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SubscribeAdvancing Depression Detection on Social Media Platforms Through Fine-Tuned Large Language Models
This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for improved depression detection from users social media data. Through the use of fine-tuned GPT 3.5 Turbo 1106 and LLaMA2-7B models and a sizable dataset from earlier studies, we were able to identify depressed content in social media posts with a high accuracy of nearly 96.0 percent. The comparative analysis of the obtained results with the relevant studies in the literature shows that the proposed fine-tuned LLMs achieved enhanced performance compared to existing state of the-art systems. This demonstrates the robustness of LLM-based fine-tuned systems to be used as potential depression detection systems. The study describes the approach in depth, including the parameters used and the fine-tuning procedure, and it addresses the important implications of our results for the early diagnosis of depression on several social media platforms.
Analyzing the Effectiveness of Large Language Models on Text-to-SQL Synthesis
This study investigates various approaches to using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Text-to-SQL program synthesis, focusing on the outcomes and insights derived. Employing the popular Text-to-SQL dataset, spider, the goal was to input a natural language question along with the database schema and output the correct SQL SELECT query. The initial approach was to fine-tune a local and open-source model to generate the SELECT query. After QLoRa fine-tuning WizardLM's WizardCoder-15B model on the spider dataset, the execution accuracy for generated queries rose to a high of 61%. With the second approach, using the fine-tuned gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (Few-shot) + gpt-4-turbo (Zero-shot error correction), the execution accuracy reached a high of 82.1%. Of all the incorrect queries, most can be categorized into a seven different categories of what went wrong: selecting the wrong columns or wrong order of columns, grouping by the wrong column, predicting the wrong values in conditionals, using different aggregates than the ground truth, extra or too few JOIN clauses, inconsistencies in the Spider dataset, and lastly completely incorrect query structure. Most if not all of the queries fall into these categories and it is insightful to understanding where the faults still lie with LLM program synthesis and where they can be improved.
FineTuneBench: How well do commercial fine-tuning APIs infuse knowledge into LLMs?
There is great interest in fine-tuning frontier large language models (LLMs) to inject new information and update existing knowledge. While commercial LLM fine-tuning APIs from providers such as OpenAI and Google promise flexible adaptation for various applications, the efficacy of fine-tuning remains unclear. In this study, we introduce FineTuneBench, an evaluation framework and dataset for understanding how well commercial fine-tuning APIs can successfully learn new and updated knowledge. We analyze five frontier LLMs with commercially available fine-tuning APIs, including GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, on their effectiveness in two settings: (1) ingesting novel information, such as recent news events and new people profiles, and (2) updating existing knowledge, such as updated medical guidelines and code frameworks. Our results reveal substantial shortcomings in all the models' abilities to effectively learn new information through fine-tuning, with an average generalization accuracy of 37% across all models. When updating existing knowledge, such as incorporating medical guideline updates, commercial fine-tuning APIs show even more limited capability (average generalization accuracy of 19%). Overall, fine-tuning GPT-4o mini is the most effective for infusing new knowledge and updating knowledge, followed by GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o. The fine-tuning APIs for Gemini 1.5 Flesh and Gemini 1.5 Pro are unable to learn new knowledge or update existing knowledge. These findings underscore a major shortcoming in using current commercial fine-tuning services to achieve reliable knowledge infusion in common scenarios. We open source the FineTuneBench dataset at https://github.com/kevinwu23/StanfordFineTuneBench.
Hackphyr: A Local Fine-Tuned LLM Agent for Network Security Environments
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential across various domains, including cybersecurity. Using commercial cloud-based LLMs may be undesirable due to privacy concerns, costs, and network connectivity constraints. In this paper, we present Hackphyr, a locally fine-tuned LLM to be used as a red-team agent within network security environments. Our fine-tuned 7 billion parameter model can run on a single GPU card and achieves performance comparable with much larger and more powerful commercial models such as GPT-4. Hackphyr clearly outperforms other models, including GPT-3.5-turbo, and baselines, such as Q-learning agents in complex, previously unseen scenarios. To achieve this performance, we generated a new task-specific cybersecurity dataset to enhance the base model's capabilities. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive analysis of the agents' behaviors that provides insights into the planning abilities and potential shortcomings of such agents, contributing to the broader understanding of LLM-based agents in cybersecurity contexts
Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Adaptive Machine Translation
This paper presents the outcomes of fine-tuning Mistral 7B, a general-purpose large language model (LLM), for adaptive machine translation (MT). The fine-tuning process involves utilising a combination of zero-shot and one-shot translation prompts within the medical domain. The primary objective is to enhance real-time adaptive MT capabilities of Mistral 7B, enabling it to adapt translations to the required domain at inference time. The results, particularly for Spanish-to-English MT, showcase the efficacy of the fine-tuned model, demonstrating quality improvements in both zero-shot and one-shot translation scenarios, surpassing Mistral 7B's baseline performance. Notably, the fine-tuned Mistral outperforms ChatGPT "gpt-3.5-turbo" in zero-shot translation while achieving comparable one-shot translation quality. Moreover, the zero-shot translation of the fine-tuned Mistral matches NLLB 3.3B's performance, and its one-shot translation quality surpasses that of NLLB 3.3B. These findings emphasise the significance of fine-tuning efficient LLMs like Mistral 7B to yield high-quality zero-shot translations comparable to task-oriented models like NLLB 3.3B. Additionally, the adaptive gains achieved in one-shot translation are comparable to those of commercial LLMs such as ChatGPT. Our experiments demonstrate that, with a relatively small dataset of 20,000 segments that incorporate a mix of zero-shot and one-shot prompts, fine-tuning significantly enhances Mistral's in-context learning ability, especially for real-time adaptive MT.
Mining experimental data from Materials Science literature with Large Language Models: an evaluation study
This study is dedicated to assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and GPT-4-Turbo in extracting structured information from scientific documents in materials science. To this end, we primarily focus on two critical tasks of information extraction: (i) a named entity recognition (NER) of studied materials and physical properties and (ii) a relation extraction (RE) between these entities. Due to the evident lack of datasets within Materials Informatics (MI), we evaluated using SuperMat, based on superconductor research, and MeasEval, a generic measurement evaluation corpus. The performance of LLMs in executing these tasks is benchmarked against traditional models based on the BERT architecture and rule-based approaches (baseline). We introduce a novel methodology for the comparative analysis of intricate material expressions, emphasising the standardisation of chemical formulas to tackle the complexities inherent in materials science information assessment. For NER, LLMs fail to outperform the baseline with zero-shot prompting and exhibit only limited improvement with few-shot prompting. However, a GPT-3.5-Turbo fine-tuned with the appropriate strategy for RE outperforms all models, including the baseline. Without any fine-tuning, GPT-4 and GPT-4-Turbo display remarkable reasoning and relationship extraction capabilities after being provided with merely a couple of examples, surpassing the baseline. Overall, the results suggest that although LLMs demonstrate relevant reasoning skills in connecting concepts, specialised models are currently a better choice for tasks requiring extracting complex domain-specific entities like materials. These insights provide initial guidance applicable to other materials science sub-domains in future work.
End-to-end multilingual fact-checking at scale
In this article, we describe how you can perform end-to-end fact-checking in over 100 languages using Factiverse AI models. We also show through an experimental benchmark that fine-tuned models tailored for fact-checking tasks outperform Large Language Models such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Mistral-7b.
ToolVQA: A Dataset for Multi-step Reasoning VQA with External Tools
Integrating external tools into Large Foundation Models (LFMs) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance their problem-solving capabilities. While existing studies have demonstrated strong performance in tool-augmented Visual Question Answering (VQA), recent benchmarks reveal significant gaps in real-world tool-use proficiency, particularly in functionally diverse multimodal settings requiring multi-step reasoning. In this work, we introduce ToolVQA, a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising 23K instances, designed to bridge this gap. Unlike previous datasets that rely on synthetic scenarios and simplified queries, ToolVQA features real-world visual contexts and challenging implicit multi-step reasoning tasks, better aligning with real user interactions. To construct this dataset, we propose ToolEngine, a novel data generation pipeline that employs Depth-First Search (DFS) with a dynamic in-context example matching mechanism to simulate human-like tool-use reasoning. ToolVQA encompasses 10 multimodal tools across 7 diverse task domains, with an average inference length of 2.78 reasoning steps per instance. The fine-tuned 7B LFMs on ToolVQA not only achieve impressive performance on our test set but also surpass the large close-sourced model GPT-3.5-turbo on various out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets, demonstrating strong generalizability to real-world tool-use scenarios.
Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges arising from the imprecision of manually crafted rules and inadequate risk perception in models without safety training. To address these, we introduce Guide-Align, a two-stage approach. Initially, a safety-trained model identifies potential risks and formulates specific guidelines for various inputs, establishing a comprehensive library of guidelines and a model for input-guidelines retrieval. Subsequently, the retrieval model correlates new inputs with relevant guidelines, which guide LLMs in response generation to ensure safe and high-quality outputs, thereby aligning with human values. An additional optional stage involves fine-tuning a model with well-aligned datasets generated through the process implemented in the second stage. Our method customizes guidelines to accommodate diverse inputs, thereby enhancing the fine-grainedness and comprehensiveness of the guideline library. Furthermore, it incorporates safety expertise from a safety-trained LLM through a lightweight retrieval model. We evaluate our approach on three benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in LLM security and quality. Notably, our fine-tuned model, Labrador, even at 13 billion parameters, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo and surpasses GPT-4 in alignment capabilities.
Mixtral of Experts
We introduce Mixtral 8x7B, a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) language model. Mixtral has the same architecture as Mistral 7B, with the difference that each layer is composed of 8 feedforward blocks (i.e. experts). For every token, at each layer, a router network selects two experts to process the current state and combine their outputs. Even though each token only sees two experts, the selected experts can be different at each timestep. As a result, each token has access to 47B parameters, but only uses 13B active parameters during inference. Mixtral was trained with a context size of 32k tokens and it outperforms or matches Llama 2 70B and GPT-3.5 across all evaluated benchmarks. In particular, Mixtral vastly outperforms Llama 2 70B on mathematics, code generation, and multilingual benchmarks. We also provide a model fine-tuned to follow instructions, Mixtral 8x7B - Instruct, that surpasses GPT-3.5 Turbo, Claude-2.1, Gemini Pro, and Llama 2 70B - chat model on human benchmarks. Both the base and instruct models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.
Aalap: AI Assistant for Legal & Paralegal Functions in India
Using proprietary Large Language Models on legal tasks poses challenges due to data privacy issues, domain data heterogeneity, domain knowledge sophistication, and domain objectives uniqueness. We created Aalalp, a fine-tuned Mistral 7B model on instructions data related to specific Indian legal tasks. The performance of Aalap is better than gpt-3.5-turbo in 31\% of our test data and obtains an equivalent score in 34\% of the test data as evaluated by GPT4. Training Aalap mainly focuses on teaching legal reasoning rather than legal recall. Aalap is definitely helpful for the day-to-day activities of lawyers, judges, or anyone working in legal systems.
Effective Distillation of Table-based Reasoning Ability from LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their remarkable parameter size and their impressive high requirement of computing resources pose challenges for their practical deployment. Recent research has revealed that specific capabilities of LLMs, such as numerical reasoning, can be transferred to smaller models through distillation. Some studies explore the potential of leveraging LLMs to perform table-based reasoning. Nevertheless, prior to our work, there has been no investigation into the prospect of specialising table reasoning skills in smaller models specifically tailored for table-to-text generation tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel table-based reasoning distillation, with the aim of distilling distilling LLMs into tailored, smaller models specifically designed for table-based reasoning task. Experimental results have shown that a 0.22 billion parameter model (Flan-T5-base) fine-tuned using distilled data, not only achieves a significant improvement compared to traditionally fine-tuned baselines but also surpasses specific LLMs like gpt-3.5-turbo on the scientific table-to-text generation dataset (SciGen). The code and data are released in https://github.com/Bernard-Yang/TableDistill.
InternChat: Solving Vision-Centric Tasks by Interacting with Chatbots Beyond Language
We present an interactive visual framework named InternChat, or iChat for short. The framework integrates chatbots that have planning and reasoning capabilities, such as ChatGPT, with non-verbal instructions like pointing movements that enable users to directly manipulate images or videos on the screen. Pointing (including gestures, cursors, etc.) movements can provide more flexibility and precision in performing vision-centric tasks that require fine-grained control, editing, and generation of visual content. The name InternChat stands for interaction, nonverbal, and chatbots. Different from existing interactive systems that rely on pure language, by incorporating pointing instructions, the proposed iChat significantly improves the efficiency of communication between users and chatbots, as well as the accuracy of chatbots in vision-centric tasks, especially in complicated visual scenarios where the number of objects is greater than 2. Additionally, in iChat, an auxiliary control mechanism is used to improve the control capability of LLM, and a large vision-language model termed Husky is fine-tuned for high-quality multi-modal dialogue (impressing ChatGPT-3.5-turbo with 93.89% GPT-4 Quality). We hope this work can spark new ideas and directions for future interactive visual systems. Welcome to watch the code at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternChat.
ELECTRA and GPT-4o: Cost-Effective Partners for Sentiment Analysis
Bidirectional transformers excel at sentiment analysis, and Large Language Models (LLM) are effective zero-shot learners. Might they perform better as a team? This paper explores collaborative approaches between ELECTRA and GPT-4o for three-way sentiment classification. We fine-tuned (FT) four models (ELECTRA Base/Large, GPT-4o/4o-mini) using a mix of reviews from Stanford Sentiment Treebank (SST) and DynaSent. We provided input from ELECTRA to GPT as: predicted label, probabilities, and retrieved examples. Sharing ELECTRA Base FT predictions with GPT-4o-mini significantly improved performance over either model alone (82.74 macro F1 vs. 79.29 ELECTRA Base FT, 79.52 GPT-4o-mini) and yielded the lowest cost/performance ratio (\0.12/F1 point). However, when GPT models were fine-tuned, including predictions decreased performance. GPT-4o FT-M was the top performer (86.99), with GPT-4o-mini FT close behind (86.77) at much less cost (0.38 vs. \$1.59/F1 point). Our results show that augmenting prompts with predictions from fine-tuned encoders is an efficient way to boost performance, and a fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini is nearly as good as GPT-4o FT at 76% less cost. Both are affordable options for projects with limited resources.
A Comprehensive Capability Analysis of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Series Models
GPT series models, such as GPT-3, CodeX, InstructGPT, ChatGPT, and so on, have gained considerable attention due to their exceptional natural language processing capabilities. However, despite the abundance of research on the difference in capabilities between GPT series models and fine-tuned models, there has been limited attention given to the evolution of GPT series models' capabilities over time. To conduct a comprehensive analysis of the capabilities of GPT series models, we select six representative models, comprising two GPT-3 series models (i.e., davinci and text-davinci-001) and four GPT-3.5 series models (i.e., code-davinci-002, text-davinci-002, text-davinci-003, and gpt-3.5-turbo). We evaluate their performance on nine natural language understanding (NLU) tasks using 21 datasets. In particular, we compare the performance and robustness of different models for each task under zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our extensive experiments reveal that the overall ability of GPT series models on NLU tasks does not increase gradually as the models evolve, especially with the introduction of the RLHF training strategy. While this strategy enhances the models' ability to generate human-like responses, it also compromises their ability to solve some tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that there is still room for improvement in areas such as model robustness.
WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback
We fine-tune GPT-3 to answer long-form questions using a text-based web-browsing environment, which allows the model to search and navigate the web. By setting up the task so that it can be performed by humans, we are able to train models on the task using imitation learning, and then optimize answer quality with human feedback. To make human evaluation of factual accuracy easier, models must collect references while browsing in support of their answers. We train and evaluate our models on ELI5, a dataset of questions asked by Reddit users. Our best model is obtained by fine-tuning GPT-3 using behavior cloning, and then performing rejection sampling against a reward model trained to predict human preferences. This model's answers are preferred by humans 56% of the time to those of our human demonstrators, and 69% of the time to the highest-voted answer from Reddit.
Evaluating AI Vocational Skills Through Professional Testing
Using a novel professional certification survey, the study focuses on assessing the vocational skills of two highly cited AI models, GPT-3 and Turbo-GPT3.5. The approach emphasizes the importance of practical readiness over academic performance by examining the models' performances on a benchmark dataset consisting of 1149 professional certifications. This study also includes a comparison with human test scores, providing perspective on the potential of AI models to match or even surpass human performance in professional certifications. GPT-3, even without any fine-tuning or exam preparation, managed to achieve a passing score (over 70% correct) on 39% of the professional certifications. It showcased proficiency in computer-related fields, including cloud and virtualization, business analytics, cybersecurity, network setup and repair, and data analytics. Turbo-GPT3.5, on the other hand, scored a perfect 100% on the highly regarded Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) exam. This model also demonstrated competency in diverse professional fields, such as nursing, licensed counseling, pharmacy, and aviation. Turbo-GPT3.5 exhibited strong performance on customer service tasks, indicating potential use cases in enhancing chatbots for call centers and routine advice services. Both models also scored well on sensory and experience-based tests outside a machine's traditional roles, including wine sommelier, beer tasting, emotional quotient, and body language reading. The study found that OpenAI's model improvement from Babbage to Turbo led to a 60% better performance on the grading scale within a few years. This progress indicates that addressing the current model's limitations could yield an AI capable of passing even the most rigorous professional certifications.
Keeping LLMs Aligned After Fine-tuning: The Crucial Role of Prompt Templates
Public LLMs such as the Llama 2-Chat have driven huge activity in LLM research. These models underwent alignment training and were considered safe. Recently Qi et al. (2023) reported that even benign fine-tuning (e.g., on seemingly safe datasets) can give rise to unsafe behaviors in the models. The current paper is about methods and best practices to mitigate such loss of alignment. Through extensive experiments on several chat models (Meta's Llama 2-Chat, Mistral AI's Mistral 7B Instruct v0.2, and OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo), this paper uncovers that the prompt templates used during fine-tuning and inference play a crucial role in preserving safety alignment, and proposes the "Pure Tuning, Safe Testing" (PTST) principle -- fine-tune models without a safety prompt, but include it at test time. Fine-tuning experiments on GSM8K, ChatDoctor, and OpenOrca show that PTST significantly reduces the rise of unsafe behaviors, and even almost eliminates them in some cases.
ReCatcher: Towards LLMs Regression Testing for Code Generation
Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation evolve rapidly through fine-tuning, merging, or new model releases. However, such updates can introduce regressions, not only in correctness but also in code quality and performance. To address this, we present ReCatcher, a regression testing framework for Python code generation. ReCatcher systematically compares two LLMs, typically a current model and a candidate update, across three dimensions: logical correctness, static code quality, and execution performance. We apply ReCatcher to assess regressions across three update scenarios, fine-tuning, merging, and model release, using CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder, and GPT-4o. Our evaluation shows that fine-tuning with cross-language datasets increases syntax errors by up to 12%. Merging with general-purpose models like Llama2 leads to regressions in correctness by up to 18%. GPT-4o introduces regressions of up to 50% in handling missing imports compared to GPT-3.5-turbo, while GPT-4o-mini suffers up to 80% performance degradation in execution time versus GPT-4o. Overall, logical correctness, performance, and error handling (e.g., syntax errors and missing imports) are the most regression-prone areas. Comparing ReCatcher with baseline solutions, it presents better and consistent accuracy across logical and performance aspects. ReCatcher highlights the importance of systematic regression evaluation before adopting new models, while assisting researchers and practitioners in making more informed update decisions.
Efficacy of Machine-Generated Instructions
Large "instruction-tuned" language models (i.e., finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is often limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We conducted a quantitative study to figure out the efficacy of machine-generated annotations, where we compare the results of a fine-tuned BERT model with human v/s machine-generated annotations. Applying our methods to the vanilla GPT-3 model, we saw that machine generated annotations were 78.54% correct and the fine-tuned model achieved a 96.01% model performance compared to the performance with human-labelled annotations. This result shows that machine-generated annotations are a resource and cost effective way to fine-tune down-stream models.
FAIT: Fault-Aware Fine-Tuning for Better Code Generation
Modern instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in code generation. However, these LLMs fine-tuned with standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) sometimes generate plausible-looking but functionally incorrect code variants. This issue likely stems from the limitation of standard SFT, which treats all tokens equally during optimization and fails to emphasize the error-sensitive segments-specific code differences between correct implementations and similar incorrect variants. To address this problem, we propose Fault-Aware Fine-Tuning (FAIT), a novel fine-tuning technique that enhances LLMs' code generation by (1) extracting multi-granularity (line/token-level) differences between correct and incorrect yet similar implementations to identify error-sensitive segments, and (2) dynamically prioritizing those segments during training via dynamic loss weighting. Through extensive experiments on seven LLMs across three widely-used benchmarks, our method achieves an average relative improvement of 6.9% on pass@1 with just one epoch of training, with some enhanced 6.7B LLMs outperforming closed-source models, e.g., GPT-3.5-Turbo. Furthermore, our fine-tuning technique demonstrates strong generalization with performance improvements ranging from 3.8% to 19.1% across diverse instruction-tuned LLMs, and our ablation studies confirm the contributions of different granularities of differences and loss function components.
Does Prompt Formatting Have Any Impact on LLM Performance?
In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt optimization is crucial for model performance. Although previous research has explored aspects like rephrasing prompt contexts, using various prompting techniques (like in-context learning and chain-of-thought), and ordering few-shot examples, our understanding of LLM sensitivity to prompt templates remains limited. Therefore, this paper examines the impact of different prompt templates on LLM performance. We formatted the same contexts into various human-readable templates, including plain text, Markdown, JSON, and YAML, and evaluated their impact across tasks like natural language reasoning, code generation, and translation using OpenAI's GPT models. Experiments show that GPT-3.5-turbo's performance varies by up to 40\% in a code translation task depending on the prompt template, while larger models like GPT-4 are more robust to these variations. Our analysis highlights the need to reconsider the use of fixed prompt templates, as different formats can significantly affect model performance.
Enhancing Large Language Models for Text-to-Testcase Generation
Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is a widely employed software development practice that involves developing test cases based on requirements prior to writing the code. Although various methods for automated test case generation have been proposed, they are not specifically tailored for TDD, where requirements instead of code serve as input. Objective: In this paper, we introduce a text-to-testcase generation approach based on a large language model (GPT-3.5) that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompt design. Method: Our approach involves enhancing the capabilities of basic GPT-3.5 for text-to-testcase generation task that is fine-tuned on our curated dataset with an effective prompting design. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach using a span of five large-scale open-source software projects. Results: Our approach generated 7k test cases for open source projects, achieving 78.5% syntactic correctness, 67.09% requirement alignment, and 61.7% code coverage, which substantially outperforms all other LLMs (basic GPT-3.5, Bloom, and CodeT5). In addition, our ablation study demonstrates the substantial performance improvement of the fine-tuning and prompting components of the GPT-3.5 model. Conclusions: These findings lead us to conclude that fine-tuning and prompting should be considered in the future when building a language model for the text-to-testcase generation task
Non-instructional Fine-tuning: Enabling Instruction-Following Capabilities in Pre-trained Language Models without Instruction-Following Data
Instruction fine-tuning is crucial for today's large language models (LLMs) to learn to follow instructions and align with human preferences. Conventionally, supervised data, including the instruction and the correct response, is required for instruction fine-tuning. To obtain such data, some researchers prompted well-trained models like GPT-4 to generate instructions and correct responses. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that uses the first half of a random text from OpenWebText as the instruction and GPT-3.5-turbo or GPT-4-turbo to complete the text as the response. Despite the data being "non-instructional", we found that pre-trained LLMs fine-tuned on this data can gain instruction-following capabilities. This observation is verified by fine-tuning several well-known pre-trained LLMs (e.g., LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-3-8B, LLaMA-3-70B, Mistral-7B-v0.1). The "non-instructional data" also improved some models that underwent supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. Our LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct fine-tuned through "non-instructional data" is comparable with LLaMA-3.1-70B-Instruct on the Arena Hard leaderboard. We analyzed the "non-instructional data" and ensured it is devoid of content related to instruction fine-tuning. Our findings will inspire further investigation into how to develop instruction-following capabilities without explicit instruction-related data.
Does fine-tuning GPT-3 with the OpenAI API leak personally-identifiable information?
Machine learning practitioners often fine-tune generative pre-trained models like GPT-3 to improve model performance at specific tasks. Previous works, however, suggest that fine-tuned machine learning models memorize and emit sensitive information from the original fine-tuning dataset. Companies such as OpenAI offer fine-tuning services for their models, but no prior work has conducted a memorization attack on any closed-source models. In this work, we simulate a privacy attack on GPT-3 using OpenAI's fine-tuning API. Our objective is to determine if personally identifiable information (PII) can be extracted from this model. We (1) explore the use of naive prompting methods on a GPT-3 fine-tuned classification model, and (2) we design a practical word generation task called Autocomplete to investigate the extent of PII memorization in fine-tuned GPT-3 within a real-world context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning GPT3 for both tasks led to the model memorizing and disclosing critical personally identifiable information (PII) obtained from the underlying fine-tuning dataset. To encourage further research, we have made our codes and datasets publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/albertsun1/gpt3-pii-attacks
RankRAG: Unifying Context Ranking with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) typically utilize the top-k contexts from a retriever in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). In this work, we propose a novel instruction fine-tuning framework RankRAG, which instruction-tunes a single LLM for the dual purpose of context ranking and answer generation in RAG. In particular, the instruction-tuned LLMs work surprisingly well by adding a small fraction of ranking data into the training blend, and outperform existing expert ranking models, including the same LLM exclusively fine-tuned on a large amount of ranking data. For generation, we compare our model with many strong baselines, including GPT-4-0613, GPT-4-turbo-2024-0409, and ChatQA-1.5, an open-sourced model with the state-of-the-art performance on RAG benchmarks. Specifically, our Llama3-RankRAG significantly outperforms Llama3-ChatQA-1.5 and GPT-4 models on nine knowledge-intensive benchmarks. In addition, it also performs comparably to GPT-4 on five RAG benchmarks in the biomedical domain without instruction fine-tuning on biomedical data, demonstrating its superb capability for generalization to new domains.
Exploring Small Language Models with Prompt-Learning Paradigm for Efficient Domain-Specific Text Classification
Domain-specific text classification faces the challenge of scarce labeled data due to the high cost of manual labeling. Prompt-learning, known for its efficiency in few-shot scenarios, is proposed as an alternative to traditional fine-tuning methods. And besides, although large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence, small language models (SLMs, with under 1B parameters) offer significant customizability, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness for domain-specific tasks, given industry constraints. In this study, we investigate the potential of SLMs combined with prompt-learning paradigm for domain-specific text classification, specifically within customer-agent interactions in retail. Our evaluations show that, in few-shot settings when prompt-based model fine-tuning is possible, T5-base, a typical SLM with 220M parameters, achieve approximately 75% accuracy with limited labeled data (up to 15% of full data), which shows great potentials of SLMs with prompt-learning. Based on this, We further validate the effectiveness of active few-shot sampling and the ensemble strategy in the prompt-learning pipeline that contribute to a remarkable performance gain. Besides, in zero-shot settings with a fixed model, we underscore a pivotal observation that, although the GPT-3.5-turbo equipped with around 154B parameters garners an accuracy of 55.16%, the power of well designed prompts becomes evident when the FLAN-T5-large, a model with a mere 0.5% of GPT-3.5-turbo's parameters, achieves an accuracy exceeding 31% with the optimized prompt, a leap from its sub-18% performance with an unoptimized one. Our findings underscore the promise of prompt-learning in classification tasks with SLMs, emphasizing the benefits of active few-shot sampling, and ensemble strategies in few-shot settings, and the importance of prompt engineering in zero-shot settings.
How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?
GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are the two most widely used large language model (LLM) services. However, when and how these models are updated over time is opaque. Here, we evaluate the March 2023 and June 2023 versions of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on four diverse tasks: 1) solving math problems, 2) answering sensitive/dangerous questions, 3) generating code and 4) visual reasoning. We find that the performance and behavior of both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can vary greatly over time. For example, GPT-4 (March 2023) was very good at identifying prime numbers (accuracy 97.6%) but GPT-4 (June 2023) was very poor on these same questions (accuracy 2.4%). Interestingly GPT-3.5 (June 2023) was much better than GPT-3.5 (March 2023) in this task. GPT-4 was less willing to answer sensitive questions in June than in March, and both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 had more formatting mistakes in code generation in June than in March. Overall, our findings shows that the behavior of the same LLM service can change substantially in a relatively short amount of time, highlighting the need for continuous monitoring of LLM quality.
LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
An important paradigm of natural language processing consists of large-scale pre-training on general domain data and adaptation to particular tasks or domains. As we pre-train larger models, full fine-tuning, which retrains all model parameters, becomes less feasible. Using GPT-3 175B as an example -- deploying independent instances of fine-tuned models, each with 175B parameters, is prohibitively expensive. We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks. Compared to GPT-3 175B fine-tuned with Adam, LoRA can reduce the number of trainable parameters by 10,000 times and the GPU memory requirement by 3 times. LoRA performs on-par or better than fine-tuning in model quality on RoBERTa, DeBERTa, GPT-2, and GPT-3, despite having fewer trainable parameters, a higher training throughput, and, unlike adapters, no additional inference latency. We also provide an empirical investigation into rank-deficiency in language model adaptation, which sheds light on the efficacy of LoRA. We release a package that facilitates the integration of LoRA with PyTorch models and provide our implementations and model checkpoints for RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and GPT-2 at https://github.com/microsoft/LoRA.
Can It Edit? Evaluating the Ability of Large Language Models to Follow Code Editing Instructions
A significant amount of research is focused on developing and evaluating large language models for a variety of code synthesis tasks. These include synthesizing code from natural language instructions, synthesizing tests from code, and synthesizing explanations of code. In contrast, the behavior of instructional code editing with LLMs is understudied. These are tasks in which the model is instructed to update a block of code provided in a prompt. The editing instruction may ask for a feature to added or removed, describe a bug and ask for a fix, ask for a different kind of solution, or many other common code editing tasks. We introduce a carefully crafted benchmark of code editing tasks and use it evaluate several cutting edge LLMs. Our evaluation exposes a significant gap between the capabilities of state-of-the-art open and closed models. For example, even GPT-3.5-Turbo is 8.8% better than the best open model at editing code. We also introduce a new, carefully curated, permissively licensed training set of code edits coupled with natural language instructions. Using this training set, we show that we can fine-tune open Code LLMs to significantly improve their code editing capabilities.
Detection Made Easy: Potentials of Large Language Models for Solidity Vulnerabilities
The large-scale deployment of Solidity smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet has increasingly attracted financially-motivated attackers in recent years. A few now-infamous attacks in Ethereum's history includes DAO attack in 2016 (50 million dollars lost), Parity Wallet hack in 2017 (146 million dollars locked), Beautychain's token BEC in 2018 (900 million dollars market value fell to 0), and NFT gaming blockchain breach in 2022 ($600 million in Ether stolen). This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of the use of large language models (LLMs) and their capabilities in detecting OWASP Top Ten vulnerabilities in Solidity. We introduce a novel, class-balanced, structured, and labeled dataset named VulSmart, which we use to benchmark and compare the performance of open-source LLMs such as CodeLlama, Llama2, CodeT5 and Falcon, alongside closed-source models like GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o Mini. Our proposed SmartVD framework is rigorously tested against these models through extensive automated and manual evaluations, utilizing BLEU and ROUGE metrics to assess the effectiveness of vulnerability detection in smart contracts. We also explore three distinct prompting strategies-zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought-to evaluate the multi-class classification and generative capabilities of the SmartVD framework. Our findings reveal that SmartVD outperforms its open-source counterparts and even exceeds the performance of closed-source base models like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Mini. After fine-tuning, the closed-source models, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o Mini, achieved remarkable performance with 99% accuracy in detecting vulnerabilities, 94% in identifying their types, and 98% in determining severity. Notably, SmartVD performs best with the `chain-of-thought' prompting technique, whereas the fine-tuned closed-source models excel with the `zero-shot' prompting approach.
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
Recent work has demonstrated substantial gains on many NLP tasks and benchmarks by pre-training on a large corpus of text followed by fine-tuning on a specific task. While typically task-agnostic in architecture, this method still requires task-specific fine-tuning datasets of thousands or tens of thousands of examples. By contrast, humans can generally perform a new language task from only a few examples or from simple instructions - something which current NLP systems still largely struggle to do. Here we show that scaling up language models greatly improves task-agnostic, few-shot performance, sometimes even reaching competitiveness with prior state-of-the-art fine-tuning approaches. Specifically, we train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting. For all tasks, GPT-3 is applied without any gradient updates or fine-tuning, with tasks and few-shot demonstrations specified purely via text interaction with the model. GPT-3 achieves strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, question-answering, and cloze tasks, as well as several tasks that require on-the-fly reasoning or domain adaptation, such as unscrambling words, using a novel word in a sentence, or performing 3-digit arithmetic. At the same time, we also identify some datasets where GPT-3's few-shot learning still struggles, as well as some datasets where GPT-3 faces methodological issues related to training on large web corpora. Finally, we find that GPT-3 can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans. We discuss broader societal impacts of this finding and of GPT-3 in general.
Is ChatGPT a Biomedical Expert? -- Exploring the Zero-Shot Performance of Current GPT Models in Biomedical Tasks
We assessed the performance of commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 on tasks from the 2023 BioASQ challenge. In Task 11b Phase B, which is focused on answer generation, both models demonstrated competitive abilities with leading systems. Remarkably, they achieved this with simple zero-shot learning, grounded with relevant snippets. Even without relevant snippets, their performance was decent, though not on par with the best systems. Interestingly, the older and cheaper GPT-3.5-Turbo system was able to compete with GPT-4 in the grounded Q&A setting on factoid and list answers. In Task 11b Phase A, focusing on retrieval, query expansion through zero-shot learning improved performance, but the models fell short compared to other systems. The code needed to rerun these experiments is available through GitHub.
ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation
Pre-trained models have achieved state-of-the-art results in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recent works such as T5 and GPT-3 have shown that scaling up pre-trained language models can improve their generalization abilities. Particularly, the GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters shows its strong task-agnostic zero-shot/few-shot learning capabilities. Despite their success, these large-scale models are trained on plain texts without introducing knowledge such as linguistic knowledge and world knowledge. In addition, most large-scale models are trained in an auto-regressive way. As a result, this kind of traditional fine-tuning approach demonstrates relatively weak performance when solving downstream language understanding tasks. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a unified framework named ERNIE 3.0 for pre-training large-scale knowledge enhanced models. It fuses auto-regressive network and auto-encoding network, so that the trained model can be easily tailored for both natural language understanding and generation tasks with zero-shot learning, few-shot learning or fine-tuning. We trained the model with 10 billion parameters on a 4TB corpus consisting of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. Empirical results show that the model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on 54 Chinese NLP tasks, and its English version achieves the first place on the SuperGLUE benchmark (July 3, 2021), surpassing the human performance by +0.8% (90.6% vs. 89.8%).
Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Real-World Code Repair
We tackle the challenge of training reliable code-fixing agents in real repositories, where complex builds and shifting dependencies make evaluation unstable. We developed a verifiable pipeline with success defined as post-fix build validation and improved reproducibility across ~1K real issues by pinning dependencies and disabling automatic upgrades. Building on this, we introduced a scalable simplified pipeline for large-scale reinforcement learning (RL). Using this setup, we supervised fine-tuned Qwen3-32B in the full pipeline and applied RL on top of the SFT model in the simplified environment. The SFT model distilled from GPT-4.1 trajectories performs on par while being 56x smaller, and RL added 7-20% absolute gains under matched train-test conditions. "Thinking mode" was on par or worse in our experiments. Both SFT and RL models failed to generalize across environments, highlighting the importance of matching train-test environments for building reliable real-world code-fixing agents.
