AI Papers of the Week
Every paper worth reading in AI, hand-picked one week at a time.
DataGemma
includes a series of fine-tuned Gemma 2 models to help LLMs access and incorporate numerical and statistical data; proposes a new approach called Retrieval Interleaved Generation (RIG) which can reliably incorporate public statistical data from Data Commons into LLM responses; RIG is a tool-inspired approach, can interleave statistical tokens with natural language questions suitable for retrieval from Data Commons; to attain such capability, they fine-tune the LLM on an instruction-response dataset generated with the help of Gemini 1.5; the RIG approach improves factuality from 5-7% to about 58%.
Can LLMs Unlock Novel Scientific Research Ideas
investigates whether LLM can generate novel scientific research ideas; reports that Claude and GPT models tend to align more with the author's perspectives on future research ideas; this is measured across different domains like science, economics, and medicine.
AlphaProteo
presents a family of ML models trained for protein design; reports a 3-to 300-fold better binding affinities and higher experimental success rates compared to other existing methods on seven target proteins; shows that AlphaProteo’s performance on hundreds of target proteins from the PDB is comparable to the seven targets.
Effective of AI on High Skilled Work
studies the impact of generative AI on software developers; reveals a 26.08% increase in the number of completed tasks among the developers that use AI tools like GitHub Copilot; also shows that less experienced developers are likely to adopt the AI tools and have greater productivity gains.
LongCite
synthesizes a large-scale SFT dataset with off-the-shelf LLMs to improve long-context question answering with citations; it trains 8B and 9B parameter models that enhance citation generation capabilities from lengthy contexts while improving response correctness; claims to even surpass GPT-4o on their proposed LongBench-Cite benchmark.
Smaller, Weaker, Yet Better
finds that weaker + cheaper (WC) models can generate better synthetic data for fine-tuning models compared to data generated with stronger but more expensive models; overall, results suggest that WC models may be a compute-optimal approach for training advanced LLM reasoners.
Foundation Models for Music
provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art pre-trained models and foundation models in music.
Guide to Continual Multimodal Pretraining
a comprehensive guide on continual multimodal pertaining; introduces FoMo-In-Flux, a large-scale fine-grained and long horizon continual pretraining benchmark.
LLM Pruning and Distillation in Practice
provides a comprehensive report on effective methods for compressing Llama 3.1 and Mistral NeMo models; it presents pruning and distillation approaches applied to the original models to produce 4B and 8B parameter models, respectively; before pruning, they also fine-tune the teacher model on their datasets leading to better distillation; their compression strategy yields a state-of-the-art 8B model (MN-Minitron-8B) which outperforms all similarly-sized models on common language modeling benchmarks.
Challenges and Responses in the Practice of LLMs
curates a set of important questions with insightful answers; questions are categorized across topics such as infrastructure, software architecture, data, application, and brain science.
LongWriter
proposes AgentWrite to enable off-the-shelf LLMs to generate coherent outputs beyond 20K words; AgentWrite breaks down the long generation task into subtasks and in a divide-and-conquer approach generates; the agent breaks the task into multiple writing subtasks and concatenates the outputs to get a final output (i.e., plan + write); the approach is then used to build SFT datasets that are used to tune LLMs to generate coherent longer outputs automatically; a 9B parameter model, further improved through DPO, achieves state-of-the-art performance on their benchmark, and surpasses proprietary models.
HybridRAG
combines GraphRAG and VectorRAG leading to a HybridRAG system that outperforms both individually; it was tested on a set of financial earning call transcripts. Combining the advantages of both approaches provides more accurate answers to queries.
rStar
introduces self-play mutual reasoning to improve the reasoning capabilities of small language models without fine-tuning or superior models; MCTS is augmented with human-like reasoning actions, obtained from SLMs, to build richer reasoning trajectories; a separate SLM provides unsupervised feedback on the trajectories and the target SLM selects the final reasoning trajectory as the answer; rStar boosts GSM8K accuracy from 12.51% to 63.91% for LLaMA2-7B and consistently improves the accuracy of other SLMs.
Transformer Explainer
presents an open-source interactive tool to learn about the inner workings of a Transformer model; it runs a GPT-2 instance locally in the user's browser and allows experimenting with your own inputs.
Conversational Prompt Engineering
proposes an approach to help users create personalized prompts by articulating the preferred outputs via interactions; it involves two stages: 1) an initial instruction shaped by the model based on user-provided unlabeled data, and 2) the model shares the output and the user provides feedback with refinements on outputs and instruction; this iterative process results in a personalized few-shot prompt that performs better and more optimally on the desired task.
Machine Unlearning Survey
provides a comprehensive survey on machine unlearning in generative AI.
Teaching LLM Agents to Self-Improve
claims it is possible to iteratively fine-tune LLMs with the ability to improve their own response over multiple turns with additional environment feedback; the LLM learns to recursively detect and correct its previous mistakes in subsequent iterations; improves the self-improvement abilities of 7B models on reasoning tasks (GSM8K and MATH), attaining an improvement over turns that’s unseen in strong proprietary models.
Text-to-SQL Survey
provides a survey on employing LLMs for Text-to-SQL tasks, including prompt engineering techniques, fine-tuning methods, benchmarks, and more.
A Survey of Prompt Engineering Methods in LLMs
a collection of prompt engineering methods for a variety of NLP tasks.
Distilling System 2 into System 1
investigates self-supervised methods to distill high-quality outputs from System 2 techniques and then fine-tune System 1 to match the predictions of the System 2 technique but without generating intermediate steps; the process of distilling reasoning into System 1 results in less inference cost.
Beyond Euclid
provides an illustrated guide and graphical taxonomy of recent advances in non-Euclidean machine learning.
RankRAG
introduces a new instruction fine-tuning framework to perform effective context ranking and answering generation to enhance an LLM’s RAG capabilities; it leverages a small ranking dataset to outperform existing expert ranking models; shows that a Llama3-RankRAG significantly outperforms Llama3-ChatQA-1.5 and GPT-4 models on nine knowledge-intensive benchmarks.
CriticGPT
a new model based on GPT-4 to help write critiques for responses generated by ChatGPT; trained using RLHF using a large number of inputs that contained mistakes for which it had to critique; built to help human trainers spot mistakes during RLHF and claims that CriticGPT critiques are preferred by trainers over ChatGPT critiques in 63% of cases on naturally occurring bugs.
Scaling Synthetic Data Creation
proposes 1 billion diverse personas to facilitate the creation of diverse synthetic data for different scenarios; uses a novel persona-driven data synthesis methodology to generate diverse and distinct data covering a wide range of perspectives; to measure the quality of the synthetic datasets, they performed an out-of-distribution evaluation on MATH. A fine-tuned model on their synthesized 1.07M math problems achieves 64.9% on MATH, matching the performance of gpt-4-turbo-preview at only a 7B scale.