Haibo Tong

Chenyang Zhang, Haibo Tong, Bin Zhang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown various ability on natural language processing, including problems about causality. It is not intuitive for LLMs to command causality, since pretrained models usually work on statistical associations, and do not focus on causes and effects in sentences. So that probing internal manipulation of causality is necessary for LLMs. This paper proposes a novel approach to probe causality manipulation hierarchically, by providing different shortcuts to models and observe behaviors. We exploit retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and in-context learning (ICL) for models on a designed causality classification task. We conduct experiments on mainstream LLMs, including GPT-4 and some smaller and domain-specific models. Our results suggest that LLMs can detect entities related to causality and recognize direct causal relationships. However, LLMs lack specialized cognition for causality, merely treating them as part of the global semantic of the sentence.

Yi Zeng, Feifei Zhao, Yuwei Wang et al.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) advances toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and eventually Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), it may potentially surpass human control, deviate from human values, and even lead to irreversible catastrophic consequences in extreme cases. This looming risk underscores the critical importance of the "superalignment" problem - ensuring that AI systems which are much smarter than humans, remain aligned with human (compatible) intentions and values. While current scalable oversight and weak-to-strong generalization methods demonstrate certain applicability, they exhibit fundamental flaws in addressing the superalignment paradigm - notably, the unidirectional imposition of human values cannot accommodate superintelligence's autonomy or ensure AGI/ASI's stable learning. We contend that the values for sustainable symbiotic society should be co-shaped by humans and living AI together, achieving "Super Co-alignment." Guided by this vision, we propose a concrete framework that integrates external oversight and intrinsic proactive alignment. External oversight superalignment should be grounded in human-centered ultimate decision, supplemented by interpretable automated evaluation and correction, to achieve continuous alignment with humanity's evolving values. Intrinsic proactive superalignment is rooted in a profound understanding of the Self, others, and society, integrating self-awareness, self-reflection, and empathy to spontaneously infer human intentions, distinguishing good from evil and proactively prioritizing human well-being. The integration of externally-driven oversight with intrinsically-driven proactive alignment will co-shape symbiotic values and rules through iterative human-ASI co-alignment, paving the way for achieving safe and beneficial AGI and ASI for good, for human, and for a symbiotic ecology.

Jiayi Lin, Chenyang Zhang, Haibo Tong et al.

Multi-Span Question Answering (MSQA) requires models to extract one or multiple answer spans from a given context to answer a question. Prior work mainly focuses on designing specific methods or applying heuristic strategies to encourage models to predict more correct predictions. However, these models are trained on gold answers and fail to consider the incorrect predictions. Through a statistical analysis, we observe that models with stronger abilities do not predict less incorrect predictions compared with other models. In this work, we propose Answering-Classifying-Correcting (ACC) framework, which employs a post-processing strategy to handle incorrect predictions. Specifically, the ACC framework first introduces a classifier to classify the predictions into three types and exclude "wrong predictions", then introduces a corrector to modify "partially correct predictions". Experiments on several MSQA datasets show that ACC framework significantly improves the Exact Match (EM) scores, and further analysis demostrates that ACC framework efficiently reduces the number of incorrect predictions, improving the quality of predictions.

Chenyang Zhang, Jiayi Lin, Haibo Tong et al.

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable abilities with instruction tuning. However, they fail to achieve ideal tasks when lacking high-quality instruction tuning data on target tasks. Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation (MCTG) is a representative task for this dilemma, where aspect datasets are usually biased and correlated. Existing work exploits additional model structures and strategies for solutions, limiting adaptability to LLMs. To activate MCTG ability of LLMs, we propose a lightweight MCTG pipeline based on data augmentation. We analyze bias and correlations in traditional datasets, and address these concerns with augmented control attributes and sentences. Augmented datasets are feasible for instruction tuning. In our experiments, LLMs perform better in MCTG after data augmentation, with a 20% accuracy rise and less aspect correlations.

Wenxuan Pan, Feifei Zhao, Bing Han et al.

By exploiting discrete signal processing and simulating brain neuron communication, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a low-energy alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, existing SNN models, still face high computational costs due to the numerous time steps as well as network depth and scale. The tens of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses in the human brain are developed from only 20,000 genes, which inspires us to design an efficient genetic encoding strategy that dynamic evolves to regulate large-scale deep SNNs at low cost. Therefore, we first propose a genetically scaled SNN encoding scheme that incorporates globally shared genetic interactions to indirectly optimize neuronal encoding instead of weight, which obviously brings about reductions in parameters and energy consumption. Then, a spatio-temporal evolutionary framework is designed to optimize the inherently initial wiring rules. Two dynamic regularization operators in the fitness function evolve the neuronal encoding to a suitable distribution and enhance information quality of the genetic interaction respectively, substantially accelerating evolutionary speed and improving efficiency. Experiments show that our approach compresses parameters by approximately 50\% to 80\%, while outperforming models on the same architectures by 0.21\% to 4.38\% on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. In summary, the consistent trends of the proposed genetically encoded spatio-temporal evolution across different datasets and architectures highlight its significant enhancements in terms of efficiency, broad scalability and robustness, demonstrating the advantages of the brain-inspired evolutionary genetic coding for SNN optimization.