Despite the crucial importance of accelerating text generation in large language models (LLMs) for efficiently producing content, the sequential nature of this process often leads to high inference latency, posing challenges for real-time applications. Various techniques have been proposed and developed to address these challenges and improve efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of accelerated generation techniques in autoregressive language models, aiming to understand the state-of-the-art methods and their applications. We categorize these techniques into several key areas: speculative decoding, early exiting mechanisms, and non-autoregressive methods. We discuss each category's underlying principles, advantages, limitations, and recent advancements. Through this survey, we aim to offer insights into the current landscape of techniques in LLMs and provide guidance for future research directions in this critical area of natural language processing.
The automatic evaluation of natural language generation (NLG) systems presents a long-lasting challenge. Recent studies have highlighted various neural metrics that align well with human evaluations. Yet, the robustness of these evaluators against adversarial perturbations remains largely under-explored due to the unique challenges in obtaining adversarial data for different NLG evaluation tasks. To address the problem, we introduce AdvEval, a novel black-box adversarial framework against NLG evaluators. AdvEval is specially tailored to generate data that yield strong disagreements between human and victim evaluators. Specifically, inspired by the recent success of large language models (LLMs) in text generation and evaluation, we adopt strong LLMs as both the data generator and gold evaluator. Adversarial data are automatically optimized with feedback from the gold and victim evaluator. We conduct experiments on 12 victim evaluators and 11 NLG datasets, spanning tasks including dialogue, summarization, and question evaluation. The results show that AdvEval can lead to significant performance degradation of various victim metrics, thereby validating its efficacy.
There has been a surge in developing various Large Language Models (LLMs). However, text generation for languages other than English often faces significant challenges, including poor generation quality and reduced computational performance due to the disproportionate representation of tokens in the model's vocabulary. In this work, we address these issues by developing a pipeline for adapting English-oriented pre-trained models to other languages and constructing efficient bilingual LLMs. Using this pipeline, we construct Vikhr, a state-of-the-art bilingual open-source instruction-following LLM designed specifically for the Russian language. "Vikhr" refers to the name of the Mistral LLM series and means a "strong gust of wind." Unlike previous Russian-language models that typically rely on LoRA adapters on top of English-oriented models, sacrificing performance for lower training costs, Vikhr features an adapted tokenizer vocabulary and undergoes continued pre-training and instruction tuning of all weights. This not only enhances the model's performance but also significantly improves its computational and contextual efficiency. The remarkable performance of Vikhr across various Russian-language benchmarks can also be attributed to our efforts in expanding instruction datasets and corpora for continued pre-training. Vikhr not only sets a new state of the art among open-source LLMs for Russian but even outperforms some proprietary closed-source models on certain benchmarks. The model weights, instruction sets, and code are publicly available.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in artificial intelligence, especially in complex decision-making scenarios, but their static problem-solving strategies often limit their adaptability to dynamic environments. We explore the enhancement of reasoning capabilities in LLMs through Temperature Tree ($T^2$) prompting via Particle Swarm Optimization, termed as $T^2$ of Thoughts ($T^2oT$). The primary focus is on enhancing decision-making processes by dynamically adjusting search parameters, especially temperature, to improve accuracy without increasing computational demands. We empirically validate that our hybrid $T^2oT$ approach yields enhancements in, single-solution accuracy, multi-solution generation and text generation quality. Our findings suggest that while dynamic search depth adjustments based on temperature can yield mixed results, a fixed search depth, when coupled with adaptive capabilities of $T^2oT$, provides a more reliable and versatile problem-solving strategy. This work highlights the potential for future explorations in optimizing algorithmic interactions with foundational language models, particularly illustrated by our development for the Game of 24 and Creative Writing tasks.
Powerful Large Language Models (large LMs or LLMs) such as BERT and GPT are making the task of detecting machine-generated text more and more prominent and crucial to minimize threats posed by text generation models misuse. Nonetheless, only a limited number of efforts exist so far, which can be classified into simple classifiers, zero-shot approaches, and fine-tuned LMs. These approaches usually rely on LMs whose discrimination accuracy decreases as the size difference in favor of the generator model increases (hence, a detector should always employ a LM with at least the same number of parameters of the source LM). Also, most of these approaches do not explicitly investigate whether the sentence syntactic structure can provide additional information that helps to build better detectors. All these considerations make the generalizing ability of detection methods into question. While generation techniques become more and more capable of producing human-like text, are the detection techniques capable of keeping up if not properly trained? In this paper, we evaluate the most effective (and reproducible) detection method available in the state of the art in order to figure out the limits in its robustness. We complement this analysis by discussing results obtained using a novel naive approach that demonstrably achieves comparable results in terms of robustness with respect to much more advanced and sophisticated state-of-the-art methods. Code with details on experiments are available at: https://github.com/bancaditalia/gen-text-detect.
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized language understanding and human-like text generation, drawing interest from many other fields with this question in mind: What else are the LLMs capable of? Despite their widespread adoption, ongoing research continues to explore new ways to integrate LLMs into diverse systems. This paper explores new techniques to harness the power of LLMs for 6G (6th Generation) wireless communication technologies, a domain where automation and intelligent systems are pivotal. The inherent adaptability of LLMs to domain-specific tasks positions them as prime candidates for enhancing wireless systems in the 6G landscape. We introduce a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) based framework that leverages LLMs for network deployment in wireless communications. Our approach involves training an RL agent, utilizing LLMs as its core, in an urban setting to maximize coverage. The agent's objective is to navigate the complexities of urban environments and identify the network parameters for optimal area coverage. Additionally, we integrate LLMs with Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to capitalize on their strengths while mitigating their limitations. The Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm is employed for training purposes. The results suggest that LLM-assisted models can outperform CNN-based models in some cases while performing at least as well in others.
Language Models (LMs) excel in understanding textual descriptions of proteins, as evident in biomedical question-answering tasks. However, their capability falters with raw protein data, such as amino acid sequences, due to a deficit in pretraining on such data. Conversely, Protein Language Models (PLMs) can understand and convert protein data into high-quality representations, but struggle to process texts. To address their limitations, we introduce ProtT3, a framework for Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding. ProtT3 empowers an LM to understand protein sequences of amino acids by incorporating a PLM as its protein understanding module, enabling effective protein-to-text generation. This collaboration between PLM and LM is facilitated by a cross-modal projector (i.e., Q-Former) that bridges the modality gap between the PLM's representation space and the LM's input space. Unlike previous studies focusing on protein property prediction and protein-text retrieval, we delve into the largely unexplored field of protein-to-text generation. To facilitate comprehensive benchmarks and promote future research, we establish quantitative evaluations for protein-text modeling tasks, including protein captioning, protein question-answering, and protein-text retrieval. Our experiments show that ProtT3 substantially surpasses current baselines, with ablation studies further highlighting the efficacy of its core components. Our code is available at https://github.com/acharkq/ProtT3.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent in various domains, their ability to process inputs of any length and maintain a degree of memory becomes essential. However, the one-off input of overly long texts is limited, as studies have shown that when input lengths exceed the LLMs' pre-trained text length, there is a dramatic decline in text generation capabilities. Moreover, simply extending the length of pre-training texts is impractical due to the difficulty in obtaining long text data and the substantial memory consumption costs this would entail for LLMs. Recent efforts have employed streaming inputs to alleviate the pressure of excessively long text inputs, but this approach can significantly impair the model's long-term memory capabilities. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Streaming Infinite Retentive LLM (SirLLM), which allows LLMs to maintain longer memory during infinite-length dialogues without the need for fine-tuning. SirLLM utilizes the Token Entropy metric and a memory decay mechanism to filter key phrases, endowing LLMs with both long-lasting and flexible memory. We designed three distinct tasks and constructed three datasets to measure the effectiveness of SirLLM from various angles: (1) DailyDialog; (2) Grocery Shopping; (3) Rock-Paper-Scissors. Our experimental results robustly demonstrate that SirLLM can achieve stable and significant improvements across different LLMs and tasks, compellingly proving its effectiveness. When having a coversation, "A sir could forget himself," but SirLLM never does! Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zoeyyao27/SirLLM
Textual image generation spans diverse fields like advertising, education, product packaging, social media, information visualization, and branding. Despite recent strides in language-guided image synthesis using diffusion models, current models excel in image generation but struggle with accurate text rendering and offer limited control over font attributes. In this paper, we aim to enhance the synthesis of high-quality images with precise text customization, thereby contributing to the advancement of image generation models. We call our proposed method CustomText. Our implementation leverages a pre-trained TextDiffuser model to enable control over font color, background, and types. Additionally, to address the challenge of accurately rendering small-sized fonts, we train the ControlNet model for a consistency decoder, significantly enhancing text-generation performance. We assess the performance of CustomText in comparison to previous methods of textual image generation on the publicly available CTW-1500 dataset and a self-curated dataset for small-text generation, showcasing superior results.
In the medical domain, numerous scenarios necessitate the long-form generation ability of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, when addressing patients' questions, it is essential that the model's response conveys factual claims, highlighting the need for an automated method to evaluate those claims. Thus, we introduce MedLFQA, a benchmark dataset reconstructed using long-form question-answering datasets related to the biomedical domain. We use MedLFQA to facilitate a cost-effective automatic evaluations of factuality. We also propose OLAPH, a simple and novel framework that utilizes cost-effective and multifaceted automatic evaluation to construct a synthetic preference set and answers questions in our preferred manner. Our framework leads us to train LLMs step-by-step to reduce hallucinations and include crucial medical claims. We highlight that, even on evaluation metrics not used during training, LLMs trained with our OLAPH framework demonstrate significant performance improvement in factuality. Our findings reveal that a 7B LLM trained with our OLAPH framework can provide long answers comparable to the medical experts' answers in terms of factuality. We believe that our work could shed light on gauging the long-text generation ability of LLMs in the medical domain. Our code and datasets are available.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionised the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and have achieved state-of-the-art performance in practically every task in this field. However, the prevalent approach used in text generation, Causal Language Modelling (CLM), which generates text sequentially from left to right, inherently limits the freedom of the model, which does not decide when and where each token is generated. In contrast, Masked Language Modelling (MLM), primarily used for language understanding tasks, can generate tokens anywhere in the text and any order. This paper conducts an extensive comparison of MLM and CLM approaches for text generation tasks. To do so, we pre-train several language models of comparable sizes on three different datasets, namely 1) medical discharge summaries, 2) movie plot synopses, and 3) authorship verification datasets. To assess the quality of the generations, we first employ quantitative metrics and then perform a qualitative human evaluation to analyse coherence and grammatical correctness. In addition, we evaluate the usefulness of the generated texts by using them in three different downstream tasks: 1) Entity Recognition, 2) Text Classification, and 3) Authorship Verification. The results show that MLM consistently outperforms CLM in text generation across all datasets, with higher quantitative scores and better coherence in the generated text. The study also finds \textit{no strong correlation} between the quality of the generated text and the performance of the models in the downstream tasks. With this study, we show that MLM for text generation has great potential for future research and provides direction for future studies in this area.
This study aims to leverage state of the art language models to automate generating the "Brief Hospital Course" and "Discharge Instructions" sections of Discharge Summaries from the MIMIC-IV dataset, reducing clinicians' administrative workload. We investigate how automation can improve documentation accuracy, alleviate clinician burnout, and enhance operational efficacy in healthcare facilities. This research was conducted within our participation in the Shared Task Discharge Me! at BioNLP @ ACL 2024. Various strategies were employed, including few-shot learning, instruction tuning, and Dynamic Expert Selection (DES), to develop models capable of generating the required text sections. Notably, utilizing an additional clinical domain-specific dataset demonstrated substantial potential to enhance clinical language processing. The DES method, which optimizes the selection of text outputs from multiple predictions, proved to be especially effective. It achieved the highest overall score of 0.332 in the competition, surpassing single-model outputs. This finding suggests that advanced deep learning methods in combination with DES can effectively automate parts of electronic health record documentation. These advancements could enhance patient care by freeing clinician time for patient interactions. The integration of text selection strategies represents a promising avenue for further research.
Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL's robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA's generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape.
Visual Language Tracking (VLT) enhances single object tracking (SOT) by integrating natural language descriptions from a video, for the precise tracking of a specified object. By leveraging high-level semantic information, VLT guides object tracking, alleviating the constraints associated with relying on a visual modality. Nevertheless, most VLT benchmarks are annotated in a single granularity and lack a coherent semantic framework to provide scientific guidance. Moreover, coordinating human annotators for high-quality annotations is laborious and time-consuming. To address these challenges, we introduce DTLLM-VLT, which automatically generates extensive and multi-granularity text to enhance environmental diversity. (1) DTLLM-VLT generates scientific and multi-granularity text descriptions using a cohesive prompt framework. Its succinct and highly adaptable design allows seamless integration into various visual tracking benchmarks. (2) We select three prominent benchmarks to deploy our approach: short-term tracking, long-term tracking, and global instance tracking. We offer four granularity combinations for these benchmarks, considering the extent and density of semantic information, thereby showcasing the practicality and versatility of DTLLM-VLT. (3) We conduct comparative experiments on VLT benchmarks with different text granularities, evaluating and analyzing the impact of diverse text on tracking performance. Conclusionally, this work leverages LLM to provide multi-granularity semantic information for VLT task from efficient and diverse perspectives, enabling fine-grained evaluation of multi-modal trackers. In the future, we believe this work can be extended to more datasets to support vision datasets understanding.
In recent years, the study of artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a paradigm shift. This has been propelled by the groundbreaking capabilities of generative models both in supervised and unsupervised learning scenarios. Generative AI has shown state-of-the-art performance in solving perplexing real-world conundrums in fields such as image translation, medical diagnostics, textual imagery fusion, natural language processing, and beyond. This paper documents the systematic review and analysis of recent advancements and techniques in Generative AI with a detailed discussion of their applications including application-specific models. Indeed, the major impact that generative AI has made to date, has been in language generation with the development of large language models, in the field of image translation and several other interdisciplinary applications of generative AI. Moreover, the primary contribution of this paper lies in its coherent synthesis of the latest advancements in these areas, seamlessly weaving together contemporary breakthroughs in the field. Particularly, how it shares an exploration of the future trajectory for generative AI. In conclusion, the paper ends with a discussion of Responsible AI principles, and the necessary ethical considerations for the sustainability and growth of these generative models.
Prompts play a crucial role in guiding the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the intricate role of individual tokens in prompts, known as input saliency, in shaping the responses remains largely underexplored. Existing saliency methods either misalign with LLM generation objectives or rely heavily on linearity assumptions, leading to potential inaccuracies. To address this, we propose Token Distribution Dynamics (TDD), a \textcolor{black}{simple yet effective} approach to unveil and manipulate the role of prompts in generating LLM outputs. TDD leverages the robust interpreting capabilities of the language model head (LM head) to assess input saliency. It projects input tokens into the embedding space and then estimates their significance based on distribution dynamics over the vocabulary. We introduce three TDD variants: forward, backward, and bidirectional, each offering unique insights into token relevance. Extensive experiments reveal that the TDD surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with a big margin in elucidating the causal relationships between prompts and LLM outputs. Beyond mere interpretation, we apply TDD to two prompt manipulation tasks for controlled text generation: zero-shot toxic language suppression and sentiment steering. Empirical results underscore TDD's proficiency in identifying both toxic and sentimental cues in prompts, subsequently mitigating toxicity or modulating sentiment in the generated content.
In this study, we propose an axiomatic system to define and quantify the precise memorization and in-context reasoning effects used by the large language model (LLM) for language generation. These effects are formulated as non-linear interactions between tokens/words encoded by the LLM. Specifically, the axiomatic system enables us to categorize the memorization effects into foundational memorization effects and chaotic memorization effects, and further classify in-context reasoning effects into enhanced inference patterns, eliminated inference patterns, and reversed inference patterns. Besides, the decomposed effects satisfy the sparsity property and the universal matching property, which mathematically guarantee that the LLM's confidence score can be faithfully decomposed into the memorization effects and in-context reasoning effects. Experiments show that the clear disentanglement of memorization effects and in-context reasoning effects enables a straightforward examination of detailed inference patterns encoded by LLMs.
Compositional generalization is an important ability of language models and has many different manifestations. For data-to-text generation, previous research on this ability is limited to a single manifestation called Systematicity and lacks consideration of large language models (LLMs), which cannot fully cover practical application scenarios. In this work, we propose SPOR, a comprehensive and practical evaluation method for compositional generalization in data-to-text generation. SPOR includes four aspects of manifestations (Systematicity, Productivity, Order invariance, and Rule learnability) and allows high-quality evaluation without additional manual annotations based on existing datasets. We demonstrate SPOR on two different datasets and evaluate some existing language models including LLMs. We find that the models are deficient in various aspects of the evaluation and need further improvement. Our work shows the necessity for comprehensive research on different manifestations of compositional generalization in data-to-text generation and provides a framework for evaluation.
This paper explores an automatic news generation and fact-checking system based on language processing, aimed at enhancing the efficiency and quality of news production while ensuring the authenticity and reliability of the news content. With the rapid development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep learning technologies, automatic news generation systems are capable of extracting key information from massive data and generating well-structured, fluent news articles. Meanwhile, by integrating fact-checking technology, the system can effectively prevent the spread of false news and improve the accuracy and credibility of news. This study details the key technologies involved in automatic news generation and factchecking, including text generation, information extraction, and the application of knowledge graphs, and validates the effectiveness of these technologies through experiments. Additionally, the paper discusses the future development directions of automatic news generation and fact-checking systems, emphasizing the importance of further integration and innovation of technologies. The results show that with continuous technological optimization and practical application, these systems will play an increasingly important role in the future news industry, providing more efficient and reliable news services.
Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching billions of parameters. These huge models are memory hungry and incur significant inference latency even on cutting edge AI-accelerators, such as GPUs. Specifically, the time and memory complexity of the attention operation is quadratic in terms of the total context length, i.e., prompt and output tokens. Thus, several optimizations such as key-value tensor caching and FlashAttention computation have been proposed to deliver the low latency demands of applications relying on such large models. However, these techniques do not cater to the computationally distinct nature of different phases during inference. To that end, we propose LeanAttention, a scalable technique of computing self-attention for the token-generation phase (decode-phase) of decoder-only transformer models. LeanAttention enables scaling the attention mechanism implementation for the challenging case of long context lengths by re-designing the execution flow for the decode-phase. We identify that the associative property of online softmax can be treated as a reduction operation thus allowing us to parallelize the attention computation over these large context lengths. We extend the "stream-K" style reduction of tiled calculation to self-attention to enable parallel computation resulting in an average of 2.6x attention execution speedup over FlashAttention-2 and up to 8.33x speedup for 512k context lengths.