We’re exploring Reinforcement Learning in the Era of LLMs this week with Claire Longo, Arize’s Head of Customer Success. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered wide attention and led to successful products such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Their proficiency in adhering to instructions and delivering harmless, helpful, and honest (3H) responses can largely be attributed to the technique of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This week’s paper, aims to link the research in conventional RL to RL techniques used in LLM research and demystify this technique by discussing why, when, and how RL excels.

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This week, we discuss the implications of Text-to-Video Generation and speculate as to the possibilities (and limitations) of this incredible technology with some hot takes. Dat Ngo, ML Solutions Engineer at Arize, is joined by community member and AI Engineer Vibhu Sapra to review OpenAI’s technical report on their Text-To-Video Generation Model: Sora.

According to OpenAI, “Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.” At the time of this recording, the model had not been widely released yet, but was becoming available to red teamers to assess risk, and also to artists to receive feedback on how Sora could be helpful for creatives.

At the end of our discussion, we also explore EvalCrafter: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Video Generation Models. This recent paper proposed a new framework and pipeline to exhaustively evaluate the performance of the generated videos, which we look at in light of Sora.

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This week, we’re discussing "RAG vs Fine-Tuning: Pipelines, Tradeoff, and a Case Study on Agriculture." This paper explores a pipeline for fine-tuning and RAG, and presents the tradeoffs of both for multiple popular LLMs, including Llama2-13B, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. 

The authors propose a pipeline that consists of multiple stages, including extracting information from PDFs, generating questions and answers, using them for fine-tuning, and leveraging GPT-4 for evaluating the results. Overall, the results point to how systems built using LLMs can be adapted to respond and incorporate knowledge across a dimension that is critical for a specific industry, paving the way for further applications of LLMs in other industrial domains.

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We dive into Phi-2 and some of the major differences and use cases for a small language model (SLM) versus an LLM.

With only 2.7 billion parameters, Phi-2 surpasses the performance of Mistral and Llama-2 models at 7B and 13B parameters on various aggregated benchmarks. Notably, it achieves better performance compared to 25x larger Llama-2-70B model on multi-step reasoning tasks, i.e., coding and math. Furthermore, Phi-2 matches or outperforms the recently-announced Google Gemini Nano 2, despite being smaller in size. 

Find the transcript and live recording: https://arize.com/blog/phi-2-model

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We discuss HyDE: a thrilling zero-shot learning technique that combines GPT-3’s language understanding with contrastive text encoders.

HyDE revolutionizes information retrieval and grounding in real-world data by generating hypothetical documents from queries and retrieving similar real-world documents. It outperforms traditional unsupervised retrievers, rivaling fine-tuned retrievers across diverse tasks and languages. This leap in zero-shot learning efficiently retrieves relevant real-world information without task-specific fine-tuning, broadening AI model applicability and effectiveness.

Link to transcript and live recording: https://arize.com/blog/hyde-paper-reading-and-discussion/

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For the last paper read of the year, Arize CPO & Co-Founder, Aparna Dhinakaran, is joined by a Dat Ngo (ML Solutions Architect) and Aman Khan (Product Manager) for an exploration of the new kids on the block: Gemini and Mixtral-8x7B. 

There's a lot to cover, so this week's paper read is Part I in a series about Mixtral and Gemini. In Part I, we  provide some background and context for Mixtral 8x7B from Mistral AI, a high-quality sparse mixture of experts model (SMoE) that outperforms Llama 2 70B on most benchmarks with 6x faster inference Mixtral also matches or outperforms GPT3.5 on most benchmarks. This open-source model was optimized through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. 

Stay tuned for Part II in January, where we'll build on this conversation in and discuss Gemini-developed by teams at DeepMind and Google Research. 

Link to transcript and live recording: https://arize.com/blog/a-deep-dive-into-generatives-newest-models-mistral-mixtral-8x7b/

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We’re thrilled to be joined by Shuaichen Chang, LLM researcher and the author of this week’s paper to discuss his findings. Shuaichen’s research investigates the impact of prompt constructions on the performance of large language models (LLMs) in the text-to-SQL task, particularly focusing on zero-shot, single-domain, and cross-domain settings. Shuaichen and his team explore various strategies for prompt construction, evaluating the influence of database schema, content representation, and prompt length on LLMs’ effectiveness. The findings emphasize the importance of careful consideration in constructing prompts, highlighting the crucial role of table relationships and content, the effectiveness of in-domain demonstration examples, and the significance of prompt length in cross-domain scenarios.

Read the blog and watch the discussion: https://arize.com/blog/how-to-prompt-llms-for-text-to-sql-paper-reading/

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For this paper read, we’re joined by Samuel Marks, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Northeastern University, to discuss his paper, “The Geometry of Truth: Emergent Linear Structure in LLM Representation of True/False Datasets.” Samuel and his team curated high-quality datasets of true/false statements and used them to study in detail the structure of LLM representations of truth. Overall, they present evidence that language models linearly represent the truth or falsehood of factual statements and also introduce a novel technique, mass-mean probing, which generalizes better and is more causally implicated in model outputs than other probing techniques.

Find the transcript and read more here: https://arize.com/blog/the-geometry-of-truth-emergent-linear-structure-in-llm-representation-of-true-false-datasets-paper-reading/

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In this paper read, we discuss “Towards Monosemanticity: Decomposing Language Models Into Understandable Components,” a paper from Anthropic that addresses the challenge of understanding the inner workings of neural networks, drawing parallels with the complexity of human brain function. It explores the concept of “features,” (patterns of neuron activations) providing a more interpretable way to dissect neural networks. By decomposing a layer of neurons into thousands of features, this approach uncovers hidden model properties that are not evident when examining individual neurons. These features are demonstrated to be more interpretable and consistent, offering the potential to steer model behavior and improve AI safety.

Find the transcript and more here: https://arize.com/blog/decomposing-language-models-with-dictionary-learning-paper-reading/

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We discuss RankVicuna, the first fully open-source LLM capable of performing high-quality listwise reranking in a zero-shot setting. While researchers have successfully applied LLMs such as ChatGPT to reranking in an information retrieval context, such work has mostly been built on proprietary models hidden behind opaque API endpoints. This approach yields experimental results that are not reproducible and non-deterministic, threatening the veracity of outcomes that build on such shaky foundations. RankVicuna provides access to a fully open-source LLM and associated code infrastructure capable of performing high-quality reranking.

Find the transcript and more here: https://arize.com/blog/rankvicuna-paper-reading/

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