When Parameter-efficient Tuning Meets General-purpose Vision-language Models. (arXiv:2312.12458v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yihang Zhai, Haixin Wang, Jianlong Chang, Xinlong Yang, Jinan Sun, Shikun Zhang, Qi Tian

Instruction tuning has shown promising potential for developing general-purpose AI capabilities by using large-scale pre-trained models and boosts growing research to integrate multimodal information for creative applications. However, existing works still face two main limitations: the high training costs and heavy computing resource dependence of full model fine-tuning, and the lack of semantic information in instructions, which hinders multimodal alignment. Addressing these challenges, this paper proposes a novel approach to utilize Parameter-Efficient Tuning for generAl-purpose vision-Language models, namely PETAL. PETAL revolutionizes the training process by requiring only 0.5% of the total parameters, achieved through a unique mode approximation technique, which significantly reduces the training costs and reliance on heavy computing resources. Furthermore, PETAL enhances the semantic depth of instructions in two innovative ways: 1) by introducing adaptive instruction mixture-of-experts(MOEs), and 2) by fortifying the score-based linkage between parameter-efficient tuning and mutual information. Our extensive experiments across five multimodal downstream benchmarks reveal that PETAL not only outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in most scenarios but also surpasses full fine-tuning models in effectiveness. Additionally, our approach demonstrates remarkable advantages in few-shot settings, backed by comprehensive visualization analyses. Our source code is available at: https://github. com/melonking32/PETAL.

Towards Better Serialization of Tabular Data for Few-shot Classification. (arXiv:2312.12464v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Sukriti Jaitly, Tanay Shah, Ashish Shugani, Razik Singh Grewal

We present a study on the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in tabular data classification, emphasizing an efficient framework. Building upon existing work done in TabLLM (arXiv:2210.10723), we introduce three novel serialization techniques, including the standout LaTeX serialization method. This method significantly boosts the performance of LLMs in processing domain-specific datasets, Our method stands out for its memory efficiency and ability to fully utilize complex data structures. Through extensive experimentation, including various serialization approaches like feature combination and importance, we demonstrate our work's superiority in accuracy and efficiency over traditional models.

Users Approach on Providing Feedback for Smart Home Devices. (arXiv:2312.12466v1 [cs.HC])

Authors: Santhosh Pogaku

Smart Home technology has accomplished extraordinary interest in making individuals' lives more straightforward and more relaxing as of late. Technology as of late brought about delivering numerous savvy and refined frameworks which advanced clever living innovation. In this paper, we will be investigating the behavioural intention of user's approach on providing feedback for smart home devices. We will be conducting an online survey for sample of three to five students selected by simple random sampling to study the user's motto for giving feedback on smart home devices and their expectations. We have observed that most users are ready to share their feedback on smart home devices actively to improvise the service and quality of the product to fulfill the user needs and make their lives easier.

An Empirical study of Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation: analyzing NMT output, model's behavior and sentences' contribution. (arXiv:2312.12588v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Isidora Chara Tourni, Derry Wijaya

Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT) focuses on improving NMT results under the assumption there is no human translated parallel data, yet little work has been done so far in highlighting its advantages compared to supervised methods and analyzing its output in aspects other than translation accuracy. We focus on three very diverse languages, French, Gujarati, and Kazakh, and train bilingual NMT models, to and from English, with various levels of supervision, in high- and low- resource setups, measure quality of the NMT output and compare the generated sequences' word order and semantic similarity to source and reference sentences. We also use Layer-wise Relevance Propagation to evaluate the source and target sentences' contribution to the result, expanding the findings of previous works to the UNMT paradigm.

Building a Llama2-finetuned LLM for Odia Language Utilizing Domain Knowledge Instruction Set. (arXiv:2312.12624v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Guneet Singh Kohli, Shantipriya Parida, Sambit Sekhar, Samirit Saha, Nipun B Nair, Parul Agarwal, Sonal Khosla, Kusumlata Patiyal, Debasish Dhal

Building LLMs for languages other than English is in great demand due to the unavailability and performance of multilingual LLMs, such as understanding the local context. The problem is critical for low-resource languages due to the need for instruction sets. In a multilingual country like India, there is a need for LLMs supporting Indic languages to provide generative AI and LLM-based technologies and services to its citizens.

This paper presents our approach of i) generating a large Odia instruction set, including domain knowledge data suitable for LLM fine-tuning, and ii) building a Llama2-finetuned model tailored for enhanced performance in the Odia domain. The proposed work will help researchers build an instruction set and LLM, particularly for Indic languages. We will release the model and instruction set for the public for research and noncommercial purposes.

MotionScript: Natural Language Descriptions for Expressive 3D Human Motions. (arXiv:2312.12634v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Payam Jome Yazdian, Eric Liu, Li Cheng, Angelica Lim

This paper proposes MotionScript, a motion-to-text conversion algorithm and natural language representation for human body motions. MotionScript aims to describe movements in greater detail and with more accuracy than previous natural language approaches. Many motion datasets describe relatively objective and simple actions with little variation on the way they are expressed (e.g. sitting, walking, dribbling a ball). But for expressive actions that contain a diversity of movements in the class (e.g. being sad, dancing), or for actions outside the domain of standard motion capture datasets (e.g. stylistic walking, sign-language), more specific and granular natural language descriptions are needed. Our proposed MotionScript descriptions differ from existing natural language representations in that it provides direct descriptions in natural language instead of simple action labels or high-level human captions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at translating 3D motions to natural language descriptions without requiring training data. Our experiments show that when MotionScript representations are used in a text-to-motion neural task, body movements are more accurately reconstructed, and large language models can be used to generate unseen complex motions.

Can Transformers Learn Sequential Function Classes In Context?. (arXiv:2312.12655v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Ryan Campbell, Emma Guo, Evan Hu, Reya Vir, Ethan Hsiao

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential, non-textual function class data distributions. We introduce a novel sliding window sequential function class and employ toy-sized transformers with a GPT-2 architecture to conduct our experiments. Our analysis indicates that these models can indeed leverage ICL when trained on non-textual sequential function classes. Additionally, our experiments with randomized y-label sequences highlights that transformers retain some ICL capabilities even when the label associations are obfuscated. We provide evidence that transformers can reason with and understand sequentiality encoded within function classes, as reflected by the effective learning of our proposed tasks. Our results also show that the performance deteriorated with increasing randomness in the labels, though not to the extent one might expect, implying a potential robustness of learned sequentiality against label noise. Future research may want to look into how previous explanations of transformers, such as induction heads and task vectors, relate to sequentiality in ICL in these toy examples. Our investigation lays the groundwork for further research into how transformers process and perceive sequential data.

Is post-editing really faster than human translation?. (arXiv:2312.12660v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Silvia Terribile

Time efficiency is paramount for the localisation industry, which demands ever-faster turnaround times. However, translation speed is largely underresearched, and there is a lack of clarity about how language service providers (LSPs) can evaluate the performance of their post-editing (PE) and human translation (HT) services. This study constitutes the first large-scale investigation of translation and revision speed in HT and in the PE of neural machine translation, based on real-world data from an LSP. It uses an exploratory data analysis approach to investigate data for 90 million words translated by 879 linguists across 11 language pairs, over 2.5 years. The results of this research indicate that (a) PE is usually but not always faster than HT; (b) average speed values may be misleading; (c) translation speed is highly variable; and (d) edit distance cannot be used as a proxy for post-editing productivity, because it does not correlate strongly with speed.

Imitation of Life: A Search Engine for Biologically Inspired Design. (arXiv:2312.12681v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Hen Emuna, Nadav Borenstein, Xin Qian, Hyeonsu Kang, Joel Chan, Aniket Kittur, Dafna Shahaf

Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations.

In this paper, we introduce BARcode (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARcode identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARcode can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARcode as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.

Mini-GPTs: Efficient Large Language Models through Contextual Pruning. (arXiv:2312.12682v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Tim Valicenti, Justice Vidal, Ritik Patnaik

In AI research, the optimization of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, crucial for advancing the field's practical applications and sustainability. Building upon the foundational work of Professor Song Han's lab at MIT, this paper introduces a novel approach in developing Mini-GPTs via contextual pruning. Our methodology strategically prunes the computational architecture of traditional LLMs, like Phi-1.5, focusing on retaining core functionalities while drastically reducing model sizes. We employ the technique across diverse and complex datasets, including US law, Medical Q&A, Skyrim dialogue, English-Taiwanese translation, and Economics articles. The results underscore the efficiency and effectiveness of contextual pruning, not merely as a theoretical concept but as a practical tool in developing domain-specific, resource-efficient LLMs. Contextual pruning is a promising method for building domain-specific LLMs, and this research is a building block towards future development with more hardware compute, refined fine-tuning, and quantization.

Turning English-centric LLMs Into Polyglots: How Much Multilinguality Is Needed?. (arXiv:2312.12683v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Tannon Kew, Florian Schottmann, Rico Sennrich

The vast majority of today's large language models are English-centric, having been pretrained predominantly on English text. Yet, in order to meet user expectations, models need to be able to respond appropriately in multiple languages once deployed in downstream applications. Given limited exposure to other languages during pretraining, cross-lingual transfer is important for achieving decent performance in non-English settings. In this work, we investigate just how much multilinguality is required during finetuning to elicit strong cross-lingual generalisation across a range of tasks and target languages. We find that, compared to English-only finetuning, multilingual instruction tuning with as few as three languages significantly improves a model's cross-lingual transfer abilities on generative tasks that assume input/output language agreement, while being of less importance for highly structured tasks. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/ZurichNLP/multilingual-instruction-tuning.

Response Enhanced Semi-Supervised Dialogue Query Generation. (arXiv:2312.12713v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Jianheng Huang, Ante Wang, Linfeng Gao, Linfeng Song, Jinsong Su

Leveraging vast and continually updated knowledge from the Internet has been considered an important ability for a dialogue system. Therefore, the dialogue query generation task is proposed for generating search queries from dialogue histories, which will be submitted to a search engine for retrieving relevant websites on the Internet. In this regard, previous efforts were devoted to collecting conversations with annotated queries and training a query producer (QP) via standard supervised learning. However, these studies still face the challenges of data scarcity and domain adaptation. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning framework -- SemiDQG, to improve model performance with unlabeled conversations. Based on the observation that the search query is typically related to the topic of dialogue response, we train a response-augmented query producer (RA) to provide rich and effective training signals for QP. We first apply a similarity-based query selection strategy to select high-quality RA-generated pseudo queries, which are used to construct pseudo instances for training QP and RA. Then, we adopt the REINFORCE algorithm to further enhance QP, with RA-provided rewards as fine-grained training signals. Experimental results and in-depth analysis of three benchmarks show the effectiveness of our framework in cross-domain and low-resource scenarios. Particularly, SemiDQG significantly surpasses ChatGPT and competitive baselines. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/SemiDQG}.

BloomVQA: Assessing Hierarchical Multi-modal Comprehension. (arXiv:2312.12716v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Yunye Gong, Robik Shrestha, Jared Claypoole, Michael Cogswell, Arijit Ray, Christopher Kanan, Ajay Divakaran

We propose a novel VQA dataset, based on picture stories designed for educating young children, that aims to facilitate comprehensive evaluation and characterization of vision-language models on comprehension tasks. Unlike current VQA datasets that often focus on fact-based memorization and simple reasoning tasks without principled scientific grounding, we collect data containing tasks reflecting different levels of comprehension and underlying cognitive processes, as laid out in Bloom's Taxonomy, a classic framework widely adopted in education research. The proposed BloomVQA dataset can be mapped to a hierarchical graph-based representation of visual stories, enabling automatic data augmentation and novel measures characterizing model consistency across the underlying taxonomy. We demonstrate graded evaluation and reliability analysis based on our proposed consistency metrics on state-of-the-art vision-language models. Our results suggest that, while current models achieve the most gain on low-level comprehension tasks, they generally fall short on high-level tasks requiring more advanced comprehension and cognitive skills, as 38.0% drop in VQA accuracy is observed comparing lowest and highest level tasks. Furthermore, current models show consistency patterns misaligned with human comprehension in various scenarios, suggesting emergent structures of model behaviors.

Learning and Forgetting Unsafe Examples in Large Language Models. (arXiv:2312.12736v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Jiachen Zhao, Zhun Deng, David Madras, James Zou, Mengye Ren

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the behavior of LLMs finetuned on noisy custom data containing unsafe content, represented by datasets that contain biases, toxicity, and harmfulness, finding that while aligned LLMs can readily learn this unsafe content, they also tend to forget it more significantly than other examples when subsequently finetuned on safer content. Drawing inspiration from the discrepancies in forgetting, we introduce the "ForgetFilter" algorithm, which filters unsafe data based on how strong the model's forgetting signal is for that data. We demonstrate that the ForgetFilter algorithm ensures safety in customized finetuning without compromising downstream task performance, unlike sequential safety finetuning. ForgetFilter outperforms alternative strategies like replay and moral self-correction in curbing LLMs' ability to assimilate unsafe content during custom finetuning, e.g. 75% lower than not applying any safety measures and 62% lower than using self-correction in toxicity score.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Adaptive Machine Translation. (arXiv:2312.12740v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yasmin Moslem, Rejwanul Haque, Andy Way

This paper presents the outcomes of fine-tuning Mistral 7B, a general-purpose large language model (LLM), for adaptive machine translation (MT). The fine-tuning process involves utilising a combination of zero-shot and one-shot translation prompts within the medical domain. The primary objective is to enhance real-time adaptive MT capabilities of Mistral 7B, enabling it to adapt translations to the required domain at inference time. The results, particularly for Spanish-to-English MT, showcase the efficacy of the fine-tuned model, demonstrating quality improvements in both zero-shot and one-shot translation scenarios, surpassing Mistral 7B's baseline performance. Notably, the fine-tuned Mistral outperforms ChatGPT "gpt-3.5-turbo" in zero-shot translation while achieving comparable one-shot translation quality. Moreover, the zero-shot translation of the fine-tuned Mistral matches NLLB 3.3B's performance, and its one-shot translation quality surpasses that of NLLB 3.3B. These findings emphasise the significance of fine-tuning efficient LLMs like Mistral 7B to yield high-quality zero-shot translations comparable to task-oriented models like NLLB 3.3B. Additionally, the adaptive gains achieved in one-shot translation are comparable to those of commercial LLMs such as ChatGPT. Our experiments demonstrate that, with a relatively small dataset of 20,000 segments that incorporate a mix of zero-shot and one-shot prompts, fine-tuning significantly enhances Mistral's in-context learning ability, especially for real-time adaptive MT.

ChatFDA: Medical Records Risk Assessment. (arXiv:2312.12746v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: M Tran, C Sun

In healthcare, the emphasis on patient safety and the minimization of medical errors cannot be overstated. Despite concerted efforts, many healthcare systems, especially in low-resource regions, still grapple with preventing these errors effectively. This study explores a pioneering application aimed at addressing this challenge by assisting caregivers in gauging potential risks derived from medical notes. The application leverages data from openFDA, delivering real-time, actionable insights regarding prescriptions. Preliminary analyses conducted on the MIMIC-III \cite{mimic} dataset affirm a proof of concept highlighting a reduction in medical errors and an amplification in patient safety. This tool holds promise for drastically enhancing healthcare outcomes in settings with limited resources. To bolster reproducibility and foster further research, the codebase underpinning our methodology is accessible on https://github.com/autonlab/2023.hackAuton/tree/main/prescription_checker. This is a submission for the 30th HackAuton CMU.

ALMANACS: A Simulatability Benchmark for Language Model Explainability. (arXiv:2312.12747v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Edmund Mills, Shiye Su, Stuart Russell, Scott Emmons

How do we measure the efficacy of language model explainability methods? While many explainability methods have been developed, they are typically evaluated on bespoke tasks, preventing an apples-to-apples comparison. To help fill this gap, we present ALMANACS, a language model explainability benchmark. ALMANACS scores explainability methods on simulatability, i.e., how well the explanations improve behavior prediction on new inputs. The ALMANACS scenarios span twelve safety-relevant topics such as ethical reasoning and advanced AI behaviors; they have idiosyncratic premises to invoke model-specific behavior; and they have a train-test distributional shift to encourage faithful explanations. By using another language model to predict behavior based on the explanations, ALMANACS is a fully automated benchmark. We use ALMANACS to evaluate counterfactuals, rationalizations, attention, and Integrated Gradients explanations. Our results are sobering: when averaged across all topics, no explanation method outperforms the explanation-free control. We conclude that despite modest successes in prior work, developing an explanation method that aids simulatability in ALMANACS remains an open challenge.

Spectral Prompt Tuning:Unveiling Unseen Classes for Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation. (arXiv:2312.12754v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Wenhao Xu, Rongtao Xu, Changwei Wang, Shibiao Xu, Li Guo, Man Zhang, Xiaopeng Zhang

Recently, CLIP has found practical utility in the domain of pixel-level zero-shot segmentation tasks. The present landscape features two-stage methodologies beset by issues such as intricate pipelines and elevated computational costs. While current one-stage approaches alleviate these concerns and incorporate Visual Prompt Training (VPT) to uphold CLIP's generalization capacity, they still fall short in fully harnessing CLIP's potential for pixel-level unseen class demarcation and precise pixel predictions. To further stimulate CLIP's zero-shot dense prediction capability, we propose SPT-SEG, a one-stage approach that improves CLIP's adaptability from image to pixel. Specifically, we initially introduce Spectral Prompt Tuning (SPT), incorporating spectral prompts into the CLIP visual encoder's shallow layers to capture structural intricacies of images, thereby enhancing comprehension of unseen classes. Subsequently, we introduce the Spectral Guided Decoder (SGD), utilizing both high and low-frequency information to steer the network's spatial focus towards more prominent classification features, enabling precise pixel-level prediction outcomes. Through extensive experiments on two public datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art approaches, performing well across all classes and particularly excelling in handling unseen classes. Code is available at:https://github.com/clearxu/SPT.

Lattice Rescoring Based on Large Ensemble of Complementary Neural Language Models. (arXiv:2312.12764v1 [eess.AS])

Authors: Atsunori Ogawa, Naohiro Tawara, Marc Delcroix, Shoko Araki

We investigate the effectiveness of using a large ensemble of advanced neural language models (NLMs) for lattice rescoring on automatic speech recognition (ASR) hypotheses. Previous studies have reported the effectiveness of combining a small number of NLMs. In contrast, in this study, we combine up to eight NLMs, i.e., forward/backward long short-term memory/Transformer-LMs that are trained with two different random initialization seeds. We combine these NLMs through iterative lattice generation. Since these NLMs work complementarily with each other, by combining them one by one at each rescoring iteration, language scores attached to given lattice arcs can be gradually refined. Consequently, errors of the ASR hypotheses can be gradually reduced. We also investigate the effectiveness of carrying over contextual information (previous rescoring results) across a lattice sequence of a long speech such as a lecture speech. In experiments using a lecture speech corpus, by combining the eight NLMs and using context carry-over, we obtained a 24.4% relative word error rate reduction from the ASR 1-best baseline. For further comparison, we performed simultaneous (i.e., non-iterative) NLM combination and 100-best rescoring using the large ensemble of NLMs, which confirmed the advantage of lattice rescoring with iterative NLM combination.

Segmenting Messy Text: Detecting Boundaries in Text Derived from Historical Newspaper Images. (arXiv:2312.12773v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Carol Anderson, Phil Crone (Ancestry.com)

Text segmentation, the task of dividing a document into sections, is often a prerequisite for performing additional natural language processing tasks. Existing text segmentation methods have typically been developed and tested using clean, narrative-style text with segments containing distinct topics. Here we consider a challenging text segmentation task: dividing newspaper marriage announcement lists into units of one announcement each. In many cases the information is not structured into sentences, and adjacent segments are not topically distinct from each other. In addition, the text of the announcements, which is derived from images of historical newspapers via optical character recognition, contains many typographical errors. As a result, these announcements are not amenable to segmentation with existing techniques. We present a novel deep learning-based model for segmenting such text and show that it significantly outperforms an existing state-of-the-art method on our task.

Stable Distillation: Regularizing Continued Pre-training for Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition. (arXiv:2312.12783v1 [eess.AS])

Authors: Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh, Dinesh Manocha

Continued self-supervised (SSL) pre-training for adapting existing SSL models to the target domain has shown to be extremely effective for low-resource Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This paper proposes Stable Distillation, a simple and novel approach for SSL-based continued pre-training that boosts ASR performance in the target domain where both labeled and unlabeled data are limited. Stable Distillation employs self-distillation as regularization for continued pre-training, alleviating the over-fitting issue, a common problem continued pre-training faces when the source and target domains differ. Specifically, first, we perform vanilla continued pre-training on an initial SSL pre-trained model on the target domain ASR dataset and call it the teacher. Next, we take the same initial pre-trained model as a student to perform continued pre-training while enforcing its hidden representations to be close to that of the teacher (via MSE loss). This student is then used for downstream ASR fine-tuning on the target dataset. In practice, Stable Distillation outperforms all our baselines by 0.8 - 7 WER when evaluated in various experimental settings.

MedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models. (arXiv:2312.12806v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yan Cai, Linlin Wang, Ye Wang, Gerard de Melo, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Liang He

The emergence of various medical large language models (LLMs) in the medical domain has highlighted the need for unified evaluation standards, as manual evaluation of LLMs proves to be time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we introduce MedBench, a comprehensive benchmark for the Chinese medical domain, comprising 40,041 questions sourced from authentic examination exercises and medical reports of diverse branches of medicine. In particular, this benchmark is composed of four key components: the Chinese Medical Licensing Examination, the Resident Standardization Training Examination, the Doctor In-Charge Qualification Examination, and real-world clinic cases encompassing examinations, diagnoses, and treatments. MedBench replicates the educational progression and clinical practice experiences of doctors in Mainland China, thereby establishing itself as a credible benchmark for assessing the mastery of knowledge and reasoning abilities in medical language learning models. We perform extensive experiments and conduct an in-depth analysis from diverse perspectives, which culminate in the following findings: (1) Chinese medical LLMs underperform on this benchmark, highlighting the need for significant advances in clinical knowledge and diagnostic precision. (2) Several general-domain LLMs surprisingly possess considerable medical knowledge. These findings elucidate both the capabilities and limitations of LLMs within the context of MedBench, with the ultimate goal of aiding the medical research community.

Enhancing Consistency in Multimodal Dialogue System Using LLM with Dialogue Scenario. (arXiv:2312.12808v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Hiroki Onozeki, Zhiyang Qi, Kazuma Akiyama, Ryutaro Asahara, Takumasa Kaneko, Michimasa Inaba

This paper describes our dialogue system submitted to Dialogue Robot Competition 2023. The system's task is to help a user at a travel agency decide on a plan for visiting two sightseeing spots in Kyoto City that satisfy the user. Our dialogue system is flexible and stable and responds to user requirements by controlling dialogue flow according to dialogue scenarios. We also improved user satisfaction by introducing motion and speech control based on system utterances and user situations. In the preliminary round, our system was ranked fifth in the impression evaluation and sixth in the plan evaluation among all 12 teams.

OCTOPUS: Open-vocabulary Content Tracking and Object Placement Using Semantic Understanding in Mixed Reality. (arXiv:2312.12815v1 [cs.CV])

Authors: Luke Yoffe, Aditya Sharma, Tobias Höllerer

One key challenge in augmented reality is the placement of virtual content in natural locations. Existing automated techniques are only able to work with a closed-vocabulary, fixed set of objects. In this paper, we introduce a new open-vocabulary method for object placement. Our eight-stage pipeline leverages recent advances in segmentation models, vision-language models, and LLMs to place any virtual object in any AR camera frame or scene. In a preliminary user study, we show that our method performs at least as well as human experts 57% of the time.

Turning Dust into Gold: Distilling Complex Reasoning Capabilities from LLMs by Leveraging Negative Data. (arXiv:2312.12832v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yiwei Li, Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Boyuan Pan, Bin Sun, Xinglin Wang, Heda Wang, Kan Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed well on various reasoning tasks, but their inaccessibility and numerous parameters hinder wide application in practice. One promising way is distilling the reasoning ability from LLMs to small models by the generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths. In some cases, however, LLMs may produce incorrect reasoning chains, especially when facing complex mathematical problems. Previous studies only transfer knowledge from positive samples and drop the synthesized data with wrong answers. In this work, we illustrate the merit of negative data and propose a model specialization framework to distill LLMs with negative samples besides positive ones. The framework consists of three progressive steps, covering from training to inference stages, to absorb knowledge from negative data. We conduct extensive experiments across arithmetic reasoning tasks to demonstrate the role of negative data in distillation from LLM.

A Stochastic Analysis of the Linguistic Provenance of English Place Names. (arXiv:2312.12850v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Michael Dalvean

In English place name analysis, meanings are often derived from the resemblance of roots in place names to topographical features, proper names and/or habitation terms in one of the languages that have had an influence on English place names. The problem here is that it is sometimes difficult to determine the base language to use to interpret the roots. The purpose of this paper is to stochastically determine the resemblance between 18799 English place names and 84685 place names from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Ancient Rome. Each English place name is ranked according to the extent to which it resembles place names from the other countries, and this provides a basis for determining the likely language to use to interpret the place name. A number of observations can be made using the ranking provided. In particular, it is found that `Didlington' is the most archetypically English place name in the English sample, and `Anna' is the least. Furthermore, it is found that the place names in the non-English datasets are most similar to Norwegian place names and least similar to Welsh place names.

Language Resources for Dutch Large Language Modelling. (arXiv:2312.12852v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Bram Vanroy

Despite the rapid expansion of types of large language models, there remains a notable gap in models specifically designed for the Dutch language. This gap is not only a shortage in terms of pretrained Dutch models but also in terms of data, and benchmarks and leaderboards. This work provides a small step to improve the situation. First, we introduce two fine-tuned variants of the Llama 2 13B model. We first fine-tuned Llama 2 using Dutch-specific web-crawled data and subsequently refined this model further on multiple synthetic instruction and chat datasets. These datasets as well as the model weights are made available. In addition, we provide a leaderboard to keep track of the performance of (Dutch) models on a number of generation tasks, and we include results of a number of state-of-the-art models, including our own. Finally we provide a critical conclusion on what we believe is needed to push forward Dutch language models and the whole eco-system around the models.

CORECODE: A Common Sense Annotated Dialogue Dataset with Benchmark Tasks for Chinese Large Language Models. (arXiv:2312.12853v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Dan Shi, Chaobin You, Jiantao Huang, Taihao Li, Deyi Xiong

As an indispensable ingredient of intelligence, commonsense reasoning is crucial for large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose CORECODE, a dataset that contains abundant commonsense knowledge manually annotated on dyadic dialogues, to evaluate the commonsense reasoning and commonsense conflict detection capabilities of Chinese LLMs. We categorize commonsense knowledge in everyday conversations into three dimensions: entity, event, and social interaction. For easy and consistent annotation, we standardize the form of commonsense knowledge annotation in open-domain dialogues as "domain: slot = value". A total of 9 domains and 37 slots are defined to capture diverse commonsense knowledge. With these pre-defined domains and slots, we collect 76,787 commonsense knowledge annotations from 19,700 dialogues through crowdsourcing. To evaluate and enhance the commonsense reasoning capability for LLMs on the curated dataset, we establish a series of dialogue-level reasoning and detection tasks, including commonsense knowledge filling, commonsense knowledge generation, commonsense conflict phrase detection, domain identification, slot identification, and event causal inference. A wide variety of existing open-source Chinese LLMs are evaluated with these tasks on our dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that these models are not competent to predict CORECODE's plentiful reasoning content, and even ChatGPT could only achieve 0.275 and 0.084 accuracy on the domain identification and slot identification tasks under the zero-shot setting. We release the data and codes of CORECODE at https://github.com/danshi777/CORECODE to promote commonsense reasoning evaluation and study of LLMs in the context of daily conversations.

Big Tech influence over AI research revisited: memetic analysis of attribution of ideas to affiliation. (arXiv:2312.12881v1 [physics.soc-ph])

Authors: Stanisław Giziński, Paulina Kaczyńska, Hubert Ruczyński, Emilia Wiśnios, Bartosz Pieliński, Przemysław Biecek, Julian Sienkiewicz

There exists a growing discourse around the domination of Big Tech on the landscape of artificial intelligence (AI) research, yet our comprehension of this phenomenon remains cursory. This paper aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of Big Tech's reach and power within AI research. It highlights the dominance not merely in terms of sheer publication volume but rather in the propagation of new ideas or \textit{memes}. Current studies often oversimplify the concept of influence to the share of affiliations in academic papers, typically sourced from limited databases such as arXiv or specific academic conferences.

The main goal of this paper is to unravel the specific nuances of such influence, determining which AI ideas are predominantly driven by Big Tech entities. By employing network and memetic analysis on AI-oriented paper abstracts and their citation network, we are able to grasp a deeper insight into this phenomenon. By utilizing two databases: OpenAlex and S2ORC, we are able to perform such analysis on a much bigger scale than previous attempts.

Our findings suggest, that while Big Tech-affiliated papers are disproportionately more cited in some areas, the most cited papers are those affiliated with both Big Tech and Academia. Focusing on the most contagious memes, their attribution to specific affiliation groups (Big Tech, Academia, mixed affiliation) seems to be equally distributed between those three groups. This suggests that the notion of Big Tech domination over AI research is oversimplified in the discourse.

Ultimately, this more nuanced understanding of Big Tech's and Academia's influence could inform a more symbiotic alliance between these stakeholders which would better serve the dual goals of societal welfare and the scientific integrity of AI research.

Assaying on the Robustness of Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detectors. (arXiv:2312.12918v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yi-Fan Zhang, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Rong Jin

To combat the potential misuse of Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology, a variety of algorithms have been developed for the detection of AI-generated texts. Traditionally, this task is treated as a binary classification problem. Although supervised learning has demonstrated promising results, acquiring labeled data for detection purposes poses real-world challenges and the risk of overfitting. In an effort to address these issues, we delve into the realm of zero-shot machine-generated text detection. Existing zero-shot detectors, typically designed for specific tasks or topics, often assume uniform testing scenarios, limiting their practicality. In our research, we explore various advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) and their specialized variants, contributing to this field in several ways. In empirical studies, we uncover a significant correlation between topics and detection performance. Secondly, we delve into the influence of topic shifts on zero-shot detectors. These investigations shed light on the adaptability and robustness of these detection methods across diverse topics.

Benchmarking and Analyzing In-context Learning, Fine-tuning and Supervised Learning for Biomedical Knowledge Curation: a focused study on chemical entities of biological interest. (arXiv:2312.12989v1 [cs.LG])

Authors: Emily Groves, Minhong Wang, Yusuf Abdulle, Holger Kunz, Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier, Ronin Wu, Honghan Wu

Automated knowledge curation for biomedical ontologies is key to ensure that they remain comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date. In the era of foundational language models, this study compares and analyzes three NLP paradigms for curation tasks: in-context learning (ICL), fine-tuning (FT), and supervised learning (ML). Using the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) database as a model ontology, three curation tasks were devised. For ICL, three prompting strategies were employed with GPT-4, GPT-3.5, BioGPT. PubmedBERT was chosen for the FT paradigm. For ML, six embedding models were utilized for training Random Forest and Long-Short Term Memory models. Five setups were designed to assess ML and FT model performance across different data availability scenarios.Datasets for curation tasks included: task 1 (620,386), task 2 (611,430), and task 3 (617,381), maintaining a 50:50 positive versus negative ratio. For ICL models, GPT-4 achieved best accuracy scores of 0.916, 0.766 and 0.874 for tasks 1-3 respectively. In a direct comparison, ML (trained on ~260,000 triples) outperformed ICL in accuracy across all tasks. (accuracy differences: +.11, +.22 and +.17). Fine-tuned PubmedBERT performed similarly to leading ML models in tasks 1 & 2 (F1 differences: -.014 and +.002), but worse in task 3 (-.048). Simulations revealed performance declines in both ML and FT models with smaller and higher imbalanced training data. where ICL (particularly GPT-4) excelled in tasks 1 & 3. GPT-4 excelled in tasks 1 and 3 with less than 6,000 triples, surpassing ML/FT. ICL underperformed ML/FT in task 2.ICL-augmented foundation models can be good assistants for knowledge curation with correct prompting, however, not making ML and FT paradigms obsolete. The latter two require task-specific data to beat ICL. In such cases, ML relies on small pretrained embeddings, minimizing computational demands.

Machine Mindset: An MBTI Exploration of Large Language Models. (arXiv:2312.12999v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Jiaxi Cui, Liuzhenghao Lv, Jing Wen, Jing Tang, YongHong Tian, Li Yuan

We present a novel approach for integrating Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality traits into large language models (LLMs), addressing the challenges of personality consistency in personalized AI. Our method, "Machine Mindset," involves a two-phase fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to embed MBTI traits into LLMs. This approach ensures that models internalize these traits, offering a stable and consistent personality profile. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our models across various domains, showing alignment between model performance and their respective MBTI traits. The paper highlights significant contributions in the development of personality datasets and a new training methodology for personality integration in LLMs, enhancing the potential for personalized AI applications. We also open-sourced our model and part of the data at \url{https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Machine-Mindset}.

AgentCoder: Multi-Agent-based Code Generation with Iterative Testing and Optimisation. (arXiv:2312.13010v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Dong Huang, Qingwen Bu, Jie M.Zhang, Michael Luck, Heming Cui

The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) has been significantly boosted by the development of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). These models have revolutionized NLP tasks, particularly in code generation, aiding developers in creating software with enhanced efficiency. Despite their advancements, challenges in balancing code snippet generation with effective test case generation and execution persist. To address these issues, this paper introduces Multi-Agent Assistant Code Generation (AgentCoder), a novel solution comprising a multi-agent framework with specialized agents: the programmer agent, the test designer agent, and the test executor agent. During the coding procedure, the programmer agent will focus on the code generation and refinement based on the test executor agent's feedback. The test designer agent will generate test cases for the generated code, and the test executor agent will run the code with the test cases and write the feedback to the programmer. This collaborative system ensures robust code generation, surpassing the limitations of single-agent models and traditional methodologies. Our extensive experiments on 9 code generation models and 12 enhancement approaches showcase AgentCoder's superior performance over existing code generation models and prompt engineering techniques across various benchmarks. For example, AgentCoder achieves 77.4% and 89.1% pass@1 in HumanEval-ET and MBPP-ET with GPT-3.5, while SOTA baselines obtain only 69.5% and 63.0%.

FusDom: Combining In-Domain and Out-of-Domain Knowledge for Continuous Self-Supervised Learning. (arXiv:2312.13026v1 [eess.AS])

Authors: Ashish Seth, Sreyan Ghosh, S. Umesh, Dinesh Manocha

Continued pre-training (CP) offers multiple advantages, like target domain adaptation and the potential to exploit the continuous stream of unlabeled data available online. However, continued pre-training on out-of-domain distributions often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, leading to sub-optimal ASR performance. This paper presents FusDom, a simple and novel methodology for SSL-based continued pre-training. FusDom learns speech representations that are robust and adaptive yet not forgetful of concepts seen in the past. Instead of solving the SSL pre-text task on the output representations of a single model, FusDom leverages two identical pre-trained SSL models, a teacher and a student, with a modified pre-training head to solve the CP SSL pre-text task. This head employs a cross-attention mechanism between the representations of both models while only the student receives gradient updates and the teacher does not. Finally, the student is fine-tuned for ASR. In practice, FusDom outperforms all our baselines across settings significantly, with WER improvements in the range of 0.2 WER - 7.3 WER in the target domain while retaining the performance in the earlier domain.

Retrieval-augmented Multilingual Knowledge Editing. (arXiv:2312.13040v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Weixuan Wang, Barry Haddow, Alexandra Birch

Knowledge represented in Large Language Models (LLMs) is quite often incorrect and can also become obsolete over time. Updating knowledge via fine-tuning is computationally resource-hungry and not reliable, and so knowledge editing (KE) has developed as an effective and economical alternative to inject new knowledge or to fix factual errors in LLMs. Although there has been considerable interest in this area, current KE research exclusively focuses on the monolingual setting, typically in English. However, what happens if the new knowledge is supplied in one language, but we would like to query the LLM in a different language? To address the problem of multilingual knowledge editing, we propose Retrieval-augmented Multilingual Knowledge Editor (ReMaKE) to update new knowledge in LLMs. ReMaKE can perform model-agnostic knowledge editing in multilingual settings. ReMaKE concatenates the new knowledge retrieved from a multilingual knowledge base with prompts. Our experimental results show that ReMaKE outperforms baseline knowledge editing methods by a significant margin and is the first KE method to work in a multilingual setting. We provide our multilingual knowledge editing dataset (MzsRE) in 12 languages, which along with code, and additional project information is available at https://github.com/Vicky-Wil/ReMaKE.

In Generative AI we Trust: Can Chatbots Effectively Verify Political Information?. (arXiv:2312.13096v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Elizaveta Kuznetsova, Mykola Makhortykh, Victoria Vziatysheva, Martha Stolze, Ani Baghumyan, Aleksandra Urman

This article presents a comparative analysis of the ability of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots, ChatGPT and Bing Chat, recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot, to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ+ related debates. We compare how the chatbots perform in high- and low-resource languages by using prompts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Furthermore, we explore the ability of chatbots to evaluate statements according to political communication concepts of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theory, using definition-oriented prompts. We also systematically test how such evaluations are influenced by source bias which we model by attributing specific claims to various political and social actors. The results show high performance of ChatGPT for the baseline veracity evaluation task, with 72 percent of the cases evaluated correctly on average across languages without pre-training. Bing Chat performed worse with a 67 percent accuracy. We observe significant disparities in how chatbots evaluate prompts in high- and low-resource languages and how they adapt their evaluations to political communication concepts with ChatGPT providing more nuanced outputs than Bing Chat. Finally, we find that for some veracity detection-related tasks, the performance of chatbots varied depending on the topic of the statement or the source to which it is attributed. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based chatbots in tackling different forms of false information in online environments, but also points to the substantial variation in terms of how such potential is realized due to specific factors, such as language of the prompt or the topic.

Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Error-checking. (arXiv:2312.13103v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Jinge Wu, Yunsoo Kim, Eva C. Keller, Jamie Chow, Adam P. Levine, Nikolas Pontikos, Zina Ibrahim, Paul Taylor, Michelle C. Williams, Honghan Wu

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.

Prometheus: Infrastructure Security Posture Analysis with AI-generated Attack Graphs. (arXiv:2312.13119v1 [cs.CR])

Authors: Xin Jin, Charalampos Katsis, Fan Sang, Jiahao Sun, Elisa Bertino, Ramana Rao Kompella, Ashish Kundu

The rampant occurrence of cybersecurity breaches imposes substantial limitations on the progress of network infrastructures, leading to compromised data, financial losses, potential harm to individuals, and disruptions in essential services. The current security landscape demands the urgent development of a holistic security assessment solution that encompasses vulnerability analysis and investigates the potential exploitation of these vulnerabilities as attack paths. In this paper, we propose Prometheus, an advanced system designed to provide a detailed analysis of the security posture of computing infrastructures. Using user-provided information, such as device details and software versions, Prometheus performs a comprehensive security assessment. This assessment includes identifying associated vulnerabilities and constructing potential attack graphs that adversaries can exploit. Furthermore, Prometheus evaluates the exploitability of these attack paths and quantifies the overall security posture through a scoring mechanism. The system takes a holistic approach by analyzing security layers encompassing hardware, system, network, and cryptography. Furthermore, Prometheus delves into the interconnections between these layers, exploring how vulnerabilities in one layer can be leveraged to exploit vulnerabilities in others. In this paper, we present the end-to-end pipeline implemented in Prometheus, showcasing the systematic approach adopted for conducting this thorough security analysis.

Contextual Code Switching for Machine Translation using Language Models. (arXiv:2312.13179v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Arshad Kaji, Manan Shah

Large language models (LLMs) have exerted a considerable impact on diverse language-related tasks in recent years. Their demonstrated state-of-the-art performance is achieved through methodologies such as zero-shot or few-shot prompting. These models undergo training on extensive datasets that encompass segments of the Internet and subsequently undergo fine-tuning tailored to specific tasks. Notably, they exhibit proficiency in tasks such as translation, summarization, question answering, and creative writing, even in the absence of explicit training for those particular tasks. While they have shown substantial improvement in the multilingual tasks their performance in the code switching, especially for machine translation remains relatively uncharted. In this paper, we present an extensive study on the code switching task specifically for the machine translation task comparing multiple LLMs. Our results indicate that despite the LLMs having promising results in the certain tasks, the models with relatively lesser complexity outperform the multilingual large language models in the machine translation task. We posit that the efficacy of multilingual large language models in contextual code switching is constrained by their training methodologies. In contrast, relatively smaller models, when trained and fine-tuned on bespoke datasets, may yield superior results in comparison to the majority of multilingual models.

HCDIR: End-to-end Hate Context Detection, and Intensity Reduction model for online comments. (arXiv:2312.13193v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Neeraj Kumar Singh, Koyel Ghosh, Joy Mahapatra, Utpal Garain, Apurbalal Senapati

Warning: This paper contains examples of the language that some people may find offensive.

Detecting and reducing hateful, abusive, offensive comments is a critical and challenging task on social media. Moreover, few studies aim to mitigate the intensity of hate speech. While studies have shown that context-level semantics are crucial for detecting hateful comments, most of this research focuses on English due to the ample datasets available. In contrast, low-resource languages, like Indian languages, remain under-researched because of limited datasets. Contrary to hate speech detection, hate intensity reduction remains unexplored in high-resource and low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end model, HCDIR, for Hate Context Detection, and Hate Intensity Reduction in social media posts. First, we fine-tuned several pre-trained language models to detect hateful comments to ascertain the best-performing hateful comments detection model. Then, we identified the contextual hateful words. Identification of such hateful words is justified through the state-of-the-art explainable learning model, i.e., Integrated Gradient (IG). Lastly, the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) model has been employed to capture domain-specific nuances to reduce hate intensity. We masked the 50\% hateful words of the comments identified as hateful and predicted the alternative words for these masked terms to generate convincing sentences. An optimal replacement for the original hate comments from the feasible sentences is preferred. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several recent datasets using automatic metric-based evaluation (BERTScore) and thorough human evaluation. To enhance the faithfulness in human evaluation, we arranged a group of three human annotators with varied expertise.

LlaMaVAE: Guiding Large Language Model Generation via Continuous Latent Sentence Spaces. (arXiv:2312.13208v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Yingji Zhang, Danilo S. Carvalho, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, André Freitas

Deep generative neural networks, such as Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), offer an opportunity to better understand and control language models from the perspective of sentence-level latent spaces. To combine the controllability of VAE latent spaces with the state-of-the-art performance of recent large language models (LLMs), we present in this work LlaMaVAE, which combines expressive encoder and decoder models (sentenceT5 and LlaMA) with a VAE architecture, aiming to provide better text generation control to LLMs. In addition, to conditionally guide the VAE generation, we investigate a new approach based on flow-based invertible neural networks (INNs) named Invertible CVAE. Experimental results reveal that LlaMaVAE can outperform the previous state-of-the-art VAE language model, Optimus, across various tasks, including language modelling, semantic textual similarity and definition modelling. Qualitative analysis on interpolation and traversal experiments also indicates an increased degree of semantic clustering and geometric consistency, which enables better generation control.

DSFormer: Effective Compression of Text-Transformers by Dense-Sparse Weight Factorization. (arXiv:2312.13211v1 [cs.CL])

Authors: Rahul Chand, Yashoteja Prabhu, Pratyush Kumar

With the tremendous success of large transformer models in natural language understanding, down-sizing them for cost-effective deployments has become critical. Recent studies have explored the low-rank weight factorization techniques which are efficient to train, and apply out-of-the-box to any transformer architecture. Unfortunately, the low-rank assumption tends to be over-restrictive and hinders the expressiveness of the compressed model. This paper proposes, DSFormer, a simple alternative factorization scheme which expresses a target weight matrix as the product of a small dense and a semi-structured sparse matrix. The resulting approximation is more faithful to the weight distribution in transformers and therefore achieves a stronger efficiency-accuracy trade-off. Another concern with existing factorizers is their dependence on a task-unaware initialization step which degrades the accuracy of the resulting model. DSFormer addresses this issue through a novel Straight-Through Factorizer (STF) algorithm that jointly learns all the weight factorizations to directly maximize the final task accuracy. Extensive experiments on multiple natural language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that DSFormer obtains up to 40% better compression than the state-of-the-art low-rank factorizers, leading semi-structured sparsity baselines and popular knowledge distillation approaches. Our approach is also orthogonal to mainstream compressors and offers up to 50% additional compression when added to popular distilled, layer-shared and quantized transformers. We empirically evaluate the benefits of STF over conventional optimization practices.

Interactive Visual Task Learning for Robots. (arXiv:2312.13219v1 [cs.RO])

Authors: Weiwei Gu, Anant Sah, Nakul Gopalan

We present a framework for robots to learn novel visual concepts and tasks via in-situ linguistic interactions with human users. Previous approaches have either used large pre-trained visual models to infer novel objects zero-shot, or added novel concepts along with their attributes and representations to a concept hierarchy. We extend the approaches that focus on learning visual concept hierarchies by enabling them to learn novel concepts and solve unseen robotics tasks with them. To enable a visual concept learner to solve robotics tasks one-shot, we developed two distinct techniques. Firstly, we propose a novel approach, Hi-Viscont(HIerarchical VISual CONcept learner for Task), which augments information of a novel concept to its parent nodes within a concept hierarchy. This information propagation allows all concepts in a hierarchy to update as novel concepts are taught in a continual learning setting. Secondly, we represent a visual task as a scene graph with language annotations, allowing us to create novel permutations of a demonstrated task zero-shot in-situ. We present two sets of results. Firstly, we compare Hi-Viscont with the baseline model (FALCON) on visual question answering(VQA) in three domains. While being comparable to the baseline model on leaf level concepts, Hi-Viscont achieves an improvement of over 9% on non-leaf concepts on average. We compare our model's performance against the baseline FALCON model. Our framework achieves 33% improvements in success rate metric, and 19% improvements in the object level accuracy compared to the baseline model. With both of these results we demonstrate the ability of our model to learn tasks and concepts in a continual learning setting on the robot.

Latency Adjustable Transformer Encoder for Language Understanding. (arXiv:2201.03327v7 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Sajjad Kachuee, Mohammad Sharifkhani

Adjusting the latency, power, and accuracy of natural language understanding models is a desirable objective of an efficient architecture. This paper proposes an efficient Transformer architecture that adjusts the inference computational cost adaptively with a desired inference latency speedup. In fine-tuning phase, the proposed method detects less important hidden sequence elements (word-vectors) and eliminates them in each encoder layer using a proposed Attention Context Contribution (ACC) metric. After the fine-tuning phase, with the novel offline-tuning property, the inference latency of the model can be adjusted in a wide range of inference speedup selections without any further training. The proposed method is applied to the BERT-base and GPT-2 models for evaluation. Extensive experiments show that most of the word-vectors in higher Transformer layers have less contribution to the subsequent layers; hence, they can be eliminated to improve the inference latency. Experimental results on extensive sentiment analysis, classification, text generation tasks and regression benchmarks like GLUE showed that the method is effective in various datasets with minimal impact on global context. The proposed method mathematically and experimentally improves the inference latency of BERT-base and GPT-2 by up to 4.8 and 3.72 times with less than 0.75% accuracy drop and passable perplexity on average. The suggested approach posits that in Large Language Models (LLMs), although the complete network is necessary for training, it can be truncated during the fine-tuning phase.

Beyond Grounding: Extracting Fine-Grained Event Hierarchies Across Modalities. (arXiv:2206.07207v3 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Hammad A. Ayyubi, Christopher Thomas, Lovish Chum, Rahul Lokesh, Long Chen, Yulei Niu, Xudong Lin, Xuande Feng, Jaywon Koo, Sounak Ray, Shih-Fu Chang

Events describe happenings in our world that are of importance. Naturally, understanding events mentioned in multimedia content and how they are related forms an important way of comprehending our world. Existing literature can infer if events across textual and visual (video) domains are identical (via grounding) and thus, on the same semantic level. However, grounding fails to capture the intricate cross-event relations that exist due to the same events being referred to on many semantic levels. For example, in Figure 1, the abstract event of "war" manifests at a lower semantic level through subevents "tanks firing" (in video) and airplane "shot" (in text), leading to a hierarchical, multimodal relationship between the events.

In this paper, we propose the task of extracting event hierarchies from multimodal (video and text) data to capture how the same event manifests itself in different modalities at different semantic levels. This reveals the structure of events and is critical to understanding them. To support research on this task, we introduce the Multimodal Hierarchical Events (MultiHiEve) dataset. Unlike prior video-language datasets, MultiHiEve is composed of news video-article pairs, which makes it rich in event hierarchies. We densely annotate a part of the dataset to construct the test benchmark. We show the limitations of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines on this task. Further, we address these limitations via a new weakly supervised model, leveraging only unannotated video-article pairs from MultiHiEve. We perform a thorough evaluation of our proposed method which demonstrates improved performance on this task and highlight opportunities for future research.

Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation. (arXiv:2210.03087v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Jacob Krantz, Shurjo Banerjee, Wang Zhu, Jason Corso, Peter Anderson, Stefan Lee, Jesse Thomason

We present Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation (IVLN), a paradigm for evaluating language-guided agents navigating in a persistent environment over time. Existing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks erase the agent's memory at the beginning of every episode, testing the ability to perform cold-start navigation with no prior information. However, deployed robots occupy the same environment for long periods of time. The IVLN paradigm addresses this disparity by training and evaluating VLN agents that maintain memory across tours of scenes that consist of up to 100 ordered instruction-following Room-to-Room (R2R) episodes, each defined by an individual language instruction and a target path. We present discrete and continuous Iterative Room-to-Room (IR2R) benchmarks comprising about 400 tours each in 80 indoor scenes. We find that extending the implicit memory of high-performing transformer VLN agents is not sufficient for IVLN, but agents that build maps can benefit from environment persistence, motivating a renewed focus on map-building agents in VLN.

SoftCorrect: Error Correction with Soft Detection for Automatic Speech Recognition. (arXiv:2212.01039v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Wenjie Liu, Kaitao Song, Rui Wang, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Edward Lin, Tie-Yan Liu

Error correction in automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to correct those incorrect words in sentences generated by ASR models. Since recent ASR models usually have low word error rate (WER), to avoid affecting originally correct tokens, error correction models should only modify incorrect words, and therefore detecting incorrect words is important for error correction. Previous works on error correction either implicitly detect error words through target-source attention or CTC (connectionist temporal classification) loss, or explicitly locate specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors. However, implicit error detection does not provide clear signal about which tokens are incorrect and explicit error detection suffers from low detection accuracy. In this paper, we propose SoftCorrect with a soft error detection mechanism to avoid the limitations of both explicit and implicit error detection. Specifically, we first detect whether a token is correct or not through a probability produced by a dedicatedly designed language model, and then design a constrained CTC loss that only duplicates the detected incorrect tokens to let the decoder focus on the correction of error tokens. Compared with implicit error detection with CTC loss, SoftCorrect provides explicit signal about which words are incorrect and thus does not need to duplicate every token but only incorrect tokens; compared with explicit error detection, SoftCorrect does not detect specific deletion/substitution/insertion errors but just leaves it to CTC loss. Experiments on AISHELL-1 and Aidatatang datasets show that SoftCorrect achieves 26.1% and 9.4% CER reduction respectively, outperforming previous works by a large margin, while still enjoying fast speed of parallel generation.

SEAM: An Integrated Activation-Coupled Model of Sentence Processing and Eye Movements in Reading. (arXiv:2303.05221v4 [q-bio.NC] UPDATED)

Authors: Maximilian M. Rabe, Dario Paape, Daniela Mertzen, Shravan Vasishth, Ralf Engbert

Models of eye-movement control during reading, developed largely within psychology, usually focus on visual, attentional, lexical, and motor processes but neglect post-lexical language processing; by contrast, models of sentence comprehension processes, developed largely within psycholinguistics, generally focus only on post-lexical language processes. We present a model that combines these two research threads, by integrating eye-movement control and sentence processing. Developing such an integrated model is extremely challenging and computationally demanding, but such an integration is an important step toward complete mathematical models of natural language comprehension in reading. We combine the SWIFT model of eye-movement control (Seelig et al., 2020, doi:10.1016/j.jmp.2019.102313) with key components of the Lewis and Vasishth sentence processing model (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005, doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_25). This integration becomes possible, for the first time, due in part to recent advances in successful parameter identification in dynamical models, which allows us to investigate profile log-likelihoods for individual model parameters. We present a fully implemented proof-of-concept model demonstrating how such an integrated model can be achieved; our approach includes Bayesian model inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as a key computational tool. The integrated Sentence-Processing and Eye-Movement Activation-Coupled Model (SEAM) can successfully reproduce eye movement patterns that arise due to similarity-based interference in reading. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever integration of a complete process model of eye-movement control with linguistic dependency completion processes in sentence comprehension. In future work, this proof of concept model will need to be evaluated using a comprehensive set of benchmark data.

Robust Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training against Data Poisoning and Backdoor Attacks. (arXiv:2303.06854v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Wenhan Yang, Jingdong Gao, Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Contrastive vision-language representation learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot classification, by learning from millions of image-caption pairs crawled from the internet. However, the massive data that powers large multimodal models such as CLIP, makes them extremely vulnerable to various types of targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks. Despite this vulnerability, robust contrastive vision-language pre-training against such attacks has remained unaddressed. In this work, we propose ROCLIP, the first effective method for robust pre-training multimodal vision-language models against targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks. ROCLIP effectively breaks the association between poisoned image-caption pairs by considering a relatively large and varying pool of random captions, and matching every image with the text that is most similar to it in the pool instead of its own caption, every few epochs.It also leverages image and text augmentations to further strengthen the defense and improve the performance of the model. Our extensive experiments show that ROCLIP renders state-of-the-art targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks ineffective during pre-training CLIP models. In particular, ROCLIP decreases the success rate for targeted data poisoning attacks from 93.75% to 12.5% and that of backdoor attacks down to 0%, while improving the model's linear probe performance by 10% and maintains a similar zero shot performance compared to CLIP. By increasing the frequency of matching, ROCLIP is able to defend strong attacks, which add up to 1% poisoned examples to the data, and successfully maintain a low attack success rate of 12.5%, while trading off the performance on some tasks.

Debiasing Scores and Prompts of 2D Diffusion for View-consistent Text-to-3D Generation. (arXiv:2303.15413v5 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Susung Hong, Donghoon Ahn, Seungryong Kim

Existing score-distilling text-to-3D generation techniques, despite their considerable promise, often encounter the view inconsistency problem. One of the most notable issues is the Janus problem, where the most canonical view of an object (\textit{e.g}., face or head) appears in other views. In this work, we explore existing frameworks for score-distilling text-to-3D generation and identify the main causes of the view inconsistency problem -- the embedded bias of 2D diffusion models. Based on these findings, we propose two approaches to debias the score-distillation frameworks for view-consistent text-to-3D generation. Our first approach, called score debiasing, involves cutting off the score estimated by 2D diffusion models and gradually increasing the truncation value throughout the optimization process. Our second approach, called prompt debiasing, identifies conflicting words between user prompts and view prompts using a language model, and adjusts the discrepancy between view prompts and the viewing direction of an object. Our experimental results show that our methods improve the realism of the generated 3D objects by significantly reducing artifacts and achieve a good trade-off between faithfulness to the 2D diffusion models and 3D consistency with little overhead. Our project page is available at~\url{https://susunghong.github.io/Debiased-Score-Distillation-Sampling/}.

Safety Analysis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Case Study of STPA using ChatGPT. (arXiv:2304.01246v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yi Qi, Xingyu Zhao, Siddartha Khastgir, Xiaowei Huang

Can safety analysis make use of Large Language Models (LLMs)? A case study explores Systems Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) applied to Automatic Emergency Brake (AEB) and Electricity Demand Side Management (DSM) systems using ChatGPT. We investigate how collaboration schemes, input semantic complexity, and prompt guidelines influence STPA results. Comparative results show that using ChatGPT without human intervention may be inadequate due to reliability related issues, but with careful design, it may outperform human experts. No statistically significant differences are found when varying the input semantic complexity or using common prompt guidelines, which suggests the necessity for developing domain-specific prompt engineering. We also highlight future challenges, including concerns about LLM trustworthiness and the necessity for standardisation and regulation in this domain.

The Short Text Matching Model Enhanced with Knowledge via Contrastive Learning. (arXiv:2304.03898v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Ruiqiang Liu, Qiqiang Zhong, Mengmeng Cui, Hanjie Mai, Qiang Zhang, Shaohua Xu, Xiangzheng Liu, Yanlong Du

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

Separating form and meaning: Using self-consistency to quantify task understanding across multiple senses. (arXiv:2305.11662v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Xenia Ohmer, Elia Bruni, Dieuwke Hupkes

At the staggering pace with which the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are increasing, creating future-proof evaluation sets to assess their understanding becomes more and more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm for evaluating LLMs which leverages the idea that correct world understanding should be consistent across different (Fregean) senses of the same meaning. Accordingly, we measure understanding not in terms of correctness but by evaluating consistency across multiple senses that are generated by the model itself. We showcase our approach by instantiating a test where the different senses are different languages, hence using multilingual self-consistency as a litmus test for the model's understanding and simultaneously addressing the important topic of multilinguality. Taking one of the latest versions of ChatGPT as our object of study, we evaluate multilingual consistency for two different tasks across three different languages. We show that its multilingual consistency is still lacking, and that its task and world understanding are thus not language-independent. As our approach does not require any static evaluation corpora in languages other than English, it can easily and cheaply be extended to different languages and tasks and could become an integral part of future benchmarking efforts.

RewriteLM: An Instruction-Tuned Large Language Model for Text Rewriting. (arXiv:2305.15685v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Lei Shu, Liangchen Luo, Jayakumar Hoskere, Yun Zhu, Yinxiao Liu, Simon Tong, Jindong Chen, Lei Meng

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creative tasks such as storytelling and E-mail generation. However, as LLMs are primarily trained on final text results rather than intermediate revisions, it might be challenging for them to perform text rewriting tasks. Most studies in the rewriting tasks focus on a particular transformation type within the boundaries of single sentences. In this work, we develop new strategies for instruction tuning and reinforcement learning to better align LLMs for cross-sentence rewriting tasks using diverse wording and structures expressed through natural languages including 1) generating rewriting instruction data from Wiki edits and public corpus through instruction generation and chain-of-thought prompting; 2) collecting comparison data for reward model training through a new ranking function. To facilitate this research, we introduce OpenRewriteEval, a novel benchmark covers a wide variety of rewriting types expressed through natural language instructions. Our results show significant improvements over a variety of baselines. The public repository is available on GitHub under Google Research (https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/rewritelm).

IndicTrans2: Towards High-Quality and Accessible Machine Translation Models for all 22 Scheduled Indian Languages. (arXiv:2305.16307v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Jay Gala, Pranjal A. Chitale, Raghavan AK, Varun Gumma, Sumanth Doddapaneni, Aswanth Kumar, Janki Nawale, Anupama Sujatha, Ratish Puduppully, Vivek Raghavan, Pratyush Kumar, Mitesh M. Khapra, Raj Dabre, Anoop Kunchukuttan

India has a rich linguistic landscape with languages from 4 major language families spoken by over a billion people. 22 of these languages are listed in the Constitution of India (referred to as scheduled languages) are the focus of this work. Given the linguistic diversity, high-quality and accessible Machine Translation (MT) systems are essential in a country like India. Prior to this work, there was (i) no parallel training data spanning all 22 languages, (ii) no robust benchmarks covering all these languages and containing content relevant to India, and (iii) no existing translation models which support all the 22 scheduled languages of India. In this work, we aim to address this gap by focusing on the missing pieces required for enabling wide, easy, and open access to good machine translation systems for all 22 scheduled Indian languages. We identify four key areas of improvement: curating and creating larger training datasets, creating diverse and high-quality benchmarks, training multilingual models, and releasing models with open access. Our first contribution is the release of the Bharat Parallel Corpus Collection (BPCC), the largest publicly available parallel corpora for Indic languages. BPCC contains a total of 230M bitext pairs, of which a total of 126M were newly added, including 644K manually translated sentence pairs created as part of this work. Our second contribution is the release of the first n-way parallel benchmark covering all 22 Indian languages, featuring diverse domains, Indian-origin content, and source-original test sets. Next, we present IndicTrans2, the first model to support all 22 languages, surpassing existing models on multiple existing and new benchmarks created as a part of this work. Lastly, to promote accessibility and collaboration, we release our models and associated data with permissive licenses at https://github.com/AI4Bharat/IndicTrans2.

DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models. (arXiv:2306.11698v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Boxin Wang, Weixin Chen, Hengzhi Pei, Chulin Xie, Mintong Kang, Chenhui Zhang, Chejian Xu, Zidi Xiong, Ritik Dutta, Rylan Schaeffer, Sang T. Truong, Simran Arora, Mantas Mazeika, Dan Hendrycks, Zinan Lin, Yu Cheng, Sanmi Koyejo, Dawn Song, Bo Li

Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in their capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications such as healthcare and finance -- where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives -- including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially because GPT-4 follows (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/; our dataset can be previewed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AI-Secure/DecodingTrust; a concise version of this work is at https://openreview.net/pdf?id=kaHpo8OZw2.

Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Knowledge Editing in Language Models. (arXiv:2307.12976v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Roi Cohen, Eden Biran, Ori Yoran, Amir Globerson, Mor Geva

Modern language models capture a large body of factual knowledge. However, some facts can be incorrectly induced or become obsolete over time, resulting in factually incorrect generations. This has led to the development of various editing methods that allow updating facts encoded by the model. Evaluation of these methods has primarily focused on testing whether an individual fact has been successfully injected, and if similar predictions for other subjects have not changed. Here we argue that such evaluation is limited, since injecting one fact (e.g. ``Jack Depp is the son of Johnny Depp'') introduces a ``ripple effect'' in the form of additional facts that the model needs to update (e.g.``Jack Depp is the sibling of Lily-Rose Depp''). To address this issue, we propose a novel set of evaluation criteria that consider the implications of an edit on related facts. Using these criteria, we then construct RippleEdits, a diagnostic benchmark of 5K factual edits, capturing a variety of types of ripple effects. We evaluate prominent editing methods on RippleEdits, showing that current methods fail to introduce consistent changes in the model's knowledge. In addition, we find that a simple in-context editing baseline obtains the best scores on our benchmark, suggesting a promising research direction for model editing.

PMET: Precise Model Editing in a Transformer. (arXiv:2308.08742v4 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Xiaopeng Li, Shasha Li, Shezheng Song, Jing Yang, Jun Ma, Jie Yu

Model editing techniques modify a minor proportion of knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs) at a relatively low cost, which have demonstrated notable success. Existing methods assume Transformer Layer (TL) hidden states are values of key-value memories of the Feed-Forward Network (FFN). They usually optimize the TL hidden states to memorize target knowledge and use it to update the weights of the FFN in LLMs. However, the information flow of TL hidden states comes from three parts: Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA), FFN, and residual connections. Existing methods neglect the fact that the TL hidden states contains information not specifically required for FFN. Consequently, the performance of model editing decreases. To achieve more precise model editing, we analyze hidden states of MHSA and FFN, finding that MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns. This implies that MHSA weights do not require updating when new knowledge is introduced. Based on above findings, we introduce PMET, which simultaneously optimizes Transformer Component (TC, namely MHSA and FFN) hidden states, while only using the optimized TC hidden states of FFN to precisely update FFN weights. Our experiments demonstrate that PMET exhibits state-of-the-art performance on both the COUNTERFACT and zsRE datasets. Our ablation experiments substantiate the effectiveness of our enhancements, further reinforcing the finding that the MHSA encodes certain general knowledge extraction patterns and indicating its storage of a small amount of factual knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/xpq-tech/PMET.

Characterizing Information Seeking Events in Health-Related Social Discourse. (arXiv:2308.09156v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Omar Sharif, Madhusudan Basak, Tanzia Parvin, Ava Scharfstein, Alphonso Bradham, Jacob T. Borodovsky, Sarah E. Lord, Sarah M. Preum

Social media sites have become a popular platform for individuals to seek and share health information. Despite the progress in natural language processing for social media mining, a gap remains in analyzing health-related texts on social discourse in the context of events. Event-driven analysis can offer insights into different facets of healthcare at an individual and collective level, including treatment options, misconceptions, knowledge gaps, etc. This paper presents a paradigm to characterize health-related information-seeking in social discourse through the lens of events. Events here are board categories defined with domain experts that capture the trajectory of the treatment/medication. To illustrate the value of this approach, we analyze Reddit posts regarding medications for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), a critical global health concern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define event categories for characterizing information-seeking in OUD social discourse. Guided by domain experts, we develop TREAT-ISE, a novel multilabel treatment information-seeking event dataset to analyze online discourse on an event-based framework. This dataset contains Reddit posts on information-seeking events related to recovery from OUD, where each post is annotated based on the type of events. We also establish a strong performance benchmark (77.4% F1 score) for the task by employing several machine learning and deep learning classifiers. Finally, we thoroughly investigate the performance and errors of ChatGPT on this task, providing valuable insights into the LLM's capabilities and ongoing characterization efforts.

Journey to the Center of the Knowledge Neurons: Discoveries of Language-Independent Knowledge Neurons and Degenerate Knowledge Neurons. (arXiv:2308.13198v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yuheng Chen, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) contain vast amounts of factual knowledge, but how the knowledge is stored in the parameters remains unclear. This paper delves into the complex task of understanding how factual knowledge is stored in multilingual PLMs, and introduces the Architecture-adapted Multilingual Integrated Gradients method, which successfully localizes knowledge neurons more precisely compared to current methods, and is more universal across various architectures and languages. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth exploration of knowledge neurons, leading to the following two important discoveries: (1) The discovery of Language-Independent Knowledge Neurons, which store factual knowledge in a form that transcends language. We design cross-lingual knowledge editing experiments, demonstrating that the PLMs can accomplish this task based on language-independent neurons; (2) The discovery of Degenerate Knowledge Neurons, a novel type of neuron showing that different knowledge neurons can store the same fact. Its property of functional overlap endows the PLMs with a robust mastery of factual knowledge. We design fact-checking experiments, proving that the degenerate knowledge neurons can help the PLMs to detect wrong facts. Experiments corroborate these findings, shedding light on the mechanisms of factual knowledge storage in multilingual PLMs, and contribute valuable insights to the field. The code is available at https://github.com/heng840/AMIG.

Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation. (arXiv:2309.01431v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Jiawei Chen, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising approach for mitigating the hallucination of large language models (LLMs). However, existing research lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented generation on different large language models, which make it challenging to identify the potential bottlenecks in the capabilities of RAG for different LLMs. In this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of Retrieval-Augmented Generation on large language models. We analyze the performance of different large language models in 4 fundamental abilities required for RAG, including noise robustness, negative rejection, information integration, and counterfactual robustness. To this end, we establish Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark (RGB), a new corpus for RAG evaluation in both English and Chinese. RGB divides the instances within the benchmark into 4 separate testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities required to resolve the case. Then we evaluate 6 representative LLMs on RGB to diagnose the challenges of current LLMs when applying RAG. Evaluation reveals that while LLMs exhibit a certain degree of noise robustness, they still struggle significantly in terms of negative rejection, information integration, and dealing with false information. The aforementioned assessment outcomes indicate that there is still a considerable journey ahead to effectively apply RAG to LLMs.

Knowledge Graphs for the Life Sciences: Recent Developments, Challenges and Opportunities. (arXiv:2309.17255v4 [cs.AI] UPDATED)

Authors: Jiaoyan Chen, Hang Dong, Janna Hastings, Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz, Vanessa López, Pierre Monnin, Catia Pesquita, Petr Škoda, Valentina Tamma

The term life sciences refers to the disciplines that study living organisms and life processes, and include chemistry, biology, medicine, and a range of other related disciplines. Research efforts in life sciences are heavily data-driven, as they produce and consume vast amounts of scientific data, much of which is intrinsically relational and graph-structured.

The volume of data and the complexity of scientific concepts and relations referred to therein promote the application of advanced knowledge-driven technologies for managing and interpreting data, with the ultimate aim to advance scientific discovery.

In this survey and position paper, we discuss recent developments and advances in the use of graph-based technologies in life sciences and set out a vision for how these technologies will impact these fields into the future. We focus on three broad topics: the construction and management of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), the use of KGs and associated technologies in the discovery of new knowledge, and the use of KGs in artificial intelligence applications to support explanations (explainable AI). We select a few exemplary use cases for each topic, discuss the challenges and open research questions within these topics, and conclude with a perspective and outlook that summarizes the overarching challenges and their potential solutions as a guide for future research.

Redefining Digital Health Interfaces with Large Language Models. (arXiv:2310.03560v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Fergus Imrie, Paulius Rauba, Mihaela van der Schaar

Digital health tools have the potential to significantly improve the delivery of healthcare services. However, their adoption remains comparatively limited due, in part, to challenges surrounding usability and trust. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as general-purpose models with the ability to process complex information and produce human-quality text, presenting a wealth of potential applications in healthcare. Directly applying LLMs in clinical settings is not straightforward, with LLMs susceptible to providing inconsistent or nonsensical answers. We describe how LLM-based systems can utilize external tools to provide a novel interface between clinicians and digital technologies. This enhances the utility and practical impact of digital healthcare tools and AI models while addressing current issues with using LLM in clinical settings such as hallucinations. We illustrate LLM-based interfaces with examples from cardiovascular disease and diabetes risk prediction, highlighting the benefit compared to traditional interfaces for digital tools.

MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation. (arXiv:2310.14747v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Hongzhan Chen, Siyue Wu, Xiaojun Quan, Rui Wang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, there has been a growing interest in transferring these reasoning abilities from LLMs to smaller models. However, achieving both the diversity and consistency in rationales presents a challenge. In this paper, we focus on enhancing these two aspects and propose Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation (MCC-KD) to efficiently distill the reasoning capabilities. In MCC-KD, we generate multiple rationales for each question and enforce consistency among the corresponding predictions by minimizing the bidirectional KL-divergence between the answer distributions. We investigate the effectiveness of MCC-KD with different model architectures (LLaMA/FlanT5) and various model scales (3B/7B/11B/13B) on both mathematical reasoning and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. The empirical results not only confirm MCC-KD's superior performance on in-distribution datasets but also highlight its robust generalization ability on out-of-distribution datasets.

TRAMS: Training-free Memory Selection for Long-range Language Modeling. (arXiv:2310.15494v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Haofei Yu, Cunxiang Wang, Yue Zhang, Wei Bi

The Transformer architecture is crucial for numerous AI models, but it still faces challenges in long-range language modeling. Though several specific transformer architectures have been designed to tackle issues of long-range dependencies, existing methods like Transformer-XL are plagued by a high percentage of ineffective memories. In this study, we present a plug-and-play strategy, known as TRAining-free Memory Selection (TRAMS), that selects tokens participating in attention calculation based on one simple metric. This strategy allows us to keep tokens that are likely to have a high attention score with the current queries and ignore the other ones. We have tested our approach on the word-level benchmark (WikiText-103) and the character-level benchmark (enwik8), and the results indicate an improvement without having additional training or adding additional parameters.

Human-Centric Autonomous Systems With LLMs for User Command Reasoning. (arXiv:2311.08206v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yi Yang, Qingwen Zhang, Ci Li, Daniel Simões Marta, Nazre Batool, John Folkesson

The evolution of autonomous driving has made remarkable advancements in recent years, evolving into a tangible reality. However, a human-centric large-scale adoption hinges on meeting a variety of multifaceted requirements. To ensure that the autonomous system meets the user's intent, it is essential to accurately discern and interpret user commands, especially in complex or emergency situations. To this end, we propose to leverage the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to infer system requirements from in-cabin users' commands. Through a series of experiments that include different LLM models and prompt designs, we explore the few-shot multivariate binary classification accuracy of system requirements from natural language textual commands. We confirm the general ability of LLMs to understand and reason about prompts but underline that their effectiveness is conditioned on the quality of both the LLM model and the design of appropriate sequential prompts. Code and models are public with the link \url{https://github.com/KTH-RPL/DriveCmd_LLM}.

How Far Have We Gone in Vulnerability Detection Using Large Language Models. (arXiv:2311.12420v2 [cs.AI] UPDATED)

Authors: Zeyu Gao, Hao Wang, Yuchen Zhou, Wenyu Zhu, Chao Zhang

As software becomes increasingly complex and prone to vulnerabilities, automated vulnerability detection is critically important, yet challenging. Given the significant successes of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there is growing anticipation of their efficacy in vulnerability detection. However, a quantitative understanding of their potential in vulnerability detection is still missing. To bridge this gap, we introduce a comprehensive vulnerability benchmark VulBench. This benchmark aggregates high-quality data from a wide range of CTF (Capture-the-Flag) challenges and real-world applications, with annotations for each vulnerable function detailing the vulnerability type and its root cause. Through our experiments encompassing 16 LLMs and 6 state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning-based models and static analyzers, we find that several LLMs outperform traditional deep learning approaches in vulnerability detection, revealing an untapped potential in LLMs. This work contributes to the understanding and utilization of LLMs for enhanced software security.

Assessing AI Chatbots Performance in Comprehensive Standardized Test Preparation; A Case Study with GRE. (arXiv:2312.03719v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Mohammad Abu-Haifa, Bara'a Etawi, Huthaifa Alkhatatbeh, Ayman Ababneh

This research paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of the performance of three artificial 10 intelligence chatbots: Bing, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, in addressing standardized test questions. Graduate record examination, known as GRE, serves as a case study in this paper, encompassing both quantitative reasoning and verbal skills. A total of 137 quantitative reasoning questions, featuring diverse styles and 157 verbal questions categorized into varying levels of difficulty (easy, medium, and hard) were administered to assess the chatbots' capabilities. This paper provides a detailed examination of the results and their implications for the utilization of artificial intelligence in standardized test preparation by presenting the performance of each chatbot across various skills and styles tested in the exam. Additionally, this paper explores the proficiency of artificial intelligence in addressing image-based questions and illustrates the uncertainty level of each chatbot. The results reveal varying degrees of success across the chatbots, demonstrating the influence of model sophistication and training data. GPT-4 emerged as the most proficient, especially in complex language understanding tasks, highlighting the evolution of artificial intelligence in language comprehension and its ability to pass the exam with a high score.

Exploiting Representation Bias for Data Distillation in Abstractive Text Summarization. (arXiv:2312.06022v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yash Kumar Atri, Vikram Goyal, Tanmoy Chakraborty

Abstractive text summarization is surging with the number of training samples to cater to the needs of the deep learning models. These models tend to exploit the training data representations to attain superior performance by improving the quantitative element of the resultant summary. However, increasing the size of the training set may not always be the ideal solution to maximize the performance, and therefore, a need to revisit the quality of training samples and the learning protocol of deep learning models is a must. In this paper, we aim to discretize the vector space of the abstractive text summarization models to understand the characteristics learned between the input embedding space and the models' encoder space. We show that deep models fail to capture the diversity of the input space. Further, the distribution of data points on the encoder space indicates that an unchecked increase in the training samples does not add value; rather, a tear-down of data samples is highly needed to make the models focus on variability and faithfulness. We employ clustering techniques to learn the diversity of a model's sample space and how data points are mapped from the embedding space to the encoder space and vice versa. Further, we devise a metric to filter out redundant data points to make the model more robust and less data hungry. We benchmark our proposed method using quantitative metrics, such as Rouge, and qualitative metrics, such as BERTScore, FEQA and Pyramid score. We also quantify the reasons that inhibit the models from learning the diversity from the varied input samples.

The Earth is Flat because...: Investigating LLMs' Belief towards Misinformation via Persuasive Conversation. (arXiv:2312.09085v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Rongwu Xu, Brian S. Lin, Shujian Yang, Tianqi Zhang, Weiyan Shi, Tianwei Zhang, Zhixuan Fang, Wei Xu, Han Qiu

Large Language Models (LLMs) encapsulate vast amounts of knowledge but still remain vulnerable to external misinformation. Existing research mainly studied this susceptibility behavior in a single-turn setting. However, belief can change during a multi-turn conversation, especially a persuasive one. Therefore, in this study, we delve into LLMs' susceptibility to persuasive conversations, particularly on factual questions that they can answer correctly. We first curate the Farm (i.e., Fact to Misinform) dataset, which contains factual questions paired with systematically generated persuasive misinformation. Then, we develop a testing framework to track LLMs' belief changes in a persuasive dialogue. Through extensive experiments, we find that LLMs' correct beliefs on factual knowledge can be easily manipulated by various persuasive strategies.

"Paraphrasing The Original Text" Makes High Accuracy Long-Context QA. (arXiv:2312.11193v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yijiong Yu

Although LLMs continue to iterate and improve, most open-source models still have a context window of no more than 4k, limiting their ability to handle long-context problems. Most existing open-source models for long-context chat still lack satisfactory accuracy. To address this issue, I approach it from the perspective of training data and theoretically prove that training the capability to handle long contexts requires "effective" rather than "long" data. Based on this, I propose using the "original text paraphrase" task, and successfully extend the context window of the existing model to 32k by a low-cost and effective method, achieving extremely high accuracy in multi-document-QA and surpassing all existing open-source models of the same scale. The model and training data have been open-sourced on HuggingFace(https://huggingface.co/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k) and WiseModel(https://wisemodel.cn/models/yuyijiong/Qwen-14b-chat-yarn-32k).

Compositional Generalization for Multi-label Text Classification: A Data-Augmentation Approach. (arXiv:2312.11276v3 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Yuyang Chai, Zhuang Li, Jiahui Liu, Lei Chen, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng

Despite significant advancements in multi-label text classification, the ability of existing models to generalize to novel and seldom-encountered complex concepts, which are compositions of elementary ones, remains underexplored. This research addresses this gap. By creating unique data splits across three benchmarks, we assess the compositional generalization ability of existing multi-label text classification models. Our results show that these models often fail to generalize to compositional concepts encountered infrequently during training, leading to inferior performance on tests with these new combinations. To address this, we introduce a data augmentation method that leverages two innovative text generation models designed to enhance the classification models' capacity for compositional generalization. Our experiments show that this data augmentation approach significantly improves the compositional generalization capabilities of classification models on our benchmarks, with both generation models surpassing other text generation baselines.

Unlocking Musculoskeletal Disorder Risk Factors: NLP-Based Classification and Mode-Based Ranking. (arXiv:2312.11517v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Md Abrar Jahin, Subrata Talapatra

This research delves into the intricate landscape of Musculoskeletal Disorder (MSD) risk factors, employing a novel fusion of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and mode-based ranking methodologies. The primary objective is to advance the comprehension of MSD risk factors, their classification, and their relative severity, facilitating more targeted preventive and management interventions. The study utilizes eight diverse models, integrating pre-trained transformers, cosine similarity, and various distance metrics to classify risk factors into personal, biomechanical, workplace, psychological, and organizational classes. Key findings reveal that the BERT model with cosine similarity attains an overall accuracy of 28%, while the sentence transformer, coupled with Euclidean, Bray-Curtis, and Minkowski distances, achieves a flawless accuracy score of 100%. In tandem with the classification efforts, the research employs a mode-based ranking approach on survey data to discern the severity hierarchy of MSD risk factors. Intriguingly, the rankings align precisely with the previous literature, reaffirming the consistency and reliability of the approach. ``Working posture" emerges as the most severe risk factor, emphasizing the critical role of proper posture in preventing MSDs. The collective perceptions of survey participants underscore the significance of factors like "Job insecurity," "Effort reward imbalance," and "Poor employee facility" in contributing to MSD risks. The convergence of rankings provides actionable insights for organizations aiming to reduce the prevalence of MSDs. The study concludes with implications for targeted interventions, recommendations for improving workplace conditions, and avenues for future research.

A Survey of Reasoning with Foundation Models: Concepts, Methodologies, and Outlook. (arXiv:2312.11562v2 [cs.AI] UPDATED)

Authors: Jiankai Sun, Chuanyang Zheng, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Ruihang Chu, Jianing Qiu, Jiaqi Xu, Mingyu Ding, Hongyang Li, Mengzhe Geng, Yue Wu, Wenhai Wang, Junsong Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Xiaozhe Ren, Jie Fu, Junxian He, Wu Yuan, Qi Liu, Xihui Liu, Yu Li, Hao Dong, Yu Cheng, Ming Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng, Jifeng Dai, Ping Luo, Jingdong Wang, Ji-Rong Wen, Xipeng Qiu, Yike Guo, Hui Xiong, Qun Liu, Zhenguo Li

Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.

Designing LLM Chains by Adapting Techniques from Crowdsourcing Workflows. (arXiv:2312.11681v2 [cs.HC] UPDATED)

Authors: Madeleine Grunde-McLaughlin, Michelle S. Lam, Ranjay Krishna, Daniel S. Weld, Jeffrey Heer

LLM chains enable complex tasks by decomposing work into a sequence of sub-tasks. Crowdsourcing workflows similarly decompose complex tasks into smaller tasks for human crowdworkers. Chains address LLM errors analogously to the way crowdsourcing workflows address human error. To characterize opportunities for LLM chaining, we survey 107 papers across the crowdsourcing and chaining literature to construct a design space for chain development. The design space connects an LLM designer's objectives to strategies they can use to achieve those objectives, and tactics to implement each strategy. To explore how techniques from crowdsourcing may apply to chaining, we adapt crowdsourcing workflows to implement LLM chains across three case studies: creating a taxonomy, shortening text, and writing a short story. From the design space and our case studies, we identify which techniques transfer from crowdsourcing to LLM chaining and raise implications for future research and development.

Climate Change from Large Language Models. (arXiv:2312.11985v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Hongyin Zhu, Prayag Tiwari

Climate change presents significant challenges to the global community, and it is imperative to raise widespread awareness of the climate crisis and educate users about low-carbon living. Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs), have emerged as powerful tools in mitigating the climate crisis, leveraging their extensive knowledge, broad user base, and natural language interaction capabilities. However, despite the growing body of research on climate change, there is a lack of comprehensive assessments of climate crisis knowledge within LLMs. This paper aims to resolve this gap by proposing an automatic evaluation framework. We employ a hybrid approach to data acquisition that combines data synthesis and manual collection to compile a diverse set of questions related to the climate crisis. These questions cover various aspects of climate change, including its causes, impacts, mitigation strategies, and adaptation measures. We then evaluate the model knowledge through prompt engineering based on the collected questions and generated answers. We propose a set of comprehensive metrics to evaluate the climate crisis knowledge, incorporating indicators from 10 different perspectives. Experimental results show that our method is effective in evaluating the knowledge of LLMs regarding the climate crisis. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs and find that their knowledge falls short in terms of timeliness.

Founder-GPT: Self-play to evaluate the Founder-Idea fit. (arXiv:2312.12037v2 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

Authors: Sichao Xiong, Yigit Ihlamur

This research introduces an innovative evaluation method for the "founder-idea" fit in early-stage startups, utilizing advanced large language model techniques to assess founders' profiles against their startup ideas to enhance decision-making. Embeddings, self-play, tree-of-thought, and critique-based refinement techniques show early promising results that each idea's success patterns are unique and they should be evaluated based on the context of the founder's background.

Efficient Title Reranker for Fast and Improved Knowledge-Intense NLP. (arXiv:2312.12430v2 [cs.IR] UPDATED)

Authors: Ziyi Chen, Heyi Tao, Daqian Zuo, Jize Jiang, Jun Yang, Yuxiang Wei

We introduce Efficient Title Reranker via Broadcasting Query Encoder, a novel title reranking technique to achieve efficient title reranking 20x-40x faster than vanilla passage reranker. However, one of the challenges with the training of Efficient Title Reranker is the instability. Analyzing the issue, we found some very difficult ground truths might act as noisy labels causing accuracy to drop as well as some extreme values in model probability output causing nan. To address these issues, we introduce the Sigmoid Trick, a novel technique that reduces the gradient update of both cases resulting in better retrieval efficacy. Experiments showed the effectiveness of ETR and sigmoid trick as we achieved four state-of-the-art positions on the kilt knowledge benchmark.

A Challenger to GPT-4V? Early Explorations of Gemini in Visual Expertise. (arXiv:2312.12436v2 [cs.CV] UPDATED)

Authors: Chaoyou Fu, Renrui Zhang, Zihan Wang, Yubo Huang, Zhengye Zhang, Longtian Qiu, Gaoxiang Ye, Yunhang Shen, Mengdan Zhang, Peixian Chen, Sirui Zhao, Shaohui Lin, Deqiang Jiang, Di Yin, Peng Gao, Ke Li, Hongsheng Li, Xing Sun

The surge of interest towards Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), e.g., GPT-4V(ision) from OpenAI, has marked a significant trend in both academia and industry. They endow Large Language Models (LLMs) with powerful capabilities in visual understanding, enabling them to tackle diverse multi-modal tasks. Very recently, Google released Gemini, its newest and most capable MLLM built from the ground up for multi-modality. In light of the superior reasoning capabilities, can Gemini challenge GPT-4V's leading position in multi-modal learning? In this paper, we present a preliminary exploration of Gemini Pro's visual understanding proficiency, which comprehensively covers four domains: fundamental perception, advanced cognition, challenging vision tasks, and various expert capacities. We compare Gemini Pro with the state-of-the-art GPT-4V to evaluate its upper limits, along with the latest open-sourced MLLM, Sphinx, which reveals the gap between manual efforts and black-box systems. The qualitative samples indicate that, while GPT-4V and Gemini showcase different answering styles and preferences, they can exhibit comparable visual reasoning capabilities, and Sphinx still trails behind them concerning domain generalizability. Specifically, GPT-4V tends to elaborate detailed explanations and intermediate steps, and Gemini prefers to output a direct and concise answer. The quantitative evaluation on the popular MME benchmark also demonstrates the potential of Gemini to be a strong challenger to GPT-4V. Our early investigation of Gemini also observes some common issues of MLLMs, indicating that there still remains a considerable distance towards artificial general intelligence. Our project for tracking the progress of MLLM is released at https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.