Boyang Xue

Yiming Du, Baojun Wang, Yifan Xiang et al.

Temporal reasoning over long, multi-session dialogues is a critical capability for conversational agents. However, existing works and our pilot study have shown that as dialogue histories grow in length and accumulate noise, current long-context models struggle to accurately identify temporally pertinent information, significantly impairing reasoning performance. To address this, we introduce Memory-T1, a framework that learns a time-aware memory selection policy using reinforcement learning (RL). It employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, first pruning the dialogue history into a candidate set using temporal and relevance filters, followed by an RL agent that selects the precise evidence sessions. The RL training is guided by a multi-level reward function optimizing (i) answer accuracy, (ii) evidence grounding, and (iii) temporal consistency. In particular, the temporal consistency reward provides a dense signal by evaluating alignment with the query time scope at both the session-level (chronological proximity) and the utterance-level (chronological fidelity), enabling the agent to resolve subtle chronological ambiguities. On the Time-Dialog benchmark, Memory-T1 boosts a 7B model to an overall score of 67.0\%, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance for open-source models and outperforming a 14B baseline by 10.2\%. Ablation studies show temporal consistency and evidence grounding rewards jointly contribute to a 15.0\% performance gain. Moreover, Memory-T1 maintains robustness up to 128k tokens, where baseline models collapse, proving effectiveness against noise in extensive dialogue histories. The code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/Elvin-Yiming-Du/Memory-T1/

Boyang Xue, Shoukang Hu, Junhao Xu et al.

State-of-the-art neural network language models (NNLMs) represented by long short term memory recurrent neural networks (LSTM-RNNs) and Transformers are becoming highly complex. They are prone to overfitting and poor generalization when given limited training data. To this end, an overarching full Bayesian learning framework encompassing three methods is proposed in this paper to account for the underlying uncertainty in LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs. The uncertainty over their model parameters, choice of neural activations and hidden output representations are modeled using Bayesian, Gaussian Process and variational LSTM-RNN or Transformer LMs respectively. Efficient inference approaches were used to automatically select the optimal network internal components to be Bayesian learned using neural architecture search. A minimal number of Monte Carlo parameter samples as low as one was also used. These allow the computational costs incurred in Bayesian NNLM training and evaluation to be minimized. Experiments are conducted on two tasks: AMI meeting transcription and Oxford-BBC LipReading Sentences 2 (LRS2) overlapped speech recognition using state-of-the-art LF-MMI trained factored TDNN systems featuring data augmentation, speaker adaptation and audio-visual multi-channel beamforming for overlapped speech. Consistent performance improvements over the baseline LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs with point estimated model parameters and drop-out regularization were obtained across both tasks in terms of perplexity and word error rate (WER). In particular, on the LRS2 data, statistically significant WER reductions up to 1.3% and 1.2% absolute (12.1% and 11.3% relative) were obtained over the baseline LSTM-RNN and Transformer LMs respectively after model combination between Bayesian NNLMs and their respective baselines.

Boyang Xue, Weichao Wang, Hongru Wang et al.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) based knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are prone to generate responses that are factually inconsistent with the provided knowledge source. In such inconsistent responses, the dialogue models fail to accurately express the external knowledge they rely upon. Inspired by previous work which identified that feed-forward networks (FFNs) within Transformers are responsible for factual knowledge expressions, we investigate two methods to efficiently improve the factual expression capability {of FFNs} by knowledge enhancement and alignment respectively. We first propose \textsc{K-Dial}, which {explicitly} introduces {extended FFNs in Transformers to enhance factual knowledge expressions} given the specific patterns of knowledge-grounded dialogue inputs. Additionally, we apply the reinforcement learning for factual consistency (RLFC) method to implicitly adjust FFNs' expressions in responses by aligning with gold knowledge for the factual consistency preference. To comprehensively assess the factual consistency and dialogue quality of responses, we employ extensive automatic measures and human evaluations including sophisticated fine-grained NLI-based metrics. Experimental results on WoW and CMU\_DoG datasets demonstrate that our methods efficiently enhance the ability of the FFN module to convey factual knowledge, validating the efficacy of improving factual consistency for knowledge-grounded dialogue systems.

Mingyu Cui, Jiajun Deng, Shoukang Hu et al.

Fundamental modelling differences between hybrid and end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems create large diversity and complementarity among them. This paper investigates multi-pass rescoring and cross adaptation based system combination approaches for hybrid TDNN and Conformer E2E ASR systems. In multi-pass rescoring, state-of-the-art hybrid LF-MMI trained CNN-TDNN system featuring speed perturbation, SpecAugment and Bayesian learning hidden unit contributions (LHUC) speaker adaptation was used to produce initial N-best outputs before being rescored by the speaker adapted Conformer system using a 2-way cross system score interpolation. In cross adaptation, the hybrid CNN-TDNN system was adapted to the 1-best output of the Conformer system or vice versa. Experiments on the 300-hour Switchboard corpus suggest that the combined systems derived using either of the two system combination approaches outperformed the individual systems. The best combined system obtained using multi-pass rescoring produced statistically significant word error rate (WER) reductions of 2.5% to 3.9% absolute (22.5% to 28.9% relative) over the stand alone Conformer system on the NIST Hub5'00, Rt03 and Rt02 evaluation data.

Hongru Wang, Huimin Wang, Lingzhi Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in planning the use of various functional tools, such as calculators and retrievers, particularly in question-answering tasks. In this paper, we expand the definition of these tools, centering on conceptual tools within the context of dialogue systems. A conceptual tool specifies a cognitive concept that aids systematic or investigative thought. These conceptual tools play important roles in practice, such as multiple psychological or tutoring strategies being dynamically applied in a single turn to compose helpful responses. To further enhance the reasoning and planning capability of LLMs with these conceptual tools, we introduce a multi-persona collaboration framework: Think-Plan-Execute (TPE). This framework decouples the response generation process into three distinct roles: Thinker, Planner, and Executor. Specifically, the Thinker analyzes the internal status exhibited in the dialogue context, such as user emotions and preferences, to formulate a global guideline. The Planner then generates executable plans to call different conceptual tools (e.g., sources or strategies), while the Executor compiles all intermediate results into a coherent response. This structured approach not only enhances the explainability and controllability of responses but also reduces token redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPE across various dialogue response generation tasks, including multi-source (FoCus) and multi-strategy interactions (CIMA and PsyQA). This reveals its potential to handle real-world dialogue interactions that require more complicated tool learning beyond just functional tools. The full code and data will be released for reproduction.

Shuofei Qiao, Yunxiang Wei, Xuehai Wang et al.

The rapid evolution of Large Language Models has catalyzed a surge in scientific idea production, yet this leap has not been accompanied by a matching advance in idea evaluation. The fundamental nature of scientific evaluation needs knowledgeable grounding, collective deliberation, and multi-criteria decision-making. However, existing idea evaluation methods often suffer from narrow knowledge horizons, flattened evaluation dimensions, and the inherent bias in LLM-as-a-Judge. To address these, we regard idea evaluation as a knowledge-grounded, multi-perspective reasoning problem and introduce InnoEval, a deep innovation evaluation framework designed to emulate human-level idea assessment. We apply a heterogeneous deep knowledge search engine that retrieves and grounds dynamic evidence from diverse online sources. We further achieve review consensus with an innovation review board containing reviewers with distinct academic backgrounds, enabling a multi-dimensional decoupled evaluation across multiple metrics. We construct comprehensive datasets derived from authoritative peer-reviewed submissions to benchmark InnoEval. Experiments demonstrate that InnoEval can consistently outperform baselines in point-wise, pair-wise, and group-wise evaluation tasks, exhibiting judgment patterns and consensus highly aligned with human experts.

Boyang Xue, Qi Zhu, Rui Wang et al.

Although demonstrating remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still tend to fabricate unreliable responses when confronted with problems that are unsolvable or beyond their capability, severely undermining the reliability. Prior studies of LLM reliability have primarily focused on knowledge tasks to identify unanswerable questions, while mathematical reasoning tasks have remained unexplored due to the dearth of unsolvable math problems. To systematically investigate LLM reliability in mathematical reasoning tasks, we formulate the reliability evaluation for both solvable and unsolvable problems. We then develop a ReliableMath dataset which incorporates open-source solvable problems and high-quality unsolvable problems synthesized by our proposed construction workflow with human evaluations. Experiments are conducted on various LLMs with several key findings uncovered. LLMs fail to directly identify unsolvable problems and always generate fabricated responses. When instructing LLMs to indicate unsolvability using a reliable prompt, the reliability of larger-sized LLMs remains on solvable problems, but notably improves on unsolvable problems yet still falls short of solvable problems. However, small LLMs rarely show any progress despite employing reliable prompts. Therefore, we further propose an alignment strategy to enhance small LLMs' reliability, which can significantly improve LLM reliability performances on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks.

Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma et al. · tencent-ai

Deep research web agents not only retrieve information from diverse sources such as web environments, files, and multimodal inputs, but more importantly, they need to rigorously analyze and aggregate knowledge for insightful research. However, existing open-source deep research agents predominantly focus on enhancing information-seeking capabilities of web agents to locate specific information, while overlooking the essential need for information aggregation, which would limit their ability to support in-depth research. We propose an Explore to Evolve paradigm to scalably construct verifiable training data for web agents. Begins with proactive online exploration, an agent sources grounded information by exploring the real web. Using the collected evidence, the agent then self-evolves an aggregation program by selecting, composing, and refining operations from 12 high-level logical types to synthesize a verifiable QA pair. This evolution from high-level guidance to concrete operations allowed us to scalably produce WebAggregatorQA, a dataset of 10K samples across 50K websites and 11 domains. Based on an open-source agent framework, SmolAgents, we collect supervised fine-tuning trajectories to develop a series of foundation models, WebAggregator. WebAggregator-8B matches the performance of GPT-4.1, while the 32B variant surpasses GPT-4.1 by more than 10% on GAIA-text and closely approaches Claude-3.7-sonnet. Moreover, given the limited availability of benchmarks that evaluate web agents' information aggregation abilities, we construct a human-annotated evaluation split of WebAggregatorQA as a challenging test set. On this benchmark, Claude-3.7-sonnet only achieves 28%, and GPT-4.1 scores 25.8%. Even when agents manage to retrieve all references, they still struggle on WebAggregatorQA, highlighting the need to strengthen the information aggregation capabilities of web agent foundations.

Sheng Wang, Pengan Chen, Jingqi Zhou et al.

Model customization necessitates high-quality and diverse datasets, but acquiring such data remains time-consuming and labor-intensive. Despite the great potential of large language models (LLMs) for data synthesis, current approaches are constrained by limited seed data, model biases, and low-variation prompts, resulting in limited diversity and biased distributions with the increase of data scales. To tackle this challenge, we introduce TREESYNTH, a tree-guided subspace-based data synthesis approach inspired by decision trees. It constructs a spatial partitioning tree to recursively divide a task-specific full data space (i.e., root node) into numerous atomic subspaces (i.e., leaf nodes) with mutually exclusive and exhaustive attributes to ensure both distinctiveness and comprehensiveness before synthesizing samples within each atomic subspace. This globally dividing-and-synthesizing method finally collects subspace samples into a comprehensive dataset, effectively circumventing repetition and space collapse to ensure the diversity of large-scale data synthesis. Furthermore, the spatial partitioning tree enables sample allocation into atomic subspaces, allowing the rebalancing of existing datasets for more balanced and comprehensive distributions. Empirically, extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks consistently demonstrate the superior data diversity, model performance, and robust scalability of TREESYNTH compared to both human-crafted datasets and peer data synthesis methods, with an average performance gain reaching 10%. Besides, the consistent improvements of TREESYNTH-balanced datasets highlight its efficacious application to redistribute existing datasets for more comprehensive coverage and the induced performance enhancement. The code is available at https://github.com/cpa2001/TreeSynth.

Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou et al.

Previous research has typically concentrated on leveraging the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions (i.e., \textit{internal reasoning such as generate-then-read}). In contrast, for questions that fall outside their known scope, these models rely on external knowledge retrieval to provide accurate responses (i.e., \textit{external acting such as retrieve-then-read}). However, few previous works consider the \textit{compositional questions}, which consist of several known and unknown sub-questions, necessitating the dynamic combination of previous two methods (i.e., \textit{internal reasoning and external acting}) to achieve a better trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. To this end, we introduce a \textbf{Self} \textbf{D}ivide-and-\textbf{C}onquer (\textit{\texttt{Self-DC}}) framework, accompanying with the first \textbf{C}ompositional \textbf{u}nknown \textbf{Q}uestion-\textbf{A}nswering dataset (CuQA). This framework enables LLMs to adaptively choose between using internal knowledge and retrieving external knowledge as needed, resulting in a better trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that \textit{\texttt{Self-DC}} can achieve comparable or even better performance with much fewer external calls compared with several strong baselines.

Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, transitioning from fast and intuitive thinking (System 1) to slow and deep reasoning (System 2). While System 2 reasoning improves task accuracy, it often incurs substantial computational costs due to its slow thinking nature and inefficient or unnecessary reasoning behaviors. In contrast, System 1 reasoning is computationally efficient but leads to suboptimal performance. Consequently, it is critical to balance the trade-off between performance (benefits) and computational costs (budgets), giving rise to the concept of reasoning economy. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive analysis of reasoning economy in both the post-training and test-time inference stages of LLMs, encompassing i) the cause of reasoning inefficiency, ii) behavior analysis of different reasoning patterns, and iii) potential solutions to achieve reasoning economy. By offering actionable insights and highlighting open challenges, we aim to shed light on strategies for improving the reasoning economy of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area. We also provide a public repository to continually track developments in this fast-evolving field.

Sheng Wang, Liheng Chen, Jiyue Jiang et al. · oxford

With the remarkable capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as essential elements in numerous NLP applications, while parameter-efficient finetuning, especially LoRA, has gained popularity as a lightweight approach for model customization. Meanwhile, various dropout methods, initially designed for full finetuning with all the parameters updated, alleviates overfitting associated with excessive parameter redundancy. Hence, a possible contradiction arises from negligible trainable parameters of LoRA and the effectiveness of previous dropout methods, which has been largely overlooked. To fill this gap, we first confirm that parameter-efficient LoRA is also overfitting-prone. We then revisit transformer-specific dropout methods, and establish their equivalence and distinctions mathematically and empirically. Building upon this comparative analysis, we introduce a unified framework for a comprehensive investigation, which instantiates these methods based on dropping position, structural pattern and compensation measure. Through this framework, we reveal the new preferences and performance comparisons of them when involved with limited trainable parameters. This framework also allows us to amalgamate the most favorable aspects into a novel dropout method named HiddenKey. Extensive experiments verify the remarkable superiority and sufficiency of HiddenKey across multiple models and tasks, which highlights it as the preferred approach for high-performance and parameter-efficient finetuning of LLMs.

Sheng Wang, Boyang Xue, Jiacheng Ye et al. · oxford

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), serving numerous low-rank adaptations (LoRAs) concurrently has become increasingly impractical, leading to unaffordable costs and necessitating more parameter-efficient finetuning methods. In this work, we introduce Partially Rotation-enhanced Low-Rank Adaptation (PRoLoRA), an intra-layer sharing mechanism comprising four essential components: broadcast reduction, rotation enhancement, partially-sharing refinement, and rectified initialization strategy. As a superset of LoRA, PRoLoRA retains its advantages, and effectively circumvent the drawbacks of peer parameter-sharing methods with superior model capacity, practical feasibility, and broad applicability. Empirical experiments demonstrate the remarkably higher parameter efficiency of PRoLoRA in both specific parameter budget and performance target scenarios, and its scalability to larger LLMs. Notably, with one time less trainable parameters, PRoLoRA still outperforms LoRA on multiple instruction tuning datasets. Subsequently, an ablation study is conducted to validate the necessity of individual components and highlight the superiority of PRoLoRA over three potential variants. Hopefully, the conspicuously higher parameter efficiency can establish PRoLoRA as a resource-friendly alternative to LoRA.

Rui Wang, Fei Mi, Yi Chen et al.

The growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized applications has revealed a significant challenge: when tailored to specific domains, LLMs tend to experience catastrophic forgetting, compromising their general capabilities and leading to a suboptimal user experience. Additionally, crafting a versatile model for multiple domains simultaneously often results in a decline in overall performance due to confusion between domains. In response to these issues, we present the RolE Prompting Guided Multi-Domain Adaptation (REGA) strategy. This novel approach effectively manages multi-domain LLM adaptation through three key components: 1) Self-Distillation constructs and replays general-domain exemplars to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. 2) Role Prompting assigns a central prompt to the general domain and a unique role prompt to each specific domain to minimize inter-domain confusion during training. 3) Role Integration reuses and integrates a small portion of domain-specific data to the general-domain data, which are trained under the guidance of the central prompt. The central prompt is used for a streamlined inference process, removing the necessity to switch prompts for different domains. Empirical results demonstrate that REGA effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting and inter-domain confusion. This leads to improved domain-specific performance compared to standard fine-tuned models, while still preserving robust general capabilities.

Hongru Wang, Cheng Qian, Manling Li et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into increasingly autonomous agents, fundamental questions about their epistemic foundations remain unresolved: What defines an agent? How should it make decisions? And what objectives should guide its behavior? In this position paper, we argue that true autonomy requires agents to be grounded in a coherent epistemic framework that governs what they know, what they need to know, and how to acquire that knowledge efficiently. We propose a unified theory that treats internal reasoning and external actions as equivalent epistemic tools, enabling agents to systematically coordinate introspection and interaction. Building on this framework, we advocate for aligning an agent's tool use decision-making boundary with its knowledge boundary, thereby minimizing unnecessary tool use and maximizing epistemic efficiency. This perspective shifts the design of agents from mere action executors to knowledge-driven intelligence systems, offering a principled path toward building foundation agents capable of adaptive, efficient, and goal-directed behavior.

Boyang Xue, Fei Mi, Qi Zhu et al.

Despite demonstrating impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still often struggle to accurately express the factual knowledge they possess, especially in cases where the LLMs' knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. To improve LLMs' factual expressions, we propose the UAlign framework, which leverages Uncertainty estimations to represent knowledge boundaries, and then explicitly incorporates these representations as input features into prompts for LLMs to Align with factual knowledge. First, we prepare the dataset on knowledge question-answering (QA) samples by calculating two uncertainty estimations, including confidence score and semantic entropy, to represent the knowledge boundaries for LLMs. Subsequently, using the prepared dataset, we train a reward model that incorporates uncertainty estimations and then employ the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm for factuality alignment on LLMs. Experimental results indicate that, by integrating uncertainty representations in LLM alignment, the proposed UAlign can significantly enhance the LLMs' capacities to confidently answer known questions and refuse unknown questions on both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks, showing reliability improvements and good generalizability over various prompt- and training-based baselines.

Boyang Xue, Hongru Wang, Rui Wang et al.

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a comprehensive investigation of Multilingual Confidence estimation (MlingConf) on LLMs, focusing on both language-agnostic (LA) and language-specific (LS) tasks to explore the performance and language dominance effects of multilingual confidence estimations on different tasks. The benchmark comprises four meticulously checked and human-evaluate high-quality multilingual datasets for LA tasks and one for the LS task tailored to specific social, cultural, and geographical contexts of a language. Our experiments reveal that on LA tasks English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations than other languages, while on LS tasks, using question-related language to prompt LLMs demonstrates better linguistic dominance in multilingual confidence estimations. The phenomena inspire a simple yet effective native-tone prompting strategy by employing language-specific prompts for LS tasks, effectively improving LLMs' reliability and accuracy on LS tasks.

Boyang Xue, Hongru Wang, Rui Wang et al.

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English remain underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a comprehensive investigation of Multilingual Confidence estimation (MlingConf) on LLMs, focusing on both language-agnostic (LA) and language-specific (LS) tasks to explore the performance and language dominance effects of multilingual confidence estimations on different tasks. The benchmark comprises four meticulously checked and human-evaluated high-quality multilingual datasets for LA tasks and one for the LS task tailored to specific social, cultural, and geographical contexts of a language. Our experiments reveal that on LA tasks English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations than other languages, while on LS tasks, using question-related language to prompt LLMs demonstrates better linguistic dominance in multilingual confidence estimations. The phenomena inspire a simple yet effective native-tone prompting strategy by employing language-specific prompts for LS tasks, effectively improving LLMs' reliability and accuracy in LS scenarios.

Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou et al.

Conversational retrieval refers to an information retrieval system that operates in an iterative and interactive manner, requiring the retrieval of various external resources, such as persona, knowledge, and even response, to effectively engage with the user and successfully complete the dialogue. However, most previous work trained independent retrievers for each specific resource, resulting in sub-optimal performance and low efficiency. Thus, we propose a multi-task framework function as a universal retriever for three dominant retrieval tasks during the conversation: persona selection, knowledge selection, and response selection. To this end, we design a dual-encoder architecture consisting of a context-adaptive dialogue encoder and a candidate encoder, aiming to attention to the relevant context from the long dialogue and retrieve suitable candidates by simply a dot product. Furthermore, we introduce two loss constraints to capture the subtle relationship between dialogue context and different candidates by regarding historically selected candidates as hard negatives. Extensive experiments and analysis establish state-of-the-art retrieval quality both within and outside its training domain, revealing the promising potential and generalization capability of our model to serve as a universal retriever for different candidate selection tasks simultaneously.

Boyang Xue, Qi Zhu, Hongru Wang et al.

Present Large Language Models (LLM) self-training methods always under-sample on challenging queries, leading to inadequate learning on difficult problems which limits LLMs' ability. Therefore, this work proposes a difficulty-aware self-training (DAST) framework that focuses on improving both the quantity and quality of self-generated responses on challenging queries during self-training. DAST is specified in three components: 1) sampling-based difficulty level estimation, 2) difficulty-aware data augmentation, and 3) the self-training algorithm using SFT and DPO respectively. Experiments on mathematical tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of DAST, highlighting the critical role of difficulty-aware strategies in advancing LLM self-training.

Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao et al.

Although large language models demonstrate strong performance across various domains, they still struggle with numerous bad cases in mathematical reasoning. Previous approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by solely extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. This paper presents Self-Error-Instruct (SEI), a framework that addresses these model weaknesses and synthesizes more generalized targeted training data. Specifically, we explore a target model on two mathematical datasets, GSM8K and MATH, to pinpoint bad cases. Then, we generate error keyphrases for these cases based on the instructor model's (GPT-4o) analysis and identify error types by clustering these keyphrases. Next, we sample a few bad cases during each generation for each identified error type and input them into the instructor model, which synthesizes additional training data using a self-instruct approach. This new data is refined through a one-shot learning process to ensure that only the most effective examples are kept. Finally, we use these curated data to fine-tune the target model, iteratively repeating the process to enhance performance. We apply our framework to various models and observe improvements in their reasoning abilities across both in-domain and out-of-domain mathematics datasets. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of self-error instruction in improving LLMs' mathematical reasoning through error generalization.

Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Fei Mi et al.

Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful. Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and following them will lead to untruthful and unsafe responses. Previous work rarely focused on understanding how LLMs manage instructions based on counterfactual premises, referred to here as \textit{inductive instructions}, which may stem from users' false beliefs or malicious intents. In this paper, we aim to reveal the behaviors of LLMs towards \textit{inductive instructions} and enhance their truthfulness and helpfulness accordingly. Specifically, we first introduce a benchmark of \underline{\textbf{Indu}}ctive {In\underline{\textbf{st}}ruct}ions (\textsc{\textbf{INDust}}), where the false knowledge is incorporated into instructions in multiple different styles. After extensive human and automatic evaluations, we uncovered a universal vulnerability among LLMs in processing inductive instructions. Additionally, we identified that different inductive styles affect the models' ability to identify the same underlying errors, and the complexity of the underlying assumptions also influences the model's performance. Motivated by these results, we propose \textsc{Dual-critique} prompting to improve LLM robustness against inductive instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that \textsc{Dual-critique} prompting significantly bolsters the robustness of a diverse array of LLMs, even when confronted with varying degrees of inductive instruction complexity and differing inductive styles.

Boyang Xue, Jianwei Yu, Junhao Xu et al.

State-of-the-art neural language models (LMs) represented by Transformers are highly complex. Their use of fixed, deterministic parameter estimates fail to account for model uncertainty and lead to over-fitting and poor generalization when given limited training data. In order to address these issues, this paper proposes a full Bayesian learning framework for Transformer LM estimation. Efficient variational inference based approaches are used to estimate the latent parameter posterior distributions associated with different parts of the Transformer model architecture including multi-head self-attention, feed forward and embedding layers. Statistically significant word error rate (WER) reductions up to 0.5\% absolute (3.18\% relative) and consistent perplexity gains were obtained over the baseline Transformer LMs on state-of-the-art Switchboard corpus trained LF-MMI factored TDNN systems with i-Vector speaker adaptation. Performance improvements were also obtained on a cross domain LM adaptation task requiring porting a Transformer LM trained on the Switchboard and Fisher data to a low-resource DementiaBank elderly speech corpus.