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Back to Natural Language Processing

All Work Published on Natural Language Processing

DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into State-of-the-Art Pipelines
Omar Khattab, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts
Jan 16, 2024
Research
Your browser does not support the video tag.

The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded “prompt templates”, i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, or imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric, by creating and collecting demonstrations. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, DSPy can automatically produce pipelines that outperform out-of-the-box few-shot prompting as well as expert-created demonstrations for GPT-3.5 and Llama2-13b-chat. On top of that, DSPy programs compiled for relatively small LMs like 770M parameter T5 and Llama2-13b-chat are competitive with many approaches that rely on large and proprietary LMs like GPT-3.5 and on expert-written prompt chains. DSPy is available at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into State-of-the-Art Pipelines

Omar Khattab, Matei Zaharia, Christopher Potts
Jan 16, 2024

The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded “prompt templates”, i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, or imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric, by creating and collecting demonstrations. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, DSPy can automatically produce pipelines that outperform out-of-the-box few-shot prompting as well as expert-created demonstrations for GPT-3.5 and Llama2-13b-chat. On top of that, DSPy programs compiled for relatively small LMs like 770M parameter T5 and Llama2-13b-chat are competitive with many approaches that rely on large and proprietary LMs like GPT-3.5 and on expert-written prompt chains. DSPy is available at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy

Foundation Models
Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Research
Can AI Improve Medical Diagnostic Accuracy?
Adam Hadhazy
Oct 28, 2024
News

Potentially. An investigation into how well ChatGPT performs on its own and as a diagnostic aid for physicians reveals clinical shortfalls where the AI tool could be put to good use.

Can AI Improve Medical Diagnostic Accuracy?

Adam Hadhazy
Oct 28, 2024

Potentially. An investigation into how well ChatGPT performs on its own and as a diagnostic aid for physicians reveals clinical shortfalls where the AI tool could be put to good use.

Healthcare
Natural Language Processing
News
WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia
Sina Semnani, Violet Yao, Monica Lam, Heidi Zhang
Dec 01, 2023
Research
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This paper presents the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus. WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment. Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments.

WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia

Sina Semnani, Violet Yao, Monica Lam, Heidi Zhang
Dec 01, 2023

This paper presents the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus. WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment. Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments.

Natural Language Processing
Foundation Models
Machine Learning
Generative AI
Your browser does not support the video tag.
Research
The Data Behind Your Doom Scroll: How Negative News Takes Over Your Feed
Andrew Myers
Oct 25, 2024
News

Analyzing nearly 30 million posts, Stanford scholars reveal how emotional, negative content fuels the viral spread of news on social media. Now, what to do about it?

The Data Behind Your Doom Scroll: How Negative News Takes Over Your Feed

Andrew Myers
Oct 25, 2024

Analyzing nearly 30 million posts, Stanford scholars reveal how emotional, negative content fuels the viral spread of news on social media. Now, what to do about it?

Natural Language Processing
Machine Learning
News
Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Models
Kanishk Gandhi, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Tobias Gerstenberg, Noah Goodman
Sep 25, 2023
Research
Your browser does not support the video tag.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.

Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Models

Kanishk Gandhi, Jan-Philipp Fränken, Tobias Gerstenberg, Noah Goodman
Sep 25, 2023

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives, understanding their ability to comprehend human mental states becomes critical for ensuring effective interactions. However, despite the recent attempts to assess the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities of LLMs, the degree to which these models can align with human ToM remains a nuanced topic of exploration. This is primarily due to two distinct challenges: (1) the presence of inconsistent results from previous evaluations, and (2) concerns surrounding the validity of existing evaluation methodologies. To address these challenges, we present a novel framework for procedurally generating evaluations with LLMs by populating causal templates. Using our framework, we create a new social reasoning benchmark (BigToM) for LLMs which consists of 25 controls and 5,000 model-written evaluations. We find that human participants rate the quality of our benchmark higher than previous crowd-sourced evaluations and comparable to expert-written evaluations. Using BigToM, we evaluate the social reasoning capabilities of a variety of LLMs and compare model performances with human performance. Our results suggest that GPT4 has ToM capabilities that mirror human inference patterns, though less reliable, while other LLMs struggle.

Natural Language Processing
Foundation Models
Sciences (Social, Health, Biological, Physical)
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Research
The 12 Greatest Dangers Of AI
Forbes
Oct 09, 2024
Media Mention

AI expert Gary Marcus references HAI's study showing that LLM responses to medical questions highly vary and are often inaccurate. 

The 12 Greatest Dangers Of AI

Forbes
Oct 09, 2024

AI expert Gary Marcus references HAI's study showing that LLM responses to medical questions highly vary and are often inaccurate. 

Natural Language Processing
Foundation Models
Generative AI
Media Mention
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