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Jul 31

COBRA Frames: Contextual Reasoning about Effects and Harms of Offensive Statements

Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Understanding the harms and offensiveness of statements requires reasoning about the social and situational context in which statements are made. For example, the utterance "your English is very good" may implicitly signal an insult when uttered by a white man to a non-white colleague, but uttered by an ESL teacher to their student would be interpreted as a genuine compliment. Such contextual factors have been largely ignored by previous approaches to toxic language detection. We introduce COBRA frames, the first context-aware formalism for explaining the intents, reactions, and harms of offensive or biased statements grounded in their social and situational context. We create COBRACORPUS, a dataset of 33k potentially offensive statements paired with machine-generated contexts and free-text explanations of offensiveness, implied biases, speaker intents, and listener reactions. To study the contextual dynamics of offensiveness, we train models to generate COBRA explanations, with and without access to the context. We find that explanations by context-agnostic models are significantly worse than by context-aware ones, especially in situations where the context inverts the statement's offensiveness (29% accuracy drop). Our work highlights the importance and feasibility of contextualized NLP by modeling social factors.

Learning to Quantize Vulnerability Patterns and Match to Locate Statement-Level Vulnerabilities

Deep learning (DL) models have become increasingly popular in identifying software vulnerabilities. Prior studies found that vulnerabilities across different vulnerable programs may exhibit similar vulnerable scopes, implicitly forming discernible vulnerability patterns that can be learned by DL models through supervised training. However, vulnerable scopes still manifest in various spatial locations and formats within a program, posing challenges for models to accurately identify vulnerable statements. Despite this challenge, state-of-the-art vulnerability detection approaches fail to exploit the vulnerability patterns that arise in vulnerable programs. To take full advantage of vulnerability patterns and unleash the ability of DL models, we propose a novel vulnerability-matching approach in this paper, drawing inspiration from program analysis tools that locate vulnerabilities based on pre-defined patterns. Specifically, a vulnerability codebook is learned, which consists of quantized vectors representing various vulnerability patterns. During inference, the codebook is iterated to match all learned patterns and predict the presence of potential vulnerabilities within a given program. Our approach was extensively evaluated on a real-world dataset comprising more than 188,000 C/C++ functions. The evaluation results show that our approach achieves an F1-score of 94% (6% higher than the previous best) and 82% (19% higher than the previous best) for function and statement-level vulnerability identification, respectively. These substantial enhancements highlight the effectiveness of our approach to identifying vulnerabilities. The training code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/optimatch/optimatch.

Math Word Problem Solving by Generating Linguistic Variants of Problem Statements

The art of mathematical reasoning stands as a fundamental pillar of intellectual progress and is a central catalyst in cultivating human ingenuity. Researchers have recently published a plethora of works centered around the task of solving Math Word Problems (MWP) - a crucial stride towards general AI. These existing models are susceptible to dependency on shallow heuristics and spurious correlations to derive the solution expressions. In order to ameliorate this issue, in this paper, we propose a framework for MWP solvers based on the generation of linguistic variants of the problem text. The approach involves solving each of the variant problems and electing the predicted expression with the majority of the votes. We use DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) as the encoder to leverage its rich textual representations and enhanced mask decoder to construct the solution expressions. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging dataset, Psmall{ARAMAWPS}, consisting of paraphrased, adversarial, and inverse variants of selectively sampled MWPs from the benchmark Msmall{AWPS} dataset. We extensively experiment on this dataset along with other benchmark datasets using some baseline MWP solver models. We show that training on linguistic variants of problem statements and voting on candidate predictions improve the mathematical reasoning and robustness of the model. We make our code and data publicly available.

I am a Strange Dataset: Metalinguistic Tests for Language Models

Statements involving metalinguistic self-reference ("This paper has six sections.") are prevalent in many domains. Can large language models (LLMs) handle such language? In this paper, we present "I am a Strange Dataset", a new dataset for addressing this question. There are two subtasks: generation and verification. In generation, models continue statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is" (where a correct continuation is "is"). In verification, models judge the truth of statements like "The penultimate word in this sentence is sentence." (false). We also provide minimally different metalinguistic non-self-reference examples to complement the main dataset by probing for whether models can handle metalinguistic language at all. The dataset is hand-crafted by experts and validated by non-expert annotators. We test a variety of open-source LLMs (7B to 70B parameters) as well as closed-source LLMs through APIs. All models perform close to chance across both subtasks and even on the non-self-referential metalinguistic control data, though we find some steady improvement with model scale. GPT 4 is the only model to consistently do significantly better than chance, and it is still only in the 60% range, while our untrained human annotators score well in the 89-93% range. The dataset and evaluation toolkit are available at https://github.com/TristanThrush/i-am-a-strange-dataset.

ExecRepoBench: Multi-level Executable Code Completion Evaluation

Code completion has become an essential tool for daily software development. Existing evaluation benchmarks often employ static methods that do not fully capture the dynamic nature of real-world coding environments and face significant challenges, including limited context length, reliance on superficial evaluation metrics, and potential overfitting to training datasets. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for enhancing code completion in software development through the creation of a repository-level benchmark ExecRepoBench and the instruction corpora Repo-Instruct, aim at improving the functionality of open-source large language models (LLMs) in real-world coding scenarios that involve complex interdependencies across multiple files. ExecRepoBench includes 1.2K samples from active Python repositories. Plus, we present a multi-level grammar-based completion methodology conditioned on the abstract syntax tree to mask code fragments at various logical units (e.g. statements, expressions, and functions). Then, we fine-tune the open-source LLM with 7B parameters on Repo-Instruct to produce a strong code completion baseline model Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C based on the open-source model. Qwen2.5-Coder-Instruct-C is rigorously evaluated against existing benchmarks, including MultiPL-E and ExecRepoBench, which consistently outperforms prior baselines across all programming languages. The deployment of can be used as a high-performance, local service for programming development\url{https://execrepobench.github.io/}.

JavaBench: A Benchmark of Object-Oriented Code Generation for Evaluating Large Language Models

Code generation benchmarks such as HumanEval are widely adopted to evaluate LLMs' capabilities. However, after consolidating the latest 24 benchmarks, we noticed three significant imbalances. First, imbalanced programming language. 95.8% of benchmarks involve Python, while only 5 benchmarks involve Java. Second, imbalanced code granularity. Function-/statement-level benchmarks account for over 83.3% of benchmarks. Only a mere handful extends to class-/project-levels, and all are limited to Python. Third, lacking advanced features. Existing benchmarks primarily assess basic coding skills, while overlooking advanced Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) features (i.e., encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism). To fill these gaps, we propose JavaBench, a project-level Java benchmark that exercises OOP features. It comprises four Java projects with 389 methods in 106 Java classes. The test coverage is up to 92%, and JavaBench is attested by 282 undergraduate students, reaching a 90.93/100 average score (i.e., pass rate against the test suite), ensuring the quality of documentation, code skeleton, and tests. To better evaluate LLM's capability against JavaBench, we introduce a systematic evaluation design covering three context settings and five synthesis strategies at two granularities using three hierarchical metrics. Our extensive experiment yields several interesting findings. First, we noticed that regarding project-level Java programming, LLMs are far behind undergraduate students (no project can be correctly completed by any studied LLMs, and at most 41.17% Pass@5 in a more relaxed evaluation). Second, using method signature as prompt context may strike an ideal balance for project-level code generation. JavaBench is publicly available at https://github.com/java-bench/JavaBench.

Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models

Recent statements about the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are usually supported by evaluating on open-access benchmarks. Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs' training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data, leading to LLMs being more susceptible to data contamination. However, due to the opacity of training data, the black-box access of models, and the rapid growth of synthetic training data, detecting and mitigating data contamination for LLMs faces significant challenges. In this paper, we propose CDD, which stands for Contamination Detection via output Distribution for LLMs. CDD necessitates only the sampled texts to detect data contamination, by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution. To mitigate the impact of data contamination in evaluation, we also present TED: Trustworthy Evaluation via output Distribution, based on the correction of LLM's output distribution. To facilitate this study, we introduce two benchmarks, i.e., DetCon and ComiEval, for data contamination detection and contamination mitigation evaluation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that CDD achieves the average relative improvements of 21.8\%-30.2\% over other contamination detection approaches in terms of Accuracy, F1 Score, and AUC metrics, and can effectively detect implicit contamination. TED substantially mitigates performance improvements up to 66.9\% attributed to data contamination across various contamination setups. In real-world applications, we reveal that ChatGPT exhibits a high potential to suffer from data contamination on HumanEval benchmark.

Higher Layers Need More LoRA Experts

Parameter-efficient tuning (PEFT) techniques like low-rank adaptation (LoRA) offer training efficiency on Large Language Models, but their impact on model performance remains limited. Recent efforts integrate LoRA and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to improve the performance of PEFT methods. Despite promising results, research on improving the efficiency of LoRA with MoE is still in its early stages. Recent studies have shown that experts in the MoE architecture have different strengths and also exhibit some redundancy. Does this statement also apply to parameter-efficient MoE? In this paper, we introduce a novel parameter-efficient MoE method, \textbf{MoE-LoRA with Layer-wise Expert Allocation (MoLA)} for Transformer-based models, where each model layer has the flexibility to employ a varying number of LoRA experts. We investigate several architectures with varying layer-wise expert configurations. Experiments on six well-known NLP and commonsense QA benchmarks demonstrate that MoLA achieves equal or superior performance compared to all baselines. We find that allocating more LoRA experts to higher layers further enhances the effectiveness of models with a certain number of experts in total. With much fewer parameters, this allocation strategy outperforms the setting with the same number of experts in every layer. This work can be widely used as a plug-and-play parameter-efficient tuning approach for various applications. The code is available at https://github.com/GCYZSL/MoLA.

CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization

Translating natural language mathematical statements into formal, executable code is a fundamental challenge in automated theorem proving. While prior work has focused on generation and compilation success, little attention has been paid to the critic phase-the evaluation of whether generated formalizations truly capture the semantic intent of the original problem. In this paper, we introduce CriticLean, a novel critic-guided reinforcement learning framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component. Specifically, first, we propose the CriticLeanGPT, trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to rigorously assess the semantic fidelity of Lean 4 formalizations. Then, we introduce CriticLeanBench, a benchmark designed to measure models' ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations, and demonstrate that our trained CriticLeanGPT models can significantly outperform strong open- and closed-source baselines. Building on the CriticLean framework, we construct FineLeanCorpus, a dataset comprising over 285K problems that exhibits rich domain diversity, broad difficulty coverage, and high correctness based on human evaluation. Overall, our findings highlight that optimizing the critic phase is essential for producing reliable formalizations, and we hope our CriticLean will provide valuable insights for future advances in formal mathematical reasoning.

Contextual API Completion for Unseen Repositories Using LLMs

Large language models have made substantial progress in addressing diverse code-related tasks. However, their adoption is hindered by inconsistencies in generating output due to the lack of real-world, domain-specific information, such as for intra-repository API calls for unseen software projects. We introduce a novel technique to mitigate hallucinations by leveraging global and local contextual information within a code repository for API completion tasks. Our approach is tailored to refine code completion tasks, with a focus on optimizing local API completions. We examine relevant import statements during API completion to derive insights into local APIs, drawing from their method signatures. For API token completion, we analyze the inline variables and correlate them with the appropriate imported modules, thereby allowing our approach to rank the most contextually relevant suggestions from the available local APIs. Further, for conversational API completion, we gather APIs that are most relevant to the developer query with a retrieval-based search across the project. We employ our tool, LANCE, within the framework of our proposed benchmark, APIEval, encompassing two different programming languages. Our evaluation yields an average accuracy of 82.6% for API token completion and 76.9% for conversational API completion tasks. On average, LANCE surpasses Copilot by 143% and 142% for API token completion and conversational API completion, respectively. The implications of our findings are substantial for developers, suggesting that our lightweight context analysis can be applied to multilingual environments without language-specific training or fine-tuning, allowing for efficient implementation with minimal examples and effort.

SOUL: Towards Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language

Sentiment analysis is a well-established natural language processing task, with sentiment polarity classification being one of its most popular and representative tasks. However, despite the success of pre-trained language models in this area, they often fall short of capturing the broader complexities of sentiment analysis. To address this issue, we propose a new task called Sentiment and Opinion Understanding of Language (SOUL). SOUL aims to evaluate sentiment understanding through two subtasks: Review Comprehension (RC) and Justification Generation (JG). RC seeks to validate statements that focus on subjective information based on a review text, while JG requires models to provide explanations for their sentiment predictions. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we annotate a new dataset comprising 15,028 statements from 3,638 reviews. Experimental results indicate that SOUL is a challenging task for both small and large language models, with a performance gap of up to 27% when compared to human performance. Furthermore, evaluations conducted with both human experts and GPT-4 highlight the limitations of the small language model in generating reasoning-based justifications. These findings underscore the challenging nature of the SOUL task for existing models, emphasizing the need for further advancements in sentiment analysis to address its complexities. The new dataset and code are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/SOUL.

The COVID-19 Infodemic: Can the Crowd Judge Recent Misinformation Objectively?

Misinformation is an ever increasing problem that is difficult to solve for the research community and has a negative impact on the society at large. Very recently, the problem has been addressed with a crowdsourcing-based approach to scale up labeling efforts: to assess the truthfulness of a statement, instead of relying on a few experts, a crowd of (non-expert) judges is exploited. We follow the same approach to study whether crowdsourcing is an effective and reliable method to assess statements truthfulness during a pandemic. We specifically target statements related to the COVID-19 health emergency, that is still ongoing at the time of the study and has arguably caused an increase of the amount of misinformation that is spreading online (a phenomenon for which the term "infodemic" has been used). By doing so, we are able to address (mis)information that is both related to a sensitive and personal issue like health and very recent as compared to when the judgment is done: two issues that have not been analyzed in related work. In our experiment, crowd workers are asked to assess the truthfulness of statements, as well as to provide evidence for the assessments as a URL and a text justification. Besides showing that the crowd is able to accurately judge the truthfulness of the statements, we also report results on many different aspects, including: agreement among workers, the effect of different aggregation functions, of scales transformations, and of workers background / bias. We also analyze workers behavior, in terms of queries submitted, URLs found / selected, text justifications, and other behavioral data like clicks and mouse actions collected by means of an ad hoc logger.

TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification

The problem of verifying whether a textual hypothesis holds based on the given evidence, also known as fact verification, plays an important role in the study of natural language understanding and semantic representation. However, existing studies are mainly restricted to dealing with unstructured evidence (e.g., natural language sentences and documents, news, etc), while verification under structured evidence, such as tables, graphs, and databases, remains under-explored. This paper specifically aims to study the fact verification given semi-structured data as evidence. To this end, we construct a large-scale dataset called TabFact with 16k Wikipedia tables as the evidence for 118k human-annotated natural language statements, which are labeled as either ENTAILED or REFUTED. TabFact is challenging since it involves both soft linguistic reasoning and hard symbolic reasoning. To address these reasoning challenges, we design two different models: Table-BERT and Latent Program Algorithm (LPA). Table-BERT leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language model to encode the linearized tables and statements into continuous vectors for verification. LPA parses statements into programs and executes them against the tables to obtain the returned binary value for verification. Both methods achieve similar accuracy but still lag far behind human performance. We also perform a comprehensive analysis to demonstrate great future opportunities. The data and code of the dataset are provided in https://github.com/wenhuchen/Table-Fact-Checking.

An Empirical Evaluation of Using Large Language Models for Automated Unit Test Generation

Unit tests play a key role in ensuring the correctness of software. However, manually creating unit tests is a laborious task, motivating the need for automation. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been applied to this problem, utilizing additional training or few-shot learning on examples of existing tests. This paper presents a large-scale empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of LLMs for automated unit test generation without additional training or manual effort, providing the LLM with the signature and implementation of the function under test, along with usage examples extracted from documentation. We also attempt to repair failed generated tests by re-prompting the model with the failing test and error message. We implement our approach in TestPilot, a test generation tool for JavaScript that automatically generates unit tests for all API functions in an npm package. We evaluate TestPilot using OpenAI's gpt3.5-turbo LLM on 25 npm packages with a total of 1,684 API functions. The generated tests achieve a median statement coverage of 70.2% and branch coverage of 52.8%, significantly improving on Nessie, a recent feedback-directed JavaScript test generation technique, which achieves only 51.3% statement coverage and 25.6% branch coverage. We also find that 92.8% of TestPilot's generated tests have no more than 50% similarity with existing tests (as measured by normalized edit distance), with none of them being exact copies. Finally, we run TestPilot with two additional LLMs, OpenAI's older code-cushman-002 LLM and the open LLM StarCoder. Overall, we observed similar results with the former (68.2% median statement coverage), and somewhat worse results with the latter (54.0% median statement coverage), suggesting that the effectiveness of the approach is influenced by the size and training set of the LLM, but does not fundamentally depend on the specific model.

Quantifying and Optimizing Global Faithfulness in Persona-driven Role-playing

Persona-driven role-playing (PRP) aims to build AI characters that can respond to user queries by faithfully sticking with all persona statements. Unfortunately, existing faithfulness criteria for PRP are limited to coarse-grained LLM-based scoring without a clear definition or formulation. This paper presents a pioneering exploration to quantify PRP faithfulness as a fine-grained and explainable criterion, which also serves as a reliable reference for optimization. Our criterion first discriminates persona statements into active and passive constraints by identifying the query-statement relevance. Then, we incorporate all constraints following the principle that the AI character's response should be (a) entailed by active (relevant) constraints and (b) not contradicted by passive (irrelevant) constraints. We translate this principle mathematically into a novel Active-Passive-Constraint (APC) score, a constraint-wise sum of natural language inference (NLI) scores weighted by relevance scores. In practice, we build the APC scoring system by symbolically distilling small discriminators from GPT-4 for efficiency. We validate the quality of the APC score against human evaluation based on example personas with tens of statements, and the results show a high correlation. We further leverage it as a reward system in direct preference optimization (DPO) for better AI characters. Our experiments offer a fine-grained and explainable comparison between existing PRP techniques, revealing their advantages and limitations. We further find APC-based DPO to be one of the most competitive techniques for sticking with all constraints and can be well incorporated with other techniques. We then extend the scale of the experiments to real persons with hundreds of statements and reach a consistent conclusion.

MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data

Recent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD.

Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Large Language Models for Deductive Reasoning

Exploiting large language models (LLMs) to tackle deductive reasoning has garnered growing attention. It still remains highly challenging to achieve satisfactory results in complex deductive problems, characterized by plenty of premises (i.e., facts or rules) entailing intricate relationships among entities and requiring multi-hop reasoning. One intuitive solution is to decompose the original task into smaller sub-tasks, and then chain the multiple casual reasoning steps together in a forward (e.g., Selection-Inference) or backward (e.g., LAMBADA) direction. However, these techniques inevitably necessitate a large number of overall stages, leading to computationally expensive operations and a higher possibility of making misleading steps. In addition to stage-by-stage decomposition, we draw inspiration from another aspect of human problem-solving. Humans tend to distill the most relevant information and organize their thoughts systematically (e.g., creating mind maps), which assists them in answering questions or drawing conclusions precisely and quickly. In light of this, we propose a novel reasoning approach named Concise and Organized Perception (COP). COP carefully analyzes the given statements to efficiently identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy. It then prompts the LLMs in a more organized form that adapts to the model's inference process. By perceiving concise and organized proofs, the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs can be better elicited, and the risk of acquiring errors caused by excessive reasoning stages is mitigated. Furthermore, our approach can be combined with the aforementioned ones to further boost their performance. Extensive experimental results on three popular deductive benchmarks (i.e., ProofWriter, PrOntoQA and PrOntoQA-OOD) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search

Since large language models have approached human-level performance on many tasks, it has become increasingly harder for researchers to find tasks that are still challenging to the models. Failure cases usually come from the long-tail distribution - data that an oracle language model could assign a probability on the lower end of its distribution. Current methodology such as prompt engineering or crowdsourcing are insufficient for creating long-tail examples because humans are constrained by cognitive bias. We propose a Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) framework for systematically generating long-tail knowledge statements. Grounded by a symbolic rule, we search for long-tail values for each variable of the rule by first prompting a LLM, then verifying the correctness of the values with a critic, and lastly pushing for the long-tail distribution with a reranker. With this framework we construct a dataset, Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), consisting of 200 symbolic rules and 50K knowledge statements spanning across four domains. Human annotations find that 84% of the statements in LINT are factually correct. In contrast, ChatGPT and GPT4 struggle with directly generating long-tail statements under the guidance of logic rules, each only getting 56% and 78% of their statements correct. Moreover, their "long-tail" generations in fact fall into the higher likelihood range, and thus are not really long-tail. Our findings suggest that LINK is effective for generating data in the long-tail distribution while enforcing quality. LINT can be useful for systematically evaluating LLMs' capabilities in the long-tail distribution. We challenge the models with a simple entailment classification task using samples from LINT. We find that ChatGPT and GPT4's capability in identifying incorrect knowledge drop by ~3% in the long-tail distribution compared to head distribution.

The political ideology of conversational AI: Converging evidence on ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian orientation

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) disrupts how humans interact with technology. Recently, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art dialogue model that can converse with its human counterparts with unprecedented capabilities. ChatGPT has witnessed tremendous attention from the media, academia, industry, and the general public, attracting more than a million users within days of its release. However, its explosive adoption for information search and as an automated decision aid underscores the importance to understand its limitations and biases. This paper focuses on one of democratic society's most important decision-making processes: political elections. Prompting ChatGPT with 630 political statements from two leading voting advice applications and the nation-agnostic political compass test in three pre-registered experiments, we uncover ChatGPT's pro-environmental, left-libertarian ideology. For example, ChatGPT would impose taxes on flights, restrict rent increases, and legalize abortion. In the 2021 elections, it would have voted most likely for the Greens both in Germany (B\"undnis 90/Die Gr\"unen) and in the Netherlands (GroenLinks). Our findings are robust when negating the prompts, reversing the order of the statements, varying prompt formality, and across languages (English, German, Dutch, and Spanish). We conclude by discussing the implications of politically biased conversational AI on society.

CREAK: A Dataset for Commonsense Reasoning over Entity Knowledge

Most benchmark datasets targeting commonsense reasoning focus on everyday scenarios: physical knowledge like knowing that you could fill a cup under a waterfall [Talmor et al., 2019], social knowledge like bumping into someone is awkward [Sap et al., 2019], and other generic situations. However, there is a rich space of commonsense inferences anchored to knowledge about specific entities: for example, deciding the truthfulness of a claim "Harry Potter can teach classes on how to fly on a broomstick." Can models learn to combine entity knowledge with commonsense reasoning in this fashion? We introduce CREAK, a testbed for commonsense reasoning about entity knowledge, bridging fact-checking about entities (Harry Potter is a wizard and is skilled at riding a broomstick) with commonsense inferences (if you're good at a skill you can teach others how to do it). Our dataset consists of 13k human-authored English claims about entities that are either true or false, in addition to a small contrast set. Crowdworkers can easily come up with these statements and human performance on the dataset is high (high 90s); we argue that models should be able to blend entity knowledge and commonsense reasoning to do well here. In our experiments, we focus on the closed-book setting and observe that a baseline model finetuned on existing fact verification benchmark struggles on CREAK. Training a model on CREAK improves accuracy by a substantial margin, but still falls short of human performance. Our benchmark provides a unique probe into natural language understanding models, testing both its ability to retrieve facts (e.g., who teaches at the University of Chicago?) and unstated commonsense knowledge (e.g., butlers do not yell at guests).

Neural Theorem Proving: Generating and Structuring Proofs for Formal Verification

Formally verifying properties of software code has been a highly desirable task, especially with the emergence of LLM-generated code. In the same vein, they provide an interesting avenue for the exploration of formal verification and mechanistic interpretability. Since the introduction of code-specific models, despite their successes in generating code in Lean4 and Isabelle, the task of generalized theorem proving still remains far from being fully solved and will be a benchmark for reasoning capability in LLMs. In this work, we introduce a framework that generates whole proofs in a formal language to be used within systems that utilize the power of built-in tactics and off-the-shelf automated theorem provers. Our framework includes 3 components: generating natural language statements of the code to be verified, an LLM that generates formal proofs for the given statement, and a module employing heuristics for building the final proof. To train the LLM, we employ a 2-stage fine-tuning process, where we first use SFT-based training to enable the model to generate syntactically correct Isabelle code and then RL-based training that encourages the model to generate proofs verified by a theorem prover. We validate our framework using the miniF2F-test benchmark and the Isabelle proof assistant and design a use case to verify the correctness of the AWS S3 bucket access policy code. We also curate a dataset based on the FVEL\textnormal{ER} dataset for future training tasks.

Dated Data: Tracing Knowledge Cutoffs in Large Language Models

Released Large Language Models (LLMs) are often paired with a claimed knowledge cutoff date, or the dates at which training data was gathered. Such information is crucial for applications where the LLM must provide up to date information. However, this statement only scratches the surface: do all resources in the training data share the same knowledge cutoff date? Does the model's demonstrated knowledge for these subsets closely align to their cutoff dates? In this work, we define the notion of an effective cutoff. This is distinct from the LLM designer reported cutoff and applies separately to sub-resources and topics. We propose a simple approach to estimate effective cutoffs on the resource-level temporal alignment of an LLM by probing across versions of the data. Using this analysis, we find that effective cutoffs often differ from reported cutoffs. To understand the root cause of this observation, we conduct a direct large-scale analysis on open pre-training datasets. Our analysis reveals two reasons for these inconsistencies: (1) temporal biases of CommonCrawl data due to non-trivial amounts of old data in new dumps and (2) complications in LLM deduplication schemes involving semantic duplicates and lexical near-duplicates. Overall, our results show that knowledge cutoffs are not as simple as they have seemed and that care must be taken both by LLM dataset curators as well as practitioners who seek to use information from these models.

The Edinburgh International Accents of English Corpus: Towards the Democratization of English ASR

English is the most widely spoken language in the world, used daily by millions of people as a first or second language in many different contexts. As a result, there are many varieties of English. Although the great many advances in English automatic speech recognition (ASR) over the past decades, results are usually reported based on test datasets which fail to represent the diversity of English as spoken today around the globe. We present the first release of The Edinburgh International Accents of English Corpus (EdAcc). This dataset attempts to better represent the wide diversity of English, encompassing almost 40 hours of dyadic video call conversations between friends. Unlike other datasets, EdAcc includes a wide range of first and second-language varieties of English and a linguistic background profile of each speaker. Results on latest public, and commercial models show that EdAcc highlights shortcomings of current English ASR models. The best performing model, trained on 680 thousand hours of transcribed data, obtains an average of 19.7% word error rate (WER) -- in contrast to the 2.7% WER obtained when evaluated on US English clean read speech. Across all models, we observe a drop in performance on Indian, Jamaican, and Nigerian English speakers. Recordings, linguistic backgrounds, data statement, and evaluation scripts are released on our website (https://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/edacc/) under CC-BY-SA license.

DeepSeek-Prover: Advancing Theorem Proving in LLMs through Large-Scale Synthetic Data

Proof assistants like Lean have revolutionized mathematical proof verification, ensuring high accuracy and reliability. Although large language models (LLMs) show promise in mathematical reasoning, their advancement in formal theorem proving is hindered by a lack of training data. To address this issue, we introduce an approach to generate extensive Lean 4 proof data derived from high-school and undergraduate-level mathematical competition problems. This approach involves translating natural language problems into formal statements, filtering out low-quality statements, and generating proofs to create synthetic data. After fine-tuning the DeepSeekMath 7B model on this synthetic dataset, which comprises 8 million formal statements with proofs, our model achieved whole-proof generation accuracies of 46.3% with 64 samples and 52% cumulatively on the Lean 4 miniF2F test, surpassing the baseline GPT-4 at 23.0% with 64 samples and a tree search reinforcement learning method at 41.0%. Additionally, our model successfully proved 5 out of 148 problems in the Lean 4 Formalized International Mathematical Olympiad (FIMO) benchmark, while GPT-4 failed to prove any. These results demonstrate the potential of leveraging large-scale synthetic data to enhance theorem-proving capabilities in LLMs. Both the synthetic dataset and the model will be made available to facilitate further research in this promising field.

FormalMATH: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models

Formal mathematical reasoning remains a critical challenge for artificial intelligence, hindered by limitations of existing benchmarks in scope and scale. To address this, we present FormalMATH, a large-scale Lean4 benchmark comprising 5,560 formally verified problems spanning from high-school Olympiad challenges to undergraduate-level theorems across diverse domains (e.g., algebra, applied mathematics, calculus, number theory, and discrete mathematics). To mitigate the inefficiency of manual formalization, we introduce a novel human-in-the-loop autoformalization pipeline that integrates: (1) specialized large language models (LLMs) for statement autoformalization, (2) multi-LLM semantic verification, and (3) negation-based disproof filtering strategies using off-the-shelf LLM-based provers. This approach reduces expert annotation costs by retaining 72.09% of statements before manual verification while ensuring fidelity to the original natural-language problems. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based theorem provers reveals significant limitations: even the strongest models achieve only 16.46% success rate under practical sampling budgets, exhibiting pronounced domain bias (e.g., excelling in algebra but failing in calculus) and over-reliance on simplified automation tactics. Notably, we identify a counterintuitive inverse relationship between natural-language solution guidance and proof success in chain-of-thought reasoning scenarios, suggesting that human-written informal reasoning introduces noise rather than clarity in the formal reasoning settings. We believe that FormalMATH provides a robust benchmark for benchmarking formal mathematical reasoning.

One Example Shown, Many Concepts Known! Counterexample-Driven Conceptual Reasoning in Mathematical LLMs

Leveraging mathematical Large Language Models (LLMs) for proof generation is a fundamental topic in LLMs research. We argue that the ability of current LLMs to prove statements largely depends on whether they have encountered the relevant proof process during training. This reliance limits their deeper understanding of mathematical theorems and related concepts. Inspired by the pedagogical method of "proof by counterexamples" commonly used in human mathematics education, our work aims to enhance LLMs' ability to conduct mathematical reasoning and proof through counterexamples. Specifically, we manually create a high-quality, university-level mathematical benchmark, CounterMATH, which requires LLMs to prove mathematical statements by providing counterexamples, thereby assessing their grasp of mathematical concepts. Additionally, we develop a data engineering framework to automatically obtain training data for further model improvement. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate that CounterMATH is challenging, indicating that LLMs, such as OpenAI o1, have insufficient counterexample-driven proof capabilities. Moreover, our exploration into model training reveals that strengthening LLMs' counterexample-driven conceptual reasoning abilities is crucial for improving their overall mathematical capabilities. We believe that our work offers new perspectives on the community of mathematical LLMs.

SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 are capable of generating highly fluent responses to a wide variety of user prompts. However, LLMs are known to hallucinate facts and make non-factual statements which can undermine trust in their output. Existing fact-checking approaches either require access to token-level output probability distribution (which may not be available for systems such as ChatGPT) or external databases that are interfaced via separate, often complex, modules. In this work, we propose "SelfCheckGPT", a simple sampling-based approach that can be used to fact-check black-box models in a zero-resource fashion, i.e. without an external database. SelfCheckGPT leverages the simple idea that if a LLM has knowledge of a given concept, sampled responses are likely to be similar and contain consistent facts. However, for hallucinated facts, stochastically sampled responses are likely to diverge and contradict one another. We investigate this approach by using GPT-3 to generate passages about individuals from the WikiBio dataset, and manually annotate the factuality of the generated passages. We demonstrate that SelfCheckGPT can: i) detect non-factual and factual sentences; and ii) rank passages in terms of factuality. We compare our approach to several existing baselines and show that in sentence hallucination detection, our approach has AUC-PR scores comparable to grey-box methods, while SelfCheckGPT is best at passage factuality assessment.

HyperFormer: Enhancing Entity and Relation Interaction for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graph Completion

Hyper-relational knowledge graphs (HKGs) extend standard knowledge graphs by associating attribute-value qualifiers to triples, which effectively represent additional fine-grained information about its associated triple. Hyper-relational knowledge graph completion (HKGC) aims at inferring unknown triples while considering its qualifiers. Most existing approaches to HKGC exploit a global-level graph structure to encode hyper-relational knowledge into the graph convolution message passing process. However, the addition of multi-hop information might bring noise into the triple prediction process. To address this problem, we propose HyperFormer, a model that considers local-level sequential information, which encodes the content of the entities, relations and qualifiers of a triple. More precisely, HyperFormer is composed of three different modules: an entity neighbor aggregator module allowing to integrate the information of the neighbors of an entity to capture different perspectives of it; a relation qualifier aggregator module to integrate hyper-relational knowledge into the corresponding relation to refine the representation of relational content; a convolution-based bidirectional interaction module based on a convolutional operation, capturing pairwise bidirectional interactions of entity-relation, entity-qualifier, and relation-qualifier. realize the depth perception of the content related to the current statement. Furthermore, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts strategy into the feed-forward layers of HyperFormer to strengthen its representation capabilities while reducing the amount of model parameters and computation. Extensive experiments on three well-known datasets with four different conditions demonstrate HyperFormer's effectiveness. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/zhiweihu1103/HKGC-HyperFormer.

ToxiGen: A Large-Scale Machine-Generated Dataset for Adversarial and Implicit Hate Speech Detection

Toxic language detection systems often falsely flag text that contains minority group mentions as toxic, as those groups are often the targets of online hate. Such over-reliance on spurious correlations also causes systems to struggle with detecting implicitly toxic language. To help mitigate these issues, we create ToxiGen, a new large-scale and machine-generated dataset of 274k toxic and benign statements about 13 minority groups. We develop a demonstration-based prompting framework and an adversarial classifier-in-the-loop decoding method to generate subtly toxic and benign text with a massive pretrained language model. Controlling machine generation in this way allows ToxiGen to cover implicitly toxic text at a larger scale, and about more demographic groups, than previous resources of human-written text. We conduct a human evaluation on a challenging subset of ToxiGen and find that annotators struggle to distinguish machine-generated text from human-written language. We also find that 94.5% of toxic examples are labeled as hate speech by human annotators. Using three publicly-available datasets, we show that finetuning a toxicity classifier on our data improves its performance on human-written data substantially. We also demonstrate that ToxiGen can be used to fight machine-generated toxicity as finetuning improves the classifier significantly on our evaluation subset. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/ToxiGen.

Socrates or Smartypants: Testing Logic Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models with Logic Programming-based Test Oracles

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in language understanding and reasoning. Evaluating and analyzing their logical reasoning abilities has therefore become essential. However, existing datasets and benchmarks are often limited to overly simplistic, unnatural, or contextually constrained examples. In response to the growing demand, we introduce SmartyPat-Bench, a challenging, naturally expressed, and systematically labeled benchmark derived from real-world high-quality Reddit posts containing subtle logical fallacies. Unlike existing datasets and benchmarks, it provides more detailed annotations of logical fallacies and features more diverse data. To further scale up the study and address the limitations of manual data collection and labeling - such as fallacy-type imbalance and labor-intensive annotation - we introduce SmartyPat, an automated framework powered by logic programming-based oracles. SmartyPat utilizes Prolog rules to systematically generate logically fallacious statements, which are then refined into fluent natural-language sentences by LLMs, ensuring precise fallacy representation. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that SmartyPat produces fallacies comparable in subtlety and quality to human-generated content and significantly outperforms baseline methods. Finally, experiments reveal nuanced insights into LLM capabilities, highlighting that while excessive reasoning steps hinder fallacy detection accuracy, structured reasoning enhances fallacy categorization performance.

Welzijn.AI: Developing Responsible Conversational AI for Elderly Care through Stakeholder Involvement

We present Welzijn.AI as new digital solution for monitoring (mental) well-being in elderly populations, and illustrate how development of systems like Welzijn.AI can align with guidelines on responsible AI development. Three evaluations with different stakeholders were designed to disclose new perspectives on the strengths, weaknesses, design characteristics, and value requirements of Welzijn.AI. Evaluations concerned expert panels and involved patient federations, general practitioners, researchers, and the elderly themselves. Panels concerned interviews, a co-creation session, and feedback on a proof-of-concept implementation. Interview results were summarized in terms of Welzijn.AI's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The co-creation session ranked a variety of value requirements of Welzijn.AI with the Hundred Dollar Method. User evaluation comprised analysing proportions of (dis)agreement on statements targeting Welzijn.AI's design characteristics, and ranking desired social characteristics. Experts in the panel interviews acknowledged Welzijn.AI's potential to combat loneliness and extract patterns from elderly behaviour. The proof-of-concept evaluation complemented the design characteristics most appealing to the elderly to potentially achieve this: empathetic and varying interactions. Stakeholders also link the technology to the implementation context: it could help activate an individual's social network, but support should also be available to empower users. Yet, non-elderly and elderly experts also disclose challenges in properly understanding the application; non-elderly experts also highlight issues concerning privacy. In sum, incorporating all stakeholder perspectives in system development remains challenging. Still, our results benefit researchers, policy makers, and health professionals that aim to improve elderly care with technology.

Herald: A Natural Language Annotated Lean 4 Dataset

Verifiable formal languages like Lean have profoundly impacted mathematical reasoning, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated reasoning. A significant challenge in training LLMs for these formal languages is the lack of parallel datasets that align natural language with formal language proofs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel framework for translating the Mathlib4 corpus (a unified library of mathematics in formal language Lean 4) into natural language. Building upon this, we employ a dual augmentation strategy that combines tactic-based and informal-based approaches, leveraging the Lean-jixia system, a Lean 4 analyzer. We present the results of this pipeline on Mathlib4 as Herald (Hierarchy and Retrieval-based Translated Lean Dataset). We also propose the Herald Translator, which is fine-tuned on Herald. Herald translator achieves a 93.2% accuracy (Pass@128) on formalizing statements in the miniF2F-test and a 22.5% accuracy on our internal graduate-level textbook dataset, outperforming InternLM2-Math-Plus-7B (74.0% and 7.5%) and TheoremLlama (50.1% and 4.0%). Furthermore, we propose a section-level translation framework for real-world applications. As a direct application of Herald translator, we have successfully translated a template section in the Stack project, marking a notable progress in the automatic formalization of graduate-level mathematical literature. Our model, along with the datasets, will be open-sourced to the public soon.

BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL

Existing text-to-SQL benchmarks have largely been constructed from web tables with human-generated question-SQL pairs. LLMs typically show strong results on these benchmarks, leading to a belief that LLMs are effective at text-to-SQL tasks. However, how these results transfer to enterprise settings is unclear because tables in enterprise databases might differ substantially from web tables in structure and content. To contend with this problem, we introduce a new dataset BEAVER, the first enterprise text-to-SQL benchmark sourced from real private enterprise data warehouses. This dataset includes natural language queries and their correct SQL statements, which we collected from actual query logs. We then benchmark off-the-shelf LLMs on this dataset. LLMs perform poorly, even when augmented with standard prompt engineering and RAG techniques. We identify three main reasons for the poor performance: (1) schemas of enterprise tables are more complex than the schemas in public data, resulting in SQL-generation tasks intrinsically harder; (2) business-oriented questions are often more complex, requiring joins over multiple tables, aggregations, and nested queries; (3) public LLMs cannot train on private enterprise data warehouses that are not publicly accessible, and therefore it is difficult for the model to learn to solve (1) and (2). We believe BEAVER will facilitate future research in building text-to-SQL systems that perform better in enterprise settings.

Knowledge Overshadowing Causes Amalgamated Hallucination in Large Language Models

Hallucination is often regarded as a major impediment for using large language models (LLMs), especially for knowledge-intensive tasks. Even when the training corpus consists solely of true statements, language models still generate hallucinations in the form of amalgamations of multiple facts. We coin this phenomenon as ``knowledge overshadowing'': when we query knowledge from a language model with multiple conditions, some conditions overshadow others, leading to hallucinated outputs. This phenomenon partially stems from training data imbalance, which we verify on both pretrained models and fine-tuned models, over a wide range of LM model families and sizes.From a theoretical point of view, knowledge overshadowing can be interpreted as over-generalization of the dominant conditions (patterns). We show that the hallucination rate grows with both the imbalance ratio (between the popular and unpopular condition) and the length of dominant condition description, consistent with our derived generalization bound. Finally, we propose to utilize overshadowing conditions as a signal to catch hallucination before it is produced, along with a training-free self-contrastive decoding method to alleviate hallucination during inference. Our proposed approach showcases up to 82% F1 for hallucination anticipation and 11.2% to 39.4% hallucination control, with different models and datasets.

Discourse-Aware Text Simplification: From Complex Sentences to Linked Propositions

Sentences that present a complex syntax act as a major stumbling block for downstream Natural Language Processing applications whose predictive quality deteriorates with sentence length and complexity. The task of Text Simplification (TS) may remedy this situation. It aims to modify sentences in order to make them easier to process, using a set of rewriting operations, such as reordering, deletion, or splitting. State-of-the-art syntactic TS approaches suffer from two major drawbacks: first, they follow a very conservative approach in that they tend to retain the input rather than transforming it, and second, they ignore the cohesive nature of texts, where context spread across clauses or sentences is needed to infer the true meaning of a statement. To address these problems, we present a discourse-aware TS approach that splits and rephrases complex English sentences within the semantic context in which they occur. Based on a linguistically grounded transformation stage that uses clausal and phrasal disembedding mechanisms, complex sentences are transformed into shorter utterances with a simple canonical structure that can be easily analyzed by downstream applications. With sentence splitting, we thus address a TS task that has hardly been explored so far. Moreover, we introduce the notion of minimality in this context, as we aim to decompose source sentences into a set of self-contained minimal semantic units. To avoid breaking down the input into a disjointed sequence of statements that is difficult to interpret because important contextual information is missing, we incorporate the semantic context between the split propositions in the form of hierarchical structures and semantic relationships. In that way, we generate a semantic hierarchy of minimal propositions that leads to a novel representation of complex assertions that puts a semantic layer on top of the simplified sentences.

DyCL: Dynamic Neural Network Compilation Via Program Rewriting and Graph Optimization

DL compiler's primary function is to translate DNN programs written in high-level DL frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow into portable executables. These executables can then be flexibly executed by the deployed host programs. However, existing DL compilers rely on a tracing mechanism, which involves feeding a runtime input to a neural network program and tracing the program execution paths to generate the computational graph necessary for compilation. Unfortunately, this mechanism falls short when dealing with modern dynamic neural networks (DyNNs) that possess varying computational graphs depending on the inputs. Consequently, conventional DL compilers struggle to accurately compile DyNNs into executable code. To address this limitation, we propose \tool, a general approach that enables any existing DL compiler to successfully compile DyNNs. \tool tackles the dynamic nature of DyNNs by introducing a compilation mechanism that redistributes the control and data flow of the original DNN programs during the compilation process. Specifically, \tool develops program analysis and program transformation techniques to convert a dynamic neural network into multiple sub-neural networks. Each sub-neural network is devoid of conditional statements and is compiled independently. Furthermore, \tool synthesizes a host module that models the control flow of the DyNNs and facilitates the invocation of the sub-neural networks. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of \tool, achieving a 100\% success rate in compiling all dynamic neural networks. Moreover, the compiled executables generated by \tool exhibit significantly improved performance, running between 1.12times and 20.21times faster than the original DyNNs executed on general-purpose DL frameworks.

Can the Crowd Judge Truthfulness? A Longitudinal Study on Recent Misinformation about COVID-19

Recently, the misinformation problem has been addressed with a crowdsourcing-based approach: to assess the truthfulness of a statement, instead of relying on a few experts, a crowd of non-expert is exploited. We study whether crowdsourcing is an effective and reliable method to assess truthfulness during a pandemic, targeting statements related to COVID-19, thus addressing (mis)information that is both related to a sensitive and personal issue and very recent as compared to when the judgment is done. In our experiments, crowd workers are asked to assess the truthfulness of statements, and to provide evidence for the assessments. Besides showing that the crowd is able to accurately judge the truthfulness of the statements, we report results on workers behavior, agreement among workers, effect of aggregation functions, of scales transformations, and of workers background and bias. We perform a longitudinal study by re-launching the task multiple times with both novice and experienced workers, deriving important insights on how the behavior and quality change over time. Our results show that: workers are able to detect and objectively categorize online (mis)information related to COVID-19; both crowdsourced and expert judgments can be transformed and aggregated to improve quality; worker background and other signals (e.g., source of information, behavior) impact the quality of the data. The longitudinal study demonstrates that the time-span has a major effect on the quality of the judgments, for both novice and experienced workers. Finally, we provide an extensive failure analysis of the statements misjudged by the crowd-workers.

Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI

Large language models (LLMs) are often praised for exhibiting near-human performance on a wide range of tasks and valued for their ability to hold a general conversation. The rise of agentic AI systems is, however, ushering in a mass of applications in which language models perform a small number of specialized tasks repetitively and with little variation. Here we lay out the position that small language models (SLMs) are sufficiently powerful, inherently more suitable, and necessarily more economical for many invocations in agentic systems, and are therefore the future of agentic AI. Our argumentation is grounded in the current level of capabilities exhibited by SLMs, the common architectures of agentic systems, and the economy of LM deployment. We further argue that in situations where general-purpose conversational abilities are essential, heterogeneous agentic systems (i.e., agents invoking multiple different models) are the natural choice. We discuss the potential barriers for the adoption of SLMs in agentic systems and outline a general LLM-to-SLM agent conversion algorithm. Our position, formulated as a value statement, highlights the significance of the operational and economic impact even a partial shift from LLMs to SLMs is to have on the AI agent industry. We aim to stimulate the discussion on the effective use of AI resources and hope to advance the efforts to lower the costs of AI of the present day. Calling for both contributions to and critique of our position, we commit to publishing all such correspondence at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/lpr/slm-agents.

SWE-bench Multimodal: Do AI Systems Generalize to Visual Software Domains?

Autonomous systems for software engineering are now capable of fixing bugs and developing features. These systems are commonly evaluated on SWE-bench (Jimenez et al., 2024a), which assesses their ability to solve software issues from GitHub repositories. However, SWE-bench uses only Python repositories, with problem statements presented predominantly as text and lacking visual elements such as images. This limited coverage motivates our inquiry into how existing systems might perform on unrepresented software engineering domains (e.g., front-end, game development, DevOps), which use different programming languages and paradigms. Therefore, we propose SWE-bench Multimodal (SWE-bench M), to evaluate systems on their ability to fix bugs in visual, user-facing JavaScript software. SWE-bench M features 617 task instances collected from 17 JavaScript libraries used for web interface design, diagramming, data visualization, syntax highlighting, and interactive mapping. Each SWE-bench M task instance contains at least one image in its problem statement or unit tests. Our analysis finds that top-performing SWE-bench systems struggle with SWE-bench M, revealing limitations in visual problem-solving and cross-language generalization. Lastly, we show that SWE-agent's flexible language-agnostic features enable it to substantially outperform alternatives on SWE-bench M, resolving 12% of task instances compared to 6% for the next best system.

Process-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation

Existing reinforcement learning strategies based on outcome supervision have proven effective in enhancing the performance of large language models(LLMs) for code generation. While reinforcement learning based on process supervision has shown great promise in handling multi-step reasoning tasks, its effectiveness in code generation remains largely underexplored and underjustified. The primary obstacle stems from the resource-intensive nature of constructing high-quality process-supervised data, which demands substantial human expertise and computational resources. In response to this challenge, we propose a "statement mutation/refactoring-compile and execution verification" strategy: mutating and refactoring code line-by-line through a teacher model, and utilizing compiler execution results to automatically label each line, resulting in line-by-line process-supervised data, which is pivotal for training a process-supervised reward model. The trained reward model is then integrated into the PRLCoder framework, followed by experimental validation on several benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that process-supervised reinforcement learning significantly surpasses methods relying solely on outcome supervision. Notably, in tackling complex code generation tasks, process-supervised reinforcement learning shows a clear advantage, ensuring both the integrity of the code generation process and the correctness of the generation results.

Optimizing Multilingual Text-To-Speech with Accents & Emotions

State-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) systems realize high naturalness in monolingual environments, synthesizing speech with correct multilingual accents (especially for Indic languages) and context-relevant emotions still poses difficulty owing to cultural nuance discrepancies in current frameworks. This paper introduces a new TTS architecture integrating accent along with preserving transliteration with multi-scale emotion modelling, in particularly tuned for Hindi and Indian English accent. Our approach extends the Parler-TTS model by integrating A language-specific phoneme alignment hybrid encoder-decoder architecture, and culture-sensitive emotion embedding layers trained on native speaker corpora, as well as incorporating a dynamic accent code switching with residual vector quantization. Quantitative tests demonstrate 23.7% improvement in accent accuracy (Word Error Rate reduction from 15.4% to 11.8%) and 85.3% emotion recognition accuracy from native listeners, surpassing METTS and VECL-TTS baselines. The novelty of the system is that it can mix code in real time - generating statements such as "Namaste, let's talk about <Hindi phrase>" with uninterrupted accent shifts while preserving emotional consistency. Subjective evaluation with 200 users reported a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.2/5 for cultural correctness, much better than existing multilingual systems (p<0.01). This research makes cross-lingual synthesis more feasible by showcasing scalable accent-emotion disentanglement, with direct application in South Asian EdTech and accessibility software.

CodeBERTScore: Evaluating Code Generation with Pretrained Models of Code

Since the rise of neural models of code that can generate long expressions and statements rather than a single next-token, one of the major problems has been reliably evaluating their generated output. In this paper, we propose CodeBERTScore: an automatic evaluation metric for code generation, which builds on BERTScore (Zhang et al., 2020). Instead of measuring exact token matching as BLEU, CodeBERTScore computes a soft similarity score between each token in the generated code and in the reference code, using the contextual encodings of large pretrained models. Further, instead of encoding only the generated tokens as in BERTScore, CodeBERTScore also encodes the programmatic context surrounding the generated code. We perform an extensive evaluation of CodeBERTScore across four programming languages. We find that CodeBERTScore achieves a higher correlation with human preference and with functional correctness than all existing metrics. That is, generated code that receives a higher score by CodeBERTScore is more likely to be preferred by humans, as well as to function correctly when executed. Finally, while CodeBERTScore can be used with a multilingual CodeBERT as its base model, we release five language-specific pretrained models to use with our publicly available code at https://github.com/neulab/code-bert-score . Our language-specific models have been downloaded more than 25,000 times from the Huggingface Hub.

Documenting Ethical Considerations in Open Source AI Models

Background: The development of AI-enabled software heavily depends on AI model documentation, such as model cards, due to different domain expertise between software engineers and model developers. From an ethical standpoint, AI model documentation conveys critical information on ethical considerations along with mitigation strategies for downstream developers to ensure the delivery of ethically compliant software. However, knowledge on such documentation practice remains scarce. Aims: The objective of our study is to investigate how developers document ethical aspects of open source AI models in practice, aiming at providing recommendations for future documentation endeavours. Method: We selected three sources of documentation on GitHub and Hugging Face, and developed a keyword set to identify ethics-related documents systematically. After filtering an initial set of 2,347 documents, we identified 265 relevant ones and performed thematic analysis to derive the themes of ethical considerations. Results: Six themes emerge, with the three largest ones being model behavioural risks, model use cases, and model risk mitigation. Conclusions: Our findings reveal that open source AI model documentation focuses on articulating ethical problem statements and use case restrictions. We further provide suggestions to various stakeholders for improving documentation practice regarding ethical considerations.

Cause and Effect: Can Large Language Models Truly Understand Causality?

With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), it has become crucial to understand their capabilities and limitations in deciphering and explaining the complex web of causal relationships that language entails. Current methods use either explicit or implicit causal reasoning, yet there is a strong need for a unified approach combining both to tackle a wide array of causal relationships more effectively. This research proposes a novel architecture called Context Aware Reasoning Enhancement with Counterfactual Analysis(CARE CA) framework to enhance causal reasoning and explainability. The proposed framework incorporates an explicit causal detection module with ConceptNet and counterfactual statements, as well as implicit causal detection through LLMs. Our framework goes one step further with a layer of counterfactual explanations to accentuate LLMs understanding of causality. The knowledge from ConceptNet enhances the performance of multiple causal reasoning tasks such as causal discovery, causal identification and counterfactual reasoning. The counterfactual sentences add explicit knowledge of the not caused by scenarios. By combining these powerful modules, our model aims to provide a deeper understanding of causal relationships, enabling enhanced interpretability. Evaluation of benchmark datasets shows improved performance across all metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores. We also introduce CausalNet, a new dataset accompanied by our code, to facilitate further research in this domain.

The Many Dimensions of Truthfulness: Crowdsourcing Misinformation Assessments on a Multidimensional Scale

Recent work has demonstrated the viability of using crowdsourcing as a tool for evaluating the truthfulness of public statements. Under certain conditions such as: (1) having a balanced set of workers with different backgrounds and cognitive abilities; (2) using an adequate set of mechanisms to control the quality of the collected data; and (3) using a coarse grained assessment scale, the crowd can provide reliable identification of fake news. However, fake news are a subtle matter: statements can be just biased ("cherrypicked"), imprecise, wrong, etc. and the unidimensional truth scale used in existing work cannot account for such differences. In this paper we propose a multidimensional notion of truthfulness and we ask the crowd workers to assess seven different dimensions of truthfulness selected based on existing literature: Correctness, Neutrality, Comprehensibility, Precision, Completeness, Speaker's Trustworthiness, and Informativeness. We deploy a set of quality control mechanisms to ensure that the thousands of assessments collected on 180 publicly available fact-checked statements distributed over two datasets are of adequate quality, including a custom search engine used by the crowd workers to find web pages supporting their truthfulness assessments. A comprehensive analysis of crowdsourced judgments shows that: (1) the crowdsourced assessments are reliable when compared to an expert-provided gold standard; (2) the proposed dimensions of truthfulness capture independent pieces of information; (3) the crowdsourcing task can be easily learned by the workers; and (4) the resulting assessments provide a useful basis for a more complete estimation of statement truthfulness.

Alchemy: Amplifying Theorem-Proving Capability through Symbolic Mutation

Formal proofs are challenging to write even for experienced experts. Recent progress in Neural Theorem Proving (NTP) shows promise in expediting this process. However, the formal corpora available on the Internet are limited compared to the general text, posing a significant data scarcity challenge for NTP. To address this issue, this work proposes Alchemy, a general framework for data synthesis that constructs formal theorems through symbolic mutation. Specifically, for each candidate theorem in Mathlib, we identify all invocable theorems that can be used to rewrite or apply to it. Subsequently, we mutate the candidate theorem by replacing the corresponding term in the statement with its equivalent form or antecedent. As a result, our method increases the number of theorems in Mathlib by an order of magnitude, from 110k to 6M. Furthermore, we perform continual pretraining and supervised finetuning on this augmented corpus for large language models. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a 5% absolute performance improvement on Leandojo benchmark. Additionally, our synthetic data achieve a 2.5% absolute performance gain on the out-of-distribution miniF2F benchmark. To provide further insights, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of synthetic data composition and the training paradigm, offering valuable guidance for developing a strong theorem prover.

Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been shown to deliver impressive performance in various NLP tasks. To tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting includes a few manually crafted step-by-step reasoning demonstrations which enable LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning steps and improve their reasoning task accuracy. To eliminate the manual effort, Zero-shot-CoT concatenates the target problem statement with "Let's think step by step" as an input prompt to LLMs. Despite the success of Zero-shot-CoT, it still suffers from three pitfalls: calculation errors, missing-step errors, and semantic misunderstanding errors. To address the missing-step errors, we propose Plan-and-Solve (PS) Prompting. It consists of two components: first, devising a plan to divide the entire task into smaller subtasks, and then carrying out the subtasks according to the plan. To address the calculation errors and improve the quality of generated reasoning steps, we extend PS prompting with more detailed instructions and derive PS+ prompting. We evaluate our proposed prompting strategy on ten datasets across three reasoning problems. The experimental results over GPT-3 show that our proposed zero-shot prompting consistently outperforms Zero-shot-CoT across all datasets by a large margin, is comparable to or exceeds Zero-shot-Program-of-Thought Prompting, and has comparable performance with 8-shot CoT prompting on the math reasoning problem. The code can be found at https://github.com/AGI-Edgerunners/Plan-and-Solve-Prompting.

Large Language Models (GPT) Struggle to Answer Multiple-Choice Questions about Code

We analyzed effectiveness of three generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models in answering multiple-choice question (MCQ) assessments, often involving short snippets of code, from introductory and intermediate programming courses at the postsecondary level. This emerging technology stirs countless discussions of its potential uses (e.g., exercise generation, code explanation) as well as misuses in programming education (e.g., cheating). However, the capabilities of GPT models and their limitations to reason about and/or analyze code in educational settings have been under-explored. We evaluated several OpenAI's GPT models on formative and summative MCQ assessments from three Python courses (530 questions). We found that MCQs containing code snippets are not answered as successfully as those that only contain natural language. While questions requiring to fill-in a blank in the code or completing a natural language statement about the snippet are handled rather successfully, MCQs that require analysis and/or reasoning about the code (e.g., what is true/false about the snippet, or what is its output) appear to be the most challenging. These findings can be leveraged by educators to adapt their instructional practices and assessments in programming courses, so that GPT becomes a valuable assistant for a learner as opposed to a source of confusion and/or potential hindrance in the learning process.

SubgoalXL: Subgoal-based Expert Learning for Theorem Proving

Formal theorem proving, a field at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, has seen renewed interest with advancements in large language models (LLMs). This paper introduces SubgoalXL, a novel approach that synergizes subgoal-based proofs with expert learning to enhance LLMs' capabilities in formal theorem proving within the Isabelle environment. SubgoalXL addresses two critical challenges: the scarcity of specialized mathematics and theorem-proving data, and the need for improved multi-step reasoning abilities in LLMs. By optimizing data efficiency and employing subgoal-level supervision, SubgoalXL extracts richer information from limited human-generated proofs. The framework integrates subgoal-oriented proof strategies with an expert learning system, iteratively refining formal statement, proof, and subgoal generators. Leveraging the Isabelle environment's advantages in subgoal-based proofs, SubgoalXL achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 56.1\% in Isabelle on the standard miniF2F dataset, marking an absolute improvement of 4.9\%. Notably, SubgoalXL successfully solves 41 AMC12, 9 AIME, and 3 IMO problems from miniF2F. These results underscore the effectiveness of maximizing limited data utility and employing targeted guidance for complex reasoning in formal theorem proving, contributing to the ongoing advancement of AI reasoning capabilities. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/SubgoalXL.

Class-Level Code Generation from Natural Language Using Iterative, Tool-Enhanced Reasoning over Repository

LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in code generation tasks, achieving promising results at the function or statement level across various benchmarks. However, the complexities associated with creating code artifacts like classes, particularly within the context of real-world software repositories, remain underexplored. Prior research treats class-level generation as an isolated task, neglecting the intricate dependencies & interactions that characterize real-world software environments. To address this gap, we introduce RepoClassBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs in generating complex, class-level code within real-world repositories. RepoClassBench includes "Natural Language to Class generation" tasks across Java, Python & C# from a selection of repositories. We ensure that each class in our dataset not only has cross-file dependencies within the repository but also includes corresponding test cases to verify its functionality. We find that current models struggle with the realistic challenges posed by our benchmark, primarily due to their limited exposure to relevant repository contexts. To address this shortcoming, we introduce Retrieve-Repotools-Reflect (RRR), a novel approach that equips LLMs with static analysis tools to iteratively navigate & reason about repository-level context in an agent-based framework. Our experiments demonstrate that RRR significantly outperforms existing baselines on RepoClassBench, showcasing its effectiveness across programming languages & under various settings. Our findings emphasize the critical need for code-generation benchmarks to incorporate repo-level dependencies to more accurately reflect the complexities of software development. Our work shows the benefits of leveraging specialized tools to enhance LLMs' understanding of repository context. We plan to make our dataset & evaluation harness public.

PRobELM: Plausibility Ranking Evaluation for Language Models

This paper introduces PRobELM (Plausibility Ranking Evaluation for Language Models), a benchmark designed to assess language models' ability to discern more plausible from less plausible scenarios through their parametric knowledge. While benchmarks such as TruthfulQA emphasise factual accuracy or truthfulness, and others such as COPA explore plausible scenarios without explicitly incorporating world knowledge, PRobELM seeks to bridge this gap by evaluating models' capabilities to prioritise plausible scenarios that leverage world knowledge over less plausible alternatives. This design allows us to assess the potential of language models for downstream use cases such as literature-based discovery where the focus is on identifying information that is likely but not yet known. Our benchmark is constructed from a dataset curated from Wikidata edit histories, tailored to align the temporal bounds of the training data for the evaluated models. PRobELM facilitates the evaluation of language models across multiple prompting types, including statement, text completion, and question-answering. Experiments with 10 models of various sizes and architectures on the relationship between model scales, training recency, and plausibility performance, reveal that factual accuracy does not directly correlate with plausibility performance and that up-to-date training data enhances plausibility assessment across different model architectures.

CABINET: Content Relevance based Noise Reduction for Table Question Answering

Table understanding capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been extensively studied through the task of question-answering (QA) over tables. Typically, only a small part of the whole table is relevant to derive the answer for a given question. The irrelevant parts act as noise and are distracting information, resulting in sub-optimal performance due to the vulnerability of LLMs to noise. To mitigate this, we propose CABINET (Content RelevAnce-Based NoIse ReductioN for TablE QuesTion-Answering) - a framework to enable LLMs to focus on relevant tabular data by suppressing extraneous information. CABINET comprises an Unsupervised Relevance Scorer (URS), trained differentially with the QA LLM, that weighs the table content based on its relevance to the input question before feeding it to the question-answering LLM (QA LLM). To further aid the relevance scorer, CABINET employs a weakly supervised module that generates a parsing statement describing the criteria of rows and columns relevant to the question and highlights the content of corresponding table cells. CABINET significantly outperforms various tabular LLM baselines, as well as GPT3-based in-context learning methods, is more robust to noise, maintains outperformance on tables of varying sizes, and establishes new SoTA performance on WikiTQ, FeTaQA, and WikiSQL datasets. We release our code and datasets at https://github.com/Sohanpatnaik106/CABINET_QA.

CodeFill: Multi-token Code Completion by Jointly Learning from Structure and Naming Sequences

Code completion is an essential feature of IDEs, yet current autocompleters are restricted to either grammar-based or NLP-based single token completions. Both approaches have significant drawbacks: grammar-based autocompletion is restricted in dynamically-typed language environments, whereas NLP-based autocompleters struggle to understand the semantics of the programming language and the developer's code context. In this work, we present CodeFill, a language model for autocompletion that combines learned structure and naming information. Using a parallel Transformer architecture and multi-task learning, CodeFill consumes sequences of source code token names and their equivalent AST token types. Uniquely, CodeFill is trained both for single-token and multi-token (statement) prediction, which enables it to learn long-range dependencies among grammatical and naming elements. We train CodeFill on two datasets, consisting of 29M and 425M lines of code, respectively. To make the evaluation more realistic, we develop a method to automatically infer points in the source code at which completion matters. We compare CodeFill against four baselines and two state-of-the-art models, GPT-C and TravTrans+.CodeFill surpasses all baselines in single token prediction (MRR: 70.9% vs. 66.2% and 67.8%) and outperforms the state of the art for multi-token prediction (ROUGE-L: 63.7% vs. 52.4% and 59.2%, for n=4 tokens). We publicly release our source code and datasets.

The Consciousness Prior

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them

Despite their impressive ability to generate high-quality and fluent text, generative large language models (LLMs) also produce hallucinations: statements that are misaligned with established world knowledge or provided input context. However, measuring hallucination can be challenging, as having humans verify model generations on-the-fly is both expensive and time-consuming. In this work, we release HALoGEN, a comprehensive hallucination benchmark consisting of: (1) 10,923 prompts for generative models spanning nine domains including programming, scientific attribution, and summarization, and (2) automatic high-precision verifiers for each use case that decompose LLM generations into atomic units, and verify each unit against a high-quality knowledge source. We use this framework to evaluate ~150,000 generations from 14 language models, finding that even the best-performing models are riddled with hallucinations (sometimes up to 86% of generated atomic facts depending on the domain). We further define a novel error classification for LLM hallucinations based on whether they likely stem from incorrect recollection of training data (Type A errors), or incorrect knowledge in training data (Type B errors), or are fabrication (Type C errors). We hope our framework provides a foundation to enable the principled study of why generative models hallucinate, and advances the development of trustworthy large language models.

Machine Bullshit: Characterizing the Emergent Disregard for Truth in Large Language Models

Bullshit, as conceptualized by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, refers to statements made without regard to their truth value. While previous work has explored large language model (LLM) hallucination and sycophancy, we propose machine bullshit as an overarching conceptual framework that can allow researchers to characterize the broader phenomenon of emergent loss of truthfulness in LLMs and shed light on its underlying mechanisms. We introduce the Bullshit Index, a novel metric quantifying LLMs' indifference to truth, and propose a complementary taxonomy analyzing four qualitative forms of bullshit: empty rhetoric, paltering, weasel words, and unverified claims. We conduct empirical evaluations on the Marketplace dataset, the Political Neutrality dataset, and our new BullshitEval benchmark (2,400 scenarios spanning 100 AI assistants) explicitly designed to evaluate machine bullshit. Our results demonstrate that model fine-tuning with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) significantly exacerbates bullshit and inference-time chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting notably amplify specific bullshit forms, particularly empty rhetoric and paltering. We also observe prevalent machine bullshit in political contexts, with weasel words as the dominant strategy. Our findings highlight systematic challenges in AI alignment and provide new insights toward more truthful LLM behavior.

MedCaseReasoning: Evaluating and learning diagnostic reasoning from clinical case reports

Doctors and patients alike increasingly use Large Language Models (LLMs) to diagnose clinical cases. However, unlike domains such as math or coding, where correctness can be objectively defined by the final answer, medical diagnosis requires both the outcome and the reasoning process to be accurate. Currently, widely used medical benchmarks like MedQA and MMLU assess only accuracy in the final answer, overlooking the quality and faithfulness of the clinical reasoning process. To address this limitation, we introduce MedCaseReasoning, the first open-access dataset for evaluating LLMs on their ability to align with clinician-authored diagnostic reasoning. The dataset includes 14,489 diagnostic question-and-answer cases, each paired with detailed reasoning statements derived from open-access medical case reports. We evaluate state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs on MedCaseReasoning and find significant shortcomings in their diagnoses and reasoning: for instance, the top-performing open-source model, DeepSeek-R1, achieves only 48% 10-shot diagnostic accuracy and mentions only 64% of the clinician reasoning statements (recall). However, we demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on the reasoning traces derived from MedCaseReasoning significantly improves diagnostic accuracy and clinical reasoning recall by an average relative gain of 29% and 41%, respectively. The open-source dataset, code, and models are available at https://github.com/kevinwu23/Stanford-MedCaseReasoning.

Explore, Establish, Exploit: Red Teaming Language Models from Scratch

Deploying Large language models (LLMs) can pose hazards from harmful outputs such as toxic or dishonest speech. Prior work has introduced tools that elicit harmful outputs in order to identify and mitigate these risks. While this is a valuable step toward securing language models, these approaches typically rely on a pre-existing classifier for undesired outputs. This limits their application to situations where the type of harmful behavior is known with precision beforehand. However, this skips a central challenge of red teaming: developing a contextual understanding of the behaviors that a model can exhibit. Furthermore, when such a classifier already exists, red teaming has limited marginal value because the classifier could simply be used to filter training data or model outputs. In this work, we consider red teaming under the assumption that the adversary is working from a high-level, abstract specification of undesired behavior. The red team is expected to refine/extend this specification and identify methods to elicit this behavior from the model. Our red teaming framework consists of three steps: 1) Exploring the model's behavior in the desired context; 2) Establishing a measurement of undesired behavior (e.g., a classifier trained to reflect human evaluations); and 3) Exploiting the model's flaws using this measure and an established red teaming methodology. We apply this approach to red team GPT-2 and GPT-3 models to systematically discover classes of prompts that elicit toxic and dishonest statements. In doing so, we also construct and release the CommonClaim dataset of 20,000 statements that have been labeled by human subjects as common-knowledge-true, common-knowledge-false, or neither. Code is available at https://github.com/thestephencasper/explore_establish_exploit_llms. CommonClaim is available at https://github.com/thestephencasper/common_claim.

Can Large Language Models Infer Causation from Correlation?

Causal inference is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. While the field of CausalNLP has attracted much interest in the recent years, existing causal inference datasets in NLP primarily rely on discovering causality from empirical knowledge (e.g., commonsense knowledge). In this work, we propose the first benchmark dataset to test the pure causal inference skills of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we formulate a novel task Corr2Cause, which takes a set of correlational statements and determines the causal relationship between the variables. We curate a large-scale dataset of more than 400K samples, on which we evaluate seventeen existing LLMs. Through our experiments, we identify a key shortcoming of LLMs in terms of their causal inference skills, and show that these models achieve almost close to random performance on the task. This shortcoming is somewhat mitigated when we try to re-purpose LLMs for this skill via finetuning, but we find that these models still fail to generalize -- they can only perform causal inference in in-distribution settings when variable names and textual expressions used in the queries are similar to those in the training set, but fail in out-of-distribution settings generated by perturbing these queries. Corr2Cause is a challenging task for LLMs, and would be helpful in guiding future research on improving LLMs' pure reasoning skills and generalizability. Our data is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/causalnlp/corr2cause. Our code is at https://github.com/causalNLP/corr2cause.

STP: Self-play LLM Theorem Provers with Iterative Conjecturing and Proving

A fundamental challenge in formal theorem proving by LLMs is the lack of high-quality training data. Although reinforcement learning or expert iteration partially mitigates this issue by alternating between LLM generating proofs and finetuning them on correctly generated ones, performance quickly plateaus due to the scarcity of correct proofs (sparse rewards). To keep improving the models with limited data, we draw inspiration from mathematicians, who continuously develop new results, partly by proposing novel conjectures or exercises (which are often variants of known results) and attempting to solve them. We design the Self-play Theorem Prover (STP) that simultaneously takes on two roles, conjecturer and prover, each providing training signals to the other. The conjecturer is trained iteratively on previously generated conjectures that are barely provable by the current prover, which incentivizes it to generate increasingly challenging conjectures over time. The prover attempts to prove the conjectures with standard expert iteration. We evaluate STP with both Lean and Isabelle formal versifiers. With 19.8 billion tokens generated during the training in Lean, STP proves 26.3% of the statements in the LeanWorkbook dataset, doubling the previous best result of 13.2% achieved through expert iteration. The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance among whole-proof generation methods on miniF2F-test (61.7%, pass@3200), Proofnet-test (23.1%, pass@3200) and PutnamBench (8/644, pass@3200).

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on "A is B" fail to learn "B is A"

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form "A is B", it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction "B is A". This is the Reversal Curse. For instance, if a model is trained on "Olaf Scholz was the ninth Chancellor of Germany", it will not automatically be able to answer the question, "Who was the ninth Chancellor of Germany?". Moreover, the likelihood of the correct answer ("Olaf Scholz") will not be higher than for a random name. Thus, models exhibit a basic failure of logical deduction and do not generalize a prevalent pattern in their training set (i.e. if "A is B'' occurs, "B is A" is more likely to occur). We provide evidence for the Reversal Curse by finetuning GPT-3 and Llama-1 on fictitious statements such as "Uriah Hawthorne is the composer of 'Abyssal Melodies'" and showing that they fail to correctly answer "Who composed 'Abyssal Melodies?'". The Reversal Curse is robust across model sizes and model families and is not alleviated by data augmentation. We also evaluate ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on questions about real-world celebrities, such as "Who is Tom Cruise's mother? [A: Mary Lee Pfeiffer]" and the reverse "Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?". GPT-4 correctly answers questions like the former 79% of the time, compared to 33% for the latter. This shows a failure of logical deduction that we hypothesize is caused by the Reversal Curse. Code is available at https://github.com/lukasberglund/reversal_curse.

Evaluating Implicit Bias in Large Language Models by Attacking From a Psychometric Perspective

As large language models (LLMs) become an important way of information access, there have been increasing concerns that LLMs may intensify the spread of unethical content, including implicit bias that hurts certain populations without explicit harmful words. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous evaluation of LLMs' implicit bias towards certain demographics by attacking them from a psychometric perspective to elicit agreements to biased viewpoints. Inspired by psychometric principles in cognitive and social psychology, we propose three attack approaches, i.e., Disguise, Deception, and Teaching. Incorporating the corresponding attack instructions, we built two benchmarks: (1) a bilingual dataset with biased statements covering four bias types (2.7K instances) for extensive comparative analysis, and (2) BUMBLE, a larger benchmark spanning nine common bias types (12.7K instances) for comprehensive evaluation. Extensive evaluation of popular commercial and open-source LLMs shows that our methods can elicit LLMs' inner bias more effectively than competitive baselines. Our attack methodology and benchmarks offer an effective means of assessing the ethical risks of LLMs, driving progress toward greater accountability in their development. Our code, data and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/yuchenwen1/ImplicitBiasPsychometricEvaluation and https://github.com/yuchenwen1/BUMBLE.

The Duality of Whittaker Potential Theory: Fundamental Representations of Electromagnetism and Gravity, and Their Orthogonality

E. T. Whittaker produced two papers in 1903 and 1904 that, although sometimes considered mere mathematical statements (Barrett, 1993), held important implications for physical theory. The Whittaker 1903 paper united electrostatic and gravitational attraction as resulting from longitudinal waves - waves whose wavefronts propagate parallel to their direction. The Whittaker 1904 paper showed that electromagnetic waves resulted from the interference of two such longitudinal waves or scalar potential functions. Although unexplored, the implications of these papers are profound: gravitational lensing, gravitational waves, the Aharonov-Bohm effect, the existence of a hyperspace above or behind normal space, the elimination of gravitational and point charge singularities, MOND, and the expansion of the universe. This last implication can be related to the recent finding that black holes with posited vacuum energy interior solutions alongside cosmological boundaries have a cosmological coupling constant of k=3, meaning that black holes gain mass-proportional to a3 in a parameterization equation within a Robertson-Walker cosmology and are a cosmological accelerated expansion species (Farrah et al., 2023). This expansion and many features of General Relativity can be explained by the mass-proportionality and preferred direction of the longitudinal waves within the two underlying non-local Whittaker potentials (Titleman, 2022). Whittaker potential theory also offers a simple explanation for expansion of the universe - it is produced as longitudinal motion within the Whittaker potentials only when dynamic electromagnetism is separate from time-static gravity in intergalactic space.

Truthful AI: Developing and governing AI that does not lie

In many contexts, lying -- the use of verbal falsehoods to deceive -- is harmful. While lying has traditionally been a human affair, AI systems that make sophisticated verbal statements are becoming increasingly prevalent. This raises the question of how we should limit the harm caused by AI "lies" (i.e. falsehoods that are actively selected for). Human truthfulness is governed by social norms and by laws (against defamation, perjury, and fraud). Differences between AI and humans present an opportunity to have more precise standards of truthfulness for AI, and to have these standards rise over time. This could provide significant benefits to public epistemics and the economy, and mitigate risks of worst-case AI futures. Establishing norms or laws of AI truthfulness will require significant work to: (1) identify clear truthfulness standards; (2) create institutions that can judge adherence to those standards; and (3) develop AI systems that are robustly truthful. Our initial proposals for these areas include: (1) a standard of avoiding "negligent falsehoods" (a generalisation of lies that is easier to assess); (2) institutions to evaluate AI systems before and after real-world deployment; and (3) explicitly training AI systems to be truthful via curated datasets and human interaction. A concerning possibility is that evaluation mechanisms for eventual truthfulness standards could be captured by political interests, leading to harmful censorship and propaganda. Avoiding this might take careful attention. And since the scale of AI speech acts might grow dramatically over the coming decades, early truthfulness standards might be particularly important because of the precedents they set.

The Role of the Crowd in Countering Misinformation: A Case Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic

Fact checking by professionals is viewed as a vital defense in the fight against misinformation.While fact checking is important and its impact has been significant, fact checks could have limited visibility and may not reach the intended audience, such as those deeply embedded in polarized communities. Concerned citizens (i.e., the crowd), who are users of the platforms where misinformation appears, can play a crucial role in disseminating fact-checking information and in countering the spread of misinformation. To explore if this is the case, we conduct a data-driven study of misinformation on the Twitter platform, focusing on tweets related to the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the spread of misinformation, professional fact checks, and the crowd response to popular misleading claims about COVID-19. In this work, we curate a dataset of false claims and statements that seek to challenge or refute them. We train a classifier to create a novel dataset of 155,468 COVID-19-related tweets, containing 33,237 false claims and 33,413 refuting arguments.Our findings show that professional fact-checking tweets have limited volume and reach. In contrast, we observe that the surge in misinformation tweets results in a quick response and a corresponding increase in tweets that refute such misinformation. More importantly, we find contrasting differences in the way the crowd refutes tweets, some tweets appear to be opinions, while others contain concrete evidence, such as a link to a reputed source. Our work provides insights into how misinformation is organically countered in social platforms by some of their users and the role they play in amplifying professional fact checks.These insights could lead to development of tools and mechanisms that can empower concerned citizens in combating misinformation. The code and data can be found in http://claws.cc.gatech.edu/covid_counter_misinformation.html.

Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, to mitigate hallucinations in CoT that are notoriously difficult to detect, current methods such as process reward models (PRMs) or self-consistency operate as opaque boxes and do not provide checkable evidence for their judgments, possibly limiting their effectiveness. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the idea that "the gold standard for supporting a mathematical claim is to provide a proof". We propose a retrospective, step-aware formal verification framework Safe. Rather than assigning arbitrary scores, we strive to articulate mathematical claims in formal mathematical language Lean 4 at each reasoning step and provide formal proofs to identify hallucinations. We evaluate our framework Safe across multiple language models and various mathematical datasets, demonstrating a significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence. We also propose FormalStep as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements. To the best of our knowledge, our work represents the first endeavor to utilize formal mathematical language Lean 4 for verifying natural language content generated by LLMs, aligning with the reason why formal mathematical languages were created in the first place: to provide a robust foundation for hallucination-prone human-written proofs.

Measuring Large Language Models Capacity to Annotate Journalistic Sourcing

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the capacities of Large Language Models and their evaluation have been in constant discussion and evaluation both in academic research and in the industry. Scenarios and benchmarks have been developed in several areas such as law, medicine and math (Bommasani et al., 2023) and there is continuous evaluation of model variants. One area that has not received sufficient scenario development attention is journalism, and in particular journalistic sourcing and ethics. Journalism is a crucial truth-determination function in democracy (Vincent, 2023), and sourcing is a crucial pillar to all original journalistic output. Evaluating the capacities of LLMs to annotate stories for the different signals of sourcing and how reporters justify them is a crucial scenario that warrants a benchmark approach. It offers potential to build automated systems to contrast more transparent and ethically rigorous forms of journalism with everyday fare. In this paper we lay out a scenario to evaluate LLM performance on identifying and annotating sourcing in news stories on a five-category schema inspired from journalism studies (Gans, 2004). We offer the use case, our dataset and metrics and as the first step towards systematic benchmarking. Our accuracy findings indicate LLM-based approaches have more catching to do in identifying all the sourced statements in a story, and equally, in matching the type of sources. An even harder task is spotting source justifications.

Generating refactored code accurately using reinforcement learning

Automated source code refactoring, particularly extract method refactoring, is a crucial and frequently employed technique during software development. Despite its importance and frequent use by practitioners, current automated techniques face significant limitations. These approaches often rely on developers to identify the precise bounds of refactoring opportunities in terms of source code statements. Also, they often do not capture the semantic context, resulting in offering no automated means to suggest meaningful method name, for instance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel reinforcement learning-based approach for fine-tuning and aligning code language models to perform automated, intelligent extract method refactoring on Java source code. Our approach fine-tunes sequence-to-sequence generative models and aligns them using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm. We utilize code compilation and presence of the refactoring in the generated code as reward signals, providing a code-centric optimization process. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the performance of large language models in code refactoring, as evidenced by both quantitative evaluation metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and CodeBLEU, and qualitative measures including syntactical and functional correctness. The supervised fine-tuned model, further aligned with PPO, surpasses traditional supervised fine-tuning by 11.96% and 16.45% in terms of BLEU and CodeBLEU scores, respectively. When subjected to a suite of 122 unit tests, the number of successful tests increased from 41 to 66 for the reinforcement learning aligned fine-tuned Code-T5 model, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach in producing functionally correct refactorings.

Achieving Peak Performance for Large Language Models: A Systematic Review

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). LLMs require an extreme amount of parameters to attain high performance. As models grow into the trillion-parameter range, computational and memory costs increase significantly. This makes it difficult for many researchers to access the resources needed to train or apply these models. Optimizing LLM performance involves two main approaches: fine-tuning pre-trained models for specific tasks to achieve state-of-the-art performance, and reducing costs or improving training time while maintaining similar performance. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement. We reviewed 65 publications out of 983 from 2017 to December 2023, retrieved from 5 databases. The study presents methods to optimize and accelerate LLMs while achieving cutting-edge results without sacrificing accuracy. We begin with an overview of the development of language modeling, followed by a detailed explanation of commonly used frameworks and libraries, and a taxonomy for improving and speeding up LLMs based on three classes: LLM training, LLM inference, and system serving. We then delve into recent optimization and acceleration strategies such as training optimization, hardware optimization, scalability and reliability, accompanied by the taxonomy and categorization of these strategies. Finally, we provide an in-depth comparison of each class and strategy, with two case studies on optimizing model training and enhancing inference efficiency. These case studies showcase practical approaches to address LLM resource limitations while maintaining performance.

FELM: Benchmarking Factuality Evaluation of Large Language Models

Assessing factuality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) is an emerging yet crucial research area, aimed at alerting users to potential errors and guiding the development of more reliable LLMs. Nonetheless, the evaluators assessing factuality necessitate suitable evaluation themselves to gauge progress and foster advancements. This direction remains under-explored, resulting in substantial impediments to the progress of factuality evaluators. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a benchmark for Factuality Evaluation of large Language Models, referred to as felm. In this benchmark, we collect responses generated from LLMs and annotate factuality labels in a fine-grained manner. Contrary to previous studies that primarily concentrate on the factuality of world knowledge (e.g.~information from Wikipedia), felm focuses on factuality across diverse domains, spanning from world knowledge to math and reasoning. Our annotation is based on text segments, which can help pinpoint specific factual errors. The factuality annotations are further supplemented by predefined error types and reference links that either support or contradict the statement. In our experiments, we investigate the performance of several LLM-based factuality evaluators on felm, including both vanilla LLMs and those augmented with retrieval mechanisms and chain-of-thought processes. Our findings reveal that while retrieval aids factuality evaluation, current LLMs are far from satisfactory to faithfully detect factual errors.

Don't Ignore Dual Logic Ability of LLMs while Privatizing: A Data-Intensive Analysis in Medical Domain

Extensive studies have been devoted to privatizing general-domain Large Language Models (LLMs) as Domain-Specific LLMs via feeding specific-domain data. However, these privatization efforts often ignored a critical aspect: Dual Logic Ability, which is a core reasoning ability for LLMs. The dual logic ability of LLMs ensures that they can maintain a consistent stance when confronted with both positive and negative statements about the same fact. Our study focuses on how the dual logic ability of LLMs is affected during the privatization process in the medical domain. We conduct several experiments to analyze the dual logic ability of LLMs by examining the consistency of the stance in responses to paired questions about the same fact. In our experiments, interestingly, we observed a significant decrease in the dual logic ability of existing LLMs after privatization. Besides, our results indicate that incorporating general domain dual logic data into LLMs not only enhances LLMs' dual logic ability but also further improves their accuracy. These findings underscore the importance of prioritizing LLMs' dual logic ability during the privatization process. Our study establishes a benchmark for future research aimed at exploring LLMs' dual logic ability during the privatization process and offers valuable guidance for privatization efforts in real-world applications.

Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework

Large Language Models (LLMs) especially ChatGPT have produced impressive results in various areas, but their potential human-like psychology is still largely unexplored. Existing works study the virtual personalities of LLMs but rarely explore the possibility of analyzing human personalities via LLMs. This paper presents a generic evaluation framework for LLMs to assess human personalities based on Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) tests. Specifically, we first devise unbiased prompts by randomly permuting options in MBTI questions and adopt the average testing result to encourage more impartial answer generation. Then, we propose to replace the subject in question statements to enable flexible queries and assessments on different subjects from LLMs. Finally, we re-formulate the question instructions in a manner of correctness evaluation to facilitate LLMs to generate clearer responses. The proposed framework enables LLMs to flexibly assess personalities of different groups of people. We further propose three evaluation metrics to measure the consistency, robustness, and fairness of assessment results from state-of-the-art LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT. Our experiments reveal ChatGPT's ability to assess human personalities, and the average results demonstrate that it can achieve more consistent and fairer assessments in spite of lower robustness against prompt biases compared with InstructGPT.

NumHTML: Numeric-Oriented Hierarchical Transformer Model for Multi-task Financial Forecasting

Financial forecasting has been an important and active area of machine learning research because of the challenges it presents and the potential rewards that even minor improvements in prediction accuracy or forecasting may entail. Traditionally, financial forecasting has heavily relied on quantitative indicators and metrics derived from structured financial statements. Earnings conference call data, including text and audio, is an important source of unstructured data that has been used for various prediction tasks using deep earning and related approaches. However, current deep learning-based methods are limited in the way that they deal with numeric data; numbers are typically treated as plain-text tokens without taking advantage of their underlying numeric structure. This paper describes a numeric-oriented hierarchical transformer model to predict stock returns, and financial risk using multi-modal aligned earnings calls data by taking advantage of the different categories of numbers (monetary, temporal, percentages etc.) and their magnitude. We present the results of a comprehensive evaluation of NumHTML against several state-of-the-art baselines using a real-world publicly available dataset. The results indicate that NumHTML significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art across a variety of evaluation metrics and that it has the potential to offer significant financial gains in a practical trading context.

Foundations for Near-Term Quantum Natural Language Processing

We provide conceptual and mathematical foundations for near-term quantum natural language processing (QNLP), and do so in quantum computer scientist friendly terms. We opted for an expository presentation style, and provide references for supporting empirical evidence and formal statements concerning mathematical generality. We recall how the quantum model for natural language that we employ canonically combines linguistic meanings with rich linguistic structure, most notably grammar. In particular, the fact that it takes a quantum-like model to combine meaning and structure, establishes QNLP as quantum-native, on par with simulation of quantum systems. Moreover, the now leading Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) paradigm for encoding classical data on quantum hardware, variational quantum circuits, makes NISQ exceptionally QNLP-friendly: linguistic structure can be encoded as a free lunch, in contrast to the apparently exponentially expensive classical encoding of grammar. Quantum speed-up for QNLP tasks has already been established in previous work with Will Zeng. Here we provide a broader range of tasks which all enjoy the same advantage. Diagrammatic reasoning is at the heart of QNLP. Firstly, the quantum model interprets language as quantum processes via the diagrammatic formalism of categorical quantum mechanics. Secondly, these diagrams are via ZX-calculus translated into quantum circuits. Parameterisations of meanings then become the circuit variables to be learned. Our encoding of linguistic structure within quantum circuits also embodies a novel approach for establishing word-meanings that goes beyond the current standards in mainstream AI, by placing linguistic structure at the heart of Wittgenstein's meaning-is-context.

The Tensor Brain: Semantic Decoding for Perception and Memory

We analyse perception and memory, using mathematical models for knowledge graphs and tensors, to gain insights into the corresponding functionalities of the human mind. Our discussion is based on the concept of propositional sentences consisting of subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples for expressing elementary facts. SPO sentences are the basis for most natural languages but might also be important for explicit perception and declarative memories, as well as intra-brain communication and the ability to argue and reason. A set of SPO sentences can be described as a knowledge graph, which can be transformed into an adjacency tensor. We introduce tensor models, where concepts have dual representations as indices and associated embeddings, two constructs we believe are essential for the understanding of implicit and explicit perception and memory in the brain. We argue that a biological realization of perception and memory imposes constraints on information processing. In particular, we propose that explicit perception and declarative memories require a semantic decoder, which, in a simple realization, is based on four layers: First, a sensory memory layer, as a buffer for sensory input, second, an index layer representing concepts, third, a memoryless representation layer for the broadcasting of information ---the "blackboard", or the "canvas" of the brain--- and fourth, a working memory layer as a processing center and data buffer. We discuss the operations of the four layers and relate them to the global workspace theory. In a Bayesian brain interpretation, semantic memory defines the prior for observable triple statements. We propose that ---in evolution and during development--- semantic memory, episodic memory, and natural language evolved as emergent properties in agents' process to gain a deeper understanding of sensory information.

How Far Can We Go with Practical Function-Level Program Repair?

Recently, multiple Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to enhance the repair performance. While these techniques mainly focus on the single-line or hunk-level repair, they face significant challenges in real-world application due to the limited repair task scope and costly statement-level fault localization. However, the more practical function-level APR, which broadens the scope of APR task to fix entire buggy functions and requires only cost-efficient function-level fault localization, remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive study of LLM-based function-level APR including investigating the effect of the few-shot learning mechanism and the auxiliary repair-relevant information. Specifically, we adopt six widely-studied LLMs and construct a benchmark in both the Defects4J 1.2 and 2.0 datasets. Our study demonstrates that LLMs with zero-shot learning are already powerful function-level APR techniques, while applying the few-shot learning mechanism leads to disparate repair performance. Moreover, we find that directly applying the auxiliary repair-relevant information to LLMs significantly increases function-level repair performance. Inspired by our findings, we propose an LLM-based function-level APR technique, namely SRepair, which adopts a dual-LLM framework to leverage the power of the auxiliary repair-relevant information for advancing the repair performance. The evaluation results demonstrate that SRepair can correctly fix 300 single-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, largely surpassing all previous APR techniques by at least 85%, without the need for the costly statement-level fault location information. Furthermore, SRepair successfully fixes 32 multi-function bugs in the Defects4J dataset, which is the first time achieved by any APR technique ever to our best knowledge.

Benchmarking LLMs for Political Science: A United Nations Perspective

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, yet their potential for high-stake political decision-making remains largely unexplored. This paper addresses the gap by focusing on the application of LLMs to the United Nations (UN) decision-making process, where the stakes are particularly high and political decisions can have far-reaching consequences. We introduce a novel dataset comprising publicly available UN Security Council (UNSC) records from 1994 to 2024, including draft resolutions, voting records, and diplomatic speeches. Using this dataset, we propose the United Nations Benchmark (UNBench), the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across four interconnected political science tasks: co-penholder judgment, representative voting simulation, draft adoption prediction, and representative statement generation. These tasks span the three stages of the UN decision-making process--drafting, voting, and discussing--and aim to assess LLMs' ability to understand and simulate political dynamics. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the potential and challenges of applying LLMs in this domain, providing insights into their strengths and limitations in political science. This work contributes to the growing intersection of AI and political science, opening new avenues for research and practical applications in global governance. The UNBench Repository can be accessed at: https://github.com/yueqingliang1/UNBench.

Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit an exceptional capacity for generalization in practical applications. This work aims to capture the effect and benefits of depth for supervised learning via information-theoretic generalization bounds. We first derive two hierarchical bounds on the generalization error in terms of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence or the 1-Wasserstein distance between the train and test distributions of the network internal representations. The KL divergence bound shrinks as the layer index increases, while the Wasserstein bound implies the existence of a layer that serves as a generalization funnel, which attains a minimal 1-Wasserstein distance. Analytic expressions for both bounds are derived under the setting of binary Gaussian classification with linear DNNs. To quantify the contraction of the relevant information measures when moving deeper into the network, we analyze the strong data processing inequality (SDPI) coefficient between consecutive layers of three regularized DNN models: Dropout, DropConnect, and Gaussian noise injection. This enables refining our generalization bounds to capture the contraction as a function of the network architecture parameters. Specializing our results to DNNs with a finite parameter space and the Gibbs algorithm reveals that deeper yet narrower network architectures generalize better in those examples, although how broadly this statement applies remains a question.

Counter Turing Test CT^2: AI-Generated Text Detection is Not as Easy as You May Think -- Introducing AI Detectability Index

With the rise of prolific ChatGPT, the risk and consequences of AI-generated text has increased alarmingly. To address the inevitable question of ownership attribution for AI-generated artifacts, the US Copyright Office released a statement stating that 'If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it'. Furthermore, both the US and the EU governments have recently drafted their initial proposals regarding the regulatory framework for AI. Given this cynosural spotlight on generative AI, AI-generated text detection (AGTD) has emerged as a topic that has already received immediate attention in research, with some initial methods having been proposed, soon followed by emergence of techniques to bypass detection. This paper introduces the Counter Turing Test (CT^2), a benchmark consisting of techniques aiming to offer a comprehensive evaluation of the robustness of existing AGTD techniques. Our empirical findings unequivocally highlight the fragility of the proposed AGTD methods under scrutiny. Amidst the extensive deliberations on policy-making for regulating AI development, it is of utmost importance to assess the detectability of content generated by LLMs. Thus, to establish a quantifiable spectrum facilitating the evaluation and ranking of LLMs according to their detectability levels, we propose the AI Detectability Index (ADI). We conduct a thorough examination of 15 contemporary LLMs, empirically demonstrating that larger LLMs tend to have a higher ADI, indicating they are less detectable compared to smaller LLMs. We firmly believe that ADI holds significant value as a tool for the wider NLP community, with the potential to serve as a rubric in AI-related policy-making.

Investigating Subtler Biases in LLMs: Ageism, Beauty, Institutional, and Nationality Bias in Generative Models

LLMs are increasingly powerful and widely used to assist users in a variety of tasks. This use risks the introduction of LLM biases to consequential decisions such as job hiring, human performance evaluation, and criminal sentencing. Bias in NLP systems along the lines of gender and ethnicity has been widely studied, especially for specific stereotypes (e.g., Asians are good at math). In this paper, we investigate bias along less-studied but still consequential, dimensions, such as age and beauty, measuring subtler correlated decisions that LLMs make between social groups and unrelated positive and negative attributes. We ask whether LLMs hold wide-reaching biases of positive or negative sentiment for specific social groups similar to the ``what is beautiful is good'' bias found in people in experimental psychology. We introduce a template-generated dataset of sentence completion tasks that asks the model to select the most appropriate attribute to complete an evaluative statement about a person described as a member of a specific social group. We also reverse the completion task to select the social group based on an attribute. We report the correlations that we find for 4 cutting-edge LLMs. This dataset can be used as a benchmark to evaluate progress in more generalized biases and the templating technique can be used to expand the benchmark with minimal additional human annotation.

Revealing Fine-Grained Values and Opinions in Large Language Models

Uncovering latent values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by presenting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying their stances towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

CIVICS: Building a Dataset for Examining Culturally-Informed Values in Large Language Models

This paper introduces the "CIVICS: Culturally-Informed & Values-Inclusive Corpus for Societal impacts" dataset, designed to evaluate the social and cultural variation of Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages and value-sensitive topics. We create a hand-crafted, multilingual dataset of value-laden prompts which address specific socially sensitive topics, including LGBTQI rights, social welfare, immigration, disability rights, and surrogacy. CIVICS is designed to generate responses showing LLMs' encoded and implicit values. Through our dynamic annotation processes, tailored prompt design, and experiments, we investigate how open-weight LLMs respond to value-sensitive issues, exploring their behavior across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Using two experimental set-ups based on log-probabilities and long-form responses, we show social and cultural variability across different LLMs. Specifically, experiments involving long-form responses demonstrate that refusals are triggered disparately across models, but consistently and more frequently in English or translated statements. Moreover, specific topics and sources lead to more pronounced differences across model answers, particularly on immigration, LGBTQI rights, and social welfare. As shown by our experiments, the CIVICS dataset aims to serve as a tool for future research, promoting reproducibility and transparency across broader linguistic settings, and furthering the development of AI technologies that respect and reflect global cultural diversities and value pluralism. The CIVICS dataset and tools will be made available upon publication under open licenses; an anonymized version is currently available at https://huggingface.co/CIVICS-dataset.

Personas as a Way to Model Truthfulness in Language Models

Large Language Models are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. Can language models discern truth from falsehood in this contradicting data? Expanding on the view that LLMs can model different agents producing the corpora, we hypothesize that they can cluster truthful text by modeling a truthful persona: a group of agents that are likely to produce truthful text and share similar features. For example, trustworthy sources like Wikipedia and Science usually use formal writing styles and make consistent claims. By modeling this persona, LLMs can generalize truthfulness beyond the specific contexts in which each agent generated the training text. For example, the model can infer that the agent "Wikipedia" will behave truthfully on topics that were only generated by "Science" because they share a persona. We first show evidence for the persona hypothesis via two observations: (1) we can probe whether a model's answer will be truthful before it is generated; (2) finetuning a model on a set of facts improves its truthfulness on unseen topics. Next, using arithmetics as a synthetic environment, we show that language models can separate true and false statements, and generalize truthfulness across agents; but only if agents in the training data share a truthful generative process that enables the creation of a truthful persona. Overall, our findings suggest that models can exploit hierarchical structures in the data to learn abstract concepts like truthfulness.

Reviving DSP for Advanced Theorem Proving in the Era of Reasoning Models

Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7\%, 32.8\%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo\_2019\_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.

CodeCompose: A Large-Scale Industrial Deployment of AI-assisted Code Authoring

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked various applications of this technology in software development. In particular, generative LLMs have been shown to effectively power AI-based code authoring tools that can suggest entire statements or blocks of code during code authoring. In this paper we present CodeCompose, an AI-assisted code authoring tool developed and deployed at Meta internally. CodeCompose is based on the InCoder LLM that merges generative capabilities with bi-directionality. We have scaled up CodeCompose to serve tens of thousands of developers at Meta, across 10+ programming languages and several coding surfaces. We discuss unique challenges in terms of user experience and metrics that arise when deploying such tools in large-scale industrial settings. We present our experience in making design decisions about the model and system architecture for CodeCompose that addresses these challenges. Finally, we present metrics from our large-scale deployment of CodeCompose that shows its impact on Meta's internal code authoring experience over a 15-day time window, where 4.5 million suggestions were made by CodeCompose. Quantitative metrics reveal that (i) CodeCompose has an acceptance rate of 22% across several languages, and (ii) 8% of the code typed by users of CodeCompose is through accepting code suggestions from CodeCompose. Qualitative feedback indicates an overwhelming 91.5% positive reception for CodeCompose. In addition to assisting with code authoring, CodeCompose is also introducing other positive side effects such as encouraging developers to generate more in-code documentation, helping them with the discovery of new APIs, etc.

The Trilemma of Truth in Large Language Models

We often attribute human characteristics to large language models (LLMs) and claim that they "know" certain things. LLMs have an internal probabilistic knowledge that represents information retained during training. How can we assess the veracity of this knowledge? We examine two common methods for probing the veracity of LLMs and discover several assumptions that are flawed. To address these flawed assumptions, we introduce sAwMIL (short for Sparse Aware Multiple-Instance Learning), a probing method that utilizes the internal activations of LLMs to separate statements into true, false, and neither. sAwMIL is based on multiple-instance learning and conformal prediction. We evaluate sAwMIL on 5 validity criteria across 16 open-source LLMs, including both default and chat-based variants, as well as on 3 new datasets. Among the insights we provide are: (1) the veracity signal is often concentrated in the third quarter of an LLM's depth; (2) truth and falsehood signals are not always symmetric; (3) linear probes perform better on chat models than on default models; (4) nonlinear probes may be required to capture veracity signals for some LLMs with reinforcement learning from human feedback or knowledge distillation; and (5) LLMs capture a third type of signal that is distinct from true and false and is neither true nor false. These findings provide a reliable method for verifying what LLMs "know" and how certain they are of their probabilistic internal knowledge.

Graph Retrieval-Augmented LLM for Conversational Recommendation Systems

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) have emerged as a transformative paradigm for offering personalized recommendations through natural language dialogue. However, they face challenges with knowledge sparsity, as users often provide brief, incomplete preference statements. While recent methods have integrated external knowledge sources to mitigate this, they still struggle with semantic understanding and complex preference reasoning. Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate promising capabilities in natural language understanding and reasoning, showing significant potential for CRSs. Nevertheless, due to the lack of domain knowledge, existing LLM-based CRSs either produce hallucinated recommendations or demand expensive domain-specific training, which largely limits their applicability. In this work, we present G-CRS (Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Conversational Recommender Systems), a novel training-free framework that combines graph retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning to enhance LLMs' recommendation capabilities. Specifically, G-CRS employs a two-stage retrieve-and-recommend architecture, where a GNN-based graph reasoner first identifies candidate items, followed by Personalized PageRank exploration to jointly discover potential items and similar user interactions. These retrieved contexts are then transformed into structured prompts for LLM reasoning, enabling contextually grounded recommendations without task-specific training. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show that G-CRS achieves superior recommendation performance compared to existing methods without requiring task-specific training.

The Potential of LLMs in Medical Education: Generating Questions and Answers for Qualification Exams

Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has primarily focused on their adaptation and application in specialized domains. The application of LLMs in the medical field is mainly concentrated on tasks such as the automation of medical report generation, summarization, diagnostic reasoning, and question-and-answer interactions between doctors and patients. The challenge of becoming a good teacher is more formidable than that of becoming a good student, and this study pioneers the application of LLMs in the field of medical education. In this work, we investigate the extent to which LLMs can generate medical qualification exam questions and corresponding answers based on few-shot prompts. Utilizing a real-world Chinese dataset of elderly chronic diseases, we tasked the LLMs with generating open-ended questions and answers based on a subset of sampled admission reports across eight widely used LLMs, including ERNIE 4, ChatGLM 4, Doubao, Hunyuan, Spark 4, Qwen, Llama 3, and Mistral. Furthermore, we engaged medical experts to manually evaluate these open-ended questions and answers across multiple dimensions. The study found that LLMs, after using few-shot prompts, can effectively mimic real-world medical qualification exam questions, whereas there is room for improvement in the correctness, evidence-based statements, and professionalism of the generated answers. Moreover, LLMs also demonstrate a decent level of ability to correct and rectify reference answers. Given the immense potential of artificial intelligence in the medical field, the task of generating questions and answers for medical qualification exams aimed at medical students, interns and residents can be a significant focus of future research.

SemCoder: Training Code Language Models with Comprehensive Semantics

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have excelled at tasks like code completion but often miss deeper semantics such as execution effects and dynamic states. This paper aims to bridge the gap between Code LLMs' reliance on static text data and the need for thorough semantic understanding for complex tasks like debugging and program repair. We introduce a novel strategy to train Code LLMs with comprehensive semantics, encompassing high-level functional descriptions, local execution effects of individual statements, and overall input/output behavior, thereby linking static code text with dynamic execution states. We begin by collecting PyX, a clean code corpus of fully executable samples with functional descriptions and execution tracing. We propose training Code LLMs to write code and represent and reason about execution behaviors using natural language, mimicking human verbal debugging. This approach led to the development of SemCoder, a Code LLM with only 6.7B parameters, which shows competitive performance with GPT-3.5-turbo on code generation and execution reasoning tasks. SemCoder achieves 81.1% on HumanEval (GPT-3.5-turbo: 76.8%) and 54.5% on CRUXEval-I (GPT-3.5-turbo: 50.3%). We also study the effectiveness of SemCoder's monologue-style execution reasoning compared to concrete scratchpad reasoning, showing that our approach integrates semantics from multiple dimensions more smoothly. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of applying learned semantics to improve Code LLMs' debugging and self-refining capabilities.

IRef-VLA: A Benchmark for Interactive Referential Grounding with Imperfect Language in 3D Scenes

With the recent rise of large language models, vision-language models, and other general foundation models, there is growing potential for multimodal, multi-task robotics that can operate in diverse environments given natural language input. One such application is indoor navigation using natural language instructions. However, despite recent progress, this problem remains challenging due to the 3D spatial reasoning and semantic understanding required. Additionally, the language used may be imperfect or misaligned with the scene, further complicating the task. To address this challenge, we curate a benchmark dataset, IRef-VLA, for Interactive Referential Vision and Language-guided Action in 3D Scenes with imperfect references. IRef-VLA is the largest real-world dataset for the referential grounding task, consisting of over 11.5K scanned 3D rooms from existing datasets, 7.6M heuristically generated semantic relations, and 4.7M referential statements. Our dataset also contains semantic object and room annotations, scene graphs, navigable free space annotations, and is augmented with statements where the language has imperfections or ambiguities. We verify the generalizability of our dataset by evaluating with state-of-the-art models to obtain a performance baseline and also develop a graph-search baseline to demonstrate the performance bound and generation of alternatives using scene-graph knowledge. With this benchmark, we aim to provide a resource for 3D scene understanding that aids the development of robust, interactive navigation systems. The dataset and all source code is publicly released at https://github.com/HaochenZ11/IRef-VLA.

Self-Supervised Pre-Training with Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture Boosts ECG Classification Performance

Accurate diagnosis of heart arrhythmias requires the interpretation of electrocardiograms (ECG), which capture the electrical activity of the heart. Automating this process through machine learning is challenging due to the need for large annotated datasets, which are difficult and costly to collect. To address this issue, transfer learning is often employed, where models are pre-trained on large datasets and fine-tuned for specific ECG classification tasks with limited labeled data. Self-supervised learning has become a widely adopted pre-training method, enabling models to learn meaningful representations from unlabeled datasets. In this work, we explore the joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) for self-supervised learning from ECG data. Unlike invariance-based methods, JEPA does not rely on hand-crafted data augmentations, and unlike generative methods, it predicts latent features rather than reconstructing input data. We create a large unsupervised pre-training dataset by combining ten public ECG databases, amounting to over one million records. We pre-train Vision Transformers using JEPA on this dataset and fine-tune them on various PTB-XL benchmarks. Our results show that JEPA outperforms existing invariance-based and generative approaches, achieving an AUC of 0.945 on the PTB-XL all statements task. JEPA consistently learns the highest quality representations, as demonstrated in linear evaluations, and proves advantageous for pre-training even in the absence of additional data.

Verifiable by Design: Aligning Language Models to Quote from Pre-Training Data

For humans to trust the fluent generations of large language models (LLMs), they must be able to verify their correctness against trusted, external sources. Recent efforts aim to increase verifiability through citations of retrieved documents or post-hoc provenance. However, such citations are prone to mistakes that further complicate their verifiability. To address these limitations, we tackle the verifiability goal with a different philosophy: we trivialize the verification process by developing models that quote verbatim statements from trusted sources in pre-training data. We propose Quote-Tuning, which demonstrates the feasibility of aligning LLMs to leverage memorized information and quote from pre-training data. Quote-Tuning quantifies quoting against large corpora with efficient membership inference tools, and uses the amount of quotes as an implicit reward signal to construct a synthetic preference dataset for quoting, without any human annotation. Next, the target model is aligned to quote using preference optimization algorithms. Experimental results show that Quote-Tuning significantly increases the percentage of LLM generation quoted verbatim from high-quality pre-training documents by 55% to 130% relative to untuned models while maintaining response quality. Further experiments demonstrate that Quote-Tuning generalizes quoting to out-of-domain data, is applicable in different tasks, and provides additional benefits to truthfulness. Quote-Tuning not only serves as a hassle-free method to increase quoting but also opens up avenues for improving LLM trustworthiness through better verifiability.

Reshaping Free-Text Radiology Notes Into Structured Reports With Generative Transformers

BACKGROUND: Radiology reports are typically written in a free-text format, making clinical information difficult to extract and use. Recently the adoption of structured reporting (SR) has been recommended by various medical societies thanks to the advantages it offers, e.g. standardization, completeness and information retrieval. We propose a pipeline to extract information from free-text radiology reports, that fits with the items of the reference SR registry proposed by a national society of interventional and medical radiology, focusing on CT staging of patients with lymphoma. METHODS: Our work aims to leverage the potential of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Transformer-based models to deal with automatic SR registry filling. With the availability of 174 radiology reports, we investigate a rule-free generative Question Answering approach based on a domain-specific version of T5 (IT5). Two strategies (batch-truncation and ex-post combination) are implemented to comply with the model's context length limitations. Performance is evaluated in terms of strict accuracy, F1, and format accuracy, and compared with the widely used GPT-3.5 Large Language Model. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire is used to collect human-expert feedback on the similarity between medical annotations and generated answers. RESULTS: The combination of fine-tuning and batch splitting allows IT5 to achieve notable results; it performs on par with GPT-3.5 albeit its size being a thousand times smaller in terms of parameters. Human-based assessment scores show a high correlation (Spearman's correlation coefficients>0.88, p-values<0.001) with AI performance metrics (F1) and confirm the superior ability of LLMs (i.e., GPT-3.5, 175B of parameters) in generating plausible human-like statements.

Code Security Vulnerability Repair Using Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models

With the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), generating functionally correct code has become less complicated for a wide array of developers. While using LLMs has sped up the functional development process, it poses a heavy risk to code security. Code generation with proper security measures using LLM is a significantly more challenging task than functional code generation. Security measures may include adding a pair of lines of code with the original code, consisting of null pointer checking or prepared statements for SQL injection prevention. Currently, available code repair LLMs generate code repair by supervised fine-tuning, where the model looks at cross-entropy loss. However, the original and repaired codes are mostly similar in functionality and syntactically, except for a few (1-2) lines, which act as security measures. This imbalance between the lines needed for security measures and the functional code enforces the supervised fine-tuned model to prioritize generating functional code without adding proper security measures, which also benefits the model by resulting in minimal loss. Therefore, in this work, for security hardening and strengthening of generated code from LLMs, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method for program-specific repair with the combination of semantic and syntactic reward mechanisms that focus heavily on adding security and functional measures in the code, respectively.

I2D2: Inductive Knowledge Distillation with NeuroLogic and Self-Imitation

Pre-trained language models, despite their rapid advancements powered by scale, still fall short of robust commonsense capabilities. And yet, scale appears to be the winning recipe; after all, the largest models seem to have acquired the largest amount of commonsense capabilities. Or is it? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of a seemingly impossible match: can smaller language models with dismal commonsense capabilities (i.e., GPT-2), ever win over models that are orders of magnitude larger and better (i.e., GPT-3), if the smaller models are powered with novel commonsense distillation algorithms? The key intellectual question we ask here is whether it is possible, if at all, to design a learning algorithm that does not benefit from scale, yet leads to a competitive level of commonsense acquisition. In this work, we study the generative models of commonsense knowledge, focusing on the task of generating generics, statements of commonsense facts about everyday concepts, e.g., birds can fly. We introduce a novel commonsense distillation framework, I2D2, that loosely follows the Symbolic Knowledge Distillation of West et al. but breaks the dependence on the extreme-scale models as the teacher model by two innovations: (1) the novel adaptation of NeuroLogic Decoding to enhance the generation quality of the weak, off-the-shelf language models, and (2) self-imitation learning to iteratively learn from the model's own enhanced commonsense acquisition capabilities. Empirical results suggest that scale is not the only way, as novel algorithms can be a promising alternative. Moreover, our study leads to a new corpus of generics, Gen-A-Tomic, that is of the largest and highest quality available to date.

Using Transfer Learning for Code-Related Tasks

Deep learning (DL) techniques have been used to support several code-related tasks such as code summarization and bug-fixing. In particular, pre-trained transformer models are on the rise, also thanks to the excellent results they achieved in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The basic idea behind these models is to first pre-train them on a generic dataset using a self-supervised task (e.g, filling masked words in sentences). Then, these models are fine-tuned to support specific tasks of interest (e.g, language translation). A single model can be fine-tuned to support multiple tasks, possibly exploiting the benefits of transfer learning. This means that knowledge acquired to solve a specific task (e.g, language translation) can be useful to boost performance on another task (e.g, sentiment classification). While the benefits of transfer learning have been widely studied in NLP, limited empirical evidence is available when it comes to code-related tasks. In this paper, we assess the performance of the Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) model in supporting four different code-related tasks: (i) automatic bug-fixing, (ii) injection of code mutants, (iii) generation of assert statements, and (iv) code summarization. We pay particular attention in studying the role played by pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning on the model's performance. We show that (i) the T5 can achieve better performance as compared to state-of-the-art baselines; and (ii) while pre-training helps the model, not all tasks benefit from a multi-task fine-tuning.

Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables

Neural natural language generation (NLG) models have recently shown remarkable progress in fluency and coherence. However, existing studies on neural NLG are primarily focused on surface-level realizations with limited emphasis on logical inference, an important aspect of human thinking and language. In this paper, we suggest a new NLG task where a model is tasked with generating natural language statements that can be logically entailed by the facts in an open-domain semi-structured table. To facilitate the study of the proposed logical NLG problem, we use the existing TabFact dataset chen2019tabfact featured with a wide range of logical/symbolic inferences as our testbed, and propose new automatic metrics to evaluate the fidelity of generation models w.r.t.\ logical inference. The new task poses challenges to the existing monotonic generation frameworks due to the mismatch between sequence order and logical order. In our experiments, we comprehensively survey different generation architectures (LSTM, Transformer, Pre-Trained LM) trained with different algorithms (RL, Adversarial Training, Coarse-to-Fine) on the dataset and made following observations: 1) Pre-Trained LM can significantly boost both the fluency and logical fidelity metrics, 2) RL and Adversarial Training are trading fluency for fidelity, 3) Coarse-to-Fine generation can help partially alleviate the fidelity issue while maintaining high language fluency. The code and data are available at https://github.com/wenhuchen/LogicNLG.

A Japanese Language Model and Three New Evaluation Benchmarks for Pharmaceutical NLP

We present a Japanese domain-specific language model for the pharmaceutical field, developed through continual pretraining on 2 billion Japanese pharmaceutical tokens and 8 billion English biomedical tokens. To enable rigorous evaluation, we introduce three new benchmarks: YakugakuQA, based on national pharmacist licensing exams; NayoseQA, which tests cross-lingual synonym and terminology normalization; and SogoCheck, a novel task designed to assess consistency reasoning between paired statements. We evaluate our model against both open-source medical LLMs and commercial models, including GPT-4o. Results show that our domain-specific model outperforms existing open models and achieves competitive performance with commercial ones, particularly on terminology-heavy and knowledge-based tasks. Interestingly, even GPT-4o performs poorly on SogoCheck, suggesting that cross-sentence consistency reasoning remains an open challenge. Our benchmark suite offers a broader diagnostic lens for pharmaceutical NLP, covering factual recall, lexical variation, and logical consistency. This work demonstrates the feasibility of building practical, secure, and cost-effective language models for Japanese domain-specific applications, and provides reusable evaluation resources for future research in pharmaceutical and healthcare NLP. Our model, codes, and datasets are released at https://github.com/EQUES-Inc/pharma-LLM-eval.