In-context learning(ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability. Unfortunately, ICL suffers from the demonstration bias, i.e., its performance and robustness are severely affected by the selection and ordering of demonstrations. In this paper, we identify that such demonstration bias may primarily stem from the semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations, i.e., a demonstration may indicate multiple input-to-label mappings and its mapping can be interpreted differently in different contexts by LLMs. Such semantic ambiguity disrupts task comprehension during ICL and results in performance fluctuations. To resolve the semantic ambiguity problem, this paper further proposes two de-biasing strategies to mitigate demonstration bias in in-context learning. Experiments on six datasets show that our methods can effectively alleviate demonstration bias and significantly improve task performance.

Embodied agents equipped with GPT as their brain have exhibited extraordinary decision-making and generalization abilities across various tasks. However, existing zero-shot agents for vision-and-language navigation (VLN) only prompt the GPT-4 to select potential locations within localized environments, without constructing an effective “global-view” for the agent to understand the overall environment. In this work, we present a novel **map**-guided **GPT**-based agent, dubbed **MapGPT**, which introduces an online linguistic-formed map to encourage the global exploration. Specifically, we build an online map and incorporate it into the prompts that include node information and topological relationships, to help GPT understand the spatial environment. Benefiting from this design, we further propose an adaptive planning mechanism to assist the agent in performing multi-step path planning based on a map, systematically exploring multiple candidate nodes or sub-goals step by step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MapGPT is applicable to both GPT-4 and GPT-4V, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on the R2R and REVERIE simultaneously (~10% and ~12% improvements in SR), and showcasing the newly emergent global thinking and path planning abilities of the GPT.

In this paper, we revisit the solving bias when evaluating models on current Math Word Problem (MWP) benchmarks. However, current solvers exist solving bias which consists of data bias and learning bias due to biased dataset and improper training strategy. Our experiments verify MWP solvers are easy to be biased by the biased training datasets which do not cover diverse questions for each problem narrative of all MWPs, thus a solver can only learn shallow heuristics rather than deep semantics for understanding problems. Besides, an MWP can be naturally solved by multiple equivalent equations while current datasets take only one of the equivalent equations as ground truth, forcing the model to match the labeled ground truth and ignoring other equivalent equations. Here, we first introduce a novel MWP dataset named UnbiasedMWP which is constructed by varying the grounded expressions in our collected data and annotating them with corresponding multiple new questions manually. Then, to further mitigate learning bias, we propose a Dynamic Target Selection (DTS) Strategy to dynamically select more suitable target expressions according to the longest prefix match between the current model output and candidate equivalent equations which are obtained by applying commutative law during training. The results show that our UnbiasedMWP has significantly fewer biases than its original data and other datasets, posing a promising benchmark for fairly evaluating the solvers’ reasoning skills rather than matching nearest neighbors. And the solvers trained with our DTS achieve higher accuracies on multiple MWP benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/UnbiasedMWP.

Recently, deep learning models have made great progress in MWP solving on answer accuracy. However, they are uninterpretable since they mainly rely on shallow heuristics to achieve high performance without understanding and reasoning the grounded math logic. To address this issue and make a step towards interpretable MWP solving, we first construct a high-quality MWP dataset named InterMWP which consists of 11,495 MWPs and annotates interpretable logical formulas based on algebraic knowledge as the grounded linguistic logic of each solution equation. Different from existing MWP datasets, our InterMWP benchmark asks for a solver to not only output the solution expressions but also predict the corresponding logical formulas. We further propose a novel approach with logical prompt and interpretation generation, called LogicSolver. For each MWP, our LogicSolver first retrieves some highly-correlated algebraic knowledge and then passes them to the backbone model as prompts to improve the semantic representations of MWPs. With these improved semantic representations, our LogicSolver generates corresponding solution expressions and interpretable knowledge formulas in accord with the generated solution expressions, simultaneously. Experimental results show that our LogicSolver has stronger logical formula-based interpretability than baselines while achieving higher answer accuracy with the help of logical prompts, simultaneously. The source code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/yangzhch6/InterMWP.

Geometry problem solving is a well-recognized testbed for evaluating the high-level multi-modal reasoning capability of deep models. In most existing works, two main geometry problems: calculation and proving, are usually treated as two specific tasks, hindering a deep model to unify its reasoning capability on multiple math tasks. However, in essence, these two tasks have similar problem representations and overlapped math knowledge which can improve the understanding and reasoning ability of a deep model on both two tasks. Therefore, we construct a large-scale Unified Geometry problem benchmark, UniGeo, which contains 4,998 calculation problems and 9,543 proving problems. Each proving problem is annotated with a multi-step proof with reasons and mathematical expressions. The proof can be easily reformulated as a proving sequence that shares the same formats with the annotated program sequence for calculation problems. Naturally, we also present a unified multi-task Geometric Transformer framework, Geoformer, to tackle calculation and proving problems simultaneously in the form of sequence generation, which finally shows the reasoning ability can be improved on both two tasks by unifying formulation. Furthermore, we propose a Mathematical Expression Pretraining (MEP) method that aims to predict the mathematical expressions in the problem solution, thus improving the Geoformer model. Experiments on the UniGeo demonstrate that our proposed Geoformer obtains state-of-the-art performance by outperforming task-specific model NGS with over 5.6% and 3.2% accuracies on calculation and proving problems, respectively.