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Add to EdgeAgentGym: Evolving Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments
Jun 06, 2024
Building generalist agents that can handle diverse tasks and evolve themselves across different environments is a long-term goal in the AI community. Large language models (LLMs) are considered a promising foundation to build such agents due to their generalized capabilities. Current approaches either have LLM-based agents imitate expert-provided trajectories step-by-step, requiring human supervision, which is hard to scale and limits environmental exploration; or they let agents explore and learn in isolated environments, resulting in specialist agents with limited generalization. In this paper, we take the first step towards building generally-capable LLM-based agents with self-evolution ability. We identify a trinity of ingredients: 1) diverse environments for agent exploration and learning, 2) a trajectory set to equip agents with basic capabilities and prior knowledge, and 3) an effective and scalable evolution method. We propose AgentGym, a new framework featuring a variety of environments and tasks for broad, real-time, uni-format, and concurrent agent exploration. AgentGym also includes a database with expanded instructions, a benchmark suite, and high-quality trajectories across environments. Next, we propose a novel method, AgentEvol, to investigate the potential of agent self-evolution beyond previously seen data across tasks and environments. Experimental results show that the evolved agents can achieve results comparable to SOTA models. We release the AgentGym suite, including the platform, dataset, benchmark, checkpoints, and algorithm implementations. The AgentGym suite is available on https://github.com/WooooDyy/AgentGym.
Advancing Spiking Neural Networks for Sequential Modeling with Central Pattern Generators
May 23, 2024Spiking neural networks (SNNs) represent a promising approach to developing artificial neural networks that are both energy-efficient and biologically plausible. However, applying SNNs to sequential tasks, such as text classification and time-series forecasting, has been hindered by the challenge of creating an effective and hardware-friendly spike-form positional encoding (PE) strategy. Drawing inspiration from the central pattern generators (CPGs) in the human brain, which produce rhythmic patterned outputs without requiring rhythmic inputs, we propose a novel PE technique for SNNs, termed CPG-PE. We demonstrate that the commonly used sinusoidal PE is mathematically a specific solution to the membrane potential dynamics of a particular CPG. Moreover, extensive experiments across various domains, including time-series forecasting, natural language processing, and image classification, show that SNNs with CPG-PE outperform their conventional counterparts. Additionally, we perform analysis experiments to elucidate the mechanism through which SNNs encode positional information and to explore the function of CPGs in the human brain. This investigation may offer valuable insights into the fundamental principles of neural computation.
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning
May 05, 2024Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset \textsc{MathTrap}\footnotemark[3] by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8k. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent ``unseen'' cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not \textbf{spontaneously} combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. We find that LLMs' performance can be \textbf{passively} improved through the above external intervention. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.
MetaRM: Shifted Distributions Alignment via Meta-Learning
May 01, 2024The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is critically dependent on the capability of the reward model (RM). However, as the training process progresses, the output distribution of the policy model shifts, leading to the RM's reduced ability to distinguish between responses. This issue is further compounded when the RM, trained on a specific data distribution, struggles to generalize to examples outside of that distribution. These two issues can be united as a challenge posed by the shifted distribution of the environment. To surmount this challenge, we introduce MetaRM, a method leveraging meta-learning to align the RM with the shifted environment distribution. MetaRM is designed to train the RM by minimizing data loss, particularly for data that can improve the differentiation ability to examples of the shifted target distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaRM significantly improves the RM's distinguishing ability in iterative RLHF optimization, and also provides the capacity to identify subtle differences in out-of-distribution samples.
Length Generalization of Causal Transformers without Position Encoding
Apr 18, 2024Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to overcome the challenge. In this paper, we study the length generalization property of NoPE. We find that although NoPE can extend to longer sequences than the commonly used explicit position encodings, it still has a limited context length. We identify a connection between the failure of NoPE's generalization and the distraction of attention distributions. We propose a parameter-efficient tuning for searching attention heads' best temperature hyper-parameters, which substantially expands NoPE's context size. Experiments on long sequence language modeling, the synthetic passkey retrieval task and real-world long context tasks show that NoPE can achieve competitive performances with state-of-the-art length generalization algorithms. The source code is publicly accessible
DELAN: Dual-Level Alignment for Vision-and-Language Navigation by Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning
Apr 02, 2024
Vision-and-Language navigation (VLN) requires an agent to navigate in unseen environment by following natural language instruction. For task completion, the agent needs to align and integrate various navigation modalities, including instruction, observation and navigation history. Existing works primarily concentrate on cross-modal attention at the fusion stage to achieve this objective. Nevertheless, modality features generated by disparate uni-encoders reside in their own spaces, leading to a decline in the quality of cross-modal fusion and decision. To address this problem, we propose a Dual-levEL AligNment (DELAN) framework by cross-modal contrastive learning. This framework is designed to align various navigation-related modalities before fusion, thereby enhancing cross-modal interaction and action decision-making. Specifically, we divide the pre-fusion alignment into dual levels: instruction-history level and landmark-observation level according to their semantic correlations. We also reconstruct a dual-level instruction for adaptation to the dual-level alignment. As the training signals for pre-fusion alignment are extremely limited, self-supervised contrastive learning strategies are employed to enforce the matching between different modalities. Our approach seamlessly integrates with the majority of existing models, resulting in improved navigation performance on various VLN benchmarks, including R2R, R4R, RxR and CVDN.
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models
Apr 01, 2024Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities of in-context learning (ICL), adapting swiftly to new tasks with only few-shot demonstrations. However, current few-shot methods heavily depend on high-quality, query-specific demos, which are often lacking. When faced with out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries, methods that rely on hand-crafted demos or external retrievers might fail. To bridge the gap between limited demos and OOD queries, we propose Self-Demos, a novel prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability in LLMs by query-aware demo generation. The generated demos strategically interpolate between existing demos and the given query, transforming the query from OOD to ID. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we manually constructed OOD-Toolset, a dataset in the tool-using scenario with over 300 real-world APIs and 1000 instances, each consisting of three tool-use cases as demos and an OOD query. Thorough experiments on our dataset and two public math benchmarks have shown that our method can outperform state-of-the-art baselines in the OOD setting. Moreover, we conduct a range of analyses to validate Self-Demos's generalization and provide more insights.
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals
Mar 24, 2024Deep neural networks (DNNs) are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place carefully crafted perturbations on normal examples to fool DNNs. To better understand such attacks, a characterization of the features carried by adversarial examples is needed. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by inspecting the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis. We first empirically show that the features of either clean signals or adversarial perturbations are redundant and span in low-dimensional linear subspaces respectively with minimal overlap, and the classical low-dimensional subspace projection can suppress perturbation features out of the subspace of clean signals. This makes it possible for DNNs to learn a subspace where only features of clean signals exist while those of perturbations are discarded, which can facilitate the distinction of adversarial examples. To prevent the residual perturbations that is inevitable in subspace learning, we propose an independence criterion to disentangle clean signals from perturbations. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which not only boosts model robustness but also motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense.
Decoding Continuous Character-based Language from Non-invasive Brain Recordings
Mar 19, 2024Deciphering natural language from brain activity through non-invasive devices remains a formidable challenge. Previous non-invasive decoders either require multiple experiments with identical stimuli to pinpoint cortical regions and enhance signal-to-noise ratios in brain activity, or they are limited to discerning basic linguistic elements such as letters and words. We propose a novel approach to decoding continuous language from single-trial non-invasive fMRI recordings, in which a three-dimensional convolutional network augmented with information bottleneck is developed to automatically identify responsive voxels to stimuli, and a character-based decoder is designed for the semantic reconstruction of continuous language characterized by inherent character structures. The resulting decoder can produce intelligible textual sequences that faithfully capture the meaning of perceived speech both within and across subjects, while existing decoders exhibit significantly inferior performance in cross-subject contexts. The ability to decode continuous language from single trials across subjects demonstrates the promising applications of non-invasive language brain-computer interfaces in both healthcare and neuroscience.
EasyJailbreak: A Unified Framework for Jailbreaking Large Language Models
Mar 18, 2024
Jailbreak attacks are crucial for identifying and mitigating the security vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are designed to bypass safeguards and elicit prohibited outputs. However, due to significant differences among various jailbreak methods, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which limits comprehensive security evaluations. This paper introduces EasyJailbreak, a unified framework simplifying the construction and evaluation of jailbreak attacks against LLMs. It builds jailbreak attacks using four components: Selector, Mutator, Constraint, and Evaluator. This modular framework enables researchers to easily construct attacks from combinations of novel and existing components. So far, EasyJailbreak supports 11 distinct jailbreak methods and facilitates the security validation of a broad spectrum of LLMs. Our validation across 10 distinct LLMs reveals a significant vulnerability, with an average breach probability of 60% under various jailbreaking attacks. Notably, even advanced models like GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 exhibit average Attack Success Rates (ASR) of 57% and 33%, respectively. We have released a wealth of resources for researchers, including a web platform, PyPI published package, screencast video, and experimental outputs.