Instruction tuning is a supervised fine-tuning approach that significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow human instructions. For programming tasks, most models are finetuned with costly human-annotated instruction-response pairs or those generated by large, proprietary LLMs, which may not be permitted. We propose SelfCodeAlign, the first fully transparent and permissive pipeline for self-aligning code LLMs without extensive human annotations or distillation. SelfCodeAlign employs the same base model for inference throughout the data generation process. It first extracts diverse coding concepts from high-quality seed snippets to generate new tasks. It then samples multiple responses per task, pairs each with test cases, and validates them in a sandbox environment. Finally, passing examples are selected for instruction tuning. In our primary experiments, we use SelfCodeAlign with CodeQwen1.5-7B to generate a dataset of 74k instruction-response pairs. Finetuning on this dataset leads to a model that achieves a 67.1 pass@1 on HumanEval+, surpassing CodeLlama-70B-Instruct despite being ten times smaller. Across all benchmarks, this finetuned model consistently outperforms the original version trained with OctoPack, the previous state-of-the-art method for instruction tuning without human annotations or distillation. Additionally, we show that SelfCodeAlign is effective across LLMs of various sizes, from 3B to 33B, and that the base models can benefit more from alignment with their own data distribution. We further validate each component’s effectiveness in our pipeline, showing that SelfCodeAlign outperforms both direct distillation from GPT-4o and leading GPT-3.5-based distillation methods, such as OSS-Instruct and Evol-Instruct. SelfCodeAlign has also led to the creation of StarCoder2-Instruct, the first fully transparent, permissively licensed, and self-aligned code LLM that achieves state-of-the-art coding performance. Overall, SelfCodeAlign shows for the first time that a strong instruction-tuned code LLM can result from self-alignment rather than distillation.

We introduce the StatCan Dialogue Dataset 1 consisting of 19,379 conversation turns between agents working at Statistics Canada and online users looking for published data tables.The conversations stem from genuine intents, are held in English or French, and lead to agents retrieving one of over 5000 complex data tables.Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks: (1) automatic retrieval of relevant tables based on a on-going conversation, and (2) automatic generation of appropriate agent responses at each turn.We investigate the difficulty of each task by establishing strong baselines.Our experiments on a temporal data split reveal that all models struggle to generalize to future conversations, as we observe a significant drop in performance across both tasks when we move from the validation to the test set.In addition, we find that response generation models struggle to decide when to return a table.Considering that the tasks pose significant challenges to existing models, we encourage the community to develop models for our task, which can be directly used to help knowledge workers find relevant tables for live chat users.† Work done as visiting researcher at ServiceNow Research 1 Website: mcgill-nlp.github.io/statcan-dialogue-datasetU1: Hi, I'm looking to obtain quarterly data in regards to GDP grow (Canada), BC Housing STarts, Canada Oil Price/BBL A1: Hello, my name is

Abstract In a conversational question answering scenario, a questioner seeks to extract information about a topic through a series of interdependent questions and answers. As the conversation progresses, they may switch to related topics, a phenomenon commonly observed in information-seeking search sessions. However, current datasets for conversational question answering are limiting in two ways: 1) they do not contain topic switches; and 2) they assume the reference text for the conversation is given, that is, the setting is not open-domain. We introduce TopiOCQA (pronounced Tapioca), an open-domain conversational dataset with topic switches based on Wikipedia. TopiOCQA contains 3,920 conversations with information-seeking questions and free-form answers. On average, a conversation in our dataset spans 13 question-answer turns and involves four topics (documents). TopiOCQA poses a challenging test-bed for models, where efficient retrieval is required on multiple turns of the same conversation, in conjunction with constructing valid responses using conversational history. We evaluate several baselines, by combining state-of-the-art document retrieval methods with neural reader models. Our best model achieves F1 of 55.8, falling short of human performance by 14.2 points, indicating the difficulty of our dataset. Our dataset and code are available at https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/topiocqa.

Inferring objects and their relationships from an image in the form of a scene graph is useful in many applications at the intersection of vision and language. We consider a challenging problem of compositional generalization that emerges in this task due to a long tail data distribution. Current scene graph generation models are trained on a tiny fraction of the distribution corresponding to the most frequent compositions, e.g.. However, test images might contain zero- and few-shot compositions of objects and relationships, e.g.. Despite each of the object categories and the predicate (e.g. ‘on’) being frequent in the training data, the models often fail to properly understand such unseen or rare compositions. To improve generalization, it is natural to attempt increasing the diversity of the training distribution. However, in the graph domain this is non-trivial. To that end, we propose a method to synthesize rare yet plausible scene graphs by perturbing real ones. We then propose and empirically study a model based on conditional generative adversarial networks (GANs) that allows us to generate visual features of perturbed scene graphs and learn from them in a joint fashion. When evaluated on the Visual Genome dataset, our approach yields marginal, but consistent improvements in zero- and few-shot metrics. We analyze the limitations of our approach indicating promising directions for future research.

Torsten Scholak, Raymond Li, Dzmitry Bahdanau, Harm de Vries, Chris Pal. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Subgroup Discovery is a supervised, exploratory data mining paradigm that aims to identify subsets of a dataset that show interesting behaviour with respect to some designated target attribute. The way in which such distributional differences are quantified varies with the target attribute type. This work concerns continuous targets, which are important in many practical applications. For such targets, differences are often quantified using z-score and similar measures that compare simple statistics such as the mean and variance of the subset and the data. However, most distributions are not fully determined by their mean and variance alone. As a result, measures of distributional difference solely based on such simple statistics will miss potentially interesting subgroups. This work proposes methods to recognise distributional differences in a much broader sense. To this end, density estimation is performed using histogram and kernel density estimation techniques. In the spirit of Exceptional Model Mining, the proposed methods are extended to deal with multiple continuous target attributes, such that comparisons are not restricted to univariate distributions, but are available for joint distributions of any dimensionality. The methods can be incorporated easily into existing Subgroup Discovery frameworks, so no new frameworks are developed.

We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence neural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.

We introduce GuessWhat?!, a two-player guessing game as a testbed for research on the interplay of computer vision and dialogue systems. The goal of the game is to locate an unknown object in a rich image scene by asking a sequence of questions. Higher-level image understanding, like spatial reasoning and language grounding, is required to solve the proposed task. Our key contribution is the collection of a large-scale dataset consisting of 150K human-played games with a total of 800K visual question-answer pairs on 66K images. We explain our design decisions in collecting the dataset and introduce the oracle and questioner tasks that are associated with the two players of the game. We prototyped deep learning models to establish initial baselines of the introduced tasks.

End-to-end design of dialogue systems has recently become a popular research topic thanks to powerful tools such as encoder-decoder architectures for sequence-to-sequence learning. Yet, most current approaches cast human-machine dialogue management as a supervised learning problem, aiming at predicting the next utterance of a participant given the full history of the dialogue. This vision may fail to correctly render the planning problem inherent to dialogue as well as its contextual and grounded nature. In this paper, we introduce a Deep Reinforcement Learning method to optimize visually grounded task-oriented dialogues, based on the policy gradient algorithm. This approach is tested on the question generation task from the dataset GuessWhat?! containing 120k dialogues and provides encouraging results at solving both the problem of generating natural dialogues and the task of discovering a specific object in a complex picture.

It is commonly assumed that language refers to high-level visual concepts while leaving low-level visual processing unaffected. This view dominates the current literature in computational models for language-vision tasks, where visual and linguistic inputs are mostly processed independently before being fused into a single representation. In this paper, we deviate from this classic pipeline and propose to modulate the \emph{entire visual processing} by a linguistic input. Specifically, we introduce Conditional Batch Normalization (CBN) as an efficient mechanism to modulate convolutional feature maps by a linguistic embedding. We apply CBN to a pre-trained Residual Network (ResNet), leading to the MODulatEd ResNet (\MRN) architecture, and show that this significantly improves strong baselines on two visual question answering tasks. Our ablation study confirms that modulating from the early stages of the visual processing is beneficial.

Parameter-specific adaptive learning rate methods are computationally efficient ways to reduce the ill-conditioning problems encountered when training large deep networks. Following recent work that strongly suggests that most of thecritical points encountered when training such networks are saddle points, we find how considering the presence of negative eigenvalues of the Hessian could help us design better suited adaptive learning rate schemes. We show that the popular Jacobi preconditioner has undesirable behavior in the presence of both positive and negative curvature, and present theoretical and empirical evidence that the so-called equilibration preconditioner is comparatively better suited to non-convex problems. We introduce a novel adaptive learning rate scheme, called ESGD, based on the equilibration preconditioner. Our experiments demonstrate that both schemes yield very similar step directions but that ESGD sometimes surpasses RMSProp in terms of convergence speed, always clearly improving over plain stochastic gradient descent.