PlaSma: Making Small Language Models Better Procedural Knowledge Models for (Counterfactual) Planning

fa brah, Chandra Bhagavatula, Valentina Pyatkin, jena hwang, Xiang Lorraine Li, Hirona J. Arai, Soumya Sanyal, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Xiang Ren, Yejin Choi

PlaSma: Making Small Language Models Better Procedural Knowledge Models for (Counterfactual) Planning: 1 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #8 of 11 papers on 2023-06-01. Day-by-day upvote history.

Procedural planning, which entails decomposing a high-level goal into a sequence of temporally ordered steps, is an important yet intricate task for machines. It involves integrating common-sense knowledge to reason about complex contextualized situations that are often counterfactual, e.g. "scheduling a doctor's appointment without a phone". While current approaches show encouraging results using large language models (LLMs), they are hindered by drawbacks such as costly API calls and reproducibility issues. In this paper, we advocate planning using smaller language models. We present PlaSma, a novel two-pronged approach to endow small language models with procedural knowledge and (counterfactual) planning capabilities. More concretely, we develop symbolic procedural knowledge distillation to enhance the implicit knowledge in small language models and an inference-time algorithm to facilitate more structured and accurate reasoning. In addition, we introduce a novel task, Counterfactual Planning, that requires a revision of a plan to cope with a counterfactual situation. In both the original and counterfactual setting, we show that orders-of-magnitude smaller models (770M-11B parameters) can compete and often surpass their larger teacher models' capabilities.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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