Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs still struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning like generating complex programs. In these cases, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs, based on hierarchical function descriptions in natural language. Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, e.g. code synthesis, theorem proving, and robotic planning. We demonstrate Parsel's capabilities by using it to generate complex programs that cannot currently be automatically implemented from one description and backtranslating Python programs in the APPS dataset. Beyond modeling capabilities, Parsel allows problem-solving with high-level algorithmic designs, benefiting both students and professional programmers.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.

我们介绍了Sparrow，这是一个寻求信息的对话代理，与提示的语言模型基线相比，训练有素，更有帮助，正确和无害。我们使用从人类反馈中的强化学习来培训我们的模型，以帮助人类评估者判断代理人的行为。首先，为了使我们的代理人更有帮助和无害，我们将良好对话的要求分解为代理人应遵循的自然语言规则，并分别向评估者询问每个规则。我们证明，这种崩溃使我们能够收集对代理行为的更多针对性的人类判断，并允许更有效的规则条件奖励模型。其次，我们的代理商在收集对模型声明的偏好判决时提供了支持事实主张的来源的证据。对于事实问题，麻雀提供的证据支持了78％的时间。比基线比基线更享受麻雀，同时对人类的对抗性探测更具弹性，在探测时只有8％的时间违反了我们的规则。最后，我们进行了广泛的分析，表明尽管我们的模型学会遵守我们的规则，但它可以表现出分布偏见。

大型语言模型会产生类似人类的文本，这些文本推动了越来越多的应用。但是，最近的文献以及越来越多的现实世界观察表明，这些模型可以产生有毒，有偏见，不真实或其他有害的语言。尽管正在进行评估语言模型危害的工作，但要远见卓识转换出可能出现的危害可能会引起严格的基准。为了促进这种翻译，我们概述了六种表征有害文本的方式，这些方法在设计新基准时值得明确考虑。然后，我们将这些特征用作镜头来识别现有基准中的趋势和差距。最后，我们将它们应用于视角API的案例研究，这是一种毒性分类器，被广泛用于HARS基准。我们的特征提供了一块桥梁，可以在远见和有效评估之间转化。

本文旨在帮助构建与大规模语言模型（LMS）相关的风险景观。为了促进负责任的创新的进步，需要深入了解这些模型提出的潜在风险。详细分析了广泛的建立和预期的风险，借鉴了计算机科学，语言学和社会科学的多学科专业知识和文学。我们概述了六个具体风险领域：I.歧视，排除和毒性，II。信息危害，III。误导危害，V.恶意用途，V.人机互动危害，vi。自动化，访问和环境危害。第一个领域涉及陈规定型，不公平歧视，排他性规范，有毒语言和LMS社会群体的绩效。第二个重点侧重于私有数据泄漏或LMS正确推断敏感信息的风险。第三次解决贫困，虚假或误导性信息的风险，包括在敏感域中，以及敲门式风险，如共享信息的信任侵蚀。第四次考虑了试图使用LMS造成伤害的行动者的风险。第五部分侧重于用于支持与人类用户互动的会话代理的LLMS特异性的风险，包括不安全使用，操纵或欺骗。第六六探讨了对不同社会群体或社区可能产生不同影响的环境危害，工作自动化和其他挑战的风险。总的来说，我们审查了21个风险。我们讨论了不同风险的起源点和指向潜在的缓解方法。最后，我们讨论在实施减轻的组织职责，以及协作和参与的作用。我们强调了进一步研究的方向，特别是在扩展工具包时，用于评估和评估LMS中的概述风险。

标记数据通常昂贵且耗时，特别是对于诸如对象检测和实例分割之类的任务，这需要对图像的密集标签进行密集的标签。虽然几张拍摄对象检测是关于培训小说中的模型（看不见的）对象类具有很少的数据，但它仍然需要在许多标记的基础（见）类的课程上进行训练。另一方面，自我监督的方法旨在从未标记数据学习的学习表示，该数据转移到诸如物体检测的下游任务。结合几次射击和自我监督的物体检测是一个有前途的研究方向。在本调查中，我们审查并表征了几次射击和自我监督对象检测的最新方法。然后，我们给我们的主要外卖，并讨论未来的研究方向。https://gabrielhuang.github.io/fsod-survey/的项目页面

Non-linear state-space models, also known as general hidden Markov models, are ubiquitous in statistical machine learning, being the most classical generative models for serial data and sequences in general. The particle-based, rapid incremental smoother PaRIS is a sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique allowing for efficient online approximation of expectations of additive functionals under the smoothing distribution in these models. Such expectations appear naturally in several learning contexts, such as likelihood estimation (MLE) and Markov score climbing (MSC). PARIS has linear computational complexity, limited memory requirements and comes with non-asymptotic bounds, convergence results and stability guarantees. Still, being based on self-normalised importance sampling, the PaRIS estimator is biased. Our first contribution is to design a novel additive smoothing algorithm, the Parisian particle Gibbs PPG sampler, which can be viewed as a PaRIS algorithm driven by conditional SMC moves, resulting in bias-reduced estimates of the targeted quantities. We substantiate the PPG algorithm with theoretical results, including new bounds on bias and variance as well as deviation inequalities. Our second contribution is to apply PPG in a learning framework, covering MLE and MSC as special examples. In this context, we establish, under standard assumptions, non-asymptotic bounds highlighting the value of bias reduction and the implicit Rao--Blackwellization of PPG. These are the first non-asymptotic results of this kind in this setting. We illustrate our theoretical results with numerical experiments supporting our claims.

In order for artificial neural networks to begin accurately mimicking biological ones, they must be able to adapt to new exigencies without forgetting what they have learned from previous training. Lifelong learning approaches to artificial neural networks attempt to strive towards this goal, yet have not progressed far enough to be realistically deployed for natural language processing tasks. The proverbial roadblock of catastrophic forgetting still gate-keeps researchers from an adequate lifelong learning model. While efforts are being made to quell catastrophic forgetting, there is a lack of research that looks into the importance of class ordering when training on new classes for incremental learning. This is surprising as the ordering of "classes" that humans learn is heavily monitored and incredibly important. While heuristics to develop an ideal class order have been researched, this paper examines class ordering as it relates to priming as a scheme for incremental class learning. By examining the connections between various methods of priming found in humans and how those are mimicked yet remain unexplained in life-long machine learning, this paper provides a better understanding of the similarities between our biological systems and the synthetic systems while simultaneously improving current practices to combat catastrophic forgetting. Through the merging of psychological priming practices with class ordering, this paper is able to identify a generalizable method for class ordering in NLP incremental learning tasks that consistently outperforms random class ordering.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.