Holistically measuring societal biases of large language models is crucial for detecting and reducing ethical risks in highly capable AI models. In this work, we present a Chinese Bias Benchmark dataset that consists of over 100K questions jointly constructed by human experts and generative language models, covering stereotypes and societal biases in 14 social dimensions related to Chinese culture and values. The curation process contains 4 essential steps: bias identification, ambiguous context generation, AI-assisted disambiguous context generation, and manual review and recomposition. The testing instances in the dataset are automatically derived from 3K+ high-quality templates manually authored with stringent quality control. The dataset exhibits wide coverage and high diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset in evaluating model bias, with all 12 publicly available Chinese large language models exhibiting strong bias in certain categories. Additionally, we observe from our experiments that fine-tuned models could, to a certain extent, heed instructions and avoid generating harmful outputs, in the way of “moral self-correction”. Our dataset is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CBBQ-B860/.

Instruction tuning has demonstrated its superiority in unlocking the abilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), including their capability to respond to diverse human instructions and conduct complex reasoning. In order to further enhance the continuous learning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs, we explore the training process of instruction tuning through the lens of task sequences. We propose a 2-phase automated curriculum learning guided instruction tuning framework, IT2ACL that learns easy-to-hard instructions for LLMs in a self-adjusting dynamic manner. To facilitate curriculum learning from instructions, we propose a loss-driven progress signal for two-phase strategies: instruction prediction gain that decides the instruction level syllabus. Through comprehensive experiments on 70 Chinese datasets which have been grouped into 16 distinct task clusters, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in eliciting latent ability in pre-trained LLMs and achieving superior performance across diverse tasks.

Although contextualized embeddings generated from large-scale pre-trained models perform well in many tasks, traditional static embeddings (e.g., Skip-gram, Word2Vec) still play an important role in low-resource and lightweight settings due to their low computational cost, ease of deployment, and stability. In this paper, we aim to improve word embeddings by 1) incorporating more contextual information from existing pre-trained models into the Skip-gram framework, which we call Context-to-Vec; 2) proposing a post-processing retrofitting method for static embeddings independent of training by employing priori synonym knowledge and weighted vector distribution. Through extrinsic and intrinsic tasks, our methods are well proven to outperform the baselines by a large margin.

Recently, prompt tuning (PT) has gained increasing attention as a parameter-efficient way of tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs). Despite extensively reducing the number of tunable parameters and achieving satisfying performance, PT is training-inefficient due to its slow convergence. To improve PT’s training efficiency, we first make some novel observations about the prompt transferability of “partial PLMs”, which are defined by compressing a PLM in depth or width. We observe that the soft prompts learned by different partial PLMs of various sizes are similar in the parameter space, implying that these soft prompts could potentially be transferred among partial PLMs. Inspired by these observations, we propose Fast Prompt Tuning (FPT), which starts by conducting PT using a small-scale partial PLM, and then progressively expands its depth and width until the full-model size. After each expansion, we recycle the previously learned soft prompts as initialization for the enlarged partial PLM and then proceed PT. We demonstrate the feasibility of FPT on 5 tasks and show that FPT could save over 30% training computations while achieving comparable performance. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/thunlp/FastPromptTuning.

Existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often computationally expensive in inference, making them impractical in various resource-limited real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose a dynamic token reduction approach to accelerate PLMs’ inference, named TR-BERT, which could flexibly adapt the layer number of each token in inference to avoid redundant calculation. Specially, TR-BERT formulates the token reduction process as a multi-step token selection problem and automatically learns the selection strategy via reinforcement learning. The experimental results on several downstream NLP tasks show that TR-BERT is able to speed up BERT by 2-5 times to satisfy various performance demands. Moreover, TR-BERT can also achieve better performance with less computation in a suite of long-text tasks since its token-level layer number adaption greatly accelerates the self-attention operation in PLMs. The source code and experiment details of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/TR-BERT.