With the development of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), improving the safety of LLMs has become more critical. However, the current approaches for aligning the LLMs output with expected safety usually require substantial training efforts, e.g., high-quality safety data and expensive computational resources, which are costly and inefficient. To this end, we present reverse prompt contrastive decoding (ROSE), a simple-yet-effective method to directly boost the safety of existing instruction-tuned LLMs without any additional training. The principle of ROSE is to improve the probability of desired safe output via suppressing the undesired output induced by the carefully-designed reverse prompts. Experiments on 6 safety and 2 general-purpose tasks show that, our ROSE not only brings consistent and significant safety improvements (up to +13.8% safety score) upon 5 types of instruction-tuned LLMs, but also benefits the general-purpose ability of LLMs. In-depth analyses explore the underlying mechanism of ROSE, and reveal when and where to use it.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a common approach to compress a teacher model to reduce its inference cost and memory footprint, by training a smaller student model. However, in the context of autoregressive language models (LMs), we empirically find that larger teacher LMs might dramatically result in a poorer student. In response to this problem, we conduct a series of analyses and reveal that different tokens have different teaching modes, neglecting which will lead to performance degradation. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive teaching approach (ATKD) to improve the KD. The core of ATKD is to reduce rote learning and make teaching more diverse and flexible. Extensive experiments on 8 LM tasks show that, with the help of ATKD, various baseline KD methods can achieve consistent and significant performance gains (up to +3.04% average score) across all model types and sizes. More encouragingly, ATKD can improve the student model generalization effectively.

Quantization is a promising approach for reducing memory overhead and accelerating inference, especially in large pre-trained language model (PLM) scenarios. While having no access to original training data due to security and privacy concerns has emerged the demand for zero-shot quantization. Most of the cutting-edge zero-shot quantization methods primarily 1) apply to computer vision tasks, and 2) neglect of overfitting problem in the generative adversarial learning process, leading to sub-optimal performance. Motivated by this, we propose a novel zero-shot sharpness-aware quantization (ZSAQ) framework for the zero-shot quantization of various PLMs. The key algorithm in solving ZSAQ is the SAM-SGA optimization, which aims to improve the quantization accuracy and model generalization via optimizing a minimax problem. We theoretically prove the convergence rate for the minimax optimization problem and this result can be applied to other nonconvex-PL minimax optimization frameworks. Extensive experiments on 11 tasks demonstrate that our method brings consistent and significant performance gains on both discriminative and generative PLMs, i.e., up to +6.98 average score. Furthermore, we empirically validate that our method can effectively improve the model generalization.

Masked language modeling, widely used in discriminative language model (e.g., BERT) pretraining, commonly adopts a random masking strategy. However, random masking does not consider the importance of the different words in the sentence meaning, where some of them are more worthy to be predicted. Therefore, various masking strategies (e.g., entity-level masking) are proposed, but most of them require expensive prior knowledge and generally train from scratch without reusing existing model weights. In this paper, we present Self-Evolution learning (SE), a simple and effective token masking and learning method to fully and wisely exploit the knowledge from data. SE focuses on learning the informative yet under-explored tokens and adaptively regularizes the training by introducing a novel Token-specific Label Smoothing approach. Experiments on 10 tasks show that our SE brings consistent and significant improvements (+1.43 2.12 average scores) upon different PLMs. In-depth analyses demonstrate that SE improves linguistic knowledge learning and generalization.

Token dropping is a recently-proposed strategy to speed up the pretraining of masked language models, such as BERT, by skipping the computation of a subset of the input tokens at several middle layers. It can effectively reduce the training time without degrading much performance on downstream tasks. However, we empirically find that token dropping is prone to a semantic loss problem and falls short in handling semantic-intense tasks. Motivated by this, we propose a simple yet effective semantic-consistent learning method (ScTD) to improve the token dropping. ScTD aims to encourage the model to learn how to preserve the semantic information in the representation space. Extensive experiments on 12 tasks show that, with the help of our ScTD, token dropping can achieve consistent and significant performance gains across all task types and model sizes. More encouragingly, ScTD saves up to 57% of pretraining time and brings up to +1.56% average improvement over the vanilla token dropping.

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models on a limited training corpus usually suffers from poor generalization. Prior works show that the recently-proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization method can improve the model generalization. However, SAM adds a perturbation to each model parameter equally (but not all parameters contribute equally to the optimization of training), which we argue is sub-optimal and will lead to excessive computation. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization procedure, namely FSAM, which introduces a Fisher mask to improve the efficiency and performance of SAM. In short, instead of adding perturbation to all parameters, FSAM uses the Fisher information to identity the important parameters and formulates a Fisher mask to obtain the sparse perturbation, i.e., making the optimizer focus on these important parameters. Experiments on various tasks in GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks show that FSAM consistently outperforms the vanilla SAM by 0.67 1.98 average score among four different pretrained models. We also empirically show that FSAM works well in other complex scenarios, e.g., fine-tuning on generation tasks or limited training data. Encouragingly, when training data is limited, FSAM improves the SAM by a large margin, i.e., up to 15.1.