Teaching to improve student models (e.g., knowledge distillation) is an extensively studied methodology in LLMs. However, in human education, teaching enhances not only the students but also the teachers by fostering more rigorous and clearer reasoning, as well as deeper knowledge building. We ask: Can LLMs also learn by teaching (LbT) for better reasoning? If the answer is yes, we can potentially unlock the possibility of continuously advancing the models without solely relying on human-produced data or stronger models. In this paper, we provide a preliminary exploration of this question. We show that LbT ideas can be incorporated into existing LLM training/prompting pipelines and bring improvements. Specifically, we design three methods, each mimicking one of the three levels of LbT: observing students' feedback, learning from the feedback, and learning iteratively, with the goal of improving answer accuracy without training or improving models' inherent capability with fine-tuning. We reveal some findings: (1) Teaching materials that make it easier for students to learn (via in-context learning) have clearer and more accurate logic; (2) Weak-to-strong generalization: LbT might help improve strong models by teaching weak models; (3) Diversity in students might help: teaching multiple students could be better than teaching a single student or the teacher alone. We hope that our exploration can inspire future research on LbT and, more broadly, the adoption of advanced education techniques to improve LLMs. The code and website are at https://github.com/imagination-research/lbt and https://sites.google.com/view/llm-learning-by-teaching.

Different knowledge graphs for the same domain are often uniquely housed on the Web. Effectively linking entities from different graphs is critical for building an open and comprehensive knowledge graph. However, linking entities across different sources has thus far faced various challenges, including the increasingly large-scale volume of the data, the heterogeneity of the graphs, and the ambiguity of real-world entities. To address them, we propose a unified framework LinKG. Specifically, we decouple the problem into different linking tasks based on the unique properties of each type of entity. To link word sequence based entities, we propose an LSTM-based method to capture word dependencies. To link entities of large scale, we utilize the hashing technique and convolutional neural networks for scalable and accurate linking. To link ambiguous entities, we propose heterogeneous graph attention networks to leverage heterogeneous structural information. Finally, to validate the design choices of different LinKG modules, we characterize the relationships between different tasks based on the single-domain and multi-domain transfer models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LinKG with an overall F1-score of 95.15%, based on which we deploy and release the Open Academic Graph (OAG)—the largest publicly available heterogeneous academic graph to date.

Large-scale factual knowledge graphs (KGs) such as DBpedia and Wikidata are essential to many popular downstream tasks and are also widely used by various research communities as training and/or benchmarking data. Despite their immense success and utility, these KGs are surprisingly noisy. In this study, we investigate the quality of these KGs, where the typing error rate is estimated to be 27% for coarse-grained types on average, and even 73% for certain fine-grained types. In pursuit of solutions, we propose an active typing error detection algorithm that maximizes the utilization of both gold and noisy labels. We also comprehensively discuss and compare the state-of-the-art in unsupervised, semi-supervised, and supervised paradigms to deal with typing errors in factual KGs. The outcomes of this study provide guidelines for researchers to use noisy factual KGs. To help practitioners deploy the techniques and conduct further research, we published our code and data 1.

Linking entities from different sources is a fundamental task in building open knowledge graphs. Despite much research conducted in related fields, the challenges of linkinglarge-scale heterogeneous entity graphs are far from resolved. Employing two billion-scale academic entity graphs (Microsoft Academic Graph and AMiner) as sources for our study, we propose a unified framework --- LinKG --- to address the problem of building a large-scale linked entity graph. LinKG is coupled with three linking modules, each of which addresses one category of entities. To link word-sequence-based entities (e.g., venues), we present a long short-term memory network-based method for capturing the dependencies. To link large-scale entities (e.g., papers), we leverage locality-sensitive hashing and convolutional neural networks for scalable and precise linking. To link entities with ambiguity (e.g., authors), we propose heterogeneous graph attention networks to model different types of entities. Our extensive experiments and systematical analysis demonstrate that LinKG can achieve linking accuracy with an F1-score of 0.9510, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art. LinKG has been deployed to Microsoft Academic Search and AMiner to integrate the two large graphs. We have published the linked results---the Open Academic Graph (OAG)\footnote\urlhttps://www.openacademic.ai/oag/ , making it the largest publicly available heterogeneous academic graph to date.

AMiner 1 is a free online academic search and mining system, having collected more than 130,000,000 researcher profiles and over 200,000,000 papers from multiple publication databases [25].