David Vázquez

WorkArena: How Capable are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

2024-07-08

Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (published)

doi.org

openreview.net

RepLiQA: A Question-Answering Dataset for Benchmarking LLMs on Unseen Reference Content

Joao Monteiro

Pierre-Andre Noel

Étienne Marcotte

Sai Rajeswar

Valentina Zantedeschi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includ… (see more)es encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and depicting an imaginary scenario (e.g., a news article) absent from the internet; (2) a question about the document's topic; (3) a ground-truth answer derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting. Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.

2024-06-17

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

RepLiQA: A Question-Answering Dataset for Benchmarking LLMs on Unseen Reference Content

Joao Monteiro

Pierre-Andre Noel

Étienne Marcotte

Sai Rajeswar

Valentina Zantedeschi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includ… (see more)es encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and depicting an imaginary scenario (e.g., a news article) absent from the internet; (2) a question about the document's topic; (3) a ground-truth answer derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting. Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.

2024-06-17

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

Exploring validation metrics for offline model-based optimisation with diffusion models

2024-06-13

TMLR (accepted)

openreview.net

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference

Jo˜ao Monteiro

Étienne Marcotte

Pierre-Andre Noel

Valentina Zantedeschi

In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (see more)on. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context isn't known in advance, caching ICL can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform ICL, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude.

2024-04-23

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference

Jo˜ao Monteiro

Étienne Marcotte

Pierre-Andre Noel

Valentina Zantedeschi

In-context learning (ICL) approaches typically leverage prompting to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference informati… (see more)on. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context isn't known in advance, caching ICL can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform ICL, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude.

2024-04-23

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

2024-03-12

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

2024-03-12

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

2024-03-12

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

2024-03-12

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

WorkArena: How Capable Are Web Agents at Solving Common Knowledge Work Tasks?

Alexandre Drouin

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Alexandre Lacoste

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuri… (see more)ng the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 33 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

2024-03-12

ArXiv (preprint)

doi.org

arxiv.org

IntentGPT: Few-shot Intent Discovery with Large Language Models

Juan A. Rodriguez

Nicholas Botzer

David Vázquez

Chris Pal

Marco Pedersoli

Issam Hadj Laradji

2024-03-11