Nicolas Chapados

Perouz Taslakian

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Issam Hadj Laradji

Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (see more)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.

2024-07-08

ArXiv (preprint)

InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation

Gaurav Sahu

Abhay Puri

Juan A. Rodriguez

Perouz Taslakian

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Issam Hadj Laradji

Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (see more)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.

2024-07-08

ArXiv (preprint)

InsightBench: Evaluating Business Analytics Agents Through Multi-Step Insight Generation

Gaurav Sahu

Abhay Puri

Juan A. Rodriguez

Perouz Taslakian

Valentina Zantedeschi

Alexandre Lacoste

David Vazquez

Sai Rajeswar

Issam Hadj Laradji

Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We intro… (see more)duce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics.

2024-07-08

ArXiv (preprint)

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

Maxime Gasse

Massimo Caccia

Issam Hadj Laradji

Manuel Del Verme

Tom Marty

Léo Boisvert

Megh Thakkar

Quentin Cappart

David Vazquez

Alexandre Lacoste

2024-07-08

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

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

David Vazquez

Perouz Taslakian

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)

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

Joao Monteiro

Pierre-Andre Noel

Étienne Marcotte

Sai Rajeswar

Valentina Zantedeschi

David Vazquez

Perouz Taslakian

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)

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

Jo˜ao Monteiro

Étienne Marcotte

Pierre-Andre Noel

Valentina Zantedeschi

David Vazquez

Perouz Taslakian

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)

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

Jo˜ao Monteiro

Étienne Marcotte

Pierre-Andre Noel

Valentina Zantedeschi

David Vazquez

Perouz Taslakian

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)

LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders

Parishad BehnamGhader

Vaibhav Adlakha

Marius Mosbach

Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.

2024-04-09

ArXiv (preprint)

LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders

Parishad BehnamGhader

Vaibhav Adlakha

Marius Mosbach

Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 3 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 7B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data. Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.

2024-04-09

ArXiv (preprint)

LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders

Parishad BehnamGhader

Vaibhav Adlakha

Marius Mosbach

Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.

2024-04-09

ArXiv (preprint)

LLM2Vec: Large Language Models Are Secretly Powerful Text Encoders

Parishad BehnamGhader

Vaibhav Adlakha

Marius Mosbach

Large decoder-only language models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art models on most of today's NLP tasks and benchmarks. Yet, the community is… (see more) only slowly adopting these models for text embedding tasks, which require rich contextualized representations. In this work, we introduce LLM2Vec, a simple unsupervised approach that can transform any decoder-only LLM into a strong text encoder. LLM2Vec consists of three simple steps: 1) enabling bidirectional attention, 2) masked next token prediction, and 3) unsupervised contrastive learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM2Vec by applying it to 4 popular LLMs ranging from 1.3B to 8B parameters and evaluate the transformed models on English word- and sequence-level tasks. We outperform encoder-only models by a large margin on word-level tasks and reach a new unsupervised state-of-the-art performance on the Massive Text Embeddings Benchmark (MTEB). Moreover, when combining LLM2Vec with supervised contrastive learning, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on MTEB among models that train only on publicly available data (as of May 24, 2024). Our strong empirical results and extensive analysis demonstrate that LLMs can be effectively transformed into universal text encoders in a parameter-efficient manner without the need for expensive adaptation or synthetic GPT-4 generated data.

2024-04-09

ArXiv (preprint)