??Top ML Papers of the Week

Welcome to The Top ML Papers of the Week (April 8 - April 14).

1). Leave No Context Behind - integrates compressive memory into a vanilla dot-product attention layer; the goal is to enable Transformer LLMs to effectively process infinitely long inputs with bounded memory footprint and computation; proposes a new attention technique called Infini-attention which incorporates a compressive memory module into a vanilla attention mechanism; it builds in both masked local attention and long-term linear attention into a single Transformer block; this allows the Infini-Transformer model to efficiently handle both long and short-range contextual dependencies; outperforms baseline models on long-context language modeling with a 114x compression ratio of memory. (paper | tweet)

2). OpenEQA - proposes an open-vocabulary benchmark dataset to measure the capabilities of AI models to perform embodied question answering (EQA); it contains 1600 human-generated questions composed from 180 real-world environments; also provides an LLM-powered evaluation protocol for the task and shows that models like GPT-4V are significantly behind human-level performance. (paper | tweet)

3). CodeGemma - a family of open code LLMs based on Gemma; CodeGemma 7B models excel in mathematical reasoning and match the code capabilities of other open models; the instruction-tuned CodeGemma 7B model is the more powerful model for Python coding as assessed via the HumanEval benchmark; results also suggest that the model performs best on GSM8K among 7B models; the CodeGemma 2B model achieves SoTA code completion and is designed for fast code infilling and deployment in latency-sensitive settings. (paper | tweet)

4). LM-Guided Chain-of-Thought - applies knowledge distillation to a small LM with rationales generated by the large LM with the hope of narrowing the gap in reasoning capabilities; the rationale is generated by the lightweight LM and the answer prediction is then left for the frozen large LM; this resource-efficient approach avoids the need to fine-tune the large model and instead offloads the rationale generation to the small language model; the knowledge-distilled LM is further optimized with reinforcement learning using several rational-oriented and task-oriented reward signals; the LM-guided CoT prompting approach proposed in this paper outperforms both standard prompting and CoT prompting. Self-consistency decoding also enhances performance. (paper | tweet)

5). Best Practices and Lessons on Synthetic Data - an overview by Google DeepMind on synthetic data research, covering applications, challenges, and future directions; discusses important topics when working with synthetic data such as ensuring quality, factuality, fidelity, unbiasedness, trustworthiness, privacy, and more. (paper | tweet)

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6). Reasoning with Intermediate Revision and Search - presents an approach for general reasoning and search on tasks that can be decomposed into components; the proposed graph-based framework, THOUGHTSCULPT, incorporates iterative self-revision capabilities and allows an LLM to build an interwoven network of thoughts; unlike other approaches such as Tree-of-thoughts that shape the reasoning process using a tree, this new approach incorporates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to efficiently navigate the search space; due to its ability for continuous thought iteration, THOUGHTSCULPT is particularly suitable for tasks such as open-ended generation, multip-step reasoning, and creative ideation. (paper | tweet)

7). Overview of Multilingual LLMs - a survey on multilingual LLMs including a thorough review of methods, a taxonomy, emerging frontiers, challenges, and resources to advance research. (paper | tweet)

8). The Physics of Language Models - investigates knowledge capacity scaling laws where it evaluates a model’s capability via loss or benchmarks, to estimate the number of knowledge bits a model stores; reports that "Language models can and only can store 2 bits of knowledge per parameter, even when quantized to int8, and such knowledge can be flexibly extracted for downstream applications. Consequently, a 7B model can store 14B bits of knowledge, surpassing the English Wikipedia and textbooks combined based on our estimation." (paper | tweet)

9). Aligning LLMs to Quote from Pre-Training Data - proposes techniques to align LLMs to leverage memorized information quotes directly from pre-training data; the alignment approach is not only able to generate high-quality quoted verbatim statements but overall preserve response quality; it leverages a synthetic preference dataset for quoting without any human annotation and aligns the target model to quote using preference optimization. (paper | tweet)

10). The Influence Between NLP and Other Fields - aims to quantify the degree of influence between 23 fields of study and NLP; the cross-field engagement of NLP has declined from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.31 in 2022; the study also finds that NLP citations are dominated by CS which accounts for over 80% of citations with emphasis on AI, ML, and information retrieval; overall, NLP is growing more insular -- higher growth of intra-field citation and a decline in multidisciplinary works. (paper | tweet)

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