Viktor Moskvoretskii

Maxim Zhelnin, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Egor Shvetsov et al.

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained popularity and democratized the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies have shown that a small subset of weights significantly impacts performance. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel PEFT method, called Gaussian noise Injected Fine Tuning of Salient Weights (GIFT-SW). Our method updates only salient columns, while injecting Gaussian noise into non-salient ones. To identify these columns, we developeda generalized sensitivity metric that extends and unifies metrics from previous studies. Experiments with LLaMA models demonstrate that GIFT-SW outperforms full fine-tuning and modern PEFT methods under the same computational budget. Moreover, GIFT-SW offers practical advantages to recover performance of models subjected to mixed-precision quantization with keeping salient weights in full precision.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Nazarii Tupitsa, Chris Biemann et al.

We present a new approach called MeritOpt based on the Personalized Federated Learning algorithm MeritFed that can be applied to Natural Language Tasks with heterogeneous data. We evaluate it on the Low-Resource Machine Translation task, using the datasets of South East Asian and Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to its effectiveness, MeritOpt is also highly interpretable, as it can be applied to track the impact of each language used for training. Our analysis reveals that target dataset size affects weight distribution across auxiliary languages, that unrelated languages do not interfere with the training, and auxiliary optimizer parameters have minimal impact. Our approach is easy to apply with a few lines of code, and we provide scripts for reproducing the experiments at https://github.com/VityaVitalich/MeritOpt.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Ekaterina Neminova, Alina Lobanova et al.

In this paper, we explore the capabilities of LLMs in capturing lexical-semantic knowledge from WordNet on the example of the LLaMA-2-7b model and test it on multiple lexical semantic tasks. As the outcome of our experiments, we present TaxoLLaMA, the everything-in-one model, lightweight due to 4-bit quantization and LoRA. It achieves 11 SotA results, 4 top-2 results out of 16 tasks for the Taxonomy Enrichment, Hypernym Discovery, Taxonomy Construction, and Lexical Entailment tasks. Moreover, it demonstrates very strong zero-shot performance on Lexical Entailment and Taxonomy Construction with no fine-tuning. We also explore its hidden multilingual and domain adaptation capabilities with a little tuning or few-shot learning. All datasets, code, and model are available online at https://github.com/VityaVitalich/TaxoLLaMA

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Maria Lysyuk, Mikhail Salnikov et al.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) improves correctness of Question Answering (QA) and addresses hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet greatly increase computational costs. Besides, RAG is not always needed as may introduce irrelevant information. Recent adaptive retrieval methods integrate LLMs' intrinsic knowledge with external information appealing to LLM self-knowledge, but they often neglect efficiency evaluations and comparisons with uncertainty estimation techniques. We bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of 35 adaptive retrieval methods, including 8 recent approaches and 27 uncertainty estimation techniques, across 6 datasets using 10 metrics for QA performance, self-knowledge, and efficiency. Our findings show that uncertainty estimation techniques often outperform complex pipelines in terms of efficiency and self-knowledge, while maintaining comparable QA performance.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Chris Biemann, Irina Nikishina

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks, they remain prone to errors. A key challenge is enabling them to self-correct. While prior research has relied on external tools or large proprietary models, this work explores self-correction in small language models (SLMs) through iterative fine-tuning using solely self-generated data. We introduce the Self-Taught Self-Correction (STaSC) algorithm, which incorporates multiple algorithmic design choices. Experimental results on a question-answering task demonstrate that STaSC effectively learns self-correction, leading to significant performance improvements. Our analysis further provides insights into the mechanisms of self-correction and the impact of different design choices on learning dynamics and overall performance. To support future research, we release our user-friendly codebase and lightweight models.

Artyom Kharinaev, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Egor Shvetsov et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for modern applications, but their computational demands limit accessibility. Quantization offers efficiency gains, yet its impact on safety and trustworthiness remains poorly understood. To address this, we introduce OpenMiniSafety, a human-curated safety dataset with 1.067 challenging questions to rigorously evaluate model behavior. We publicly release human safety evaluations for four LLMs (both quantized and full-precision), totaling 4.268 annotated question-answer pairs. By assessing 66 quantized variants of these models using four post-training quantization (PTQ) and two quantization-aware training (QAT) methods across four safety benchmarks including human-centric evaluations we uncover critical safety performance trade-offs. Our results show both PTQ and QAT can degrade safety alignment, with QAT techniques like QLORA or STE performing less safely. No single method consistently outperforms others across benchmarks, precision settings, or models, highlighting the need for safety-aware compression strategies. Furthermore, precision-specialized methods (e.g., QUIK and AWQ for 4-bit, AQLM and Q-PET for 2-bit) excel at their target precision, meaning that these methods are not better at compressing but rather different approaches.

Maria Marina, Nikolay Ivanov, Sergey Pletenev et al.

Large Language Models~(LLMs) are prone to hallucinations, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) helps mitigate this, but at a high computational cost while risking misinformation. Adaptive retrieval aims to retrieve only when necessary, but existing approaches rely on LLM-based uncertainty estimation, which remain inefficient and impractical. In this study, we introduce lightweight LLM-independent adaptive retrieval methods based on external information. We investigated 27 features, organized into 7 groups, and their hybrid combinations. We evaluated these methods on 6 QA datasets, assessing the QA performance and efficiency. The results show that our approach matches the performance of complex LLM-based methods while achieving significant efficiency gains, demonstrating the potential of external information for adaptive retrieval.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Dmitry Osin, Egor Shvetsov et al.

This study explores the application of self-supervised learning techniques for event sequences. It is a key modality in various applications such as banking, e-commerce, and healthcare. However, there is limited research on self-supervised learning for event sequences, and methods from other domains like images, texts, and speech may not easily transfer. To determine the most suitable approach, we conduct a detailed comparative analysis of previously identified best-performing methods. We find that neither the contrastive nor generative method is superior. Our assessment includes classifying event sequences, predicting the next event, and evaluating embedding quality. These results further highlight the potential benefits of combining both methods. Given the lack of research on hybrid models in this domain, we initially adapt the baseline model from another domain. However, upon observing its underperformance, we develop a novel method called the Multimodal-Learning Event Model (MLEM). MLEM treats contrastive learning and generative modeling as distinct yet complementary modalities, aligning their embeddings. The results of our study demonstrate that combining contrastive and generative approaches into one procedure with MLEM achieves superior performance across multiple metrics.

Sergey Pletenev, Maria Marina, Nikolay Ivanov et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often hallucinate in question answering (QA) tasks. A key yet underexplored factor contributing to this is the temporality of questions -- whether they are evergreen (answers remain stable over time) or mutable (answers change). In this work, we introduce EverGreenQA, the first multilingual QA dataset with evergreen labels, supporting both evaluation and training. Using EverGreenQA, we benchmark 12 modern LLMs to assess whether they encode question temporality explicitly (via verbalized judgments) or implicitly (via uncertainty signals). We also train EG-E5, a lightweight multilingual classifier that achieves SoTA performance on this task. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of evergreen classification across three applications: improving self-knowledge estimation, filtering QA datasets, and explaining GPT-4o retrieval behavior.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Alina Lobanova, Ekaterina Neminova et al.

This paper explores the feasibility of using text-to-image models in a zero-shot setup to generate images for taxonomy concepts. While text-based methods for taxonomy enrichment are well-established, the potential of the visual dimension remains unexplored. To address this, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for Taxonomy Image Generation that assesses models' abilities to understand taxonomy concepts and generate relevant, high-quality images. The benchmark includes common-sense and randomly sampled WordNet concepts, alongside the LLM generated predictions. The 12 models are evaluated using 9 novel taxonomy-related text-to-image metrics and human feedback. Moreover, we pioneer the use of pairwise evaluation with GPT-4 feedback for image generation. Experimental results show that the ranking of models differs significantly from standard T2I tasks. Playground-v2 and FLUX consistently outperform across metrics and subsets and the retrieval-based approach performs poorly. These findings highlight the potential for automating the curation of structured data resources.

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Narek Alvandian

Coreset selection methods are effective in accelerating training and reducing memory requirements but remain largely unexplored in applied multimodal settings. We adapt a state-of-the-art (SoTA) coreset selection technique for multimodal data, focusing on the depth prediction task. Our experiments with embedding aggregation and dimensionality reduction approaches reveal the challenges of extending unimodal algorithms to multimodal scenarios, highlighting the need for specialized methods to better capture inter-modal relationships.

Irina Nikishina, Saba Anwar, Nikolay Dolgov et al.

In this paper, we aim to solve the problems standing in the way of automatic comparative question answering. To this end, we propose an evaluation framework to assess the quality of comparative question answering summaries. We formulate 15 criteria for assessing comparative answers created using manual annotation and annotation from 6 large language models and two comparative question asnwering datasets. We perform our tests using several LLMs and manual annotation under different settings and demonstrate the constituency of both evaluations. Our results demonstrate that the Llama-3 70B Instruct model demonstrates the best results for summary evaluation, while GPT-4 is the best for answering comparative questions. All used data, code, and evaluation results are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/cqa-evaluation-benchmark-4561/README.md}}.