[HN Gopher] Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with L...
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       Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language
       Models
        
       Author : jonbaer
       Score  : 201 points
       Date   : 2023-08-24 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | refulgentis wrote:
       | Need more data.
       | 
       | - Complex generalization with a simple unstated justification:
       | last 'paper' like this was ToT, and a tree is a graph with
       | constraints.
       | 
       | - Framework is discussed cognitively, units of "thoughts"
       | "scored". (AutoGPT redux, having the LLM eat its own output
       | repetitively improves things but isn't a panacea)
       | 
       | - Only sorting demonstrated "due to space constraints" -- unclear
       | what that means, it seems much more likely it was self-enforced
       | time constraints
       | 
       | - Error rate is consistently 14%.
       | 
       | - ~10x the cost for ~15% error rate in sorting instead of ~30%
       | 
       | - GPT3.5
        
       | creer wrote:
       | I keep feeling that LLMs are one direction to address the thorny
       | "common sense" issue of AI. Mountains of training text
       | incorporate, probably, most common sense (and a lot of nonsense).
       | It's beautiful to see so many ideas come out currently to make
       | better use of the models. Including the fast progress made with
       | image generation.
        
       | marcopicentini wrote:
       | What are other use cases that could be made only by LLM ?
       | 
       | Number sorting is faster using code.
        
         | creer wrote:
         | I don't think efficiency is important at this point. Finding
         | that it's possible "this way" opens the door for more work and
         | more applications. (Which doesn't prevent others to already
         | work on efficiency.)
        
         | empath-nirvana wrote:
         | The point of using number sorting for this paper is that its
         | 
         | A) difficult to impossible for an LLM to do in a single pass B)
         | easy to verify the correctness.
         | 
         | In general, the point isn't finding things that only an LLM can
         | do, but find things that LLMs can do with decent results at
         | lower cost than getting a human to do it.
        
           | jbay808 wrote:
           | It is only difficult for a LLM to sort a list of numbers if
           | the list is longer than half of the context window. (Source:
           | I tested this myself[1]). The sorts are not error-free
           | _every_ time, but with sufficient training they become error-
           | free the vast majority of the time, even for long lists. This
           | is not especially surprising because transformers are capable
           | of directly representing sorting programs.[2]
           | 
           | [1] https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/its-not-just-
           | statistics-...
           | 
           | [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06981
        
           | [deleted]
        
       | firewolf34 wrote:
       | The more I read about ML, the more I begin to believe that -
       | psychologically speaking - hierarchy (esp. graph structures,
       | trees) are absolutely core to advanced information processing in
       | general.
        
         | brutusborn wrote:
         | I won't pretend to understand it, but this reminds me of the
         | idea of markov blankets when using the free energy principle to
         | model congition. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7
         | 955287/#:~:tex....
        
         | macawfish wrote:
         | This article is about how non-hierarchical graphs, those with
         | cycles, are performing better than trees or chains.
        
           | theptip wrote:
           | I suspect that you'll still find strong hierarchy in an
           | optimized/well-performing graph of thought. The human brain,
           | for example, also has recurrence, but it's limited.
           | 
           | It seems pretty intuitive that you'd get a "task / subtask"
           | split for example, with feedback from the latter, but
           | semantic content largely flowing from the former to the
           | latter.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | We got symbolic AI sneaked into the connectionist model by
         | making a graph of thoughts. A graph can explicitly implement
         | any algorithm or data structure.
         | 
         | They could make it more efficient by implementing a kind of
         | "hard attention". Each token should have access to a sparse
         | subset of the whole input, so it would be like a node in a
         | graph only having access to a few neighbours. Could solve the
         | very large context issue. This can also be parallelised,
         | running all thought nodes in parallel, of course each with a
         | sparse view of the whole input making it much faster.
         | 
         | For example when reading a long book, the model would spawn
         | nodes for each person, location or event of interest, and they
         | would track the source text as the action develops. A mental
         | map of the book. That would surely help a model deal with many
         | moving pieces of information.
         | 
         | Or when solving a problem, the model could spawn a node to work
         | on a subproblem, parametrised by the parent node with the right
         | inputs. Then the node would report back with the answer and the
         | parent continues. This would work with recursive calls.
         | 
         | The new cpu is the LLM and the clock tick is 1 token.
        
           | barrenko wrote:
           | Could you expand on "A graph can explicitly implement any
           | algorithm or data structure."?
        
             | gryn wrote:
             | you can use graph transformation to perform general
             | computation.
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_rewriting
             | 
             | probably not was GP meant, but something along those lines.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | You could create a node for each execution step, or data
             | field.
        
               | Vox_Leone wrote:
               | And thus you could use UML to formalize prompting. An
               | activity diagram can be viewed as a chain of thought.
               | Fulfilling the UML promise.
        
       | zalyalov wrote:
       | Weird that they claim to use arbitrary graphs, while in reality
       | it's a weird subclass of DAGs with one-vertex loops kind of
       | allowed, except they don't really make sense to be represented as
       | loops.
        
       | Cloudly wrote:
       | https://github.com/spcl/graph-of-thoughts Code for the paper too
        
       | knexer wrote:
       | This is a really natural extension of CoT. I was experimenting
       | for a month or two with a similar concept in a hobby project this
       | past spring: https://github.com/knexer/llmtaskgraph . I'm really
       | excited to see more people exploring in this direction!
       | 
       | I was focusing more on an engineering perspective; modeling a
       | complex LLM-and-code process as a dependency graph makes it easy
       | to:
       | 
       | - add tracing to continuously measure and monitor even post-
       | deployment
       | 
       | - perform reproducible experiments, a la time-rewinding debugging
       | 
       | - speed up iteration on prompts by caching the parts of the
       | program you aren't working on right now
       | 
       | My test case was using GPT4 to implement the operators in a
       | genetic algorithm, which tbh is a fascinating concept of its own.
       | I drifted away after a while (curse that ADHD) but had a great
       | time with the project in the meantime.
        
       | brutusborn wrote:
       | This is fantastic. I'd love to see a system that uses an LLM to
       | generate knowledge graphs from academic papers to make them
       | machine readable.
       | 
       | Some kind of prompt like "does paper P contain idea A and does it
       | suggest that A is true." Then you could automatically categorise
       | citations by whether they agree/disagree with the cited paper.
       | 
       | Sometimes I see papers with 2,000 citations and I wonder: how
       | many of those are dis/agreeing with the paper.
        
         | nvm0n2 wrote:
         | This has already been studied. Negative citations are
         | vanishingly rare. So virtually all of them will be either
         | neutral or positive.
        
           | photonthug wrote:
           | Applications to case law might be interesting since
           | establishing precedent is somewhat more nonbinary
        
           | jll29 wrote:
           | > Sometimes I see papers with 2,000 citations and I wonder:
           | how many of those are dis/agreeing with the paper.
           | 
           | One example of an author that is very influential, despite
           | causing a lot of disagreement (even in more than one
           | discipline) is Noam Chomsky, who is also the most cited
           | person alive, and the second most cited person in recorded
           | history after Aristotle. His views about generative grammar
           | are in part revolutionary, in part plain wrong; your
           | assessment of his views about the Palestine conflict and U.S.
           | foreign politics will largely depend on your political
           | leanings; and his contribution to formal language theory is
           | fundamental regardless of your leanings (Chomsky hierarchy;
           | Chomsky Normal Form).
           | 
           | > This has already been studied. Negative citations are
           | vanishingly rare. So virtually all of them will be either
           | neutral or positive. Might be a difference between
           | science/engineering (where true) and humanities (where a
           | larger amount is negative).
        
         | anentropic wrote:
         | There are already models which are specialised to this task,
         | e.g. https://huggingface.co/Babelscape/rebel-large (if I
         | understood you correctly)
         | 
         | Though with LLM and sufficient context length you could
         | probably just use that prompt directly on the academic paper
         | without ever generating a knowledge graph
        
         | throwaway290 wrote:
         | By that logic why don't you just directly ask the LLM on
         | whether a citation agrees or not, you are already trusting it
         | to be correct with that graph in the first place...
        
           | 3abiton wrote:
           | I already feel synthesis is becoming a useless skill for
           | humans.
        
           | brutusborn wrote:
           | You are correct, I wrote that in a rush and mixed up examples
           | in my head.
           | 
           | I don't think you need to trust the LLMs for this kind of
           | thing to be very useful. The LLM could generate the KG with
           | every node labelled as "autogenerated." When you use the
           | graph for research, you are still going to read the papers
           | you are interested in so you can then update the relevant
           | citation node with the label "human checked."
           | 
           | If a research group uses the same graph over time, the nodes
           | will gradually become "trustworthy" (ie verified by humans).
           | Maybe even get reviewers to update a papers graph during
           | review and publish that for other groups to add to their
           | graphs.
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | That's a great idea. It would be easier to know if anyone
             | done what you want, get a better overview of the current
             | knowledge.
        
       | jstx1 wrote:
       | How well do these papers replicate? In some of experiments with
       | GPT-4 I've seen chain-of-thought style prompting make answers
       | noticeably worse than plainly asking a question once.
        
         | rmbyrro wrote:
         | Really? Do you have any examples to share? I'd be surprised to
         | see that in action.
        
       | sorokod wrote:
       | For the kind of synergy I demand, only the hypergraph of thought
       | ( HoT ) will do.
        
         | groceryheist wrote:
         | Intractable. Only the simplical complex of thought provides the
         | optimal balance of expressiveness and constraint.
        
           | sorokod wrote:
           | Well ok, maybe only for distilling the essence of whole
           | networks of thoughts
        
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       (page generated 2023-08-24 23:00 UTC)