Finetuning large language models (LLMs) has been empirically effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Existing approaches to finetuning an LLM either focus on parameter-efficient finetuning, which only updates a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetuning. Typically, the memory footprint during finetuning stems from three contributors: model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations. However, existing works still require considerable memory, and none can simultaneously mitigate the memory footprint of all three sources. In this paper, we present quantized side tuing (QST), which enables memory-efficient and fast finetuning of LLMs by operating through a dual-stage process. First, QST quantizes an LLM’s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the LLM’s original weights. Second, QST introduces a side network separated from the LLM, which utilizes the hidden states of the LLM to make task-specific predictions. Using a separate side network avoids performing back-propagation through the LLM, thus reducing the memory requirement of the intermediate activations. Finally, QST leverages several low-rank adaptors and gradient-free downsample modules to significantly reduce the trainable parameters, so as to save the memory footprint of the optimizer states. Experiments show that QST can reduce the total memory footprint by up to 2.3× and speed up the finetuning process by up to 3× while achieving competent performance compared with the state-of-the-art. When it comes to full finetuning, QST can reduce the total memory footprint up to 7×.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable cross-lingual alignment and generalization ability. Current research primarily focuses on improving LLMs’ cross-lingual generalization capabilities. However, there is still a lack of research on the intrinsic mechanisms of how LLMs achieve cross-lingual alignment. From the perspective of region partitioning, this paper conducts several investigations on the linguistic competence of LLMs. We discover a core region in LLMs that corresponds to linguistic competence, accounting for approximately 1% of the total model parameters. Removing this core region by setting parameters to zero results in a significant performance decrease across 30 different languages. Furthermore, this core region exhibits significant dimensional dependence, perturbations to even a single parameter on specific dimensions leading to a loss of linguistic competence. Moreover, we discover that distinct monolingual regions exist for different languages, and disruption to these specific regions substantially reduces the LLMs’ proficiency in those corresponding languages. Our research also indicates that freezing the core linguistic region during further pre-training can mitigate the issue of catastrophic forgetting (CF), a common phenomenon observed during further pre-training of LLMs. Overall, exploring the LLMs’ functional regions provides insights into the foundation of their intelligence.

Lay summarisation aims to produce summaries of scientific articles that are comprehensible to non-expert audiences. However, previous work assumes a one-size-fits-all approach, where the content and style of the produced summary are entirely dependent on the data used to train the model. In practice, audiences with different levels of expertise will have specific needs, impacting what content should appear in a lay summary and how it should be presented. Aiming to address this, we propose ATLAS, a novel abstractive summarisation approach that can control various properties that contribute to the overall “layness” of the generated summary using targeted control attributes. We evaluate ATLAS on a combination of biomedical lay summarisation datasets, where it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines using mainstream summarisation metrics.Additional analyses provided on the discriminatory power and emergent influence of our selected controllable attributes further attest to the effectiveness of our approach.

Previous approaches for automatic lay summarisation are exclusively reliant on the source article that, given it is written for a technical audience (e.g., researchers), is unlikely to explicitly define all technical concepts or state all of the background information that is relevant for a lay audience. We address this issue by augmenting eLife, an existing biomedical lay summarisation dataset, with article-specific knowledge graphs, each containing detailed information on relevant biomedical concepts. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of three different approaches for incorporating knowledge graphs within lay summarisation models, with each method targeting a distinct area of the encoder-decoder model architecture. Our results confirm that integrating graph-based domain knowledge can significantly benefit lay summarisation by substantially increasing the readability of generated text and improving the explanation of technical concepts.

To improve the performance of long text generation, recent studies have leveraged automatically planned event structures (i.e. storylines) to guide story generation. Such prior works mostly employ end-to-end neural generation models to predict event sequences for a story. However, such generation models struggle to guarantee the narrative coherence of separate events due to the hallucination problem, and additionally the generated event sequences are often hard to control due to the end-to-end nature of the models. To address these challenges, we propose NGEP, an novel event planning framework which generates an event sequence by performing inference on an automatically constructed event graph and enhances generalisation ability through a neural event advisor. We conduct a range of experiments on multiple criteria, and the results demonstrate that our graph-based neural framework outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) event planning approaches, considering both the performance of event sequence generation and the effectiveness on the downstream task of story generation.

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts.Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries.We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractivenessbetween datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications.Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.

One of the key challenges of automatic story generation is how to generate a long narrative that can maintain fluency, relevance, and coherence. Despite recent progress, current story generation systems still face the challenge of how to effectively capture contextual and event features, which has a profound impact on a model’s generation performance. To address these challenges, we present EtriCA, a novel neural generation model, which improves the relevance and coherence of the generated stories through residually mapping context features to event sequences with a cross-attention mechanism. Such a feature capturing mechanism allows our model to better exploit the logical relatedness between events when generating stories. Extensive experiments based on both automatic and human evaluations show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model in leveraging context and event features.