Daily Papers

Extensive work has shown that the performance and interpretability of commonsense reasoning can be improved via knowledge-augmented reasoning methods, where the knowledge that underpins the reasoning process is explicitly verbalized and utilized. However, existing implementations, including "chain-of-thought" and its variants, fall short in capturing the introspective nature of knowledge required in commonsense reasoning, and in accounting for the mutual adaptation between the generation and utilization of knowledge. We propose a novel method to develop an introspective commonsense reasoner, Crystal. To tackle commonsense problems, it first introspects for knowledge statements related to the given question, and subsequently makes an informed prediction that is grounded in the previously introspected knowledge. The knowledge introspection and knowledge-grounded reasoning modes of the model are tuned via reinforcement learning to mutually adapt, where the reward derives from the feedback given by the model itself. Experiments show that Crystal significantly outperforms both the standard supervised finetuning and chain-of-thought distilled methods, and enhances the transparency of the commonsense reasoning process. Our work ultimately validates the feasibility and potential of reinforcing a neural model with self-feedback.

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g., thoughts and feelings) that is not accessible to external observers. Can LLMs introspect? We define introspection as acquiring knowledge that is not contained in or derived from training data but instead originates from internal states. Such a capability could enhance model interpretability. Instead of painstakingly analyzing a model's internal workings, we could simply ask the model about its beliefs, world models, and goals. More speculatively, an introspective model might self-report on whether it possesses certain internal states such as subjective feelings or desires and this could inform us about the moral status of these states. Such self-reports would not be entirely dictated by the model's training data. We study introspection by finetuning LLMs to predict properties of their own behavior in hypothetical scenarios. For example, "Given the input P, would your output favor the short- or long-term option?" If a model M1 can introspect, it should outperform a different model M2 in predicting M1's behavior even if M2 is trained on M1's ground-truth behavior. The idea is that M1 has privileged access to its own behavioral tendencies, and this enables it to predict itself better than M2 (even if M2 is generally stronger). In experiments with GPT-4, GPT-4o, and Llama-3 models (each finetuned to predict itself), we find that the model M1 outperforms M2 in predicting itself, providing evidence for introspection. Notably, M1 continues to predict its behavior accurately even after we intentionally modify its ground-truth behavior. However, while we successfully elicit introspection on simple tasks, we are unsuccessful on more complex tasks or those requiring out-of-distribution generalization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with safety alignment to prevent generating malicious content. Although some attacks have highlighted vulnerabilities in these safety-aligned LLMs, they typically have limitations, such as necessitating access to the model weights or the generation process. Since proprietary models through API-calling do not grant users such permissions, these attacks find it challenging to compromise them. In this paper, we propose Jailbreaking Using LLM Introspection (JULI), which jailbreaks LLMs by manipulating the token log probabilities, using a tiny plug-in block, BiasNet. JULI relies solely on the knowledge of the target LLM's predicted token log probabilities. It can effectively jailbreak API-calling LLMs under a black-box setting and knowing only top-5 token log probabilities. Our approach demonstrates superior effectiveness, outperforming existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches across multiple metrics.

Knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation seeks to mitigate hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) caused by insufficient or outdated knowledge. However, existing methods often fail to fully exploit the prior knowledge embedded in knowledge graphs (KGs), particularly their structural information and explicit or implicit constraints. The former can enhance the faithfulness of LLMs' reasoning, while the latter can improve the reliability of response generation. Motivated by these, we propose a trustworthy reasoning framework, termed Deliberation over Priors (DP), which sufficiently utilizes the priors contained in KGs. Specifically, DP adopts a progressive knowledge distillation strategy that integrates structural priors into LLMs through a combination of supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky optimization, thereby improving the faithfulness of relation path generation. Furthermore, our framework employs a reasoning-introspection strategy, which guides LLMs to perform refined reasoning verification based on extracted constraint priors, ensuring the reliability of response generation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that DP achieves new state-of-the-art performance, especially a Hit@1 improvement of 13% on the ComplexWebQuestions dataset, and generates highly trustworthy responses. We also conduct various analyses to verify its flexibility and practicality. The code is available at https://github.com/reml-group/Deliberation-on-Priors.

While large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and PaLM have demonstrated remarkable performance in various language understanding and generation tasks, their capabilities in complex reasoning and intricate knowledge utilization still fall short of human-level proficiency. Recent studies have established the effectiveness of prompts in steering LLMs towards generating desired outputs. Building on these insights, we introduce a novel framework that harnesses the potential of large-scale pre-trained language models, to iteratively enhance performance of the LLMs. Our framework incorporates three components: Normal CoT, a Convincer, and an Answerer. It processes the output of a typical few-shot chain-of-thought prompt, assesses the correctness of the response, scrutinizes the answer, refines the reasoning, and ultimately produces a new solution. Experimental results on the 7 datasets of miscellaneous problems validate the efficacy of the Self-Convince framework, achieving substantial improvements compared to the baselines. This study contributes to the burgeoning body of research focused on integrating pre-trained language models with tailored prompts and iterative refinement processes to augment their performance in complex tasks.

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities in commonsense question answering benchmarks, but the process underlying their success remains largely opaque. As a consequence, recent approaches have equipped LLMs with mechanisms for knowledge retrieval, reasoning and introspection, not only to improve their capabilities but also to enhance the interpretability of their outputs. However, these methods require additional training, hand-crafted templates or human-written explanations. To address these issues, we introduce ZEBRA, a zero-shot question answering framework that combines retrieval, case-based reasoning and introspection and dispenses with the need for additional training of the LLM. Given an input question, ZEBRA retrieves relevant question-knowledge pairs from a knowledge base and generates new knowledge by reasoning over the relationships in these pairs. This generated knowledge is then used to answer the input question, improving the model's performance and interpretability. We evaluate our approach across 8 well-established commonsense reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating that ZEBRA consistently outperforms strong LLMs and previous knowledge integration approaches, achieving an average accuracy improvement of up to 4.5 points.

Knowledge underpins reasoning. Recent research demonstrates that when relevant knowledge is provided as additional context to commonsense question answering (QA), it can substantially enhance the performance even on top of state-of-the-art. The fundamental challenge is where and how to find such knowledge that is high quality and on point with respect to the question; knowledge retrieved from knowledge bases are incomplete and knowledge generated from language models are inconsistent. We present Rainier, or Reinforced Knowledge Introspector, that learns to generate contextually relevant knowledge in response to given questions. Our approach starts by imitating knowledge generated by GPT-3, then learns to generate its own knowledge via reinforcement learning where rewards are shaped based on the increased performance on the resulting question answering. Rainier demonstrates substantial and consistent performance gains when tested over 9 different commonsense benchmarks: including 5 datasets that are seen during model training, as well as 4 datasets that are kept unseen. Our work is the first to report that knowledge generated by models that are orders of magnitude smaller than GPT-3, even without direct supervision on the knowledge itself, can exceed the quality of commonsense knowledge elicited from GPT-3.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning skills, enabling robots to comprehend natural language instructions and strategically plan high-level actions through proper grounding. However, LLM hallucination may result in robots confidently executing plans that are misaligned with user goals or even unsafe in critical scenarios. Additionally, inherent ambiguity in natural language instructions can introduce uncertainty into the LLM's reasoning and planning processes.We propose introspective planning, a systematic approach that align LLM's uncertainty with the inherent ambiguity of the task. Our approach constructs a knowledge base containing introspective reasoning examples as post-hoc rationalizations of human-selected safe and compliant plans, which are retrieved during deployment. Evaluations on three tasks, including a newly introduced safe mobile manipulation benchmark, demonstrate that introspection substantially improves both compliance and safety over state-of-the-art LLM-based planning methods. Furthermore, we empirically show that introspective planning, in combination with conformal prediction, achieves tighter confidence bounds, maintaining statistical success guarantees while minimizing unnecessary user clarification requests. The webpage and code are accessible at https://introplan.github.io.

In Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been consistent advancements in task-specific performance, largely influenced by effective prompt design. While recent research on prompting has enhanced the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, a gap remains in further improving their understanding abilities. In this study, we introduce Metacognitive Prompting (MP), a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes. Using MP, LLMs undergo a systematic series of structured, self-aware evaluations, drawing on both their vast inherent knowledge and new insights. Our experiments involve five prevalent LLMs: Llama2, Vicuna, PaLM, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, all of which span various general natural language understanding (NLU) tasks from the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. Results indicate that, although GPT-4 consistently excels in most tasks, PaLM, when equipped with MP, approaches its performance level. Furthermore, across models and datasets, MP consistently outperforms existing prompting methods, including standard and chain-of-thought prompting. This study underscores the potential to amplify the understanding abilities of LLMs and highlights the benefits of mirroring human introspective reasoning in NLU tasks.

Previous work has showcased the intriguing capability of large language models (LLMs) in retrieving facts and processing context knowledge. However, only limited research exists on the layer-wise capability of LLMs to encode knowledge, which challenges our understanding of their internal mechanisms. In this paper, we devote the first attempt to investigate the layer-wise capability of LLMs through probing tasks. We leverage the powerful generative capability of ChatGPT to construct probing datasets, providing diverse and coherent evidence corresponding to various facts. We employ mathcal V-usable information as the validation metric to better reflect the capability in encoding context knowledge across different layers. Our experiments on conflicting and newly acquired knowledge show that LLMs: (1) prefer to encode more context knowledge in the upper layers; (2) primarily encode context knowledge within knowledge-related entity tokens at lower layers while progressively expanding more knowledge within other tokens at upper layers; and (3) gradually forget the earlier context knowledge retained within the intermediate layers when provided with irrelevant evidence. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/probing_llama.

As LLMs grow more powerful, their most profound achievement may be recognising when to say "I don't know". Existing studies on LLM self-knowledge have been largely constrained by human-defined notions of feasibility, often neglecting the reasons behind unanswerability by LLMs and failing to study deficient types of self-knowledge. This study aims to obtain intrinsic insights into different types of LLM self-knowledge with a novel methodology: allowing them the flexibility to set their own feasibility boundaries and then analysing the consistency of these limits. We find that even frontier models like GPT-4o and Mistral Large are not sure of their own capabilities more than 80% of the time, highlighting a significant lack of trustworthiness in responses. Our analysis of confidence balance in LLMs indicates that models swing between overconfidence and conservatism in feasibility boundaries depending on task categories and that the most significant self-knowledge weaknesses lie in temporal awareness and contextual understanding. These difficulties in contextual comprehension additionally lead models to question their operational boundaries, resulting in considerable confusion within the self-knowledge of LLMs. We make our code and results available publicly at https://github.com/knowledge-verse-ai/LLM-Self_Knowledge_Eval

Knowledge-grounded conversation (KGC) shows great potential in building an engaging and knowledgeable chatbot, and knowledge selection is a key ingredient in it. However, previous methods for knowledge selection only concentrate on the relevance between knowledge and dialogue context, ignoring the fact that age, hobby, education and life experience of an interlocutor have a major effect on his or her personal preference over external knowledge. Without taking the personalization issue into account, it is difficult to select the proper knowledge and generate persona-consistent responses. In this work, we introduce personal memory into knowledge selection in KGC to address the personalization issue. We propose a variational method to model the underlying relationship between one's personal memory and his or her selection of knowledge, and devise a learning scheme in which the forward mapping from personal memory to knowledge and its inverse mapping is included in a closed loop so that they could teach each other. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing KGC methods significantly on both automatic evaluation and human evaluation.

This work presents a framework for assessing whether large language models (LLMs) encode more factual knowledge in their parameters than what they express in their outputs. While a few studies hint at this possibility, none has clearly defined or demonstrated this phenomenon. We first propose a formal definition of knowledge, quantifying it for a given question as the fraction of correct-incorrect answer pairs where the correct one is ranked higher. This gives rise to external and internal knowledge, depending on the information used to score individual answer candidates: either the model's observable token-level probabilities or its intermediate computations. Hidden knowledge arises when internal knowledge exceeds external knowledge. We then present a case study, applying this framework to three popular open-weights LLMs in a closed-book QA setup. Our results indicate that: (1) LLMs consistently encode more factual knowledge internally than what they express externally, with an average gap of 40%. (2) Surprisingly, some knowledge is so deeply hidden that a model can internally know an answer perfectly, yet fail to generate it even once, despite large-scale repeated sampling of 1,000 answers. This reveals fundamental limitations in the generation capabilities of LLMs, which (3) puts a practical constraint on scaling test-time compute via repeated answer sampling in closed-book QA: significant performance improvements remain inaccessible because some answers are practically never sampled, yet if they were, we would be guaranteed to rank them first.

Procedural text describes dynamic state changes during a step-by-step natural process (e.g., photosynthesis). In this work, we focus on the task of procedural text understanding, which aims to comprehend such documents and track entities' states and locations during a process. Although recent approaches have achieved substantial progress, their results are far behind human performance. Two challenges, the difficulty of commonsense reasoning and data insufficiency, still remain unsolved, which require the incorporation of external knowledge bases. Previous works on external knowledge injection usually rely on noisy web mining tools and heuristic rules with limited applicable scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel KnOwledge-Aware proceduraL text understAnding (KOALA) model, which effectively leverages multiple forms of external knowledge in this task. Specifically, we retrieve informative knowledge triples from ConceptNet and perform knowledge-aware reasoning while tracking the entities. Besides, we employ a multi-stage training schema which fine-tunes the BERT model over unlabeled data collected from Wikipedia before further fine-tuning it on the final model. Experimental results on two procedural text datasets, ProPara and Recipes, verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods, in which our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparison to various baselines.

We propose knowledge internalization (KI), which aims to complement the lexical knowledge into neural dialog models. Instead of further conditioning the knowledge-grounded dialog (KGD) models on externally retrieved knowledge, we seek to integrate knowledge about each input token internally into the model's parameters. To tackle the challenge due to the large scale of lexical knowledge, we adopt the contrastive learning approach and create an effective token-level lexical knowledge retriever that requires only weak supervision mined from Wikipedia. We demonstrate the effectiveness and general applicability of our approach on various datasets and diversified model structures.

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense behind texts, designing probes for conceptual knowledge is hard. Inspired by knowledge representation schemata, we comprehensively evaluate conceptual knowledge of PLMs by designing three tasks to probe whether PLMs organize entities by conceptual similarities, learn conceptual properties, and conceptualize entities in contexts, respectively. For the tasks, we collect and annotate 24k data instances covering 393 concepts, which is COPEN, a COnceptual knowledge Probing bENchmark. Extensive experiments on different sizes and types of PLMs show that existing PLMs systematically lack conceptual knowledge and suffer from various spurious correlations. We believe this is a critical bottleneck for realizing human-like cognition in PLMs. COPEN and our codes are publicly released at https://github.com/THU-KEG/COPEN.

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

Large language models (LLMs) have a wealth of knowledge that allows them to excel in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Current research focuses on enhancing their performance within their existing knowledge. Despite their vast knowledge, LLMs are still limited by the amount of information they can accommodate and comprehend. Therefore, the ability to understand their own limitations on the unknows, referred to as self-knowledge, is of paramount importance. This study aims to evaluate LLMs' self-knowledge by assessing their ability to identify unanswerable or unknowable questions. We introduce an automated methodology to detect uncertainty in the responses of these models, providing a novel measure of their self-knowledge. We further introduce a unique dataset, SelfAware, consisting of unanswerable questions from five diverse categories and their answerable counterparts. Our extensive analysis, involving 20 LLMs including GPT-3, InstructGPT, and LLaMA, discovering an intrinsic capacity for self-knowledge within these models. Moreover, we demonstrate that in-context learning and instruction tuning can further enhance this self-knowledge. Despite this promising insight, our findings also highlight a considerable gap between the capabilities of these models and human proficiency in recognizing the limits of their knowledge.

Task-oriented dialogue generation is challenging since the underlying knowledge is often dynamic and effectively incorporating knowledge into the learning process is hard. It is particularly challenging to generate both human-like and informative responses in this setting. Recent research primarily focused on various knowledge distillation methods where the underlying relationship between the facts in a knowledge base is not effectively captured. In this paper, we go one step further and demonstrate how the structural information of a knowledge graph can improve the system's inference capabilities. Specifically, we propose DialoKG, a novel task-oriented dialogue system that effectively incorporates knowledge into a language model. Our proposed system views relational knowledge as a knowledge graph and introduces (1) a structure-aware knowledge embedding technique, and (2) a knowledge graph-weighted attention masking strategy to facilitate the system selecting relevant information during the dialogue generation. An empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of DialoKG over state-of-the-art methods on several standard benchmark datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning. Despite the success, the knowledge stored in the parameters of LLMs could still be incomplete and difficult to update due to the computational costs. As complementary, retrieval-based methods can offer non-parametric world knowledge and improve the performance on tasks such as question answering. However, we find that the retrieved knowledge does not always help and even has a negative impact on original responses occasionally. To better make use of both internal knowledge and external world knowledge, we investigate eliciting the model's ability to recognize what they know and do not know (which is also called self-knowledge) and propose Self-Knowledge guided Retrieval augmentation (SKR), a simple yet effective method which can let LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions. We evaluate SKR on multiple datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms chain-of-thought based and fully retrieval-based methods by using either InstructGPT or ChatGPT.

Existing Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). While they achieve remarkable performance on challenging tasks such as mathematics and coding, they often rely on their internal knowledge to solve problems, which can be inadequate for time-sensitive or knowledge-intensive questions, leading to inaccuracies and hallucinations. To address this, we propose R1-Searcher, a novel two-stage outcome-based RL approach designed to enhance the search capabilities of LLMs. This method allows LLMs to autonomously invoke external search systems to access additional knowledge during the reasoning process. Our framework relies exclusively on RL, without requiring process rewards or distillation for a cold start. % effectively generalizing to out-of-domain datasets and supporting both Base and Instruct models. Our experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous strong RAG methods, even when compared to the closed-source GPT-4o-mini.

Knowledge plays a critical role in artificial intelligence. Recently, the extensive success of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has raised significant attention about how knowledge can be acquired, maintained, updated and used by language models. Despite the enormous amount of related studies, there still lacks a unified view of how knowledge circulates within language models throughout the learning, tuning, and application processes, which may prevent us from further understanding the connections between current progress or realizing existing limitations. In this survey, we revisit PLMs as knowledge-based systems by dividing the life circle of knowledge in PLMs into five critical periods, and investigating how knowledge circulates when it is built, maintained and used. To this end, we systematically review existing studies of each period of the knowledge life cycle, summarize the main challenges and current limitations, and discuss future directions.

Knowledge-intensive tasks (e.g., open-domain question answering (QA)) require a substantial amount of factual knowledge and often rely on external information for assistance. Recently, large language models (LLMs) (e.g., ChatGPT), have demonstrated impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge, including knowledge-intensive tasks. However, it remains unclear how well LLMs are able to perceive their factual knowledge boundaries, particularly how they behave when incorporating retrieval augmentation. In this study, we present an initial analysis of the factual knowledge boundaries of LLMs and how retrieval augmentation affects LLMs on open-domain QA. Specially, we focus on three primary research questions and analyze them by examining QA performance, priori judgement and posteriori judgement of LLMs. We show evidence that LLMs possess unwavering confidence in their capabilities to respond to questions and the accuracy of their responses. Furthermore, retrieval augmentation proves to be an effective approach in enhancing LLMs' awareness of knowledge boundaries, thereby improving their judgemental abilities. Additionally, we also find that LLMs have a propensity to rely on the provided retrieval results when formulating answers, while the quality of these results significantly impacts their reliance. The code to reproduce this work is available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLM-Knowledge-Boundary.

LLMs usually exhibit limitations in their ability to incorporate new knowledge, the generation of hallucinations, and the transparency of their decision-making process. In this paper, we explore how to prompt LLMs with knowledge graphs (KG), working as a remedy to engage LLMs with up-to-date knowledge and elicit the reasoning pathways from LLMs. Specifically, we build a prompting pipeline that endows LLMs with the capability of comprehending KG inputs and inferring with a combined implicit knowledge and the retrieved external knowledge. In addition, we investigate eliciting the mind map on which LLMs perform the reasoning and generate the answers. It is identified that the produced mind map exhibits the reasoning pathways of LLMs grounded on the ontology of knowledge, hence bringing the prospects of probing and gauging LLM inference in production. The experiments on three question & answering datasets also show that MindMap prompting leads to a striking empirical gain. For instance, prompting a GPT-3.5 with MindMap yields an overwhelming performance over GPT-4 consistently. We also demonstrate that with structured facts retrieved from KG, MindMap can outperform a series of prompting-with-document-retrieval methods, benefiting from more accurate, concise, and comprehensive knowledge from KGs. To reproduce our results and extend the framework further, we make our codebase available at https://github.com/wyl.willing/MindMap.

Knowledge-dependent tasks typically use two sources of knowledge: parametric, learned at training time, and contextual, given as a passage at inference time. To understand how models use these sources together, we formalize the problem of knowledge conflicts, where the contextual information contradicts the learned information. Analyzing the behaviour of popular models, we measure their over-reliance on memorized information (the cause of hallucinations), and uncover important factors that exacerbate this behaviour. Lastly, we propose a simple method to mitigate over-reliance on parametric knowledge, which minimizes hallucination, and improves out-of-distribution generalization by 4%-7%. Our findings demonstrate the importance for practitioners to evaluate model tendency to hallucinate rather than read, and show that our mitigation strategy encourages generalization to evolving information (i.e., time-dependent queries). To encourage these practices, we have released our framework for generating knowledge conflicts.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks by leveraging increased test-time computation and exhibiting behaviors reminiscent of human-like self-reflection. While LRMs show a clear capacity for valuable self-reflection, how this ability interacts with other model behaviors remains underexplored. We investigate this connection by analyzing verbalized confidence, how models articulate their certainty, as a lens into the nature of self-reflection in LRMs. We find that supervised fine-tuning on reasoning traces (i.e., distillation) and reinforcement learning can improve verbalized calibration in reasoning-intensive settings in a progressive, laddered fashion. However, our results also indicate that reasoning models may possess a diminished awareness of their own knowledge boundaries, as evidenced by significantly lower "I don't know" response rates on factuality benchmarks. Moreover, we examine the relationship between verbalized confidence and reasoning chains, finding that models tend to express higher confidence when providing shorter or less elaborate reasoning. Our findings highlight how reasoning-oriented training can enhance performance in reasoning-centric tasks while potentially incurring a "reasoning tax," a cost reflected in the model's reduced ability to accurately recognize the limits of its own knowledge in small-scale models. More broadly, our work showcases how this erosion of knowledge boundaries can compromise model faithfulness, as models grow more confident without a commensurate understanding of when they should abstain.

Analogical reasoning is a unique ability of humans to address unfamiliar challenges by transferring strategies from relevant past experiences. One key finding in psychology is that compared with irrelevant past experiences, recalling relevant ones can help humans better handle new tasks. Coincidentally, the NLP community has also recently found that self-generating relevant examples in the context can help large language models (LLMs) better solve a given problem than hand-crafted prompts. However, it is yet not clear whether relevance is the key factor eliciting such capability, i.e., can LLMs benefit more from self-generated relevant examples than irrelevant ones? In this work, we systematically explore whether LLMs can truly perform analogical reasoning on a diverse set of reasoning tasks. With extensive experiments and analysis, we show that self-generated random examples can surprisingly achieve comparable or even better performance, e.g., 4% performance boost on GSM8K with random biological examples. We find that the accuracy of self-generated examples is the key factor and subsequently design two improved methods with significantly reduced inference costs. Overall, we aim to advance a deeper understanding of LLM analogical reasoning and hope this work stimulates further research in the design of self-generated contexts.

A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is inspired by cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, seen as a bottleneck through which just a few elements, after having been selected by attention from a broader pool, are then broadcast and condition further processing, both in perception and decision-making. The set of recently selected elements one becomes aware of is seen as forming a low-dimensional conscious state. This conscious state is combining the few concepts constituting a conscious thought, i.e., what one is immediately conscious of at a particular moment. We claim that this architectural and information-processing constraint corresponds to assumptions about the joint distribution between high-level concepts. To the extent that these assumptions are generally true (and the form of natural language seems consistent with them), they can form a useful prior for representation learning. A low-dimensional thought or conscious state is analogous to a sentence: it involves only a few variables and yet can make a statement with very high probability of being true. This is consistent with a joint distribution (over high-level concepts) which has the form of a sparse factor graph, i.e., where the dependencies captured by each factor of the factor graph involve only very few variables while creating a strong dip in the overall energy function. The consciousness prior also makes it natural to map conscious states to natural language utterances or to express classical AI knowledge in a form similar to facts and rules, albeit capturing uncertainty as well as efficient search mechanisms implemented by attention mechanisms.

The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledgedriven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based access of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020).

As the general capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) agents continue to evolve, their ability to learn to master multiple complex tasks through experience remains a key challenge. Current LLM agents, particularly those based on proprietary language models, typically rely on prompts to incorporate knowledge about the target tasks. This approach does not allow the agent to internalize this information and instead relies on ever-expanding prompts to sustain its functionality in diverse scenarios. This resembles a system of notes used by a person affected by anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories. In this paper, we propose a novel method to train AI agents to incorporate knowledge and skills for multiple tasks without the need for either cumbersome note systems or prior high-quality demonstration data. Our approach employs an iterative process where the agent collects new experiences, receives corrective feedback from humans in the form of hints, and integrates this feedback into its weights via a context distillation training procedure. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by implementing it in a Llama-3-based agent that, after only a few rounds of feedback, outperforms advanced models GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 in tasksets requiring correct sequencing of information retrieval, tool use, and question answering.

Knowledge is fundamental to the overall capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The knowledge paradigm of a model, which dictates how it encodes and utilizes knowledge, significantly affects its performance. Despite the continuous development of LLMs under existing knowledge paradigms, issues within these frameworks continue to constrain model potential. This blog post highlight three critical open problems limiting model capabilities: (1) challenges in knowledge updating for LLMs, (2) the failure of reverse knowledge generalization (the reversal curse), and (3) conflicts in internal knowledge. We review recent progress made in addressing these issues and discuss potential general solutions. Based on observations in these areas, we propose a hypothetical paradigm based on Contextual Knowledge Scaling, and further outline implementation pathways that remain feasible within contemporary techniques. Evidence suggests this approach holds potential to address current shortcomings, serving as our vision for future model paradigms. This blog post aims to provide researchers with a brief overview of progress in LLM knowledge systems, while provide inspiration for the development of next-generation model architectures.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a common strategy to reduce hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs). While reinforcement learning (RL) can enable LLMs to act as search agents by activating retrieval capabilities, existing ones often underutilize their internal knowledge. This can lead to redundant retrievals, potential harmful knowledge conflicts, and increased inference latency. To address these limitations, an efficient and adaptive search agent capable of discerning optimal retrieval timing and synergistically integrating parametric (internal) and retrieved (external) knowledge is in urgent need. This paper introduces the Reinforced Internal-External Knowledge Synergistic Reasoning Agent (IKEA), which could indentify its own knowledge boundary and prioritize the utilization of internal knowledge, resorting to external search only when internal knowledge is deemed insufficient. This is achieved using a novel knowledge-boundary aware reward function and a knowledge-boundary aware training dataset. These are designed for internal-external knowledge synergy oriented RL, incentivizing the model to deliver accurate answers, minimize unnecessary retrievals, and encourage appropriate external searches when its own knowledge is lacking. Evaluations across multiple knowledge reasoning tasks demonstrate that IKEA significantly outperforms baseline methods, reduces retrieval frequency significantly, and exhibits robust generalization capabilities.

The remarkable capabilities of modern large language models are rooted in their vast repositories of knowledge encoded within their parameters, enabling them to perceive the world and engage in reasoning. The inner workings of how these models store knowledge have long been a subject of intense interest and investigation among researchers. To date, most studies have concentrated on isolated components within these models, such as the Multilayer Perceptrons and attention head. In this paper, we delve into the computation graph of the language model to uncover the knowledge circuits that are instrumental in articulating specific knowledge. The experiments, conducted with GPT2 and TinyLLAMA, has allowed us to observe how certain information heads, relation heads, and Multilayer Perceptrons collaboratively encode knowledge within the model. Moreover, we evaluate the impact of current knowledge editing techniques on these knowledge circuits, providing deeper insights into the functioning and constraints of these editing methodologies. Finally, we utilize knowledge circuits to analyze and interpret language model behaviors such as hallucinations and in-context learning. We believe the knowledge circuit holds potential for advancing our understanding of Transformers and guiding the improved design of knowledge editing. Code and data are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowledgeCircuits.

Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is useful for AI applications such as robust chatbots. Prior works like ConceptNet, TupleKB and others compiled large CSK collections, but are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Also, these projects have either prioritized precision or recall, but hardly reconcile these complementary goals. This paper presents a methodology, called Ascent, to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with advanced expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. Ascent goes beyond triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter are important to express temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Ascent combines open information extraction with judicious cleaning using language models. Intrinsic evaluation shows the superior size and quality of the Ascent KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of Ascent. A web interface, data and code can be found at https://ascent.mpi-inf.mpg.de/.

Large language models learn and continually learn through the accumulation of gradient-based updates, but how individual pieces of new information affect existing knowledge, leading to both beneficial generalization and problematic hallucination, remains poorly understood. We demonstrate that when learning new information, LLMs exhibit a "priming" effect: learning a new fact can cause the model to inappropriately apply that knowledge in unrelated contexts. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce "Outlandish," a carefully curated dataset of 1320 diverse text samples designed to probe how new knowledge permeates through an LLM's existing knowledge base. Using this dataset, we show that the degree of priming after learning new information can be predicted by measuring the token probability of key words before learning. This relationship holds robustly across different model architectures (PALM-2, Gemma, Llama), sizes, and training stages. Finally, we develop two novel techniques to modulate how new knowledge affects existing model behavior: (1) a ``stepping-stone'' text augmentation strategy and (2) an ``ignore-k'' update pruning method. These approaches reduce undesirable priming effects by 50-95\% while preserving the model's ability to learn new information. Our findings provide both empirical insights into how LLMs learn and practical tools for improving the specificity of knowledge insertion in language models. Further materials: https://sunchipsster1.github.io/projects/outlandish/

Research on LLM technologies is rapidly emerging, with most of them employing a 'fast thinking' approach to inference. Most LLMs generate the final result based solely on a single query and LLM's reasoning capabilities. However, with the advent of OpenAI-o1, 'slow thinking' techniques have garnered increasing attention because its process is closer to the human thought process. Inspired by the human ability to constantly associate and replenish knowledge during thinking, we developed the novel Chain-of-Associated-Thoughts (CoAT) framework, which introduces an innovative synergy between the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm and a dynamic mechanism for integrating new key information, termed 'associative memory'. By combining the structured exploration capabilities of MCTS with the adaptive learning capacity of associative memory, CoAT significantly expands the LLM search space, enabling our framework to explore diverse reasoning pathways and dynamically update its knowledge base in real-time. This allows the framework to not only revisit and refine earlier inferences but also adaptively incorporate evolving information, ensuring that the final output is both accurate and comprehensive. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted extensive experiments across a range of generative and reasoning tasks. These experiments demonstrated that our framework outperforms conventional inference processes on accuracy, coherence, and diversity. The framework's ability to iteratively expand its search space while retaining contextually relevant information results.

Knowledge tracing (KT) has recently been an active research area of computational pedagogy. The task is to model students' mastery level of knowledge concepts based on their responses to the questions in the past, as well as predict the probabilities that they correctly answer subsequent questions in the future. KT tasks were historically solved using statistical modeling methods such as Bayesian inference and factor analysis, but recent advances in deep learning have led to the successive proposals that leverage deep neural networks, including long short-term memory networks, memory-augmented networks and self-attention networks. While those deep models demonstrate superior performance over the traditional approaches, they all neglect the explicit modeling of the learning curve theory, which generally says that more practice on the same knowledge concept enhances one's mastery level of the concept. Based on this theory, we propose a Convolution-Augmented Knowledge Tracing (CAKT) model in this paper. The model employs three-dimensional convolutional neural networks to explicitly learn a student's recent experience on applying the same knowledge concept with that in the next question, and fuses the learnt feature with the feature representing her overall latent knowledge state obtained using a classic LSTM network. The fused feature is then fed into a second LSTM network to predict the student's response to the next question. Experimental results show that CAKT achieves the new state-of-the-art performance in predicting students' responses compared with existing models. We also conduct extensive sensitivity analysis and ablation study to show the stability of the results and justify the particular architecture of CAKT, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have majorly advanced NLP and AI, and next to their ability to perform a wide range of procedural tasks, a major success factor is their internalized factual knowledge. Since Petroni et al. (2019), analyzing this knowledge has gained attention. However, most approaches investigate one question at a time via modest-sized pre-defined samples, introducing an ``availability bias'' (Tversky&Kahnemann, 1973) that prevents the analysis of knowledge (or beliefs) of LLMs beyond the experimenter's predisposition. To address this challenge, we propose a novel methodology to comprehensively materialize an LLM's factual knowledge through recursive querying and result consolidation. Our approach is a milestone for LLM research, for the first time providing constructive insights into the scope and structure of LLM knowledge (or beliefs). As a prototype, we build GPTKB, a knowledge base (KB) comprising 101 million relational triples for over 2.9 million entities from GPT-4o-mini. We use GPTKB to exemplarily analyze GPT-4o-mini's factual knowledge in terms of scale, accuracy, bias, cutoff and consistency, at the same time. GPTKB is accessible at https://gptkb.org

Machine writing with large language models often relies on retrieval-augmented generation. However, these approaches remain confined within the boundaries of the model's predefined scope, limiting the generation of content with rich information. Specifically, vanilla-retrieved information tends to lack depth, utility, and suffers from redundancy, which negatively impacts the quality of generated articles, leading to shallow, repetitive, and unoriginal outputs. To address these issues, we propose OmniThink, a machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection. The core idea behind OmniThink is to simulate the cognitive behavior of learners as they progressively deepen their knowledge of the topics. Experimental results demonstrate that OmniThink improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. Human evaluations and expert feedback further highlight the potential of OmniThink to address real-world challenges in the generation of long-form articles.

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) necessitates improvements in evaluations. Rather than merely exploring the breadth of LLM abilities, we believe meticulous and thoughtful designs are essential to thorough, unbiased, and applicable evaluations. Given the importance of world knowledge to LLMs, we construct a Knowledge-oriented LLM Assessment benchmark (KoLA), in which we carefully design three crucial factors: (1) For ability modeling, we mimic human cognition to form a four-level taxonomy of knowledge-related abilities, covering 19 tasks. (2) For data, to ensure fair comparisons, we use both Wikipedia, a corpus prevalently pre-trained by LLMs, along with continuously collected emerging corpora, aiming to evaluate the capacity to handle unseen data and evolving knowledge. (3) For evaluation criteria, we adopt a contrastive system, including overall standard scores for better numerical comparability across tasks and models and a unique self-contrast metric for automatically evaluating knowledge hallucination. We evaluate 21 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtain some intriguing findings. The KoLA dataset and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at https://kola.xlore.cn and will be continuously updated to provide references for developing LLMs and knowledge-related systems.

Language models are known to encode a great amount of factual knowledge through pretraining. However, such knowledge might be insufficient to cater to user requests, requiring the model to integrate external knowledge sources and adhere to user-provided specifications. When answering questions about ongoing events, the model should use recent news articles to update its response; when asked to provide recommendations, the model should prioritize user specifications over retrieved product reviews; when some facts are edited in the model, the updated facts should override all prior knowledge learned by the model even if they are conflicting. In all of the cases above, the model faces a decision between its own parametric knowledge, (retrieved) contextual knowledge, and user instruction knowledge. In this paper, we (1) unify such settings into the problem of knowledge preference and define a three-level preference hierarchy over these knowledge sources; (2) compile a collection of existing datasets IfQA, MQuAKE, and MRQA covering a combination of settings (with/without user specifications, with/without context documents) to systematically evaluate how well models obey the intended knowledge preference; and (3) propose a dataset synthesis method that composes diverse question-answer pairs with user assumptions and related context to directly fine-tune LMs for instilling the hierarchy of knowledge. We demonstrate that a 7B model, fine-tuned on only a few thousand examples automatically generated by our proposed method, effectively achieves superior performance (more than 18% improvement across all evaluation benchmarks) in adhering to the desired knowledge preference hierarchy.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

In open-domain dialogue intelligent agents should exhibit the use of knowledge, however there are few convincing demonstrations of this to date. The most popular sequence to sequence models typically "generate and hope" generic utterances that can be memorized in the weights of the model when mapping from input utterance(s) to output, rather than employing recalled knowledge as context. Use of knowledge has so far proved difficult, in part because of the lack of a supervised learning benchmark task which exhibits knowledgeable open dialogue with clear grounding. To that end we collect and release a large dataset with conversations directly grounded with knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. We then design architectures capable of retrieving knowledge, reading and conditioning on it, and finally generating natural responses. Our best performing dialogue models are able to conduct knowledgeable discussions on open-domain topics as evaluated by automatic metrics and human evaluations, while our new benchmark allows for measuring further improvements in this important research direction.

With the development in cognitive science and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing connections have come to light between these two distinct fields. Building upon these connections, we propose a conjecture suggesting the existence of a duality between LLMs and Tulving's theory of memory. We identify a potential correspondence between Tulving's synergistic ecphory model (SEM) of retrieval and the emergent abilities observed in LLMs, serving as supporting evidence for our conjecture. Furthermore, we speculate that consciousness may be considered a form of emergent ability based on this duality. We also discuss how other theories of consciousness intersect with our research.

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are versatile and can solve different tasks due to their emergent ability and generalizability. However, LLMs sometimes lack domain-specific knowledge to perform tasks, which would also cause hallucination during inference. In some previous works, additional modules like graph neural networks (GNNs) are trained on retrieved knowledge from external knowledge bases, aiming to mitigate the problem of lacking domain-specific knowledge. However, incorporating additional modules: 1) would need retraining additional modules when encountering novel domains; 2) would become a bottleneck since LLMs' strong abilities are not fully utilized for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a paradigm, termed Knowledge Solver (KSL), to teach LLMs to search for essential knowledge from external knowledge bases by harnessing their own strong generalizability. Specifically, we design a simple yet effective prompt to transform retrieval into a multi-hop decision sequence, which empowers LLMs with searching knowledge ability in zero-shot manner. Additionally, KSL is able to provide complete retrieval paths and therefore increase explainability of LLMs' reasoning processes. We conduct experiments on three datasets: CommonsenseQA, OpenbookQA, and MedQA-USMLE, and found that our approach improves LLM baseline performance by a relatively large margin.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

While pretrained models such as BERT have shown large gains across natural language understanding tasks, their performance can be improved by further training the model on a data-rich intermediate task, before fine-tuning it on a target task. However, it is still poorly understood when and why intermediate-task training is beneficial for a given target task. To investigate this, we perform a large-scale study on the pretrained RoBERTa model with 110 intermediate-target task combinations. We further evaluate all trained models with 25 probing tasks meant to reveal the specific skills that drive transfer. We observe that intermediate tasks requiring high-level inference and reasoning abilities tend to work best. We also observe that target task performance is strongly correlated with higher-level abilities such as coreference resolution. However, we fail to observe more granular correlations between probing and target task performance, highlighting the need for further work on broad-coverage probing benchmarks. We also observe evidence that the forgetting of knowledge learned during pretraining may limit our analysis, highlighting the need for further work on transfer learning methods in these settings.

Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain largely as black-box systems. Consequently, their development relies heavily on data-driven approaches, limiting performance enhancement through changes in internal architecture and reasoning pathways. As a result, many researchers have begun exploring the potential internal mechanisms of LLMs, aiming to identify the essence of their reasoning bottlenecks, with most studies focusing on attention heads. Our survey aims to shed light on the internal reasoning processes of LLMs by concentrating on the interpretability and underlying mechanisms of attention heads. We first distill the human thought process into a four-stage framework: Knowledge Recalling, In-Context Identification, Latent Reasoning, and Expression Preparation. Using this framework, we systematically review existing research to identify and categorize the functions of specific attention heads. Furthermore, we summarize the experimental methodologies used to discover these special heads, dividing them into two categories: Modeling-Free methods and Modeling-Required methods. Also, we outline relevant evaluation methods and benchmarks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current research and propose several potential future directions. Our reference list is open-sourced at https://github.com/IAAR-Shanghai/Awesome-Attention-Heads.

While numerous works have assessed the generative performance of language models (LMs) on tasks requiring Theory of Mind reasoning, research into the models' internal representation of mental states remains limited. Recent work has used probing to demonstrate that LMs can represent beliefs of themselves and others. However, these claims are accompanied by limited evaluation, making it difficult to assess how mental state representations are affected by model design and training choices. We report an extensive benchmark with various LM types with different model sizes, fine-tuning approaches, and prompt designs to study the robustness of mental state representations and memorisation issues within the probes. Our results show that the quality of models' internal representations of the beliefs of others increases with model size and, more crucially, with fine-tuning. We are the first to study how prompt variations impact probing performance on theory of mind tasks. We demonstrate that models' representations are sensitive to prompt variations, even when such variations should be beneficial. Finally, we complement previous activation editing experiments on Theory of Mind tasks and show that it is possible to improve models' reasoning performance by steering their activations without the need to train any probe.

Large language models (LLMs) face issues in handling factual knowledge, making it vital to evaluate their true ability to understand facts. In this study, we introduce knowledge probing frameworks, BELIEF(-ICL), to evaluate the knowledge understanding ability of not only encoder-based PLMs but also decoder-based PLMs from diverse perspectives. BELIEFs utilize a multi-prompt dataset to evaluate PLM's accuracy, consistency, and reliability in factual knowledge understanding. To provide a more reliable evaluation with BELIEFs, we semi-automatically create MyriadLAMA, which has more diverse prompts than existing datasets. We validate the effectiveness of BELIEFs in correctly and comprehensively evaluating PLM's factual understanding ability through extensive evaluations. We further investigate key factors in learning facts in LLMs, and reveal the limitation of the prompt-based knowledge probing. The dataset is anonymously publicized.

Retrieval augmented language models have recently become the standard for knowledge intensive tasks. Rather than relying purely on latent semantics within the parameters of large neural models, these methods enlist a semi-parametric memory to encode an index of knowledge for the model to retrieve over. Most prior work has employed text passages as the unit of knowledge, which has high coverage at the cost of interpretability, controllability, and efficiency. The opposite properties arise in other methods which have instead relied on knowledge base (KB) facts. At the same time, more recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of storing and retrieving from an index of Q-A pairs derived from text lewis2021paq. This approach yields a high coverage knowledge representation that maintains KB-like properties due to its representations being more atomic units of information. In this work we push this line of research further by proposing a question-answer augmented encoder-decoder model and accompanying pretraining strategy. This yields an end-to-end system that not only outperforms prior QA retrieval methods on single-hop QA tasks but also enables compositional reasoning, as demonstrated by strong performance on two multi-hop QA datasets. Together, these methods improve the ability to interpret and control the model while narrowing the performance gap with passage retrieval systems.

Knowledge-grounded conversation (KGC) shows excellent potential to deliver an engaging and informative response. However, existing approaches emphasize selecting one golden knowledge given a particular dialogue context, overlooking the one-to-many phenomenon in dialogue. As a result, the existing paradigm limits the diversity of knowledge selection and generation. To this end, we establish a multi-reference KGC dataset and propose a series of metrics to systematically assess the one-to-many efficacy of existing KGC models. Furthermore, to extend the hypothesis space of knowledge selection to enhance the mapping relationship between multiple knowledge and multiple responses, we devise a span-based variational model and optimize the model in a wake-sleep style with an ameliorated evidence lower bound objective to learn the one-to-many generalization. Both automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come with incorrect or unfaithful intermediate reasoning steps, especially in the context of answering knowledge-intensive tasks such as KBQA. To alleviate this issue, we propose a framework called Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) to verify and modify reasoning traces in CoT via interaction with external knowledge, and thus overcome the hallucinations and error propagation. Concretely, we formulate the CoT rationale process of LLMs into a structured multi-round QA format. In each round, LLMs interact with a QA system that retrieves external knowledge and produce faithful reasoning traces based on retrieved precise answers. The structured CoT reasoning of LLMs is facilitated by our developed KBQA CoT collection, which serves as in-context learning demonstrations and can also be utilized as feedback augmentation to train a robust retriever. Extensive experiments on WebQSP and ComplexWebQuestion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed KD-CoT in task-solving reasoning generation, which outperforms the vanilla CoT ICL with an absolute success rate of 8.0% and 5.1%. Furthermore, our proposed feedback-augmented retriever outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for retrieving knowledge, achieving significant improvement in Hit performance.

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive research reports requiring synthesis of diverse web information. To address this, we propose WebThinker, a deep research agent that empowers LRMs to autonomously search the web, navigate web pages, and draft research reports during the reasoning process. WebThinker integrates a Deep Web Explorer module, enabling LRMs to dynamically search, navigate, and extract information from the web when encountering knowledge gaps. It also employs an Autonomous Think-Search-and-Draft strategy, allowing the model to seamlessly interleave reasoning, information gathering, and report writing in real time. To further enhance research tool utilization, we introduce an RL-based training strategy via iterative online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments on complex reasoning benchmarks (GPQA, GAIA, WebWalkerQA, HLE) and scientific report generation tasks (Glaive) demonstrate that WebThinker significantly outperforms existing methods and strong proprietary systems. Our approach enhances LRM reliability and applicability in complex scenarios, paving the way for more capable and versatile deep research systems. The code is available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/WebThinker.

LLMs are typically trained to answer user questions or follow instructions similarly to how human experts respond. However, in the standard alignment framework they lack the basic ability of explicit thinking before answering. Thinking is important for complex questions that require reasoning and planning -- but can be applied to any task. We propose a training method for equipping existing LLMs with such thinking abilities for general instruction following without use of additional human data. We achieve this by an iterative search and optimization procedure that explores the space of possible thought generations, allowing the model to learn how to think without direct supervision. For each instruction, the thought candidates are scored using a judge model to evaluate their responses only, and then optimized via preference optimization. We show that this procedure leads to superior performance on AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard, and shows gains from thinking on non-reasoning categories such as marketing, health and general knowledge, in addition to more traditional reasoning & problem-solving tasks.

Large language models have been shown to struggle with limited context memory and multi-step reasoning. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes. Unlike recent scratchpad approaches, the model can deviate from the input context at any time to explicitly think. This allows the model to recall information and perform reasoning on the fly as it reads the context, thus extending its memory and enabling multi-step reasoning. Our experiments on multiple tasks demonstrate that our method can successfully generalize to longer and more complicated instances from their training setup by taking Self-Notes at inference time.

This paper summarizes our submission to Task 2 of the second track of the 10th Dialog System Technology Challenge (DSTC10) "Knowledge-grounded Task-oriented Dialogue Modeling on Spoken Conversations". Similar to the previous year's iteration, the task consists of three subtasks: detecting whether a turn is knowledge seeking, selecting the relevant knowledge document and finally generating a grounded response. This year, the focus lies on adapting the system to noisy ASR transcripts. We explore different approaches to make the models more robust to this type of input and to adapt the generated responses to the style of spoken conversations. For the latter, we get the best results with a noisy channel model that additionally reduces the number of short and generic responses. Our best system achieved the 1st rank in the automatic and the 3rd rank in the human evaluation of the challenge.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire vast knowledge during pre-training, they often lack domain-specific, new, or niche information. Continual pre-training (CPT) attempts to address this gap but suffers from catastrophic forgetting and inefficiencies in low-data regimes. We introduce Knowledge-Instruct, a novel approach to efficiently inject knowledge from limited corpora through pure instruction-tuning. By generating information-dense synthetic instruction data, it effectively integrates new knowledge while preserving general reasoning and instruction-following abilities. Knowledge-Instruct demonstrates superior factual memorization, minimizes catastrophic forgetting, and remains scalable by leveraging synthetic data from relatively small language models. Additionally, it enhances contextual understanding, including complex multi-hop reasoning, facilitating integration with retrieval systems. We validate its effectiveness across diverse benchmarks, including Companies, a new dataset that we release to measure knowledge injection capabilities.

It remains an open question whether incorporating external knowledge benefits commonsense reasoning while maintaining the flexibility of pretrained sequence models. To investigate this question, we develop generated knowledge prompting, which consists of generating knowledge from a language model, then providing the knowledge as additional input when answering a question. Our method does not require task-specific supervision for knowledge integration, or access to a structured knowledge base, yet it improves performance of large-scale, state-of-the-art models on four commonsense reasoning tasks, achieving state-of-the-art results on numerical commonsense (NumerSense), general commonsense (CommonsenseQA 2.0), and scientific commonsense (QASC) benchmarks. Generated knowledge prompting highlights large-scale language models as flexible sources of external knowledge for improving commonsense reasoning. Our code is available at https://github.com/liujch1998/GKP

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly demonstrate signs of conceptual understanding, yet much of their internal knowledge remains latent, loosely structured, and difficult to access or evaluate. We propose self-questioning as a lightweight and scalable strategy to improve LLMs' understanding, particularly in domains where success depends on fine-grained semantic distinctions. To evaluate this approach, we introduce a challenging new benchmark of 1.3 million post-2015 computer science patent pairs, characterized by dense technical jargon and strategically complex writing. The benchmark centers on a pairwise differentiation task: can a model distinguish between closely related but substantively different inventions? We show that prompting LLMs to generate and answer their own questions - targeting the background knowledge required for the task - significantly improves performance. These self-generated questions and answers activate otherwise underutilized internal knowledge. Allowing LLMs to retrieve answers from external scientific texts further enhances performance, suggesting that model knowledge is compressed and lacks the full richness of the training data. We also find that chain-of-thought prompting and self-questioning converge, though self-questioning remains more effective for improving understanding of technical concepts. Notably, we uncover an asymmetry in prompting: smaller models often generate more fundamental, more open-ended, better-aligned questions for mid-sized models than large models with better understanding do, revealing a new strategy for cross-model collaboration. Altogether, our findings establish self-questioning as both a practical mechanism for automatically improving LLM comprehension, especially in domains with sparse and underrepresented knowledge, and a diagnostic probe of how internal and external knowledge are organized.

Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance across diverse tasks by leveraging both pre-trained knowledge (i.e., parametric knowledge) and external knowledge (i.e., contextual knowledge). While substantial efforts have been made to leverage both forms of knowledge, scenarios in which the model lacks any relevant knowledge remain underexplored. Such limitations can result in issues like hallucination, causing reduced reliability and potential risks in high-stakes applications. To address such limitations, this paper extends the task scope to encompass cases where the user's request cannot be fulfilled due to the lack of relevant knowledge. To this end, we introduce Contrastive Decoding with Abstention (CDA), a training-free decoding method that empowers LLMs to generate responses when relevant knowledge is available and to abstain otherwise. CDA evaluates the relevance of each knowledge for a given query, adaptively determining which knowledge to prioritize or which to completely ignore. Extensive experiments with four LLMs on three question-answering datasets demonstrate that CDA can effectively perform accurate generation and abstention simultaneously. These findings highlight CDA's potential to broaden the applicability of LLMs, enhancing reliability and preserving user trust.

To build a conversational agent that interacts fluently with humans, previous studies blend knowledge or personal profile into the pre-trained language model. However, the model that considers knowledge and persona at the same time is still limited, leading to hallucination and a passive way of using personas. We propose an effective dialogue agent that grounds external knowledge and persona simultaneously. The agent selects the proper knowledge and persona to use for generating the answers with our candidate scoring implemented with a poly-encoder. Then, our model generates the utterance with lesser hallucination and more engagingness utilizing retrieval augmented generation with knowledge-persona enhanced query. We conduct experiments on the persona-knowledge chat and achieve state-of-the-art performance in grounding and generation tasks on the automatic metrics. Moreover, we validate the answers from the models regarding hallucination and engagingness through human evaluation and qualitative results. We show our retriever's effectiveness in extracting relevant documents compared to the other previous retrievers, along with the comparison of multiple candidate scoring methods. Code is available at https://github.com/dlawjddn803/INFO

Extensive research has investigated the integration of large language models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs to enhance the reasoning process. However, understanding how models perform reasoning utilizing structured graph knowledge remains underexplored. Most existing approaches rely on LLMs or retrievers to make binary judgments regarding the utilization of knowledge, which is too coarse. Meanwhile, there is still a lack of feedback mechanisms for reflection and correction throughout the entire reasoning path. This paper proposes an Active self-Reflection framework for knowledge Graph reasoning ARG, introducing for the first time an end-to-end training approach to achieve iterative reasoning grounded on structured graphs. Within the framework, the model leverages special tokens to actively determine whether knowledge retrieval is necessary, performs reflective critique based on the retrieved knowledge, and iteratively reasons over the knowledge graph. The reasoning paths generated by the model exhibit high interpretability, enabling deeper exploration of the model's understanding of structured knowledge. Ultimately, the proposed model achieves outstanding results compared to existing baselines in knowledge graph reasoning tasks.

When completing knowledge-intensive tasks, humans sometimes need not just an answer but also a corresponding reference passage for auxiliary reading. Previous methods required obtaining pre-segmented article chunks through additional retrieval models. This paper explores leveraging the parameterized knowledge stored during the pre-training phase of large language models (LLMs) to independently recall reference passage from any starting position. We propose a two-stage framework that simulates the scenario of humans recalling easily forgotten references. Initially, the LLM is prompted to recall document title identifiers to obtain a coarse-grained document set. Then, based on the acquired coarse-grained document set, it recalls fine-grained passage. In the two-stage recall process, we use constrained decoding to ensure that content outside of the stored documents is not generated. To increase speed, we only recall a short prefix in the second stage, then locate its position to retrieve a complete passage. Experiments on KILT knowledge-sensitive tasks have verified that LLMs can independently recall reference passage location in various task forms, and the obtained reference significantly assist downstream tasks.

It is important for Large Language Models to be aware of the boundary of their knowledge, the mechanism of identifying known and unknown queries. This type of awareness can help models perform adaptive inference, such as invoking RAG, engaging in slow and deep thinking, or adopting the abstention mechanism, which is beneficial to the development of efficient and trustworthy AI. In this work, we propose a method to detect knowledge boundaries via Query-Level Uncertainty, which aims to determine if the model is able to address a given query without generating any tokens. To this end, we introduce a novel and training-free method called Internal Confidence, which leverages self-evaluations across layers and tokens. Empirical results on both factual QA and mathematical reasoning tasks demonstrate that our internal confidence can outperform several baselines. Furthermore, we showcase that our proposed method can be used for efficient RAG and model cascading, which is able to reduce inference costs while maintaining performance.

Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, suggesting that real-world knowledge is encoded in their model parameters. However, besides explorations on a few probing tasks in limited knowledge domains, it is not well understood how to evaluate LLMs' knowledge systematically and how well their knowledge abilities generalize, across a spectrum of knowledge domains and progressively complex task formats. To this end, we propose KGQuiz, a knowledge-intensive benchmark to comprehensively investigate the knowledge generalization abilities of LLMs. KGQuiz is a scalable framework constructed from triplet-based knowledge, which covers three knowledge domains and consists of five tasks with increasing complexity: true-or-false, multiple-choice QA, blank filling, factual editing, and open-ended knowledge generation. To gain a better understanding of LLMs' knowledge abilities and their generalization, we evaluate 10 open-source and black-box LLMs on the KGQuiz benchmark across the five knowledge-intensive tasks and knowledge domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve impressive performance in straightforward knowledge QA tasks, while settings and contexts requiring more complex reasoning or employing domain-specific facts still present significant challenges. We envision KGQuiz as a testbed to analyze such nuanced variations in performance across domains and task formats, and ultimately to understand, evaluate, and improve LLMs' knowledge abilities across a wide spectrum of knowledge domains and tasks.

We often attribute human characteristics to large language models (LLMs) and claim that they "know" certain things. LLMs have an internal probabilistic knowledge that represents information retained during training. How can we assess the veracity of this knowledge? We examine two common methods for probing the veracity of LLMs and discover several assumptions that are flawed. To address these flawed assumptions, we introduce sAwMIL (short for Sparse Aware Multiple-Instance Learning), a probing method that utilizes the internal activations of LLMs to separate statements into true, false, and neither. sAwMIL is based on multiple-instance learning and conformal prediction. We evaluate sAwMIL on 5 validity criteria across 16 open-source LLMs, including both default and chat-based variants, as well as on 3 new datasets. Among the insights we provide are: (1) the veracity signal is often concentrated in the third quarter of an LLM's depth; (2) truth and falsehood signals are not always symmetric; (3) linear probes perform better on chat models than on default models; (4) nonlinear probes may be required to capture veracity signals for some LLMs with reinforcement learning from human feedback or knowledge distillation; and (5) LLMs capture a third type of signal that is distinct from true and false and is neither true nor false. These findings provide a reliable method for verifying what LLMs "know" and how certain they are of their probabilistic internal knowledge.

Characterizing a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge of a given question is challenging. As a result, prior work has primarily examined LLM behavior under knowledge conflicts, where the model's internal parametric memory contradicts information in the external context. However, this does not fully reflect how well the model knows the answer to the question. In this paper, we first introduce a taxonomy of five knowledge statuses based on the consistency and correctness of LLM knowledge modes. We then propose KScope, a hierarchical framework of statistical tests that progressively refines hypotheses about knowledge modes and characterizes LLM knowledge into one of these five statuses. We apply KScope to nine LLMs across four datasets and systematically establish: (1) Supporting context narrows knowledge gaps across models. (2) Context features related to difficulty, relevance, and familiarity drive successful knowledge updates. (3) LLMs exhibit similar feature preferences when partially correct or conflicted, but diverge sharply when consistently wrong. (4) Context summarization constrained by our feature analysis, together with enhanced credibility, further improves update effectiveness and generalizes across LLMs.

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize external knowledge to assist LLMs. Unfortunately, current methods for incorporating external knowledge often require additional training or fine-tuning, which can be costly and may not be feasible for LLMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel post-processing approach, rethinking with retrieval (RR), which retrieves relevant external knowledge based on the decomposed reasoning steps obtained from the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. This lightweight approach does not require additional training or fine-tuning and is not limited by the input length of LLMs. We evaluate the effectiveness of RR through extensive experiments with GPT-3 on three complex reasoning tasks: commonsense reasoning, temporal reasoning, and tabular reasoning. Our results show that RR can produce more faithful explanations and improve the performance of LLMs.

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive abilities over high level perception and reasoning, their robustness in the wild still lags behind humans and exhibits diminished efficacy on simple tasks that are intuitive for humans. We examine the hypothesis that these deficiencies stem from the absence of core knowledge, rudimentary cognitive abilities innate to humans from early childhood. To probe core knowledge representation in MLLMs, we draw from developmental cognitive sciences and develop a large-scale benchmark, CoreCognition dataset, encompassing 12 core cognitive concepts. We evaluate 219 models with 10 different prompts, leading to a total of 2409 data points for analysis. Our findings reveal core knowledge deficits in early developed core abilities while models demonstrate human comparable performance in high level cognition. Moreover, we find that low level abilities show little to no scaling, in stark contrast to high level abilities. Finally, we introduce an evaluation technique, Concept Hacking, through which we demonstrate that MLLMs do not genuinely advance toward core knowledge but instead rely on illusory understanding and shortcut learning as they scale. Website with this https://growing-ai-like-a-child.github.io/{link}.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various complex tasks, yet they still suffer from hallucinations. Introducing external knowledge, such as knowledge graph, can enhance the LLMs' ability to provide factual answers. LLMs have the ability to interactively explore knowledge graphs. However, most approaches have been affected by insufficient internal knowledge excavation in LLMs, limited generation of trustworthy knowledge reasoning paths, and a vague integration between internal and external knowledge. Therefore, we propose KnowPath, a knowledge-enhanced large model framework driven by the collaboration of internal and external knowledge. It relies on the internal knowledge of the LLM to guide the exploration of interpretable directed subgraphs in external knowledge graphs, better integrating the two knowledge sources for more accurate reasoning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets confirm the superiority of KnowPath.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet struggle with hallucination and outdated knowledge when tasked with complex knowledge reasoning, resulting in factually incorrect outputs. Previous studies have attempted to mitigate it by retrieving factual knowledge from large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) to assist LLMs in logical reasoning and prediction of answers. However, this kind of approach often introduces noise and irrelevant data, especially in situations with extensive context from multiple knowledge aspects. In this way, LLM attention can be potentially mislead from question and relevant information. In our study, we introduce an Adaptive Multi-Aspect Retrieval-augmented over KGs (Amar) framework. This method retrieves knowledge including entities, relations, and subgraphs, and converts each piece of retrieved text into prompt embeddings. The Amar framework comprises two key sub-components: 1) a self-alignment module that aligns commonalities among entities, relations, and subgraphs to enhance retrieved text, thereby reducing noise interference; 2) a relevance gating module that employs a soft gate to learn the relevance score between question and multi-aspect retrieved data, to determine which information should be used to enhance LLMs' output, or even filtered altogether. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance on two common datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, showing a 1.9\% improvement in accuracy over its best competitor and a 6.6\% improvement in logical form generation over a method that directly uses retrieved text as context prompts. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of Amar in improving the reasoning of LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in linguistic tasks, necessitating robust evaluation frameworks to understand their capabilities and limitations. Inspired by Feynman's principle of understanding through creation, we introduce a self-knowledge evaluation framework that is easy to implement, evaluating models on their ability to comprehend and respond to self-generated questions. Our findings, based on testing multiple models across diverse tasks, reveal significant gaps in the model's self-knowledge ability. Further analysis indicates these gaps may be due to misalignment with human attention mechanisms. Additionally, fine-tuning on self-generated math task may enhance the model's math performance, highlighting the potential of the framework for efficient and insightful model evaluation and may also contribute to the improvement of LLMs.

Automatically repairing software issues remains a fundamental challenge at the intersection of software engineering and AI. Although recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential for repository-level repair tasks, current methodologies exhibit two notable limitations: (1) they often address issues in isolation, neglecting to incorporate insights from previously resolved issues, and (2) they rely on static and rigid prompting strategies, which constrain their ability to generalize across diverse and evolving issue scenarios. Inspired by the dual memory systems of human cognition, where episodic and semantic memories work synergistically to support human reasoning and decision-making, we propose ExpeRepair, a novel LLM-based approach that continuously learns from historical repair experiences through dual-channel knowledge accumulation. ExpeRepair organizes historical repair experiences into two complementary memories: an episodic memory that stores concrete repair demonstrations, and a semantic memory that encodes abstract reflective insights. At inference time, ExpeRepair activates both memory systems by retrieving relevant demonstrations from episodic memory and recalling high-level repair insights from semantic memory. It further enhances adaptability through dynamic prompt composition, synergistically integrating both memory types to replace static prompts with context-aware, experience-driven prompts. Experiments on the SWE-bench Lite benchmark demonstrate that ExpeRepair achieves a pass@1 score of 49.3% with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, outperforming all state-of-the-art open-source methods.

As the research community aims to build better AI assistants that are more dynamic and personalized to the diversity of humans that they interact with, there is increased interest in evaluating the theory of mind capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Indeed, several recent studies suggest that LLM theory of mind capabilities are quite impressive, approximating human-level performance. Our paper aims to rebuke this narrative and argues instead that past studies were not directly measuring agent performance, potentially leading to findings that are illusory in nature as a result. We draw a strong distinction between what we call literal theory of mind i.e. measuring the agent's ability to predict the behavior of others and functional theory of mind i.e. adapting to agents in-context based on a rational response to predictions of their behavior. We find that top performing open source LLMs may display strong capabilities in literal theory of mind, depending on how they are prompted, but seem to struggle with functional theory of mind -- even when partner policies are exceedingly simple. Our work serves to highlight the double sided nature of inductive bias in LLMs when adapting to new situations. While this bias can lead to strong performance over limited horizons, it often hinders convergence to optimal long-term behavior.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often encounter conflicts between their learned, internal (parametric knowledge, PK) and external knowledge provided during inference (contextual knowledge, CK). Understanding how LLMs models prioritize one knowledge source over the other remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel probing framework to explore the mechanisms governing the selection between PK and CK in LLMs. Using controlled prompts designed to contradict the model's PK, we demonstrate that specific model activations are indicative of the knowledge source employed. We evaluate this framework on various LLMs of different sizes and demonstrate that mid-layer activations, particularly those related to relations in the input, are crucial in predicting knowledge source selection, paving the way for more reliable models capable of handling knowledge conflicts effectively.

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory (uparrow 44.0%) or external context (uparrow 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method.

Thanks to rapid progress in artificial intelligence, we have entered an era when technology and philosophy intersect in interesting ways. Sitting squarely at the centre of this intersection are large language models (LLMs). The more adept LLMs become at mimicking human language, the more vulnerable we become to anthropomorphism, to seeing the systems in which they are embedded as more human-like than they really are. This trend is amplified by the natural tendency to use philosophically loaded terms, such as "knows", "believes", and "thinks", when describing these systems. To mitigate this trend, this paper advocates the practice of repeatedly stepping back to remind ourselves of how LLMs, and the systems of which they form a part, actually work. The hope is that increased scientific precision will encourage more philosophical nuance in the discourse around artificial intelligence, both within the field and in the public sphere.

The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavily rely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE, a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC, we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across four downstream tasks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.

Recent studies show that the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to question-answering (QA) tasks in areas such as math and coding. With a long context length, LLMs may learn to perform search, as indicated by the self-correction behavior observed in DeepSeek R1. However, this search behavior is often imprecise and lacks confidence, resulting in long, redundant responses and highlighting deficiencies in intuition and verification. Inspired by the Dual Process Theory in psychology, we introduce a simple modification to the QA task that includes four stages: Fast Thinking, where the LLM must answer within a strict token budget; Verification, where the model evaluates its initial response; Slow Thinking, where it refines the initial response with more deliberation; and Summarization, where it distills the refinement from the previous stage into precise steps. Our proposed task improves average accuracy from 24.9% to 27.9% for Qwen2.5-1.5B, and from 45.9% to 49.8% for DeepSeek-R1-Qwen-1.5B. Notably, for Qwen2.5-1.5B, the Fast Thinking mode alone achieves 26.8% accuracy using fewer than 1000 tokens, demonstrating substantial inference efficiency gains. These findings suggest that intuition and deliberative reasoning are distinct, complementary systems benefiting from targeted training.

Large Language Models (LMs) are known to encode world knowledge in their parameters as they pretrain on a vast amount of web corpus, which is often utilized for performing knowledge-dependent downstream tasks such as question answering, fact-checking, and open dialogue. In real-world scenarios, the world knowledge stored in the LMs can quickly become outdated as the world changes, but it is non-trivial to avoid catastrophic forgetting and reliably acquire new knowledge while preserving invariant knowledge. To push the community towards better maintenance of ever-changing LMs, we formulate a new continual learning (CL) problem called Continual Knowledge Learning (CKL). We construct a new benchmark and metric to quantify the retention of time-invariant world knowledge, the update of outdated knowledge, and the acquisition of new knowledge. We adopt applicable recent methods from literature to create several strong baselines. Through extensive experiments, we find that CKL exhibits unique challenges that are not addressed in previous CL setups, where parameter expansion is necessary to reliably retain and learn knowledge simultaneously. By highlighting the critical causes of knowledge forgetting, we show that CKL is a challenging and important problem that helps us better understand and train ever-changing LMs. The benchmark datasets, evaluation script, and baseline code to reproduce our results are available at https://github.com/joeljang/continual-knowledge-learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown the impressive capability of answering questions in a wide range of scenarios. However, when LLMs face different types of questions, it is worth exploring whether LLMs are aware that some questions have limited answers and need to respond more deterministically but some do not. We refer to this as question awareness of LLMs. The lack of question awareness in LLMs leads to two phenomena that LLMs are: (1) too casual to answer non-open-ended questions or (2) too boring to answer open-ended questions. In this paper, we first evaluate the question awareness in LLMs. The experimental results show that LLMs have the issues of lacking awareness of questions in certain domains, e.g. factual knowledge, resulting in hallucinations during the generation. To mitigate these, we propose a method called Question Awareness Temperature Sampling (QuATS). This method enhances the question awareness of LLMs by adaptively adjusting the output distributions based on question features. The automatic adjustment in QuATS eliminates the need for manual temperature tuning in text generation and consistently improves model performance in various benchmarks.

Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models (LLMs), where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. This paradox, in which error generation continues despite high-quality training data, calls for a deeper understanding of the underlying LLM mechanisms. To address it, we propose a novel concept: knowledge overshadowing, where model's dominant knowledge can obscure less prominent knowledge during text generation, causing the model to fabricate inaccurate details. Building on this idea, we introduce a novel framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. Central to our approach is the log-linear law, which predicts that the rate of factual hallucination increases linearly with the logarithmic scale of (1) Knowledge Popularity, (2) Knowledge Length, and (3) Model Size. The law provides a means to preemptively quantify hallucinations, offering foresight into their occurrence even before model training or inference. Built on overshadowing effect, we propose a new decoding strategy CoDa, to mitigate hallucinations, which notably enhance model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). Our findings not only deepen understandings of the underlying mechanisms behind hallucinations but also provide actionable insights for developing more predictable and controllable language models.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly impacted many aspects of our lives. However, assessing and ensuring their chronological knowledge remains challenging. Existing approaches fall short in addressing the accumulative nature of knowledge, often relying on a single time stamp. To overcome this, we introduce ChroKnowBench, a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate chronologically accumulated knowledge across three key aspects: multiple domains, time dependency, temporal state. Our benchmark distinguishes between knowledge that evolves (e.g., scientific discoveries, amended laws) and knowledge that remain constant (e.g., mathematical truths, commonsense facts). Building on this benchmark, we present ChroKnowledge (Chronological Categorization of Knowledge), a novel sampling-based framework for evaluating and updating LLMs' non-parametric chronological knowledge. Our evaluation shows: (1) The ability of eliciting temporal knowledge varies depending on the data format that model was trained on. (2) LLMs partially recall knowledge or show a cut-off at temporal boundaries rather than recalling all aspects of knowledge correctly. Thus, we apply our ChroKnowPrompt, an in-depth prompting to elicit chronological knowledge by traversing step-by-step through the surrounding time spans. We observe that our framework successfully updates the overall knowledge across the entire timeline in both the biomedical domain (+11.9%) and the general domain (+2.8%), demonstrating its effectiveness in refining temporal knowledge. This non-parametric approach also enables knowledge updates not only in open-source models but also in proprietary LLMs, ensuring comprehensive applicability across model types. We perform a comprehensive analysis based on temporal characteristics of ChroKnowPrompt and validate the potential of various models to elicit intrinsic temporal knowledge through our method.

As language models (LMs) become integral to fields like healthcare, law, and journalism, their ability to differentiate between fact, belief, and knowledge is essential for reliable decision-making. Failure to grasp these distinctions can lead to significant consequences in areas such as medical diagnosis, legal judgments, and dissemination of fake news. Despite this, current literature has largely focused on more complex issues such as theory of mind, overlooking more fundamental epistemic challenges. This study systematically evaluates the epistemic reasoning capabilities of modern LMs, including GPT-4, Claude-3, and Llama-3, using a new dataset, KaBLE, consisting of 13,000 questions across 13 tasks. Our results reveal key limitations. First, while LMs achieve 86% accuracy on factual scenarios, their performance drops significantly with false scenarios, particularly in belief-related tasks. Second, LMs struggle with recognizing and affirming personal beliefs, especially when those beliefs contradict factual data, which raises concerns for applications in healthcare and counseling, where engaging with a person's beliefs is critical. Third, we identify a salient bias in how LMs process first-person versus third-person beliefs, performing better on third-person tasks (80.7%) compared to first-person tasks (54.4%). Fourth, LMs lack a robust understanding of the factive nature of knowledge, namely, that knowledge inherently requires truth. Fifth, LMs rely on linguistic cues for fact-checking and sometimes bypass the deeper reasoning. These findings highlight significant concerns about current LMs' ability to reason about truth, belief, and knowledge while emphasizing the need for advancements in these areas before broad deployment in critical sectors.

Scaling laws describe the relationship between the size of language models and their capabilities. Unlike prior studies that evaluate a model's capability via loss or benchmarks, we estimate the number of knowledge bits a model stores. We focus on factual knowledge represented as tuples, such as (USA, capital, Washington D.C.) from a Wikipedia page. Through multiple controlled datasets, we establish that language models can and only can store 2 bits of knowledge per parameter, even when quantized to int8, and such knowledge can be flexibly extracted for downstream applications. Consequently, a 7B model can store 14B bits of knowledge, surpassing the English Wikipedia and textbooks combined based on our estimation. More broadly, we present 12 results on how (1) training duration, (2) model architecture, (3) quantization, (4) sparsity constraints such as MoE, and (5) data signal-to-noise ratio affect a model's knowledge storage capacity. Notable insights include: * The GPT-2 architecture, with rotary embedding, matches or even surpasses LLaMA/Mistral architectures in knowledge storage, particularly over shorter training durations. This arises because LLaMA/Mistral uses GatedMLP, which is less stable and harder to train. * Prepending training data with domain names (e.g., wikipedia.org) significantly increases a model's knowledge capacity. Language models can autonomously identify and prioritize domains rich in knowledge, optimizing their storage capacity.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue is a task of generating an informative response based on both the dialogue history and external knowledge source. In general, there are two forms of knowledge: manually annotated knowledge graphs and knowledge text from website. From various evaluation viewpoints, each type of knowledge has advantages and downsides. To further distinguish the principles and determinants from the intricate factors, we conduct a thorough experiment and study on the task to answer three essential questions. The questions involve the choice of appropriate knowledge form, the degree of mutual effects between knowledge and the model selection, and the few-shot performance of knowledge. Supported by statistical shreds of evidence, we offer conclusive solutions and sensible suggestions for directions and standards of future research.

Reasoning is central to a wide range of intellectual activities, and while the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their performance in reasoning tasks remains limited. The processes and mechanisms underlying reasoning are not yet fully understood, but key elements include path exploration, selection of relevant knowledge, and multi-step inference. Problems are solved through the synthesis of these components. In this paper, we propose a benchmark that focuses on a specific aspect of reasoning ability: the direct evaluation of multi-step inference. To this end, we design a special reasoning task where multi-step inference is specifically focused by largely eliminating path exploration and implicit knowledge utilization. Our dataset comprises pairs of explicit instructions and corresponding questions, where the procedures necessary for solving the questions are entirely detailed within the instructions. This setup allows models to solve problems solely by following the provided directives. By constructing problems that require varying numbers of steps to solve and evaluating responses at each step, we enable a thorough assessment of state-of-the-art LLMs' ability to follow instructions. To ensure the robustness of our evaluation, we include multiple distinct tasks. Furthermore, by comparing accuracy across tasks, utilizing step-aware metrics, and applying separately defined measures of complexity, we conduct experiments that offer insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in reasoning tasks. Our findings have significant implications for the development of LLMs and highlight areas for future research in advancing their reasoning abilities. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ifujisawa/procbench and code at https://github.com/ifujisawa/proc-bench.

Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how to structurally embed acquired knowledge in their neural computations. We address this issue through the lens of knowledge circuit evolution, identifying computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing. Our systematic analysis of circuit evolution throughout continual pre-training reveals several key findings: (1) the acquisition of new knowledge is influenced by its relevance to pre-existing knowledge; (2) the evolution of knowledge circuits exhibits a distinct phase shift from formation to optimization; (3) the evolution of knowledge circuits follows a deep-to-shallow pattern. These insights not only advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of new knowledge acquisition in LLMs, but also provide potential implications for improving continual pre-training strategies to enhance model performance. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DynamicKnowledgeCircuits.

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate intermediate reasoning steps. However, the generated rationales often come with mistakes, making unfactual and unfaithful reasoning chains. To mitigate this brittleness, we propose a novel Chain-of-Knowledge (CoK) prompting, where we aim at eliciting LLMs to generate explicit pieces of knowledge evidence in the form of structure triple. This is inspired by our human behaviors, i.e., we can draw a mind map or knowledge map as the reasoning evidence in the brain before answering a complex question. Benefiting from CoK, we additionally introduce a F^2-Verification method to estimate the reliability of the reasoning chains in terms of factuality and faithfulness. For the unreliable response, the wrong evidence can be indicated to prompt the LLM to rethink. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can further improve the performance of commonsense, factual, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning tasks.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been used to support a wide range of applications, from web search to personal assistant. In this paper, we describe three generations of knowledge graphs: entity-based KGs, which have been supporting general search and question answering (e.g., at Google and Bing); text-rich KGs, which have been supporting search and recommendations for products, bio-informatics, etc. (e.g., at Amazon and Alibaba); and the emerging integration of KGs and LLMs, which we call dual neural KGs. We describe the characteristics of each generation of KGs, the crazy ideas behind the scenes in constructing such KGs, and the techniques developed over time to enable industry impact. In addition, we use KGs as examples to demonstrate a recipe to evolve research ideas from innovations to production practice, and then to the next level of innovations, to advance both science and business.

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR), aiming to deduce new facts from existing facts based on mined logic rules underlying knowledge graphs (KGs), has become a fast-growing research direction. It has been proven to significantly benefit the usage of KGs in many AI applications, such as question answering, recommendation systems, and etc. According to the graph types, existing KGR models can be roughly divided into three categories, i.e., static models, temporal models, and multi-modal models. Early works in this domain mainly focus on static KGR, and recent works try to leverage the temporal and multi-modal information, which are more practical and closer to real-world. However, no survey papers and open-source repositories comprehensively summarize and discuss models in this important direction. To fill the gap, we conduct a first survey for knowledge graph reasoning tracing from static to temporal and then to multi-modal KGs. Concretely, the models are reviewed based on bi-level taxonomy, i.e., top-level (graph types) and base-level (techniques and scenarios). Besides, the performances, as well as datasets, are summarized and presented. Moreover, we point out the challenges and potential opportunities to enlighten the readers. The corresponding open-source repository is shared on GitHub https://github.com/LIANGKE23/Awesome-Knowledge-Graph-Reasoning.

Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of neural-retrieval-in-the-loop architectures - recently shown to be effective in open-domain QA (Lewis et al., 2020b; Izacard and Grave, 2020) - for knowledge-grounded dialogue, a task that is arguably more challenging as it requires querying based on complex multi-turn dialogue context and generating conversationally coherent responses. We study various types of architectures with multiple components - retrievers, rankers, and encoder-decoders - with the goal of maximizing knowledgeability while retaining conversational ability. We demonstrate that our best models obtain state-of-the-art performance on two knowledge-grounded conversational tasks. The models exhibit open-domain conversational capabilities, generalize effectively to scenarios not within the training data, and, as verified by human evaluations, substantially reduce the well-known problem of knowledge hallucination in state-of-the-art chatbots.

Pre-trained vision-language models, e.g., CLIP, working with manually designed prompts have demonstrated great capacity of transfer learning. Recently, learnable prompts achieve state-of-the-art performance, which however are prone to overfit to seen classes, failing to generalize to unseen classes. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Prompt Tuning (KAPT) framework for vision-language models. Our approach takes inspiration from human intelligence in which external knowledge is usually incorporated into recognizing novel categories of objects. Specifically, we design two complementary types of knowledge-aware prompts for the text encoder to leverage the distinctive characteristics of category-related external knowledge. The discrete prompt extracts the key information from descriptions of an object category, and the learned continuous prompt captures overall contexts. We further design an adaptation head for the visual encoder to aggregate salient attentive visual cues, which establishes discriminative and task-aware visual representations. We conduct extensive experiments on 11 widely-used benchmark datasets and the results verify the effectiveness in few-shot image classification, especially in generalizing to unseen categories. Compared with the state-of-the-art CoCoOp method, KAPT exhibits favorable performance and achieves an absolute gain of 3.22% on new classes and 2.57% in terms of harmonic mean.

Knowledge probing evaluates the extent to which a language model (LM) has acquired relational knowledge during its pre-training phase. It provides a cost-effective means of comparing LMs of different sizes and training setups and is useful for monitoring knowledge gained or lost during continual learning (CL). In prior work, we presented an improved knowledge probe called BEAR (Wiland et al., 2024), which enables the comparison of LMs trained with different pre-training objectives (causal and masked LMs) and addresses issues of skewed distributions in previous probes to deliver a more unbiased reading of LM knowledge. With this paper, we present LM-PUB- QUIZ, a Python framework and leaderboard built around the BEAR probing mechanism that enables researchers and practitioners to apply it in their work. It provides options for standalone evaluation and direct integration into the widely-used training pipeline of the Hugging Face TRANSFORMERS library. Further, it provides a fine-grained analysis of different knowledge types to assist users in better understanding the knowledge in each evaluated LM. We publicly release LM-PUB-QUIZ as an open-source project.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) and search engines represents a significant evolution in knowledge acquisition methodologies. However, determining the knowledge that an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine remains an unresolved issue. Most existing methods solve this problem through the results of preliminary answers or reasoning done by the LLM itself, but this incurs excessively high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel collaborative approach, namely SlimPLM, that detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a slim proxy model, to enhance the LLM's knowledge acquisition process. We employ a proxy model which has far fewer parameters, and take its answers as heuristic answers. Heuristic answers are then utilized to predict the knowledge required to answer the user question, as well as the known and unknown knowledge within the LLM. We only conduct retrieval for the missing knowledge in questions that the LLM does not know. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with two LLMs demonstrate a notable improvement in the end-to-end performance of LLMs in question-answering tasks, achieving or surpassing current state-of-the-art models with lower LLM inference costs.

The present study introduces the knowledge-augmented generator, which is specifically designed to produce information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge, regardless of alterations in the context. Previous research has predominantly focused on examining hallucinations stemming from static input, such as in the domains of summarization or machine translation. However, our investigation delves into the faithfulness of generative question answering in the presence of dynamic knowledge. Our objective is to explore the existence of hallucinations arising from parametric memory when contextual knowledge undergoes changes, while also analyzing the underlying causes for their occurrence. In order to efficiently address this issue, we propose a straightforward yet effective measure for detecting such hallucinations. Intriguingly, our investigation uncovers that all models exhibit a tendency to generate previous answers as hallucinations. To gain deeper insights into the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we conduct a series of experiments that verify the critical role played by context in hallucination, both during training and testing, from various perspectives.

A central piece in enabling intelligent agentic behavior in foundation models is to make them capable of introspecting upon their behavior, reasoning, and correcting their mistakes as more computation or interaction is available. Even the strongest proprietary large language models (LLMs) do not quite exhibit the ability of continually improving their responses sequentially, even in scenarios where they are explicitly told that they are making a mistake. In this paper, we develop RISE: Recursive IntroSpEction, an approach for fine-tuning LLMs to introduce this capability, despite prior work hypothesizing that this capability may not be possible to attain. Our approach prescribes an iterative fine-tuning procedure, which attempts to teach the model how to alter its response after having executed previously unsuccessful attempts to solve a hard test-time problem, with optionally additional environment feedback. RISE poses fine-tuning for a single-turn prompt as solving a multi-turn Markov decision process (MDP), where the initial state is the prompt. Inspired by principles in online imitation learning and reinforcement learning, we propose strategies for multi-turn data collection and training so as to imbue an LLM with the capability to recursively detect and correct its previous mistakes in subsequent iterations. Our experiments show that RISE enables Llama2, Llama3, and Mistral models to improve themselves with more turns on math reasoning tasks, outperforming several single-turn strategies given an equal amount of inference-time computation. We also find that RISE scales well, often attaining larger benefits with more capable models. Our analysis shows that RISE makes meaningful improvements to responses to arrive at the correct solution for challenging prompts, without disrupting one-turn abilities as a result of expressing more complex distributions.

Driven by curiosity, humans have continually sought to explore and understand the world around them, leading to the invention of various tools to satiate this inquisitiveness. Despite not having the capacity to process and memorize vast amounts of information in their brains, humans excel in critical thinking, planning, reflection, and harnessing available tools to interact with and interpret the world, enabling them to find answers efficiently. The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that machines might also possess the aforementioned human-like capabilities, allowing them to exhibit powerful abilities even with a constrained parameter count. In this paper, we introduce KwaiAgents, a generalized information-seeking agent system based on LLMs. Within KwaiAgents, we propose an agent system that employs LLMs as its cognitive core, which is capable of understanding a user's query, behavior guidelines, and referencing external documents. The agent can also update and retrieve information from its internal memory, plan and execute actions using a time-aware search-browse toolkit, and ultimately provide a comprehensive response. We further investigate the system's performance when powered by LLMs less advanced than GPT-4, and introduce the Meta-Agent Tuning (MAT) framework, designed to ensure even an open-sourced 7B or 13B model performs well among many agent systems. We exploit both benchmark and human evaluations to systematically validate these capabilities. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our agent system compared to other autonomous agents and highlight the enhanced generalized agent-abilities of our fine-tuned LLMs.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, understanding and validating their knowledge utilization remains challenging. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting partially addresses this by revealing intermediate reasoning steps, but the knowledge flow and application remain implicit. We introduce IAO (Input-Action-Output) prompting, a structured template-based method that explicitly models how LLMs access and apply their knowledge during complex reasoning tasks. IAO decomposes problems into sequential steps, each clearly identifying the input knowledge being used, the action being performed, and the resulting output. This structured decomposition enables us to trace knowledge flow, verify factual consistency, and identify potential knowledge gaps or misapplications. Through experiments across diverse reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that IAO not only improves zero-shot performance but also provides transparency in how LLMs leverage their stored knowledge. Human evaluation confirms that this structured approach enhances our ability to verify knowledge utilization and detect potential hallucinations or reasoning errors. Our findings provide insights into both knowledge representation within LLMs and methods for more reliable knowledge application.

In various fields of knowledge creation, including science, new ideas often build on pre-existing information. In this work, we explore this concept within the context of language models. Specifically, we explore the potential of self-training models on their own outputs, akin to how humans learn and build on their previous thoughts and actions. While this approach is intuitively appealing, our research reveals its practical limitations. We find that extended self-training of the GPT-2 model leads to a significant degradation in performance, resulting in repetitive and collapsed token output.

Over the years, various approaches have been employed to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers, from addressing psychological well-being to the development of personal knowledge assistants. A significant challenge in this research area has been the absence of a comprehensive, publicly accessible dataset that mirrors real-world knowledge work. Although a handful of datasets exist, many are restricted in access or lack vital information dimensions, complicating meaningful comparison and benchmarking in the domain. This paper presents RLKWiC, a novel dataset of Real-Life Knowledge Work in Context, derived from monitoring the computer interactions of eight participants over a span of two months. As the first publicly available dataset offering a wealth of essential information dimensions (such as explicated contexts, textual contents, and semantics), RLKWiC seeks to address the research gap in the personal information management domain, providing valuable insights for modeling user behavior.

Human knowledge provides a formal understanding of the world. Knowledge graphs that represent structural relations between entities have become an increasingly popular research direction towards cognition and human-level intelligence. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of knowledge graph covering overall research topics about 1) knowledge graph representation learning, 2) knowledge acquisition and completion, 3) temporal knowledge graph, and 4) knowledge-aware applications, and summarize recent breakthroughs and perspective directions to facilitate future research. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. Knowledge graph embedding is organized from four aspects of representation space, scoring function, encoding models, and auxiliary information. For knowledge acquisition, especially knowledge graph completion, embedding methods, path inference, and logical rule reasoning, are reviewed. We further explore several emerging topics, including meta relational learning, commonsense reasoning, and temporal knowledge graphs. To facilitate future research on knowledge graphs, we also provide a curated collection of datasets and open-source libraries on different tasks. In the end, we have a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.

The exponential growth of knowledge and the increasing complexity of interdisciplinary research pose significant challenges for researchers, including information overload and difficulties in exploring novel ideas. The advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown great potential in enhancing idea proposals, but how to effectively utilize large models for reasonable idea proposal has not been thoroughly explored. This paper proposes a scientific paper idea proposer (SciPIP). Based on a user-provided research background, SciPIP retrieves helpful papers from a literature database while leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to generate more novel and feasible ideas. To this end, 1) we construct a literature retrieval database, extracting lots of papers' multi-dimension information for fast access. Then, a literature retrieval method based on semantics, entity, and citation co-occurrences is proposed to search relevant literature from multiple aspects based on the user-provided background. 2) After literature retrieval, we introduce dual-path idea proposal strategies, where one path infers solutions from the retrieved literature and the other path generates original ideas through model brainstorming. We then combine the two to achieve a good balance between feasibility and originality. Through extensive experiments on the natural language processing (NLP) field, we demonstrate that SciPIP can retrieve citations similar to those of existing top conference papers and generate many ideas consistent with them. Additionally, we evaluate the originality of other ideas generated by SciPIP using large language models, further validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code and the database are released at https://github.com/cheerss/SciPIP.

The growing popularity of data mining catalyses the researchers to explore various exciting aspects of education. Early prediction of student performance is an emerging area among them. The researchers have used various predictors in performance modelling studies. Although prior cognition can affect student performance, establishing their relationship is still an open research challenge. Quantifying the knowledge from readily available data is the major challenge here. We have proposed a semantic approach for this purpose. Association mining on nearly 0.35 million observations establishes that prior cognition impacts the student performance. The proposed approach of measuring domain knowledge can help the early performance modelling studies to use it as a predictor.

Access to external knowledge is essential for many natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and dialogue. Existing methods often rely on a parametric model that stores knowledge in its parameters, or use a retrieval-augmented model that has access to an external knowledge source. Parametric and retrieval-augmented models have complementary strengths in terms of computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. To combine the strength of both approaches, we propose the Efficient Memory-Augmented Transformer (EMAT) -- it encodes external knowledge into a key-value memory and exploits the fast maximum inner product search for memory querying. We also introduce pre-training tasks that allow EMAT to encode informative key-value representations, and to learn an implicit strategy to integrate multiple memory slots into the transformer. Experiments on various knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering and dialogue datasets show that, simply augmenting parametric models (T5-base) using our method produces more accurate results (e.g., 25.8 -> 44.3 EM on NQ) while retaining a high throughput (e.g., 1000 queries/s on NQ). Compared to retrieval-augmented models, EMAT runs substantially faster across the board and produces more accurate results on WoW and ELI5. Our code and datasets are available at https://github. com/uclnlp/EMAT.

The concept of Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of attention over the last decade. In particular, AI-based tools have been employed in several scenarios and are, by now, pervading our everyday life. Nonetheless, most of these systems lack many capabilities that we would naturally consider to be included in a notion of "intelligence". In this work, we present an architecture that, inspired by the cognitive theory known as Thinking Fast and Slow by D. Kahneman, is tasked with solving planning problems in different settings, specifically: classical and multi-agent epistemic. The system proposed is an instance of a more general AI paradigm, referred to as SOFAI (for Slow and Fast AI). SOFAI exploits multiple solving approaches, with different capabilities that characterize them as either fast or slow, and a metacognitive module to regulate them. This combination of components, which roughly reflects the human reasoning process according to D. Kahneman, allowed us to enhance the reasoning process that, in this case, is concerned with planning in two different settings. The behavior of this system is then compared to state-of-the-art solvers, showing that the newly introduced system presents better results in terms of generality, solving a wider set of problems with an acceptable trade-off between solving times and solution accuracy.

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. However, such a paradigm fails to comprehensively differentiate the fine-grained language and cognitive skills, rendering the lack of sufficient interpretation to LLMs' capabilities. In this paper, we present FAC^2E, a framework for Fine-grAined and Cognition-grounded LLMs' Capability Evaluation. Specifically, we formulate LLMs' evaluation in a multi-dimensional and explainable manner by dissociating the language-related capabilities and the cognition-related ones. Besides, through extracting the intermediate reasoning from LLMs, we further break down the process of applying a specific capability into three sub-steps: recalling relevant knowledge, utilizing knowledge, and solving problems. Finally, FAC^2E evaluates each sub-step of each fine-grained capability, providing a two-faceted diagnosis for LLMs. Utilizing FAC^2E, we identify a common shortfall in knowledge utilization among models and propose a straightforward, knowledge-enhanced method to mitigate this issue. Our results not only showcase promising performance enhancements but also highlight a direction for future LLM advancements.

For an artificial creative agent, an essential driver of the search for novelty is a value function which is often provided by the system designer or users. We argue that an important barrier for progress in creativity research is the inability of these systems to develop their own notion of value for novelty. We propose a notion of knowledge-driven creativity that circumvent the need for an externally imposed value function, allowing the system to explore based on what it has learned from a set of referential objects. The concept is illustrated by a specific knowledge model provided by a deep generative autoencoder. Using the described system, we train a knowledge model on a set of digit images and we use the same model to build coherent sets of new digits that do not belong to known digit types.

We introduce KnowledgeMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in applying financial knowledge to solve complex math word problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, KnowledgeMath includes 1,259 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content and require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 14 LLMs with different prompting strategies like Chain-of-Thoughts and Program-of-Thoughts. The current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4 with Program-of-Thoughts) achieves only 45.4% accuracy, leaving substantial room for improvement. While knowledge-augmented LLMs can improve the performance (e.g., from 23.9% to 32.0% for GPT-3.5), it is still significantly lower the estimated human expert performance of 94%. We believe that KnowledgeMath can facilitate future research on domain-specific knowledge retrieval and augmentation into the math word problem-solving process. We will release the benchmark and code at https://github.com/yale-nlp/KnowledgeMath.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities in familiar contexts, but struggle when the context conflicts with their parametric knowledge. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce CounterLogic, a dataset containing 1,800 examples across 9 logical schemas, explicitly designed to evaluate logical reasoning through counterfactual (hypothetical knowledge-conflicting) scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of 11 LLMs across 6 different datasets reveals a consistent performance degradation, with accuracies dropping by 27% on average when reasoning through counterfactual information. We propose Self-Segregate, a prompting method enabling metacognitive awareness (explicitly identifying knowledge conflicts) before reasoning. Our method dramatically narrows the average performance gaps from 27% to just 11%, while significantly increasing the overall accuracy (+7.5%). We discuss the implications of these findings and draw parallels to human cognitive processes, particularly on how humans disambiguate conflicting information during reasoning tasks. Our findings offer practical insights for understanding and enhancing LLMs reasoning capabilities in real-world applications, especially where models must logically reason independently of their factual knowledge.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made significant strides in recent years, yet it continues to struggle with a fundamental aspect of cognition present in all animals: common sense. Current AI systems, including those designed for complex tasks like autonomous driving, problem-solving challenges such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC), and conversational benchmarks like the Turing Test, often lack the ability to adapt to new situations without extensive prior knowledge. This manuscript argues that integrating common sense into AI systems is essential for achieving true autonomy and unlocking the full societal and commercial value of AI. We propose a shift in the order of knowledge acquisition emphasizing the importance of developing AI systems that start from minimal prior knowledge and are capable of contextual learning, adaptive reasoning, and embodiment -- even within abstract domains. Additionally, we highlight the need to rethink the AI software stack to address this foundational challenge. Without common sense, AI systems may never reach true autonomy, instead exhibiting asymptotic performance that approaches theoretical ideals like AIXI but remains unattainable in practice due to infinite resource and computation requirements. While scaling AI models and passing benchmarks like the Turing Test have brought significant advancements in applications that do not require autonomy, these approaches alone are insufficient to achieve autonomous AI with common sense. By redefining existing benchmarks and challenges to enforce constraints that require genuine common sense, and by broadening our understanding of embodiment to include both physical and abstract domains, we can encourage the development of AI systems better equipped to handle the complexities of real-world and abstract environments.

Despite the promising few-shot ability of large language models (LLMs), the standard paradigm of In-context Learning (ICL) suffers the disadvantages of susceptibility to selected demonstrations and the intricacy to generate these demonstrations. In this paper, we raise the fundamental question that whether human-generated demonstrations are necessary for ICL. To answer this question, we propose self-contemplation prompting strategy (SEC), a paradigm free from human-crafted demonstrations. The key point of SEC is that, instead of using hand-crafted examples as demonstrations in ICL, SEC asks LLMs to first create demonstrations on their own, based on which the final output is generated. SEC is a flexible framework and can be adapted to both the vanilla ICL and the chain-of-thought (CoT), but with greater ease: as the manual-generation process of both examples and rationale can be saved. Extensive experiments in arithmetic reasoning, commonsense reasoning, multi-task language understanding, and code generation benchmarks, show that SEC, which does not require hand-crafted demonstrations, significantly outperforms the zero-shot learning strategy, and achieves comparable results to ICL with hand-crafted demonstrations. This demonstrates that, for many tasks, contemporary LLMs possess a sufficient level of competence to exclusively depend on their own capacity for decision making, removing the need for external training data. Code is available at https://github.com/ruili33/SEC.

While understanding the knowledge boundaries of LLMs is crucial to prevent hallucination, research on knowledge boundaries of LLMs has predominantly focused on English. In this work, we present the first study to analyze how LLMs recognize knowledge boundaries across different languages by probing their internal representations when processing known and unknown questions in multiple languages. Our empirical studies reveal three key findings: 1) LLMs' perceptions of knowledge boundaries are encoded in the middle to middle-upper layers across different languages. 2) Language differences in knowledge boundary perception follow a linear structure, which motivates our proposal of a training-free alignment method that effectively transfers knowledge boundary perception ability across languages, thereby helping reduce hallucination risk in low-resource languages; 3) Fine-tuning on bilingual question pair translation further enhances LLMs' recognition of knowledge boundaries across languages. Given the absence of standard testbeds for cross-lingual knowledge boundary analysis, we construct a multilingual evaluation suite comprising three representative types of knowledge boundary data. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/LLM-Multilingual-Knowledge-Boundaries.

Models of language trained on very large corpora have been demonstrated useful for NLP. As fixed artifacts, they have become the object of intense study, with many researchers "probing" the extent to which linguistic abstractions, factual and commonsense knowledge, and reasoning abilities they acquire and readily demonstrate. Building on this line of work, we consider a new question: for types of knowledge a language model learns, when during (pre)training are they acquired? We plot probing performance across iterations, using RoBERTa as a case study. Among our findings: linguistic knowledge is acquired fast, stably, and robustly across domains. Facts and commonsense are slower and more domain-sensitive. Reasoning abilities are, in general, not stably acquired. As new datasets, pretraining protocols, and probes emerge, we believe that probing-across-time analyses can help researchers understand the complex, intermingled learning that these models undergo and guide us toward more efficient approaches that accomplish necessary learning faster.

Large pre-trained language models have demonstrated their proficiency in storing factual knowledge within their parameters and achieving remarkable results when fine-tuned for downstream natural language processing tasks. Nonetheless, their capacity to access and manipulate knowledge with precision remains constrained, resulting in performance disparities on knowledge-intensive tasks when compared to task-specific architectures. Additionally, the challenges of providing provenance for model decisions and maintaining up-to-date world knowledge persist as open research frontiers. To address these limitations, the integration of pre-trained models with differentiable access mechanisms to explicit non-parametric memory emerges as a promising solution. This survey delves into the realm of language models (LMs) augmented with the ability to tap into external knowledge sources, including external knowledge bases and search engines. While adhering to the standard objective of predicting missing tokens, these augmented LMs leverage diverse, possibly non-parametric external modules to augment their contextual processing capabilities, departing from the conventional language modeling paradigm. Through an exploration of current advancements in augmenting large language models with knowledge, this work concludes that this emerging research direction holds the potential to address prevalent issues in traditional LMs, such as hallucinations, un-grounded responses, and scalability challenges.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that LLMs process concepts of varying complexities in different layers, introducing the idea of "Concept Depth" to suggest that more complex concepts are typically acquired in deeper layers. Specifically, we categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction, defining them in the order of increasing complexity within factual, emotional, and inferential tasks. We conduct extensive probing experiments using layer-wise representations across various LLM families (Gemma, LLaMA, QWen) on various datasets spanning the three domains of tasks. Our findings reveal that models could efficiently conduct probing for simpler tasks in shallow layers, and more complex tasks typically necessitate deeper layers for accurate understanding. Additionally, we examine how external factors, such as adding noise to the input and quantizing the model weights, might affect layer-wise representations. Our findings suggest that these factors can impede the development of a conceptual understanding of LLMs until deeper layers are explored. We hope that our proposed concept and experimental insights will enhance the understanding of the mechanisms underlying LLMs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Luckfort/CD.

Large Language Models (LLMs) store and retrieve vast amounts of factual knowledge acquired during pre-training. Prior research has localized and identified mechanisms behind knowledge recall; however, it has primarily focused on English monolingual models. The question of how these processes generalize to other languages and multilingual LLMs remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of two highly multilingual LLMs. We assess the extent to which previously identified components and mechanisms of factual recall in English apply to a multilingual context. Then, we examine when language plays a role in the recall process, uncovering evidence of language-independent and language-dependent mechanisms.

Despite significant advancements, there is a limited understanding of how large language models (LLMs) utilize knowledge for reasoning. To address this, we propose a method that deconstructs complex real-world questions into a graph, representing each question as a node with parent nodes of background knowledge needed to solve the question. We develop the DepthQA dataset, deconstructing questions into three depths: (i) recalling conceptual knowledge, (ii) applying procedural knowledge, and (iii) analyzing strategic knowledge. Based on a hierarchical graph, we quantify forward discrepancy, discrepancies in LLMs' performance on simpler sub-problems versus complex questions. We also measure backward discrepancy, where LLMs answer complex questions but struggle with simpler ones. Our analysis shows that smaller models have more discrepancies than larger models. Additionally, guiding models from simpler to complex questions through multi-turn interactions improves performance across model sizes, highlighting the importance of structured intermediate steps in knowledge reasoning. This work enhances our understanding of LLM reasoning and suggests ways to improve their problem-solving abilities.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding and generating responses to complex queries through large-scale pre-training. However, the efficacy of these models in memorizing and reasoning among large-scale structured knowledge, especially world knowledge that explicitly covers abundant factual information remains questionable. Addressing this gap, our research investigates whether LLMs can effectively store, recall, and reason with knowledge on a large scale comparable to latest knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata. Specifically, we focus on three crucial aspects to study the viability: (1) the efficiency of LLMs with different sizes in memorizing the exact knowledge in the large-scale KB; (2) the flexibility of recalling the memorized knowledge in response to natural language queries; (3) the capability to infer new knowledge through reasoning. Our findings indicate that while LLMs hold promise as large-scale KBs capable of retrieving and responding with flexibility, enhancements in their reasoning capabilities are necessary to fully realize their potential.

Knowledge probing assesses to which degree a language model (LM) has successfully learned relational knowledge during pre-training. Probing is an inexpensive way to compare LMs of different sizes and training configurations. However, previous approaches rely on the objective function used in pre-training LMs and are thus applicable only to masked or causal LMs. As a result, comparing different types of LMs becomes impossible. To address this, we propose an approach that uses an LM's inherent ability to estimate the log-likelihood of any given textual statement. We carefully design an evaluation dataset of 7,731 instances (40,916 in a larger variant) from which we produce alternative statements for each relational fact, one of which is correct. We then evaluate whether an LM correctly assigns the highest log-likelihood to the correct statement. Our experimental evaluation of 22 common LMs shows that our proposed framework, BEAR, can effectively probe for knowledge across different LM types. We release the BEAR datasets and an open-source framework that implements the probing approach to the research community to facilitate the evaluation and development of LMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in reasoning and planning when integrated with tree-search-based prompting methods. However, since these methods ignore the previous search experiences, they often make the same mistakes in the search process. To address this issue, we introduce Reflection on search Trees (RoT), an LLM reflection framework designed to improve the performance of tree-search-based prompting methods. It uses a strong LLM to summarize guidelines from previous tree search experiences to enhance the ability of a weak LLM. The guidelines are instructions about solving this task through tree search which can prevent the weak LLMs from making similar mistakes in the past search process. In addition, we proposed a novel state selection method, which identifies the critical information from historical search processes to help RoT generate more specific and meaningful guidelines. In our extensive experiments, we find that RoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs in reasoning or planning tasks with various tree-search-based prompting methods (e.g., BFS and MCTS). Non-tree-search-based prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can also benefit from RoT guidelines since RoT can provide task-specific knowledge collected from the search experience.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized decision-making by breaking down complex problems into more manageable language sequences referred to as ``thoughts''. An effective thought design should consider three key perspectives: performance, efficiency, and flexibility. However, existing thought can at most exhibit two of these attributes. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel thought prompting approach called ``Everything of Thoughts'' (XoT) to defy the law of ``Penrose triangle of existing thought paradigms. XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge into thoughts, thereby enhancing LLMs' capabilities and enabling them to generalize to unseen problems efficiently. Through the utilization of the MCTS-LLM collaborative thought revision framework, this approach autonomously produces high-quality comprehensive cognitive mappings with minimal LLM interactions. Additionally, XoT empowers LLMs to engage in unconstrained thinking, allowing for flexible cognitive mappings for problems with multiple solutions.

In applications such as personal assistants, large language models (LLMs) must consider the user's personal information and preferences. However, LLMs lack the inherent ability to learn from user interactions. This paper explores capturing personal information from user prompts using ontology and knowledge-graph approaches. We use a subset of the KNOW ontology, which models personal information, to train the language model on these concepts. We then evaluate the success of knowledge capture using a specially constructed dataset. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/HaltiaAI/paper-PTODSKC

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong ability to assist people and show "sparks of intelligence". However, several open challenges hinder their wider application: such as concerns over privacy, tendencies to produce hallucinations, and difficulties in handling long contexts. In this work, we address those challenges by introducing the Retrieval-Augmented Thought Process (RATP). Given access to external knowledge, RATP formulates the thought generation of LLMs as a multiple-step decision process. To optimize such a thought process, RATP leverages Monte-Carlo Tree Search, and learns a Q-value estimator that permits cost-efficient inference. In addressing the task of question-answering with private data, where ethical and security concerns limit LLM training methods, RATP achieves a 50% improvement over existing in-context retrieval-augmented language models.

We show that existing unsupervised methods on large language model (LLM) activations do not discover knowledge -- instead they seem to discover whatever feature of the activations is most prominent. The idea behind unsupervised knowledge elicitation is that knowledge satisfies a consistency structure, which can be used to discover knowledge. We first prove theoretically that arbitrary features (not just knowledge) satisfy the consistency structure of a particular leading unsupervised knowledge-elicitation method, contrast-consistent search (Burns et al. - arXiv:2212.03827). We then present a series of experiments showing settings in which unsupervised methods result in classifiers that do not predict knowledge, but instead predict a different prominent feature. We conclude that existing unsupervised methods for discovering latent knowledge are insufficient, and we contribute sanity checks to apply to evaluating future knowledge elicitation methods. Conceptually, we hypothesise that the identification issues explored here, e.g. distinguishing a model's knowledge from that of a simulated character's, will persist for future unsupervised methods.

Language models can store vast amounts of factual knowledge, but their ability to use this knowledge for logical reasoning remains questionable. This paper explores a language model's ability to manipulate its stored knowledge during inference. We focus on four manipulation types: retrieval (e.g., "What is person A's attribute X"), classification (e.g., "Is A's attribute X even or odd?"), comparison (e.g., "Is A greater than B in attribute X?") and inverse search (e.g., "Which person's attribute X equals T?") We observe that pre-trained language models like GPT2/3/4 excel in knowledge retrieval but struggle with simple classification or comparison tasks unless Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) are employed during both training and inference. They also perform poorly in inverse knowledge search, irrespective of the prompts. Our primary contribution is a synthetic dataset for a controlled experiment that confirms these inherent weaknesses: a language model cannot efficiently manipulate knowledge from pre-training data, even when such knowledge is perfectly stored and fully extractable in the models, and despite adequate instruct fine-tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks but still face challenges such as hallucinations. One potential reason for hallucinations is the lack of relevant knowledge or context. Thus, a promising solution to mitigate this issue involves instructing LLMs to respond with "I do not know" when a question falls outside their knowledge domain or the provided context. However, in this work, we observed that LLMs struggle to admit their lack of knowledge, primarily due to existing instruction datasets designed to encourage specific answers. To improve large language models' capability to recognize the boundaries of their knowledge, we propose a novel approach called uncertainty-sensitive tuning. This method involves two-stage training designed for uncertainty recognition and prompt-sensitive activation. In the first stage, we guide the LLM to reject unknown questions. In the second stage, we recover the decreased performance in QA tasks by incorporating designed causal instructions. By leveraging this method, we aim to enhance the model's ability to identify areas of uncertainty. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty-sensitive tuning method significantly improves the performance of the Llama2-chat-7B model. Specifically, it achieves a substantial 34.7% improvement in handling questions involving knowledge gaps compared to the original model. Moreover, our approach outperforms GPT-4, exhibiting a 9.4% increase in overall performance. We open-source the model and code on GitHub.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their impressive abilities in various reasoning and decision-making tasks. However, the quality and coherence of the reasoning process can still benefit from enhanced introspection and self-reflection. In this paper, we introduce Multiplex CoT (Chain of Thought), a method that enables LLMs to simulate a form of self-review while reasoning, by initiating double Chain of Thought (CoT) thinking. Multiplex CoT leverages the power of iterative reasoning, where the model generates an initial chain of thought and subsequently critiques and refines this reasoning with a second round of thought generation. This recursive approach allows for more coherent, logical, and robust answers, improving the overall decision-making process. We demonstrate how this method can be effectively implemented using simple prompt engineering in existing LLM architectures, achieving an effect similar to that of the Learning-Refinement Model (LRM) without the need for additional training. Additionally, we present a practical guide for implementing the method in Google Colab, enabling easy integration into real-world applications.

While prior work has explored whether large language models (LLMs) possess a "theory of mind" (ToM) - the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others - there has been little work testing whether LLMs can implicitly apply such knowledge to predict behavior, or to judge whether an observed behavior is rational. Such skills are critical for appropriate interaction in social environments. We create a new dataset, SimpleTom, containing concise, diverse stories (e.g., "The can of Pringles has moldy chips in it. Mary picks up the can in the supermarket and walks to the cashier."), each with three questions that test different degrees of ToM reasoning, asking models to predict (a) mental state ("Is Mary aware of the mold?"), (b) behavior ("Will Mary pay for the chips or report the mold?"), and (c) judgment ("Mary paid for the chips. Was that reasonable?"). To our knowledge, SimpleToM is the first dataset to systematically explore downstream reasoning requiring knowledge of mental states in realistic scenarios. Our experimental results are intriguing: While most models can reliably predict mental state on our dataset (a), they often fail to correctly predict the behavior (b), and fare even worse at judging whether given behaviors are reasonable (c), despite being correctly aware of the protagonist's mental state should make such secondary predictions obvious. We further show that we can help models do better at (b) and (c) via interventions such as reminding the model of its earlier mental state answer and mental-state-specific chain-of-thought prompting, raising the action prediction accuracies (e.g., from 49.5% to 93.5% for GPT-4o) and judgment accuracies (e.g., from 15.3% to 94.7% in GPT-4o). While this shows that models can be coaxed to perform well, it requires task-specific interventions, and the natural model performances remain low, a cautionary tale for LLM deployment.

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to hallucinations-outputs that are ungrounded, factually incorrect, or inconsistent with prior generations. We focus on close-book Question Answering (CBQA), where previous work has not fully addressed the distinction between two possible kinds of hallucinations, namely, whether the model (1) does not hold the correct answer in its parameters or (2) answers incorrectly despite having the required knowledge. We argue that distinguishing these cases is crucial for detecting and mitigating hallucinations. Specifically, case (2) may be mitigated by intervening in the model's internal computation, as the knowledge resides within the model's parameters. In contrast, in case (1) there is no parametric knowledge to leverage for mitigation, so it should be addressed by resorting to an external knowledge source or abstaining. To help distinguish between the two cases, we introduce Wrong Answer despite having Correct Knowledge (WACK), an approach for constructing model-specific datasets for the second hallucination type. Our probing experiments indicate that the two kinds of hallucinations are represented differently in the model's inner states. Next, we show that datasets constructed using WACK exhibit variations across models, demonstrating that even when models share knowledge of certain facts, they still vary in the specific examples that lead to hallucinations. Finally, we show that training a probe on our WACK datasets leads to better hallucination detection of case (2) hallucinations than using the common generic one-size-fits-all datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/technion-cs-nlp/hallucination-mitigation .

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

When writing and talking, people sometimes pause to think. Although reasoning-focused works have often framed reasoning as a method of answering questions or completing agentic tasks, reasoning is implicit in almost all written text. For example, this applies to the steps not stated between the lines of a proof or to the theory of mind underlying a conversation. In the Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR, Zelikman et al. 2022), useful thinking is learned by inferring rationales from few-shot examples in question-answering and learning from those that lead to a correct answer. This is a highly constrained setting -- ideally, a language model could instead learn to infer unstated rationales in arbitrary text. We present Quiet-STaR, a generalization of STaR in which LMs learn to generate rationales at each token to explain future text, improving their predictions. We address key challenges, including 1) the computational cost of generating continuations, 2) the fact that the LM does not initially know how to generate or use internal thoughts, and 3) the need to predict beyond individual next tokens. To resolve these, we propose a tokenwise parallel sampling algorithm, using learnable tokens indicating a thought's start and end, and an extended teacher-forcing technique. Encouragingly, generated rationales disproportionately help model difficult-to-predict tokens and improve the LM's ability to directly answer difficult questions. In particular, after continued pretraining of an LM on a corpus of internet text with Quiet-STaR, we find zero-shot improvements on GSM8K (5.9%rightarrow10.9%) and CommonsenseQA (36.3%rightarrow47.2%) and observe a perplexity improvement of difficult tokens in natural text. Crucially, these improvements require no fine-tuning on these tasks. Quiet-STaR marks a step towards LMs that can learn to reason in a more general and scalable way.

Language has long been conceived as an essential tool for human reasoning. The breakthrough of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked significant research interest in leveraging these models to tackle complex reasoning tasks. Researchers have moved beyond simple autoregressive token generation by introducing the concept of "thought" -- a sequence of tokens representing intermediate steps in the reasoning process. This innovative paradigm enables LLMs' to mimic complex human reasoning processes, such as tree search and reflective thinking. Recently, an emerging trend of learning to reason has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to train LLMs to master reasoning processes. This approach enables the automatic generation of high-quality reasoning trajectories through trial-and-error search algorithms, significantly expanding LLMs' reasoning capacity by providing substantially more training data. Furthermore, recent studies demonstrate that encouraging LLMs to "think" with more tokens during test-time inference can further significantly boost reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the train-time and test-time scaling combined to show a new research frontier -- a path toward Large Reasoning Model. The introduction of OpenAI's o1 series marks a significant milestone in this research direction. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent progress in LLM reasoning. We begin by introducing the foundational background of LLMs and then explore the key technical components driving the development of large reasoning models, with a focus on automated data construction, learning-to-reason techniques, and test-time scaling. We also analyze popular open-source projects at building large reasoning models, and conclude with open challenges and future research directions.

Despite their success at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, large language models (LLMs) still struggle to effectively leverage knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks, manifesting limitations such as generating incomplete, non-factual, or illogical answers. These limitations stem from inadequate knowledge awareness of LLMs during vanilla fine-tuning. To address these problems, we propose a knowledge-aware fine-tuning (KnowTuning) method to explicitly and implicitly improve the knowledge awareness of LLMs. We devise an explicit knowledge-aware generation stage to train LLMs to explicitly identify knowledge triples in answers. We also propose an implicit knowledge-aware comparison stage to train LLMs to implicitly distinguish between reliable and unreliable knowledge, in three aspects: completeness, factuality, and logicality. Extensive experiments on both generic and medical question answering (QA) datasets confirm the effectiveness of KnowTuning, through automatic and human evaluations, across various sizes of LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate that the improvements of KnowTuning generalize to unseen QA datasets.

This paper examines the extent to which large language models (LLMs) have developed higher-order theory of mind (ToM); the human ability to reason about multiple mental and emotional states in a recursive manner (e.g. I think that you believe that she knows). This paper builds on prior work by introducing a handwritten test suite -- Multi-Order Theory of Mind Q&A -- and using it to compare the performance of five LLMs to a newly gathered adult human benchmark. We find that GPT-4 and Flan-PaLM reach adult-level and near adult-level performance on ToM tasks overall, and that GPT-4 exceeds adult performance on 6th order inferences. Our results suggest that there is an interplay between model size and finetuning for the realisation of ToM abilities, and that the best-performing LLMs have developed a generalised capacity for ToM. Given the role that higher-order ToM plays in a wide range of cooperative and competitive human behaviours, these findings have significant implications for user-facing LLM applications.

Metacognitive knowledge refers to humans' intuitive knowledge of their own thinking and reasoning processes. Today's best LLMs clearly possess some reasoning processes. The paper gives evidence that they also have metacognitive knowledge, including ability to name skills and procedures to apply given a task. We explore this primarily in context of math reasoning, developing a prompt-guided interaction procedure to get a powerful LLM to assign sensible skill labels to math questions, followed by having it perform semantic clustering to obtain coarser families of skill labels. These coarse skill labels look interpretable to humans. To validate that these skill labels are meaningful and relevant to the LLM's reasoning processes we perform the following experiments. (a) We ask GPT-4 to assign skill labels to training questions in math datasets GSM8K and MATH. (b) When using an LLM to solve the test questions, we present it with the full list of skill labels and ask it to identify the skill needed. Then it is presented with randomly selected exemplar solved questions associated with that skill label. This improves accuracy on GSM8k and MATH for several strong LLMs, including code-assisted models. The methodology presented is domain-agnostic, even though this article applies it to math problems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown extraordinary capabilities in understanding and generating text that closely mirrors human communication. However, a primary limitation lies in the significant computational demands during training, arising from their extensive parameterization. This challenge is further intensified by the dynamic nature of the world, necessitating frequent updates to LLMs to correct outdated information or integrate new knowledge, thereby ensuring their continued relevance. Note that many applications demand continual model adjustments post-training to address deficiencies or undesirable behaviors. There is an increasing interest in efficient, lightweight methods for on-the-fly model modifications. To this end, recent years have seen a burgeoning in the techniques of knowledge editing for LLMs, which aim to efficiently modify LLMs' behaviors within specific domains while preserving overall performance across various inputs. In this paper, we first define the knowledge editing problem and then provide a comprehensive review of cutting-edge approaches. Drawing inspiration from educational and cognitive research theories, we propose a unified categorization criterion that classifies knowledge editing methods into three groups: resorting to external knowledge, merging knowledge into the model, and editing intrinsic knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce a new benchmark, KnowEdit, for a comprehensive empirical evaluation of representative knowledge editing approaches. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of knowledge location, which can provide a deeper understanding of the knowledge structures inherent within LLMs. Finally, we discuss several potential applications of knowledge editing, outlining its broad and impactful implications.

Open-ended algorithms aim to learn new, interesting behaviors forever. That requires a vast environment search space, but there are thus infinitely many possible tasks. Even after filtering for tasks the current agent can learn (i.e., learning progress), countless learnable yet uninteresting tasks remain (e.g., minor variations of previously learned tasks). An Achilles Heel of open-endedness research is the inability to quantify (and thus prioritize) tasks that are not just learnable, but also interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel). We propose solving this problem by Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI). The insight is that we can utilize foundation models (FMs) as a model of interestingness (MoI), because they already internalize human concepts of interestingness from training on vast amounts of human-generated data, where humans naturally write about what they find interesting or boring. We show that FM-based MoIs improve open-ended learning by focusing on tasks that are both learnable and interesting, outperforming baselines based on uniform task sampling or learning progress alone. This approach has the potential to dramatically advance the ability to intelligently select which tasks to focus on next (i.e., auto-curricula), and could be seen as AI selecting its own next task to learn, facilitating self-improving AI and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website at https://www.jennyzhangzt.com/omni/

External knowledge (a.k.a. side information) plays a critical role in zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to predict with unseen classes that have never appeared in training data. Several kinds of external knowledge, such as text and attribute, have been widely investigated, but they alone are limited with incomplete semantics. Some very recent studies thus propose to use Knowledge Graph (KG) due to its high expressivity and compatibility for representing kinds of knowledge. However, the ZSL community is still in short of standard benchmarks for studying and comparing different external knowledge settings and different KG-based ZSL methods. In this paper, we proposed six resources covering three tasks, i.e., zero-shot image classification (ZS-IMGC), zero-shot relation extraction (ZS-RE), and zero-shot KG completion (ZS-KGC). Each resource has a normal ZSL benchmark and a KG containing semantics ranging from text to attribute, from relational knowledge to logical expressions. We have clearly presented these resources including their construction, statistics, data formats and usage cases w.r.t. different ZSL methods. More importantly, we have conducted a comprehensive benchmarking study, with two general and state-of-the-art methods, two setting-specific methods and one interpretable method. We discussed and compared different ZSL paradigms w.r.t. different external knowledge settings, and found that our resources have great potential for developing more advanced ZSL methods and more solutions for applying KGs for augmenting machine learning. All the resources are available at https://github.com/China-UK-ZSL/Resources_for_KZSL.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive proficiency in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which involve increasingly complex reasoning. Knowledge reasoning, a primary type of reasoning, aims at deriving new knowledge from existing one.While it has been widely studied in the context of knowledge graphs (KGs), knowledge reasoning in LLMs remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Knowledge, a comprehensive framework for knowledge reasoning, including methodologies for both dataset construction and model learning. For dataset construction, we create KnowReason via rule mining on KGs. For model learning, we observe rule overfitting induced by naive training. Hence, we enhance CoK with a trial-and-error mechanism that simulates the human process of internal knowledge exploration. We conduct extensive experiments with KnowReason. Our results show the effectiveness of CoK in refining LLMs in not only knowledge reasoning, but also general reasoning benchmarkms.

Extensive knowledge graphs (KGs) have been constructed to facilitate knowledge-driven tasks across various scenarios. However, existing work usually develops separate reasoning models for different KGs, lacking the ability to generalize and transfer knowledge across diverse KGs and reasoning settings. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based KG foundation model via in-context learning, namely KG-ICL, to achieve a universal reasoning ability. Specifically, we introduce a prompt graph centered with a query-related example fact as context to understand the query relation. To encode prompt graphs with the generalization ability to unseen entities and relations in queries, we first propose a unified tokenizer that maps entities and relations in prompt graphs to predefined tokens. Then, we propose two message passing neural networks to perform prompt encoding and KG reasoning, respectively. We conduct evaluation on 43 different KGs in both transductive and inductive settings. Results indicate that the proposed KG-ICL outperforms baselines on most datasets, showcasing its outstanding generalization and universal reasoning capabilities. The source code is accessible on GitHub: https://github.com/nju-websoft/KG-ICL.

Large language/multimodal models (LLMs/LMMs) store extensive pre-trained knowledge but struggle to maintain consistency with real-world updates, making it difficult to avoid catastrophic forgetting while acquiring evolving knowledge. Previous work focused on constructing textual knowledge datasets and exploring knowledge injection in LLMs, lacking exploration of multimodal evolving knowledge injection in LMMs. To address this, we propose the EVOKE benchmark to evaluate LMMs' ability to inject multimodal evolving knowledge in real-world scenarios. Meanwhile, a comprehensive evaluation of multimodal evolving knowledge injection revealed two challenges: (1) Existing knowledge injection methods perform terribly on evolving knowledge. (2) Supervised fine-tuning causes catastrophic forgetting, particularly instruction following ability is severely compromised. Additionally, we provide pathways and find that: (1) Text knowledge augmentation during the training phase improves performance, while image augmentation cannot achieve it. (2) Continual learning methods, especially Replay and MoELoRA, effectively mitigate forgetting. Our findings indicate that current knowledge injection methods have many limitations on evolving knowledge, which motivates further research on more efficient and stable knowledge injection methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in handling complex tasks requiring both extensive knowledge and reasoning abilities. However, the existing LLM inference pipeline operates as an opaque process without explicit separation between knowledge retrieval and reasoning steps, making the model's decision-making process unclear and disorganized. This ambiguity can lead to issues such as hallucinations and knowledge forgetting, which significantly impact the reliability of LLMs in high-stakes domains. In this paper, we propose a new inference paradigm that decomposes the complex inference process into two distinct and clear actions: (1) memory recall: which retrieves relevant knowledge, and (2) reasoning: which performs logical steps based on the recalled knowledge. To facilitate this decomposition, we introduce two special tokens memory and reason, guiding the model to distinguish between steps that require knowledge retrieval and those that involve reasoning. Our experiment results show that this decomposition not only improves model performance but also enhances the interpretability of the inference process, enabling users to identify sources of error and refine model responses effectively. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Disentangling-Memory-and-Reasoning.

Recent research developing neural network architectures with external memory have often used the benchmark bAbI question and answering dataset which provides a challenging number of tasks requiring reasoning. Here we employed a classic associative inference task from the memory-based reasoning neuroscience literature in order to more carefully probe the reasoning capacity of existing memory-augmented architectures. This task is thought to capture the essence of reasoning -- the appreciation of distant relationships among elements distributed across multiple facts or memories. Surprisingly, we found that current architectures struggle to reason over long distance associations. Similar results were obtained on a more complex task involving finding the shortest path between nodes in a path. We therefore developed MEMO, an architecture endowed with the capacity to reason over longer distances. This was accomplished with the addition of two novel components. First, it introduces a separation between memories (facts) stored in external memory and the items that comprise these facts in external memory. Second, it makes use of an adaptive retrieval mechanism, allowing a variable number of "memory hops" before the answer is produced. MEMO is capable of solving our novel reasoning tasks, as well as match state of the art results in bAbI.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in various tasks. However, fundamentally improving them depends on high-quality datasets or computationally expensive fine-tuning. On the contrary, humans can easily improve themselves by self-thinking and memory, without external resources. In this paper, we propose a framework, MoT, to let the LLM self-improve through Memory-of-Thought, without annotated datasets and parameter updates. Specifically, MoT is divided into two stages: 1. before the test stage, the LLM pre-thinks on the unlabeled dataset and saves the high-confidence thoughts as external memory; 2. During the test stage, given a test question, the LLM recalls relevant memory to help itself reason and answer it. Experimental results show that MoT can help ChatGPT significantly improve its abilities in arithmetic reasoning, commonsense reasoning, factual reasoning, and natural language inference. Further analyses show that each component contributes critically to the improvements and MoT can lead to consistent improvements across various CoT methods and LLMs.

In a multi-turn knowledge-grounded dialog, the difference between the knowledge selected at different turns usually provides potential clues to knowledge selection, which has been largely neglected in previous research. In this paper, we propose a difference-aware knowledge selection method. It first computes the difference between the candidate knowledge sentences provided at the current turn and those chosen in the previous turns. Then, the differential information is fused with or disentangled from the contextual information to facilitate final knowledge selection. Automatic, human observational, and interactive evaluation shows that our method is able to select knowledge more accurately and generate more informative responses, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines. The codes are available at https://github.com/chujiezheng/DiffKS.

One long-term goal of machine learning research is to produce methods that are applicable to reasoning and natural language, in particular building an intelligent dialogue agent. To measure progress towards that goal, we argue for the usefulness of a set of proxy tasks that evaluate reading comprehension via question answering. Our tasks measure understanding in several ways: whether a system is able to answer questions via chaining facts, simple induction, deduction and many more. The tasks are designed to be prerequisites for any system that aims to be capable of conversing with a human. We believe many existing learning systems can currently not solve them, and hence our aim is to classify these tasks into skill sets, so that researchers can identify (and then rectify) the failings of their systems. We also extend and improve the recently introduced Memory Networks model, and show it is able to solve some, but not all, of the tasks.

The training and inference of large language models (LLMs) are together a costly process that transports knowledge from raw data to meaningful computation. Inspired by the memory hierarchy of the human brain, we reduce this cost by equipping LLMs with explicit memory, a memory format cheaper than model parameters and text retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Conceptually, with most of its knowledge externalized to explicit memories, the LLM can enjoy a smaller parameter size, training cost, and inference cost, all proportional to the amount of remaining "abstract knowledge". As a preliminary proof of concept, we train from scratch a 2.4B LLM, which achieves better performance than much larger LLMs as well as RAG models, and maintains higher decoding speed than RAG. The model is named Memory^3, since explicit memory is the third form of memory in LLMs after implicit memory (model parameters) and working memory (context key-values). We introduce a memory circuitry theory to support the externalization of knowledge, and present novel techniques including a memory sparsification mechanism that makes storage tractable and a two-stage pretraining scheme that facilitates memory formation.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to generate factually incorrect reasoning steps when the required knowledge is not available or up-to-date in models' parameters. Recent works turn to retrieving external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. Despite being promising, these chain-based methods suffer from: 1) Negative retrieval. Unnecessary or incorrect retrieval may mislead the reasoning; 2) Limited sight. Lacking the ability to look backward or forward, a local error in one step will propagate along the chain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning (ProbTree). First, LLMs translate a complex question into a query tree, in which each non-root node denotes a sub-question of its parent node. Then, probabilistic reasoning is conducted over the tree, by solving questions from leaf to root considering the confidence of both question decomposing and answering. During reasoning, for leaf nodes, LLMs choose a more confident answer from Closed-book QA that employs parametric knowledge and Open-book QA that employs retrieved external knowledge, thus eliminating the negative retrieval problem. For non-leaf nodes, with the hierarchical structure, LLMs have broader sights and are able to globally reason with the information from child nodes, thus recovering from local errors. The experiments on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effect of probabilistic tree-of-thought reasoning.

We present the first comprehensive study on automatic knowledge base construction for two prevalent commonsense knowledge graphs: ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019) and ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017). Contrary to many conventional KBs that store knowledge with canonical templates, commonsense KBs only store loosely structured open-text descriptions of knowledge. We posit that an important step toward automatic commonsense completion is the development of generative models of commonsense knowledge, and propose COMmonsEnse Transformers (COMET) that learn to generate rich and diverse commonsense descriptions in natural language. Despite the challenges of commonsense modeling, our investigation reveals promising results when implicit knowledge from deep pre-trained language models is transferred to generate explicit knowledge in commonsense knowledge graphs. Empirical results demonstrate that COMET is able to generate novel knowledge that humans rate as high quality, with up to 77.5% (ATOMIC) and 91.7% (ConceptNet) precision at top 1, which approaches human performance for these resources. Our findings suggest that using generative commonsense models for automatic commonsense KB completion could soon be a plausible alternative to extractive methods.

Current literature, aiming to surpass the "Chain-of-Thought" approach, often resorts to an external modus operandi involving halting, modifying, and then resuming the generation process to boost Large Language Models' (LLMs) reasoning capacities. This mode escalates the number of query requests, leading to increased costs, memory, and computational overheads. Addressing this, we propose the Algorithm of Thoughts -- a novel strategy that propels LLMs through algorithmic reasoning pathways, pioneering a new mode of in-context learning. By employing algorithmic examples, we exploit the innate recurrence dynamics of LLMs, expanding their idea exploration with merely one or a few queries. Our technique outperforms earlier single-query methods and stands on par with a recent multi-query strategy that employs an extensive tree search algorithm. Intriguingly, our results suggest that instructing an LLM using an algorithm can lead to performance surpassing that of the algorithm itself, hinting at LLM's inherent ability to weave its intuition into optimized searches. We probe into the underpinnings of our method's efficacy and its nuances in application.

Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.

In this paper, we propose to leverage the unique characteristics of dialogues sharing commonsense knowledge across participants, to resolve the difficulties in summarizing them. We present SICK, a framework that uses commonsense inferences as additional context. Compared to previous work that solely relies on the input dialogue, SICK uses an external knowledge model to generate a rich set of commonsense inferences and selects the most probable one with a similarity-based selection method. Built upon SICK, SICK++ utilizes commonsense as supervision, where the task of generating commonsense inferences is added upon summarizing the dialogue in a multi-task learning setting. Experimental results show that with injected commonsense knowledge, our framework generates more informative and consistent summaries than existing methods.

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data.

We automate deep step-by step reasoning in an LLM dialog thread by recursively exploring alternatives (OR-nodes) and expanding details (AND-nodes) up to a given depth. Starting from a single succinct task-specific initiator we steer the automated dialog thread to stay focussed on the task by synthesizing a prompt that summarizes the depth-first steps taken so far. Our algorithm is derived from a simple recursive descent implementation of a Horn Clause interpreter, except that we accommodate our logic engine to fit the natural language reasoning patterns LLMs have been trained on. Semantic similarity to ground-truth facts or oracle advice from another LLM instance is used to restrict the search space and validate the traces of justification steps returned as answers. At the end, the unique minimal model of a generated Horn Clause program collects the results of the reasoning process. As applications, we sketch implementations of consequence predictions, causal explanations, recommendation systems and topic-focussed exploration of scientific literature.

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

Most benchmark datasets targeting commonsense reasoning focus on everyday scenarios: physical knowledge like knowing that you could fill a cup under a waterfall [Talmor et al., 2019], social knowledge like bumping into someone is awkward [Sap et al., 2019], and other generic situations. However, there is a rich space of commonsense inferences anchored to knowledge about specific entities: for example, deciding the truthfulness of a claim "Harry Potter can teach classes on how to fly on a broomstick." Can models learn to combine entity knowledge with commonsense reasoning in this fashion? We introduce CREAK, a testbed for commonsense reasoning about entity knowledge, bridging fact-checking about entities (Harry Potter is a wizard and is skilled at riding a broomstick) with commonsense inferences (if you're good at a skill you can teach others how to do it). Our dataset consists of 13k human-authored English claims about entities that are either true or false, in addition to a small contrast set. Crowdworkers can easily come up with these statements and human performance on the dataset is high (high 90s); we argue that models should be able to blend entity knowledge and commonsense reasoning to do well here. In our experiments, we focus on the closed-book setting and observe that a baseline model finetuned on existing fact verification benchmark struggles on CREAK. Training a model on CREAK improves accuracy by a substantial margin, but still falls short of human performance. Our benchmark provides a unique probe into natural language understanding models, testing both its ability to retrieve facts (e.g., who teaches at the University of Chicago?) and unstated commonsense knowledge (e.g., butlers do not yell at guests).

Small Language Models (SLMs) are attracting attention due to the high computational demands and privacy concerns of Large Language Models (LLMs). Some studies fine-tune SLMs using Chains of Thought (CoT) data distilled from LLMs, aiming to enhance their reasoning ability. Furthermore, Some CoT distillation methods introduce external symbolic knowledge into the generation process to improve the limited knowledge memory, reasoning ability and out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of SLMs. However, the introduction of symbolic knowledge increases computational overhead and introduces potential noise. In this paper, we introduce SKIntern, an innovative approach that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process, guided by a predefined linear decay schedule under curriculum learning. By efficiently internalizing knowledge, SKIntern reduces computational overhead and speeds up the reasoning process by focusing solely on the question during inference. It outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5\%, while reducing inference costs (measured in FLOPs) by up to 4times across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of-domain (OOD) tasks. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/SKIntern.

Knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering (QA), require access to a large amount of world or domain knowledge. A common approach for knowledge-intensive tasks is to employ a retrieve-then-read pipeline that first retrieves a handful of relevant contextual documents from an external corpus such as Wikipedia and then predicts an answer conditioned on the retrieved documents. In this paper, we present a novel perspective for solving knowledge-intensive tasks by replacing document retrievers with large language model generators. We call our method generate-then-read (GenRead), which first prompts a large language model to generate contextutal documents based on a given question, and then reads the generated documents to produce the final answer. Furthermore, we propose a novel clustering-based prompting method that selects distinct prompts, resulting in the generated documents that cover different perspectives, leading to better recall over acceptable answers. We conduct extensive experiments on three different knowledge-intensive tasks, including open-domain QA, fact checking, and dialogue system. Notably, GenRead achieves 71.6 and 54.4 exact match scores on TriviaQA and WebQ, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art retrieve-then-read pipeline DPR-FiD by +4.0 and +3.9, without retrieving any documents from any external knowledge source. Lastly, we demonstrate the model performance can be further improved by combining retrieval and generation. Our code and generated documents can be found at https://github.com/wyu97/GenRead.

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly slow-thinking models, often exhibit severe hallucination, outputting incorrect content due to an inability to accurately recognize knowledge boundaries during reasoning. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can enhance complex reasoning abilities, its outcome-oriented reward mechanism often lacks factual supervision over the thinking process, further exacerbating the hallucination problem. To address the high hallucination in slow-thinking models, we propose Knowledge-enhanced RL, KnowRL. KnowRL guides models to perform fact-based slow thinking by integrating a factuality reward, based on knowledge verification, into the RL training process, helping them recognize their knowledge boundaries. KnowRL guides models to perform fact-based slow thinking by integrating a factuality reward, based on knowledge verification, into the RL training process, helping them recognize their knowledge boundaries. This targeted factual input during RL training enables the model to learn and internalize fact-based reasoning strategies. By directly rewarding adherence to facts within the reasoning steps, KnowRL fosters a more reliable thinking process. Experimental results on three hallucination evaluation datasets and two reasoning evaluation datasets demonstrate that KnowRL effectively mitigates hallucinations in slow-thinking models while maintaining their original strong reasoning capabilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowRL.

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

Understanding knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing towards trustworthy AGI. This paper reviews knowledge mechanism analysis from a novel taxonomy including knowledge utilization and evolution. Knowledge utilization delves into the mechanism of memorization, comprehension and application, and creation. Knowledge evolution focuses on the dynamic progression of knowledge within individual and group LLMs. Moreover, we discuss what knowledge LLMs have learned, the reasons for the fragility of parametric knowledge, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) that will be challenging to address. We hope this work can help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research.

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks that require a compound understanding of knowledge. However, deployment of the LLMs in real-world applications can be challenging due to their high computational requirements and concerns on data privacy. Previous studies have focused on building task-specific small language models (LMs) by fine-tuning them with labeled data or distilling LLMs. However, these approaches are ill-suited for knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks due to the limited capacity of small LMs in memorizing the knowledge required. Motivated by our theoretical analysis on memorization, we propose Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning Distillation (KARD), a novel method that fine-tunes small LMs to generate rationales with augmented knowledge retrieved from an external knowledge base. Moreover, we further propose a neural reranker to obtain documents relevant to rationale generation. We empirically show that KARD significantly improves the performance of small T5 and Flan-T5 models on the challenging knowledge-intensive reasoning datasets, namely MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA. Notably, our method makes the 250M models achieve superior performance against the fine-tuned 3B models, having 12 times larger parameters, on both MedQA-USMLE and StrategyQA benchmarks.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable achievements in various domains. However, the untimeliness and cost of knowledge updates coupled with hallucination issues of LLMs have curtailed their applications in knowledge intensive tasks, where retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can be of help. Nevertheless, existing retrieval augmented models typically use similarity as a bridge between queries and documents and follow a retrieve then read procedure. In this work, we argue that similarity is not always the panacea and totally relying on similarity would sometimes degrade the performance of retrieval augmented generation. To this end, we propose MetRag, a Multi layEred Thoughts enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation framework. To begin with, beyond existing similarity oriented thought, we embrace a small scale utility model that draws supervision from an LLM for utility oriented thought and further come up with a smarter model by comprehensively combining the similarity and utility oriented thoughts. Furthermore, given the fact that the retrieved document set tends to be huge and using them in isolation makes it difficult to capture the commonalities and characteristics among them, we propose to make an LLM as a task adaptive summarizer to endow retrieval augmented generation with compactness-oriented thought. Finally, with multi layered thoughts from the precedent stages, an LLM is called for knowledge augmented generation. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive tasks have demonstrated the superiority of MetRag.

We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) latently perform multi-hop reasoning with complex prompts such as "The mother of the singer of 'Superstition' is". We look for evidence of a latent reasoning pathway where an LLM (1) latently identifies "the singer of 'Superstition'" as Stevie Wonder, the bridge entity, and (2) uses its knowledge of Stevie Wonder's mother to complete the prompt. We analyze these two hops individually and consider their co-occurrence as indicative of latent multi-hop reasoning. For the first hop, we test if changing the prompt to indirectly mention the bridge entity instead of any other entity increases the LLM's internal recall of the bridge entity. For the second hop, we test if increasing this recall causes the LLM to better utilize what it knows about the bridge entity. We find strong evidence of latent multi-hop reasoning for the prompts of certain relation types, with the reasoning pathway used in more than 80% of the prompts. However, the utilization is highly contextual, varying across different types of prompts. Also, on average, the evidence for the second hop and the full multi-hop traversal is rather moderate and only substantial for the first hop. Moreover, we find a clear scaling trend with increasing model size for the first hop of reasoning but not for the second hop. Our experimental findings suggest potential challenges and opportunities for future development and applications of LLMs.

We present KNOW--the Knowledge Navigator Ontology for the World--the first ontology designed to capture everyday knowledge to augment large language models (LLMs) in real-world generative AI use cases such as personal AI assistants. Our domain is human life, both its everyday concerns and its major milestones. We have limited the initial scope of the modeled concepts to only established human universals: spacetime (places, events) plus social (people, groups, organizations). The inclusion criteria for modeled concepts are pragmatic, beginning with universality and utility. We compare and contrast previous work such as Schema.org and Cyc--as well as attempts at a synthesis of knowledge graphs and language models--noting how LLMs already encode internally much of the commonsense tacit knowledge that took decades to capture in the Cyc project. We also make available code-generated software libraries for the 12 most popular programming languages, enabling the direct use of ontology concepts in software engineering. We emphasize simplicity and developer experience in promoting AI interoperability.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains. Recent studies have shown that increasing test-time computation enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities. This typically involves extensive sampling at inference time guided by an external LLM verifier, resulting in a two-player system. Despite external guidance, the effectiveness of this system demonstrates the potential of a single LLM to tackle complex tasks. Thus, we pose a new research problem: Can we internalize the searching capabilities to fundamentally enhance the reasoning abilities of a single LLM? This work explores an orthogonal direction focusing on post-training LLMs for autoregressive searching (i.e., an extended reasoning process with self-reflection and self-exploration of new strategies). To achieve this, we propose the Chain-of-Action-Thought (COAT) reasoning and a two-stage training paradigm: 1) a small-scale format tuning stage to internalize the COAT reasoning format and 2) a large-scale self-improvement stage leveraging reinforcement learning. Our approach results in Satori, a 7B LLM trained on open-source models and data. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that Satori achieves state-of-the-art performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks while exhibits strong generalization to out-of-domain tasks. Code, data, and models will be fully open-sourced.

Traditional systems designed for task oriented dialog utilize knowledge present only in structured knowledge sources to generate responses. However, relevant information required to generate responses may also reside in unstructured sources, such as documents. Recent state of the art models such as HyKnow and SeKnow aimed at overcoming these challenges make limiting assumptions about the knowledge sources. For instance, these systems assume that certain types of information, such as a phone number, is always present in a structured knowledge base (KB) while information about aspects such as entrance ticket prices, would always be available in documents. In this paper, we create a modified version of the MutliWOZ-based dataset prepared by SeKnow to demonstrate how current methods have significant degradation in performance when strict assumptions about the source of information are removed. Then, in line with recent work exploiting pre-trained language models, we fine-tune a BART based model using prompts for the tasks of querying knowledge sources, as well as, for response generation, without making assumptions about the information present in each knowledge source. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our model is robust to perturbations to knowledge modality (source of information), and that it can fuse information from structured as well as unstructured knowledge to generate responses.

Recent advancements in natural language processing by large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have been suggested to approach Artificial General Intelligence. And yet, it is still under dispute whether LLMs possess similar reasoning abilities to humans. This study evaluates GPT-4 and various other LLMs in judging the profoundness of mundane, motivational, and pseudo-profound statements. We found a significant statement-to-statement correlation between the LLMs and humans, irrespective of the type of statements and the prompting technique used. However, LLMs systematically overestimate the profoundness of nonsensical statements, with the exception of Tk-instruct, which uniquely underestimates the profoundness of statements. Only few-shot learning prompts, as opposed to chain-of-thought prompting, draw LLMs ratings closer to humans. Furthermore, this work provides insights into the potential biases induced by Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), inducing an increase in the bias to overestimate the profoundness of statements.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. These agents are now capable of collaborating seamlessly, splitting tasks and enhancing accuracy, thus minimizing the need for human involvement. However, these agents often approach a diverse range of tasks in isolation, without benefiting from past experiences. This isolation can lead to repeated mistakes and inefficient trials in task solving. To this end, this paper introduces Experiential Co-Learning, a novel framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for mutual reasoning. This paradigm, enriched with previous experiences, equips agents to more effectively address unseen tasks.

We introduce XCOMPS in this work, a multilingual conceptual minimal pair dataset covering 17 languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' multilingual conceptual understanding through metalinguistic prompting, direct probability measurement, and neurolinguistic probing. By comparing base, instruction-tuned, and knowledge-distilled models, we find that: 1) LLMs exhibit weaker conceptual understanding for low-resource languages, and accuracy varies across languages despite being tested on the same concept sets. 2) LLMs excel at distinguishing concept-property pairs that are visibly different but exhibit a marked performance drop when negative pairs share subtle semantic similarities. 3) Instruction tuning improves performance in concept understanding but does not enhance internal competence; knowledge distillation can enhance internal competence in conceptual understanding for low-resource languages with limited gains in explicit task performance. 4) More morphologically complex languages yield lower concept understanding scores and require deeper layers for conceptual reasoning.

Unsupervised commonsense question answering requires mining effective commonsense knowledge without the rely on the labeled task data. Previous methods typically retrieved from traditional knowledge bases or used pre-trained language models (PrLMs) to generate fixed types of knowledge, which have poor generalization ability. In this paper, we aim to address the above limitation by leveraging the implicit knowledge stored in PrLMs and propose a two-stage prompt-based unsupervised commonsense question answering framework (TSGP). Specifically, we first use knowledge generation prompts to generate the knowledge required for questions with unlimited types and possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Then, we further utilize answer generation prompts to generate possible candidate answers independent of specified choices. Experimental results and analysis on three different commonsense reasoning tasks, CommonsenseQA, OpenBookQA, and SocialIQA, demonstrate that TSGP significantly improves the reasoning ability of language models in unsupervised settings. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yueqing-Sun/TSGP.

The first generation of Large Language Models - what might be called "Act I" of generative AI (2020-2023) - achieved remarkable success through massive parameter and data scaling, yet exhibited fundamental limitations in knowledge latency, shallow reasoning, and constrained cognitive processes. During this era, prompt engineering emerged as our primary interface with AI, enabling dialogue-level communication through natural language. We now witness the emergence of "Act II" (2024-present), where models are transitioning from knowledge-retrieval systems (in latent space) to thought-construction engines through test-time scaling techniques. This new paradigm establishes a mind-level connection with AI through language-based thoughts. In this paper, we clarify the conceptual foundations of cognition engineering and explain why this moment is critical for its development. We systematically break down these advanced approaches through comprehensive tutorials and optimized implementations, democratizing access to cognition engineering and enabling every practitioner to participate in AI's second act. We provide a regularly updated collection of papers on test-time scaling in the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/cognition-engineering

We explore how iterative revising a chain of thoughts with the help of information retrieval significantly improves large language models' reasoning and generation ability in long-horizon generation tasks, while hugely mitigating hallucination. In particular, the proposed method -- *retrieval-augmented thoughts* (RAT) -- revises each thought step one by one with retrieved information relevant to the task query, the current and the past thought steps, after the initial zero-shot CoT is generated. Applying RAT to GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and CodeLLaMA-7b substantially improves their performances on various long-horizon generation tasks; on average of relatively increasing rating scores by 13.63% on code generation, 16.96% on mathematical reasoning, 19.2% on creative writing, and 42.78% on embodied task planning. The demo page can be found at https://craftjarvis.github.io/RAT

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.

This paper presents an in-depth analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing on LLaMA, a prominent open-source foundational model in natural language processing. Instead of assessing LLaMA through its generative output, we design multiple-choice tasks to probe its intrinsic understanding in high-order tasks such as reasoning and computation. We examine the model horizontally, comparing different sizes, and vertically, assessing different layers. We unveil several key and uncommon findings based on the designed probing tasks: (1) Horizontally, enlarging model sizes almost could not automatically impart additional knowledge or computational prowess. Instead, it can enhance reasoning abilities, especially in math problem solving, and helps reduce hallucinations, but only beyond certain size thresholds; (2) In vertical analysis, the lower layers of LLaMA lack substantial arithmetic and factual knowledge, showcasing logical thinking, multilingual and recognitive abilities, with top layers housing most computational power and real-world knowledge.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Large Language Models (LLMs) assist in specialized tasks but struggle to align with evolving domain knowledge without costly fine-tuning. Domain knowledge consists of: Knowledge: Immutable facts (e.g., 'A stone is solid') and generally accepted principles (e.g., ethical standards); Refined Memory: Evolving insights shaped by business needs and real-world changes. However, a significant gap often exists between a domain expert's deep, nuanced understanding and the system's domain knowledge, which can hinder accurate information retrieval and application. Our Memory-Augmented Refinement of Knowledge (MARK) framework enables LLMs to continuously learn without retraining by leveraging structured refined memory, inspired by the Society of Mind. MARK operates through specialized agents, each serving a distinct role: Residual Refined Memory Agent: Stores and retrieves domain-specific insights to maintain context over time; User Question Refined Memory Agent: Captures user-provided facts, abbreviations, and terminology for better comprehension; LLM Response Refined Memory Agent: Extracts key elements from responses for refinement and personalization. These agents analyse stored refined memory, detect patterns, resolve contradictions, and improve response accuracy. Temporal factors like recency and frequency prioritize relevant information while discarding outdated insights. MARK enhances LLMs in multiple ways: Ground Truth Strategy: Reduces hallucinations by establishing a structured reference; Domain-Specific Adaptation: Essential for fields like healthcare, law, and manufacturing, where proprietary insights are absent from public datasets; Personalized AI Assistants: Improves virtual assistants by remembering user preferences, ensuring coherent responses over time.