We focus on the problem of fusing two or more heterogeneous large language models (LLMs) to leverage their complementary strengths. One of the challenges of model fusion is high computational load, specifically in fine-tuning or aligning vocabularies. To address this, we propose Cool-Fusion, a simple yet effective approach that fuses the knowledge of source LLMs, which does not require training. Unlike ensemble methods, Cool-Fusion is applicable to any set of source LLMs that have different vocabularies. To overcome the vocabulary discrepancies among LLMs, we ensemble LLMs on text level, allowing them to rerank the generated texts by each other with different granularities. Extensive experiments have been conducted across a variety of benchmark datasets. On GSM8K, Cool-Fusion increases accuracy from three strong source LLMs by a significant margin of 17.4%.

Explainable recommendation has attracted much attention from the academic and industry communities. Traditional models usually leverage user reviews as ground truths for model training, and the interactions without reviews are totally ignored. However, in practice, a large amount of users may not leave reviews after purchasing items. In this paper, we argue that the interactions without reviews may also contain comprehensive user preferences, and incorporating them to build explainable recommender model may further improve the explanation quality. To follow such intuition, we first leverage generative models to predict the missing reviews, and then train the recommender model based on all the predicted and original reviews. In specific, since the reviews are discrete tokens, we regard the review generation process as a reinforcement learning problem, where each token is an action at one step. We hope that the generated reviews are indistinguishable with the real ones. Thus, we introduce an discriminator as a reward model to evaluate the quality of the generated reviews. At last, to smooth the review generation process, we introduce a self-paced learning strategy to first generate shorter reviews and then predict the longer ones. We conduct extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

In this paper, we propose TrInk, a Transformer-based model for ink generation, which effectively captures global dependencies. To better facilitate the alignment between the input text and generated stroke points, we introduce scaled positional embeddings and a Gaussian memory mask in the cross-attention module. Additionally, we design both subjective and objective evaluation pipelines to comprehensively assess the legibility and style consistency of the generated handwriting. Experiments demonstrate that our Transformer-based model achieves a 35.56% reduction in character error rate (CER) and an 29.66% reduction in word error rate (WER) on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous methods. We provide an demo page with handwriting samples from TrInk and baseline models at: https://akahello-a11y.github.io/trink-demo/

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to insufficient in-depth insights in their training data, which are frequently absent in publicly available documents. This paper introduces the Chain of Methodologies (CoM), a simple and innovative iterative prompting framework designed to build structured reasoning processes by injecting human methodological insights, thereby enabling LLMs to perform long and effective reasoning for complex tasks. Assuming that LLMs possess certain metacognitive abilities, CoM leverages user-defined methodologies to stimulate the cognitive insights that LLMs have learned implicitly from training data. Experimental results indicate that CoM outperforms competitive baselines, highlighting the potential of training-free prompting methods as general solutions for complex reasoning tasks and the possibility of incorporating human-like methodological insights to bridge the gap to human-level reasoning.

With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), recent years have witnessed many promising studies on leveraging LLM-based agents to simulate human social behavior. While prior work has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, much of it has focused on specific scenarios involving a limited number of agents and has lacked the ability to adapt when errors occur during simulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel LLM-agent-based simulation platform called GenSim, which: (1) Abstracts a set of general functions to simplify the simulation of customized social scenarios; (2) Supports one hundred thousand agents to better simulate large-scale populations in real-world contexts; (3) Incorporates error-correction mechanisms to ensure more reliable and long-term simulations. To evaluate our platform, we assess both the efficiency of large-scale agent simulations and the effectiveness of the error-correction mechanisms. To our knowledge, GenSim represents an initial step toward a general, large-scale, and correctable social simulation platform based on LLM agents, promising to further advance the field of social science.

“近年来,基于大语言模型的自主智能体受到了学术界和工业界的广泛关注,其关键在于利用大语言模型作为核心控制器,并设计相应的辅助模块增强智能体在动态环境中的演化和适应能力,从而提升智能体自主解决任务的能力。本文通过总结过去工作,抽象出智能体设计的通用范式,并讨论了大模型时代自主智能体能力提升的途径。我们还从个体拓展到系统,深入探讨了多自主智能体系统常见的交互机制和面临的重要问题。”

Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for example, the agent can choose an emotional-appeal strategy to impress users. Compared with utterance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuasions. In this paper, we propose to build a persuasion model by jointly modeling the conversation semantics and strategies, where we design a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor to match the semantics and strategies, respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach can significantly improve the state-of-the-art baseline by 5% on a small dataset and 37% on a large dataset in terms of Recall@1. Detailed analyses show that the auto-regressive predictor contributes most to the final performance.

Jointly representation learning of words and entities benefits many NLP tasks, but has not been well explored in cross-lingual settings. In this paper, we propose a novel method for joint representation learning of cross-lingual words and entities. It captures mutually complementary knowledge, and enables cross-lingual inferences among knowledge bases and texts. Our method does not require parallel corpus, and automatically generates comparable data via distant supervision using multi-lingual knowledge bases. We utilize two types of regularizers to align cross-lingual words and entities, and design knowledge attention and cross-lingual attention to further reduce noises. We conducted a series of experiments on three tasks: word translation, entity relatedness, and cross-lingual entity linking. The results, both qualitative and quantitative, demonstrate the significance of our method.

Integrating text and knowledge into a unified semantic space has attracted significant research interests recently. However, the ambiguity in the common space remains a challenge, namely that the same mention phrase usually refers to various entities. In this paper, to deal with the ambiguity of entity mentions, we propose a novel Multi-Prototype Mention Embedding model, which learns multiple sense embeddings for each mention by jointly modeling words from textual contexts and entities derived from a knowledge base. In addition, we further design an efficient language model based approach to disambiguate each mention to a specific sense. In experiments, both qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrate the high quality of the word, entity and multi-prototype mention embeddings. Using entity linking as a study case, we apply our disambiguation method as well as the multi-prototype mention embeddings on the benchmark dataset, and achieve state-of-the-art performance.