LLM Processes: Numerical Predictive Distributions Conditioned on Natural Language

Machine learning practitioners often face significant challenges in formally integrating their prior knowledge and beliefs into predictive models, limiting the potential for nuanced and context-aware analyses. Moreover, the expertise needed to integrate this prior knowledge into probabilistic modeling typically limits the application of these models to specialists. Our goal is to build a regression model that can process numerical data and make probabilistic predictions at arbitrary locations, guided by natural language text which describes a user's prior knowledge. Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a useful starting point for designing such a tool since they 1) provide an interface where users can incorporate expert insights in natural language and 2) provide an opportunity for leveraging latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs that users may not have themselves. We start by exploring strategies for eliciting explicit, coherent numerical predictive distributions from LLMs. We examine these joint predictive distributions, which we call LLM Processes, over arbitrarily-many quantities in settings such as forecasting, multi-dimensional regression, black-box optimization, and image modeling. We investigate the practical details of prompting to elicit coherent predictive distributions, and demonstrate their effectiveness at regression. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to usefully incorporate text into numerical predictions, improving predictive performance and giving quantitative structure that reflects qualitative descriptions. This lets us begin to explore the rich, grounded hypothesis space that LLMs implicitly encode.

Paper

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Peer review

Reviewer mWHr6/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-11

Summary

This paper focuses on the setting where the goal is to use LLMs to make numerical predictions, as these models can be grounded by the provision of side-information (given in text) as well as other information that may be learned during their pretraining. They propose LLM Processes, an approach to apply LLMs to numerical tasks, such as density estimation and multivariate time series tasks. In computing their densities over continuous valued numerical inputs, they employ binning as is done in LLMTime, although they do not rescale to remove decimal points. They also add an additional terminal special token (<t>). In selecting their input prompt formats, they use separators between each x, y and (x,y) pair, order points by distance to the current point, scale the y values to be closer to [0, 1] and not incorporate -1 values. On many 1D synthetic tasks, LLMP demonstrates matching or better performance when compared to GPs with a RBF kernel. Their approach outperforms the most related baseline of LLMTime in terms of both NLL and MAE in predictions on a Weather time series benchmark. Their experiments also outperform a GP (with RBF kernel) on a multidimensional input/output task of simultaneous temperature, rainfall and wind speed regression task. They also provide experiments looking at the ability of LLMP to handle textual information (alongside numerical inputs); they provide descriptions of the numerical features, which cannot be used in baseline forecasting approaches that do not understand text.

Strengths

1. Good empirical results showing that the proposed approach improves over the baselines of LLMTime and a BP with an RBF kernel across a variety of univariate and multivariate forecasting tasks. 2. Ablations supporting particular choices for input formatting and scaling

Weaknesses

Slightly unclear in the evaluation; please see questions below.

Questions

1. It’s not immediately clear to me what the takeaways from Figure 9 are. What are the axes for each of the subplots? 2. My current understanding is that incorporating some additional textual information should meaningfully change the predictive distribution, which seems to occur. Is there any way to measure how correct this change in distribution is? 3. For instance, in Figure 9d, it seems that the median from 5 random samples seems to be roughly constant (around 2.5-3), which does not seem to match the ground truth values in 9f. Is this case just a failure of the LLM Process?

Rating

6

Confidence

3

Soundness

4

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes, limitations are adequately addressed.

Reviewer Qkoz9/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-12

Summary

This paper proposes using LLMs to model joint distributions over numerical outputs while conditioning on potentially multiple covariates per data point. This is achieved through tokenizing a series of input and output pairs and then decoding corresponding outputs for another input. Outputs for numerical values are achieved by treating the number as a sequence of digits, each of which are represented with a token. The method is empirically validated with additional experiments showcasing capabilities of conditioning on additional contextual information, such as text describing the process.

Strengths

The problem statement is innovative and clearly investigates many different ablations and alternatives. Extensive empirical results are shown, investigating different failure modes and comparing performance to traditional methods. The method demonstrates great versatility and interesting applications. Additionally, the paper itself is very well-written and clear in its presentation.

Weaknesses

The main weakness in the approach that I potentially see is the runtime. From what I could tell, there is no runtime results in either the main paper or the appendix. For processing a sequence of input-output pairs, what is the general runtime exhibited, and how does it change as the sequence grows?

Questions

See weaknesses.

Rating

9

Confidence

4

Soundness

4

Presentation

4

Contribution

4

Limitations

The authors extensively discussed the limitations and societal impact of the model.

Reviewer Qkoz2024-08-10

Thank you for the response to my question, this does indeed directly communicate the type of information I wanted to see regarding this issue. As far as the paper, I do still feel strongly that this is innovative work with a great deal of experimental results backing the empirical findings. As such, I maintain my original score.

Reviewer dL9w7/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-27

Summary

This paper investigates the regression problem in large language models via in-context learning. They evaluate a variety of regression tasks such as for-casting and time series prediction, multi-dimensional regression, and more. They look into prompt engineering exploiting both numerical examples and their textual explanation for eliciting coherent predictive distributions.

Strengths

-The problem of looking into the regression capabilities of language models in their in-context learning is very interesting and important. -the paper provides a large amount of experimental resutls and research work.

Weaknesses

-some parts of the paper were unclear to me, especially the experimetnal part. -Though the related works are covered well in terms of citation the actual resutls are not compared to the previous ones. see below my questions.

Questions

If I correctly understand the experimetnal part reports resutls on both training and only prompting. In this case make these two paradigms more clear in the organization of the experimental results. The paper that is cited [21] : their experiments should be comparable to this work, why the results are not compared? while you apply more technical variations here what is the main message and your new contribution compared to them? can you put their results and yours side by side and compare them? [21] From words to numbers ....

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Soundness

4

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

NA

Reviewer mWHr2024-08-08

Reviewer Response

Thank you for the clarifications about the evaluation and axes meaning in the figures. I'll maintain my stance of a weak accept; I think there are useful comparisons to prior work and ablations that illuminate some of both the abilities and failures of the application of LLMs to numerical prediction.

Reviewer dL9w2024-08-13

Thank you for addressing my question and adding the new resutls. I have raised my score.

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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