Authors: Hritik Bansal, Yonatan Bitton, Idan Szpektor, Kai-Wei Chang, Aditya Grover
Despite being (pre)trained on a massive amount of data, state-of-the-art video-language alignment models are not robust to semantically-plausible contrastive changes in the video captions. Our work addresses this by identifying a broad spectrum of contrast misalignments, such as replacing entities, actions, and flipping event order, which alignment models should be robust against. To this end, we introduce the VideoCon, a video-language alignment dataset constructed by a large language model that generates plausible contrast video captions and explanations for differences between original and contrast video captions. Then, a generative video-language model is finetuned with VideoCon to assess video-language entailment and generate explanations. Our VideoCon-based alignment model significantly outperforms current models. It exhibits a 12-point increase in AUC for the video-language alignment task on human-generated contrast captions. Finally, our model sets new state of the art zero-shot performance in temporally-extensive video-language tasks such as text-to-video retrieval (SSv2-Temporal) and video question answering (ATP-Hard). Moreover, our model shows superior performance on novel videos and human-crafted captions and explanations. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/videocon.
Authors: Zifeng Ding, Heling Cai, Jingpei Wu, Yunpu Ma, Ruotong Liao, Bo Xiong, Volker Tresp
In recent years, modeling evolving knowledge over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) has become a heated topic. Various methods have been proposed to forecast links on TKGs. Most of them are embedding-based, where hidden representations are learned to represent knowledge graph (KG) entities and relations based on the observed graph contexts. Although these methods show strong performance on traditional TKG forecasting (TKGF) benchmarks, they naturally face a strong challenge when they are asked to model the unseen zero-shot relations that has no prior graph context. In this paper, we try to mitigate this problem as follows. We first input the text descriptions of KG relations into large language models (LLMs) for generating relation representations, and then introduce them into embedding-based TKGF methods. LLM-empowered representations can capture the semantic information in the relation descriptions. This makes the relations, whether seen or unseen, with similar semantic meanings stay close in the embedding space, enabling TKGF models to recognize zero-shot relations even without any observed graph context. Experimental results show that our approach helps TKGF models to achieve much better performance in forecasting the facts with previously unseen relations, while still maintaining their ability in link forecasting regarding seen relations.
Authors: Shester Gueuwou, Sophie Siake, Colin Leong, Mathias Müller
Advancements in sign language processing have been hindered by a lack of sufficient data, impeding progress in recognition, translation, and production tasks. The absence of comprehensive sign language datasets across the world's sign languages has widened the gap in this field, resulting in a few sign languages being studied more than others, making this research area extremely skewed mostly towards sign languages from high-income countries. In this work we introduce a new large and highly multilingual dataset for sign language translation: JWSign. The dataset consists of 2,530 hours of Bible translations in 98 sign languages, featuring more than 1,500 individual signers. On this dataset, we report neural machine translation experiments. Apart from bilingual baseline systems, we also train multilingual systems, including some that take into account the typological relatedness of signed or spoken languages. Our experiments highlight that multilingual systems are superior to bilingual baselines, and that in higher-resource scenarios, clustering language pairs that are related improves translation quality.
Authors: Yunke He, Xixian Liao, Jialing Liang, Gemma Boleda
Different speakers often produce different names for the same object or entity (e.g., "woman" vs. "tourist" for a female tourist). The reasons behind variation in naming are not well understood. We create a Language and Vision dataset for Mandarin Chinese that provides an average of 20 names for 1319 naturalistic images, and investigate how familiarity with a given kind of object relates to the degree of naming variation it triggers across subjects. We propose that familiarity influences naming variation in two competing ways: increasing familiarity can either expand vocabulary, leading to higher variation, or promote convergence on conventional names, thereby reducing variation. We find evidence for both factors being at play. Our study illustrates how computational resources can be used to address research questions in Cognitive Science.
Authors: Jan Kulveit, Clem von Stengel, Roman Leventov
Large language models (LLMs) like GPT are often conceptualized as passive predictors, simulators, or even stochastic parrots. We instead conceptualize LLMs by drawing on the theory of active inference originating in cognitive science and neuroscience. We examine similarities and differences between traditional active inference systems and LLMs, leading to the conclusion that, currently, LLMs lack a tight feedback loop between acting in the world and perceiving the impacts of their actions, but otherwise fit in the active inference paradigm. We list reasons why this loop may soon be closed, and possible consequences of this including enhanced model self-awareness and the drive to minimize prediction error by changing the world.
Authors: Vasilii A. Gromov, Nikita S. Borodin, Asel S. Yerbolova
The present paper introduces a novel object of study - a language fractal structure. We hypothesize that a set of embeddings of all $n$-grams of a natural language constitutes a representative sample of this fractal set. (We use the term Hailonakea to refer to the sum total of all language fractal structures, over all $n$). The paper estimates intrinsic (genuine) dimensions of language fractal structures for the Russian and English languages. To this end, we employ methods based on (1) topological data analysis and (2) a minimum spanning tree of a data graph for a cloud of points considered (Steele theorem). For both languages, for all $n$, the intrinsic dimensions appear to be non-integer values (typical for fractal sets), close to 9 for both of the Russian and English language.
Authors: Alex Wilf, Sihyun Shawn Lee, Paul Pu Liang, Louis-Philippe Morency
Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent improvements to LLMs' reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought have seen limited applicability to ToM. In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory "Simulation Theory" to bridge this gap. We introduce SimToM, a novel two-stage prompting framework inspired by Simulation Theory's notion of perspective-taking. To implement this idea on current ToM benchmarks, SimToM first filters context based on what the character in question knows before answering a question about their mental state. Our approach, which requires no additional training and minimal prompt-tuning, shows substantial improvement over existing methods, and our analysis reveals the importance of perspective-taking to Theory-of-Mind capabilities. Our findings suggest perspective-taking as a promising direction for future research into improving LLMs' ToM capabilities.
Authors: Maike Züfle, Verna Dankers, Ivan Titov
With the ever-growing presence of social media platforms comes the increased spread of harmful content and the need for robust hate speech detection systems. Such systems easily overfit to specific targets and keywords, and evaluating them without considering distribution shifts that might occur between train and test data overestimates their benefit. We challenge hate speech models via new train-test splits of existing datasets that rely on the clustering of models' hidden representations. We present two split variants (Subset-Sum-Split and Closest-Split) that, when applied to two datasets using four pretrained models, reveal how models catastrophically fail on blind spots in the latent space. This result generalises when developing a split with one model and evaluating it on another. Our analysis suggests that there is no clear surface-level property of the data split that correlates with the decreased performance, which underscores that task difficulty is not always humanly interpretable. We recommend incorporating latent feature-based splits in model development and release two splits via the GenBench benchmark.
Authors: Ambri Ma, Arnav Kumar, Brett Zeligson
The training of large language models (LLMs) on extensive, unfiltered corpora sourced from the internet is a common and advantageous practice. Consequently, LLMs have learned and inadvertently reproduced various types of biases, including violent, offensive, and toxic language. However, recent research shows that generative pretrained transformer (GPT) language models can recognize their own biases and detect toxicity in generated content, a process referred to as self-diagnosis. In response, researchers have developed a decoding algorithm that allows LLMs to self-debias, or reduce their likelihood of generating harmful text. This study investigates the efficacy of the diagnosing-debiasing approach in mitigating two additional types of biases: insults and political bias. These biases are often used interchangeably in discourse, despite exhibiting potentially dissimilar semantic and syntactic properties. We aim to contribute to the ongoing effort of investigating the ethical and social implications of human-AI interaction.
Authors: Xiaorong Wang, Clara Na, Emma Strubell, Sorelle Friedler, Sasha Luccioni
Despite the popularity of the `pre-train then fine-tune' paradigm in the NLP community, existing work quantifying energy costs and associated carbon emissions has largely focused on language model pre-training. Although a single pre-training run draws substantially more energy than fine-tuning, fine-tuning is performed more frequently by many more individual actors, and thus must be accounted for when considering the energy and carbon footprint of NLP. In order to better characterize the role of fine-tuning in the landscape of energy and carbon emissions in NLP, we perform a careful empirical study of the computational costs of fine-tuning across tasks, datasets, hardware infrastructure and measurement modalities. Our experimental results allow us to place fine-tuning energy and carbon costs into perspective with respect to pre-training and inference, and outline recommendations to NLP researchers and practitioners who wish to improve their fine-tuning energy efficiency.
Authors: Hong Liu, Yucheng Cai, Yuan Zhou, Zhijian Ou, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng
Continual learning is crucial for dialog state tracking (DST) in dialog systems, since requirements from users for new functionalities are often encountered. However, most of existing continual learning methods for DST require task identities during testing, which is a severe limit in real-world applications. In this paper, we aim to address continual learning of DST in the class-incremental scenario (namely the task identity is unknown in testing). Inspired by the recently emerging prompt tuning method that performs well on dialog systems, we propose to use the prompt pool method, where we maintain a pool of key-value paired prompts and select prompts from the pool according to the distance between the dialog history and the prompt keys. The proposed method can automatically identify tasks and select appropriate prompts during testing. We conduct experiments on Schema-Guided Dialog dataset (SGD) and another dataset collected from a real-world dialog application. Experiment results show that the prompt pool method achieves much higher joint goal accuracy than the baseline. After combining with a rehearsal buffer, the model performance can be further improved.
Authors: Tongquan Zhou, Yao Zhang, Siyi Cao, Yulu Li, Tao Wang
ChatGPT has shown its great power in text processing, including its reasoning ability from text reading. However, there has not been any direct comparison between human readers and ChatGPT in reasoning ability related to text reading. This study was undertaken to investigate how ChatGPTs (i.e., ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus) and Chinese senior school students as ESL learners exhibited their reasoning ability from English narrative texts. Additionally, we compared the two ChatGPTs in the reasoning performances when commands were updated elaborately. The whole study was composed of three reasoning tests: Test 1 for commonsense inference, Test 2 for emotional inference, and Test 3 for causal inference. The results showed that in Test 1, the students outdid the two ChatGPT versions in local-culture-related inferences but performed worse than the chatbots in daily-life inferences. In Test 2, ChatGPT Plus excelled whereas ChatGPT lagged behind in accuracy. In association with both accuracy and frequency of correct responses, the students were inferior to the two chatbots. Compared with ChatGPTs' better performance in positive emotions, the students showed their superiority in inferring negative emotions. In Test 3, the students demonstrated better logical analysis, outdoing both chatbots. In updating command condition, ChatGPT Plus displayed good causal reasoning ability while ChatGPT kept unchanged. Our study reveals that human readers and ChatGPTs have their respective advantages and disadvantages in drawing inferences from text reading comprehension, unlocking a complementary relationship in text-based reasoning.
Authors: Hanyu Duan, Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang, Ahmed Abbasi, Kar Yan Tam
In-Context Learning (ICL) and Instruction Tuning (IT) are two primary paradigms of adopting Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream applications. However, they are significantly different. In ICL, a set of demonstrations are provided at inference time but the LLM's parameters are not updated. In IT, a set of demonstrations are used to tune LLM's parameters in training time but no demonstrations are used at inference time. Although a growing body of literature has explored ICL and IT, studies on these topics have largely been conducted in isolation, leading to a disconnect between these two paradigms. In this work, we explore the relationship between ICL and IT by examining how the hidden states of LLMs change in these two paradigms. Through carefully designed experiments conducted with LLaMA-2 (7B and 13B), we find that ICL is implicit IT. In other words, ICL changes an LLM's hidden states as if the demonstrations were used to instructionally tune the model. Furthermore, the convergence between ICL and IT is largely contingent upon several factors related to the provided demonstrations. Overall, this work offers a unique perspective to explore the connection between ICL and IT and sheds light on understanding the behaviors of LLM.
Authors: Ting Xu, Zhen Wu, Huiyun Yang, Xinyu Dai
Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) has achieved promising results while relying on sufficient annotation data in a specific domain. However, it is infeasible to annotate data for each individual domain. We propose to explore ASTE in the cross-domain setting, which transfers knowledge from a resource-rich source domain to a resource-poor target domain, thereby alleviating the reliance on labeled data in the target domain. To effectively transfer the knowledge across domains and extract the sentiment triplets accurately, we propose a method named Fine-grained cOntrAstive Learning (FOAL) to reduce the domain discrepancy and preserve the discriminability of each category. Experiments on six transfer pairs show that FOAL achieves 6% performance gains and reduces the domain discrepancy significantly compared with strong baselines. Our code will be publicly available once accepted.
Authors: Yi Yang, Hanyu Duan, Ahmed Abbasi, John P. Lalor, Kar Yan Tam
Transformer-based pretrained large language models (PLM) such as BERT and GPT have achieved remarkable success in NLP tasks. However, PLMs are prone to encoding stereotypical biases. Although a burgeoning literature has emerged on stereotypical bias mitigation in PLMs, such as work on debiasing gender and racial stereotyping, how such biases manifest and behave internally within PLMs remains largely unknown. Understanding the internal stereotyping mechanisms may allow better assessment of model fairness and guide the development of effective mitigation strategies. In this work, we focus on attention heads, a major component of the Transformer architecture, and propose a bias analysis framework to explore and identify a small set of biased heads that are found to contribute to a PLM's stereotypical bias. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the existence of these biased heads and to better understand how they behave. We investigate gender and racial bias in the English language in two types of Transformer-based PLMs: the encoder-based BERT model and the decoder-based autoregressive GPT model. Overall, the results shed light on understanding the bias behavior in pretrained language models.
Authors: Zhengqi He, Taro Toyoizumi
Understanding how humans process natural language has long been a vital research direction. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently experienced a surge in the development of powerful language models. These models have proven to be invaluable tools for studying another complex system known to process human language: the brain. Previous studies have demonstrated that the features of language models can be mapped to fMRI brain activity. This raises the question: is there a commonality between information processing in language models and the human brain? To estimate information flow patterns in a language model, we examined the causal relationships between different layers. Drawing inspiration from the workspace framework for consciousness, we hypothesized that features integrating more information would more accurately predict higher hierarchical brain activity. To validate this hypothesis, we classified language model features into two categories based on causal network measures: 'low in-degree' and 'high in-degree'. We subsequently compared the brain prediction accuracy maps for these two groups. Our results reveal that the difference in prediction accuracy follows a hierarchical pattern, consistent with the cortical hierarchy map revealed by activity time constants. This finding suggests a parallel between how language models and the human brain process linguistic information.
Authors: Kasun Wickramasinghe, Nisansa de Silva
Since their inception, embeddings have become a primary ingredient in many flavours of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks supplanting earlier types of representation. Even though multilingual embeddings have been used for the increasing number of multilingual tasks, due to the scarcity of parallel training data, low-resource languages such as Sinhala, tend to focus more on monolingual embeddings. Then when it comes to the aforementioned multi-lingual tasks, it is challenging to utilize these monolingual embeddings given that even if the embedding spaces have a similar geometric arrangement due to an identical training process, the embeddings of the languages considered are not aligned. This is solved by the embedding alignment task. Even in this, high-resource language pairs are in the limelight while low-resource languages such as Sinhala which is in dire need of help seem to have fallen by the wayside. In this paper, we try to align Sinhala and English word embedding spaces based on available alignment techniques and introduce a benchmark for Sinhala language embedding alignment. In addition to that, to facilitate the supervised alignment, as an intermediate task, we also introduce Sinhala-English alignment datasets. These datasets serve as our anchor datasets for supervised word embedding alignment. Even though we do not obtain results comparable to the high-resource languages such as French, German, or Chinese, we believe our work lays the groundwork for more specialized alignment between English and Sinhala embeddings.
Authors: Simone Caruso, Carmine Dodaro, Marco Maratea, Marco Mochi, Francesco Riccio
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative programming language for solving hard combinatorial problems. Although ASP has gained widespread acceptance in academic and industrial contexts, there are certain user groups who may find it more advantageous to employ a higher-level language that closely resembles natural language when specifying ASP programs. In this paper, we propose a novel tool, called CNL2ASP, for translating English sentences expressed in a controlled natural language (CNL) form into ASP. In particular, we first provide a definition of the type of sentences allowed by our CNL and their translation as ASP rules, and then exemplify the usage of the CNL for the specification of both synthetic and real-world combinatorial problems. Finally, we report the results of an experimental analysis conducted on the real-world problems to compare the performance of automatically generated encodings with the ones written by ASP practitioners, showing that our tool can obtain satisfactory performance on these benchmarks. Under consideration in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).
Authors: Stetsenko Daria
Many under-resourced languages require high-quality datasets for specific tasks such as offensive language detection, disinformation, or misinformation identification. However, the intricacies of the content may have a detrimental effect on the annotators. The article aims to revisit an approach of pseudo-labeling sensitive data on the example of Ukrainian tweets covering the Russian-Ukrainian war. Nowadays, this acute topic is in the spotlight of various language manipulations that cause numerous disinformation and profanity on social media platforms. The conducted experiment highlights three main stages of data annotation and underlines the main obstacles during machine annotation. Ultimately, we provide a fundamental statistical analysis of the obtained data, evaluation of models used for pseudo-labelling, and set further guidelines on how the scientists can leverage the corpus to execute more advanced research and extend the existing data samples without annotators' engagement.
Authors: Xiangru Tang, Anni Zou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Yilun Zhao, Xingyao Zhang, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and the reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these obstinate issues, we propose a novel Multi-disciplinary Collaboration (MC) framework for the medical domain that leverages role-playing LLM-based agents who participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free and interpretable framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work particularly focuses on the zero-shot scenario, our results on nine data sets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MC framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise in LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. Based on these outcomes, we further conduct a human evaluation to pinpoint and categorize common errors within our method, as well as ablation studies aimed at understanding the impact of various factors on overall performance. Our code can be found at \url{https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedAgents}.
Authors: Fatima Muhammad Adam, Abubakar Yakubu Zandam, Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Hausa is a major Chadic language, spoken by over 100 million people in Africa. However, from a computational linguistic perspective, it is considered a low-resource language, with limited resources to support Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Online platforms often facilitate social interactions that can lead to the use of offensive and threatening language, which can go undetected due to the lack of detection systems designed for Hausa. This study aimed to address this issue by (1) conducting two user studies (n=308) to investigate cyberbullying-related issues, (2) collecting and annotating the first set of offensive and threatening datasets to support relevant downstream tasks in Hausa, (3) developing a detection system to flag offensive and threatening content, and (4) evaluating the detection system and the efficacy of the Google-based translation engine in detecting offensive and threatening terms in Hausa. We found that offensive and threatening content is quite common, particularly when discussing religion and politics. Our detection system was able to detect more than 70% of offensive and threatening content, although many of these were mistranslated by Google's translation engine. We attribute this to the subtle relationship between offensive and threatening content and idiomatic expressions in the Hausa language. We recommend that diverse stakeholders participate in understanding local conventions and demographics in order to develop a more effective detection system. These insights are essential for implementing targeted moderation strategies to create a safe and inclusive online environment.
Authors: Daniel Russo, Shane Peter Kaszefski-Yaschuk, Jacopo Staiano, Marco Guerini
The proliferation of misinformation on social media platforms (SMPs) poses a significant danger to public health, social cohesion and ultimately democracy. Previous research has shown how social correction can be an effective way to curb misinformation, by engaging directly in a constructive dialogue with users who spread -- often in good faith -- misleading messages. Although professional fact-checkers are crucial to debunking viral claims, they usually do not engage in conversations on social media. Thereby, significant effort has been made to automate the use of fact-checker material in social correction; however, no previous work has tried to integrate it with the style and pragmatics that are commonly employed in social media communication. To fill this gap, we present VerMouth, the first large-scale dataset comprising roughly 12 thousand claim-response pairs (linked to debunking articles), accounting for both SMP-style and basic emotions, two factors which have a significant role in misinformation credibility and spreading. To collect this dataset we used a technique based on an author-reviewer pipeline, which efficiently combines LLMs and human annotators to obtain high-quality data. We also provide comprehensive experiments showing how models trained on our proposed dataset have significant improvements in terms of output quality and generalization capabilities.
Authors: Steven Leung, Filippos Papapolyzos
Personal attacks in the context of social media conversations often lead to fast-paced derailment, leading to even more harmful exchanges being made. State-of-the-art systems for the detection of such conversational derailment often make use of deep learning approaches for prediction purposes. In this paper, we show that an Attention-based BERT architecture, pre-trained on a large Twitter corpus and fine-tuned on our task, is efficient and effective in making such predictions. This model shows clear advantages in performance to the existing LSTM model we use as a baseline. Additionally, we show that this impressive performance can be attained through fine-tuning on a relatively small, novel dataset, particularly after mitigating overfitting issues through synthetic oversampling techniques. By introducing the first transformer based model for forecasting conversational events on Twitter, this work lays the foundation for a practical tool to encourage better interactions on one of the most ubiquitous social media platforms.
Authors: Ruohong Zhang, Luyu Gao, Chen Zheng, Zhen Fan, Guokun Lai, Zheng Zhang, Fangzhou Ai, Yiming Yang, Hongxia Yang
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their great power in language generation, often encounter challenges when dealing with intricate and knowledge-demanding queries in specific domains. This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance LLMs by effectively extracting the relevant knowledge from domain-specific textual sources, and the adaptive training of a chatbot with domain-specific inquiries. Our two-step approach starts from training a knowledge miner, namely LLMiner, which autonomously extracts Question-Answer pairs from relevant documents through a chain-of-thought reasoning process. Subsequently, we blend the mined QA pairs with a conversational dataset to fine-tune the LLM as a chatbot, thereby enriching its domain-specific expertise and conversational capabilities. We also developed a new evaluation benchmark which comprises four domain-specific text corpora and associated human-crafted QA pairs for testing. Our model shows remarkable performance improvement over generally aligned LLM and surpasses domain-adapted models directly fine-tuned on domain corpus. In particular, LLMiner achieves this with minimal human intervention, requiring only 600 seed instances, thereby providing a pathway towards self-improvement of LLMs through model-synthesized training data.
Authors: Vukasin Bozic, Danilo Dordevic, Daniele Coppola, Joseph Thommes
This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks. We substitute key elements of the attention mechanism in the Transformer with simple feed-forward networks, trained using the original components via knowledge distillation. Our experiments, conducted on the IWSLT2017 dataset, reveal the capacity of these "attentionless Transformers" to rival the performance of the original architecture. Through rigorous ablation studies, and experimenting with various replacement network types and sizes, we offer insights that support the viability of our approach. This not only sheds light on the adaptability of shallow feed-forward networks in emulating attention mechanisms but also underscores their potential to streamline complex architectures for sequence-to-sequence tasks.
Authors: Keivalya Pandya
Chat models are capable of answering a wide range of questions, however, the accuracy of their responses is highly uncertain. In this research, we propose a specialized PEFT-MedAware model where we utilize parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to enhance the Falcon-1b large language model on specialized MedQuAD data consisting of 16,407 medical QA pairs, leveraging only 0.44% of its trainable parameters to enhance computational efficiency. The paper adopts data preprocessing and PEFT to optimize model performance, complemented by a BitsAndBytesConfig for efficient transformer training. The resulting model was capable of outperforming other LLMs in medical question-answering tasks in specific domains with greater accuracy utilizing limited computational resources making it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments. We propose further improvements through expanded datasets, larger models, and feedback mechanisms for sustained medical relevancy. Our work highlights the efficiency gains and specialized capabilities of PEFT in medical AI, outpacing standard models in precision without extensive resource demands. The proposed model and data are released for research purposes only.
Authors: Hamish Ivison, Yizhong Wang, Valentina Pyatkin, Nathan Lambert, Matthew Peters, Pradeep Dasigi, Joel Jang, David Wadden, Noah A. Smith, Iz Beltagy, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Since the release of T\"ULU [Wang et al., 2023b], open resources for instruction tuning have developed quickly, from better base models to new finetuning techniques. We test and incorporate a number of these advances into T\"ULU, resulting in T\"ULU 2, a suite of improved T\"ULU models for advancing the understanding and best practices of adapting pretrained language models to downstream tasks and user preferences. Concretely, we release: (1) T\"ULU-V2-mix, an improved collection of high-quality instruction datasets; (2) T\"ULU 2, LLAMA-2 models finetuned on the V2 mixture; (3) T\"ULU 2+DPO, T\"ULU 2 models trained with direct preference optimization (DPO), including the largest DPO-trained model to date (T\"ULU 2+DPO 70B); (4) CODE T\"ULU 2, CODE LLAMA models finetuned on our V2 mix that outperform CODE LLAMA and its instruction-tuned variant, CODE LLAMA-Instruct. Our evaluation from multiple perspectives shows that the T\"ULU 2 suite achieves state-of-the-art performance among open models and matches or exceeds the performance of GPT-3.5-turbo-0301 on several benchmarks. We release all the checkpoints, data, training and evaluation code to facilitate future open efforts on adapting large language models.
Authors: Leonardo Ranaldi, Aria Nourbakhsh, Arianna Patrizi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Dario Onorati, Francesca Fallucchi, Fabio Massimo Zanzotto
Pre-trained Transformers are challenging human performances in many NLP tasks. The massive datasets used for pre-training seem to be the key to their success on existing tasks. In this paper, we explore how a range of pre-trained Natural Language Understanding models perform on definitely unseen sentences provided by classification tasks over a DarkNet corpus. Surprisingly, results show that syntactic and lexical neural networks perform on par with pre-trained Transformers even after fine-tuning. Only after what we call extreme domain adaptation, that is, retraining with the masked language model task on all the novel corpus, pre-trained Transformers reach their standard high results. This suggests that huge pre-training corpora may give Transformers unexpected help since they are exposed to many of the possible sentences.
Authors: Daniel King, Zejiang Shen, Nishant Subramani, Daniel S. Weld, Iz Beltagy, Doug Downey
Abstractive summarization systems today produce fluent and relevant output, but often "hallucinate" statements not supported by the source text. We analyze the connection between hallucinations and training data, and find evidence that models hallucinate because they train on target summaries that are unsupported by the source. Based on our findings, we present PINOCCHIO, a new decoding method that improves the consistency of a transformer-based abstractive summarizer by constraining beam search to avoid hallucinations. Given the model states and outputs at a given step, PINOCCHIO detects likely model hallucinations based on various measures of attribution to the source text. PINOCCHIO backtracks to find more consistent output, and can opt to produce no summary at all when no consistent generation can be found. In experiments, we find that PINOCCHIO improves the consistency of generation (in terms of F1) by an average of~67% on two abstractive summarization datasets.
Authors: Yue Li, Carolina Scarton, Xingyi Song, Kalina Bontcheva (University of Sheffield)
Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite the government's information campaigns and the efforts of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Categorising the topics within vaccine-related narratives is crucial to understand the concerns expressed in discussions and identify the specific issues that contribute to vaccine hesitancy. This paper addresses the need for monitoring and analysing vaccine narratives online by introducing a novel vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.
Authors: Geunwoo Kim, Pierre Baldi, Stephen McAleer
Agents capable of carrying out general tasks on a computer can improve efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks and assisting in complex problem-solving. Ideally, such agents should be able to solve new computer tasks presented to them through natural language commands. However, previous approaches to this problem require large amounts of expert demonstrations and task-specific reward functions, both of which are impractical for new tasks. In this work, we show that a pre-trained large language model (LLM) agent can execute computer tasks guided by natural language using a simple prompting scheme where the agent Recursively Criticizes and Improves its output (RCI). The RCI approach significantly outperforms existing LLM methods for automating computer tasks and surpasses supervised learning (SL) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches on the MiniWoB++ benchmark. We compare multiple LLMs and find that RCI with the InstructGPT-3+RLHF LLM is state-of-the-art on MiniWoB++, using only a handful of demonstrations per task rather than tens of thousands, and without a task-specific reward function. Furthermore, we demonstrate RCI prompting's effectiveness in enhancing LLMs' reasoning abilities on a suite of natural language reasoning tasks, outperforming chain of thought (CoT) prompting with external feedback. We find that RCI combined with CoT performs better than either separately. Our code can be found here: https://github.com/posgnu/rci-agent.
Authors: Dongyeop Jang, Tae-Rim Yun, Choong-Yeol Lee, Young-Kyu Kwon, Chang-Eop Kim
Traditional Korean medicine (TKM) emphasizes individualized diagnosis and treatment. This uniqueness makes AI modeling difficult due to limited data and implicit processes. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive medical inference, even without advanced training in medical texts. This study assessed the capabilities of GPT-4 in TKM, using the Korean National Licensing Examination for Korean Medicine Doctors (K-NLEKMD) as a benchmark. The K-NLEKMD, administered by a national organization, encompasses 12 major subjects in TKM. We optimized prompts with Chinese-term annotation, English translation for questions and instruction, exam-optimized instruction, and self-consistency. GPT-4 with optimized prompts achieved 66.18% accuracy, surpassing both the examination's average pass mark of 60% and the 40% minimum for each subject. The gradual introduction of language-related prompts and prompting techniques enhanced the accuracy from 51.82% to its maximum accuracy. GPT-4 showed low accuracy in subjects including public health & medicine-related law, internal medicine (2) which are localized in Korea and TKM. The model's accuracy was lower for questions requiring TKM-specialized knowledge. It exhibited higher accuracy in diagnosis-based and recall-based questions than in intervention-based questions. A positive correlation was observed between the consistency and accuracy of GPT-4's responses. This study unveils both the potential and challenges of applying LLMs to TKM. These findings underline the potential of LLMs like GPT-4 in culturally adapted medicine, especially TKM, for tasks such as clinical assistance, medical education, and research. But they also point towards the necessity for the development of methods to mitigate cultural bias inherent in large language models and validate their efficacy in real-world clinical settings.
Authors: Kun Zhu, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng, Yingsheng Wu, Bing Qin
Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure.Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.
Authors: Ishani Mondal, Michelle Yuan, Anandhavelu N, Aparna Garimella, Francis Ferraro, Andrew Blair-Stanek, Benjamin Van Durme, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Learning template based information extraction from documents is a crucial yet difficult task. Prior template-based IE approaches assume foreknowledge of the domain templates; however, real-world IE do not have pre-defined schemas and it is a figure-out-as you go phenomena. To quickly bootstrap templates in a real-world setting, we need to induce template slots from documents with zero or minimal supervision. Since the purpose of question answering intersect with the goal of information extraction, we use automatic question generation to induce template slots from the documents and investigate how a tiny amount of a proxy human-supervision on-the-fly (termed as InteractiveIE) can further boost the performance. Extensive experiments on biomedical and legal documents, where obtaining training data is expensive, reveal encouraging trends of performance improvement using InteractiveIE over AI-only baseline.
Authors: Hannah Bast, Matthias Hertel, Natalie Prange
Existing evaluations of entity linking systems often say little about how the system is going to perform for a particular application. There are two fundamental reasons for this. One is that many evaluations only use aggregate measures (like precision, recall, and F1 score), without a detailed error analysis or a closer look at the results. The other is that all of the widely used benchmarks have strong biases and artifacts, in particular: a strong focus on named entities, an unclear or missing specification of what else counts as an entity mention, poor handling of ambiguities, and an over- or underrepresentation of certain kinds of entities.
We provide a more meaningful and fair in-depth evaluation of a variety of existing end-to-end entity linkers. We characterize their strengths and weaknesses and also report on reproducibility aspects. The detailed results of our evaluation can be inspected under https://elevant.cs.uni-freiburg.de/emnlp2023 . Our evaluation is based on several widely used benchmarks, which exhibit the problems mentioned above to various degrees, as well as on two new benchmarks, which address the problems mentioned above. The new benchmarks can be found under https://github.com/ad-freiburg/fair-entity-linking-benchmarks .
Authors: Taehyun Lee, Seokhee Hong, Jaewoo Ahn, Ilgee Hong, Hwaran Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Jamin Shin, Gunhee Kim
With the remarkable generation performance of large language models, ethical and legal concerns about using them have been raised, such as plagiarism and copyright issues. For such concerns, several approaches to watermark and detect LLM-generated text have been proposed very recently. However, we discover that the previous methods fail to function appropriately with code generation tasks because of the syntactic and semantic characteristics of code. Based on \citet{Kirchenbauer2023watermark}, we propose a new watermarking method, Selective WatErmarking via Entropy Thresholding (SWEET), that promotes "green" tokens only at the position with high entropy of the token distribution during generation, thereby preserving the correctness of the generated code. The watermarked code is detected by the statistical test and Z-score based on the entropy information. Our experiments on HumanEval and MBPP show that SWEET significantly improves the Pareto Frontier between the code correctness and watermark detection performance. We also show that notable post-hoc detection methods (e.g. DetectGPT) fail to work well in this task. Finally, we show that setting a reasonable entropy threshold is not much of a challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/hongcheki/sweet-watermark.
Authors: Yonatan Bitton, Hritik Bansal, Jack Hessel, Rulin Shao, Wanrong Zhu, Anas Awadalla, Josh Gardner, Rohan Taori, Ludwig Schmidt
We introduce VisIT-Bench (Visual InsTruction Benchmark), a benchmark for evaluation of instruction-following vision-language models for real-world use. Our starting point is curating 70 'instruction families' that we envision instruction tuned vision-language models should be able to address. Extending beyond evaluations like VQAv2 and COCO, tasks range from basic recognition to game playing and creative generation. Following curation, our dataset comprises 592 test queries, each with a human-authored instruction-conditioned caption. These descriptions surface instruction-specific factors, e.g., for an instruction asking about the accessibility of a storefront for wheelchair users, the instruction-conditioned caption describes ramps/potential obstacles. These descriptions enable 1) collecting human-verified reference outputs for each instance; and 2) automatic evaluation of candidate multimodal generations using a text-only LLM, aligning with human judgment. We quantify quality gaps between models and references using both human and automatic evaluations; e.g., the top-performing instruction-following model wins against the GPT-4 reference in just 27% of the comparison. VisIT-Bench is dynamic to participate, practitioners simply submit their model's response on the project website; Data, code and leaderboard is available at visit-bench.github.io.
Authors: Lucas Cassiel Jacaruso
Topic modeling and text mining are subsets of Natural Language Processing (NLP) with relevance for conducting meta-analysis (MA) and systematic review (SR). For evidence synthesis, the above NLP methods are conventionally used for topic-specific literature searches or extracting values from reports to automate essential phases of SR and MA. Instead, this work proposes a comparative topic modeling approach to analyze reports of contradictory results on the same general research question. Specifically, the objective is to identify topics exhibiting distinct associations with significant results for an outcome of interest by ranking them according to their proportional occurrence in (and consistency of distribution across) reports of significant effects. The proposed method was tested on broad-scope studies addressing whether supplemental nutritional compounds significantly benefit macular degeneration (MD). Four of these were further supported in terms of effectiveness upon conducting a follow-up literature search for validation (omega-3 fatty acids, copper, zeaxanthin, and nitrates). The two not supported by the follow-up literature search (niacin and molybdenum) also had scores in the lowest range under the proposed scoring system, suggesting that the proposed methods score for a given topic may be a viable proxy for its degree of association with the outcome of interest and can be helpful in the search for potentially causal relationships. These results underpin the proposed methods potential to add specificity in understanding effects from broad-scope reports, elucidate topics of interest for future research, and guide evidence synthesis in a systematic and scalable way. All of this is accomplished while yielding valuable insights into the prevention of MD.
Authors: Valentin Barriere, Felipe del Rio, Andres Carvallo De Ferari, Carlos Aspillaga, Eugenio Herrera-Berg, Cristian Buc Calderon
Artificial neural networks typically struggle in generalizing to out-of-context examples. One reason for this limitation is caused by having datasets that incorporate only partial information regarding the potential correlational structure of the world. In this work, we propose TIDA (Targeted Image-editing Data Augmentation), a targeted data augmentation method focused on improving models' human-like abilities (e.g., gender recognition) by filling the correlational structure gap using a text-to-image generative model. More specifically, TIDA identifies specific skills in captions describing images (e.g., the presence of a specific gender in the image), changes the caption (e.g., "woman" to "man"), and then uses a text-to-image model to edit the image in order to match the novel caption (e.g., uniquely changing a woman to a man while maintaining the context identical). Based on the Flickr30K benchmark, we show that, compared with the original data set, a TIDA-enhanced dataset related to gender, color, and counting abilities induces better performance in several image captioning metrics. Furthermore, on top of relying on the classical BLEU metric, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of the improvements of our models against the baseline in different ways. We compared text-to-image generative models and found different behaviors of the image captioning models in terms of encoding visual encoding and textual decoding.
Authors: Yangruibo Ding, Zijian Wang, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Hantian Ding, Ming Tan, Nihal Jain, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Ramesh Nallapati, Parminder Bhatia, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years, yet current popular evaluation datasets, such as HumanEval and MBPP, predominantly focus on code completion tasks within a single file. This over-simplified setting falls short of representing the real-world software development scenario where repositories span multiple files with numerous cross-file dependencies, and accessing and understanding cross-file context is often required to complete the code correctly.
To fill in this gap, we propose CrossCodeEval, a diverse and multilingual code completion benchmark that necessitates an in-depth cross-file contextual understanding to complete the code accurately. CrossCodeEval is built on a diverse set of real-world, open-sourced, permissively-licensed repositories in four popular programming languages: Python, Java, TypeScript, and C#. To create examples that strictly require cross-file context for accurate completion, we propose a straightforward yet efficient static-analysis-based approach to pinpoint the use of cross-file context within the current file.
Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art code language models like CodeGen and StarCoder demonstrate that CrossCodeEval is extremely challenging when the relevant cross-file context is absent, and we see clear improvements when adding these context into the prompt. However, despite such improvements, the pinnacle of performance remains notably unattained even with the highest-performing model, indicating that CrossCodeEval is also capable of assessing model's capability in leveraging extensive context to make better code completion. Finally, we benchmarked various methods in retrieving cross-file context, and show that CrossCodeEval can also be used to measure the capability of code retrievers.
Authors: Xiaoyu Tian, Liangyu Chen, Na Liu, Yaxuan Liu, Wei Zou, Kaijiang Chen, Ming Cui
Inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, we introduce DUMA, a novel conversational agent framework that embodies a dual-mind mechanism through the utilization of two generative Large Language Models (LLMs) dedicated to fast and slow thinking respectively. The fast thinking model serves as the primary interface for external interactions and initial response generation, evaluating the necessity for engaging the slow thinking model based on the complexity of the complete response. When invoked, the slow thinking model takes over the conversation, engaging in meticulous planning, reasoning, and tool utilization to provide a well-analyzed response. This dual-mind configuration allows for a seamless transition between intuitive responses and deliberate problem-solving processes based on the situation. We have constructed a conversational agent to handle online inquiries in the real estate industry. The experiment proves that our method balances effectiveness and efficiency, and has a significant improvement compared to the baseline.
Authors: Michael A. Lepori, Thomas Serre, Ellie Pavlick
Neural network models have achieved high performance on a wide variety of complex tasks, but the algorithms that they implement are notoriously difficult to interpret. In order to understand these algorithms, it is often necessary to hypothesize intermediate variables involved in the network's computation. For example, does a language model depend on particular syntactic properties when generating a sentence? However, existing analysis tools make it difficult to test hypotheses of this type. We propose a new analysis technique -- circuit probing -- that automatically uncovers low-level circuits that compute hypothesized intermediate variables. This enables causal analysis through targeted ablation at the level of model parameters. We apply this method to models trained on simple arithmetic tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness at (1) deciphering the algorithms that models have learned, (2) revealing modular structure within a model, and (3) tracking the development of circuits over training. We compare circuit probing to other methods across these three experiments, and find it on par or more effective than existing analysis methods. Finally, we demonstrate circuit probing on a real-world use case, uncovering circuits that are responsible for subject-verb agreement and reflexive anaphora in GPT2-Small and Medium.
Authors: Shahriar Golchin, Mihai Surdeanu
We propose the Data Contamination Quiz, a simple and effective approach to detect data contamination in large language models (LLMs) and estimate the amount of it. Specifically, we frame data contamination detection as a series of multiple-choice questions. We devise a quiz format wherein three perturbed versions of each dataset instance are created. These changes only include word-level perturbations, replacing words with their contextual synonyms, ensuring both the semantic and sentence structure remain exactly the same as the original instance. Together with the original instance, these perturbed versions constitute the choices in the quiz. Given that the only distinguishing signal among these choices is the exact wording, an LLM, when tasked with identifying the original instance from the choices, opts for the original if it has memorized it in its pre-training phase--a trait intrinsic to LLMs. A dataset partition is then marked as contaminated if the LLM's performance on the quiz surpasses what random chance suggests. Our evaluation spans seven datasets and their respective splits (train and test/validation) on two state-of-the-art LLMs: GPT-4 and GPT-3.5. While lacking access to the pre-training data, our results suggest that our approach not only enhances the detection of data contamination but also provides an accurate estimation of its extent, even when the contamination signal is weak.
Authors: Sheng Liu, Lei Xing, James Zou
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate emergent in-context learning capabilities, where they adapt to new tasks based on example demonstrations. However, in-context learning has seen limited effectiveness in many settings, is difficult to quantitatively control and takes up context window space. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative approach that recasts in-context learning as in-context vectors (ICV). Using ICV has two steps. We first use a forward pass on demonstration examples to create the in-context vector from the latent embedding of the LLM. This vector captures essential information about the intended task. On a new query, instead of adding demonstrations to the prompt, we shift the latent states of the LLM using the ICV. The ICV approach has several benefits: 1) it enables the LLM to more effectively follow the demonstration examples; 2) it's easy to control by adjusting the magnitude of the ICV; 3) it reduces the length of the prompt by removing the in-context demonstrations; 4) ICV is computationally much more efficient than fine-tuning. We demonstrate that ICV achieves better performance compared to standard in-context learning and fine-tuning on diverse tasks including safety, style transfer, role-playing and formatting. Moreover, we show that we can flexibly teach LLM to simultaneously follow different types of instructions by simple vector arithmetics on the corresponding ICVs.
Authors: Junlei Zhang, Hongliang He, Nirui Song, Shuyuan He, Shuai Zhang, Huachuan Qiu, Anqi Li, Lizhi Ma, Zhenzhong Lan
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming prevalent in various fields, there is an urgent need for improved NLP benchmarks that encompass all the necessary knowledge of individual discipline. Many contemporary benchmarks for foundational models emphasize a broad range of subjects but often fall short in presenting all the critical subjects and encompassing necessary professional knowledge of them. This shortfall has led to skewed results, given that LLMs exhibit varying performance across different subjects and knowledge areas. To address this issue, we present psybench, the first comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite that covers all the necessary knowledge required for graduate entrance exams. psybench offers a deep evaluation of a model's strengths and weaknesses in psychology through multiple-choice questions. Our findings show significant differences in performance across different sections of a subject, highlighting the risk of skewed results when the knowledge in test sets is not balanced. Notably, only the ChatGPT model reaches an average accuracy above $70\%$, indicating that there is still plenty of room for improvement. We expect that psybench will help to conduct thorough evaluations of base models' strengths and weaknesses and assist in practical application in the field of psychology.