Daily Papers

Pretraining Large Language Models (LLMs) on large corpora of textual data is now a standard paradigm. When using these LLMs for many downstream applications, it is common to additionally bake in new knowledge (e.g., time-critical news, or private domain knowledge) into the pretrained model either through RAG-based-prompting, or fine-tuning. However, the optimal methodology for the model to gain such new knowledge remains an open question. In this paper, we present Retrieval Augmented FineTuning (RAFT), a training recipe that improves the model's ability to answer questions in a "open-book" in-domain settings. In RAFT, given a question, and a set of retrieved documents, we train the model to ignore those documents that don't help in answering the question, which we call, distractor documents. RAFT accomplishes this by citing verbatim the right sequence from the relevant document that would help answer the question. This coupled with RAFT's chain-of-thought-style response helps improve the model's ability to reason. In domain-specific RAG, RAFT consistently improves the model's performance across PubMed, HotpotQA, and Gorilla datasets, presenting a post-training recipe to improve pre-trained LLMs to in-domain RAG. RAFT's code and demo are open-sourced at github.com/ShishirPatil/gorilla.

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially significant repercussions. Consequently, aligning these models with human ethics and preferences is an essential step toward ensuring their responsible and effective deployment in real-world applications. Prior research has primarily employed Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as a means of addressing this problem, wherein generative models are fine-tuned using RL algorithms guided by a human-feedback-informed reward model. However, the inefficiencies and instabilities associated with RL algorithms frequently present substantial obstacles to the successful alignment of generative models, necessitating the development of a more robust and streamlined approach. To this end, we introduce a new framework, Reward rAnked FineTuning (RAFT), designed to align generative models more effectively. Utilizing a reward model and a sufficient number of samples, our approach selects the high-quality samples, discarding those that exhibit undesired behavior, and subsequently assembles a streaming dataset. This dataset serves as the basis for aligning the generative model and can be employed under both offline and online settings. Notably, the sample generation process within RAFT is gradient-free, rendering it compatible with black-box generators. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm exhibits strong performance in the context of both large language models and diffusion models.

Large pre-trained language models have shown promise for few-shot learning, completing text-based tasks given only a few task-specific examples. Will models soon solve classification tasks that have so far been reserved for human research assistants? Existing benchmarks are not designed to measure progress in applied settings, and so don't directly answer this question. The RAFT benchmark (Real-world Annotated Few-shot Tasks) focuses on naturally occurring tasks and uses an evaluation setup that mirrors deployment. Baseline evaluations on RAFT reveal areas current techniques struggle with: reasoning over long texts and tasks with many classes. Human baselines show that some classification tasks are difficult for non-expert humans, reflecting that real-world value sometimes depends on domain expertise. Yet even non-expert human baseline F1 scores exceed GPT-3 by an average of 0.11. The RAFT datasets and leaderboard will track which model improvements translate into real-world benefits at https://raft.elicit.org .

Abusive language is a concerning problem in online social media. Past research on detecting abusive language covers different platforms, languages, demographies, etc. However, models trained using these datasets do not perform well in cross-domain evaluation settings. To overcome this, a common strategy is to use a few samples from the target domain to train models to get better performance in that domain (cross-domain few-shot training). However, this might cause the models to overfit the artefacts of those samples. A compelling solution could be to guide the models toward rationales, i.e., spans of text that justify the text's label. This method has been found to improve model performance in the in-domain setting across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose RAFT (Rationale Adaptor for Few-shoT classification) for abusive language detection. We first build a multitask learning setup to jointly learn rationales, targets, and labels, and find a significant improvement of 6% macro F1 on the rationale detection task over training solely rationale classifiers. We introduce two rationale-integrated BERT-based architectures (the RAFT models) and evaluate our systems over five different abusive language datasets, finding that in the few-shot classification setting, RAFT-based models outperform baseline models by about 7% in macro F1 scores and perform competitively to models finetuned on other source domains. Furthermore, RAFT-based models outperform LIME/SHAP-based approaches in terms of plausibility and are close in performance in terms of faithfulness.

We introduce Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms (RAFT), a new deep network architecture for optical flow. RAFT extracts per-pixel features, builds multi-scale 4D correlation volumes for all pairs of pixels, and iteratively updates a flow field through a recurrent unit that performs lookups on the correlation volumes. RAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance. On KITTI, RAFT achieves an F1-all error of 5.10%, a 16% error reduction from the best published result (6.10%). On Sintel (final pass), RAFT obtains an end-point-error of 2.855 pixels, a 30% error reduction from the best published result (4.098 pixels). In addition, RAFT has strong cross-dataset generalization as well as high efficiency in inference time, training speed, and parameter count. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/RAFT.

For the past ten years, CNN has reigned supreme in the world of computer vision, but recently, Transformer has been on the rise. However, the quadratic computational cost of self-attention has become a serious problem in practice applications. There has been much research on architectures without CNN and self-attention in this context. In particular, MLP-Mixer is a simple architecture designed using MLPs and hit an accuracy comparable to the Vision Transformer. However, the only inductive bias in this architecture is the embedding of tokens. This leaves open the possibility of incorporating a non-convolutional (or non-local) inductive bias into the architecture, so we used two simple ideas to incorporate inductive bias into the MLP-Mixer while taking advantage of its ability to capture global correlations. A way is to divide the token-mixing block vertically and horizontally. Another way is to make spatial correlations denser among some channels of token-mixing. With this approach, we were able to improve the accuracy of the MLP-Mixer while reducing its parameters and computational complexity. The small model that is RaftMLP-S is comparable to the state-of-the-art global MLP-based model in terms of parameters and efficiency per calculation. In addition, we tackled the problem of fixed input image resolution for global MLP-based models by utilizing bicubic interpolation. We demonstrated that these models could be applied as the backbone of architectures for downstream tasks such as object detection. However, it did not have significant performance and mentioned the need for MLP-specific architectures for downstream tasks for global MLP-based models. The source code in PyTorch version is available at https://github.com/okojoalg/raft-mlp.

We introduce SEA-RAFT, a more simple, efficient, and accurate RAFT for optical flow. Compared with RAFT, SEA-RAFT is trained with a new loss (mixture of Laplace). It directly regresses an initial flow for faster convergence in iterative refinements and introduces rigid-motion pre-training to improve generalization. SEA-RAFT achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the Spring benchmark with a 3.69 endpoint-error (EPE) and a 0.36 1-pixel outlier rate (1px), representing 22.9% and 17.8% error reduction from best published results. In addition, SEA-RAFT obtains the best cross-dataset generalization on KITTI and Spring. With its high efficiency, SEA-RAFT operates at least 2.3x faster than existing methods while maintaining competitive performance. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SEA-RAFT.

Stereo-matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Despite recent progress by deep learning, improving the robustness is ineluctable when deploying stereo-matching models to real-world applications. Different from the common practices, i.e., developing an elaborate model to achieve robustness, we argue that collecting multiple available datasets for training is a cheaper way to increase generalization ability. Specifically, this report presents an improved RaftStereo trained with a mixed dataset of seven public datasets for the robust vision challenge (denoted as iRaftStereo_RVC). When evaluated on the training sets of Middlebury, KITTI-2015, and ETH3D, the model outperforms its counterparts trained with only one dataset, such as the popular Sceneflow. After fine-tuning the pre-trained model on the three datasets of the challenge, it ranks at 2nd place on the stereo leaderboard, demonstrating the benefits of mixed dataset pre-training.

Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, generative dialogue models represented by ChatGPT have quickly become essential tools in daily life. As user expectations increase, enhancing the capability of generative dialogue models to solve complex problems has become a focal point of current research. This paper delves into the effectiveness of the RAFT (Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning) method in improving the performance of Generative dialogue models. RAFT combines chain-of-thought with model supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which significantly enhanced the model's information extraction and logical reasoning abilities. We evaluated the RAFT method across multiple datasets and analysed its performance in various reasoning tasks, including long-form QA and short-form QA tasks, tasks in both Chinese and English, and supportive and comparison reasoning tasks. Notably, it addresses the gaps in previous research regarding long-form QA tasks and Chinese datasets. Moreover, we also evaluate the benefit of the chain-of-thought (CoT) in the RAFT method. This work offers valuable insights for studies focused on enhancing the performance of generative dialogue models.