Maxamed Axmed

Kabir Ahuja, Harshita Diddee, Rishav Hada et al. · microsoft-research

Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70 typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting and provide directions for future progress in the field.

Sanchit Ahuja, Divyanshu Aggarwal, Varun Gumma et al. · cmu, deepmind

There has been a surge in LLM evaluation research to understand LLM capabilities and limitations. However, much of this research has been confined to English, leaving LLM building and evaluation for non-English languages relatively unexplored. Several new LLMs have been introduced recently, necessitating their evaluation on non-English languages. This study aims to perform a thorough evaluation of the non-English capabilities of SoTA LLMs (GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, PaLM2, Gemini-Pro, Mistral, Llama2, and Gemma) by comparing them on the same set of multilingual datasets. Our benchmark comprises 22 datasets covering 83 languages, including low-resource African languages. We also include two multimodal datasets in the benchmark and compare the performance of LLaVA models, GPT-4-Vision and Gemini-Pro-Vision. Our experiments show that larger models such as GPT-4, Gemini-Pro and PaLM2 outperform smaller models on various tasks, notably on low-resource languages, with GPT-4 outperforming PaLM2 and Gemini-Pro on more datasets. We also perform a study on data contamination and find that several models are likely to be contaminated with multilingual evaluation benchmarks, necessitating approaches to detect and handle contamination while assessing the multilingual performance of LLMs.

Qinyuan Ye, Maxamed Axmed, Reid Pryzant et al. · stanford

Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model's errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, exhibits remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform "let's think step by step" by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted and highly specific prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.

Jacki O'Neill, Vukosi Marivate, Barbara Glover et al.

This white paper is the output of a multidisciplinary workshop in Nairobi (Nov 2023). Led by a cross-organisational team including Microsoft Research, NEPAD, Lelapa AI, and University of Oxford. The workshop brought together diverse thought-leaders from various sectors and backgrounds to discuss the implications of Generative AI for the future of work in Africa. Discussions centred around four key themes: Macroeconomic Impacts; Jobs, Skills and Labour Markets; Workers' Perspectives and Africa-Centris AI Platforms. The white paper provides an overview of the current state and trends of generative AI and its applications in different domains, as well as the challenges and risks associated with its adoption and regulation. It represents a diverse set of perspectives to create a set of insights and recommendations which aim to encourage debate and collaborative action towards creating a dignified future of work for everyone across Africa.