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The remarkable multimodal capabilities demonstrated by OpenAI&#39;s GPT-4 have sparked significant interest in the development of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). A primary research objective of such models is to align visual and textual modalities effectively while comprehending human instructions.
Current methodologies often rely on annotations derived from benchmark datasets to construct image-dialogue datasets for training purposes, akin to instruction tuning in LLMs. However, these datasets often exhibit domain bias, potentially constraining the generative capabilities of the models. In an effort to mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. This approach harnesses the power of generative models, marrying the abilities of ChatGPT and text-to-image generative models to yield a diverse and controllable dataset with varied image content. This not only provides greater flexibility compared to existing methodologies but also significantly enhances several model capabilities. Our research includes comprehensive experiments conducted on various datasets using the open-source LLAVA model as a testbed for our proposed pipeline. Our results underscore marked enhancements across more than ten commonly assessed capabilities.

ACL 2024

Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data

synthesized image-dialogue data

instruction tuning

multimodal

The remarkable multimodal capabilities demonstrated by OpenAI's GPT-4 have sparked significant interest in the development of multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs). A primary research objective of such models is to align visual and textual modalities effectively while comprehending human instructions.
Current methodologies often rely on annotations derived from benchmark datasets to construct image-dialogue datasets for training purposes, akin to instruction tuning in LLMs. However, these datasets often exhibit domain bias, potentially constraining the generative capabilities of the models. In an effort to mitigate these limitations, we propose a novel data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning. This approach harnesses the power of generative models, marrying the abilities of ChatGPT and text-to-image generative models to yield a diverse and controllable dataset with varied image content. This not only provides greater flexibility compared to existing methodologies but also significantly enhances several model capabilities. Our research includes comprehensive experiments conducted on various datasets using the open-source LLAVA model as a testbed for our proposed pipeline. Our results underscore marked enhancements across more than ten commonly assessed capabilities.

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in general language understanding tasks. However, as a family of generative methods with the objective of next token prediction, the semantic evolution with the depth of these models are not fully explored, unlike their predecessors, such as BERT-like architectures. In this paper, we specifically investigate the bottom-up evolution of lexical semantics for a popular LLM, namely Llama2, by probing its hidden states at the end of each layer using a contextualized word identification task. Our experiments show that the representations in lower layers encode lexical semantics, while the higher layers, with weaker semantic induction, are responsible for prediction. This is in contrast to models with discriminative objectives, such as mask language modeling, where the higher layers obtain better lexical semantics. The conclusion is further supported by the monotonic increase in performance via the hidden states for the last meaningless symbols, such as punctuation, in the prompting strategy. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/LLM_LexSem.

Fantastic Semantics and Where to Find Them: Investigating Which Layers of Generative LLMs Reflect Lexical Semantics

How can we construct an automated debate judge to evaluate an extensive, vibrant, multi-turn debate? 
This task is challenging, as judging a debate involves grappling with lengthy texts, intricate argument relationships, and multi-dimensional assessments.
At the same time, current research mainly focuses on short dialogues, rarely touching upon the evaluation of an entire debate.
In this paper, by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose Debatrix, which makes the analysis and assessment of multi-turn debates more aligned with majority preferences. 
Specifically, Debatrix features a vertical, iterative chronological analysis and a horizontal, multi-dimensional evaluation collaboration.
To align with real-world debate scenarios, we introduced the PanelBench benchmark, comparing our system's performance to actual debate outcomes.
The findings indicate a notable enhancement over directly using LLMs for debate evaluation.
Source code and benchmark data are available at https://github.com/ljcleo/debatrix.

Debatrix: Multi-dimensional Debate Judge with Iterative Chronological Analysis Based on LLM

Recent work showed the possibility of building open-vocabulary large language models (LLMs) that directly operate on pixel representations. These models are implemented as autoencoders that reconstruct masked patches of rendered text.
However, these pixel-based LLMs are limited to discriminative tasks (e.g., classification) and, similar to BERT, cannot be used to generate text.

Therefore, they cannot be used for generative tasks such as free-form question answering. In this work, we introduce PIXAR, the first pixel-based autoregressive LLM that performs text generation. Consisting of only a decoder, PIXAR can perform free-form generative tasks while keeping the number of parameters on par with previous encoder-decoder models.

Furthermore, we highlight the challenges of generating text as non-noisy images and show this is due to using a maximum likelihood objective. To overcome this problem, we propose an adversarial pretraining stage that improves the readability and accuracy of PIXAR by 8.1 on LAMBADA and 8.5 on bAbI--- making it comparable to GPT-2 on text generation tasks.

This paves the way to build open-vocabulary LLMs that operate on perceptual input only and calls into question the necessity of the usual symbolic input representation, i.e., text as (sub)tokens.

PIXAR: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown inspiring achievements in constructing autonomous agents that rely on
language descriptions as inputs. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs can function as few-shot or zero-shot embodied agents in dynamic interactive environments. To address this gap, we introduce LangSuit·E, a versatile and simulation-free testbed featuring 6 representative embodied tasks in textual embodied worlds. Compared with previous LLM-based testbeds, LangSuit·E (i) offers adaptability to diverse environments without multiple simulation engines, (ii) evaluates agents’ capacity to develop “internalized world knowledge” with embodied observations, and (iii) allows easy customization of communication and action strategies. To address the embodiment challenge, we devise a novel chain-of-thought (CoT) schema, EmMem, which summarizes embodied states w.r.t. history information. Comprehensive benchmark results illustrate challenges and insights of embodied planning. LangSuit·E represents a significant step toward building embodied generalists in the context of language models.

LangSuit·E: Planning, Controlling and Interacting with Large Language Models in Embodied Text Environments

Parameter efficient finetuning has emerged as a viable solution for improving the performance of Large Language Models without requiring massive resources and compute. Prior work on multilingual evaluation has shown that there is a large gap between the performance of LLMs on English and other languages. Further, there is also a large gap between the performance of smaller open-source models and larger LLMs. Finetuning can be an effective way to bridge this gap and make language models more equitable. In this work, we finetune the Llama-2 and Mistral models on two synthetic multilingual instruction tuning datasets to determine its effect on model performance on six downstream tasks covering forty one languages in all. Additionally, we experiment with various parameters, such as rank for low-rank adaptation and values of quantisation to determine their effects on downstream performance and find that higher rank and higher quantisation values benefit low-resource languages. We find that parameter efficient finetuning of smaller open-source models sometimes bridges the gap between the performance of these models and the larger ones, however, English performance can take a hit. We also find that finetuning sometimes improves performance on low-resource languages, while degrading performance on high-resource languages.

MAPLE: Multilingual Evaluation of Parameter Efficient Finetuning of Large Language Models

Neural parameterization has significantly advanced unsupervised grammar induction. 
However, training these models with a traditional likelihood loss for all possible parses exacerbates two issues: 1) *structural optimization ambiguity* that arbitrarily selects one among structurally ambiguous optimal grammars despite the specific preference of gold parses, and 2) *structural simplicity bias* that leads a model to underutilize rules to compose parse trees. These challenges subject unsupervised neural grammar induction (UNGI) to inevitable prediction errors, high variance, and the necessity for extensive grammars to achieve accurate predictions. This paper tackles these issues, offering a comprehensive analysis of their origins. As a solution, we introduce *sentence-wise parse-focusing* to reduce the parse pool per sentence for loss evaluation, using the structural bias from pre-trained parsers on the same dataset.
In unsupervised parsing benchmark tests, our method significantly improves performance while effectively reducing variance and bias toward overly simplistic parses. Our research promotes learning more compact, accurate, and consistent explicit grammars, facilitating better interpretability.

Structural Optimization Ambiguity and Simplicity Bias in Unsupervised Neural Grammar Induction

Editing knowledge in large language models is an attractive capability that allows us to correct incorrectly learned facts during pre-training, as well as update the model with an ever-growing list of new facts. While existing model editing techniques have shown promise, they are usually evaluated using metrics for reliability, specificity and generalization over one or few edits. We argue that for model editing to have practical utility, we must be able to make multiple edits to the same model. With this in mind, we evaluate current model editing methods at scale, focusing on two state of the art methods - ROME and MEMIT. With the lens of scalability, we evaluate model editing methods for three crucial properties - editing proficiency, fact forgetting and downstream performance. We find that as a model is edited sequentially with multiple facts, it continually becomes less editable, forgets previously edited facts and loses the ability to perform downstream tasks. For ROME and MEMIT, this "forgetting" happens in two phases - an initial gradual but progressive forgetting phase followed by an abrupt or catastrophic forgetting. Both gradual and catastrophic forgetting limit the usefulness of model editing methods at scale - the former makes model editing less effective as multiple edits are made to the model while the latter caps the scalability of such model editing methods. Our analysis also highlights other key limitations of ROME and MEMIT at scale. With our work, we push for better evaluation of model editing and development of model editing methods keeping scalability in mind.

Model Editing at Scale leads to Gradual and Catastrophic Forgetting

Instruction tuning has emerged as a powerful technique, significantly boosting zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. While recent work has explored cross-lingual generalization by applying instruction tuning to multilingual models, previous studies have primarily focused on English, with a limited exploration of non-English tasks. For in-depth exploration of cross-lingual generalization in instruction tuning, we perform instruction tuning individually for two distinct language meta-datasets. Subsequently, we assess the performance on unseen tasks in the language different from the one used for training. To facilitate this investigation, we introduce a novel non-English meta-dataset named "KORANI" (Korean Natural Instruction), comprising 51 Korean benchmarks. Moreover, we design cross-lingual templates to mitigate discrepancies in language and instruction-format of the template between training and inference within the cross-lingual setting. Our experiments reveal consistent improvements through cross-lingual generalization in both English and Korean, outperforming baseline by average scores of 20.7\% and 13.6\%, respectively. Remarkably, these enhancements are comparable to those achieved by mono-lingual instruction tuning and even surpass them in some tasks. The result underscores the significance of relevant data acquisition across languages over linguistic congruence with unseen tasks during instruction tuning.

Deep Exploration of Cross-Lingual Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning

We propose CounterCurate, a framework to comprehensively improve the visio-linguistic compositional reasoning capability for both contrastive and generative multimodal models. In particular, we identify two critical under- explored problems: the neglect of physically grounded reasoning (counting and position understanding) and the potential of using highly capable text and image generation models for semantic counterfactual fine-tuning. Our work pioneers an approach in addressing these gaps.

We first spotlight the near-chance performance of multimodal models like CLIP and LLaVA in physically grounded compositional reasoning. We then apply simple data augmentation using the grounded image generation model GLIGEN to generate fine-tuning data, resulting in significant performance improvements: +33% and +37% for CLIP and LLaVA, respectively, on our newly curated Flickr30k-Positions benchmark. Moreover, we exploit the capabilities of high-performing text generation and image generation models, specifically GPT-4V and DALLE-3, to curate challenging semantic counterfactuals, thereby further enhancing compositional reasoning capabilities on benchmarks such as SugarCrepe, where CounterCurate outperforms GPT-4V.

To facilitate future research, we release ourcode, dataset, benchmark, and checkpoints at https://countercurate.github.io/

CounterCurate: Enhancing Physical and Semantic Visio-Linguistic Compositional Reasoning via Counterfactual Examples

The Transformer architecture has become prominent in developing large causal language models. However, mechanisms to explain its capabilities are not well understood. Focused on the training process, here we establish a meta-learning view of the Transformer architecture when trained for the causal language modeling task, by explicating an inner optimization process that may happen within the Transformer. Further, from within the inner optimization, we discover and theoretically analyze a special characteristic of the norms of learned token representations within Transformer-based causal language models. Our analysis is supported by experiments conducted on pre-trained large language models and real-world data.

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Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data

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Fantastic Semantics and Where to Find Them: Investigating Which Layers of Generative LLMs Reflect Lexical Semantics

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