Daily Papers

We introduce RealPlay, a neural network-based real-world game engine that enables interactive video generation from user control signals. Unlike prior works focused on game-style visuals, RealPlay aims to produce photorealistic, temporally consistent video sequences that resemble real-world footage. It operates in an interactive loop: users observe a generated scene, issue a control command, and receive a short video chunk in response. To enable such realistic and responsive generation, we address key challenges including iterative chunk-wise prediction for low-latency feedback, temporal consistency across iterations, and accurate control response. RealPlay is trained on a combination of labeled game data and unlabeled real-world videos, without requiring real-world action annotations. Notably, we observe two forms of generalization: (1) control transfer-RealPlay effectively maps control signals from virtual to real-world scenarios; and (2) entity transfer-although training labels originate solely from a car racing game, RealPlay generalizes to control diverse real-world entities, including bicycles and pedestrians, beyond vehicles. Project page can be found: https://wenqsun.github.io/RealPlay/

With the emergence of service robots and surveillance cameras, dynamic face recognition (DFR) in wild has received much attention in recent years. Face detection and head pose estimation are two important steps for DFR. Very often, the pose is estimated after the face detection. However, such sequential computations lead to higher latency. In this paper, we propose a low latency and lightweight network for simultaneous face detection, landmark localization and head pose estimation. Inspired by the observation that it is more challenging to locate the facial landmarks for faces with large angles, a pose loss is proposed to constrain the learning. Moreover, we also propose an uncertainty multi-task loss to learn the weights of individual tasks automatically. Another challenge is that robots often use low computational units like ARM based computing core and we often need to use lightweight networks instead of the heavy ones, which lead to performance drop especially for small and hard faces. In this paper, we propose online feedback sampling to augment the training samples across different scales, which increases the diversity of training data automatically. Through validation in commonly used WIDER FACE, AFLW and AFLW2000 datasets, the results show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art performance in low computational resources. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/MOS-Multi-Task-Face-Detect.

Building effective dense retrieval systems remains difficult when relevance supervision is not available. Recent work has looked to overcome this challenge by using a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate hypothetical documents that can be used to find the closest real document. However, this approach relies solely on the LLM to have domain-specific knowledge relevant to the query, which may not be practical. Furthermore, generating hypothetical documents can be inefficient as it requires the LLM to generate a large number of tokens for each query. To address these challenges, we introduce Real Document Embeddings from Relevance Feedback (ReDE-RF). Inspired by relevance feedback, ReDE-RF proposes to re-frame hypothetical document generation as a relevance estimation task, using an LLM to select which documents should be used for nearest neighbor search. Through this re-framing, the LLM no longer needs domain-specific knowledge but only needs to judge what is relevant. Additionally, relevance estimation only requires the LLM to output a single token, thereby improving search latency. Our experiments show that ReDE-RF consistently surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot dense retrieval methods across a wide range of low-resource retrieval datasets while also making significant improvements in latency per-query.

Recent work in speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has focused primarily on offline settings, where the full input utterance is available before any output is given. This, however, is not reasonable in many real-world scenarios. In latency-sensitive applications, rather than waiting for the full utterance, translations should be spoken as soon as the information in the input is present. In this work, we introduce a system for simultaneous S2ST targeting real-world use cases. Our system supports translation from 57 languages to English with tunable parameters for dynamically adjusting the latency of the output -- including four policies for determining when to speak an output sequence. We show that these policies achieve offline-level accuracy with minimal increases in latency over a Greedy (wait-k) baseline. We open-source our evaluation code and interactive test script to aid future SimulS2ST research and application development.

Multimodal language models that process both text and speech have a potential for applications in spoken dialogue systems. However, current models face two major challenges in response generation latency: (1) generating a spoken response requires the prior generation of a written response, and (2) speech sequences are significantly longer than text sequences. This study addresses these issues by extending the input and output sequences of the language model to support the parallel generation of text and speech. Our experiments on spoken question answering tasks demonstrate that our approach improves latency while maintaining the quality of response content. Additionally, we show that latency can be further reduced by generating speech in multiple sequences. Demo samples are available at https://rinnakk.github.io/research/publications/PSLM.

In this paper, we introduce a novel low-latency inference framework for large language models (LLMs) inference which enables LLMs to perform inferences with incomplete prompts. By reallocating computational processes to prompt input phase, we achieve a substantial reduction in latency, thereby significantly enhancing the interactive experience for users of LLMs. The framework adeptly manages the visibility of the streaming prompt to the model, allowing it to infer from incomplete prompts or await additional prompts. Compared with traditional inference methods that utilize complete prompts, our approach demonstrates an average reduction of 59% in response latency on the MMLU-Pro dataset, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Additionally, our framework facilitates collaborative inference and output across different models. By employing an LLM for inference and a small language model (SLM) for output, we achieve an average 68% reduction in response latency, alongside a 5.5% improvement in accuracy on the MMLU-Pro dataset compared with the SLM baseline. For long prompts exceeding 20 sentences, the response latency can be reduced by up to 93%.

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly permeate daily lives, there is a growing demand for real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. Traditional turn-based chat systems driven by LLMs prevent users from verbally interacting with the system while it is generating responses. To overcome these limitations, we adapt existing LLMs to duplex models so that these LLMs can listen for users while generating output and dynamically adjust themselves to provide users with instant feedback. % such as in response to interruptions. Specifically, we divide the queries and responses of conversations into several time slices and then adopt a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) encoding-decoding strategy to pseudo-simultaneously process these slices. Furthermore, to make LLMs proficient enough to handle real-time conversations, we build a fine-tuning dataset consisting of alternating time slices of queries and responses as well as covering typical feedback types in instantaneous interactions. Our experiments show that although the queries and responses of conversations are segmented into incomplete slices for processing, LLMs can preserve their original performance on standard benchmarks with a few fine-tuning steps on our dataset. Automatic and human evaluation indicate that duplex models make user-AI interactions more natural and human-like, and greatly improve user satisfaction compared to vanilla LLMs. Our duplex model and dataset will be released.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) has proven effective in improving the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. However, existing research has overlooked the efficiency of TTS from a latency-sensitive perspective. Through a latency-aware evaluation of representative TTS methods, we demonstrate that a compute-optimal TTS does not always result in the lowest latency in scenarios where latency is critical. To address this gap and achieve latency-optimal TTS, we propose two key approaches by optimizing the concurrency configurations: (1) branch-wise parallelism, which leverages multiple concurrent inference branches, and (2) sequence-wise parallelism, enabled by speculative decoding. By integrating these two approaches and allocating computational resources properly to each, our latency-optimal TTS enables a 32B model to reach 82.3% accuracy on MATH-500 within 1 minute and a smaller 3B model to achieve 72.4% within 10 seconds. Our work emphasizes the importance of latency-aware TTS and demonstrates its ability to deliver both speed and accuracy in latency-sensitive scenarios.

Natural language (NL) feedback contains rich information about the user experience. Existing studies focus on an instance-level approach, where feedback is used to refine specific examples, disregarding its system-wide application. This paper proposes a general framework for unlocking the system-level use of NL feedback. We show how to use feedback to formalize system-level design decisions in a human-in-the-loop-process -- in order to produce better models. In particular this is done through: (i) metric design for tasks; and (ii) language model prompt design for refining model responses. We conduct two case studies of this approach for improving search query generation and dialog response generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the use of system-level feedback. We show the combination of system-level feedback and instance-level feedback brings further gains, and that human written instance-level feedback results in more grounded refinements than GPT-3.5 written ones, underlying the importance of human feedback for building systems.

Generative AI search is reshaping information retrieval by offering end-to-end answers to complex queries, reducing users' reliance on manually browsing and summarizing multiple web pages. However, while this paradigm enhances convenience, it disrupts the feedback-driven improvement loop that has historically powered the evolution of traditional Web search. Web search can continuously improve their ranking models by collecting large-scale, fine-grained user feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell time) at the document level. In contrast, generative AI search operates through a much longer search pipeline, spanning query decomposition, document retrieval, and answer generation, yet typically receives only coarse-grained feedback on the final answer. This introduces a feedback loop disconnect, where user feedback for the final output cannot be effectively mapped back to specific system components, making it difficult to improve each intermediate stage and sustain the feedback loop. In this paper, we envision NExT-Search, a next-generation paradigm designed to reintroduce fine-grained, process-level feedback into generative AI search. NExT-Search integrates two complementary modes: User Debug Mode, which allows engaged users to intervene at key stages; and Shadow User Mode, where a personalized user agent simulates user preferences and provides AI-assisted feedback for less interactive users. Furthermore, we envision how these feedback signals can be leveraged through online adaptation, which refines current search outputs in real-time, and offline update, which aggregates interaction logs to periodically fine-tune query decomposition, retrieval, and generation models. By restoring human control over key stages of the generative AI search pipeline, we believe NExT-Search offers a promising direction for building feedback-rich AI search systems that can evolve continuously alongside human feedback.

A problem with many current Large Language Model (LLM) driven spoken dialogues is the response time. Some efforts such as Groq address this issue by lightning fast processing of the LLM, but we know from the cognitive psychology literature that in human-to-human dialogue often responses occur prior to the speaker completing their utterance. No amount of delay for LLM processing is acceptable if we wish to maintain human dialogue latencies. In this paper, we discuss methods for understanding an utterance in close to real time and generating a response so that the system can comply with human-level conversational turn delays. This means that the information content of the final part of the speaker's utterance is lost to the LLM. Using the Google NaturalQuestions (NQ) database, our results show GPT-4 can effectively fill in missing context from a dropped word at the end of a question over 60% of the time. We also provide some examples of utterances and the impacts of this information loss on the quality of LLM response in the context of an avatar that is currently under development. These results indicate that a simple classifier could be used to determine whether a question is semantically complete, or requires a filler phrase to allow a response to be generated within human dialogue time constraints.

LLMs demonstrate remarkable capabilities in following natural language instructions, largely due to instruction-tuning on high-quality datasets. While synthetic data generation has emerged as a scalable approach for creating such datasets, maintaining consistent quality standards remains challenging. Recent approaches incorporate feedback to improve data quality, but typically operate at the sample level, generating and applying feedback for each response individually. In this work, we propose Reference-Level Feedback, a novel methodology that instead collects feedback based on high-quality reference samples from carefully curated seed data. We use this feedback to capture rich signals of desirable characteristics and propagate it throughout the data synthesis process. We present REFED, a dataset of 10K instruction-response pairs synthesized using such feedback. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by showing that Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct finetuned on REFED achieves state-of-the-art performance among similar-sized SFT-based models on AlpacaEval 2.0 and strong results on Arena-Hard. Through extensive experiments, we show that our approach consistently outperforms traditional sample-level feedback methods with significantly fewer feedback collections and improves performance across different model architectures.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal speech-text models have laid the groundwork for seamless voice interactions, enabling real-time, natural, and human-like conversations. Previous models for voice interactions are categorized as native and aligned. Native models integrate speech and text processing in one framework but struggle with issues like differing sequence lengths and insufficient pre-training. Aligned models maintain text LLM capabilities but are often limited by small datasets and a narrow focus on speech tasks. In this work, we introduce MinMo, a Multimodal Large Language Model with approximately 8B parameters for seamless voice interaction. We address the main limitations of prior aligned multimodal models. We train MinMo through multiple stages of speech-to-text alignment, text-to-speech alignment, speech-to-speech alignment, and duplex interaction alignment, on 1.4 million hours of diverse speech data and a broad range of speech tasks. After the multi-stage training, MinMo achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks for voice comprehension and generation while maintaining the capabilities of text LLMs, and also facilitates full-duplex conversation, that is, simultaneous two-way communication between the user and the system. Moreover, we propose a novel and simple voice decoder that outperforms prior models in voice generation. The enhanced instruction-following capabilities of MinMo supports controlling speech generation based on user instructions, with various nuances including emotions, dialects, and speaking rates, and mimicking specific voices. For MinMo, the speech-to-text latency is approximately 100ms, full-duplex latency is approximately 600ms in theory and 800ms in practice. The MinMo project web page is https://funaudiollm.github.io/minmo, and the code and models will be released soon.

Frozen models trained to mimic static datasets can never improve their performance. Models that can employ internet-retrieval for up-to-date information and obtain feedback from humans during deployment provide the promise of both adapting to new information, and improving their performance. In this work we study how to improve internet-driven conversational skills in such a learning framework. We collect deployment data, which we make publicly available, of human interactions, and collect various types of human feedback -- including binary quality measurements, free-form text feedback, and fine-grained reasons for failure. We then study various algorithms for improving from such feedback, including standard supervised learning, rejection sampling, model-guiding and reward-based learning, in order to make recommendations on which type of feedback and algorithms work best. We find the recently introduced Director model (Arora et al., '22) shows significant improvements over other existing approaches.

Streaming speech recognition architectures are employed for low-latency, real-time applications. Such architectures are often characterized by their causality. Causal architectures emit tokens at each frame, relying only on current and past signal, while non-causal models are exposed to a window of future frames at each step to increase predictive accuracy. This dichotomy amounts to a trade-off for real-time Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system design: profit from the low-latency benefit of strictly-causal architectures while accepting predictive performance limitations, or realize the modeling benefits of future-context models accompanied by their higher latency penalty. In this work, we relax the constraints of this choice and present the Adaptive Non-Causal Attention Transducer (ANCAT). Our architecture is non-causal in the traditional sense, but executes in a low-latency, streaming manner by dynamically choosing when to rely on future context and to what degree within the audio stream. The resulting mechanism, when coupled with our novel regularization algorithms, delivers comparable accuracy to non-causal configurations while improving significantly upon latency, closing the gap with their causal counterparts. We showcase our design experimentally by reporting comparative ASR task results with measures of accuracy and latency on both publicly accessible and production-scale, voice-assistant datasets.

Fine-tuning language models~(LMs) on human-generated data remains a prevalent practice. However, the performance of such models is often limited by the quantity and diversity of high-quality human data. In this paper, we explore whether we can go beyond human data on tasks where we have access to scalar feedback, for example, on math problems where one can verify correctness. To do so, we investigate a simple self-training method based on expectation-maximization, which we call ReST^{EM}, where we (1) generate samples from the model and filter them using binary feedback, (2) fine-tune the model on these samples, and (3) repeat this process a few times. Testing on advanced MATH reasoning and APPS coding benchmarks using PaLM-2 models, we find that ReST^{EM} scales favorably with model size and significantly surpasses fine-tuning only on human data. Overall, our findings suggest self-training with feedback can substantially reduce dependence on human-generated data.

This research aims to explore various methods for assessing user feedback in mixed-initiative conversational search (CS) systems. While CS systems enjoy profuse advancements across multiple aspects, recent research fails to successfully incorporate feedback from the users. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of system-user conversational interaction data. To this end, we propose a user simulator-based framework for multi-turn interactions with a variety of mixed-initiative CS systems. Specifically, we develop a user simulator, dubbed ConvSim, that, once initialized with an information need description, is capable of providing feedback to a system's responses, as well as answering potential clarifying questions. Our experiments on a wide variety of state-of-the-art passage retrieval and neural re-ranking models show that effective utilization of user feedback can lead to 16% retrieval performance increase in terms of nDCG@3. Moreover, we observe consistent improvements as the number of feedback rounds increases (35% relative improvement in terms of nDCG@3 after three rounds). This points to a research gap in the development of specific feedback processing modules and opens a potential for significant advancements in CS. To support further research in the topic, we release over 30,000 transcripts of system-simulator interactions based on well-established CS datasets.

End-to-end models reach state-of-the-art performance for speech recognition, but global soft attention is not monotonic, which might lead to convergence problems, to instability, to bad generalisation, cannot be used for online streaming, and is also inefficient in calculation. Monotonicity can potentially fix all of this. There are several ad-hoc solutions or heuristics to introduce monotonicity, but a principled introduction is rarely found in literature so far. In this paper, we present a mathematically clean solution to introduce monotonicity, by introducing a new latent variable which represents the audio position or segment boundaries. We compare several monotonic latent models to our global soft attention baseline such as a hard attention model, a local windowed soft attention model, and a segmental soft attention model. We can show that our monotonic models perform as good as the global soft attention model. We perform our experiments on Switchboard 300h. We carefully outline the details of our training and release our code and configs.

Providing high-quality feedback is crucial for student success but is constrained by time, cost, and limited data availability. We introduce Synthetic Educational Feedback Loops (SEFL), a novel framework designed to deliver immediate, on-demand feedback at scale without relying on extensive, real-world student data. In SEFL, two large language models (LLMs) operate in teacher--student roles to simulate assignment completion and formative feedback, generating abundant synthetic pairs of student work and corresponding critiques. We then fine-tune smaller, more computationally efficient LLMs on these synthetic pairs, enabling them to replicate key features of high-quality, goal-oriented feedback. Unlike personalized tutoring approaches that offer multi-turn, individualized instruction, SEFL specifically focuses on replicating the teacher-->student feedback loop for diverse assignments. Through both LLM-as-a-judge and human evaluations, we demonstrate that SEFL-tuned models outperform their non-tuned counterparts in feedback quality, clarity, and timeliness. These findings reveal SEFL's potential to transform feedback processes for higher education and beyond, offering an ethical and scalable alternative to conventional manual feedback cycles.

Recent studies have shown LLMs possess some ability to improve their responses when given external feedback. However, it remains unclear how effectively and thoroughly these models can incorporate extrinsic feedback. In an ideal scenario, if LLMs receive near-perfect and complete feedback, we would expect them to fully integrate the feedback and change their incorrect answers to correct ones. In this paper, we systematically investigate LLMs' ability to incorporate feedback by designing a controlled experimental environment. For each problem, a solver model attempts a solution, then a feedback generator with access to near-complete ground-truth answers produces targeted feedback, after which the solver tries again. We evaluate this pipeline across a diverse range of tasks, including math reasoning, knowledge reasoning, scientific reasoning, and general multi-domain evaluations with state-of-the-art language models including Claude 3.7 (with and without extended thinking). Surprisingly, even under these near-ideal conditions, solver models consistently show resistance to feedback, a limitation that we term FEEDBACK FRICTION. To mitigate this limitation, we experiment with sampling-based strategies like progressive temperature increases and explicit rejection of previously attempted incorrect answers, which yield improvements but still fail to help models achieve target performance. We also perform a rigorous exploration of potential causes of FEEDBACK FRICTION, ruling out factors such as model overconfidence and data familiarity. We hope that highlighting this issue in LLMs and ruling out several apparent causes will help future research in self-improvement.

Prior works have demonstrated zero-shot text-to-speech by using a generative language model on audio tokens obtained via a neural audio codec. It is still challenging, however, to adapt them to low-latency scenarios. In this paper, we present LiveSpeech - a fully autoregressive language model-based approach for zero-shot text-to-speech, enabling low-latency streaming of the output audio. To allow multiple token prediction within a single decoding step, we propose (1) using adaptive codebook loss weights that consider codebook contribution in each frame and focus on hard instances, and (2) grouping codebooks and processing groups in parallel. Experiments show our proposed models achieve competitive results to state-of-the-art baselines in terms of content accuracy, speaker similarity, audio quality, and inference speed while being suitable for low-latency streaming applications.

Pre-trained language models are increasingly important components across multiple information retrieval (IR) paradigms. Late interaction, introduced with the ColBERT model and recently refined in ColBERTv2, is a popular paradigm that holds state-of-the-art status across many benchmarks. To dramatically speed up the search latency of late interaction, we introduce the Performance-optimized Late Interaction Driver (PLAID). Without impacting quality, PLAID swiftly eliminates low-scoring passages using a novel centroid interaction mechanism that treats every passage as a lightweight bag of centroids. PLAID uses centroid interaction as well as centroid pruning, a mechanism for sparsifying the bag of centroids, within a highly-optimized engine to reduce late interaction search latency by up to 7times on a GPU and 45times on a CPU against vanilla ColBERTv2, while continuing to deliver state-of-the-art retrieval quality. This allows the PLAID engine with ColBERTv2 to achieve latency of tens of milliseconds on a GPU and tens or just few hundreds of milliseconds on a CPU at large scale, even at the largest scales we evaluate with 140M passages.

Language models (LMs) often exhibit undesirable text generation behaviors, including generating false, toxic, or irrelevant outputs. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) - where human preference judgments on LM outputs are transformed into a learning signal - has recently shown promise in addressing these issues. However, such holistic feedback conveys limited information on long text outputs; it does not indicate which aspects of the outputs influenced user preference; e.g., which parts contain what type(s) of errors. In this paper, we use fine-grained human feedback (e.g., which sentence is false, which sub-sentence is irrelevant) as an explicit training signal. We introduce Fine-Grained RLHF, a framework that enables training and learning from reward functions that are fine-grained in two respects: (1) density, providing a reward after every segment (e.g., a sentence) is generated; and (2) incorporating multiple reward models associated with different feedback types (e.g., factual incorrectness, irrelevance, and information incompleteness). We conduct experiments on detoxification and long-form question answering to illustrate how learning with such reward functions leads to improved performance, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. Additionally, we show that LM behaviors can be customized using different combinations of fine-grained reward models. We release all data, collected human feedback, and codes at https://FineGrainedRLHF.github.io.

Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the feasibility of allowing users to interrupt their dictation with spoken editing commands in open-ended natural language. We introduce a new task and dataset, TERTiUS, to experiment with such systems. To support this flexibility in real-time, a system must incrementally segment and classify spans of speech as either dictation or command, and interpret the spans that are commands. We experiment with using large pre-trained language models to predict the edited text, or alternatively, to predict a small text-editing program. Experiments show a natural trade-off between model accuracy and latency: a smaller model achieves 30% end-state accuracy with 1.3 seconds of latency, while a larger model achieves 55% end-state accuracy with 7 seconds of latency.

We propose MusicRL, the first music generation system finetuned from human feedback. Appreciation of text-to-music models is particularly subjective since the concept of musicality as well as the specific intention behind a caption are user-dependent (e.g. a caption such as "upbeat work-out music" can map to a retro guitar solo or a techno pop beat). Not only this makes supervised training of such models challenging, but it also calls for integrating continuous human feedback in their post-deployment finetuning. MusicRL is a pretrained autoregressive MusicLM (Agostinelli et al., 2023) model of discrete audio tokens finetuned with reinforcement learning to maximise sequence-level rewards. We design reward functions related specifically to text-adherence and audio quality with the help from selected raters, and use those to finetune MusicLM into MusicRL-R. We deploy MusicLM to users and collect a substantial dataset comprising 300,000 pairwise preferences. Using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), we train MusicRL-U, the first text-to-music model that incorporates human feedback at scale. Human evaluations show that both MusicRL-R and MusicRL-U are preferred to the baseline. Ultimately, MusicRL-RU combines the two approaches and results in the best model according to human raters. Ablation studies shed light on the musical attributes influencing human preferences, indicating that text adherence and quality only account for a part of it. This underscores the prevalence of subjectivity in musical appreciation and calls for further involvement of human listeners in the finetuning of music generation models.

Learning from human feedback has gained traction in fields like robotics and natural language processing in recent years. While prior works mostly rely on human feedback in the form of comparisons, language is a preferable modality that provides more informative insights into user preferences. In this work, we aim to incorporate comparative language feedback to iteratively improve robot trajectories and to learn reward functions that encode human preferences. To achieve this goal, we learn a shared latent space that integrates trajectory data and language feedback, and subsequently leverage the learned latent space to improve trajectories and learn human preferences. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to incorporate comparative language feedback into reward learning. Our simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the learned latent space and the success of our learning algorithms. We also conduct human subject studies that show our reward learning algorithm achieves a 23.9% higher subjective score on average and is 11.3% more time-efficient compared to preference-based reward learning, underscoring the superior performance of our method. Our website is at https://liralab.usc.edu/comparative-language-feedback/

The recent rapid advancement of machine learning has been driven by increasingly powerful models with the growing availability of training data and computational resources. However, real-time decision-making tasks with limited time and sparse learning signals remain challenging. One way of improving the learning speed and performance of these agents is to leverage human guidance. In this work, we introduce GUIDE, a framework for real-time human-guided reinforcement learning by enabling continuous human feedback and grounding such feedback into dense rewards to accelerate policy learning. Additionally, our method features a simulated feedback module that learns and replicates human feedback patterns in an online fashion, effectively reducing the need for human input while allowing continual training. We demonstrate the performance of our framework on challenging tasks with sparse rewards and visual observations. Our human study involving 50 subjects offers strong quantitative and qualitative evidence of the effectiveness of our approach. With only 10 minutes of human feedback, our algorithm achieves up to 30% increase in success rate compared to its RL baseline.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse user facing applications, aligning them with real user preferences becomes essential. Existing methods like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) rely on expert annotators trained on manually defined guidelines, whose judgments may not reflect the priorities of everyday users. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from User Feedback (RLUF), a framework for aligning LLMs directly to implicit signals from users in production. RLUF addresses key challenges of user feedback: user feedback is often binary (e.g., emoji reactions), sparse, and occasionally adversarial. We train a reward model, P[Love], to predict the likelihood that an LLM response will receive a Love Reaction, a lightweight form of positive user feedback, and integrate P[Love] into a multi-objective policy optimization framework alongside helpfulness and safety objectives. In large-scale experiments, we show that P[Love] is predictive of increased positive feedback and serves as a reliable offline evaluator of future user behavior. Policy optimization using P[Love] significantly raises observed positive-feedback rates, including a 28% increase in Love Reactions during live A/B tests. However, optimizing for positive reactions introduces reward hacking challenges, requiring careful balancing of objectives. By directly leveraging implicit signals from users, RLUF offers a path to aligning LLMs with real-world user preferences at scale.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across various NLP tasks. However, they often generate incorrect or hallucinated information, which hinders their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. Human feedback has been shown to effectively enhance the factuality and quality of generated content, addressing some of these limitations. However, this approach is resource-intensive, involving manual input and supervision, which can be time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, it cannot be provided during inference, further limiting its practical utility in dynamic and interactive applications. In this paper, we introduce ReFeed, a novel pipeline designed to enhance LLMs by providing automatic retrieval feedback in a plug-and-play framework without the need for expensive fine-tuning. ReFeed first generates initial outputs, then utilizes a retrieval model to acquire relevant information from large document collections, and finally incorporates the retrieved information into the in-context demonstration for output refinement, thereby addressing the limitations of LLMs in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Experiments on four knowledge-intensive benchmark datasets demonstrate our proposed ReFeed could improve over +6.0% under zero-shot setting and +2.5% under few-shot setting, compared to baselines without using retrieval feedback.

Large language models (LLMs) have brought autonomous agents closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI) due to their promising generalization and emergent capabilities. There is, however, a lack of studies on how LLM-based agents behave, why they could potentially fail, and how to improve them, particularly in demanding real-world planning tasks. In this paper, as an effort to fill the gap, we present our study using a realistic benchmark, TravelPlanner, where an agent must meet multiple constraints to generate accurate plans. We leverage this benchmark to address four key research questions: (1) are LLM agents robust enough to lengthy and noisy contexts when it comes to reasoning and planning? (2) can few-shot prompting adversely impact the performance of LLM agents in scenarios with long context? (3) can we rely on refinement to improve plans, and (4) can fine-tuning LLMs with both positive and negative feedback lead to further improvement? Our comprehensive experiments indicate that, firstly, LLMs often fail to attend to crucial parts of a long context, despite their ability to handle extensive reference information and few-shot examples; secondly, they still struggle with analyzing the long plans and cannot provide accurate feedback for refinement; thirdly, we propose Feedback-Aware Fine-Tuning (FAFT), which leverages both positive and negative feedback, resulting in substantial gains over Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Our findings offer in-depth insights to the community on various aspects related to real-world planning applications.

In this paper, we present Duplex Conversation, a multi-turn, multimodal spoken dialogue system that enables telephone-based agents to interact with customers like a human. We use the concept of full-duplex in telecommunication to demonstrate what a human-like interactive experience should be and how to achieve smooth turn-taking through three subtasks: user state detection, backchannel selection, and barge-in detection. Besides, we propose semi-supervised learning with multimodal data augmentation to leverage unlabeled data to increase model generalization. Experimental results on three sub-tasks show that the proposed method achieves consistent improvements compared with baselines. We deploy the Duplex Conversation to Alibaba intelligent customer service and share lessons learned in production. Online A/B experiments show that the proposed system can significantly reduce response latency by 50%.

Human feedback data is a critical component in developing language models. However, collecting this feedback is costly and ultimately not scalable. We propose a scalable method for extracting feedback that users naturally include when interacting with chat models, and leveraging it for model training. We are further motivated by previous work that showed there are also qualitative advantages to using naturalistic (rather than auto-generated) feedback, such as less hallucinations and biases. We manually annotated conversation data to confirm the presence of naturally occurring feedback in a standard corpus, finding that as much as 30% of the chats include explicit feedback. We apply our method to over 1M conversations to obtain hundreds of thousands of feedback samples. Training with the extracted feedback shows significant performance improvements over baseline models, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in enhancing model alignment to human preferences.

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have seen widespread adoption due to their ability to follow user instructions well. Developing these LLMs involves a complex yet poorly understood workflow requiring training with human feedback. Replicating and understanding this instruction-following process faces three major challenges: the high cost of data collection, the lack of trustworthy evaluation, and the absence of reference method implementations. We address these challenges with AlpacaFarm, a simulator that enables research and development for learning from feedback at a low cost. First, we design LLM prompts to simulate human feedback that are 45x cheaper than crowdworkers and display high agreement with humans. Second, we propose an automatic evaluation and validate it against human instructions obtained on real-world interactions. Third, we contribute reference implementations for several methods (PPO, best-of-n, expert iteration, and more) that learn from pairwise feedback. Finally, as an end-to-end validation of AlpacaFarm, we train and evaluate eleven models on 10k pairs of real human feedback and show that rankings of models trained in AlpacaFarm match rankings of models trained on human data. As a demonstration of the research possible in AlpacaFarm, we find that methods that use a reward model can substantially improve over supervised fine-tuning and that our reference PPO implementation leads to a +10% improvement in win-rate against Davinci003. We release all components of AlpacaFarm at https://github.com/tatsu-lab/alpaca_farm.

Reinforcement learning with AI feedback (RLAIF) is a popular paradigm for improving the instruction-following abilities of powerful pre-trained language models. RLAIF first performs supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using demonstrations from a teacher model and then further fine-tunes the model with reinforcement learning (RL), using feedback from a critic model. While recent popular open-source models have demonstrated substantial improvements in performance from the RL step, in this paper we question whether the complexity of this RL step is truly warranted for AI feedback. We show that the improvements of the RL step are virtually entirely due to the widespread practice of using a weaker teacher model (e.g. GPT-3.5) for SFT data collection than the critic (e.g., GPT-4) used for AI feedback generation. Specifically, we show that simple supervised fine-tuning with GPT-4 as the teacher outperforms existing RLAIF pipelines. More generally, we find that the gains from RLAIF vary substantially across base model families, test-time evaluation protocols, and critic models. Finally, we provide a mechanistic explanation for when SFT may outperform the full two-step RLAIF pipeline as well as suggestions for making RLAIF maximally useful in practice.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intents critically involves the use of human or AI feedback. While dense feedback annotations are expensive to acquire and integrate, sparse feedback presents a structural design choice between ratings (e.g., score Response A on a scale of 1-7) and rankings (e.g., is Response A better than Response B?). In this work, we analyze the effect of this design choice for the alignment and evaluation of LLMs. We uncover an inconsistency problem wherein the preferences inferred from ratings and rankings significantly disagree 60% for both human and AI annotators. Our subsequent analysis identifies various facets of annotator biases that explain this phenomena, such as human annotators would rate denser responses higher while preferring accuracy during pairwise judgments. To our surprise, we also observe that the choice of feedback protocol also has a significant effect on the evaluation of aligned LLMs. In particular, we find that LLMs that leverage rankings data for alignment (say model X) are preferred over those that leverage ratings data (say model Y), with a rank-based evaluation protocol (is X/Y's response better than reference response?) but not with a rating-based evaluation protocol (score Rank X/Y's response on a scale of 1-7). Our findings thus shed light on critical gaps in methods for evaluating the real-world utility of language models and their strong dependence on the feedback protocol used for alignment. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/sparse_feedback.

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding tasks but continue to struggle with long-context comprehension, particularly with content located in the middle of extensive inputs. This limitation, known as the Lost-in-the-Middle (LITM) problem, hinders models from fully processing and utilizing information across lengthy contexts. To address this issue, we introduce pause-tuning, a technique that redistributes attention to enhance comprehension of long-context inputs. Our approach involves fine-tuning language models on datasets with artificially inserted pause tokens, which serve to segment the input into smaller, more manageable parts. We evaluate pause-tuning against alternative approaches using the Needle-in-a-Haystack benchmark, where models must retrieve information embedded within contexts of up to 128K tokens. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains, with the LLaMA 3.2 3B Instruct model and the LLaMA 3.1 8B Instruct model improving by 10.61% and 3.57% respectively on average, suggesting that pause-tuning successfully enhances attention redistribution and improves long-context retention. The code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LITM-PauseTokens-7357.

Finetuning pre-trained language models (LMs) enhances the models' capabilities. Prior techniques fine-tune a pre-trained LM on input-output pairs (e.g., instruction fine-tuning), or with numerical rewards that gauge the quality of its outputs (e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback). We explore LMs' potential to learn from textual interactions (LeTI) that not only check their correctness with binary labels, but also pinpoint and explain errors in their outputs through textual feedback. Our investigation focuses on the code generation task, where the model produces code pieces in response to natural language instructions. This setting invites a natural and scalable way to acquire the textual feedback: the error messages and stack traces from code execution using a Python interpreter. LeTI iteratively fine-tunes the model, using the LM objective, on a concatenation of natural language instructions, LM-generated programs, and textual feedback, which is only provided when the generated program fails to solve the task. Prepended to this fine-tuning text, a binary reward token is used to differentiate correct and buggy solutions. On MBPP, a code generation dataset, LeTI substantially improves the performance of two base LMs of different scales. LeTI requires no ground-truth outputs for training and even outperforms a fine-tuned baseline that does. LeTI's strong performance generalizes to other datasets. Trained on MBPP, it achieves comparable or better performance than the base LMs on unseen problems in HumanEval. Furthermore, compared to binary feedback, we observe that textual feedback leads to improved generation quality and sample efficiency, achieving the same performance with fewer than half of the gradient steps. LeTI is equally applicable in natural language tasks when they can be formulated as code generation, which we empirically verified on event argument extraction.

Large language models (LLMs) have been applied to a wide range of tasks, including text summarization, web navigation, and chatbots. They have benefitted from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) following an unsupervised pretraining. These datasets can be difficult to collect, limited in scope, and vary in sample quality. Additionally, datasets can vary extensively in supervision format, from numerical to binary as well as multi-dimensional with many different values. We present a framework for fine-tuning LLMs using heterogeneous feedback, which has two main components. First, we combine the heterogeneous feedback data into a single supervision format, compatible with methods like SFT and RLHF. Next, given this unified feedback dataset, we extract a high-quality and diverse subset to obtain performance increases potentially exceeding the full dataset. We conduct extensive experiments to understand the effectiveness of these techniques for incorporating heterogeneous feedback, and demonstrate improvements from using a high-quality and diverse subset of the data. We find that our framework is able to improve models in multiple areas simultaneously, such as in instruction following and bias reduction.

We present Prompt Cache, an approach for accelerating inference for large language models (LLM) by reusing attention states across different LLM prompts. Many input prompts have overlapping text segments, such as system messages, prompt templates, and documents provided for context. Our key insight is that by precomputing and storing the attention states of these frequently occurring text segments on the inference server, we can efficiently reuse them when these segments appear in user prompts. Prompt Cache employs a schema to explicitly define such reusable text segments, called prompt modules. The schema ensures positional accuracy during attention state reuse and provides users with an interface to access cached states in their prompt. Using a prototype implementation, we evaluate Prompt Cache across several LLMs. We show that Prompt Cache significantly reduce latency in time-to-first-token, especially for longer prompts such as document-based question answering and recommendations. The improvements range from 8x for GPU-based inference to 60x for CPU-based inference, all while maintaining output accuracy and without the need for model parameter modifications.

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have recently demonstrated strong performance and faster inference than Transformers at comparable parameter budgets. However, the recursive gradient computation with the backpropagation through time (or BPTT) algorithm remains the major computational bottleneck. In this work, we propose a novel method that replaces BPTT with a fixed gradient feedback mechanism, yielding an efficient approximation of the exact gradient propagation based on the assumption of time stationarity. Our approach leverages state-space model (SSM) principles to define a structured feedback matrix that directly propagates gradients from future time steps. This formulation bypasses the need for recursive gradient backpropagation, significantly reducing training overhead while preserving the network's ability to capture long-term dependencies. The experiments on language modeling benchmarks exhibit competitive perplexity scores, while significantly reducing the training costs. These promising results suggest that designing a feedback method like an SSM can fully exploit the efficiency advantages of RNNs for many practical applications.

We introduce Language Feedback Models (LFMs) that identify desirable behaviour - actions that help achieve tasks specified in the instruction - for imitation learning in instruction following. To train LFMs, we obtain feedback from Large Language Models (LLMs) on visual trajectories verbalized to language descriptions. First, by using LFMs to identify desirable behaviour to imitate, we improve in task-completion rate over strong behavioural cloning baselines on three distinct language grounding environments (Touchdown, ScienceWorld, and ALFWorld). Second, LFMs outperform using LLMs as experts to directly predict actions, when controlling for the number of LLM output tokens. Third, LFMs generalize to unseen environments, improving task-completion rate by 3.5-12.0% through one round of adaptation. Finally, LFM can be modified to provide human-interpretable feedback without performance loss, allowing human verification of desirable behaviour for imitation learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, yet interaction with these models is mostly facilitated through text. Using Text-To-Speech to synthesize LLM outputs typically results in notable latency, which is impractical for fluent voice conversations. We propose LLM2Speech, an architecture to synthesize speech while text is being generated by an LLM which yields significant latency reduction. LLM2Speech mimics the predictions of a non-streaming teacher model while limiting the exposure to future context in order to enable streaming. It exploits the hidden embeddings of the LLM, a by-product of the text generation that contains informative semantic context. Experimental results show that LLM2Speech maintains the teacher's quality while reducing the latency to enable natural conversations.

Interactively learning from observation and language feedback is an increasingly studied area driven by the emergence of large language model (LLM) agents. While impressive empirical demonstrations have been shown, so far a principled framing of these decision problems remains lacking. In this paper, we formalize the Learning from Language Feedback (LLF) problem, assert sufficient assumptions to enable learning despite latent rewards, and introduce transfer eluder dimension as a complexity measure to characterize the hardness of LLF problems. We show that transfer eluder dimension captures the intuition that information in the feedback changes the learning complexity of the LLF problem. We demonstrate cases where learning from rich language feedback can be exponentially faster than learning from reward. We develop a no-regret algorithm, called HELiX, that provably solves LLF problems through sequential interactions, with performance guarantees that scale with the transfer eluder dimension of the problem. Across several empirical domains, we show that HELiX performs well even when repeatedly prompting LLMs does not work reliably. Our contributions mark a first step towards designing principled interactive learning algorithms from generic language feedback.

This paper explores a novel perspective to speech quality assessment by leveraging natural language descriptions, offering richer, more nuanced insights than traditional numerical scoring methods. Natural language feedback provides instructive recommendations and detailed evaluations, yet existing datasets lack the comprehensive annotations needed for this approach. To bridge this gap, we introduce QualiSpeech, a comprehensive low-level speech quality assessment dataset encompassing 11 key aspects and detailed natural language comments that include reasoning and contextual insights. Additionally, we propose the QualiSpeech Benchmark to evaluate the low-level speech understanding capabilities of auditory large language models (LLMs). Experimental results demonstrate that finetuned auditory LLMs can reliably generate detailed descriptions of noise and distortion, effectively identifying their types and temporal characteristics. The results further highlight the potential for incorporating reasoning to enhance the accuracy and reliability of quality assessments. The dataset will be released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tsinghua-ee/QualiSpeech.

Many applications must provide low-latency LLM service to users or risk unacceptable user experience. However, over-provisioning resources to serve fluctuating request patterns is often prohibitively expensive. In this work, we present a best-effort serving system that employs deep reinforcement learning to adjust service quality based on the task distribution and system load. Our best-effort system can maintain availability with over 10x higher client request rates, serves above 96% of peak performance 4.1x more often, and serves above 98% of peak performance 2.3x more often than static serving on unpredictable workloads. Our learned router is robust to shifts in both the arrival and task distribution. Compared to static serving, learned best-effort serving allows for cost-efficient serving through increased hardware utility. Additionally, we argue that learned best-effort LLM serving is applicable in wide variety of settings and provides application developers great flexibility to meet their specific needs.

Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) systems aim at generating their output with the lowest possible latency, which is normally computed in terms of Average Lagging (AL). In this paper we highlight that, despite its widespread adoption, AL provides underestimated scores for systems that generate longer predictions compared to the corresponding references. We also show that this problem has practical relevance, as recent SimulST systems have indeed a tendency to over-generate. As a solution, we propose LAAL (Length-Adaptive Average Lagging), a modified version of the metric that takes into account the over-generation phenomenon and allows for unbiased evaluation of both under-/over-generating systems.

The potential for pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to use natural language feedback at inference time has been an exciting recent development. We build upon this observation by formalizing an algorithm for learning from natural language feedback at training time instead, which we call Imitation learning from Language Feedback (ILF). ILF requires only a small amount of human-written feedback during training and does not require the same feedback at test time, making it both user-friendly and sample-efficient. We further show that ILF can be seen as a form of minimizing the KL divergence to the ground truth distribution and demonstrate a proof-of-concept on a neural program synthesis task. We use ILF to improve a Codegen-Mono 6.1B model's pass@1 rate by 38% relative (and 10% absolute) on the Mostly Basic Python Problems (MBPP) benchmark, outperforming both fine-tuning on MBPP and fine-tuning on repaired programs written by humans. Overall, our results suggest that learning from human-written natural language feedback is both more effective and sample-efficient than training exclusively on demonstrations for improving an LLM's performance on code generation tasks.

Language models are aligned to emulate the collective voice of many, resulting in outputs that align with no one in particular. Steering LLMs away from generic output is possible through supervised finetuning or RLHF, but requires prohibitively large datasets for new ad-hoc tasks. We argue that it is instead possible to align an LLM to a specific setting by leveraging a very small number (<10) of demonstrations as feedback. Our method, Demonstration ITerated Task Optimization (DITTO), directly aligns language model outputs to a user's demonstrated behaviors. Derived using ideas from online imitation learning, DITTO cheaply generates online comparison data by treating users' demonstrations as preferred over output from the LLM and its intermediate checkpoints. We evaluate DITTO's ability to learn fine-grained style and task alignment across domains such as news articles, emails, and blog posts. Additionally, we conduct a user study soliciting a range of demonstrations from participants (N=16). Across our benchmarks and user study, we find that win-rates for DITTO outperform few-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and other self-play methods by an average of 19% points. By using demonstrations as feedback directly, DITTO offers a novel method for effective customization of LLMs.

In this paper we study how to effectively exploit implicit feedback in Dense Retrievers (DRs). We consider the specific case in which click data from a historic click log is available as implicit feedback. We then exploit such historic implicit interactions to improve the effectiveness of a DR. A key challenge that we study is the effect that biases in the click signal, such as position bias, have on the DRs. To overcome the problems associated with the presence of such bias, we propose the Counterfactual Rocchio (CoRocchio) algorithm for exploiting implicit feedback in Dense Retrievers. We demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that dense query representations learnt with CoRocchio are unbiased with respect to position bias and lead to higher retrieval effectiveness. We make available the implementations of the proposed methods and the experimental framework, along with all results at https://github.com/ielab/Counterfactual-DR.

The diversity of contexts in which large language models (LLMs) are deployed requires the ability to modify or customize default model behaviors to incorporate nuanced requirements and preferences. A convenient interface to specify such model adjustments is high-level verbal feedback, such as "Don't use emojis when drafting emails to my boss." However, while writing high-level feedback is far simpler than collecting annotations for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), we find that simply prompting a model with such feedback leads to overgeneralization of the feedback to contexts where it is not relevant. We study the problem of incorporating verbal feedback without such overgeneralization, inspiring a new method Contextualized Critiques with Constrained Preference Optimization (C3PO). C3PO uses a piece of high-level feedback to generate a small synthetic preference dataset specifying how the feedback should (and should not) be applied. It then fine-tunes the model in accordance with the synthetic preference data while minimizing the divergence from the original model for prompts where the feedback does not apply. Our experimental results indicate that our approach effectively applies verbal feedback to relevant scenarios while preserving existing behaviors for other contexts. For both human- and GPT-4-generated high-level feedback, C3PO effectively adheres to the given feedback comparably to in-context baselines while reducing overgeneralization by 30%.

Combining simple elements from the literature, we define a linear model that is geared toward sparse data, in particular implicit feedback data for recommender systems. We show that its training objective has a closed-form solution, and discuss the resulting conceptual insights. Surprisingly, this simple model achieves better ranking accuracy than various state-of-the-art collaborative-filtering approaches, including deep non-linear models, on most of the publicly available data-sets used in our experiments.

Despite their unprecedented success, even the largest language models make mistakes. Similar to how humans learn and improve using feedback, previous work proposed providing language models with natural language feedback to guide them in repairing their outputs. Because human-generated critiques are expensive to obtain, researchers have devised learned critique generators in lieu of human critics while assuming one can train downstream models to utilize generated feedback. However, this approach does not apply to black-box or limited access models such as ChatGPT, as they cannot be fine-tuned. Moreover, in the era of large general-purpose language agents, fine-tuning is neither computationally nor spatially efficient as it results in multiple copies of the network. In this work, we introduce RL4F (Reinforcement Learning for Feedback), a multi-agent collaborative framework where the critique generator is trained to maximize end-task performance of GPT-3, a fixed model more than 200 times its size. RL4F produces critiques that help GPT-3 revise its outputs. We study three datasets for action planning, summarization and alphabetization and show improvements (~5% on average) in multiple text similarity metrics over strong baselines across all three tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit potential artificial generic intelligence recently, however, their usage is costly with high response latency. Given mixed LLMs with their own strengths and weaknesses, LLM routing aims to identify the most suitable model for each query in the stream to maximize response quality and minimize cost and latency. However, the challenges involve: (1) dynamic trade-offs among quality, cost, and latency; (2) enabling continual learning in deployed systems; and (3) navigating a varying (e.g., new LLM addition or old LLM removal) set of LLM candidates over time. To bridge these gaps, we develop MixLLM, a dynamic contextual-bandit-based routing system for query-LLM assignment. Specifically, we first leverage query tags to enhance query embeddings for the routing task. Next, we design lightweight prediction models to estimate the response qualities and costs of queries over LLMs. We then devise a meta-decision maker to choose the query-LLM assignments to best tradeoff response quality, cost, and latency. Finally, the system benefits from continual training, allowing it to adapt to evolving queries and user feedback over time. Our extensive experiments show that MixLLM achieves the best trade-offs in response quality, cost, and latency (97.25% of GPT-4's quality at 24.18% of the cost under the time constraint).

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.

Learning from human feedback is a prominent technique to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human expectations. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preference signals that are in the form of ranking of response pairs to perform this alignment. However, human preference on LLM outputs can come in much richer forms including natural language, which may provide detailed feedback on strengths and weaknesses of a given response. In this work we investigate data efficiency of modeling human feedback that is in natural language. Specifically, we fine-tune an open-source LLM, e.g., Falcon-40B-Instruct, on a relatively small amount (1000 records or even less) of human feedback in natural language in the form of critiques and revisions of responses. We show that this model is able to improve the quality of responses from even some of the strongest LLMs such as ChatGPT, BARD, and Vicuna, through critique and revision of those responses. For instance, through one iteration of revision of ChatGPT responses, the revised responses have 56.6% win rate over the original ones, and this win rate can be further improved to 65.9% after applying the revision for five iterations.

Simultaneous translation of unbounded streaming speech remains a challenging problem due to the need for effectively processing the history speech context and past translations so that quality and latency, including computation overhead, can be balanced. Most prior works assume pre-segmented speech, limiting their real-world applicability. In this paper, we propose InfiniSST, a novel approach that formulates SST as a multi-turn dialogue task, enabling seamless translation of unbounded speech. We construct translation trajectories and robust segments from MuST-C with multi-latency augmentation during training and develop a key-value (KV) cache management strategy to facilitate efficient inference. Experiments on MuST-C En-Es, En-De, and En-Zh demonstrate that InfiniSST reduces computation-aware latency by 0.5 to 1 second while maintaining the same translation quality compared to baselines. Ablation studies further validate the contributions of our data construction and cache management strategy. We release the code and demo at https://github.com/LeiLiLab/InfiniSST

To solve complex tasks, large language models (LLMs) often require multiple rounds of interactions with the user, sometimes assisted by external tools. However, current evaluation protocols often emphasize benchmark performance with single-turn exchanges, neglecting the nuanced interactions among the user, LLMs, and external tools, while also underestimating the importance of natural language feedback from users. These oversights contribute to discrepancies between research benchmark evaluations and real-world use cases. We introduce MINT, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs' ability to solve tasks with multi-turn interactions by (1) using tools and (2) leveraging natural language feedback. To ensure reproducibility, we provide an evaluation framework where LLMs can access tools by executing Python code and receive users' natural language feedback simulated by GPT-4. We repurpose a diverse set of established evaluation datasets focusing on reasoning, coding, and decision-making and carefully curate them into a compact subset for efficient evaluation. Our analysis of 20 open- and closed-source LLMs offers intriguing findings. (a) LLMs generally benefit from tools and language feedback, with performance gains (absolute, same below) of 1-8% for each turn of tool use and 2-17% with natural language feedback. (b) Better single-turn performance does not guarantee better multi-turn performance. (c) Surprisingly, on the LLMs evaluated, supervised instruction-finetuning (SIFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) generally hurt multi-turn capabilities. We expect MINT can help measure progress and incentivize research in improving LLMs' capabilities in multi-turn interactions, especially for open-source communities where multi-turn human evaluation can be less accessible compared to commercial LLMs with a larger user base.

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture, where a higher policy decides whether to invoke the conversation module (to ask questions) or the recommendation module (to make recommendations). This architecture prevents these two components from fully interacting with each other. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel architecture, the long short-term feedback architecture, to connect these two essential components in CRS. Specifically, the recommendation predicts the long-term recommendation target based on the conversational context and the user history. Driven by the targeted recommendation, the conversational model predicts the next topic or attribute to verify if the user preference matches the target. The balance feedback loop continues until the short-term planner output matches the long-term planner output, that is when the system should make the recommendation.

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) suffers from the latency problem when applied to streaming models. We argue that in CTC lattice, the alignments that can access more future context are preferred during training, thereby leading to higher symbol delay. In this work we propose the delay-penalized CTC which is augmented with latency penalty regularization. We devise a flexible and efficient implementation based on the differentiable Finite State Transducer (FST). Specifically, by attaching a binary attribute to CTC topology, we can locate the frames that firstly emit non-blank tokens on the resulting CTC lattice, and add the frame offsets to the log-probabilities. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed delay-penalized CTC, which is able to balance the delay-accuracy trade-off. Furthermore, combining the delay-penalized transducer enables the CTC model to achieve better performance and lower latency. Our work is open-sourced and publicly available https://github.com/k2-fsa/k2.

Latency and efficiency issues are often overlooked when evaluating IR models based on Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) in reason of multiple hardware and software testing scenarios. Nevertheless, efficiency is an important part of such systems and should not be overlooked. In this paper, we focus on improving the efficiency of the SPLADE model since it has achieved state-of-the-art zero-shot performance and competitive results on TREC collections. SPLADE efficiency can be controlled via a regularization factor, but solely controlling this regularization has been shown to not be efficient enough. In order to reduce the latency gap between SPLADE and traditional retrieval systems, we propose several techniques including L1 regularization for queries, a separation of document/query encoders, a FLOPS-regularized middle-training, and the use of faster query encoders. Our benchmark demonstrates that we can drastically improve the efficiency of these models while increasing the performance metrics on in-domain data. To our knowledge, {we propose the first neural models that, under the same computing constraints, achieve similar latency (less than 4ms difference) as traditional BM25, while having similar performance (less than 10\% MRR@10 reduction) as the state-of-the-art single-stage neural rankers on in-domain data}.

In recent research on large language models (LLMs), there has been a growing emphasis on aligning these models with human values to reduce the impact of harmful content. However, current alignment methods often rely solely on singular forms of human feedback, such as preferences, annotated labels, or natural language critiques, overlooking the potential advantages of combining these feedback types. This limitation leads to suboptimal performance, even when ample training data is available. In this paper, we introduce Constructive and Diverse Feedback (CDF) as a novel method to enhance LLM alignment, inspired by constructivist learning theory. Our approach involves collecting three distinct types of feedback tailored to problems of varying difficulty levels within the training dataset. Specifically, we exploit critique feedback for easy problems, refinement feedback for medium problems, and preference feedback for hard problems. By training our model with this diversified feedback, we achieve enhanced alignment performance while using less training data. To assess the effectiveness of CDF, we evaluate it against previous methods in three downstream tasks: question answering, dialog generation, and text summarization. Experimental results demonstrate that CDF achieves superior performance even with a smaller training dataset.

AI assistance continues to help advance applications in education, from language learning to intelligent tutoring systems, yet current methods for providing students feedback are still quite limited. Most automatic feedback systems either provide binary correctness feedback, which may not help a student understand how to improve, or require hand-coding feedback templates, which may not generalize to new domains. This can be particularly challenging for physical control tasks, where the rich diversity in student behavior and specialized domains make it challenging to leverage general-purpose assistive tools for providing feedback. We design and build CORGI, a model trained to generate language corrections for physical control tasks, such as learning to ride a bike. CORGI takes in as input a pair of student and expert trajectories, and then generates natural language corrections to help the student improve. We collect and train CORGI over data from three diverse physical control tasks (drawing, steering, and joint movement). Through both automatic and human evaluations, we show that CORGI can (i) generate valid feedback for novel student trajectories, (ii) outperform baselines on domains with novel control dynamics, and (iii) improve student learning in an interactive drawing task.

Multi-turn interactions between large language models (LLMs) and users naturally include implicit feedback signals. If an LLM responds in an unexpected way to an instruction, the user is likely to signal it by rephrasing the request, expressing frustration, or pivoting to an alternative task. Such signals are task-independent and occupy a relatively constrained subspace of language, allowing the LLM to identify them even if it fails on the actual task. This creates an avenue for continually learning from interactions without additional annotations. We introduce ReSpect, a method to learn from such signals in past interactions via retrospection. We deploy ReSpect in a new multimodal interaction scenario, where humans instruct an LLM to solve an abstract reasoning task with a combinatorial solution space. Through thousands of interactions with humans, we show how ReSpect gradually improves task completion rate from 31% to 82%, all without any external annotation.

Learning from human preferences is important for language models to match human needs and to align with human and social values. Prior works have achieved remarkable successes by learning from human feedback to understand and follow instructions. Nonetheless, these methods are either founded on hand-picked model generations that are favored by human annotators, rendering them inefficient in terms of data utilization and challenging to apply in general, or they depend on reinforcement learning, which often suffers from imperfect reward functions and relies on extremely challenging optimizations. In this work, we propose a novel technique, Chain of Hindsight, that is easy to optimize and can learn from any form of feedback, regardless of its polarity. Our idea is inspired by how humans learn from extensive feedback presented in the form of languages. We convert all types of feedback into sequences of sentences, which are then used to fine-tune the model, allowing us to take advantage of the language comprehension capabilities of language models. We condition the model on a sequence of model generations paired with feedback. By doing so, the model is trained to generate outputs based on feedback, while learning to identify and correct negative attributes or errors. Applying our method to large language models, we observed that Chain of Hindsight significantly surpasses previous methods in aligning language models with human preferences. We report significant improvements on summarization and dialogue benchmarks, with our approach markedly preferred in human evaluations.

Many recent advances in natural language generation have been fueled by training large language models on internet-scale data. However, this paradigm can lead to models that generate toxic, inaccurate, and unhelpful content, and automatic evaluation metrics often fail to identify these behaviors. As models become more capable, human feedback is an invaluable signal for evaluating and improving models. This survey aims to provide an overview of the recent research that has leveraged human feedback to improve natural language generation. First, we introduce an encompassing formalization of feedback, and identify and organize existing research into a taxonomy following this formalization. Next, we discuss how feedback can be described by its format and objective, and cover the two approaches proposed to use feedback (either for training or decoding): directly using the feedback or training feedback models. We also discuss existing datasets for human-feedback data collection, and concerns surrounding feedback collection. Finally, we provide an overview of the nascent field of AI feedback, which exploits large language models to make judgments based on a set of principles and minimize the need for human intervention.

We present DRESS, a large vision language model (LVLM) that innovatively exploits Natural Language feedback (NLF) from Large Language Models to enhance its alignment and interactions by addressing two key limitations in the state-of-the-art LVLMs. First, prior LVLMs generally rely only on the instruction finetuning stage to enhance alignment with human preferences. Without incorporating extra feedback, they are still prone to generate unhelpful, hallucinated, or harmful responses. Second, while the visual instruction tuning data is generally structured in a multi-turn dialogue format, the connections and dependencies among consecutive conversational turns are weak. This reduces the capacity for effective multi-turn interactions. To tackle these, we propose a novel categorization of the NLF into two key types: critique and refinement. The critique NLF identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the responses and is used to align the LVLMs with human preferences. The refinement NLF offers concrete suggestions for improvement and is adopted to improve the interaction ability of the LVLMs-- which focuses on LVLMs' ability to refine responses by incorporating feedback in multi-turn interactions. To address the non-differentiable nature of NLF, we generalize conditional reinforcement learning for training. Our experimental results demonstrate that DRESS can generate more helpful (9.76%), honest (11.52%), and harmless (21.03%) responses, and more effectively learn from feedback during multi-turn interactions compared to SOTA LVMLs.

Despite the promise of RLHF in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it often leads to superficial alignment, prioritizing stylistic changes over improving downstream performance of LLMs. Underspecified preferences could obscure directions to align the models. Lacking exploration restricts identification of desirable outputs to improve the models. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework: Reinforcement Learning from Reflective Feedback (RLRF), which leverages fine-grained feedback based on detailed criteria to improve the core capabilities of LLMs. RLRF employs a self-reflection mechanism to systematically explore and refine LLM responses, then fine-tuning the models via a RL algorithm along with promising responses. Our experiments across Just-Eval, Factuality, and Mathematical Reasoning demonstrate the efficacy and transformative potential of RLRF beyond superficial surface-level adjustment.

The reflection capacity of Large Language Model (LLM) has garnered extensive attention. A post-hoc prompting strategy, e.g., reflexion and self-refine, refines LLM's response based on self-evaluated or external feedback. However, recent research indicates without external feedback, LLM's intrinsic reflection is unstable. Our investigation unveils that the key bottleneck is the quality of the self-evaluated feedback. We find LLMs often exhibit overconfidence or high randomness when self-evaluate, offering stubborn or inconsistent feedback, which causes poor reflection. To remedy this, we advocate Self-Contrast: It adaptively explores diverse solving perspectives tailored to the request, contrasts the differences, and summarizes these discrepancies into a checklist which could be used to re-examine and eliminate discrepancies. Our method endows LLM with diverse perspectives to alleviate stubborn biases. Moreover, their discrepancies indicate potential errors or inherent uncertainties that LLM often overlooks. Reflecting upon these can catalyze more accurate and stable reflection. Experiments conducted on a series of reasoning and translation tasks with different LLMs serve to underscore the effectiveness and generality of our strategy.

Large Language Model (LLM) workloads have distinct prefill and decode phases with different compute and memory requirements which should ideally be accounted for when scheduling input queries across different LLM instances in a cluster. However existing scheduling algorithms treat LLM workloads as monolithic jobs without considering the distinct characteristics of the two phases in each workload. This leads to sub-optimal scheduling and increased response latency. In this work, we propose a heuristic-guided reinforcement learning-based intelligent router for data-driven and workload-aware scheduling. Our router leverages a trainable response-length predictor, and a novel formulation for estimating the impact of mixing different workloads to schedule queries across LLM instances and achieve over 11\% lower end-to-end latency than existing approaches.

The problem of data sparsity has long been a challenge in recommendation systems, and previous studies have attempted to address this issue by incorporating side information. However, this approach often introduces side effects such as noise, availability issues, and low data quality, which in turn hinder the accurate modeling of user preferences and adversely impact recommendation performance. In light of the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), which possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, we propose a novel framework called LLMRec that enhances recommender systems by employing three simple yet effective LLM-based graph augmentation strategies. Our approach leverages the rich content available within online platforms (e.g., Netflix, MovieLens) to augment the interaction graph in three ways: (i) reinforcing user-item interaction egde, (ii) enhancing the understanding of item node attributes, and (iii) conducting user node profiling, intuitively from the natural language perspective. By employing these strategies, we address the challenges posed by sparse implicit feedback and low-quality side information in recommenders. Besides, to ensure the quality of the augmentation, we develop a denoised data robustification mechanism that includes techniques of noisy implicit feedback pruning and MAE-based feature enhancement that help refine the augmented data and improve its reliability. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the effectiveness of LLMRec and clarify the benefits of our method in facilitating model optimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LLM-based augmentation approach over state-of-the-art techniques. To ensure reproducibility, we have made our code and augmented data publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LLMRec.git

Large scale recommender models find most relevant items from huge catalogs, and they play a critical role in modern search and recommendation systems. To model the input space with large-vocab categorical features, a typical recommender model learns a joint embedding space through neural networks for both queries and items from user feedback data. However, with millions to billions of items in the corpus, users tend to provide feedback for a very small set of them, causing a power-law distribution. This makes the feedback data for long-tail items extremely sparse. Inspired by the recent success in self-supervised representation learning research in both computer vision and natural language understanding, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning (SSL) framework for large-scale item recommendations. The framework is designed to tackle the label sparsity problem by learning better latent relationship of item features. Specifically, SSL improves item representation learning as well as serving as additional regularization to improve generalization. Furthermore, we propose a novel data augmentation method that utilizes feature correlations within the proposed framework. We evaluate our framework using two real-world datasets with 500M and 1B training examples respectively. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SSL regularization and show its superior performance over the state-of-the-art regularization techniques. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a web-scale commercial app-to-app recommendation system, with significant improvements top-tier business metrics demonstrated in A/B experiments on live traffic. Our online results also verify our hypothesis that our framework indeed improves model performance even more on slices that lack supervision.

The ability to automatically generate music that appropriately matches an arbitrary input track is a challenging task. We present a novel controllable system for generating single stems to accompany musical mixes of arbitrary length. At the core of our method are audio autoencoders that efficiently compress audio waveform samples into invertible latent representations, and a conditional latent diffusion model that takes as input the latent encoding of a mix and generates the latent encoding of a corresponding stem. To provide control over the timbre of generated samples, we introduce a technique to ground the latent space to a user-provided reference style during diffusion sampling. For further improving audio quality, we adapt classifier-free guidance to avoid distortions at high guidance strengths when generating an unbounded latent space. We train our model on a dataset of pairs of mixes and matching bass stems. Quantitative experiments demonstrate that, given an input mix, the proposed system can generate basslines with user-specified timbres. Our controllable conditional audio generation framework represents a significant step forward in creating generative AI tools to assist musicians in music production.

While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages a feedback loop to enable the network to attend to its own latent representations. This design fosters the emergence of working memory within the Transformer, allowing it to process indefinitely long sequences. TransformerFAM requires no additional weights, enabling seamless integration with pre-trained models. Our experiments show that TransformerFAM significantly improves Transformer performance on long-context tasks across various model sizes (1B, 8B, and 24B). These results showcase the potential to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) to process sequences of unlimited length.

Recent developments in large language models (LLMs) have been impressive. However, these models sometimes show inconsistencies and problematic behavior, such as hallucinating facts, generating flawed code, or creating offensive and toxic content. Unlike these models, humans typically utilize external tools to cross-check and refine their initial content, like using a search engine for fact-checking, or a code interpreter for debugging. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a framework called CRITIC that allows LLMs, which are essentially "black boxes" to validate and progressively amend their own outputs in a manner similar to human interaction with tools. More specifically, starting with an initial output, CRITIC interacts with appropriate tools to evaluate certain aspects of the text, and then revises the output based on the feedback obtained during this validation process. Comprehensive evaluations involving free-form question answering, mathematical program synthesis, and toxicity reduction demonstrate that CRITIC consistently enhances the performance of LLMs. Meanwhile, our research highlights the crucial importance of external feedback in promoting the ongoing self-improvement of LLMs.

Despite broad interest in modeling spoken dialogue agents, most approaches are inherently "half-duplex" -- restricted to turn-based interaction with responses requiring explicit prompting by the user or implicit tracking of interruption or silence events. Human dialogue, by contrast, is "full-duplex" allowing for rich synchronicity in the form of quick and dynamic turn-taking, overlapping speech, and backchanneling. Technically, the challenge of achieving full-duplex dialogue with LLMs lies in modeling synchrony as pre-trained LLMs do not have a sense of "time". To bridge this gap, we propose Synchronous LLMs for full-duplex spoken dialogue modeling. We design a novel mechanism to integrate time information into Llama3-8b so that they run synchronously with the real-world clock. We also introduce a training recipe that uses 212k hours of synthetic spoken dialogue data generated from text dialogue data to create a model that generates meaningful and natural spoken dialogue, with just 2k hours of real-world spoken dialogue data. Synchronous LLMs outperform state-of-the-art in dialogue meaningfulness while maintaining naturalness. Finally, we demonstrate the model's ability to participate in full-duplex dialogue by simulating interaction between two agents trained on different datasets, while considering Internet-scale latencies of up to 240 ms. Webpage: https://syncllm.cs.washington.edu/.

While recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have allowed autonomous learning agents to succeed at a variety of complex tasks, existing algorithms generally require a lot of training data. One way to increase the speed at which agents are able to learn to perform tasks is by leveraging the input of human trainers. Although such input can take many forms, real-time, scalar-valued feedback is especially useful in situations where it proves difficult or impossible for humans to provide expert demonstrations. Previous approaches have shown the usefulness of human input provided in this fashion (e.g., the TAMER framework), but they have thus far not considered high-dimensional state spaces or employed the use of deep learning. In this paper, we do both: we propose Deep TAMER, an extension of the TAMER framework that leverages the representational power of deep neural networks in order to learn complex tasks in just a short amount of time with a human trainer. We demonstrate Deep TAMER's success by using it and just 15 minutes of human-provided feedback to train an agent that performs better than humans on the Atari game of Bowling - a task that has proven difficult for even state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods.

Great successes have been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models. Open-source preference datasets and reward models have enabled wider experimentation beyond generic chat settings, particularly to make systems more "helpful" for tasks like web question answering, summarization, and multi-turn dialogue. When optimizing for helpfulness, RLHF has been consistently observed to drive models to produce longer outputs. This paper demonstrates that optimizing for response length is a significant factor behind RLHF's reported improvements in these settings. First, we study the relationship between reward and length for reward models trained on three open-source preference datasets for helpfulness. Here, length correlates strongly with reward, and improvements in reward score are driven in large part by shifting the distribution over output lengths. We then explore interventions during both RL and reward model learning to see if we can achieve the same downstream improvements as RLHF without increasing length. While our interventions mitigate length increases, they aren't uniformly effective across settings. Furthermore, we find that even running RLHF with a reward based solely on length can reproduce most of the downstream improvements over the initial policy model, showing that reward models in these settings have a long way to go.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various applications by generating outputs based on given prompts. However, achieving the desired output requires iterative prompt refinement. This paper presents a novel approach that draws parallels between the iterative prompt optimization process in LLMs and feedback control systems. We iteratively refine the prompt by treating the deviation between the LLM output and the desired result as an error term until the output criteria are met. This process is akin to a feedback control system, where the LLM, despite being non-linear and non-deterministic, is managed using principles from linear feedback control systems. We explore the application of different types of controllers within this framework, providing a mathematical foundation for integrating linear feedback control mechanisms with LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide array of NLP tasks. However, their efficacy is undermined by undesired and inconsistent behaviors, including hallucination, unfaithful reasoning, and toxic content. A promising approach to rectify these flaws is self-correction, where the LLM itself is prompted or guided to fix problems in its own output. Techniques leveraging automated feedback -- either produced by the LLM itself or some external system -- are of particular interest as they are a promising way to make LLM-based solutions more practical and deployable with minimal human feedback. This paper presents a comprehensive review of this emerging class of techniques. We analyze and taxonomize a wide array of recent work utilizing these strategies, including training-time, generation-time, and post-hoc correction. We also summarize the major applications of this strategy and conclude by discussing future directions and challenges.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) adapts a trained model to specific downstream tasks, significantly improving task-specific performance. Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is a common approach, where an LLM is trained to produce desired answers. However, LLMs trained with SFT sometimes make simple mistakes and result in hallucinations on reasoning tasks such as question-answering. Without external feedback, it is difficult for SFT to learn a good mapping between the question and the desired answer, especially with a small dataset. This paper introduces an alternative to SFT called Natural Language Feedback for Finetuning LLMs (LaFFi). LaFFi has LLMs directly predict the feedback they will receive from an annotator. We find that requiring such reflection can significantly improve the accuracy in in-domain question-answering tasks, providing a promising direction for the application of natural language feedback in the realm of SFT LLMs. Additional ablation studies show that the portion of human-annotated data in the annotated datasets affects the fine-tuning performance.

AI powered code-recommendation systems, such as Copilot and CodeWhisperer, provide code suggestions inside a programmer's environment (e.g., an IDE) with the aim of improving productivity. We pursue mechanisms for leveraging signals about programmers' acceptance and rejection of code suggestions to guide recommendations. We harness data drawn from interactions with GitHub Copilot, a system used by millions of programmers, to develop interventions that can save time for programmers. We introduce a utility-theoretic framework to drive decisions about suggestions to display versus withhold. The approach, conditional suggestion display from human feedback (CDHF), relies on a cascade of models that provide the likelihood that recommended code will be accepted. These likelihoods are used to selectively hide suggestions, reducing both latency and programmer verification time. Using data from 535 programmers, we perform a retrospective evaluation of CDHF and show that we can avoid displaying a significant fraction of suggestions that would have been rejected. We further demonstrate the importance of incorporating the programmer's latent unobserved state in decisions about when to display suggestions through an ablation study. Finally, we showcase how using suggestion acceptance as a reward signal for guiding the display of suggestions can lead to suggestions of reduced quality, indicating an unexpected pitfall.

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has achieved great success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Prevalent RLHF approaches are reward-based, following the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, which may not fully capture the complexity of human preferences. In this paper, we explore RLHF under a general preference framework and approach it from a game-theoretic perspective. Specifically, we formulate the problem as a two-player game and propose a novel algorithm, iterative Nash policy optimization (INPO). The key idea is to let the policy play against itself via no-regret learning, thereby approximating the Nash policy. Unlike previous methods, INPO bypasses the need for estimating the expected win rate for individual responses, which typically incurs high computational or annotation costs. Instead, we introduce a new loss objective that is directly minimized over a preference dataset. We provide theoretical analysis for our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on various representative benchmarks. With an LLaMA-3-8B-based SFT model, INPO achieves a 41.5% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 and a 38.3% win rate on Arena-Hard, showing substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art iterative algorithm [Dong et al., 2024] under the BT model assumption. Additionally, our ablation study highlights the benefits of incorporating KL regularization for response length control.

While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.

Automated speech recognition (ASR) models have gained prominence for applications such as captioning, speech translation, and live transcription. This paper studies Whisper and two model variants: one optimized for live speech streaming and another for offline transcription. Notably, these models have been found to generate hallucinated content, reducing transcription reliability. Furthermore, larger model variants exhibit increased latency and pose challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This study analyzes the similarities and differences between three Whisper models, qualitatively examining their distinct capabilities. Next, this study quantifies the impact of model quantization on latency and evaluates its viability for edge deployment. Using the open source LibriSpeech dataset, this paper evaluates the word error rate (WER) along with latency analysis of whispercpp using 3 quantization methods (INT4, INT5, INT8). Results show that quantization reduces latency by 19\% and model size by 45\%, while preserving transcription accuracy. These findings provide insights into the optimal use cases of different Whisper models and edge device deployment possibilities. All code, datasets, and implementation details are available in a public GitHub repository: https://github.com/allisonandreyev/WhisperQuantization.git

In long context scenarios, large language models (LLMs) face three main challenges: higher computational/financial cost, longer latency, and inferior performance. Some studies reveal that the performance of LLMs depends on both the density and the position of the key information (question relevant) in the input prompt. Inspired by these findings, we propose LongLLMLingua for prompt compression towards improving LLMs' perception of the key information to simultaneously address the three challenges. We conduct evaluation on a wide range of long context scenarios including single-/multi-document QA, few-shot learning, summarization, synthetic tasks, and code completion. The experimental results show that LongLLMLingua compressed prompt can derive higher performance with much less cost. The latency of the end-to-end system is also reduced. For example, on NaturalQuestions benchmark, LongLLMLingua gains a performance boost of up to 17.1% over the original prompt with ~4x fewer tokens as input to GPT-3.5-Turbo. It can derive cost savings of \28.5 and 27.4 per 1,000 samples from the LongBench and ZeroScrolls benchmark, respectively. Additionally, when compressing prompts of ~10k tokens at a compression rate of 2x-10x, LongLLMLingua can speed up the end-to-end latency by 1.4x-3.8x. Our code is available at https://aka.ms/LLMLingua.

Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents solve user-specified tasks over multiple steps while keeping the required manual engagement to a minimum. Crucially, such LLMs need to ground their generations in any feedback obtained to reliably achieve desired outcomes. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning method for teaching models to leverage execution feedback in the realm of code synthesis, where state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to improve code iteratively compared to independent sampling. We benchmark on competitive programming tasks, where we achieve new start-of-the art results with both small (8B parameters) and large (70B) models while reducing the amount of samples required by an order of magnitude. Our analysis of inference-time behavior demonstrates that our method produces LLMs that effectively leverage automatic feedback over multiple steps.

Reward-model training is the cost bottleneck in modern Reinforcement Learning Human Feedback (RLHF) pipelines, often requiring tens of billions of parameters and an offline preference-tuning phase. In the proposed method, a frozen, instruction-tuned 7B LLM is augmented with only a one line JSON rubric and a rank-16 LoRA adapter (affecting just 0.8% of the model's parameters), enabling it to serve as a complete substitute for the previously used heavyweight evaluation models. The plug-and-play judge achieves 96.2% accuracy on RewardBench, outperforming specialized reward networks ranging from 27B to 70B parameters. Additionally, it allows a 7B actor to outperform the top 70B DPO baseline, which scores 61.8%, by achieving 92% exact match accuracy on GSM-8K utilizing online PPO. Thorough ablations indicate that (i) six in context demonstrations deliver the majority of the zero-to-few-shot improvements (+2pp), and (ii) the LoRA effectively addresses the remaining disparity, particularly in the safety and adversarial Chat-Hard segments. The proposed model introduces HH-Rationales, a subset of 10,000 pairs from Anthropic HH-RLHF, to examine interpretability, accompanied by human generated justifications. GPT-4 scoring indicates that our LoRA judge attains approximately = 9/10 in similarity to human explanations, while zero-shot judges score around =5/10. These results indicate that the combination of prompt engineering and tiny LoRA produces a cost effective, transparent, and easily adjustable reward function, removing the offline phase while achieving new state-of-the-art outcomes for both static evaluation and online RLHF.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained to predict in the forward direction of time. However, recent works have shown that prompting these models to look back and critique their own generations can produce useful feedback. Motivated by this, we explore the question of whether LLMs can be empowered to think (predict and score) backwards to provide unsupervised feedback that complements forward LLMs. Towards this, we introduce Time Reversed Language Models (TRLMs), which can score and generate queries when conditioned on responses, effectively functioning in the reverse direction of time. Further, to effectively infer in the response to query direction, we pre-train and fine-tune a language model (TRLM-Ba) in the reverse token order from scratch. We show empirically (and theoretically in a stylized setting) that time-reversed models can indeed complement forward model predictions when used to score the query given response for re-ranking multiple forward generations. We obtain up to 5\% improvement on the widely used AlpacaEval Leaderboard over the competent baseline of best-of-N re-ranking using self log-perplexity scores. We further show that TRLM scoring outperforms conventional forward scoring of response given query, resulting in significant gains in applications such as citation generation and passage retrieval. We next leverage the generative ability of TRLM to augment or provide unsupervised feedback to input safety filters of LLMs, demonstrating a drastic reduction in false negative rate with negligible impact on false positive rates against several attacks published on the popular JailbreakBench leaderboard.

Developing large audio language models (LMs) capable of understanding diverse spoken interactions is essential for accommodating the multimodal nature of human communication and can increase the accessibility of language technologies across different user populations. Recent work on audio LMs has primarily evaluated their performance on short audio segments, typically under 30 seconds, with limited exploration of long-form conversational speech segments that more closely reflect natural user interactions with these models. We introduce Brutally Long Audio Bench (BLAB), a challenging long-form audio benchmark that evaluates audio LMs on localization, duration estimation, emotion, and counting tasks using audio segments averaging 51 minutes in length. BLAB consists of 833+ hours of diverse, full-length audio clips, each paired with human-annotated, text-based natural language questions and answers. Our audio data were collected from permissively licensed sources and underwent a human-assisted filtering process to ensure task compliance. We evaluate six open-source and proprietary audio LMs on BLAB and find that all of them, including advanced models such as Gemini 2.0 Pro and GPT-4o, struggle with the tasks in BLAB. Our comprehensive analysis reveals key insights into the trade-offs between task difficulty and audio duration. In general, we find that audio LMs struggle with long-form speech, with performance declining as duration increases. They perform poorly on localization, temporal reasoning, counting, and struggle to understand non-phonemic information, relying more on prompts than audio content. BLAB serves as a challenging evaluation framework to develop audio LMs with robust long-form audio understanding capabilities.

Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) models play a vital role in code completion tasks, leveraging both prefix and suffix context to provide more accurate and contextually relevant suggestions. This paper presents approaches to improve FIM code completion while addressing the challenge of maintaining low latency for real-time coding assistance. We enhance FIM code completion by incorporating context and curriculum examples in the training process. We identify patterns where completion suggestions fail more frequently, revealing complexities that smaller language models struggle with. To address these challenges, we develop a curriculum dataset by extracting hard-to-complete patterns from code repositories and generate context examples using semantic and static analysis tools (e.g. TSC compiler). We fine-tune various sized models, including StarCoder and DeepSeek, on this enhanced dataset. Our evaluation encompasses three key dimensions: the Santa Coder FIM task, the Amazon CCEval benchmark, and a new Multi-Line Infilling evaluation benchmark derived from SWE-bench. Comprehensive ablation studies across multiple model sizes reveal that while all fine-tuned models show improvements, the performance gains are more pronounced for smaller parameter models and incorporating difficult-to-complete examples, as part of curriculum learning, improves the code completion performance. This finding is particularly significant given the latency constraints of code completion tasks. While larger models like GPT and Claude perform well in multi-line completions but are prohibitively challenging to use given high latency, and our fine-tuned models achieve a balance between performance and latency. Finally, we validate our approach through online A/B testing, demonstrating tangible improvements in Completion Acceptance Rate (CAR) and Completion Persistence Rate (CPR), with zero latency impact.

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is closely tied to the design of prompts, making prompt optimization essential for enhancing their performance across a wide range of tasks. Many existing approaches to automating prompt engineering rely exclusively on textual feedback, refining prompts based solely on inference errors identified by large, computationally expensive LLMs. Unfortunately, smaller models struggle to generate high-quality feedback, resulting in complete dependence on large LLM judgment. Moreover, these methods fail to leverage more direct and finer-grained information, such as gradients, due to operating purely in text space. To this end, we introduce GReaTer, a novel prompt optimization technique that directly incorporates gradient information over task-specific reasoning. By utilizing task loss gradients, GReaTer enables self-optimization of prompts for open-source, lightweight language models without the need for costly closed-source LLMs. This allows high-performance prompt optimization without dependence on massive LLMs, closing the gap between smaller models and the sophisticated reasoning often needed for prompt refinement. Extensive evaluations across diverse reasoning tasks including BBH, GSM8k, and FOLIO demonstrate that GReaTer consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods, even those reliant on powerful LLMs. Additionally, GReaTer-optimized prompts frequently exhibit better transferability and, in some cases, boost task performance to levels comparable to or surpassing those achieved by larger language models, highlighting the effectiveness of prompt optimization guided by gradients over reasoning. Code of GReaTer is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/GreaTer.

Aligning the behaviors of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with human preferences is crucial for developing robust and trustworthy AI systems. While recent attempts have employed human experts or powerful auxiliary AI systems to provide more accurate preference feedback, such as determining the preferable responses from MLLMs or directly rewriting hallucination-free responses, extensive resource overhead compromise the scalability of the feedback collection. In this work, we introduce Topic-level Preference Overwriting (TPO), a self-correctional approach that guide the model itself to mitigate its own hallucination at the topic level. Through a deconfounded strategy that replaces each topic within the response with the best or worst alternatives generated by the model itself, TPO creates more contrasting pairwise preference feedback, enhancing the feedback quality without human or proprietary model intervention. Notably, the experimental results demonstrate proposed TPO achieves state-of-the-art performance in trustworthiness, significantly reducing the object hallucinations by 92% and overall hallucinations by 38%. Code, model and data will be released.

Direct alignment from preferences (DAP) methods, such as DPO, have recently emerged as efficient alternatives to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), that do not require a separate reward model. However, the preference datasets used in DAP methods are usually collected ahead of training and never updated, thus the feedback is purely offline. Moreover, responses in these datasets are often sampled from a language model distinct from the one being aligned, and since the model evolves over training, the alignment phase is inevitably off-policy. In this study, we posit that online feedback is key and improves DAP methods. Our method, online AI feedback (OAIF), uses an LLM as annotator: on each training iteration, we sample two responses from the current model and prompt the LLM annotator to choose which one is preferred, thus providing online feedback. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate via human evaluation in several tasks that OAIF outperforms both offline DAP and RLHF methods. We further show that the feedback leveraged in OAIF is easily controllable, via instruction prompts to the LLM annotator.

Large language models (LLMs) are expected to respond accurately but often exhibit deficient reasoning or generate hallucinatory content. To address these, studies prefixed with ``Self-'' such as Self-Consistency, Self-Improve, and Self-Refine have been initiated. They share a commonality: involving LLMs evaluating and updating itself to mitigate the issues. Nonetheless, these efforts lack a unified perspective on summarization, as existing surveys predominantly focus on categorization without examining the motivations behind these works. In this paper, we summarize a theoretical framework, termed Internal Consistency, which offers unified explanations for phenomena such as the lack of reasoning and the presence of hallucinations. Internal Consistency assesses the coherence among LLMs' latent layer, decoding layer, and response layer based on sampling methodologies. Expanding upon the Internal Consistency framework, we introduce a streamlined yet effective theoretical framework capable of mining Internal Consistency, named Self-Feedback. The Self-Feedback framework consists of two modules: Self-Evaluation and Self-Update. This framework has been employed in numerous studies. We systematically classify these studies by tasks and lines of work; summarize relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks; and delve into the concern, ``Does Self-Feedback Really Work?'' We propose several critical viewpoints, including the ``Hourglass Evolution of Internal Consistency'', ``Consistency Is (Almost) Correctness'' hypothesis, and ``The Paradox of Latent and Explicit Reasoning''. Furthermore, we outline promising directions for future research. We have open-sourced the experimental code, reference list, and statistical data, available at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/ICSFSurvey.

We present the workflow of Online Iterative Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) in this technical report, which is widely reported to outperform its offline counterpart by a large margin in the recent large language model (LLM) literature. However, existing open-source RLHF projects are still largely confined to the offline learning setting. In this technical report, we aim to fill in this gap and provide a detailed recipe that is easy to reproduce for online iterative RLHF. In particular, since online human feedback is usually infeasible for open-source communities with limited resources, we start by constructing preference models using a diverse set of open-source datasets and use the constructed proxy preference model to approximate human feedback. Then, we discuss the theoretical insights and algorithmic principles behind online iterative RLHF, followed by a detailed practical implementation. Our trained LLM, SFR-Iterative-DPO-LLaMA-3-8B-R, achieves impressive performance on LLM chatbot benchmarks, including AlpacaEval-2, Arena-Hard, and MT-Bench, as well as other academic benchmarks such as HumanEval and TruthfulQA. We have shown that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and iterative RLHF can obtain state-of-the-art performance with fully open-source datasets. Further, we have made our models, curated datasets, and comprehensive step-by-step code guidebooks publicly available. Please refer to https://github.com/RLHFlow/RLHF-Reward-Modeling and https://github.com/RLHFlow/Online-RLHF for more detailed information.

Text-to-audio generation (TTA) produces audio from a text description, learning from pairs of audio samples and hand-annotated text. However, commercializing audio generation is challenging as user-input prompts are often under-specified when compared to text descriptions used to train TTA models. In this work, we treat TTA models as a ``blackbox'' and address the user prompt challenge with two key insights: (1) User prompts are generally under-specified, leading to a large alignment gap between user prompts and training prompts. (2) There is a distribution of audio descriptions for which TTA models are better at generating higher quality audio, which we refer to as ``audionese''. To this end, we rewrite prompts with instruction-tuned models and propose utilizing text-audio alignment as feedback signals via margin ranking learning for audio improvements. On both objective and subjective human evaluations, we observed marked improvements in both text-audio alignment and music audio quality.

Existing benchmarks do not test Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on their interactive intelligence with human users which is vital for developing general-purpose AI assistants. We design InterFeedback, an interactive framework, which can be applied to any LMM and dataset to assess this ability autonomously. On top of this, we introduce InterFeedback-Bench which evaluates interactive intelligence using two representative datasets, MMMU-Pro and MathVerse, to test 10 different open-source LMMs. Additionally, we present InterFeedback-Human, a newly collected dataset of 120 cases designed for manually testing interactive performance in leading models such as OpenAI-o1 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Our evaluation results show that even state-of-the-art LMM (like OpenAI-o1) can correct their results through human feedback less than 50%. Our findings point to the need for methods that can enhance the LMMs' capability to interpret and benefit from feedback.

Diffusion-based Generative AI gains significant attention for its superior performance over other generative techniques like Generative Adversarial Networks and Variational Autoencoders. While it has achieved notable advancements in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, their application in speech generation remains under-explored. Mainstream Text-to-Speech systems primarily map outputs to Mel-Spectrograms in the spectral space, leading to high computational loads due to the sparsity of MelSpecs. To address these limitations, we propose LatentSpeech, a novel TTS generation approach utilizing latent diffusion models. By using latent embeddings as the intermediate representation, LatentSpeech reduces the target dimension to 5% of what is required for MelSpecs, simplifying the processing for the TTS encoder and vocoder and enabling efficient high-quality speech generation. This study marks the first integration of latent diffusion models in TTS, enhancing the accuracy and naturalness of generated speech. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LatentSpeech achieves a 25% improvement in Word Error Rate and a 24% improvement in Mel Cepstral Distortion compared to existing models, with further improvements rising to 49.5% and 26%, respectively, with additional training data. These findings highlight the potential of LatentSpeech to advance the state-of-the-art in TTS technology

This study presents a deep-learning framework for controlling multichannel acoustic feedback in audio devices. Traditional digital signal processing methods struggle with convergence when dealing with highly correlated noise such as feedback. We introduce a Convolutional Recurrent Network that efficiently combines spatial and temporal processing, significantly enhancing speech enhancement capabilities with lower computational demands. Our approach utilizes three training methods: In-a-Loop Training, Teacher Forcing, and a Hybrid strategy with a Multichannel Wiener Filter, optimizing performance in complex acoustic environments. This scalable framework offers a robust solution for real-world applications, making significant advances in Acoustic Feedback Control technology.

Recent improvements in text generation have leveraged human feedback to improve the quality of the generated output. However, human feedback is not always available, especially during inference. In this work, we propose an inference time optimization method FITO to use fine-grained actionable feedback in the form of error type, error location and severity level that are predicted by a learned error pinpoint model for iterative refinement. FITO starts with an initial output, then iteratively incorporates the feedback via a refinement model that generates an improved output conditioned on the feedback. Given the uncertainty of consistent refined samples at iterative steps, we formulate iterative refinement into a local search problem and develop a simulated annealing based algorithm that balances exploration of the search space and optimization for output quality. We conduct experiments on three text generation tasks, including machine translation, long-form question answering (QA) and topical summarization. We observe 0.8 and 0.7 MetricX gain on Chinese-English and English-German translation, 4.5 and 1.8 ROUGE-L gain at long form QA and topic summarization respectively, with a single iteration of refinement. With our simulated annealing algorithm, we see further quality improvements, including up to 1.7 MetricX improvements over the baseline approach.

Existing English-teaching chatbots rarely incorporate empathy explicitly in their feedback, but empathetic feedback could help keep students engaged and reduce learner anxiety. Toward this end, we propose the task of negative emotion detection via audio, for recognizing empathetic feedback opportunities in language learning. We then build the first spoken English-teaching chatbot with adaptive, empathetic feedback. This feedback is synthesized through automatic prompt optimization of ChatGPT and is evaluated with English learners. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system through a preliminary user study.

Pretrained language models often generate outputs that are not in line with human preferences, such as harmful text or factually incorrect summaries. Recent work approaches the above issues by learning from a simple form of human feedback: comparisons between pairs of model-generated outputs. However, comparison feedback only conveys limited information about human preferences. In this paper, we introduce Imitation learning from Language Feedback (ILF), a new approach that utilizes more informative language feedback. ILF consists of three steps that are applied iteratively: first, conditioning the language model on the input, an initial LM output, and feedback to generate refinements. Second, selecting the refinement incorporating the most feedback. Third, finetuning the language model to maximize the likelihood of the chosen refinement given the input. We show theoretically that ILF can be viewed as Bayesian Inference, similar to Reinforcement Learning from human feedback. We evaluate ILF's effectiveness on a carefully-controlled toy task and a realistic summarization task. Our experiments demonstrate that large language models accurately incorporate feedback and that finetuning with ILF scales well with the dataset size, even outperforming finetuning on human summaries. Learning from both language and comparison feedback outperforms learning from each alone, achieving human-level summarization performance.

Evaluating the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with user-defined coding preferences is a challenging endeavour that requires a deep assessment of LLMs' outputs. Existing methods and benchmarks rely primarily on automated metrics and static analysis tools, which often fail to capture the nuances of user instructions and LLM outputs. To address this gap, we propose using the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology to evaluate the alignment of LLMs with coding preferences. Based on this approach, we present CodeUltraFeedback, a comprehensive dataset designed to facilitate the evaluation and improvement of LLM alignment. CodeUltraFeedback consists of 10,000 coding instructions, each annotated with four responses generated from a diverse pool of 14 LLMs. These responses are ranked based on five distinct coding preferences using GPT-3.5 as a judge, providing both numerical scores and detailed textual feedback. Our analysis of CodeUltraFeedback reveals that responses from GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are generally preferred over those from open-weight LLMs, highlighting significant differences in alignment between closed and open-weight models. In turn, we explore the usage of CodeUltraFeedback as feedback data to fine-tune and align CodeLlama-7B-Instruct using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) with direct preference optimization (DPO). The resulting aligned CodeLlama-7B-Instruct model outperforms larger LLMs in terms of alignment with coding preferences and shows improved functional correctness on the HumanEval+ benchmark compared to the original instruct model. Therefore, our contributions bridge the gap in preference tuning of LLMs for code and set the stage for further advancements in model alignment and RLAIF in automated software engineering.

We introduce Moshi, a speech-text foundation model and full-duplex spoken dialogue framework. Current systems for spoken dialogue rely on pipelines of independent components, namely voice activity detection, speech recognition, textual dialogue and text-to-speech. Such frameworks cannot emulate the experience of real conversations. First, their complexity induces a latency of several seconds between interactions. Second, text being the intermediate modality for dialogue, non-linguistic information that modifies meaning -- such as emotion or non-speech sounds -- is lost in the interaction. Finally, they rely on a segmentation into speaker turns, which does not take into account overlapping speech, interruptions and interjections. Moshi solves these independent issues altogether by casting spoken dialogue as speech-to-speech generation. Starting from a text language model backbone, Moshi generates speech as tokens from the residual quantizer of a neural audio codec, while modeling separately its own speech and that of the user into parallel streams. This allows for the removal of explicit speaker turns, and the modeling of arbitrary conversational dynamics. We moreover extend the hierarchical semantic-to-acoustic token generation of previous work to first predict time-aligned text tokens as a prefix to audio tokens. Not only this "Inner Monologue" method significantly improves the linguistic quality of generated speech, but we also illustrate how it can provide streaming speech recognition and text-to-speech. Our resulting model is the first real-time full-duplex spoken large language model, with a theoretical latency of 160ms, 200ms in practice, and is available at https://github.com/kyutai-labs/moshi.

This paper surveys research in the rapidly growing field of enhancing large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL), a technique that enables LLMs to improve their performance by receiving feedback in the form of rewards based on the quality of their outputs, allowing them to generate more accurate, coherent, and contextually appropriate responses. In this work, we make a systematic review of the most up-to-date state of knowledge on RL-enhanced LLMs, attempting to consolidate and analyze the rapidly growing research in this field, helping researchers understand the current challenges and advancements. Specifically, we (1) detail the basics of RL; (2) introduce popular RL-enhanced LLMs; (3) review researches on two widely-used reward model-based RL techniques: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF); and (4) explore Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a set of methods that bypass the reward model to directly use human preference data for aligning LLM outputs with human expectations. We will also point out current challenges and deficiencies of existing methods and suggest some avenues for further improvements. Project page of this work can be found at: https://github.com/ShuheWang1998/Reinforcement-Learning-Enhanced-LLMs-A-Survey.

Practitioners commonly align large language models using pairwise preferences, i.e., given labels of the type response A is preferred to response B for a given input. Perhaps less commonly, methods have also been developed for binary feedback, i.e. training models given labels of type response A is good or bad. We show how an existing performant binary feedback method, the Cringe Loss (Adolphs et al., 2022), can be generalized to the pairwise preference setting using a simple soft margin extension. Pairwise Cringe Loss is straightforward to implement and efficient to train, and we find it outperforms state-of-the-art preference optimization algorithms such as PPO and DPO on the AlpacaFarm benchmark.

Recently, instruction-following audio-language models have received broad attention for human-audio interaction. However, the absence of benchmarks capable of evaluating audio-centric interaction capabilities has impeded advancements in this field. Previous models primarily focus on assessing different fundamental tasks, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and lack an assessment of the open-ended generative capabilities centered around audio. Thus, it is challenging to track the progression in the Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) domain and to provide guidance for future improvement. In this paper, we introduce AIR-Bench (Audio InstRuction Benchmark), the first benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LALMs to understand various types of audio signals (including human speech, natural sounds, and music), and furthermore, to interact with humans in the textual format. AIR-Bench encompasses two dimensions: foundation and chat benchmarks. The former consists of 19 tasks with approximately 19k single-choice questions, intending to inspect the basic single-task ability of LALMs. The latter one contains 2k instances of open-ended question-and-answer data, directly assessing the comprehension of the model on complex audio and its capacity to follow instructions. Both benchmarks require the model to generate hypotheses directly. We design a unified framework that leverages advanced language models, such as GPT-4, to evaluate the scores of generated hypotheses given the meta-information of the audio. Experimental results demonstrate a high level of consistency between GPT-4-based evaluation and human evaluation. By revealing the limitations of existing LALMs through evaluation results, AIR-Bench can provide insights into the direction of future research.

Inference-Time Scaling has been critical to the success of recent models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1. However, many techniques used to train models for inference-time scaling require tasks to have answers that can be verified, limiting their application to domains such as math, coding and logical reasoning. We take inspiration from how humans make first attempts, ask for detailed feedback from others and make improvements based on such feedback across a wide spectrum of open-ended endeavors. To this end, we collect data for and train dedicated Feedback and Edit Models that are capable of performing inference-time scaling for open-ended general-domain tasks. In our setup, one model generates an initial response, which are given feedback by a second model, that are then used by a third model to edit the response. We show that performance on Arena Hard, a benchmark strongly predictive of Chatbot Arena Elo can be boosted by scaling the number of initial response drafts, effective feedback and edited responses. When scaled optimally, our setup based on 70B models from the Llama 3 family can reach SoTA performance on Arena Hard at 92.7 as of 5 Mar 2025, surpassing OpenAI o1-preview-2024-09-12 with 90.4 and DeepSeek R1 with 92.3.

When developing new large language models (LLMs), a key step is evaluating their final performance, often by computing the win-rate against a reference model based on external feedback. Human feedback is the gold standard, particularly for capturing nuanced qualities like coherence, readability, and alignment with human expectations. However, human evaluations are costly -- even for large tech companies -- and when conducted with active users, they may negatively impact user experience. A promising alternative is synthetic feedback, where evaluations are conducted by other large language models, including reward models. While this eliminates the need for costly human annotations, it introduces biases that may distort the evaluation process. In this work, we propose a statistically principled framework that integrates human and synthetic feedback to reduce reliance on human annotations while maintaining unbiased win-rate calculations. Our experiments demonstrate a reduction in human annotations by up to 12.2% with an off-the-shelf synthetic evaluator and up to 24.8% with a finetuned variant. Apart from being generalizable, scalable, and free of hyper-parameter tuning, our method offers predictable annotation savings, which can be estimated based on data-dependent characteristics.

Today's robot policies exhibit subpar performance when faced with the challenge of generalizing to novel environments. Human corrective feedback is a crucial form of guidance to enable such generalization. However, adapting to and learning from online human corrections is a non-trivial endeavor: not only do robots need to remember human feedback over time to retrieve the right information in new settings and reduce the intervention rate, but also they would need to be able to respond to feedback that can be arbitrary corrections about high-level human preferences to low-level adjustments to skill parameters. In this work, we present Distillation and Retrieval of Online Corrections (DROC), a large language model (LLM)-based system that can respond to arbitrary forms of language feedback, distill generalizable knowledge from corrections, and retrieve relevant past experiences based on textual and visual similarity for improving performance in novel settings. DROC is able to respond to a sequence of online language corrections that address failures in both high-level task plans and low-level skill primitives. We demonstrate that DROC effectively distills the relevant information from the sequence of online corrections in a knowledge base and retrieves that knowledge in settings with new task or object instances. DROC outperforms other techniques that directly generate robot code via LLMs by using only half of the total number of corrections needed in the first round and requires little to no corrections after two iterations. We show further results, videos, prompts and code on https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/droc .

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is effective at aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences, but gathering high quality human preference labels is a key bottleneck. We conduct a head-to-head comparison of RLHF vs. RL from AI Feedback (RLAIF) - a technique where preferences are labeled by an off-the-shelf LLM in lieu of humans, and we find that they result in similar improvements. On the task of summarization, human evaluators prefer generations from both RLAIF and RLHF over a baseline supervised fine-tuned model in ~70% of cases. Furthermore, when asked to rate RLAIF vs. RLHF summaries, humans prefer both at equal rates. These results suggest that RLAIF can yield human-level performance, offering a potential solution to the scalability limitations of RLHF.

Continuous speech separation for meeting pre-processing has recently become a focused research topic. Compared to the data in utterance-level speech separation, the meeting-style audio stream lasts longer, has an uncertain number of speakers. We adopt the time-domain speech separation method and the recently proposed Graph-PIT to build a super low-latency online speech separation model, which is very important for the real application. The low-latency time-domain encoder with a small stride leads to an extremely long feature sequence. We proposed a simple yet efficient model named Skipping Memory (SkiM) for the long sequence modeling. Experimental results show that SkiM achieves on par or even better separation performance than DPRNN. Meanwhile, the computational cost of SkiM is reduced by 75% compared to DPRNN. The strong long sequence modeling capability and low computational cost make SkiM a suitable model for online CSS applications. Our fastest real-time model gets 17.1 dB signal-to-distortion (SDR) improvement with less than 1-millisecond latency in the simulated meeting-style evaluation.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performances in various tasks. However, the performance of LLMs heavily depends on the input prompt, which has given rise to a number of recent works on prompt optimization. However, previous works often require the availability of a numeric score to assess the quality of every prompt. Unfortunately, when a human user interacts with a black-box LLM, attaining such a score is often infeasible and unreliable. Instead, it is usually significantly easier and more reliable to obtain preference feedback from a human user, i.e., showing the user the responses generated from a pair of prompts and asking the user which one is preferred. Therefore, in this paper, we study the problem of prompt optimization with human feedback (POHF), in which we aim to optimize the prompt for a black-box LLM using only human preference feedback. Drawing inspiration from dueling bandits, we design a theoretically principled strategy to select a pair of prompts to query for preference feedback in every iteration, and hence introduce our algorithm named automated POHF (APOHF). We apply our APOHF algorithm to various tasks, including optimizing user instructions, prompt optimization for text-to-image generative models, and response optimization with human feedback (i.e., further refining the response using a variant of our APOHF). The results demonstrate that our APOHF can efficiently find a good prompt using a small number of preference feedback instances. Our code can be found at https://github.com/xqlin98/APOHF.

Hallucination occurs when large language models exhibit behavior that deviates from the boundaries of their knowledge during response generation. To address this critical issue, previous learning-based methods attempt to finetune models but are limited by off-policy sampling and coarse-grained feedback. In this paper, we present \b{Reinforcement Learning for Hallucination} (RLFH), an on-policy self-alignment approach that enables LLMs to actively explore their knowledge boundaries and self-correct generation behavior through fine-grained feedback signals. RLFH introduces a self-assessment framework where the policy serves as its own judge. Through this framework, responses are automatically decomposed into atomic facts and their truthfulness and informativeness are assessed against external knowledge sources. The resulting fine-grained feedback at the statement level are then converted into token-level dense reward signals. This enables online reinforcement learning to achieve precise and timely optimization without human intervention. Comprehensive evaluations on HotpotQA, SQuADv2, and Biography benchmarks validate RLFH's effectiveness in hallucination mitigation.

There have been significant advances in deep learning for music demixing in recent years. However, there has been little attention given to how these neural networks can be adapted for real-time low-latency applications, which could be helpful for hearing aids, remixing audio streams and live shows. In this paper, we investigate the various challenges involved in adapting current demixing models in the literature for this use case. Subsequently, inspired by the Hybrid Demucs architecture, we propose the Hybrid Spectrogram Time-domain Audio Separation Network HS-TasNet, which utilises the advantages of spectral and waveform domains. For a latency of 23 ms, the HS-TasNet obtains an overall signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) of 4.65 on the MusDB test set, and increases to 5.55 with additional training data. These results demonstrate the potential of efficient demixing for real-time low-latency music applications.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is fundamentally limited by the capacity of humans to correctly evaluate model output. To improve human evaluation ability and overcome that limitation this work trains "critic" models that help humans to more accurately evaluate model-written code. These critics are themselves LLMs trained with RLHF to write natural language feedback highlighting problems in code from real-world assistant tasks. On code containing naturally occurring LLM errors model-written critiques are preferred over human critiques in 63% of cases, and human evaluation finds that models catch more bugs than human contractors paid for code review. We further confirm that our fine-tuned LLM critics can successfully identify hundreds of errors in ChatGPT training data rated as "flawless", even though the majority of those tasks are non-code tasks and thus out-of-distribution for the critic model. Critics can have limitations of their own, including hallucinated bugs that could mislead humans into making mistakes they might have otherwise avoided, but human-machine teams of critics and contractors catch similar numbers of bugs to LLM critics while hallucinating less than LLMs alone.

Simultaneous translation systems start producing the output while processing the partial source sentence in the incoming input stream. These systems need to decide when to read more input and when to write the output. These decisions depend on the structure of source/target language and the information contained in the partial input sequence. Hence, read/write decision policy remains the same across different input modalities, i.e., speech and text. This motivates us to leverage the text transcripts corresponding to the speech input for improving simultaneous speech-to-text translation (SimulST). We propose Decision Attentive Regularization (DAR) to improve the decision policy of SimulST systems by using the simultaneous text-to-text translation (SimulMT) task. We also extend several techniques from the offline speech translation domain to explore the role of SimulMT task in improving SimulST performance. Overall, we achieve 34.66% / 4.5 BLEU improvement over the baseline model across different latency regimes for the MuST-C English-German (EnDe) SimulST task.

One technique to improve the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine is to expand documents with terms that are related or representative of the documents' content.From the perspective of a question answering system, this might comprise questions the document can potentially answer. Following this observation, we propose a simple method that predicts which queries will be issued for a given document and then expands it with those predictions with a vanilla sequence-to-sequence model, trained using datasets consisting of pairs of query and relevant documents. By combining our method with a highly-effective re-ranking component, we achieve the state of the art in two retrieval tasks. In a latency-critical regime, retrieval results alone (without re-ranking) approach the effectiveness of more computationally expensive neural re-rankers but are much faster.

In natural human-to-human conversations, participants often receive feedback signals from one another based on their follow-up reactions. These reactions can include verbal responses, facial expressions, changes in emotional state, and other non-verbal cues. Similarly, in human-machine interactions, the machine can leverage the user's follow-up utterances as feedback signals to assess whether it has appropriately addressed the user's request. Therefore, we propose using the likelihood of follow-up utterances as rewards to differentiate preferred responses from less favored ones, without relying on human or commercial LLM-based preference annotations. Our proposed reward mechanism, ``Follow-up Likelihood as Reward" (FLR), matches the performance of strong reward models trained on large-scale human or GPT-4 annotated data on 8 pairwise-preference and 4 rating-based benchmarks. Building upon the FLR mechanism, we propose to automatically mine preference data from the online generations of a base policy model. The preference data are subsequently used to boost the helpfulness of the base model through direct alignment from preference (DAP) methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO). Lastly, we demonstrate that fine-tuning the language model that provides follow-up likelihood with natural language feedback significantly enhances FLR's performance on reward modeling benchmarks and effectiveness in aligning the base policy model's helpfulness.

With advancements in large audio-language models (LALMs), which enhance large language models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities, these models are expected to demonstrate universal proficiency across various auditory tasks. While numerous benchmarks have emerged to assess LALMs' performance, they remain fragmented and lack a structured taxonomy. To bridge this gap, we conduct a comprehensive survey and propose a systematic taxonomy for LALM evaluations, categorizing them into four dimensions based on their objectives: (1) General Auditory Awareness and Processing, (2) Knowledge and Reasoning, (3) Dialogue-oriented Ability, and (4) Fairness, Safety, and Trustworthiness. We provide detailed overviews within each category and highlight challenges in this field, offering insights into promising future directions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey specifically focused on the evaluations of LALMs, providing clear guidelines for the community. We will release the collection of the surveyed papers and actively maintain it to support ongoing advancements in the field.

Practical large language model (LLM) services may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across numerous requests. However, the long system prompt causes throughput/latency bottlenecks as the cost of generating the next token grows w.r.t. the sequence length. This paper aims to improve the efficiency of LLM services that involve long system prompts. Our key observation is that handling these system prompts requires heavily redundant memory accesses in existing causal attention computation algorithms. Specifically, for batched requests, the cached hidden states (i.e., key-value pairs) of system prompts are transferred from off-chip DRAM to on-chip SRAM multiple times, each corresponding to an individual request. To eliminate such a redundancy, we propose RelayAttention, an attention algorithm that allows reading these hidden states from DRAM exactly once for a batch of input tokens. RelayAttention is a free lunch: it maintains the generation quality while requiring no model retraining, as it is based on a mathematical reformulation of causal attention.

Developing effective text summarizers remains a challenge due to issues like hallucinations, key information omissions, and verbosity in LLM-generated summaries. This work explores using LLM-generated feedback to improve summary quality by aligning the summaries with human preferences for faithfulness, completeness, and conciseness. We introduce FeedSum, a large-scale dataset containing multi-dimensional LLM feedback on summaries of varying quality across diverse domains. Our experiments show how feedback quality, dimensionality, and granularity influence preference learning, revealing that high-quality, multi-dimensional, fine-grained feedback significantly improves summary generation. We also compare two methods for using this feedback: supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Finally, we introduce SummLlama3-8b, a model that outperforms the nearly 10x larger Llama3-70b-instruct in generating human-preferred summaries, demonstrating that smaller models can achieve superior performance with appropriate training. The full dataset will be released soon. The SummLlama3-8B model is now available at https://huggingface.co/DISLab/SummLlama3-8B.

We present Step-Back Prompting, a simple prompting technique that enables LLMs to do abstractions to derive high-level concepts and first principles from instances containing specific details. Using the concepts and principles to guide the reasoning steps, LLMs significantly improve their abilities in following a correct reasoning path towards the solution. We conduct experiments of Step-Back Prompting with PaLM-2L models and observe substantial performance gains on a wide range of challenging reasoning-intensive tasks including STEM, Knowledge QA, and Multi-Hop Reasoning. For instance, Step-Back Prompting improves PaLM-2L performance on MMLU Physics and Chemistry by 7% and 11%, TimeQA by 27%, and MuSiQue by 7%.

One of the most profound challenges of modern machine learning is performing well on the long-tail of rare and underrepresented features. Large general-purpose models are trained for many tasks, but work best on high-frequency use cases. After training, it is hard to adapt a model to perform well on specific use cases underrepresented in the training corpus. Relying on prompt engineering or few-shot examples to maximize the output quality on a particular test case can be frustrating, as models can be highly sensitive to small changes, react in unpredicted ways or rely on a fixed system prompt for maintaining performance. In this work, we ask: "Can we optimize our training protocols to both improve controllability and performance on underrepresented use cases at inference time?" We revisit the divide between training and inference techniques to improve long-tail performance while providing users with a set of control levers the model is trained to be responsive to. We create a detailed taxonomy of data characteristics and task provenance to explicitly control generation attributes and implicitly condition generations at inference time. We fine-tune a base model to infer these markers automatically, which makes them optional at inference time. This principled and flexible approach yields pronounced improvements in performance, especially on examples from the long tail of the training distribution. While we observe an average lift of 5.7% win rates in open-ended generation quality with our markers, we see over 9.1% gains in underrepresented domains. We also observe relative lifts of up to 14.1% on underrepresented tasks like CodeRepair and absolute improvements of 35.3% on length instruction following evaluations.

Learning from human feedback has been shown to be effective at aligning language models with human preferences. Past work has often relied on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which optimizes the language model using reward scores assigned from a reward model trained on human preference data. In this work we show how the recently introduced Sequence Likelihood Calibration (SLiC), can also be used to effectively learn from human preferences (SLiC-HF). Furthermore, we demonstrate this can be done with human feedback data collected for a different model, similar to off-policy, offline RL data. Automatic and human evaluation experiments on the TL;DR summarization task show that SLiC-HF significantly improves supervised fine-tuning baselines. Furthermore, SLiC-HF presents a competitive alternative to the PPO RLHF implementation used in past work while being much simpler to implement, easier to tune and more computationally efficient in practice.

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However, it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn from trial-and-error as traditional reinforcement learning methods require extensive training samples and expensive model fine-tuning. We propose Reflexion, a novel framework to reinforce language agents not by updating weights, but instead through linguistic feedback. Concretely, Reflexion agents verbally reflect on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic memory buffer to induce better decision-making in subsequent trials. Reflexion is flexible enough to incorporate various types (scalar values or free-form language) and sources (external or internally simulated) of feedback signals, and obtains significant improvements over a baseline agent across diverse tasks (sequential decision-making, coding, language reasoning). For example, Reflexion achieves a 91% pass@1 accuracy on the HumanEval coding benchmark, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art GPT-4 that achieves 80%. We also conduct ablation and analysis studies using different feedback signals, feedback incorporation methods, and agent types, and provide insights into how they affect performance.

This paper describes CMU's submission to the IWSLT 2024 Simultaneous Speech Translation (SST) task for translating English speech to German text in a streaming manner. Our end-to-end speech-to-text (ST) system integrates the WavLM speech encoder, a modality adapter, and the Llama2-7B-Base model as the decoder. We employ a two-stage training approach: initially, we align the representations of speech and text, followed by full fine-tuning. Both stages are trained on MuST-c v2 data with cross-entropy loss. We adapt our offline ST model for SST using a simple fixed hold-n policy. Experiments show that our model obtains an offline BLEU score of 31.1 and a BLEU score of 29.5 under 2 seconds latency on the MuST-C-v2 tst-COMMON.

We present ALT (ALignment with Textual feedback), an approach that aligns language models with user preferences expressed in text. We argue that text offers greater expressiveness, enabling users to provide richer feedback than simple comparative preferences and this richer feedback can lead to more efficient and effective alignment. ALT aligns the model by conditioning its generation on the textual feedback. Our method relies solely on language modeling techniques and requires minimal hyper-parameter tuning, though it still presents the main benefits of RL-based alignment algorithms and can effectively learn from textual feedback. We explore the efficacy and efficiency of textual feedback across different tasks such as toxicity reduction, summarization, and dialog response generation. We find that ALT outperforms PPO for the task of toxicity reduction while being able to match its performance on summarization with only 20% of the samples. We also explore how ALT can be used with feedback provided by an existing LLM where we explore an LLM providing constrained and unconstrained textual feedback. We also outline future directions to align models with natural language feedback.

Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) has demonstrated significant potential across various domains, including mitigating harm in LLM outputs, enhancing text summarization, and mathematical reasoning. This paper introduces an RLAIF framework for improving the code generation abilities of lightweight (<1B parameters) LLMs. We specifically focus on code generation tasks that require writing appropriate API calls, which is challenging due to the well-known issue of hallucination in LLMs. Our framework extracts AI feedback from a larger LLM (e.g., GPT-3.5) through a specialized prompting strategy and uses this data to train a reward model towards better alignment from smaller LLMs. We run our experiments on the Gorilla dataset and meticulously assess the quality of the model-generated code across various metrics, including AST, ROUGE, and Code-BLEU, and develop a pipeline to compute its executability rate accurately. Our approach significantly enhances the fine-tuned LLM baseline's performance, achieving a 4.5% improvement in executability rate. Notably, a smaller LLM model (780M parameters) trained with RLAIF surpasses a much larger fine-tuned baseline with 7B parameters, achieving a 1.0% higher code executability rate.

In this work, we study the issue of reward hacking on the response length, a challenge emerging in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) on LLMs. A well-formatted, verbose but less helpful response from the LLMs can often deceive LLMs or even human evaluators to achieve high scores. The same issue also holds for some reward models in RL. To address the challenges in both training and evaluation, we establish a more reliable evaluation protocol for comparing different training configurations, which inspects the trade-off between LLM evaluation score and response length obtained by varying training hyperparameters. Based on this evaluation, we conduct large-scale studies, where the results shed insights into the efficacy of hyperparameters and tricks used in RL on mitigating length bias. We further propose to improve the reward model by jointly training two linear heads on shared feature representations to predict the rewards, one trained to correlate with length, and the other trained to decorrelate with length and therefore focus more on the actual content. We then discard the length head in RL to prevent reward hacking on length. Experiments demonstrate that our approach almost eliminates the reward correlation with length, and improves the obtained policy by a significant margin.

Instruction following is a key capability for LLMs. However, recent studies have shown that LLMs often struggle with instructions containing multiple constraints (e.g. a request to create a social media post "in a funny tone" with "no hashtag"). Despite this, most evaluations focus solely on synthetic data. To address this, we introduce RealInstruct, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow real-world multi-constrained instructions by leveraging queries real users asked AI assistants. We also investigate model-based evaluation as a cost-effective alternative to human annotation for this task. Our findings reveal that even the proprietary GPT-4 model fails to meet at least one constraint on over 21% of instructions, highlighting the limitations of state-of-the-art models. To address the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models, we propose the Decompose, Critique and Refine (DeCRIM) self-correction pipeline, which enhances LLMs' ability to follow constraints. DeCRIM works by decomposing the original instruction into a list of constraints and using a Critic model to decide when and where the LLM's response needs refinement. Our results show that DeCRIM improves Mistral's performance by 7.3% on RealInstruct and 8.0% on IFEval even with weak feedback. Moreover, we demonstrate that with strong feedback, open-source LLMs with DeCRIM can outperform GPT-4 on both benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in designing reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. However, obtaining high-quality reward code often involves human intervention, numerous LLM queries, or repetitive RL training. To address these issues, we propose CARD, a LLM-driven Reward Design framework that iteratively generates and improves reward function code. Specifically, CARD includes a Coder that generates and verifies the code, while a Evaluator provides dynamic feedback to guide the Coder in improving the code, eliminating the need for human feedback. In addition to process feedback and trajectory feedback, we introduce Trajectory Preference Evaluation (TPE), which evaluates the current reward function based on trajectory preferences. If the code fails the TPE, the Evaluator provides preference feedback, avoiding RL training at every iteration and making the reward function better aligned with the task objective. Empirical results on Meta-World and ManiSkill2 demonstrate that our method achieves an effective balance between task performance and token efficiency, outperforming or matching the baselines across all tasks. On 10 out of 12 tasks, CARD shows better or comparable performance to policies trained with expert-designed rewards, and our method even surpasses the oracle on 3 tasks.

Building a scalable and real-time recommendation system is vital for many businesses driven by time-sensitive customer feedback, such as short-videos ranking or online ads. Despite the ubiquitous adoption of production-scale deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, these general-purpose frameworks fall short of business demands in recommendation scenarios for various reasons: on one hand, tweaking systems based on static parameters and dense computations for recommendation with dynamic and sparse features is detrimental to model quality; on the other hand, such frameworks are designed with batch-training stage and serving stage completely separated, preventing the model from interacting with customer feedback in real-time. These issues led us to reexamine traditional approaches and explore radically different design choices. In this paper, we present Monolith, a system tailored for online training. Our design has been driven by observations of our application workloads and production environment that reflects a marked departure from other recommendations systems. Our contributions are manifold: first, we crafted a collisionless embedding table with optimizations such as expirable embeddings and frequency filtering to reduce its memory footprint; second, we provide an production-ready online training architecture with high fault-tolerance; finally, we proved that system reliability could be traded-off for real-time learning. Monolith has successfully landed in the BytePlus Recommend product.

Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages user-system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users here tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win/loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.

Recent advancements in audio generation have enabled the creation of high-fidelity audio clips from free-form textual descriptions. However, temporal relationships, a critical feature for audio content, are currently underrepresented in mainstream models, resulting in an imprecise temporal controllability. Specifically, users cannot accurately control the timestamps of sound events using free-form text. We acknowledge that a significant factor is the absence of high-quality, temporally-aligned audio-text datasets, which are essential for training models with temporal control. The more temporally-aligned the annotations, the better the models can understand the precise relationship between audio outputs and temporal textual prompts. Therefore, we present a strongly aligned audio-text dataset, AudioTime. It provides text annotations rich in temporal information such as timestamps, duration, frequency, and ordering, covering almost all aspects of temporal control. Additionally, we offer a comprehensive test set and evaluation metric to assess the temporal control performance of various models. Examples are available on the https://zeyuxie29.github.io/AudioTime/

Recent advances in retrieval models based on learned sparse representations generated by transformers have led us to, once again, consider score-at-a-time query evaluation techniques for the top-k retrieval problem. Previous studies comparing document-at-a-time and score-at-a-time approaches have consistently found that the former approach yields lower mean query latency, although the latter approach has more predictable query latency. In our experiments with four different retrieval models that exploit representational learning with bags of words, we find that transformers generate "wacky weights" that appear to greatly reduce the opportunities for skipping and early exiting optimizations that lie at the core of standard document-at-a-time techniques. As a result, score-at-a-time approaches appear to be more competitive in terms of query evaluation latency than in previous studies. We find that, if an effectiveness loss of up to three percent can be tolerated, a score-at-a-time approach can yield substantial gains in mean query latency while at the same time dramatically reducing tail latency.

Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems significantly advance over traditional turn-based dialogue systems, as they allow simultaneous bidirectional communication, closely mirroring human-human interactions. However, achieving low latency and natural interactions in full-duplex dialogue systems remains a significant challenge, especially considering human conversation dynamics such as interruptions, backchannels, and overlapping speech. In this paper, we introduce a novel End-to-End GPT-based model OmniFlatten for full-duplex conversation, capable of effectively modeling the complex behaviors inherent to natural conversations with low latency. To achieve full-duplex communication capabilities, we propose a multi-stage post-training scheme that progressively adapts a text-based large language model (LLM) backbone into a speech-text dialogue LLM, capable of generating text and speech in real time, without modifying the architecture of the backbone LLM. The training process comprises three stages: modality alignment, half-duplex dialogue learning, and full-duplex dialogue learning. Throughout all training stages, we standardize the data using a flattening operation, which allows us to unify the training methods and the model architecture across different modalities and tasks. Our approach offers a straightforward modeling technique and a promising research direction for developing efficient and natural end-to-end full-duplex spoken dialogue systems. Audio samples of dialogues generated by OmniFlatten can be found at this web site (https://omniflatten.github.io/).

Semantic prompt caches reduce the latency and cost of large language model (LLM) inference by reusing cached LLM-generated responses for semantically similar prompts. Vector similarity metrics assign a numerical score to quantify the similarity between an embedded prompt and its nearest neighbor in the cache. Existing systems rely on a static threshold to classify whether the similarity score is sufficiently high to result in a cache hit. We show that this one-size-fits-all threshold is insufficient across different prompts. We propose VectorQ, a framework to learn embedding-specific threshold regions that adapt to the complexity and uncertainty of an embedding. Through evaluations on a combination of four diverse datasets, we show that VectorQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems across all static thresholds, achieving up to 12x increases in cache hit rate and error rate reductions up to 92%.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle when prompted to generate content under specific constraints. However, in such cases it is often easy to check whether these constraints are satisfied or violated. Recent works have shown that LLMs can benefit from such "corrective feedback". Here we claim that this skill of LLMs can be significantly enhanced via training. We introduce an RL framework for teaching models to use such rewards, by simulating interaction sessions, and rewarding the model according to its ability to satisfy the constraints. We refer to our method as CORGI (Controlled Generation with RL for Guided Interaction), and evaluate it on a variety of controlled generation tasks using unlabeled training data. We find that CORGI consistently outperforms the baseline reinforcement learning method that does not incorporate conversational feedback. Furthermore, CORGI's interactive framework enables meta-learning, allowing the LLM to generalize better to guided interaction in new tasks. Our results clearly show that conversational optimization, when combined with reinforcement learning, significantly improves the effectiveness of LLMs in controlled generation contexts.

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to critique and refine their outputs is crucial for building systems that can iteratively improve, yet it is fundamentally limited by the ability to provide accurate judgments and actionable suggestions. In this work, we study LLM critics for code generation and propose CTRL, a framework for Critic Training via Reinforcement Learning, which trains a critic model to generate feedback that maximizes correction performance for a fixed generator model without human supervision. Our results demonstrate that critics trained with CTRL significantly enhance pass rates and mitigate compounding errors across both base and stronger generator models. Furthermore, we show that these critic models act as accurate generative reward models and enable test-time scaling through iterative critique-revision, achieving up to 106.1% relative improvements across challenging code generation benchmarks.

This paper presents VoiceLDM, a model designed to produce audio that accurately follows two distinct natural language text prompts: the description prompt and the content prompt. The former provides information about the overall environmental context of the audio, while the latter conveys the linguistic content. To achieve this, we adopt a text-to-audio (TTA) model based on latent diffusion models and extend its functionality to incorporate an additional content prompt as a conditional input. By utilizing pretrained contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) and Whisper, VoiceLDM is trained on large amounts of real-world audio without manual annotations or transcriptions. Additionally, we employ dual classifier-free guidance to further enhance the controllability of VoiceLDM. Experimental results demonstrate that VoiceLDM is capable of generating plausible audio that aligns well with both input conditions, even surpassing the speech intelligibility of the ground truth audio on the AudioCaps test set. Furthermore, we explore the text-to-speech (TTS) and zero-shot text-to-audio capabilities of VoiceLDM and show that it achieves competitive results. Demos and code are available at https://voiceldm.github.io.

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) has proven to be an effective query reformulation technique to improve retrieval accuracy. It aims to alleviate the mismatch of linguistic expressions between a query and its potential relevant documents. Existing PRF methods independently treat revised queries originating from the same query but using different numbers of feedback documents, resulting in severe query drift. Without comparing the effects of two different revisions from the same query, a PRF model may incorrectly focus on the additional irrelevant information increased in the more feedback, and thus reformulate a query that is less effective than the revision using the less feedback. Ideally, if a PRF model can distinguish between irrelevant and relevant information in the feedback, the more feedback documents there are, the better the revised query will be. To bridge this gap, we propose the Loss-over-Loss (LoL) framework to compare the reformulation losses between different revisions of the same query during training. Concretely, we revise an original query multiple times in parallel using different amounts of feedback and compute their reformulation losses. Then, we introduce an additional regularization loss on these reformulation losses to penalize revisions that use more feedback but gain larger losses. With such comparative regularization, the PRF model is expected to learn to suppress the extra increased irrelevant information by comparing the effects of different revised queries. Further, we present a differentiable query reformulation method to implement this framework. This method revises queries in the vector space and directly optimizes the retrieval performance of query vectors, applicable for both sparse and dense retrieval models. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method for two typical sparse and dense retrieval models.

Generative AI systems like foundation models (FMs) must align well with human values to ensure their behavior is helpful and trustworthy. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise for optimizing model performance using human judgments, existing RLHF pipelines predominantly rely on immediate feedback, which can fail to accurately reflect the downstream impact of an interaction on users' utility. We demonstrate that feedback based on evaluators' foresight estimates of downstream consequences systematically induces Goodhart's Law dynamics, incentivizing misaligned behaviors like sycophancy and deception and ultimately degrading user outcomes. To alleviate this, we propose decoupling evaluation from prediction by refocusing RLHF on hindsight feedback. Our theoretical analysis reveals that conditioning evaluator feedback on downstream observations mitigates misalignment and improves expected human utility, even when these observations are simulated by the AI system itself. To leverage this insight in a practical alignment algorithm, we introduce Reinforcement Learning from Hindsight Simulation (RLHS), which first simulates plausible consequences and then elicits feedback to assess what behaviors were genuinely beneficial in hindsight. We apply RLHS to two widely-employed online and offline preference optimization methods -- Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) -- and show empirically that misalignment is significantly reduced with both methods. Through an online human user study, we show that RLHS consistently outperforms RLHF in helping users achieve their goals and earns higher satisfaction ratings, despite being trained solely with simulated hindsight feedback. These results underscore the importance of focusing on long-term consequences, even simulated ones, to mitigate misalignment in RLHF.

As AI chatbots become ubiquitous, voice interaction presents a compelling way to enable rapid, high-bandwidth communication for both semantic and social signals. This has driven research into Large Audio Models (LAMs) to power voice-native experiences. However, aligning LAM development with user goals requires a clear understanding of user needs and preferences to establish reliable progress metrics. This study addresses these challenges by introducing an interactive approach to evaluate LAMs and collecting 7,500 LAM interactions from 484 participants. Through topic modeling of user queries, we identify primary use cases for audio interfaces. We then analyze user preference rankings and qualitative feedback to determine which models best align with user needs. Finally, we evaluate how static benchmarks predict interactive performance - our analysis reveals no individual benchmark strongly correlates with interactive results (tau leq 0.33 for all benchmarks). While combining multiple coarse-grained features yields modest predictive power (R^2=0.30), only two out of twenty datasets on spoken question answering and age prediction show significantly positive correlations. This suggests a clear need to develop LAM evaluations that better correlate with user preferences.

Conversational search, unlike single-turn retrieval tasks, requires understanding the current question within a dialogue context. The common approach of rewrite-then-retrieve aims to decontextualize questions to be self-sufficient for off-the-shelf retrievers, but most existing methods produce sub-optimal query rewrites due to the limited ability to incorporate signals from the retrieval results. To overcome this limitation, we present a novel framework RetPO (Retriever's Preference Optimization), which is designed to optimize a language model (LM) for reformulating search queries in line with the preferences of the target retrieval systems. The process begins by prompting a large LM to produce various potential rewrites and then collects retrieval performance for these rewrites as the retrievers' preferences. Through the process, we construct a large-scale dataset called RF collection, containing Retrievers' Feedback on over 410K query rewrites across 12K conversations. Furthermore, we fine-tune a smaller LM using this dataset to align it with the retrievers' preferences as feedback. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two recent conversational search benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing baselines, including GPT-3.5.

As large language models (LLMs) show impressive performance on complex tasks, they still struggle with longer contextual understanding and high computational costs. To balance efficiency and quality, we introduce LLMSteer, a fine-tuning-free framework that enhances LLMs through query-independent attention steering. Tested on popular LLMs and datasets, LLMSteer narrows the performance gap with baselines by 65.9% and reduces the runtime delay by up to 4.8x compared to recent attention steering methods.

Large LMs such as GPT-3 are powerful, but can commit mistakes that are obvious to humans. For example, GPT-3 would mistakenly interpret "What word is similar to good?" to mean a homophone, while the user intended a synonym. Our goal is to effectively correct such errors via user interactions with the system but without retraining, which will be prohibitively costly. We pair GPT-3 with a growing memory of recorded cases where the model misunderstood the user's intents, along with user feedback for clarification. Such a memory allows our system to produce enhanced prompts for any new query based on the user feedback for error correction on similar cases in the past. On four tasks (two lexical tasks, two advanced ethical reasoning tasks), we show how a (simulated) user can interactively teach a deployed GPT-3, substantially increasing its accuracy over the queries with different kinds of misunderstandings by the GPT-3. Our approach is a step towards the low-cost utility enhancement for very large pre-trained LMs. Code, data, and instructions to implement MEMPROMPT for a new task at https://www.memprompt.com/.

Aligning the behavior of Large language models (LLMs) with human intentions and values remains a critical challenge. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns LLMs by training a reward model (RM) on human preferences and fine-tuning the LLMs to maximize RM feedback. Despite its effectiveness and popularity, RLHF is prone to biased local optimization. It means RM fails to provide feedback that accurately aligns with human preference, causing LLMs to explore unexpected generalizations, and failing to achieve alignment objectives. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) reward modeling method. Its key insight is that learning from language feedback rather than scalar feedback improves RLHF without additional annotations. We replaced the reward modeling target from binary maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with sequence MLE. This method enables richer and fine-grained language feedback without additional annotations, models, or training stages. Our experiments demonstrated its effectiveness, specifically, reducing the refusal-to-response paradigm in single-turn safety dialogues and the long-response bias in text summarization tasks. We provide further analysis that seq2seq RM improves RLHF performance across 2B and 7B LLMs on 3 NLP tasks, achieving an average win rate of 76.9\%. We further show that seq2seq RM can still improve the performance of RLHF under out-of-distribution prompts.

Automatic evaluation benchmarks such as MT-Bench, Arena-Hard, and Auto-Arena are seeing growing adoption for the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing research has primarily focused on approximating human-based model rankings using limited data and LLM-as-a-Judge. However, the fundamental premise of these studies, which attempts to replicate human rankings, is flawed. Specifically, these benchmarks typically offer only overall scores, limiting their utility to leaderboard rankings, rather than providing feedback that can guide model optimization and support model profiling. Therefore, we advocate for an evaluation paradigm shift from approximating human-based model rankings to providing feedback with analytical value. To this end, we introduce Feedbacker, an evaluation framework that provides comprehensive and fine-grained results, thereby enabling thorough identification of a model's specific strengths and weaknesses. Such feedback not only supports the targeted optimization of the model but also enhances the understanding of its behavior. Feedbacker comprises three key components: an extensible tree-based query taxonomy builder, an automated query synthesis scheme, and a suite of visualization and analysis tools. Furthermore, we propose a novel LLM-as-a-Judge method: PC2 (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) pointwise evaluation. This method derives evaluation criteria by pre-comparing the differences between several auxiliary responses, achieving the accuracy of pairwise evaluation while maintaining the time complexity of pointwise evaluation. Finally, leveraging the evaluation results of 17 mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate the usage of Feedbacker and highlight its effectiveness and potential. Our homepage project is available at https://liudan193.github.io/Feedbacker.

Efficiently training LLMs with long sequences is important yet challenged by the massive computation and memory requirements. Sequence parallelism has been proposed to tackle these problems, but existing methods suffer from scalability or efficiency issues. We propose LoongTrain, a novel system to efficiently train LLMs with long sequences at scale. The core of LoongTrain is the 2D-Attention mechanism, which combines both head-parallel and context-parallel techniques to break the scalability constraints while maintaining efficiency. We introduce Double-Ring-Attention and analyze the performance of device placement strategies to further speed up training. We implement LoongTrain with the hybrid ZeRO and Selective Checkpoint++ techniques. Experiment results show that LoongTrain outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, i.e., DeepSpeed-Ulysses and Megatron Context Parallelism, in both end-to-end training speed and scalability, and improves Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) by up to 2.88x.

Deep learning based channel code designs have recently gained interest as an alternative to conventional coding algorithms, particularly for channels for which existing codes do not provide effective solutions. Communication over a feedback channel is one such problem, for which promising results have recently been obtained by employing various deep learning architectures. In this paper, we introduce a novel learning-aided code design for feedback channels, called generalized block attention feedback (GBAF) codes, which i) employs a modular architecture that can be implemented using different neural network architectures; ii) provides order-of-magnitude improvements in the probability of error compared to existing designs; and iii) can transmit at desired code rates.

In real-world applications, users often require both translations and transcriptions of speech to enhance their comprehension, particularly in streaming scenarios where incremental generation is necessary. This paper introduces a streaming Transformer-Transducer that jointly generates automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST) outputs using a single decoder. To produce ASR and ST content effectively with minimal latency, we propose a joint token-level serialized output training method that interleaves source and target words by leveraging an off-the-shelf textual aligner. Experiments in monolingual (it-en) and multilingual (\{de,es,it\}-en) settings demonstrate that our approach achieves the best quality-latency balance. With an average ASR latency of 1s and ST latency of 1.3s, our model shows no degradation or even improves output quality compared to separate ASR and ST models, yielding an average improvement of 1.1 WER and 0.4 BLEU in the multilingual case.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are a promising research direction for building power-efficient information processing systems, especially for temporal tasks such as speech recognition. In SNNs, delays refer to the time needed for one spike to travel from one neuron to another. These delays matter because they influence the spike arrival times, and it is well-known that spiking neurons respond more strongly to coincident input spikes. More formally, it has been shown theoretically that plastic delays greatly increase the expressivity in SNNs. Yet, efficient algorithms to learn these delays have been lacking. Here, we propose a new discrete-time algorithm that addresses this issue in deep feedforward SNNs using backpropagation, in an offline manner. To simulate delays between consecutive layers, we use 1D convolutions across time. The kernels contain only a few non-zero weights - one per synapse - whose positions correspond to the delays. These positions are learned together with the weights using the recently proposed Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings (DCLS). We evaluated our method on three datasets: the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset (SHD), the Spiking Speech Commands (SSC) and its non-spiking version Google Speech Commands v0.02 (GSC) benchmarks, which require detecting temporal patterns. We used feedforward SNNs with two or three hidden fully connected layers, and vanilla leaky integrate-and-fire neurons. We showed that fixed random delays help and that learning them helps even more. Furthermore, our method outperformed the state-of-the-art in the three datasets without using recurrent connections and with substantially fewer parameters. Our work demonstrates the potential of delay learning in developing accurate and precise models for temporal data processing. Our code is based on PyTorch / SpikingJelly and available at: https://github.com/Thvnvtos/SNN-delays

The demand for efficient and accurate assessment methods has intensified as education systems transition to digital platforms. Providing feedback is essential in educational settings and goes beyond simply conveying marks as it justifies the assigned marks. In this context, we present a significant advancement in automated grading by introducing Engineering Short Answer Feedback (EngSAF) -- a dataset of 5.8k student answers accompanied by reference answers and questions for the Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) task. The EngSAF dataset is meticulously curated to cover a diverse range of subjects, questions, and answer patterns from multiple engineering domains. We leverage state-of-the-art large language models' (LLMs) generative capabilities with our Label-Aware Synthetic Feedback Generation (LASFG) strategy to include feedback in our dataset. This paper underscores the importance of enhanced feedback in practical educational settings, outlines dataset annotation and feedback generation processes, conducts a thorough EngSAF analysis, and provides different LLMs-based zero-shot and finetuned baselines for future comparison. Additionally, we demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the ASAG system through its deployment in a real-world end-semester exam at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), showcasing its practical viability and potential for broader implementation in educational institutions.

Parallel text-to-speech models have been widely applied for real-time speech synthesis, and they offer more controllability and a much faster synthesis process compared with conventional auto-regressive models. Although parallel models have benefits in many aspects, they become naturally unfit for incremental synthesis due to their fully parallel architecture such as transformer. In this work, we propose Incremental FastPitch, a novel FastPitch variant capable of incrementally producing high-quality Mel chunks by improving the architecture with chunk-based FFT blocks, training with receptive-field constrained chunk attention masks, and inference with fixed size past model states. Experimental results show that our proposal can produce speech quality comparable to the parallel FastPitch, with a significant lower latency that allows even lower response time for real-time speech applications.

Communication is defined as "Who says what to whom with what effect." A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich signals about it. Even after carrying signals about the message, the behavior data is often ignored while training large language models. We show that training LLMs on receiver behavior can actually help improve their content-understanding abilities. Specifically, we show that training LLMs to predict the receiver behavior of likes and comments improves the LLM's performance on a wide variety of downstream content understanding tasks. We show this performance increase over 40 video and image understanding tasks over 23 benchmark datasets across both 0-shot and fine-tuning settings, outperforming many supervised baselines. Moreover, since receiver behavior, such as likes and comments, is collected by default on the internet and does not need any human annotations to be useful, the performance improvement we get after training on this data is essentially free-lunch. We release the receiver behavior cleaned comments and likes of 750k images and videos collected from multiple platforms along with our instruction-tuning data.

Goal-directed dialogue systems aim to proactively reach a pre-determined target through multi-turn conversations. The key to achieving this task lies in planning dialogue paths that smoothly and coherently direct conversations towards the target. However, this is a challenging and under-explored task. In this work, we propose a coherent dialogue planning approach that uses a stochastic process to model the temporal dynamics of dialogue paths. We define a latent space that captures the coherence of goal-directed behavior using a Brownian bridge process, which allows us to incorporate user feedback flexibly in dialogue planning. Based on the derived latent trajectories, we generate dialogue paths explicitly using pre-trained language models. We finally employ these paths as natural language prompts to guide dialogue generation. Our experiments show that our approach generates more coherent utterances and achieves the goal with a higher success rate.

Retrieval and ranking models are the backbone of many applications such as web search, open domain QA, or text-based recommender systems. The latency of neural ranking models at query time is largely dependent on the architecture and deliberate choices by their designers to trade-off effectiveness for higher efficiency. This focus on low query latency of a rising number of efficient ranking architectures make them feasible for production deployment. In machine learning an increasingly common approach to close the effectiveness gap of more efficient models is to apply knowledge distillation from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. We find that different ranking architectures tend to produce output scores in different magnitudes. Based on this finding, we propose a cross-architecture training procedure with a margin focused loss (Margin-MSE), that adapts knowledge distillation to the varying score output distributions of different BERT and non-BERT passage ranking architectures. We apply the teachable information as additional fine-grained labels to existing training triples of the MSMARCO-Passage collection. We evaluate our procedure of distilling knowledge from state-of-the-art concatenated BERT models to four different efficient architectures (TK, ColBERT, PreTT, and a BERT CLS dot product model). We show that across our evaluated architectures our Margin-MSE knowledge distillation significantly improves re-ranking effectiveness without compromising their efficiency. Additionally, we show our general distillation method to improve nearest neighbor based index retrieval with the BERT dot product model, offering competitive results with specialized and much more costly training methods. To benefit the community, we publish the teacher-score training files in a ready-to-use package.

We apply preference modeling and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to finetune language models to act as helpful and harmless assistants. We find this alignment training improves performance on almost all NLP evaluations, and is fully compatible with training for specialized skills such as python coding and summarization. We explore an iterated online mode of training, where preference models and RL policies are updated on a weekly cadence with fresh human feedback data, efficiently improving our datasets and models. Finally, we investigate the robustness of RLHF training, and identify a roughly linear relation between the RL reward and the square root of the KL divergence between the policy and its initialization. Alongside our main results, we perform peripheral analyses on calibration, competing objectives, and the use of OOD detection, compare our models with human writers, and provide samples from our models using prompts appearing in recent related work.

Large Language Models (LLMs) generate functionally correct solutions but often fall short in code efficiency, a critical bottleneck for real-world deployment. In this paper, we introduce a novel test-time iterative optimization framework to address this, employing a closed-loop system where LLMs iteratively refine code based on empirical performance feedback from an execution sandbox. We explore three training strategies: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization~(GRPO). Experiments on our Venus dataset and the APPS benchmark show that SFT and DPO rapidly saturate in efficiency gains. In contrast, GRPO, using reinforcement learning (RL) with execution feedback, continuously optimizes code performance, significantly boosting both pass@1 (from 47% to 62%) and the likelihood of outperforming human submissions in efficiency (from 31% to 45%). Our work demonstrates effective test-time code efficiency improvement and critically reveals the power of RL in teaching LLMs to truly self-improve code efficiency.

Agents are predominantly evaluated and optimized via task success metrics, which are coarse, rely on manual design from experts, and fail to reward intermediate emergent behaviors. We propose AutoLibra, a framework for agent evaluation, that transforms open-ended human feedback, e.g., "If you find that the button is disabled, don't click it again", or "This agent has too much autonomy to decide what to do on its own", into metrics for evaluating fine-grained behaviors in agent trajectories. AutoLibra accomplishes this by grounding feedback to an agent's behavior, clustering similar positive and negative behaviors, and creating concrete metrics with clear definitions and concrete examples, which can be used for prompting LLM-as-a-Judge as evaluators. We further propose two meta-metrics to evaluate the alignment of a set of (induced) metrics with open feedback: "coverage" and "redundancy". Through optimizing these meta-metrics, we experimentally demonstrate AutoLibra's ability to induce more concrete agent evaluation metrics than the ones proposed in previous agent evaluation benchmarks and discover new metrics to analyze agents. We also present two applications of AutoLibra in agent improvement: First, we show that AutoLibra-induced metrics serve as better prompt-engineering targets than the task success rate on a wide range of text game tasks, improving agent performance over baseline by a mean of 20%. Second, we show that AutoLibra can iteratively select high-quality fine-tuning data for web navigation agents. Our results suggest that AutoLibra is a powerful task-agnostic tool for evaluating and improving language agents.

Current methods of building LLMs with voice interaction capabilities rely heavily on explicit text autoregressive generation before or during speech response generation to maintain content quality, which unfortunately brings computational overhead and increases latency in multi-turn interactions. To address this, we introduce IntrinsicVoic,e an LLM designed with intrinsic real-time voice interaction capabilities. IntrinsicVoice aims to facilitate the transfer of textual capabilities of pre-trained LLMs to the speech modality by mitigating the modality gap between text and speech. Our novelty architecture, GroupFormer, can reduce speech sequences to lengths comparable to text sequences while generating high-quality audio, significantly reducing the length difference between speech and text, speeding up inference, and alleviating long-text modeling issues. Additionally, we construct a multi-turn speech-to-speech dialogue dataset named \method-500k which includes nearly 500k turns of speech-to-speech dialogues, and a cross-modality training strategy to enhance the semantic alignment between speech and text. Experimental results demonstrate that IntrinsicVoice can generate high-quality speech response with latency lower than 100ms in multi-turn dialogue scenarios. Demos are available at https://instrinsicvoice.github.io/.

Instruction tuning-supervised fine-tuning using instruction-response pairs-is a foundational step in transitioning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) into helpful and safe chat assistants. Our hypothesis is that establishing an adequate output space can enable such a transition given the capabilities inherent in pre-trained LLMs. To verify this, we propose Response Tuning (RT), which eliminates the instruction-conditioning step in instruction tuning and solely focuses on response space supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that RT models, trained only using responses, can effectively respond to a wide range of instructions and exhibit helpfulness comparable to that of their instruction-tuned counterparts. Furthermore, we observe that controlling the training response distribution can significantly improve their user preference or elicit target behaviors such as refusing assistance for unsafe queries. Our findings illuminate the role of establishing an adequate output space in alignment, highlighting the potential of the extensive inherent capabilities of pre-trained LLMs.

Non-autoregressive (NAR) modeling has gained significant interest in speech processing since these models achieve dramatically lower inference time than autoregressive (AR) models while also achieving good transcription accuracy. Since NAR automatic speech recognition (ASR) models must wait for the completion of the entire utterance before processing, some works explore streaming NAR models based on blockwise attention for low-latency applications. However, streaming NAR models significantly lag in accuracy compared to streaming AR and non-streaming NAR models. To address this, we propose a streaming "semi-autoregressive" ASR model that incorporates the labels emitted in previous blocks as additional context using a Language Model (LM) subnetwork. We also introduce a novel greedy decoding algorithm that addresses insertion and deletion errors near block boundaries while not significantly increasing the inference time. Experiments show that our method outperforms the existing streaming NAR model by 19% relative on Tedlium2, 16%/8% on Librispeech-100 clean/other test sets, and 19%/8% on the Switchboard(SWB) / Callhome(CH) test sets. It also reduced the accuracy gap with streaming AR and non-streaming NAR models while achieving 2.5x lower latency. We also demonstrate that our approach can effectively utilize external text data to pre-train the LM subnetwork to further improve streaming ASR accuracy.

Since the natural language processing (NLP) community started to make large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, act as a critic to evaluate the quality of generated texts, most of them only train a critique generation model of a specific scale on specific datasets. We argue that a comprehensive investigation on the key factor of LLM-based evaluation models, such as scaling properties, is lacking, so that it is still inconclusive whether these models have potential to replace GPT-4's evaluation in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new critique generation model called CritiqueLLM, which includes a dialogue-based prompting method for high-quality referenced / reference-free evaluation data. Experimental results show that our model can achieve comparable evaluation performance to GPT-4 especially in system-level correlations, and even outperform GPT-4 in 3 out of 8 tasks in a challenging reference-free setting. We conduct detailed analysis to show promising scaling properties of our model in the quality of generated critiques. We also demonstrate that our generated critiques can act as scalable feedback to directly improve the generation quality of LLMs.

Traditional recommender systems leverage users' item preference history to recommend novel content that users may like. However, modern dialog interfaces that allow users to express language-based preferences offer a fundamentally different modality for preference input. Inspired by recent successes of prompting paradigms for large language models (LLMs), we study their use for making recommendations from both item-based and language-based preferences in comparison to state-of-the-art item-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods. To support this investigation, we collect a new dataset consisting of both item-based and language-based preferences elicited from users along with their ratings on a variety of (biased) recommended items and (unbiased) random items. Among numerous experimental results, we find that LLMs provide competitive recommendation performance for pure language-based preferences (no item preferences) in the near cold-start case in comparison to item-based CF methods, despite having no supervised training for this specific task (zero-shot) or only a few labels (few-shot). This is particularly promising as language-based preference representations are more explainable and scrutable than item-based or vector-based representations.

The impressive capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a powerful approach to reimagine users' typing experience. This paper demonstrates Proofread, a novel Gboard feature powered by a server-side LLM in Gboard, enabling seamless sentence-level and paragraph-level corrections with a single tap. We describe the complete system in this paper, from data generation, metrics design to model tuning and deployment. To obtain models with sufficient quality, we implement a careful data synthetic pipeline tailored to online use cases, design multifaceted metrics, employ a two-stage tuning approach to acquire the dedicated LLM for the feature: the Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT) for foundational quality, followed by the Reinforcement Learning (RL) tuning approach for targeted refinement. Specifically, we find sequential tuning on Rewrite and proofread tasks yields the best quality in SFT stage, and propose global and direct rewards in the RL tuning stage to seek further improvement. Extensive experiments on a human-labeled golden set showed our tuned PaLM2-XS model achieved 85.56\% good ratio. We launched the feature to Pixel 8 devices by serving the model on TPU v5 in Google Cloud, with thousands of daily active users. Serving latency was significantly reduced by quantization, bucket inference, text segmentation, and speculative decoding. Our demo could be seen in https://youtu.be/4ZdcuiwFU7I{Youtube}.

In modern large language models (LLMs), increasing sequence lengths is a crucial challenge for enhancing their comprehension and coherence in handling complex tasks such as multi-modal question answering. However, handling long context sequences with LLMs is prohibitively costly due to the conventional attention mechanism's quadratic time and space complexity, and the context window size is limited by the GPU memory. Although recent works have proposed linear and sparse attention mechanisms to address this issue, their real-world applicability is often limited by the need to re-train pre-trained models. In response, we propose a novel approach, Hierarchically Pruned Attention (HiP), which simultaneously reduces the training and inference time complexity from O(T^2) to O(T log T) and the space complexity from O(T^2) to O(T). To this end, we devise a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that generates an attention mask through a novel tree-search-like algorithm for a given query on the fly. HiP is training-free as it only utilizes the pre-trained attention scores to spot the positions of the top-k most significant elements for each query. Moreover, it ensures that no token is overlooked, unlike the sliding window-based sub-quadratic attention methods, such as StreamingLLM. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world benchmarks demonstrate that HiP significantly reduces prompt (i.e., prefill) and decoding latency and memory usage while maintaining high generation performance with little or no degradation. As HiP allows pretrained LLMs to scale to millions of tokens on commodity GPUs with no additional engineering due to its easy plug-and-play deployment, we believe that our work will have a large practical impact, opening up the possibility to many long-context LLM applications previously infeasible.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a pivot technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. In RLHF practice, preference data plays a crucial role in bridging human proclivity and LLMs. However, the scarcity of diverse, naturalistic datasets of human preferences on LLM outputs at scale poses a great challenge to RLHF as well as feedback learning research within the open-source community. Current preference datasets, either proprietary or limited in size and prompt variety, result in limited RLHF adoption in open-source models and hinder further exploration. In this study, we propose ULTRAFEEDBACK, a large-scale, high-quality, and diversified preference dataset designed to overcome these limitations and foster RLHF development. To create ULTRAFEEDBACK, we compile a diverse array of instructions and models from multiple sources to produce comparative data. We meticulously devise annotation instructions and employ GPT-4 to offer detailed feedback in both numerical and textual forms. ULTRAFEEDBACK establishes a reproducible and expandable preference data construction pipeline, serving as a solid foundation for future RLHF and feedback learning research. Utilizing ULTRAFEEDBACK, we train various models to demonstrate its effectiveness, including the reward model UltraRM, chat language model UltraLM-13B-PPO, and critique model UltraCM. Experimental results indicate that our models outperform existing open-source models, achieving top performance across multiple benchmarks. Our data and models are available at https://github.com/thunlp/UltraFeedback.

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity require additional pretraining or finetuning, and often sacrifice model accuracy. In this paper, we first provide both theoretical and empirical foundations for near-lossless sparse attention. We find dynamically capturing head-specific sparse patterns at runtime with low overhead is crucial. To address this, we propose SampleAttention, an adaptive structured and near-lossless sparse attention. Leveraging observed significant sparse patterns, SampleAttention attends to a fixed percentage of adjacent tokens to capture local window patterns, and employs a two-stage query-guided key-value filtering approach, which adaptively select a minimum set of key-values with low overhead, to capture column stripe patterns. Comprehensive evaluations show that SampleAttention can seamlessly replace vanilla attention in off-the-shelf LLMs with nearly no accuracy loss, and reduces TTFT by up to 2.42times compared with FlashAttention.

Large Language Models are typically trained with next-turn rewards, limiting their ability to optimize for long-term interaction. As a result, they often respond passively to ambiguous or open-ended user requests, failing to help users reach their ultimate intents and leading to inefficient conversations. To address these limitations, we introduce CollabLLM, a novel and general training framework that enhances multiturn human-LLM collaboration. Its key innovation is a collaborative simulation that estimates the long-term contribution of responses using Multiturn-aware Rewards. By reinforcement fine-tuning these rewards, CollabLLM goes beyond responding to user requests, and actively uncovers user intent and offers insightful suggestions-a key step towards more human-centered AI. We also devise a multiturn interaction benchmark with three challenging tasks such as document creation. CollabLLM significantly outperforms our baselines with averages of 18.5% higher task performance and 46.3% improved interactivity by LLM judges. Finally, we conduct a large user study with 201 judges, where CollabLLM increases user satisfaction by 17.6% and reduces user spent time by 10.4%.

This paper describes the systems submitted by team6 for ChatEval, the DSTC 11 Track 4 competition. We present three different approaches to predicting turn-level qualities of chatbot responses based on large language models (LLMs). We report improvement over the baseline using dynamic few-shot examples from a vector store for the prompts for ChatGPT. We also analyze the performance of the other two approaches and report needed improvements for future work. We developed the three systems over just two weeks, showing the potential of LLMs for this task. An ablation study conducted after the challenge deadline shows that the new Llama 2 models are closing the performance gap between ChatGPT and open-source LLMs. However, we find that the Llama 2 models do not benefit from few-shot examples in the same way as ChatGPT.

An emerging method to cheaply improve a weaker language model is to finetune it on outputs from a stronger model, such as a proprietary system like ChatGPT (e.g., Alpaca, Self-Instruct, and others). This approach looks to cheaply imitate the proprietary model's capabilities using a weaker open-source model. In this work, we critically analyze this approach. We first finetune a series of LMs that imitate ChatGPT using varying base model sizes (1.5B--13B), data sources, and imitation data amounts (0.3M--150M tokens). We then evaluate the models using crowd raters and canonical NLP benchmarks. Initially, we were surprised by the output quality of our imitation models -- they appear far better at following instructions, and crowd workers rate their outputs as competitive with ChatGPT. However, when conducting more targeted automatic evaluations, we find that imitation models close little to none of the gap from the base LM to ChatGPT on tasks that are not heavily supported in the imitation data. We show that these performance discrepancies may slip past human raters because imitation models are adept at mimicking ChatGPT's style but not its factuality. Overall, we conclude that model imitation is a false promise: there exists a substantial capabilities gap between open and closed LMs that, with current methods, can only be bridged using an unwieldy amount of imitation data or by using more capable base LMs. In turn, we argue that the highest leverage action for improving open-source models is to tackle the difficult challenge of developing better base LMs, rather than taking the shortcut of imitating proprietary systems.

Despite the successes of large language models (LLMs), they exhibit significant drawbacks, particularly when processing long contexts. Their inference cost scales quadratically with respect to sequence length, making it expensive for deployment in some real-world text processing applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Additionally, LLMs also exhibit the "distraction phenomenon," where irrelevant context in the prompt degrades output quality. To address these drawbacks, we propose a novel RAG prompting methodology, superposition prompting, which can be directly applied to pre-trained transformer-based LLMs without the need for fine-tuning. At a high level, superposition prompting allows the LLM to process input documents in parallel prompt paths, discarding paths once they are deemed irrelevant. We demonstrate the capability of our method to simultaneously enhance time efficiency across a variety of question-answering benchmarks using multiple pre-trained LLMs. Furthermore, our technique significantly improves accuracy when the retrieved context is large relative the context the model was trained on. For example, our approach facilitates an 93x reduction in compute time while improving accuracy by 43\% on the NaturalQuestions-Open dataset with the MPT-7B instruction-tuned model over naive RAG.

As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial. However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs. We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations. To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback. Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9\% and 9.5\% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at https://vlf-silkie.github.io.

Learning from feedback reduces the hallucination of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by aligning them with human preferences. While traditional methods rely on labor-intensive and time-consuming manual labeling, recent approaches employing models as automatic labelers have shown promising results without human intervention. However, these methods heavily rely on costly proprietary models like GPT-4V, resulting in scalability issues. Moreover, this paradigm essentially distills the proprietary models to provide a temporary solution to quickly bridge the performance gap. As this gap continues to shrink, the community is soon facing the essential challenge of aligning MLLMs using labeler models of comparable capability. In this work, we introduce RLAIF-V, a novel framework that aligns MLLMs in a fully open-source paradigm for super GPT-4V trustworthiness. RLAIF-V maximally exploits the open-source feedback from two perspectives, including high-quality feedback data and online feedback learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks in both automatic and human evaluation show that RLAIF-V substantially enhances the trustworthiness of models without sacrificing performance on other tasks. Using a 34B model as labeler, RLAIF-V 7B model reduces object hallucination by 82.9\% and overall hallucination by 42.1\%, outperforming the labeler model. Remarkably, RLAIF-V also reveals the self-alignment potential of open-source MLLMs, where a 12B model can learn from the feedback of itself to achieve less than 29.5\% overall hallucination rate, surpassing GPT-4V (45.9\%) by a large margin. The results shed light on a promising route to enhance the efficacy of leading-edge MLLMs.

Industrial recommender systems face the challenge of operating in non-stationary environments, where data distribution shifts arise from evolving user behaviors over time. To tackle this challenge, a common approach is to periodically re-train or incrementally update deployed deep models with newly observed data, resulting in a continual training process. However, the conventional learning paradigm of neural networks relies on iterative gradient-based updates with a small learning rate, making it slow for large recommendation models to adapt. In this paper, we introduce ReLoop2, a self-correcting learning loop that facilitates fast model adaptation in online recommender systems through responsive error compensation. Inspired by the slow-fast complementary learning system observed in human brains, we propose an error memory module that directly stores error samples from incoming data streams. These stored samples are subsequently leveraged to compensate for model prediction errors during testing, particularly under distribution shifts. The error memory module is designed with fast access capabilities and undergoes continual refreshing with newly observed data samples during the model serving phase to support fast model adaptation. We evaluate the effectiveness of ReLoop2 on three open benchmark datasets as well as a real-world production dataset. The results demonstrate the potential of ReLoop2 in enhancing the responsiveness and adaptiveness of recommender systems operating in non-stationary environments.

Conversational NLU providers often need to scale to thousands of intent-classification models where new customers often face the cold-start problem. Scaling to so many customers puts a constraint on storage space as well. In this paper, we explore four different zero and few-shot intent classification approaches with this low-resource constraint: 1) domain adaptation, 2) data augmentation, 3) zero-shot intent classification using descriptions large language models (LLMs), and 4) parameter-efficient fine-tuning of instruction-finetuned language models. Our results show that all these approaches are effective to different degrees in low-resource settings. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning using T-few recipe (Liu et al., 2022) on Flan-T5 (Chang et al., 2022) yields the best performance even with just one sample per intent. We also show that the zero-shot method of prompting LLMs using intent descriptions

We explore unconstrained natural language feedback as a learning signal for artificial agents. Humans use rich and varied language to teach, yet most prior work on interactive learning from language assumes a particular form of input (e.g., commands). We propose a general framework which does not make this assumption, using aspect-based sentiment analysis to decompose feedback into sentiment about the features of a Markov decision process. We then perform an analogue of inverse reinforcement learning, regressing the sentiment on the features to infer the teacher's latent reward function. To evaluate our approach, we first collect a corpus of teaching behavior in a cooperative task where both teacher and learner are human. We implement three artificial learners: sentiment-based "literal" and "pragmatic" models, and an inference network trained end-to-end to predict latent rewards. We then repeat our initial experiment and pair them with human teachers. All three successfully learn from interactive human feedback. The sentiment models outperform the inference network, with the "pragmatic" model approaching human performance. Our work thus provides insight into the information structure of naturalistic linguistic feedback as well as methods to leverage it for reinforcement learning.

Most lip-to-speech (LTS) synthesis models are trained and evaluated under the assumption that the audio-video pairs in the dataset are perfectly synchronized. In this work, we show that the commonly used audio-visual datasets, such as GRID, TCD-TIMIT, and Lip2Wav, can have data asynchrony issues. Training lip-to-speech with such datasets may further cause the model asynchrony issue -- that is, the generated speech and the input video are out of sync. To address these asynchrony issues, we propose a synchronized lip-to-speech (SLTS) model with an automatic synchronization mechanism (ASM) to correct data asynchrony and penalize model asynchrony. We further demonstrate the limitation of the commonly adopted evaluation metrics for LTS with asynchronous test data and introduce an audio alignment frontend before the metrics sensitive to time alignment for better evaluation. We compare our method with state-of-the-art approaches on conventional and time-aligned metrics to show the benefits of synchronization training.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, aligning these models with human preferences has emerged as a critical challenge. Traditional alignment methods, relying on human or LLM annotated datasets, are limited by their resource-intensive nature, inherent subjectivity, and the risk of feedback loops that amplify model biases. To overcome these limitations, we introduce WildFeedback, a novel framework that leverages real-time, in-situ user interactions to create preference datasets that more accurately reflect authentic human values. WildFeedback operates through a three-step process: feedback signal identification, preference data construction, and user-guided evaluation. We applied this framework to a large corpus of user-LLM conversations, resulting in a rich preference dataset that reflects genuine user preferences. This dataset captures the nuances of user preferences by identifying and classifying feedback signals within natural conversations, thereby enabling the construction of more representative and context-sensitive alignment data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs fine-tuned on WildFeedback exhibit significantly improved alignment with user preferences, as evidenced by both traditional benchmarks and our proposed user-guided evaluation. By incorporating real-time feedback from actual users, WildFeedback addresses the scalability, subjectivity, and bias challenges that plague existing approaches, marking a significant step toward developing LLMs that are more responsive to the diverse and evolving needs of their users. In summary, WildFeedback offers a robust, scalable solution for aligning LLMs with true human values, setting a new standard for the development and evaluation of user-centric language models.

Controlling the generation of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge to ensure their safe and reliable deployment. While prompt engineering and finetuning are common approaches, recent work has explored latent steering, a lightweight technique that alters LLM internal activations to guide generation. However, subsequent studies revealed latent steering's effectiveness to be limited, often underperforming simple instruction prompting. To address this limitation, we first establish a benchmark across diverse behaviors for standardized evaluation of steering techniques. Building on insights from this benchmark, we introduce Instruction Attention Boosting (InstABoost), a latent steering method that boosts the strength of instruction prompting by altering the model's attention during generation. InstABoost combines the strengths of existing approaches and is theoretically supported by prior work that suggests that in-context rule following in transformer-based models can be controlled by manipulating attention on instructions. Empirically, InstABoost demonstrates superior control success compared to both traditional prompting and latent steering.

Recommendation systems play a critical role in enhancing user experience and engagement in various online platforms. Traditional methods, such as Collaborative Filtering (CF) and Content-Based Filtering (CBF), rely heavily on past user interactions or item features. However, these models often fail to capture the dynamic and evolving nature of user preferences. To address these limitations, we propose DUIP (Dynamic User Intent Prediction), a novel framework that combines LSTM networks with Large Language Models (LLMs) to dynamically capture user intent and generate personalized item recommendations. The LSTM component models the sequential and temporal dependencies of user behavior, while the LLM utilizes the LSTM-generated prompts to predict the next item of interest. Experimental results on three diverse datasets ML-1M, Games, and Bundle show that DUIP outperforms a wide range of baseline models, demonstrating its ability to handle the cold-start problem and real-time intent adaptation. The integration of dynamic prompts based on recent user interactions allows DUIP to provide more accurate, context-aware, and personalized recommendations. Our findings suggest that DUIP is a promising approach for next-generation recommendation systems, with potential for further improvements in cross-modal recommendations and scalability.

Simultaneous neural machine translation(SNMT) models start emitting the target sequence before they have processed the source sequence. The recent adaptive policies for SNMT use monotonic attention to perform read/write decisions based on the partial source and target sequences. The lack of sufficient information might cause the monotonic attention to take poor read/write decisions, which in turn negatively affects the performance of the SNMT model. On the other hand, human translators make better read/write decisions since they can anticipate the immediate future words using linguistic information and domain knowledge.Motivated by human translators, in this work, we propose a framework to aid monotonic attention with an external language model to improve its decisions.We conduct experiments on the MuST-C English-German and English-French speech-to-text translation tasks to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.The proposed SNMT method improves the quality-latency trade-off over the state-of-the-art monotonic multihead attention.

End-to-end spoken dialogue models such as GPT-4o-audio have recently garnered significant attention in the speech domain. However, the evaluation of spoken dialogue models' conversational performance has largely been overlooked. This is primarily due to the intelligent chatbots convey a wealth of non-textual information which cannot be easily measured using text-based language models like ChatGPT. To address this gap, we propose WavReward, a reward feedback model based on audio language models that can evaluate both the IQ and EQ of spoken dialogue systems with speech input. Specifically, 1) based on audio language models, WavReward incorporates the deep reasoning process and the nonlinear reward mechanism for post-training. By utilizing multi-sample feedback via the reinforcement learning algorithm, we construct a specialized evaluator tailored to spoken dialogue models. 2) We introduce ChatReward-30K, a preference dataset used to train WavReward. ChatReward-30K includes both comprehension and generation aspects of spoken dialogue models. These scenarios span various tasks, such as text-based chats, nine acoustic attributes of instruction chats, and implicit chats. WavReward outperforms previous state-of-the-art evaluation models across multiple spoken dialogue scenarios, achieving a substantial improvement about Qwen2.5-Omni in objective accuracy from 55.1% to 91.5%. In subjective A/B testing, WavReward also leads by a margin of 83%. Comprehensive ablation studies confirm the necessity of each component of WavReward. All data and code will be publicly at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavReward after the paper is accepted.

Existing open-domain dialog models are generally trained to minimize the perplexity of target human responses. However, some human replies are more engaging than others, spawning more followup interactions. Current conversational models are increasingly capable of producing turns that are context-relevant, but in order to produce compelling agents, these models need to be able to predict and optimize for turns that are genuinely engaging. We leverage social media feedback data (number of replies and upvotes) to build a large-scale training dataset for feedback prediction. To alleviate possible distortion between the feedback and engagingness, we convert the ranking problem to a comparison of response pairs which involve few confounding factors. We trained DialogRPT, a set of GPT-2 based models on 133M pairs of human feedback data and the resulting ranker outperformed several baselines. Particularly, our ranker outperforms the conventional dialog perplexity baseline with a large margin on predicting Reddit feedback. We finally combine the feedback prediction models and a human-like scoring model to rank the machine-generated dialog responses. Crowd-sourced human evaluation shows that our ranking method correlates better with real human preferences than baseline models.

Zero-shot text-to-speech aims at synthesizing voices with unseen speech prompts. Previous large-scale multispeaker TTS models have successfully achieved this goal with an enrolled recording within 10 seconds. However, most of them are designed to utilize only short speech prompts. The limited information in short speech prompts significantly hinders the performance of fine-grained identity imitation. In this paper, we introduce Mega-TTS 2, a generic zero-shot multispeaker TTS model that is capable of synthesizing speech for unseen speakers with arbitrary-length prompts. Specifically, we 1) design a multi-reference timbre encoder to extract timbre information from multiple reference speeches; 2) and train a prosody language model with arbitrary-length speech prompts; With these designs, our model is suitable for prompts of different lengths, which extends the upper bound of speech quality for zero-shot text-to-speech. Besides arbitrary-length prompts, we introduce arbitrary-source prompts, which leverages the probabilities derived from multiple P-LLM outputs to produce expressive and controlled prosody. Furthermore, we propose a phoneme-level auto-regressive duration model to introduce in-context learning capabilities to duration modeling. Experiments demonstrate that our method could not only synthesize identity-preserving speech with a short prompt of an unseen speaker but also achieve improved performance with longer speech prompts. Audio samples can be found in https://mega-tts.github.io/mega2_demo/.

Hierarchical policies that combine language and low-level control have been shown to perform impressively long-horizon robotic tasks, by leveraging either zero-shot high-level planners like pretrained language and vision-language models (LLMs/VLMs) or models trained on annotated robotic demonstrations. However, for complex and dexterous skills, attaining high success rates on long-horizon tasks still represents a major challenge -- the longer the task is, the more likely it is that some stage will fail. Can humans help the robot to continuously improve its long-horizon task performance through intuitive and natural feedback? In this paper, we make the following observation: high-level policies that index into sufficiently rich and expressive low-level language-conditioned skills can be readily supervised with human feedback in the form of language corrections. We show that even fine-grained corrections, such as small movements ("move a bit to the left"), can be effectively incorporated into high-level policies, and that such corrections can be readily obtained from humans observing the robot and making occasional suggestions. This framework enables robots not only to rapidly adapt to real-time language feedback, but also incorporate this feedback into an iterative training scheme that improves the high-level policy's ability to correct errors in both low-level execution and high-level decision-making purely from verbal feedback. Our evaluation on real hardware shows that this leads to significant performance improvement in long-horizon, dexterous manipulation tasks without the need for any additional teleoperation. Videos and code are available at https://yay-robot.github.io/.

The Transformer architecture has proven to be highly effective for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks, becoming a foundational component for a plethora of research in the domain. Historically, many approaches have leaned on fixed-length attention windows, which becomes problematic for varied speech samples in duration and complexity, leading to data over-smoothing and neglect of essential long-term connectivity. Addressing this limitation, we introduce Echo-MSA, a nimble module equipped with a variable-length attention mechanism that accommodates a range of speech sample complexities and durations. This module offers the flexibility to extract speech features across various granularities, spanning from frames and phonemes to words and discourse. The proposed design captures the variable length feature of speech and addresses the limitations of fixed-length attention. Our evaluation leverages a parallel attention architecture complemented by a dynamic gating mechanism that amalgamates traditional attention with the Echo-MSA module output. Empirical evidence from our study reveals that integrating Echo-MSA into the primary model's training regime significantly enhances the word error rate (WER) performance, all while preserving the intrinsic stability of the original model.

In crowded settings, the human brain can focus on speech from a target speaker, given prior knowledge of how they sound. We introduce a novel intelligent hearable system that achieves this capability, enabling target speech hearing to ignore all interfering speech and noise, but the target speaker. A naive approach is to require a clean speech example to enroll the target speaker. This is however not well aligned with the hearable application domain since obtaining a clean example is challenging in real world scenarios, creating a unique user interface problem. We present the first enrollment interface where the wearer looks at the target speaker for a few seconds to capture a single, short, highly noisy, binaural example of the target speaker. This noisy example is used for enrollment and subsequent speech extraction in the presence of interfering speakers and noise. Our system achieves a signal quality improvement of 7.01 dB using less than 5 seconds of noisy enrollment audio and can process 8 ms of audio chunks in 6.24 ms on an embedded CPU. Our user studies demonstrate generalization to real-world static and mobile speakers in previously unseen indoor and outdoor multipath environments. Finally, our enrollment interface for noisy examples does not cause performance degradation compared to clean examples, while being convenient and user-friendly. Taking a step back, this paper takes an important step towards enhancing the human auditory perception with artificial intelligence. We provide code and data at: https://github.com/vb000/LookOnceToHear.

LLMs have demonstrated commendable performance across diverse domains. Nevertheless, formulating high-quality prompts to assist them in their work poses a challenge for non-AI experts. Existing research in prompt engineering suggests somewhat scattered optimization principles and designs empirically dependent prompt optimizers. Unfortunately, these endeavors lack a structural design, incurring high learning costs and it is not conducive to the iterative updating of prompts, especially for non-AI experts. Inspired by structured reusable programming languages, we propose LangGPT, a structural prompt design framework. Furthermore, we introduce Minstrel, a multi-generative agent system with reflection to automate the generation of structural prompts. Experiments and the case study illustrate that structural prompts generated by Minstrel or written manually significantly enhance the performance of LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the ease of use of structural prompts through a user survey in our online community.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, with optimizing their input prompts playing a pivotal role in maximizing their performance. However, while LLM prompts consist of both the task-agnostic system prompts and task-specific user prompts, existing work on prompt optimization has focused on user prompts specific to individual queries or tasks, and largely overlooked the system prompt that is, once optimized, applicable across different tasks and domains. Motivated by this, we introduce the novel problem of bilevel system prompt optimization, whose objective is to design system prompts that are robust to diverse user prompts and transferable to unseen tasks. To tackle this problem, we then propose a meta-learning framework, which meta-learns the system prompt by optimizing it over various user prompts across multiple datasets, while simultaneously updating the user prompts in an iterative manner to ensure synergy between them. We conduct experiments on 14 unseen datasets spanning 5 different domains, on which we show that our approach produces system prompts that generalize effectively to diverse user prompts. Also, our findings reveal that the optimized system prompt enables rapid adaptation even to unseen tasks, requiring fewer optimization steps for test-time user prompts while achieving improved performance.

Music is characterized by complex hierarchical structures. Developing a comprehensive model to capture these structures has been a significant challenge in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Prior research has mainly focused on addressing individual tasks for specific hierarchical levels, rather than providing a unified approach. In this paper, we introduce a versatile, all-in-one model that jointly performs beat and downbeat tracking as well as functional structure segmentation and labeling. The model leverages source-separated spectrograms as inputs and employs dilated neighborhood attentions to capture temporal long-term dependencies, along with non-dilated attentions for local instrumental dependencies. Consequently, the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in all four tasks on the Harmonix Set while maintaining a relatively lower number of parameters compared to recent state-of-the-art models. Furthermore, our ablation study demonstrates that the concurrent learning of beats, downbeats, and segments can lead to enhanced performance, with each task mutually benefiting from the others.

Pre-trained Language Models (LMs) exhibit strong zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities; however, their behaviors are often difficult to control. By utilizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), it is possible to fine-tune unsupervised LMs to follow instructions and produce outputs that reflect human preferences. Despite its benefits, RLHF has been shown to potentially harm a language model's reasoning capabilities and introduce artifacts such as hallucinations where the model may fabricate facts. To address this issue we introduce Direct Preference Heads (DPH), a fine-tuning framework that enables LMs to learn human preference signals through an auxiliary reward head without directly affecting the output distribution of the language modeling head. We perform a theoretical analysis of our objective function and find strong ties to Conservative Direct Preference Optimization (cDPO). Finally we evaluate our models on GLUE, RACE, and the GPT4All evaluation suite and demonstrate that our method produces models which achieve higher scores than those fine-tuned with Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) alone.

System-prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to follow a specific instruction. An implicit assumption in the use of system prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated instructions for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating instruction stability via self-chats between two instructed chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B and GPT-3.5, we reveal a significant instruction drift within eight rounds of conversations. An empirical and theoretical analysis of this phenomenon suggests the transformer attention mechanism plays a role, due to attention decay over long exchanges. To combat attention decay and instruction drift, we propose a lightweight method called split-softmax, which compares favorably against two strong baselines.

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. Recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT-4. However, these model-generated critiques often exhibit flaws due to the inherent complexity of the critique. Consequently, fine-tuning LLMs on such flawed critiques typically limits the model's performance and propagates these flaws into the learned model. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel data generation pipeline, named MultiCritique, that improves the critique ability of LLMs by utilizing multi-agent feedback in both the SFT and reinforcement learning (RL) stages. First, our data generation pipeline aggregates high-quality critiques from multiple agents instead of a single model, with crucial information as input for simplifying the critique. Furthermore, our pipeline improves the preference accuracy of critique quality through multi-agent feedback, facilitating the effectiveness of RL in improving the critique ability of LLMs. Based on our proposed MultiCritique data generation pipeline, we construct the MultiCritiqueDataset for the SFT and RL fine-tuning stages. Extensive experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate: 1) the superior quality of our constructed SFT dataset compared to existing critique datasets; 2) additional improvements to the critique ability of LLMs brought by the RL stage. Notably, our fine-tuned 7B model significantly surpasses other advanced 7B-13B open-source models, approaching the performance of advanced 70B LLMs and GPT-4. Codes, datasets and model weights will be publicly available.

Human feedback on conversations with language language models (LLMs) is central to how these systems learn about the world, improve their capabilities, and are steered toward desirable and safe behaviors. However, this feedback is mostly collected by frontier AI labs and kept behind closed doors. In this work, we bring together interdisciplinary experts to assess the opportunities and challenges to realizing an open ecosystem of human feedback for AI. We first look for successful practices in peer production, open source, and citizen science communities. We then characterize the main challenges for open human feedback. For each, we survey current approaches and offer recommendations. We end by envisioning the components needed to underpin a sustainable and open human feedback ecosystem. In the center of this ecosystem are mutually beneficial feedback loops, between users and specialized models, incentivizing a diverse stakeholders community of model trainers and feedback providers to support a general open feedback pool.

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods focus on selecting queries to maximally improve the overall quality of the reward model, but counter-intuitively, we find that this may not necessarily lead to improved performance. To unravel this mystery, we identify a long-neglected issue in the query selection schemes of existing PbRL studies: Query-Policy Misalignment. We show that the seemingly informative queries selected to improve the overall quality of reward model actually may not align with RL agents' interests, thus offering little help on policy learning and eventually resulting in poor feedback efficiency. We show that this issue can be effectively addressed via near on-policy query and a specially designed hybrid experience replay, which together enforce the bidirectional query-policy alignment. Simple yet elegant, our method can be easily incorporated into existing approaches by changing only a few lines of code. We showcase in comprehensive experiments that our method achieves substantial gains in both human feedback and RL sample efficiency, demonstrating the importance of addressing query-policy misalignment in PbRL tasks.