Qinyuan Cheng


2024

pdf
LLM can Achieve Self-Regulation via Hyperparameter Aware Generation
Siyin Wang | Shimin Li | Tianxiang Sun | Jinlan Fu | Qinyuan Cheng | Jiasheng Ye | Junjie Ye | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), users commonly employ diverse decoding strategies and adjust hyperparameters to control the generated text. However, a critical question emerges: Are LLMs conscious of the existence of these decoding strategies and capable of regulating themselves? The current decoding generation process often relies on empirical and heuristic manual adjustments to hyperparameters based on types of tasks and demands. However, this process is typically cumbersome, and the decoding hyperparameters may not always be optimal for each sample. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel text generation paradigm termed Hyperparameter Aware Generation (HAG). By leveraging hyperparameter-aware instruction tuning, the LLM autonomously determines the optimal decoding strategy and configs based on the input samples, enabling self-regulation. Our approach eliminates the need for extensive manual tuning, offering a more autonomous, self-regulate model behavior. Experimental results spanning six datasets across reasoning, creativity, translation, and mathematics tasks demonstrate that hyperparameter-aware instruction tuning empowers the LLMs to self-regulate the decoding strategy and hyperparameter. HAG extends the current paradigm in the text generation process, highlighting the feasibility of endowing the LLMs with self-regulate decoding strategies.

pdf
Aggregation of Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Enhancing Answer Selection in Large Language Models
Zhangyue Yin | Qiushi Sun | Qipeng Guo | Zhiyuan Zeng | Xiaonan Li | Tianxiang Sun | Cheng Chang | Qinyuan Cheng | Ding Wang | Xiaofeng Mou | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Recent advancements in Chain-of-Thought prompting have facilitated significant breakthroughs for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. Current research enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs by sampling multiple reasoning chains and ensembling based on the answer frequency. However, this approach fails in scenarios where the correct answers are in the minority. We identify this as a primary factor constraining the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, a limitation that cannot be resolved solely based on the predicted answers. To address this shortcoming, we introduce a hierarchical reasoning aggregation framework AoR (Aggregation of Reasoning), which selects answers based on the evaluation of reasoning chains. Additionally, AoR incorporates dynamic sampling, adjusting the number of reasoning chains in accordance with the complexity of the task. Experimental results on a series of complex reasoning tasks show that AoR outperforms prominent ensemble methods. Further analysis reveals that AoR not only adapts various LLMs but also achieves a superior performance ceiling when compared to current methods.

pdf
Reasoning in Flux: Enhancing Large Language Models Reasoning through Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance
Zhangyue Yin | Qiushi Sun | Qipeng Guo | Zhiyuan Zeng | Xiaonan Li | Junqi Dai | Qinyuan Cheng | Xuanjing Huang | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Machine reasoning, which involves solving complex problems through step-by-step deduction and analysis, is a crucial indicator of the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, as the complexity of tasks escalates, LLMs often encounter increasing errors in their multi-step reasoning process. This study delves into the underlying factors contributing to these reasoning errors and seeks to leverage uncertainty to refine them. Specifically, we introduce Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance (UAG), a novel approach for guiding LLM reasoning onto an accurate and reliable trajectory. UAG first identifies and evaluates uncertainty signals within each step of the reasoning chain. Upon detecting a significant increase in uncertainty, UAG intervenes by retracting to a previously reliable state and then introduces certified reasoning clues for refinement. By dynamically adjusting the reasoning process, UAG offers a plug-and-play solution for improving LLMs’ performance in complex reasoning. Extensive experiments across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that UAG not only enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but also consistently outperforms several strong baselines with minimal computational overhead. Further analysis reveals that UAG is notably effective in identifying and diminishing reasoning errors.

2023

pdf
Improving Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from AI Feedback
Qinyuan Cheng | Xiaogui Yang | Tianxiang Sun | Linyang Li | Xipeng Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Contrastive learning has become a popular approach in natural language processing, particularly for the learning of sentence embeddings.However, the discrete nature of natural language makes it difficult to ensure the quality of positive and negative sample pairs generated through data augmentation methods. Although supervised contrastive learning can produce more accurate sample pairs with human feedback labels, it still lacks fine-grained training signals. In this paper, we propose to improve Contrastive Learning of sentence embeddings from AI Feedback (CLAIF).Our method utilizes AI feedback from large pre-trained language models (LLMs) to construct sample pairs with fine-grained sample similarity scores to improve contrastive learning. Besides, we combine human feedback and AI feedback to provide better supervision signals for supervised contrastive learning of sentence embeddings.Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several semantic textual similarity (STS) and transfer learning tasks compared to other unsupervised and supervised contrastive learning methods.

2022

pdf
Is MultiWOZ a Solved Task? An Interactive TOD Evaluation Framework with User Simulator
Qinyuan Cheng | Linyang Li | Guofeng Quan | Feng Gao | Xiaofeng Mou | Xipeng Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are drawing more and more attention in recent studies.Current methods focus on constructing pre-trained models or fine-tuning strategies while the evaluation of TOD is limited by a policy mismatch problem.That is, during evaluation, the user utterances are from the annotated dataset while these utterances should interact with previous responses which can have many alternatives besides annotated texts.Therefore, in this work, we propose an interactive evaluation framework for TOD. We first build a goal-oriented user simulator based on pre-trained models and then use the user simulator to interact with the dialogue system to generate dialogues.Besides, we introduce a sentence-level and a session-level score to measure the sentence fluency and session coherence in the interactive evaluation. Experimental results show that RL-based TOD systems trained by our proposed user simulator can achieve nearly 98% inform and success rates in the interactive evaluation of MultiWOZ dataset and the proposed scores measure the response quality besides the inform and success rates.We are hoping that our work will encourage simulator-based interactive evaluations in the TOD task.