The introduction of large language models has significantly advanced code generation. However, open-source models often lack the execution capabilities and iterative refinement of advanced systems like the GPT-4 Code Interpreter. To address this, we introduce OpenCodeInterpreter, a family of open-source code systems designed for generating, executing, and iteratively refining code. Supported by Code Feedback, a dataset featuring 68K multi-turn interactions, OpenCodeInterpreter integrates execution and human feedback for dynamic code refinement. Our comprehensive evaluation of OpenCodeInterpreter across key benchmarks such as HumanEval, MBPP, and their enhanced versions from EvalPlus reveals its exceptional performance. Notably, OpenCodeInterpreter-33B achieves an accuracy of 83.2 (76.4) on the average (and plus versions) of HumanEval and MBPP, closely rivaling GPT-4’s 84.2 (76.2) and further elevates to 91.6 (84.6) with synthesized human feedback from GPT-4. OpenCodeInterpreterbrings the gap between open-source code generation models and proprietary systems like GPT-4 Code Interpreter.

Modern generative search engines enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) responses by providing cited evidence. However, evaluating the answer’s attribution, i.e., whether every claim within the generated responses is fully supported by its cited evidence, remains an open problem. This verification, traditionally dependent on costly human evaluation, underscores the urgent need for automatic attribution evaluation methods. To bridge the gap in the absence of standardized benchmarks for these methods, we present AttributionBench, a comprehensive benchmark compiled from various existing attribution datasets. Our extensive experiments on AttributionBench reveal the challenges of automatic attribution evaluation, even for state-of-the-art LLMs. Specifically, our findings show that even a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 only achieves around 80% macro-F1 under a binary classification formulation. A detailed analysis of more than 300 error cases indicates that a majority of failures stem from the model’s inability to process nuanced information, and the discrepancy between the information the model has access to and that human annotators do.

Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 5-44 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model’s generalizability. We open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral components in various autonomous agent systems.In this study, we present an exploration-based trajectory optimization approach, referred to as ETO. This learning method is designed to enhance the performance of open LLM agents. Contrary to previous studies that exclusively train on successful expert trajectories, our method allows agents to learn from their exploration failures. This leads to improved performance through an iterative optimization framework. During the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment while completing given tasks, gathering failure trajectories to create contrastive trajectory pairs. In the subsequent training phase, the agent utilizes these trajectory preference pairs to update its policy using contrastive learning methods like DPO. This iterative cycle of exploration and training fosters continued improvement in the agents. Our experiments on three complex tasks demonstrate that ETO consistently surpasses baseline performance by a large margin. Furthermore, an examination of task-solving efficiency and potential in scenarios lacking expert trajectory underscores the effectiveness of our approach.

This study investigates the concept of the ‘right to be forgotten’ within the context of large language models (LLMs). We explore machine unlearning as a pivotal solution, with a focus on pre-trained models–a notably under-researched area. Our research delineates a comprehensive framework for machine unlearning in pre-trained LLMs, encompassing a critical analysis of seven diverse unlearning methods. Through rigorous evaluation using curated datasets from arXiv, books, and GitHub, we establish a robust benchmark for unlearning performance, demonstrating that these methods are over 10⁵ times more computationally efficient than retraining. Our results show that integrating gradient ascent with gradient descent on in-distribution data improves hyperparameter robustness. We also provide detailed guidelines for efficient hyperparameter tuning in the unlearning process. Our findings advance the discourse on ethical AI practices, offering substantive insights into the mechanics of machine unlearning for pre-trained LLMs and underscoring the potential for responsible AI development.

In the rapidly advancing field of conditional image generation research, challenges such as limited explainability lie in effectively evaluating the performance and capabilities of various models. This paper introduces VIEScore, a Visual Instruction-guided Explainable metric for evaluating any conditional image generation tasks. VIEScore leverages general knowledge from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as the backbone and does not require training or fine-tuning. We evaluate VIEScore on seven prominent tasks in conditional image tasks and found: (1) VIEScore (GPT4-o) achieves a high Spearman correlation of 0.4 with human evaluations, while the human-to-human correlation is 0.45. (2) VIEScore (with open-source MLLM) is significantly weaker than GPT-4o and GPT-4v in evaluating synthetic images. (3) VIEScore achieves a correlation on par with human ratings in the generation tasks but struggles in editing tasks. With these results, we believe VIEScore shows its great potential to replace human judges in evaluating image synthesis tasks.

We introduce TacoBot, a user-centered task-oriented digital assistant designed to guide users through complex real-world tasks with multiple steps. Covering a wide range of cooking and how-to tasks, we aim to deliver a collaborative and engaging dialogue experience. Equipped with language understanding, dialogue management, and response generation components supported by a robust search engine, TacoBot ensures efficient task assistance. To enhance the dialogue experience, we explore a series of data augmentation strategies using LLMs to train advanced neural models continuously. TacoBot builds upon our successful participation in the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, where our team secured third place among ten competing teams. We offer TacoBot as an open-source framework that serves as a practical example for deploying task-oriented dialogue systems.

A recent focus of large language model (LLM) development, as exemplified by generative search engines, is to incorporate external references to generate and support its claims. However, evaluating the attribution, i.e., verifying whether the generated statement is fully supported by the cited reference, remains an open problem. Although human evaluation is common practice, it is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we investigate automatic evaluation of attribution given by LLMs. We begin by defining different types of attribution errors, and then explore two approaches for automatic evaluation: prompting LLMs and fine-tuning smaller LMs. The fine-tuning data is repurposed from related tasks such as question answering, fact-checking, natural language inference, and summarization. We manually curate a set of test examples covering 12 domains from a generative search engine, New Bing. Our results on this curated test set and simulated examples from existing benchmarks highlight both promising signals and challenges. We hope our problem formulation, testbeds, and findings will help lay the foundation for future studies on this important problem.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, it is difficult to know whether the models are reasoning based on deep understandings of truth and logic, or leveraging their memorized patterns in a relatively superficial way. In this work, we explore testing LLMs’ reasoning by engaging with them in a debate-like conversation, where given a question, the LLM and the user need to discuss to make the correct decision starting from opposing arguments. Upon mitigating the Clever Hans effect, our task requires the LLM to not only achieve the correct answer on its own, but also be able to hold and defend its belief instead of blindly believing or getting misled by the user’s (invalid) arguments and critiques, thus testing in greater depth whether the LLM grasps the essence of the reasoning required to solve the problem. Across a range of complex reasoning benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, logic and BIG-Bench tasks, we find that despite their impressive performance as reported in existing work on generating correct step-by-step solutions in the beginning, LLMs like ChatGPT cannot maintain their beliefs in truth for a significant portion of examples when challenged by oftentimes absurdly invalid arguments. Our work points to danger zones of model alignment, and also suggests more careful treatments and interpretations of the recent findings that LLMs can improve their responses based on feedback.

Privacy concerns have attracted increasing attention in data-driven products due to the tendency of machine learning models to memorize sensitive training data. Generating synthetic versions of such data with a formal privacy guarantee, such as differential privacy (DP), provides a promising path to mitigating these privacy concerns, but previous approaches in this direction have typically failed to produce synthetic data of high quality. In this work, we show that a simple and practical recipe in the text domain is effective: simply fine-tuning a pretrained generative language model with DP enables the model to generate useful synthetic text with strong privacy protection. Through extensive empirical analyses on both benchmark and private customer data, we demonstrate that our method produces synthetic text that is competitive in terms of utility with its non-private counterpart, meanwhile providing strong protection against potential privacy leakages.

Synthesizing QA pairs with a question generator (QG) on the target domain has become a popular approach for domain adaptation of question answering (QA) models. Since synthetic questions are often noisy in practice, existing work adapts scores from a pretrained QA (or QG) model as criteria to select high-quality questions. However, these scores do not directly serve the ultimate goal of improving QA performance on the target domain. In this paper, we introduce a novel idea of training a question value estimator (QVE) that directly estimates the usefulness of synthetic questions for improving the target-domain QA performance. By conducting comprehensive experiments, we show that the synthetic questions selected by QVE can help achieve better target-domain QA performance, in comparison with existing techniques. We additionally show that by using such questions and only around 15% of the human annotations on the target domain, we can achieve comparable performance to the fully-supervised baselines.

We consider the problem of pretraining a two-stage open-domain question answering (QA) system (retriever + reader) with strong transfer capabilities. The key challenge is how to construct a large amount of high-quality question-answer-context triplets without task-specific annotations. Specifically, the triplets should align well with downstream tasks by: (i) covering a wide range of domains (for open-domain applications), (ii) linking a question to its semantically relevant context with supporting evidence (for training the retriever), and (iii) identifying the correct answer in the context (for training the reader). Previous pretraining approaches generally fall short of one or more of these requirements. In this work, we automatically construct a large-scale corpus that meets all three criteria by consulting millions of references cited within Wikipedia. The well-aligned pretraining signals benefit both the retriever and the reader significantly. Our pretrained retriever leads to 2%-10% absolute gains in top-20 accuracy. And with our pretrained reader, the entire system improves by up to 4% in exact match.

We present a large, challenging dataset, COUGH, for COVID-19 FAQ retrieval. Similar to a standard FAQ dataset, COUGH consists of three parts: FAQ Bank, Query Bank and Relevance Set. The FAQ Bank contains ~16K FAQ items scraped from 55 credible websites (e.g., CDC and WHO). For evaluation, we introduce Query Bank and Relevance Set, where the former contains 1,236 human-paraphrased queries while the latter contains ~32 human-annotated FAQ items for each query. We analyze COUGH by testing different FAQ retrieval models built on top of BM25 and BERT, among which the best model achieves 48.8 under P@5, indicating a great challenge presented by COUGH and encouraging future research for further improvement. Our COUGH dataset is available at https://github.com/sunlab-osu/covid-faq.

De-identification is the task of identifying protected health information (PHI) in the clinical text. Existing neural de-identification models often fail to generalize to a new dataset. We propose a simple yet effective data augmentation method PHICON to alleviate the generalization issue. PHICON consists of PHI augmentation and Context augmentation, which creates augmented training corpora by replacing PHI entities with named-entities sampled from external sources, and by changing background context with synonym replacement or random word insertion, respectively. Experimental results on the i2b2 2006 and 2014 de-identification challenge datasets show that PHICON can help three selected de-identification models boost F1-score (by at most 8.6%) on cross-dataset test setting. We also discuss how much augmentation to use and how each augmentation method influences the performance.

Machine reading comprehension has made great progress in recent years owing to large-scale annotated datasets. In the clinical domain, however, creating such datasets is quite difficult due to the domain expertise required for annotation. Recently, Pampari et al. (EMNLP’18) tackled this issue by using expert-annotated question templates and existing i2b2 annotations to create emrQA, the first large-scale dataset for question answering (QA) based on clinical notes. In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis of this dataset and the clinical reading comprehension (CliniRC) task. From our qualitative analysis, we find that (i) emrQA answers are often incomplete, and (ii) emrQA questions are often answerable without using domain knowledge. From our quantitative experiments, surprising results include that (iii) using a small sampled subset (5%-20%), we can obtain roughly equal performance compared to the model trained on the entire dataset, (iv) this performance is close to human expert’s performance, and (v) BERT models do not beat the best performing base model. Following our analysis of the emrQA, we further explore two desired aspects of CliniRC systems: the ability to utilize clinical domain knowledge and to generalize to unseen questions and contexts. We argue that both should be considered when creating future datasets.