Zeqi Lin


2023

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Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier
Yifei Li | Zeqi Lin | Shizhuo Zhang | Qiang Fu | Bei Chen | Jian-Guang Lou | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Few-shot learning is a challenging task that requires language models to generalize from limited examples. Large language models like GPT-3 and PaLM have made impressive progress in this area, but they still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K, a benchmark for arithmetic problems. To improve their reasoning skills, previous work has proposed to guide the language model with prompts that elicit a series of reasoning steps before giving the final answer, achieving a significant improvement on GSM8K from 17.9% to 58.1% in problem-solving rate. In this paper, we present DiVeRSe (Diverse Verifier on Reasoning Step), a novel approach that further enhances the reasoning capability of language models. DiVeRSe has three main components: first, it generates diverse prompts to explore different reasoning paths for the same question; second, it uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme; and third, it verifies each reasoning step individually instead of the whole chain. We evaluate DiVeRSe on the latest language model code-davinci-002 and show that it achieves new state-of-the-art results on six of eight reasoning benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K 74.4% to 83.2%).

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How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization?
Shengnan An | Zeqi Lin | Qiang Fu | Bei Chen | Nanning Zheng | Jian-Guang Lou | Dongmei Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Compositional generalization–understanding unseen combinations of seen primitives–is an essential reasoning capability in human intelligence.The AI community mainly studies this capability by fine-tuning neural networks on lots of training samples, while it is still unclear whether and how in-context learning–the prevailing few-shot paradigm based on large language models–exhibits compositional generalization.In this paper, we present CoFe, a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization.We find that the compositional generalization performance can be easily affected by the selection of in-context examples, thus raising the research question what the key factors are to make good in-context examples for compositional generalization.We study three potential factors: similarity, diversity and complexity. Our systematic experiments indicate that in-context examples should be structurally similar to the test case, diverse from each other, and individually simple.Furthermore, two strong limitations are observed: in-context compositional generalization on fictional words is much weaker than that on commonly used ones; it is still critical that the in-context examples should cover required linguistic structures, even though the backbone model has been pre-trained on large corpus.We hope our analysis would facilitate the understanding and utilization of in-context learning paradigm.

2022

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When Language Model Meets Private Library
Daoguang Zan | Bei Chen | Zeqi Lin | Bei Guan | Wang Yongji | Jian-Guang Lou
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

With the rapid development of pre-training techniques, a number of language models have been pre-trained on large-scale code corpora and perform well in code generation. In this paper, we investigate how to equip pre-trained language models with the ability of code generation for private libraries. In practice, it is common for programmers to write code using private libraries. However, this is a challenge for language models since they have never seen private APIs during training. Motivated by the fact that private libraries usually come with elaborate API documentation, we propose a novel framework with two modules: the APIRetriever finds useful APIs, and then the APICoder generates code using these APIs. For APIRetriever, we present a dense retrieval system and also design a friendly interaction to involve uses. For APICoder, we can directly use off-the-shelf language models, or continually pre-train the base model on a code corpus containing API information. Both modules are trained with data from public libraries and can be generalized to private ones. Furthermore, we craft three benchmarks for private libraries, named TorchDataEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval. Experimental results demonstrate the impressive performance of our framework.

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Reasoning Like Program Executors
Xinyu Pi | Qian Liu | Bei Chen | Morteza Ziyadi | Zeqi Lin | Qiang Fu | Yan Gao | Jian-Guang Lou | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reasoning over natural language is a long-standing goal for the research community. However, studies have shown that existing language models are inadequate in reasoning. To address the issue, we present POET, a novel reasoning pre-training paradigm. Through pre-training language models with programs and their execution results, POET empowers language models to harvest the reasoning knowledge possessed by program executors via a data-driven approach. POET is conceptually simple and can be instantiated by different kinds of program executors. In this paper, we showcase two simple instances POET-Math and POET-Logic, in addition to a complex instance, POET-SQL. Experimental results on six benchmarks demonstrate that POET can significantly boost model performance in natural language reasoning, such as numerical reasoning, logical reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning. POET opens a new gate on reasoning-enhancement pre-training, and we hope our analysis would shed light on the future research of reasoning like program executors.

2021

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Learning Algebraic Recombination for Compositional Generalization
Chenyao Liu | Shengnan An | Zeqi Lin | Qian Liu | Bei Chen | Jian-Guang Lou | Lijie Wen | Nanning Zheng | Dongmei Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021