Junda Wu

Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Rui Wang et al.

Soft prompt tuning achieves superior performances across a wide range of few-shot tasks. However, the performances of prompt tuning can be highly sensitive to the initialization of the prompts. We also empirically observe that conventional prompt tuning methods cannot encode and learn sufficient task-relevant information from prompt tokens. In this work, we develop an information-theoretic framework that formulates soft prompt tuning as maximizing mutual information between prompts and other model parameters (or encoded representations). This novel view helps us to develop a more efficient, accurate and robust soft prompt tuning method InfoPrompt. With this framework, we develop two novel mutual information based loss functions, to (i) discover proper prompt initialization for the downstream tasks and learn sufficient task-relevant information from prompt tokens and (ii) encourage the output representation from the pretrained language model to be more aware of the task-relevant information captured in the learnt prompt. Extensive experiments validate that InfoPrompt can significantly accelerate the convergence of the prompt tuning and outperform traditional prompt tuning methods. Finally, we provide a formal theoretical result for showing to show that gradient descent type algorithm can be used to train our mutual information loss.

Yuhang Yao, Jianyi Zhang, Junda Wu et al.

Large language models are rapidly gaining popularity and have been widely adopted in real-world applications. While the quality of training data is essential, privacy concerns arise during data collection. Federated learning offers a solution by allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train LLMs without sharing local data. However, FL introduces new challenges, such as model convergence issues due to heterogeneous data and high communication costs. A comprehensive study is required to address these challenges and guide future research. This paper surveys Federated learning for LLMs (FedLLM), highlighting recent advances and future directions. We focus on two key aspects: fine-tuning and prompt learning in a federated setting, discussing existing work and associated research challenges. We finally propose potential directions for federated LLMs, including pre-training, federated agents, and LLMs for federated learning.

Ziao Wang, Yuhang Li, Junda Wu et al.

In this paper, we propose FinVis-GPT, a novel multimodal large language model (LLM) specifically designed for financial chart analysis. By leveraging the power of LLMs and incorporating instruction tuning and multimodal capabilities, FinVis-GPT is capable of interpreting financial charts and providing valuable analysis. To train FinVis-GPT, a financial task oriented dataset was generated for pre-training alignment and instruction tuning, comprising various types of financial charts and their corresponding descriptions. We evaluate the model performance via several case studies due to the time limit, and the promising results demonstrated that FinVis-GPT is superior in various financial chart related tasks, including generating descriptions, answering questions and predicting future market trends, surpassing existing state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs. The proposed FinVis-GPT serves as a pioneering effort in utilizing multimodal LLMs in the finance domain and our generated dataset will be release for public use in the near future to speedup related research.

Xintong Li, Junda Wu, Tong Yu et al.

Instruction tuning in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) generally involves cooperative learning between a backbone LLM and a feature encoder of non-text input modalities. The major challenge is how to efficiently find the synergy between the two modules so that LLMs can adapt their reasoning abilities to downstream tasks while feature encoders can adjust to provide more task-specific information about its modality. In this paper, we analyze the MLLM instruction tuning from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, where we find the unbalanced learning between the feature encoder and the LLM can cause problems of oscillation and biased learning that lead to sub-optimal convergence. Inspired by our findings, we propose a Multimodal Balance Coefficient that enables quantitative measurement of the balance of learning. Based on this, we further design a dynamic learning scheduler that better coordinates the learning between the LLM and feature encoder, alleviating the problems of oscillation and biased learning. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary regularization on the gradient to promote updating with larger step sizes, which potentially allows for a more accurate estimation of the proposed MultiModal Balance Coefficient and further improves the training sufficiency. Our proposed approach is agnostic to the architecture of LLM and feature encoder, so it can be generically integrated with various MLLMs. We conduct experiments on multiple downstream tasks with various MLLMs, demonstrating that the proposed method is more effective than the baselines in MLLM instruction tuning.

An Yan, Zhengyuan Yang, Junda Wu et al. · microsoft-research

Set-of-Mark (SoM) Prompting unleashes the visual grounding capability of GPT-4V, by enabling the model to associate visual objects with tags inserted on the image. These tags, marked with alphanumerics, can be indexed via text tokens for easy reference. Despite the extraordinary performance from GPT-4V, we observe that other Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to understand these visual tags. To promote the learning of SoM prompting for open-source models, we propose a new learning paradigm: "list items one by one," which asks the model to enumerate and describe all visual tags placed on the image following the alphanumeric orders of tags. By integrating our curated dataset with other visual instruction tuning datasets, we are able to equip existing MLLMs with the SoM prompting ability. Furthermore, we evaluate our finetuned SoM models on five MLLM benchmarks. We find that this new dataset, even in a relatively small size (10k-30k images with tags), significantly enhances visual reasoning capabilities and reduces hallucinations for MLLMs. Perhaps surprisingly, these improvements persist even when the visual tags are omitted from input images during inference. This suggests the potential of "list items one by one" as a new paradigm for training MLLMs, which strengthens the object-text alignment through the use of visual tags in the training stage. Finally, we conduct analyses by probing trained models to understand the working mechanism of SoM. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/zzxslp/SoM-LLaVA}.

Zhehao Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Branislav Kveton et al.

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become increasingly important with a wide range of applications. Despite the importance and recent progress, most existing works on personalized LLMs have focused either entirely on (a) personalized text generation or (b) leveraging LLMs for personalization-related downstream applications, such as recommendation systems. In this work, we bridge the gap between these two separate main directions for the first time by introducing a taxonomy for personalized LLM usage and summarizing the key differences and challenges. We provide a formalization of the foundations of personalized LLMs that consolidates and expands notions of personalization of LLMs, defining and discussing novel facets of personalization, usage, and desiderata of personalized LLMs. We then unify the literature across these diverse fields and usage scenarios by proposing systematic taxonomies for the granularity of personalization, personalization techniques, datasets, evaluation methods, and applications of personalized LLMs. Finally, we highlight challenges and important open problems that remain to be addressed. By unifying and surveying recent research using the proposed taxonomies, we aim to provide a clear guide to the existing literature and different facets of personalization in LLMs, empowering both researchers and practitioners.

Junda Wu, Cheng-Chun Chang, Tong Yu et al.

The long-tail recommendation is a challenging task for traditional recommender systems, due to data sparsity and data imbalance issues. The recent development of large language models (LLMs) has shown their abilities in complex reasoning, which can help to deduce users' preferences based on very few previous interactions. However, since most LLM-based systems rely on items' semantic meaning as the sole evidence for reasoning, the collaborative information of user-item interactions is neglected, which can cause the LLM's reasoning to be misaligned with task-specific collaborative information of the dataset. To further align LLMs' reasoning to task-specific user-item interaction knowledge, we introduce collaborative retrieval-augmented LLMs, CoRAL, which directly incorporate collaborative evidence into the prompts. Based on the retrieved user-item interactions, the LLM can analyze shared and distinct preferences among users, and summarize the patterns indicating which types of users would be attracted by certain items. The retrieved collaborative evidence prompts the LLM to align its reasoning with the user-item interaction patterns in the dataset. However, since the capacity of the input prompt is limited, finding the minimally-sufficient collaborative information for recommendation tasks can be challenging. We propose to find the optimal interaction set through a sequential decision-making process and develop a retrieval policy learned through a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, CoRAL. Our experimental results show that CoRAL can significantly improve LLMs' reasoning abilities on specific recommendation tasks. Our analysis also reveals that CoRAL can more efficiently explore collaborative information through reinforcement learning.

Jianing Wang, Junda Wu, Yupeng Hou et al.

Do current large language models (LLMs) better solve graph reasoning and generation tasks with parameter updates? In this paper, we propose InstructGraph, a framework that empowers LLMs with the abilities of graph reasoning and generation by instruction tuning and preference alignment. Specifically, we first propose a structured format verbalizer to unify all graph data into a universal code-like format, which can simply represent the graph without any external graph-specific encoders. Furthermore, a graph instruction tuning stage is introduced to guide LLMs in solving graph reasoning and generation tasks. Finally, we identify potential hallucination problems in graph tasks and sample negative instances for preference alignment, the target of which is to enhance the output's reliability of the model. Extensive experiments across multiple graph-centric tasks exhibit that InstructGraph can achieve the best performance and outperform GPT-4 and LLaMA2 by more than 13\% and 38\%, respectively.

Yu Xia, Junda Wu, Sungchul Kim et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have been used to generate query expansions augmenting original queries for improving information search. Recent studies also explore providing LLMs with initial retrieval results to generate query expansions more grounded to document corpus. However, these methods mostly focus on enhancing textual similarities between search queries and target documents, overlooking document relations. For queries like "Find me a highly rated camera for wildlife photography compatible with my Nikon F-Mount lenses", existing methods may generate expansions that are semantically similar but structurally unrelated to user intents. To handle such semi-structured queries with both textual and relational requirements, in this paper we propose a knowledge-aware query expansion framework, augmenting LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG). To further address the limitation of entity-based scoring in existing KG-based methods, we leverage document texts as rich KG node representations and use document-based relation filtering for our Knowledge-Aware Retrieval (KAR). Extensive experiments on three datasets of diverse domains show the advantages of our method compared against state-of-the-art baselines on textual and relational semi-structured retrieval.

Chengkai Huang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia et al.

Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of agentic AI systems that extend beyond the capabilities of standalone models. By empowering LLMs to perceive external environments, integrate multimodal information, and interact with various tools, these agentic systems exhibit greater autonomy and adaptability across complex tasks. This evolution brings new opportunities to recommender systems (RS): LLM-based Agentic RS (LLM-ARS) can offer more interactive, context-aware, and proactive recommendations, potentially reshaping the user experience and broadening the application scope of RS. Despite promising early results, fundamental challenges remain, including how to effectively incorporate external knowledge, balance autonomy with controllability, and evaluate performance in dynamic, multimodal settings. In this perspective paper, we first present a systematic analysis of LLM-ARS: (1) clarifying core concepts and architectures; (2) highlighting how agentic capabilities -- such as planning, memory, and multimodal reasoning -- can enhance recommendation quality; and (3) outlining key research questions in areas such as safety, efficiency, and lifelong personalization. We also discuss open problems and future directions, arguing that LLM-ARS will drive the next wave of RS innovation. Ultimately, we foresee a paradigm shift toward intelligent, autonomous, and collaborative recommendation experiences that more closely align with users' evolving needs and complex decision-making processes.

Junda Wu, Hanjia Lyu, Yu Xia et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have become increasingly important due to their state-of-the-art performance and ability to integrate multiple data modalities, such as text, images, and audio, to perform complex tasks with high accuracy. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on personalized multimodal large language models, focusing on their architecture, training methods, and applications. We propose an intuitive taxonomy for categorizing the techniques used to personalize MLLMs to individual users, and discuss the techniques accordingly. Furthermore, we discuss how such techniques can be combined or adapted when appropriate, highlighting their advantages and underlying rationale. We also provide a succinct summary of personalization tasks investigated in existing research, along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we summarize the datasets that are useful for benchmarking personalized MLLMs. Finally, we outline critical open challenges. This survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and advance the development of personalized multimodal large language models.

Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Yiran Shen et al.

Personalized preference alignment for large language models (LLMs), the process of tailoring LLMs to individual users' preferences, is an emerging research direction spanning the area of NLP and personalization. In this survey, we present an analysis of works on personalized alignment and modeling for LLMs. We introduce a taxonomy of preference alignment techniques, including training time, inference time, and additionally, user-modeling based methods. We provide analysis and discussion on the strengths and limitations of each group of techniques and then cover evaluation, benchmarks, as well as open problems in the field.

Xiaoyu Liu, Paiheng Xu, Junda Wu et al.

Causal inference has shown potential in enhancing the predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by capturing causal relationships among variables. The emergence of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various NLP domains, particularly through their advanced reasoning capabilities. This survey focuses on evaluating and improving LLMs from a causal view in the following areas: understanding and improving the LLMs' reasoning capacity, addressing fairness and safety issues in LLMs, complementing LLMs with explanations, and handling multimodality. Meanwhile, LLMs' strong reasoning capacities can in turn contribute to the field of causal inference by aiding causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimations. This review explores the interplay between causal inference frameworks and LLMs from both perspectives, emphasizing their collective potential to further the development of more advanced and equitable artificial intelligence systems.

Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Haoliang Wang et al.

In real-world scenarios, labeled samples for dialogue summarization are usually limited (i.e., few-shot) due to high annotation costs for high-quality dialogue summaries. To efficiently learn from few-shot samples, previous works have utilized massive annotated data from other downstream tasks and then performed prompt transfer in prompt tuning so as to enable cross-task knowledge transfer. However, existing general-purpose prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. In this paper, we focus on improving the prompt transfer from dialogue state tracking to dialogue summarization and propose Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer (SAPT), which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task and resulting in the model's better consumption of dialogue state information. To automatically extract dialogue skeletons as supervised training data for skeleton generation, we design a novel approach with perturbation-based probes requiring neither annotation effort nor domain knowledge. Training the model on such skeletons can also help preserve model capability during prompt transfer. Our method significantly outperforms existing baselines. In-depth analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in facilitating cross-task knowledge transfer in few-shot dialogue summarization.