Optimizing Instructions and Demonstrations for Multi-Stage Language Model Programs
Language Model Programs, i.e. sophisticated pipelines of modular language model (LM) calls, are increasingly advancing NLP tasks, but they require crafting prompts that are jointly effective for all modules. We study prompt optimization for LM programs, i.e. how to update these prompts to maximize a downstream metric without access to module-level labels or gradients. To make this tractable, we factorize our problem into optimizing the free-form instructions and few-shot demonstrations of every module and introduce several strategies to craft task-grounded instructions and navigate credit assignment across modules. Our strategies include (i) program- and data-aware techniques for proposing effective instructions, (ii) a stochastic mini-batch evaluation function for learning a surrogate model of our objective, and (iii) a meta-optimization procedure in which we refine how LMs construct proposals over time. Using these insights we develop MIPRO, a novel algorithm for optimizing LM programs. MIPRO outperforms baseline optimizers on five of seven diverse multi-stage LM programs using a best-in-class open-source model (Llama-3-8B), by as high as 13% accuracy. We have released our new optimizers and benchmark in DSPy at [http://dspy.ai](http://dspy.ai).
Related Publications
Current societal trends reflect an increased mistrust in science and a lowered civic engagement that threaten to impair research that is foundational for ensuring public health and advancing health equity. One effective countermeasure to these trends lies in community-facing citizen science applications to increase public participation in scientific research, making this field an important target for artificial intelligence (AI) exploration. We highlight potentially promising citizen science AI applications that extend beyond individual use to the community level, including conversational large language models, text-to-image generative AI tools, descriptive analytics for analyzing integrated macro- and micro-level data, and predictive analytics. The novel adaptations of AI technologies for community-engaged participatory research also bring an array of potential risks. We highlight possible negative externalities and mitigations for some of the potential ethical and societal challenges in this field.
Current societal trends reflect an increased mistrust in science and a lowered civic engagement that threaten to impair research that is foundational for ensuring public health and advancing health equity. One effective countermeasure to these trends lies in community-facing citizen science applications to increase public participation in scientific research, making this field an important target for artificial intelligence (AI) exploration. We highlight potentially promising citizen science AI applications that extend beyond individual use to the community level, including conversational large language models, text-to-image generative AI tools, descriptive analytics for analyzing integrated macro- and micro-level data, and predictive analytics. The novel adaptations of AI technologies for community-engaged participatory research also bring an array of potential risks. We highlight possible negative externalities and mitigations for some of the potential ethical and societal challenges in this field.
Vafa et al. (2024) introduced a transformer-based econometric model, CAREER, that predicts a worker’s next job as a function of career history (an “occupation model”). CAREER was initially estimated (“pre-trained”) using a large, unrepresentative resume dataset, which served as a “foundation model,” and parameter estimation was continued (“fine-tuned”) using data from a representative survey. CAREER had better predictive performance than benchmarks. This paper considers an alternative where the resume-based foundation model is replaced by a large language model (LLM). We convert tabular data from the survey into text files that resemble resumes and fine-tune the LLMs using these text files with the objective to predict the next token (word). The resulting fine-tuned LLM is used as an input to an occupation model. Its predictive performance surpasses all prior models. We demonstrate the value of fine-tuning and further show that by adding more career data from a different population, fine-tuning smaller LLMs surpasses the performance of fine-tuning larger models.
Vafa et al. (2024) introduced a transformer-based econometric model, CAREER, that predicts a worker’s next job as a function of career history (an “occupation model”). CAREER was initially estimated (“pre-trained”) using a large, unrepresentative resume dataset, which served as a “foundation model,” and parameter estimation was continued (“fine-tuned”) using data from a representative survey. CAREER had better predictive performance than benchmarks. This paper considers an alternative where the resume-based foundation model is replaced by a large language model (LLM). We convert tabular data from the survey into text files that resemble resumes and fine-tune the LLMs using these text files with the objective to predict the next token (word). The resulting fine-tuned LLM is used as an input to an occupation model. Its predictive performance surpasses all prior models. We demonstrate the value of fine-tuning and further show that by adding more career data from a different population, fine-tuning smaller LLMs surpasses the performance of fine-tuning larger models.
Increasingly large robotics datasets are being collected to train larger foundation models in robotics. However, despite the fact that data selection has been of utmost importance to scaling in vision and natural language processing (NLP), little work in robotics has questioned what data such models should actually be trained on. In this work we investigate how to weigh different subsets or "domains'' of robotics datasets during pre-training to maximize worst-case performance across all possible downstream domains using distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Unlike in NLP, we find that these methods are hard to apply out of the box due to varying action spaces and dynamics across robots. Our method, ReMix, employs early stopping and action normalization and discretization to counteract these issues. Through extensive experimentation on both the Bridge and OpenX datasets, we demonstrate that data curation can have an outsized impact on downstream performance. Specifically, domain weights learned by ReMix outperform uniform weights by over 40% on average and human-selected weights by over 20% on datasets used to train the RT-X models.
Increasingly large robotics datasets are being collected to train larger foundation models in robotics. However, despite the fact that data selection has been of utmost importance to scaling in vision and natural language processing (NLP), little work in robotics has questioned what data such models should actually be trained on. In this work we investigate how to weigh different subsets or "domains'' of robotics datasets during pre-training to maximize worst-case performance across all possible downstream domains using distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Unlike in NLP, we find that these methods are hard to apply out of the box due to varying action spaces and dynamics across robots. Our method, ReMix, employs early stopping and action normalization and discretization to counteract these issues. Through extensive experimentation on both the Bridge and OpenX datasets, we demonstrate that data curation can have an outsized impact on downstream performance. Specifically, domain weights learned by ReMix outperform uniform weights by over 40% on average and human-selected weights by over 20% on datasets used to train the RT-X models.
RAVEL: Evaluating Interpretability Methods on Disentangling Language Model Representations
Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute–Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/ explanare/ravel.
Individual neurons participate in the representation of multiple high-level concepts. To what extent can different interpretability methods successfully disentangle these roles? To help address this question, we introduce RAVEL (Resolving Attribute–Value Entanglements in Language Models), a dataset that enables tightly controlled, quantitative comparisons between a variety of existing interpretability methods. We use the resulting conceptual framework to define the new method of Multi-task Distributed Alignment Search (MDAS), which allows us to find distributed representations satisfying multiple causal criteria. With Llama2-7B as the target language model, MDAS achieves state-of-the-art results on RAVEL, demonstrating the importance of going beyond neuron-level analyses to identify features distributed across activations. We release our benchmark at https://github.com/ explanare/ravel.