Deep Papers

This week, we're excited to be joined by Kyle O'Brien, Applied Scientist at Microsoft, to discuss his most recent paper, Composable Interventions for Language Models. Kyle and his team present a new framework, composable interventions, that allows for the study of multiple interventions applied sequentially to the same language model. The discussion will cover their key findings from extensive experiments, revealing how different interventions—such as knowledge editing, model compression, and machine unlearning—interact with each other.

Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/composable-interventions-for-language-models/

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This week’s paper presents a comprehensive study of the performance of various LLMs acting as judges. The researchers leverage TriviaQA as a benchmark for assessing objective knowledge reasoning of LLMs and evaluate them alongside human annotations which they find to have a high inter-annotator agreement. The study includes nine judge models and nine exam-taker models – both base and instruction-tuned. They assess the judge models’ alignment across different model sizes, families, and judge prompts to answer questions about the strengths and weaknesses of this paradigm, and what potential biases it may hold.

Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/judging-the-judges-llm-as-a-judge/

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Meta just released Llama 3.1 405B–according to them, it’s “the first openly available model that rivals the top AI models when it comes to state-of-the-art capabilities in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use, and multilingual translation.” Will the latest Llama herd ignite new applications and modeling paradigms like synthetic data generation? Will it enable the improvement and training of smaller models, as well as model distillation? Meta thinks so. We’ll take a look at what they did here, talk about open source, and decide if we want to believe the hype.

Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/breaking-down-meta-llama-3/

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Chaining language model (LM) calls as composable modules is fueling a new way of programming, but ensuring LMs adhere to important constraints requires heuristic “prompt engineering.” 

The paper this week introduces LM Assertions, a programming construct for expressing computational constraints that LMs should satisfy. The researchers integrated their constructs into the recent DSPy programming model for LMs and present new strategies that allow DSPy to compile programs with LM Assertions into more reliable and accurate systems. They also propose strategies to use assertions at inference time for automatic self-refinement with LMs. They reported on four diverse case studies for text generation and found that LM Assertions improve not only compliance with imposed rules but also downstream task performance, passing constraints up to 164% more often and generating up to 37% more higher-quality responses.

We discuss this paper with Cyrus Nouroozi, DSPY key contributor. 

Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/dspy-assertions-computational-constraints/

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Where adapting LLMs to specialized domains is essential (e.g., recent news, enterprise private documents), we discuss a paper that asks how we adapt pre-trained LLMs for RAG in specialized domains. SallyAnn DeLucia is joined by Sai Kolasani, researcher at UC Berkeley’s RISE Lab (and Arize AI Intern), to talk about his work on RAFT: Adapting Language Model to Domain Specific RAG. 

RAFT (Retrieval-Augmented FineTuning) is a training recipe that improves an LLM’s ability to answer questions in a “open-book” in-domain settings. Given a question, and a set of retrieved documents, the model is trained to ignore documents that don’t help in answering the question (aka distractor documents). This coupled with RAFT’s chain-of-thought-style response, helps improve the model’s ability to reason. In domain-specific RAG, RAFT consistently improves the model’s performance across PubMed, HotpotQA, and Gorilla datasets, presenting a post-training recipe to improve pre-trained LLMs to in-domain RAG.

 Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/raft-adapting-language-model-to-domain-specific-rag/

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It’s been an exciting couple weeks for GenAI! Join us as we discuss the latest research from OpenAI and Anthropic. We’re excited to chat about this significant step forward in understanding how LLMs work and the implications it has for deeper understanding of the neural activity of language models. We take a closer look at some recent research from both OpenAI and Anthropic. These two recent papers both focus on the sparse autoencoder--an unsupervised approach for extracting interpretable features from an LLM.  In "Extracting Concepts from GPT-4," OpenAI researchers propose using k-sparse autoencoders to directly control sparsity, simplifying tuning and improving the reconstruction-sparsity frontier. In "Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet," researchers at Anthropic show that scaling laws can be used to guide the training of sparse autoencoders, among other findings. 

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We break down the paper--Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment.

Ensuring alignment (aka: making models behave in accordance with human intentions) has become a critical task before deploying LLMs in real-world applications. However, a major challenge faced by practitioners is the lack of clear guidance on evaluating whether LLM outputs align with social norms, values, and regulations. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of key dimensions that are crucial to consider when assessing LLM trustworthiness. The survey covers seven major categories of LLM trustworthiness: reliability, safety, fairness, resistance to misuse, explainability and reasoning, adherence to social norms, and robustness.

The measurement results indicate that, in general, more aligned models tend to perform better in terms of overall trustworthiness. However, the effectiveness of alignment varies across the different trustworthiness categories considered. By shedding light on these key dimensions of LLM trustworthiness, this paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance to practitioners in the field. Understanding and addressing these concerns will be crucial in achieving reliable and ethically sound deployment of LLMs in various applications.

Read more about Trustworthy LLMs: A Survey and Guideline for Evaluating Large Language Models' Alignment

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This week’s paper explores EvalGen, a mixed-initative approach to aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions with human preferences. EvalGen assists users in developing both criteria acceptable LLM outputs and developing functions to check these standards, ensuring evaluations reflect the users’ own grading standards.

Read it on the blog: https://arize.com/blog/breaking-down-evalgen-who-validates-the-validators/

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This week we explore ReAct, an approach that enhances the reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs by combining step-by-step reasoning with the ability to take actions and gather information from external sources in a unified framework.

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This week, we’ve covering Amazon’s time series model: Chronos. Developing accurate machine-learning-based forecasting models has traditionally required substantial dataset-specific tuning and model customization. Chronos however, is built on a language model architecture and trained with billions of tokenized time series observations, enabling it to provide accurate zero-shot forecasts matching or exceeding purpose-built models.

We dive into time series forecasting, some recent research our team has done, and take a community pulse on what people think of Chronos.  

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