. We conclude that **large language models struggle at meeting fine-grained hard constraints**.

Predicting multiple heterogeneous biological and medical targets is a challenge for traditional deep learning models. In contrast to single-task learning, in which a separate model is trained for each target, multi-task learning (MTL) optimizes a single model to predict multiple related targets simultaneously. To address this challenge, we propose the Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts with Exclusivity (MMoEEx). Our work aims to tackle the heterogeneous MTL setting, in which the same model optimizes multiple tasks with different characteristics. Such a scenario can overwhelm current MTL approaches due to the challenges in balancing shared and task-specific representations and the need to optimize tasks with competing optimization paths. Our method makes two key contributions: first, we introduce an approach to induce more diversity among experts, thus creating representations more suitable for highly imbalanced and heterogenous MTL learning; second, we adopt a two-step optimization [6, 11] approach to balancing the tasks at the gradient level. We validate our method on three MTL benchmark datasets, including Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) and PubChem BioAssay (PCBA).

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are multi-step and introduce new challenges: (1) Prompt content is likely to be more extensive and complex, making it more difficult for LLMs to analyze errors, (2) the impact of an individual step is difficult to evaluate, and (3) different people may have varied preferences about task execution. While humans struggle to optimize prompts, they are good at providing feedback about LLM outputs; we therefore introduce a new LLM-driven discrete prompt optimization framework PRompt Optimization in Multi-Step Tasks (PROMST) that incorporates human-designed feedback rules to automatically offer direct suggestions for improvement. We also use an extra learned heuristic model that predicts prompt performance to efficiently sample from prompt candidates. This approach significantly outperforms both human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods across 11 representative multi-step tasks (an average 10.6\%-29.3\% improvement to current best methods on five LLMs respectively). We believe our work can serve as a benchmark for automatic prompt optimization for LLM-driven multi-step tasks. Datasets and Codes are available at https://github.com/yongchao98/PROMST. Project Page is available at https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-PROMST.

Reading comprehension has been widely studied. One of the most representative reading comprehension tasks is Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), on which machine is already comparable with human. On the other hand, accessing large collections of multimedia or spoken content is much more difficult and time-consuming than plain text content for humans. It's therefore highly attractive to develop machines which can automatically understand spoken content. In this paper, we propose a new listening comprehension task - Spoken SQuAD. On the new task, we found that speech recognition errors have catastrophic impact on machine comprehension, and several approaches are proposed to mitigate the impact.

We present Step-Back Prompting, a simple prompting technique that enables LLMs to do abstractions to derive high-level concepts and first principles from instances containing specific details. Using the concepts and principles to guide the reasoning steps, LLMs significantly improve their abilities in following a correct reasoning path towards the solution. We conduct experiments of Step-Back Prompting with PaLM-2L models and observe substantial performance gains on a wide range of challenging reasoning-intensive tasks including STEM, Knowledge QA, and Multi-Hop Reasoning. For instance, Step-Back Prompting improves PaLM-2L performance on MMLU Physics and Chemistry by 7% and 11%, TimeQA by 27%, and MuSiQue by 7%.

The growing number of parameter-efficient adaptations of a base large language model (LLM) calls for studying whether we can reuse such trained adapters to improve performance for new tasks. We study how to best build a library of adapters given multi-task data and devise techniques for both zero-shot and supervised task generalization through routing in such library. We benchmark existing approaches to build this library and introduce model-based clustering, MBC, a method that groups tasks based on the similarity of their adapter parameters, indirectly optimizing for transfer across the multi-task dataset. To re-use the library, we present a novel zero-shot routing mechanism, Arrow, which enables dynamic selection of the most relevant adapters for new inputs without the need for retraining. We experiment with several LLMs, such as Phi-2 and Mistral, on a wide array of held-out tasks, verifying that MBC-based adapters and Arrow routing lead to superior generalization to new tasks. We make steps towards creating modular, adaptable LLMs that can match or outperform traditional joint training.

We introduce WIQA, the first large-scale dataset of "What if..." questions over procedural text. WIQA contains three parts: a collection of paragraphs each describing a process, e.g., beach erosion; a set of crowdsourced influence graphs for each paragraph, describing how one change affects another; and a large (40k) collection of "What if...?" multiple-choice questions derived from the graphs. For example, given a paragraph about beach erosion, would stormy weather result in more or less erosion (or have no effect)? The task is to answer the questions, given their associated paragraph. WIQA contains three kinds of questions: perturbations to steps mentioned in the paragraph; external (out-of-paragraph) perturbations requiring commonsense knowledge; and irrelevant (no effect) perturbations. We find that state-of-the-art models achieve 73.8% accuracy, well below the human performance of 96.3%. We analyze the challenges, in particular tracking chains of influences, and present the dataset as an open challenge to the community.

When users can benefit from certain predictive outcomes, they may be prone to act to achieve those outcome, e.g., by strategically modifying their features. The goal in strategic classification is therefore to train predictive models that are robust to such behavior. However, the conventional framework assumes that changing features does not change actual outcomes, which depicts users as "gaming" the system. Here we remove this assumption, and study learning in a causal strategic setting where true outcomes do change. Focusing on accuracy as our primary objective, we show how strategic behavior and causal effects underlie two complementing forms of distribution shift. We characterize these shifts, and propose a learning algorithm that balances between these two forces and over time, and permits end-to-end training. Experiments on synthetic and semi-synthetic data demonstrate the utility of our approach.

Conversations have an intrinsic one-to-many property, which means that multiple responses can be appropriate for the same dialog context. In task-oriented dialogs, this property leads to different valid dialog policies towards task completion. However, none of the existing task-oriented dialog generation approaches takes this property into account. We propose a Multi-Action Data Augmentation (MADA) framework to utilize the one-to-many property to generate diverse appropriate dialog responses. Specifically, we first use dialog states to summarize the dialog history, and then discover all possible mappings from every dialog state to its different valid system actions. During dialog system training, we enable the current dialog state to map to all valid system actions discovered in the previous process to create additional state-action pairs. By incorporating these additional pairs, the dialog policy learns a balanced action distribution, which further guides the dialog model to generate diverse responses. Experimental results show that the proposed framework consistently improves dialog policy diversity, and results in improved response diversity and appropriateness. Our model obtains state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ.

We introduce a neural network with a recurrent attention model over a possibly large external memory. The architecture is a form of Memory Network (Weston et al., 2015) but unlike the model in that work, it is trained end-to-end, and hence requires significantly less supervision during training, making it more generally applicable in realistic settings. It can also be seen as an extension of RNNsearch to the case where multiple computational steps (hops) are performed per output symbol. The flexibility of the model allows us to apply it to tasks as diverse as (synthetic) question answering and to language modeling. For the former our approach is competitive with Memory Networks, but with less supervision. For the latter, on the Penn TreeBank and Text8 datasets our approach demonstrates comparable performance to RNNs and LSTMs. In both cases we show that the key concept of multiple computational hops yields improved results.

In multi-task learning (MTL), gradient balancing has recently attracted more research interest than loss balancing since it often leads to better performance. However, loss balancing is much more efficient than gradient balancing, and thus it is still worth further exploration in MTL. Note that prior studies typically ignore that there exist varying improvable gaps across multiple tasks, where the improvable gap per task is defined as the distance between the current training progress and desired final training progress. Therefore, after loss balancing, the performance imbalance still arises in many cases. In this paper, following the loss balancing framework, we propose two novel improvable gap balancing (IGB) algorithms for MTL: one takes a simple heuristic, and the other (for the first time) deploys deep reinforcement learning for MTL. Particularly, instead of directly balancing the losses in MTL, both algorithms choose to dynamically assign task weights for improvable gap balancing. Moreover, we combine IGB and gradient balancing to show the complementarity between the two types of algorithms. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our IGB algorithms lead to the best results in MTL via loss balancing and achieve further improvements when combined with gradient balancing. Code is available at https://github.com/YanqiDai/IGB4MTL.

Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task distributions that are very narrow. For example, a commonly used meta-reinforcement learning benchmark uses different running velocities for a simulated robot as different tasks. When policies are meta-trained on such narrow task distributions, they cannot possibly generalize to more quickly acquire entirely new tasks. Therefore, if the aim of these methods is to enable faster acquisition of entirely new behaviors, we must evaluate them on task distributions that are sufficiently broad to enable generalization to new behaviors. In this paper, we propose an open-source simulated benchmark for meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning consisting of 50 distinct robotic manipulation tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop algorithms that generalize to accelerate the acquisition of entirely new, held-out tasks. We evaluate 7 state-of-the-art meta-reinforcement learning and multi-task learning algorithms on these tasks. Surprisingly, while each task and its variations (e.g., with different object positions) can be learned with reasonable success, these algorithms struggle to learn with multiple tasks at the same time, even with as few as ten distinct training tasks. Our analysis and open-source environments pave the way for future research in multi-task learning and meta-learning that can enable meaningful generalization, thereby unlocking the full potential of these methods.

Recent years have witnessed the great success of graph pre-training for graph representation learning. With hundreds of graph pre-training tasks proposed, integrating knowledge acquired from multiple pre-training tasks has become a popular research topic. In this paper, we identify two important collaborative processes for this topic: (1) select: how to select an optimal task combination from a given task pool based on their compatibility, and (2) weigh: how to weigh the selected tasks based on their importance. While there currently has been a lot of work focused on weighing, comparatively little effort has been devoted to selecting. This paper proposes a novel instance-level framework for integrating multiple graph pre-training tasks, Weigh And Select (WAS), where the two collaborative processes, weighing and selecting, are combined by decoupled siamese networks. Specifically, it first adaptively learns an optimal combination of tasks for each instance from a given task pool, based on which a customized instance-level task weighing strategy is learned. Extensive experiments on 16 graph datasets across node-level and graph-level downstream tasks have demonstrated that by combining a few simple but classical tasks, WAS can achieve comparable performance to other leading counterparts. The code is available at https://github.com/TianyuFan0504/WAS.

Finding ways to accelerate text input for individuals with profound motor impairments has been a long-standing area of research. Closing the speed gap for augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices such as eye-tracking keyboards is important for improving the quality of life for such individuals. Recent advances in neural networks of natural language pose new opportunities for re-thinking strategies and user interfaces for enhanced text-entry for AAC users. In this paper, we present SpeakFaster, consisting of large language models (LLMs) and a co-designed user interface for text entry in a highly-abbreviated form, allowing saving 57% more motor actions than traditional predictive keyboards in offline simulation. A pilot study with 19 non-AAC participants typing on a mobile device by hand demonstrated gains in motor savings in line with the offline simulation, while introducing relatively small effects on overall typing speed. Lab and field testing on two eye-gaze typing users with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) demonstrated text-entry rates 29-60% faster than traditional baselines, due to significant saving of expensive keystrokes achieved through phrase and word predictions from context-aware LLMs. These findings provide a strong foundation for further exploration of substantially-accelerated text communication for motor-impaired users and demonstrate a direction for applying LLMs to text-based user interfaces.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are popular for their impressive abilities, but the need for model-specific fine-tuning or task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. We propose UPRISE (Universal Prompt Retrieval for Improving zero-Shot Evaluation), which tunes a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. Specifically, we demonstrate universality in a cross-task and cross-model scenario: the retriever is tuned on a diverse set of tasks, but tested on unseen task types; we use a small frozen LLM, GPT-Neo-2.7B, for tuning the retriever, but test the retriever on different LLMs of much larger scales, such as BLOOM-7.1B, OPT-66B and GPT3-175B. Additionally, we show that UPRISE mitigates the hallucination problem in our experiments with ChatGPT, suggesting its potential to improve even the strongest LLMs. Our model and code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are commonly designed with the presumption that each utterance represents a single intent. However, this assumption may not accurately reflect real-world situations, where users frequently express multiple intents within a single utterance. While there is an emerging interest in multi-intent detection (MID), existing in-domain datasets such as MixATIS and MixSNIPS have limitations in their formulation. To address these issues, we present BlendX, a suite of refined datasets featuring more diverse patterns than their predecessors, elevating both its complexity and diversity. For dataset construction, we utilize both rule-based heuristics as well as a generative tool -- OpenAI's ChatGPT -- which is augmented with a similarity-driven strategy for utterance selection. To ensure the quality of the proposed datasets, we also introduce three novel metrics that assess the statistical properties of an utterance related to word count, conjunction use, and pronoun usage. Extensive experiments on BlendX reveal that state-of-the-art MID models struggle with the challenges posed by the new datasets, highlighting the need to reexamine the current state of the MID field. The dataset is available at https://github.com/HYU-NLP/BlendX.

How to train a generalizable meta-policy by continually learning a sequence of tasks? It is a natural human skill yet challenging to achieve by current reinforcement learning: the agent is expected to quickly adapt to new tasks (plasticity) meanwhile retaining the common knowledge from previous tasks (stability). We address it by "Continual Task Allocation via Sparse Prompting (CoTASP)", which learns over-complete dictionaries to produce sparse masks as prompts extracting a sub-network for each task from a meta-policy network. CoTASP trains a policy for each task by optimizing the prompts and the sub-network weights alternatively. The dictionary is then updated to align the optimized prompts with tasks' embedding, thereby capturing tasks' semantic correlations. Hence, relevant tasks share more neurons in the meta-policy network due to similar prompts while cross-task interference causing forgetting is effectively restrained. Given a meta-policy and dictionaries trained on previous tasks, new task adaptation reduces to highly efficient sparse prompting and sub-network finetuning. In experiments, CoTASP achieves a promising plasticity-stability trade-off without storing or replaying any past tasks' experiences. It outperforms existing continual and multi-task RL methods on all seen tasks, forgetting reduction, and generalization to unseen tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) exploit in-context learning (ICL) to solve tasks with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not yet well-understood. Some works suggest that LLMs only recall already learned concepts from pre-training, while others hint that ICL performs implicit learning over demonstrations. We characterize two ways through which ICL leverages demonstrations. Task recognition (TR) captures the extent to which LLMs can recognize a task through demonstrations -- even without ground-truth labels -- and apply their pre-trained priors, whereas task learning (TL) is the ability to capture new input-label mappings unseen in pre-training. Using a wide range of classification datasets and three LLM families (GPT-3, LLaMA and OPT), we design controlled experiments to disentangle the roles of TR and TL in ICL. We show that (1) models can achieve non-trivial performance with only TR, and TR does not further improve with larger models or more demonstrations; (2) LLMs acquire TL as the model scales, and TL's performance consistently improves with more demonstrations in context. Our findings unravel two different forces behind ICL and we advocate for discriminating them in future ICL research due to their distinct nature.

Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based models of discourse such as SDRT asher-lascarides:2003a, in which utterances attach to an evolving discourse structure and the associated knowledge graph of speaker commitments serves as an interface to real-world reasoning and conversational strategy. As first steps towards implementing the approach, we describe a simple dialogue system in a referential communication domain that accumulates constraints across discourse, interprets them using a learned probabilistic model, and plans clarification using reinforcement learning.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that they were trained to solve: next-word prediction over Internet text. By recognizing the pressures that this task exerts we can make predictions about the strategies that LLMs will adopt, allowing us to reason about when they will succeed or fail. This approach - which we call the teleological approach - leads us to identify three factors that we hypothesize will influence LLM accuracy: the probability of the task to be performed, the probability of the target output, and the probability of the provided input. We predict that LLMs will achieve higher accuracy when these probabilities are high than when they are low - even in deterministic settings where probability should not matter. To test our predictions, we evaluate two LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on eleven tasks, and we find robust evidence that LLMs are influenced by probability in the ways that we have hypothesized. In many cases, the experiments reveal surprising failure modes. For instance, GPT-4's accuracy at decoding a simple cipher is 51% when the output is a high-probability word sequence but only 13% when it is low-probability. These results show that AI practitioners should be careful about using LLMs in low-probability situations. More broadly, we conclude that we should not evaluate LLMs as if they are humans but should instead treat them as a distinct type of system - one that has been shaped by its own particular set of pressures.

Despite the recent success of representation learning in sequential decision making, the study of the pure exploration scenario (i.e., identify the best option and minimize the sample complexity) is still limited. In this paper, we study multi-task representation learning for best arm identification in linear bandits (RepBAI-LB) and best policy identification in contextual linear bandits (RepBPI-CLB), two popular pure exploration settings with wide applications, e.g., clinical trials and web content optimization. In these two problems, all tasks share a common low-dimensional linear representation, and our goal is to leverage this feature to accelerate the best arm (policy) identification process for all tasks. For these problems, we design computationally and sample efficient algorithms DouExpDes and C-DouExpDes, which perform double experimental designs to plan optimal sample allocations for learning the global representation. We show that by learning the common representation among tasks, our sample complexity is significantly better than that of the native approach which solves tasks independently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate the benefits of representation learning for multi-task pure exploration.

Task incremental learning aims to enable a system to maintain its performance on previously learned tasks while learning new tasks, solving the problem of catastrophic forgetting. One promising approach is to build an individual network or sub-network for future tasks. However, this leads to an ever-growing memory due to saving extra weights for new tasks and how to address this issue has remained an open problem in task incremental learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel Neural Weight Search technique that designs a fixed search space where the optimal combinations of frozen weights can be searched to build new models for novel tasks in an end-to-end manner, resulting in scalable and controllable memory growth. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, i.e., Split-CIFAR-100 and CUB-to-Sketches, show our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to both average inference accuracy and total memory cost.

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from simpler tasks, and faster by adapting the complexity of the actions to the task. We propose a task-oriented representation of complex actions, called procedures, to learn online task relationships and unbounded sequences of action primitives to control the different observables of the environment. Combining both goal-babbling with imitation learning, and active learning with transfer of knowledge based on intrinsic motivation, our algorithm self-organises its learning process. It chooses at any given time a task to focus on; and what, how, when and from whom to transfer knowledge. We show with a simulation and a real industrial robot arm, in cross-task and cross-learner transfer settings, that task composition is key to tackle highly complex tasks. Task decomposition is also efficiently transferred across different embodied learners and by active imitation, where the robot requests just a small amount of demonstrations and the adequate type of information. The robot learns and exploits task dependencies so as to learn tasks of every complexity.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) is an important method for improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using additional computation during the inference phase. However, current studies do not systematically analyze how policy models, Process Reward Models (PRMs), and problem difficulty influence TTS. This lack of analysis limits the understanding and practical use of TTS methods. In this paper, we focus on two core questions: (1) What is the optimal approach to scale test-time computation across different policy models, PRMs, and problem difficulty levels? (2) To what extent can extended computation improve the performance of LLMs on complex tasks, and can smaller language models outperform larger ones through this approach? Through comprehensive experiments on MATH-500 and challenging AIME24 tasks, we have the following observations: (1) The compute-optimal TTS strategy is highly dependent on the choice of policy model, PRM, and problem difficulty. (2) With our compute-optimal TTS strategy, extremely small policy models can outperform larger models. For example, a 1B LLM can exceed a 405B LLM on MATH-500. Moreover, on both MATH-500 and AIME24, a 0.5B LLM outperforms GPT-4o, a 3B LLM surpasses a 405B LLM, and a 7B LLM beats o1 and DeepSeek-R1, while with higher inference efficiency. These findings show the significance of adapting TTS strategies to the specific characteristics of each task and model and indicate that TTS is a promising approach for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs.

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way to tackle this challenge is to reformulate it as a multi-task RL problem, where the task space contains not only the challenging task of interest but also easier tasks that implicitly function as a curriculum. Such a reformulation opens up the possibility of running existing multi-task RL methods as a more efficient alternative to solving a single challenging task from scratch. In this work, we provide a theoretical framework that reformulates a single-task RL problem as a multi-task RL problem defined by a curriculum. Under mild regularity conditions on the curriculum, we show that sequentially solving each task in the multi-task RL problem is more computationally efficient than solving the original single-task problem, without any explicit exploration bonuses or other exploration strategies. We also show that our theoretical insights can be translated into an effective practical learning algorithm that can accelerate curriculum learning on simulated robotic tasks.

In real-world scenarios, it is desirable for embodied agents to have the ability to leverage human language to gain explicit or implicit knowledge for learning tasks. Despite recent progress, most previous approaches adopt simple low-level instructions as language inputs, which may not reflect natural human communication. It's not clear how to incorporate rich language use to facilitate task learning. To address this question, this paper studies different types of language inputs in facilitating reinforcement learning (RL) embodied agents. More specifically, we examine how different levels of language informativeness (i.e., feedback on past behaviors and future guidance) and diversity (i.e., variation of language expressions) impact agent learning and inference. Our empirical results based on four RL benchmarks demonstrate that agents trained with diverse and informative language feedback can achieve enhanced generalization and fast adaptation to new tasks. These findings highlight the pivotal role of language use in teaching embodied agents new tasks in an open world. Project website: https://github.com/sled-group/Teachable_RL

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs directly, but instead provide references to (hopefully authoritative) answers. Successful question answering systems offer a limited corpus created on-demand by human experts, which is neither timely nor scalable. Pre-trained language models, by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are dilettantes rather than domain experts -- they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over. This paper examines how ideas from classical information retrieval and pre-trained language models can be synthesized and evolved into systems that truly deliver on the promise of domain expert advice.

In an era where single large language models have dominated the landscape of artificial intelligence for years, multi-agent systems arise as new protagonists in conversational task-solving. While previous studies have showcased their potential in reasoning tasks and creative endeavors, an analysis of their limitations concerning the conversational paradigms and the impact of individual agents is missing. It remains unascertained how multi-agent discussions perform across tasks of varying complexity and how the structure of these conversations influences the process. To fill that gap, this work systematically evaluates multi-agent systems across various discussion paradigms, assessing their strengths and weaknesses in both generative tasks and question-answering tasks. Alongside the experiments, I propose a taxonomy of 20 multi-agent research studies from 2022 to 2024, followed by the introduction of a framework for deploying multi-agent LLMs in conversational task-solving. I demonstrate that while multi-agent systems excel in complex reasoning tasks, outperforming a single model by leveraging expert personas, they fail on basic tasks. Concretely, I identify three challenges that arise: 1) While longer discussions enhance reasoning, agents fail to maintain conformity to strict task requirements, which leads to problem drift, making shorter conversations more effective for basic tasks. 2) Prolonged discussions risk alignment collapse, raising new safety concerns for these systems. 3) I showcase discussion monopolization through long generations, posing the problem of fairness in decision-making for tasks like summarization. This work uncovers both the potential and challenges that arise with multi-agent interaction and varying conversational paradigms, providing insights into how future research could improve the efficiency, performance, and safety of multi-agent LLMs.

Language models have the ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), allowing them to flexibly adapt their behavior based on context. This contrasts with in-weights learning, where information is statically encoded in model parameters from iterated observations of the data. Despite this apparent ability to learn in-context, language models are known to struggle when faced with unseen or rarely seen tokens. Hence, we study structural in-context learning, which we define as the ability of a model to execute in-context learning on arbitrary tokens -- so called because the model must generalize on the basis of e.g. sentence structure or task structure, rather than semantic content encoded in token embeddings. An ideal model would be able to do both: flexibly deploy in-weights operations (in order to robustly accommodate ambiguous or unknown contexts using encoded semantic information) and structural in-context operations (in order to accommodate novel tokens). We study structural in-context algorithms in a simple part-of-speech setting using both practical and toy models. We find that active forgetting, a technique that was recently introduced to help models generalize to new languages, forces models to adopt structural in-context learning solutions. Finally, we introduce temporary forgetting, a straightforward extension of active forgetting that enables one to control how much a model relies on in-weights vs. in-context solutions. Importantly, temporary forgetting allows us to induce a dual process strategy where in-context and in-weights solutions coexist within a single model.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems have been applied in a range of domains to support human users to achieve specific goals. Systems are typically constructed for a single domain or language and do not generalise well beyond this. Their extension to other languages in particular is restricted by the lack of available training data for many of the world's languages. To support work on Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in TOD across multiple languages and domains simultaneously, we constructed MULTI3NLU++, a multilingual, multi-intent, multi-domain dataset. MULTI3NLU++ extends the English-only NLU++ dataset to include manual translations into a range of high, medium and low resource languages (Spanish, Marathi, Turkish and Amharic), in two domains (banking and hotels). MULTI3NLU++ inherits the multi-intent property of NLU++, where an utterance may be labelled with multiple intents, providing a more realistic representation of a user's goals and aligning with the more complex tasks that commercial systems aim to model. We use MULTI3NLU++ to benchmark state-of-the-art multilingual language models as well as Machine Translation and Question Answering systems for the NLU task of intent detection for TOD systems in the multilingual setting. The results demonstrate the challenging nature of the dataset, particularly in the low-resource language setting.

The applications of generative AI have become extremely impressive, and the interplay between users and AI is even more so. Current human-AI interaction literature has taken a broad look at how humans interact with generative AI, but it lacks specificity regarding the user interface designs and patterns used to create these applications. Therefore, we present a survey that comprehensively presents taxonomies of how a human interacts with AI and the user interaction patterns designed to meet the needs of a variety of relevant use cases. We focus primarily on user-guided interactions, surveying interactions that are initiated by the user and do not include any implicit signals given by the user. With this survey, we aim to create a compendium of different user-interaction patterns that can be used as a reference for designers and developers alike. In doing so, we also strive to lower the entry barrier for those attempting to learn more about the design of generative AI applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases, sometimes failing at problems solvable by young children, indicating that traditional notions of task complexity are insufficient for explaining LLM capabilities. However, exploring LLM capabilities is complicated by the fact that most widely-used models are also "instruction-tuned" to respond appropriately to prompts. With the goal of disentangling the factors influencing LLM performance, we investigate whether instruction-tuned models possess fundamentally different capabilities from base models that are prompted using in-context examples. Through extensive experiments across various model families, scales and task types, which included instruction tuning 90 different LLMs, we demonstrate that the performance of instruction-tuned models is significantly correlated with the in-context performance of their base counterparts. By clarifying what instruction-tuning contributes, we extend prior research into in-context learning, which suggests that base models use priors from pretraining data to solve tasks. Specifically, we extend this understanding to instruction-tuned models, suggesting that their pretraining data similarly sets a limiting boundary on the tasks they can solve, with the added influence of the instruction-tuning dataset.

Large-scale task planning is a major challenge. Recent work exploits large language models (LLMs) directly as a policy and shows surprisingly interesting results. This paper shows that LLMs provide a commonsense model of the world in addition to a policy that acts on it. The world model and the policy can be combined in a search algorithm, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), to scale up task planning. In our new LLM-MCTS algorithm, the LLM-induced world model provides a commonsense prior belief for MCTS to achieve effective reasoning; the LLM-induced policy acts as a heuristic to guide the search, vastly improving search efficiency. Experiments show that LLM-MCTS outperforms both MCTS alone and policies induced by LLMs (GPT2 and GPT3.5) by a wide margin, for complex, novel tasks. Further experiments and analyses on multiple tasks -- multiplication, multi-hop travel planning, object rearrangement -- suggest minimum description length (MDL) as a general guiding principle: if the description length of the world model is substantially smaller than that of the policy, using LLM as a world model for model-based planning is likely better than using LLM solely as a policy.

While enabling large language models to implement function calling (known as APIs) can greatly enhance the performance of LLMs, function calling is still a challenging task due to the complicated relations between different APIs, especially in a context-learning setting without fine-tuning. This paper proposes a simple yet controllable target-driven approach called Reverse Chain to empower LLMs with capabilities to use external APIs with only prompts. Given that most open-source LLMs have limited tool-use or tool-plan capabilities, LLMs in Reverse Chain are only employed to implement simple tasks, e.g., API selection and argument completion, and a generic rule is employed to implement a controllable multiple functions calling. In this generic rule, after selecting a final API to handle a given task via LLMs, we first ask LLMs to fill the required arguments from user query and context. Some missing arguments could be further completed by letting LLMs select another API based on API description before asking user. This process continues until a given task is completed. Extensive numerical experiments indicate an impressive capability of Reverse Chain on implementing multiple function calling. Interestingly enough, the experiments also reveal that tool-use capabilities of the existing LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT, can be greatly improved via Reverse Chain.

The introduction of the transformer architecture and the self-attention mechanism has led to an explosive production of language models trained on specific downstream tasks and data domains. With over 200, 000 models in the Hugging Face ecosystem, users grapple with selecting and optimizing models to suit multifaceted workflows and data domains while addressing computational, security, and recency concerns. There is an urgent need for machine learning frameworks that can eliminate the burden of model selection and customization and unleash the incredible power of the vast emerging model library for end users. Here, we propose a context-aware routing system, Tryage, that leverages a language model router for optimal selection of expert models from a model library based on analysis of individual input prompts. Inspired by the thalamic router in the brain, Tryage employs a perceptive router to predict down-stream model performance on prompts and, then, makes a routing decision using an objective function that integrates performance predictions with user goals and constraints that are incorporated through flags (e.g., model size, model recency). Tryage allows users to explore a Pareto front and automatically trade-off between task accuracy and secondary goals including minimization of model size, recency, security, verbosity, and readability. Across heterogeneous data sets that include code, text, clinical data, and patents, the Tryage framework surpasses Gorilla and GPT3.5 turbo in dynamic model selection identifying the optimal model with an accuracy of 50.9% , compared to 23.6% by GPT 3.5 Turbo and 10.8% by Gorilla. Conceptually, Tryage demonstrates how routing models can be applied to program and control the behavior of multi-model LLM systems to maximize efficient use of the expanding and evolving language model ecosystem.

We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through instructions or dictation, and the system generates a well-formatted and coherent document. We describe the system architecture and detail how we address the various challenges while building and deploying such a system at scale. More specifically, our system uses a combination of small, task-specific models as well as pre-trained language models for fast and effective text composition while supporting a variety of input modes for better usability.

A large body of research in continual learning is devoted to overcoming the catastrophic forgetting of neural networks by designing new algorithms that are robust to the distribution shifts. However, the majority of these works are strictly focused on the "algorithmic" part of continual learning for a "fixed neural network architecture", and the implications of using different architectures are mostly neglected. Even the few existing continual learning methods that modify the model assume a fixed architecture and aim to develop an algorithm that efficiently uses the model throughout the learning experience. However, in this work, we show that the choice of architecture can significantly impact the continual learning performance, and different architectures lead to different trade-offs between the ability to remember previous tasks and learning new ones. Moreover, we study the impact of various architectural decisions, and our findings entail best practices and recommendations that can improve the continual learning performance.

The attention mechanism is a critical component of Large Language Models (LLMs) that allows tokens in a sequence to interact with each other, but is order-invariant. Incorporating position encoding (PE) makes it possible to address by position, such as attending to the i-th token. However, current PE methods use token counts to derive position, and thus cannot generalize to higher levels of abstraction, such as attending to the i-th sentence. In this paper, we propose a new position encoding method, Contextual Position Encoding (CoPE), that allows positions to be conditioned on context by incrementing position only on certain tokens determined by the model. This allows more general position addressing such as attending to the i-th particular word, noun, or sentence. We show that CoPE can solve the selective copy, counting and Flip-Flop tasks where popular position embeddings fail, and improves perplexity on language modeling and coding tasks.

Prompting is used to guide or steer a language model in generating an appropriate response that is consistent with the desired outcome. Chaining is a strategy used to decompose complex tasks into smaller, manageable components. In this study, we utilize prompt chaining for extensive legal document classification tasks, which present difficulties due to their intricate domain-specific language and considerable length. Our approach begins with the creation of a concise summary of the original document, followed by a semantic search for related exemplar texts and their corresponding annotations from a training corpus. Finally, we prompt for a label - based on the task - to assign, by leveraging the in-context learning from the few-shot prompt. We demonstrate that through prompt chaining, we can not only enhance the performance over zero-shot, but also surpass the micro-F1 score achieved by larger models, such as ChatGPT zero-shot, using smaller models.

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory (uparrow 44.0%) or external context (uparrow 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method.

The primary paradigm for multi-task training in natural language processing is to represent the input with a shared pre-trained language model, and add a small, thin network (head) per task. Given an input, a target head is the head that is selected for outputting the final prediction. In this work, we examine the behaviour of non-target heads, that is, the output of heads when given input that belongs to a different task than the one they were trained for. We find that non-target heads exhibit emergent behaviour, which may either explain the target task, or generalize beyond their original task. For example, in a numerical reasoning task, a span extraction head extracts from the input the arguments to a computation that results in a number generated by a target generative head. In addition, a summarization head that is trained with a target question answering head, outputs query-based summaries when given a question and a context from which the answer is to be extracted. This emergent behaviour suggests that multi-task training leads to non-trivial extrapolation of skills, which can be harnessed for interpretability and generalization.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. These agents are now capable of collaborating seamlessly, splitting tasks and enhancing accuracy, thus minimizing the need for human involvement. However, these agents often approach a diverse range of tasks in isolation, without benefiting from past experiences. This isolation can lead to repeated mistakes and inefficient trials in task solving. To this end, this paper introduces Experiential Co-Learning, a novel framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for mutual reasoning. This paradigm, enriched with previous experiences, equips agents to more effectively address unseen tasks.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various domains like robotics, game playing, and simulation. While RL agents have shown impressive capabilities in their specific tasks, they insufficiently adapt to new tasks. In supervised learning, this adaptation problem is addressed by large-scale pre-training followed by fine-tuning to new down-stream tasks. Recently, pre-training on multiple tasks has been gaining traction in RL. However, fine-tuning a pre-trained model often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, that is, the performance on the pre-training tasks deteriorates when fine-tuning on new tasks. To investigate the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon, we first jointly pre-train a model on datasets from two benchmark suites, namely Meta-World and DMControl. Then, we evaluate and compare a variety of fine-tuning methods prevalent in natural language processing, both in terms of performance on new tasks, and how well performance on pre-training tasks is retained. Our study shows that with most fine-tuning approaches, the performance on pre-training tasks deteriorates significantly. Therefore, we propose a novel method, Learning-to-Modulate (L2M), that avoids the degradation of learned skills by modulating the information flow of the frozen pre-trained model via a learnable modulation pool. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Continual-World benchmark, while retaining performance on the pre-training tasks. Finally, to aid future research in this area, we release a dataset encompassing 50 Meta-World and 16 DMControl tasks.

Currently, a growing number of mature natural language processing applications make people's life more convenient. Such applications are built by source code - the language in software engineering. However, the applications for understanding source code language to ease the software engineering process are under-researched. Simultaneously, the transformer model, especially its combination with transfer learning, has been proven to be a powerful technique for natural language processing tasks. These breakthroughs point out a promising direction for process source code and crack software engineering tasks. This paper describes CodeTrans - an encoder-decoder transformer model for tasks in the software engineering domain, that explores the effectiveness of encoder-decoder transformer models for six software engineering tasks, including thirteen sub-tasks. Moreover, we have investigated the effect of different training strategies, including single-task learning, transfer learning, multi-task learning, and multi-task learning with fine-tuning. CodeTrans outperforms the state-of-the-art models on all the tasks. To expedite future works in the software engineering domain, we have published our pre-trained models of CodeTrans. https://github.com/agemagician/CodeTrans

We study single-machine scheduling of jobs, each belonging to a job type that determines its duration distribution. We start by analyzing the scenario where the type characteristics are known and then move to two learning scenarios where the types are unknown: non-preemptive problems, where each started job must be completed before moving to another job; and preemptive problems, where job execution can be paused in the favor of moving to a different job. In both cases, we design algorithms that achieve sublinear excess cost, compared to the performance with known types, and prove lower bounds for the non-preemptive case. Notably, we demonstrate, both theoretically and through simulations, how preemptive algorithms can greatly outperform non-preemptive ones when the durations of different job types are far from one another, a phenomenon that does not occur when the type durations are known.