new Generating Hard-Negative Out-of-Scope Data with ChatGPT for Intent Classification

Authors: Zhijian Li, Stefan Larson, Kevin Leach

Abstract: Intent classifiers must be able to distinguish when a user's utterance does not belong to any supported intent to avoid producing incorrect and unrelated system responses. Although out-of-scope (OOS) detection for intent classifiers has been studied, previous work has not yet studied changes in classifier performance against hard-negative out-of-scope utterances (i.e., inputs that share common features with in-scope data, but are actually out-of-scope). We present an automated technique to generate hard-negative OOS data using ChatGPT. We use our technique to build five new hard-negative OOS datasets, and evaluate each against three benchmark intent classifiers. We show that classifiers struggle to correctly identify hard-negative OOS utterances more than general OOS utterances. Finally, we show that incorporating hard-negative OOS data for training improves model robustness when detecting hard-negative OOS data and general OOS data. Our technique, datasets, and evaluation address an important void in the field, offering a straightforward and inexpensive way to collect hard-negative OOS data and improve intent classifiers' robustness.

new PipeRAG: Fast Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Algorithm-System Co-design

Authors: Wenqi Jiang, Shuai Zhang, Boran Han, Jie Wang, Bernie Wang, Tim Kraska

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external token databases. However, retrievals from large databases can constitute a substantial portion of the overall generation time, particularly when retrievals are periodically performed to align the retrieved content with the latest states of generation. In this paper, we introduce PipeRAG, a novel algorithm-system co-design approach to reduce generation latency and enhance generation quality. PipeRAG integrates (1) pipeline parallelism to enable concurrent retrieval and generation processes, (2) flexible retrieval intervals to maximize the efficiency of pipeline parallelism, and (3) a performance model to automatically balance retrieval quality and latency based on the generation states and underlying hardware. Our evaluation shows that, by combining the three aforementioned methods, PipeRAG achieves up to 2.6$\times$ speedup in end-to-end generation latency while improving generation quality. These promising results showcase the effectiveness of co-designing algorithms with underlying systems, paving the way for the adoption of PipeRAG in future RAG systems.

new SeeGULL Multilingual: a Dataset of Geo-Culturally Situated Stereotypes

Authors: Mukul Bhutani, Kevin Robinson, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Shachi Dave, Sunipa Dev

Abstract: While generative multilingual models are rapidly being deployed, their safety and fairness evaluations are largely limited to resources collected in English. This is especially problematic for evaluations targeting inherently socio-cultural phenomena such as stereotyping, where it is important to build multi-lingual resources that reflect the stereotypes prevalent in respective language communities. However, gathering these resources, at scale, in varied languages and regions pose a significant challenge as it requires broad socio-cultural knowledge and can also be prohibitively expensive. To overcome this critical gap, we employ a recently introduced approach that couples LLM generations for scale with culturally situated validations for reliability, and build SeeGULL Multilingual, a global-scale multilingual dataset of social stereotypes, containing over 25K stereotypes, spanning 20 languages, with human annotations across 23 regions, and demonstrate its utility in identifying gaps in model evaluations. Content warning: Stereotypes shared in this paper can be offensive.

new DADIT: A Dataset for Demographic Classification of Italian Twitter Users and a Comparison of Prediction Methods

Authors: Lorenzo Lupo, Paul Bose, Mahyar Habibi, Dirk Hovy, Carlo Schwarz

Abstract: Social scientists increasingly use demographically stratified social media data to study the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of the general public. To facilitate such analyses, we construct, validate, and release publicly the representative DADIT dataset of 30M tweets of 20k Italian Twitter users, along with their bios and profile pictures. We enrich the user data with high-quality labels for gender, age, and location. DADIT enables us to train and compare the performance of various state-of-the-art models for the prediction of the gender and age of social media users. In particular, we investigate if tweets contain valuable information for the task, since popular classifiers like M3 don't leverage them. Our best XLM-based classifier improves upon the commonly used competitor M3 by up to 53% F1. Especially for age prediction, classifiers profit from including tweets as features. We also confirm these findings on a German test set.

new A Benchmark of Domain-Adapted Large Language Models for Generating Brief Hospital Course Summaries

Authors: Asad Aali, Dave Van Veen, Yamin Ishraq Arefeen, Jason Hom, Christian Bluethgen, Eduardo Pontes Reis, Sergios Gatidis, Namuun Clifford, Joseph Daws, Arash S. Tehrani, Jangwon Kim, Akshay S. Chaudhari

Abstract: Brief hospital course (BHC) summaries are common clinical documents generated by summarizing clinical notes. While large language models (LLMs) depict remarkable capabilities in automating real-world tasks, their capabilities for healthcare applications such as BHC synthesis have not been shown. To enable the adaptation of LLMs for BHC synthesis, we introduce a novel benchmark consisting of a pre-processed dataset extracted from MIMIC-IV notes, encapsulating clinical note, and brief hospital course (BHC) pairs. We assess the performance of two general-purpose LLMs and three healthcare-adapted LLMs to improve BHC synthesis from clinical notes. Using clinical notes as input for generating BHCs, we apply prompting-based (using in-context learning) and fine-tuning-based adaptation strategies to three open-source LLMs (Clinical-T5-Large, Llama2-13B, FLAN-UL2) and two proprietary LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4). We quantitatively evaluate the performance of these LLMs across varying context-length inputs using conventional natural language similarity metrics. We further perform a qualitative study where five diverse clinicians blindly compare clinician-written BHCs and two LLM-generated BHCs for 30 samples across metrics of comprehensiveness, conciseness, factual correctness, and fluency. Overall, we present a new benchmark and pre-processed dataset for using LLMs in BHC synthesis from clinical notes. We observe high-quality summarization performance for both in-context proprietary and fine-tuned open-source LLMs using both quantitative metrics and a qualitative clinical reader study. We propose our work as a benchmark to motivate future works to adapt and assess the performance of LLMs in BHC synthesis.

new Decoding the AI Pen: Techniques and Challenges in Detecting AI-Generated Text

Authors: Sara Abdali, Richard Anarfi, CJ Barberan, Jia He

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) by demonstrating an impressive ability to generate human-like text. However, their widespread usage introduces challenges that necessitate thoughtful examination, ethical scrutiny, and responsible practices. In this study, we delve into these challenges, explore existing strategies for mitigating them, with a particular emphasis on identifying AI-generated text as the ultimate solution. Additionally, we assess the feasibility of detection from a theoretical perspective and propose novel research directions to address the current limitations in this domain.

new FLAP: Flow Adhering Planning with Constrained Decoding in LLMs

Authors: Shamik Roy, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman, Saab Mansour, Arshit Gupta

Abstract: Planning is a crucial task for agents in task oriented dialogs (TODs). Human agents typically resolve user issues by following predefined workflows, decomposing workflow steps into actionable items, and performing actions by executing APIs in order; all of which require reasoning and planning. With the recent advances in LLMs, there have been increasing attempts to use LLMs for task planning and API usage. However, the faithfulness of the plans to predefined workflows and API dependencies, is not guaranteed with LLMs because of their bias towards pretraining data. Moreover, in real life, workflows are custom-defined and prone to change, hence, quickly adapting agents to the changes is desirable. In this paper, we study faithful planning in TODs to resolve user intents by following predefined flows and preserving API dependencies. We propose a constrained decoding algorithm based on lookahead heuristic for faithful planning. Our algorithm alleviates the need for finetuning LLMs using domain specific data, outperforms other decoding and prompting-based baselines, and applying our algorithm on smaller LLMs (7B) we achieve comparable performance to larger LLMs (30B-40B).

new On the Benefits of Fine-Grained Loss Truncation: A Case Study on Factuality in Summarization

Authors: Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Arman Cohan

Abstract: Text summarization and simplification are among the most widely used applications of AI. However, models developed for such tasks are often prone to hallucination, which can result from training on unaligned data. One efficient approach to address this issue is Loss Truncation (LT) (Kang and Hashimoto, 2020), an approach to modify the standard log loss to adaptively remove noisy examples during training. However, we find that LT alone yields a considerable number of hallucinated entities on various datasets. We study the behavior of the underlying losses between factual and non-factual examples, to understand and refine the performance of LT. We demonstrate that LT's performance is limited when the underlying assumption that noisy targets have higher NLL loss is not satisfied, and find that word-level NLL among entities provides better signal for distinguishing factuality. We then leverage this to propose a fine-grained NLL loss and fine-grained data cleaning strategies, and observe improvements in hallucination reduction across some datasets. Our work is available at https://https://github.com/yale-nlp/fine-grained-lt.

URLs: https://https://github.com/yale-nlp/fine-grained-lt.

new ItD: Large Language Models Can Teach Themselves Induction through Deduction

Authors: Wangtao Sun, Haotian Xu, Xuanqing Yu, Pei Chen, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu

Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are showing impressive performance on a wide range of Natural Language Processing tasks, researchers have found that they still have limited ability to conduct induction. Recent works mainly adopt ``post processes'' paradigms to improve the performance of LLMs on induction (e.g., the hypothesis search & refinement methods), but their performance is still constrained by the inherent inductive capability of the LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Induction through Deduction (ItD), to enable the LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction. The ItD framework is composed of two main components: a Deductive Data Generation module to generate induction data and a Naive Bayesian Induction module to optimize the fine-tuning and decoding of LLMs. Our empirical results showcase the effectiveness of ItD on two induction benchmarks, achieving relative performance improvement of 36% and 10% compared with previous state-of-the-art, respectively. Our ablation study verifies the effectiveness of two key modules of ItD. We also verify the effectiveness of ItD across different LLMs and deductors. The data and code of this paper can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ItD-E844.

URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ItD-E844.

new ClinicalMamba: A Generative Clinical Language Model on Longitudinal Clinical Notes

Authors: Zhichao Yang, Avijit Mitra, Sunjae Kwon, Hong Yu

Abstract: The advancement of natural language processing (NLP) systems in healthcare hinges on language model ability to interpret the intricate information contained within clinical notes. This process often requires integrating information from various time points in a patient's medical history. However, most earlier clinical language models were pretrained with a context length limited to roughly one clinical document. In this study, We introduce ClinicalMamba, a specialized version of the Mamba language model, pretrained on a vast corpus of longitudinal clinical notes to address the unique linguistic characteristics and information processing needs of the medical domain. ClinicalMamba, with 130 million and 2.8 billion parameters, demonstrates a superior performance in modeling clinical language across extended text lengths compared to Mamba and clinical Llama. With few-shot learning, ClinicalMamba achieves notable benchmarks in speed and accuracy, outperforming existing clinical language models and general domain large models like GPT-4 in longitudinal clinical notes information extraction tasks.

new UniSparse: An Intermediate Language for General Sparse Format Customization

Authors: Jie Liu, Zhongyuan Zhao, Zijian Ding, Benjamin Brock, Hongbo Rong, Zhiru Zhang

Abstract: The ongoing trend of hardware specialization has led to a growing use of custom data formats when processing sparse workloads, which are typically memory-bound. These formats facilitate optimized software/hardware implementations by utilizing sparsity pattern- or target-aware data structures and layouts to enhance memory access latency and bandwidth utilization. However, existing sparse tensor programming models and compilers offer little or no support for productively customizing the sparse formats. Additionally, because these frameworks represent formats using a limited set of per-dimension attributes, they lack the flexibility to accommodate numerous new variations of custom sparse data structures and layouts. To overcome this deficiency, we propose UniSparse, an intermediate language that provides a unified abstraction for representing and customizing sparse formats. Unlike the existing attribute-based frameworks, UniSparse decouples the logical representation of the sparse tensor (i.e., the data structure) from its low-level memory layout, enabling the customization of both. As a result, a rich set of format customizations can be succinctly expressed in a small set of well-defined query, mutation, and layout primitives. We also develop a compiler leveraging the MLIR infrastructure, which supports adaptive customization of formats, and automatic code generation of format conversion and compute operations for heterogeneous architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through experiments running commonly-used sparse linear algebra operations with specialized formats on multiple different hardware targets, including an Intel CPU, an NVIDIA GPU, an AMD Xilinx FPGA, and a simulated processing-in-memory (PIM) device.

new Algorithmic progress in language models

Authors: Anson Ho, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil, David Owen, Robi Rahman, Zifan Carl Guo, David Atkinson, Neil Thompson, Jaime Sevilla

Abstract: We investigate the rate at which algorithms for pre-training language models have improved since the advent of deep learning. Using a dataset of over 200 language model evaluations on Wikitext and Penn Treebank spanning 2012-2023, we find that the compute required to reach a set performance threshold has halved approximately every 8 months, with a 95% confidence interval of around 5 to 14 months, substantially faster than hardware gains per Moore's Law. We estimate augmented scaling laws, which enable us to quantify algorithmic progress and determine the relative contributions of scaling models versus innovations in training algorithms. Despite the rapid pace of algorithmic progress and the development of new architectures such as the transformer, our analysis reveals that the increase in compute made an even larger contribution to overall performance improvements over this time period. Though limited by noisy benchmark data, our analysis quantifies the rapid progress in language modeling, shedding light on the relative contributions from compute and algorithms.

new MP2D: An Automated Topic Shift Dialogue Generation Framework Leveraging Knowledge Graphs

Authors: Yerin Hwang, Yongil Kim, Yunah Jang, Jeesoo Bang, Hyunkyung Bae, Kyomin Jung

Abstract: Despite advancements in on-topic dialogue systems, effectively managing topic shifts within dialogues remains a persistent challenge, largely attributed to the limited availability of training datasets. To address this issue, we propose Multi-Passage to Dialogue (MP2D), a data generation framework that automatically creates conversational question-answering datasets with natural topic transitions. By leveraging the relationships between entities in a knowledge graph, MP2D maps the flow of topics within a dialogue, effectively mirroring the dynamics of human conversation. It retrieves relevant passages corresponding to the topics and transforms them into dialogues through the passage-to-dialogue method. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we demonstrate MP2D's efficacy in generating dialogue with natural topic shifts. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel benchmark for topic shift dialogues, TS-WikiDialog. Utilizing the dataset, we demonstrate that even Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to handle topic shifts in dialogue effectively, and we showcase the performance improvements of models trained on datasets generated by MP2D across diverse topic shift dialogue tasks.

new Reverse That Number! Decoding Order Matters in Arithmetic Learning

Authors: Daniel Zhang-Li, Nianyi Lin, Jifan Yu, Zheyuan Zhang, Zijun Yao, Xiaokang Zhang, Lei Hou, Jing Zhang, Juanzi Li

Abstract: Recent advancements in pretraining have demonstrated that modern Large Language Models (LLMs) possess the capability to effectively learn arithmetic operations. However, despite acknowledging the significance of digit order in arithmetic computation, current methodologies predominantly rely on sequential, step-by-step approaches for teaching LLMs arithmetic, resulting in a conclusion where obtaining better performance involves fine-grained step-by-step. Diverging from this conventional path, our work introduces a novel strategy that not only reevaluates the digit order by prioritizing output from the least significant digit but also incorporates a step-by-step methodology to substantially reduce complexity. We have developed and applied this method in a comprehensive set of experiments. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, our findings reveal an overall improvement of in accuracy while requiring only a third of the tokens typically used during training. For the purpose of facilitating replication and further research, we have made our code and dataset publicly available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RAIT-9FB7/}.

URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RAIT-9FB7/

new KG-Rank: Enhancing Large Language Models for Medical QA with Knowledge Graphs and Ranking Techniques

Authors: Rui Yang, Haoran Liu, Qingcheng Zeng, Yu He Ke, Wanxin Li, Lechao Cheng, Qingyu Chen, James Caverlee, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced healthcare innovation on generation capabilities. However, their application in real clinical settings is challenging due to potential deviations from medical facts and inherent biases. In this work, we develop an augmented LLM framework, KG-Rank, which leverages a medical knowledge graph (KG) with ranking and re-ranking techniques, aiming to improve free-text question-answering (QA) in the medical domain. Specifically, upon receiving a question, we initially retrieve triplets from a medical KG to gather factual information. Subsequently, we innovatively apply ranking methods to refine the ordering of these triplets, aiming to yield more precise answers. To the best of our knowledge, KG-Rank is the first application of ranking models combined with KG in medical QA specifically for generating long answers. Evaluation of four selected medical QA datasets shows that KG-Rank achieves an improvement of over 18% in the ROUGE-L score. Moreover, we extend KG-Rank to open domains, where it realizes a 14% improvement in ROUGE-L, showing the effectiveness and potential of KG-Rank.

new MaiBaam Annotation Guidelines

Authors: Verena Blaschke, Barbara Kova\v{c}i\'c, Siyao Peng, Barbara Plank

Abstract: This document provides the annotation guidelines for MaiBaam, a Bavarian corpus annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags and syntactic dependencies. MaiBaam belongs to the Universal Dependencies (UD) project, and our annotations elaborate on the general and German UD version 2 guidelines. In this document, we detail how to preprocess and tokenize Bavarian data, provide an overview of the POS tags and dependencies we use, explain annotation decisions that would also apply to closely related languages like German, and lastly we introduce and motivate decisions that are specific to Bavarian grammar.

new High Throughput Phenotyping of Physician Notes with Large Language and Hybrid NLP Models

Authors: Syed I. Munzir, Daniel B. Hier, Michael D. Carrithers

Abstract: Deep phenotyping is the detailed description of patient signs and symptoms using concepts from an ontology. The deep phenotyping of the numerous physician notes in electronic health records requires high throughput methods. Over the past thirty years, progress toward making high throughput phenotyping feasible. In this study, we demonstrate that a large language model and a hybrid NLP model (combining word vectors with a machine learning classifier) can perform high throughput phenotyping on physician notes with high accuracy. Large language models will likely emerge as the preferred method for high throughput deep phenotyping of physician notes.

new Thread Detection and Response Generation using Transformers with Prompt Optimisation

Authors: Kevin Joshua T, Arnav Agarwal, Shriya Sanjay, Yash Sarda, John Sahaya Rani Alex, Saurav Gupta, Sushant Kumar, Vishwanath Kamath

Abstract: Conversational systems are crucial for human-computer interaction, managing complex dialogues by identifying threads and prioritising responses. This is especially vital in multi-party conversations, where precise identification of threads and strategic response prioritisation ensure efficient dialogue management. To address these challenges an end-to-end model that identifies threads and prioritises their response generation based on the importance was developed, involving a systematic decomposition of the problem into discrete components - thread detection, prioritisation, and performance optimisation which was meticulously analysed and optimised. These refined components seamlessly integrate into a unified framework, in conversational systems. Llama2 7b is used due to its high level of generalisation but the system can be updated with any open source Large Language Model(LLM). The computational capabilities of the Llama2 model was augmented by using fine tuning methods and strategic prompting techniques to optimise the model's performance, reducing computational time and increasing the accuracy of the model. The model achieves up to 10x speed improvement, while generating more coherent results compared to existing models.

new Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only

Authors: Dennis Ulmer, Martin Gubri, Hwaran Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Seong Joon Oh

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, building trust and maintaining safety by accurately quantifying a model's confidence in its prediction becomes even more important. However, finding effective ways to calibrate LLMs - especially when the only interface to the models is their generated text - remains a challenge. We propose APRICOT (auxiliary prediction of confidence targets): A method to set confidence targets and train an additional model that predicts an LLM's confidence based on its textual input and output alone. This approach has several advantages: It is conceptually simple, does not require access to the target model beyond its output, does not interfere with the language generation, and has a multitude of potential usages, for instance by verbalizing the predicted confidence or adjusting the given answer based on the confidence. We show how our approach performs competitively in terms of calibration error for white-box and black-box LLMs on closed-book question-answering to detect incorrect LLM answers.

new Measuring Bias in a Ranked List using Term-based Representations

Authors: Amin Abolghasemi, Leif Azzopardi, Arian Askari, Maarten de Rijke, Suzan Verberne

Abstract: In most recent studies, gender bias in document ranking is evaluated with the NFaiRR metric, which measures bias in a ranked list based on an aggregation over the unbiasedness scores of each ranked document. This perspective in measuring the bias of a ranked list has a key limitation: individual documents of a ranked list might be biased while the ranked list as a whole balances the groups' representations. To address this issue, we propose a novel metric called TExFAIR (term exposure-based fairness), which is based on two new extensions to a generic fairness evaluation framework, attention-weighted ranking fairness (AWRF). TExFAIR assesses fairness based on the term-based representation of groups in a ranked list: (i) an explicit definition of associating documents to groups based on probabilistic term-level associations, and (ii) a rank-biased discounting factor (RBDF) for counting non-representative documents towards the measurement of the fairness of a ranked list. We assess TExFAIR on the task of measuring gender bias in passage ranking, and study the relationship between TExFAIR and NFaiRR. Our experiments show that there is no strong correlation between TExFAIR and NFaiRR, which indicates that TExFAIR measures a different dimension of fairness than NFaiRR. With TExFAIR, we extend the AWRF framework to allow for the evaluation of fairness in settings with term-based representations of groups in documents in a ranked list.

new Enhanced Auto Language Prediction with Dictionary Capsule -- A Novel Approach

Authors: Pinni Venkata Abhiram, Ananya Rathore, Abhir Mirikar, Hari Krishna S, Sheena Christabel Pravin, Vishwanath Kamath Pethri, Manjunath Lokanath Belgod, Reetika Gupta, K Muthukumaran

Abstract: The paper presents a novel Auto Language Prediction Dictionary Capsule (ALPDC) framework for language prediction and machine translation. The model uses a combination of neural networks and symbolic representations to predict the language of a given input text and then translate it to a target language using pre-built dictionaries. This research work also aims to translate the text of various languages to its literal meaning in English. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets and significantly improves translation accuracy compared to existing methods. The results show the potential of the proposed method for practical use in multilingual communication and natural language processing tasks.

new Few-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer for Prompting Large Language Models in Low-Resource Languages

Authors: Christopher Toukmaji

Abstract: Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are at the forefront of advances in Natural Language Processing. One widespread use case of PLMs is "prompting" - or in-context learning - where a user provides a description of a task and some completed examples of the task to a PLM as context before prompting the PLM to perform the task on a new example. Only the largest, most capable PLMs are able to perform in-context learning effectively, and these models are typically trained with a predominantly English corpus, leaving all other languages behind. The data limitations in most languages preclude the training of language-specific PLMs capable of prompting. Albeit the surge in work of prompting settings, it is still unclear how PLMs should be adapted cross-lingually specifically for prompting. We evaluate the possible methods to adapt LLaMa, a 7B parameter open-source PLM mainly trained in English, for prompting in low-resource languages, namely for Kinyarwanda, Hausa, and Luganda. We consider three methods: few-shot prompting (prompt), language-adaptive fine-tuning (LAFT), and neural machine translation (translate), and evaluate on abstractive summarization, multi-class topic classification, and named-entity recognition. Although LAFT carries the greatest compute cost and intuitively should lead to the best results, our experiments exhibit that LAFT is only occasionally the optimal choice for adapting PLMs for prompting. Rather, the translate and prompt settings are a compute-efficient and cost-effective method of few-shot prompting for the selected low-resource languages. We find that the results are task and language dependent but find that the prompting method is the best on average across all tasks and languages. Results show that the prompt setting performs better than both translating and LAFT with statistical significance for all shots when aggregated across all tasks and languages.

new Persian Slang Text Conversion to Formal and Deep Learning of Persian Short Texts on Social Media for Sentiment Classification

Authors: Mohsen Khazeni, Mohammad Heydari, Amir Albadvi

Abstract: The lack of a suitable tool for the analysis of conversational texts in the Persian language has made various analyses of these texts, including Sentiment Analysis, difficult. In this research, we tried to make the understanding of these texts easier for the machine by providing PSC, Persian Slang Converter, a tool for converting conversational texts into formal ones, and by using the most up-to-date and best deep learning methods along with the PSC, the sentiment learning of short Persian language texts for the machine in a better way. be made More than 10 million unlabeled texts from various social networks and movie subtitles (as Conversational texts) and about 10 million news texts (as formal texts) have been used for training unsupervised models and formal implementation of the tool. 60,000 texts from the comments of Instagram social network users with positive, negative, and neutral labels are considered supervised data for training the emotion classification model of short texts. Using the formal tool, 57% of the words of the corpus of conversation were converted. Finally, by using the formalizer, FastText model, and deep LSTM network, an accuracy of 81.91 was obtained on the test data.

new Ensemble Language Models for Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Authors: Md Arid Hasan

Abstract: The rapid advancement of social media enables us to analyze user opinions. In recent times, sentiment analysis has shown a prominent research gap in understanding human sentiment based on the content shared on social media. Although sentiment analysis for commonly spoken languages has advanced significantly, low-resource languages like Arabic continue to get little research due to resource limitations. In this study, we explore sentiment analysis on tweet texts from SemEval-17 and the Arabic Sentiment Tweet dataset. Moreover, We investigated four pretrained language models and proposed two ensemble language models. Our findings include monolingual models exhibiting superior performance and ensemble models outperforming the baseline while the majority voting ensemble outperforms the English language.

new Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue

Authors: Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li

Abstract: Target-oriented proactive dialogue systems aim to lead conversations from a dialogue context toward a pre-determined target, such as making recommendations on designated items or introducing new specific topics. To this end, it is critical for such dialogue systems to plan reasonable actions to drive the conversation proactively, and meanwhile, to plan appropriate topics to move the conversation forward to the target topic smoothly. In this work, we mainly focus on effective dialogue planning for target-oriented dialogue generation. Inspired by decision-making theories in cognitive science, we propose a novel target-constrained bidirectional planning (TRIP) approach, which plans an appropriate dialogue path by looking ahead and looking back. By formulating the planning as a generation task, our TRIP bidirectionally generates a dialogue path consisting of a sequence of pairs using two Transformer decoders. They are expected to supervise each other and converge on consistent actions and topics by minimizing the decision gap and contrastive generation of targets. Moreover, we propose a target-constrained decoding algorithm with a bidirectional agreement to better control the planning process. Subsequently, we adopt the planned dialogue paths to guide dialogue generation in a pipeline manner, where we explore two variants: prompt-based generation and plan-controlled generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging dialogue datasets, which are re-purposed for exploring target-oriented dialogue. Our automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly outperform various baseline models.

new Can LLM Substitute Human Labeling? A Case Study of Fine-grained Chinese Address Entity Recognition Dataset for UAV Delivery

Authors: Yuxuan Yao, Sichun Luo, Haohan Zhao, Guanzhi Deng, Linqi Song

Abstract: We present CNER-UAV, a fine-grained \textbf{C}hinese \textbf{N}ame \textbf{E}ntity \textbf{R}ecognition dataset specifically designed for the task of address resolution in \textbf{U}nmanned \textbf{A}erial \textbf{V}ehicle delivery systems. The dataset encompasses a diverse range of five categories, enabling comprehensive training and evaluation of NER models. To construct this dataset, we sourced the data from a real-world UAV delivery system and conducted a rigorous data cleaning and desensitization process to ensure privacy and data integrity. The resulting dataset, consisting of around 12,000 annotated samples, underwent human experts and \textbf{L}arge \textbf{L}anguage \textbf{M}odel annotation. We evaluated classical NER models on our dataset and provided in-depth analysis. The dataset and models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/zhhvvv/CNER-UAV}.

URLs: https://github.com/zhhvvv/CNER-UAV

new Large Language Models on Fine-grained Emotion Detection Dataset with Data Augmentation and Transfer Learning

Authors: Kaipeng Wang, Zhi Jing, Yongye Su, Yikun Han

Abstract: This paper delves into enhancing the classification performance on the GoEmotions dataset, a large, manually annotated dataset for emotion detection in text. The primary goal of this paper is to address the challenges of detecting subtle emotions in text, a complex issue in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with significant practical applications. The findings offer valuable insights into addressing the challenges of emotion detection in text and suggest directions for future research, including the potential for a survey paper that synthesizes methods and performances across various datasets in this domain.

new FMPAF: How Do Fed Chairs Affect the Financial Market? A Fine-grained Monetary Policy Analysis Framework on Their Language

Authors: Yayue Deng, Mohan Xu, Yao Tang

Abstract: The effectiveness of central bank communication is a crucial aspect of monetary policy transmission. While recent research has examined the influence of policy communication by the chairs of the Federal Reserve on various financial variables, much of the literature relies on rule-based or dictionary-based methods in parsing the language of the chairs, leaving nuanced information about policy stance contained in nonverbal emotion out of the analysis. In the current study, we propose the Fine-Grained Monetary Policy Analysis Framework (FMPAF), a novel approach that integrates large language models (LLMs) with regression analysis to provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of the press-conference communications of chairs of the Federal Reserve on financial markets. We conduct extensive comparisons of model performance under different levels of granularity, modalities, and communication scenarios. Based on our preferred specification, a one-unit increase in the sentiment score is associated with an increase of the price of S\&P 500 Exchange-Traded Fund by approximately 500 basis points, a 15-basis-point decrease in the policy interest rate, while not leading to a significant response in exchange rates.

new Fine-grainedly Synthesize Streaming Data Based On Large Language Models With Graph Structure Understanding For Data Sparsity

Authors: Xin Zhang, Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou, Guoqiang Xu

Abstract: Due to the sparsity of user data, sentiment analysis on user reviews in e-commerce platforms often suffers from poor performance, especially when faced with extremely sparse user data or long-tail labels. Recently, the emergence of LLMs has introduced new solutions to such problems by leveraging graph structures to generate supplementary user profiles. However, previous approaches have not fully utilized the graph understanding capabilities of LLMs and have struggled to adapt to complex streaming data environments. In this work, we propose a fine-grained streaming data synthesis framework that categorizes sparse users into three categories: Mid-tail, Long-tail, and Extreme. Specifically, we design LLMs to comprehensively understand three key graph elements in streaming data, including Local-global Graph Understanding, Second-Order Relationship Extraction, and Product Attribute Understanding, which enables the generation of high-quality synthetic data to effectively address sparsity across different categories. Experimental results on three real datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements, with synthesized data contributing to MSE reductions of 45.85%, 3.16%, and 62.21%, respectively.

new Can Large Language Models Automatically Score Proficiency of Written Essays?

Authors: Watheq Mansour, Salam Albatarni, Sohaila Eltanbouly, Tamer Elsayed

Abstract: Although several methods were proposed to address the problem of automated essay scoring (AES) in the last 50 years, there is still much to desire in terms of effectiveness. Large Language Models (LLMs) are transformer-based models that demonstrate extraordinary capabilities on various tasks. In this paper, we test the ability of LLMs, given their powerful linguistic knowledge, to analyze and effectively score written essays. We experimented with two popular LLMs, namely ChatGPT and Llama. We aim to check if these models can do this task and, if so, how their performance is positioned among the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across two levels, holistically and per individual writing trait. We utilized prompt-engineering tactics in designing four different prompts to bring their maximum potential to this task. Our experiments conducted on the ASAP dataset revealed several interesting observations. First, choosing the right prompt depends highly on the model and nature of the task. Second, the two LLMs exhibited comparable average performance in AES, with a slight advantage for ChatGPT. Finally, despite the performance gap between the two LLMs and SOTA models in terms of predictions, they provide feedback to enhance the quality of the essays, which can potentially help both teachers and students.

new Are You Being Tracked? Discover the Power of Zero-Shot Trajectory Tracing with LLMs!

Authors: Huanqi Yang, Sijie Ji, Rucheng Wu, Weitao Xu

Abstract: There is a burgeoning discussion around the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in acting as fundamental components that can be seamlessly incorporated into Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) to interpret complex trajectories. This study introduces LLMTrack, a model that illustrates how LLMs can be leveraged for Zero-Shot Trajectory Recognition by employing a novel single-prompt technique that combines role-play and think step-by-step methodologies with unprocessed Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. We evaluate the model using real-world datasets designed to challenge it with distinct trajectories characterized by indoor and outdoor scenarios. In both test scenarios, LLMTrack not only meets but exceeds the performance benchmarks set by traditional machine learning approaches and even contemporary state-of-the-art deep learning models, all without the requirement of training on specialized datasets. The results of our research suggest that, with strategically designed prompts, LLMs can tap into their extensive knowledge base and are well-equipped to analyze raw sensor data with remarkable effectiveness.

new Identifying and interpreting non-aligned human conceptual representations using language modeling

Authors: Wanqian Bao, Uri Hasson

Abstract: The question of whether people's experience in the world shapes conceptual representation and lexical semantics is longstanding. Word-association, feature-listing and similarity rating tasks aim to address this question but require a subjective interpretation of the latent dimensions identified. In this study, we introduce a supervised representational-alignment method that (i) determines whether two groups of individuals share the same basis of a certain category, and (ii) explains in what respects they differ. In applying this method, we show that congenital blindness induces conceptual reorganization in both a-modal and sensory-related verbal domains, and we identify the associated semantic shifts. We first apply supervised feature-pruning to a language model (GloVe) to optimize prediction accuracy of human similarity judgments from word embeddings. Pruning identifies one subset of retained GloVe features that optimizes prediction of judgments made by sighted individuals and another subset that optimizes judgments made by blind. A linear probing analysis then interprets the latent semantics of these feature-subsets by learning a mapping from the retained GloVe features to 65 interpretable semantic dimensions. We applied this approach to seven semantic domains, including verbs related to motion, sight, touch, and amodal verbs related to knowledge acquisition. We find that blind individuals more strongly associate social and cognitive meanings to verbs related to motion or those communicating non-speech vocal utterances (e.g., whimper, moan). Conversely, for amodal verbs, they demonstrate much sparser information. Finally, for some verbs, representations of blind and sighted are highly similar. The study presents a formal approach for studying interindividual differences in word meaning, and the first demonstration of how blindness impacts conceptual representation of everyday verbs.

new Personalized LoRA for Human-Centered Text Understanding

Authors: You Zhang, Jin Wang, Liang-Chih Yu, Dan Xu, Xuejie Zhang

Abstract: Effectively and efficiently adapting a pre-trained language model (PLM) for human-centered text understanding (HCTU) is challenging since user tokens are million-level in most personalized applications and do not have concrete explicit semantics. A standard and parameter-efficient approach (e.g., LoRA) necessitates memorizing numerous suits of adapters for each user. In this work, we introduce a personalized LoRA (PLoRA) with a plug-and-play (PnP) framework for the HCTU task. PLoRA is effective, parameter-efficient, and dynamically deploying in PLMs. Moreover, a personalized dropout and a mutual information maximizing strategies are adopted and hence the proposed PLoRA can be well adapted to few/zero-shot learning scenarios for the cold-start issue. Experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in full/few/zero-shot learning scenarios for the HCTU task, even though it has fewer trainable parameters. For reproducibility, the code for this paper is available at: https://github.com/yoyo-yun/PLoRA.

URLs: https://github.com/yoyo-yun/PLoRA.

new Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models

Authors: Xiaohan Wang, Shengyu Mao, Ningyu Zhang, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen

Abstract: Recently, there has been a growing interest in knowledge editing for Large Language Models (LLMs). Current approaches and evaluations merely explore the instance-level editing, while whether LLMs possess the capability to modify concepts remains unclear. This paper pioneers the investigation of editing conceptual knowledge for LLMs, by constructing a novel benchmark dataset ConceptEdit and establishing a suite of new metrics for evaluation. The experimental results reveal that, although existing editing methods can efficiently modify concept-level definition to some extent, they also have the potential to distort the related instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. We anticipate this can inspire further progress in better understanding LLMs. Our project homepage is available at https://zjunlp.github.io/project/ConceptEdit.

URLs: https://zjunlp.github.io/project/ConceptEdit.

new SCORE: Self-supervised Correspondence Fine-tuning for Improved Content Representations

Authors: Amit Meghanani, Thomas Hain

Abstract: There is a growing interest in cost-effective self-supervised fine-tuning (SSFT) of self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models to obtain task-specific representations. These task-specific representations are used for robust performance on various downstream tasks by fine-tuning on the labelled data. This work presents a cost-effective SSFT method named Self-supervised Correspondence (SCORE) fine-tuning to adapt the SSL speech representations for content-related tasks. The proposed method uses a correspondence training strategy, aiming to learn similar representations from perturbed speech and original speech. Commonly used data augmentation techniques for content-related tasks (ASR) are applied to obtain perturbed speech. SCORE fine-tuned HuBERT outperforms the vanilla HuBERT on SUPERB benchmark with only a few hours of fine-tuning (< 5 hrs) on a single GPU for automatic speech recognition, phoneme recognition, and query-by-example tasks, with relative improvements of 1.09%, 3.58%, and 12.65%, respectively. SCORE provides competitive results with the recently proposed SSFT method SPIN, using only 1/3 of the processed speech compared to SPIN.

new Unpacking Tokenization: Evaluating Text Compression and its Correlation with Model Performance

Authors: Omer Goldman, Avi Caciularu, Matan Eyal, Kris Cao, Idan Szpektor, Reut Tsarfaty

Abstract: Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be viewed as 0-gram language modeling where equal probability is assigned to all tokens. We also demonstrate the empirical importance of compression for downstream success of pre-trained language models. We control the compression ability of several BPE tokenizers by varying the amount of documents available during their training: from 1 million documents to a character-based tokenizer equivalent to no training data at all. We then pre-train English language models based on those tokenizers and fine-tune them over several tasks. We show that there is a correlation between tokenizers' compression and models' downstream performance, suggesting that compression is a reliable intrinsic indicator of tokenization quality. These correlations are more pronounced for generation tasks (over classification) or for smaller models (over large ones). We replicated a representative part of our experiments on Turkish and found similar results, confirming that our results hold for languages with typological characteristics dissimilar to English. We conclude that building better compressing tokenizers is a fruitful avenue for further research and for improving overall model performance.

new LIEDER: Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition

Authors: Xiaomeng Zhu, Robert Frank

Abstract: Discourse Entity (DE) recognition is the task of identifying novel and known entities introduced within a text. While previous work has found that large language models have basic, if imperfect, DE recognition abilities (Schuster and Linzen, 2022), it remains largely unassessed which of the fundamental semantic properties that govern the introduction and subsequent reference to DEs they have knowledge of. We propose the Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition (LIEDER) dataset that allows for a detailed examination of language models' knowledge of four crucial semantic properties: existence, uniqueness, plurality, and novelty. We find evidence that state-of-the-art large language models exhibit sensitivity to all of these properties except novelty, which demonstrates that they have yet to reach human-level language understanding abilities.

new From Instructions to Constraints: Language Model Alignment with Automatic Constraint Verification

Authors: Fei Wang, Chao Shang, Sarthak Jain, Shuai Wang, Qiang Ning, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli, Yassine Benajiba, Dan Roth

Abstract: User alignment is crucial for adapting general-purpose language models (LMs) to downstream tasks, but human annotations are often not available for all types of instructions, especially those with customized constraints. We observe that user instructions typically contain constraints. While assessing response quality in terms of the whole instruction is often costly, efficiently evaluating the satisfaction rate of constraints is feasible. We investigate common constraints in NLP tasks, categorize them into three classes based on the types of their arguments, and propose a unified framework, ACT (Aligning to ConsTraints), to automatically produce supervision signals for user alignment with constraints. Specifically, ACT uses constraint verifiers, which are typically easy to implement in practice, to compute constraint satisfaction rate (CSR) of each response. It samples multiple responses for each prompt and collect preference labels based on their CSR automatically. Subsequently, ACT adapts the LM to the target task through a ranking-based learning process. Experiments on fine-grained entity typing, abstractive summarization, and temporal question answering show that ACT is able to enhance LMs' capability to adhere to different classes of constraints, thereby improving task performance. Further experiments show that the constraint-following capabilities are transferable.

new IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages

Authors: Mohammed Safi Ur Rahman Khan, Priyam Mehta, Ananth Sankar, Umashankar Kumaravelan, Sumanth Doddapaneni, Suriyaprasaad G, Varun Balan G, Sparsh Jain, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Pratyush Kumar, Raj Dabre, Mitesh M. Khapra

Abstract: Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

new Amharic LLaMA and LLaVA: Multimodal LLMs for Low Resource Languages

Authors: Michael Andersland

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs often struggle to perform well on low-resource languages because there is so little training data available. This shortcoming is especially prevalent with open source models. In this work, we explore training LLaMA-2 to speak Amharic, a language which is spoken by over 50 million people world wide, but has orders of magnitude less data available than languages like English. We employ methods previously used for training LLMs on other languages with data scarcity, and use open source translation models to perform data augmentation and grow our dataset from millions of tokens to billions. We further enhance the capabilities of our model by connecting an image encoder and training on a translated visual instruction tuning dataset in the same manner as LLaVA, resulting in a multimodal Amharic LLM that can understand images along with text. We introduce an Amharic version of a popular benchmarking dataset to evaluate our work. Our models and dataset are open sourced and available on GitHub.

new Multi-modal Semantic Understanding with Contrastive Cross-modal Feature Alignment

Authors: Ming Zhang, Ke Chang, Yunfang Wu

Abstract: Multi-modal semantic understanding requires integrating information from different modalities to extract users' real intention behind words. Most previous work applies a dual-encoder structure to separately encode image and text, but fails to learn cross-modal feature alignment, making it hard to achieve cross-modal deep information interaction. This paper proposes a novel CLIP-guided contrastive-learning-based architecture to perform multi-modal feature alignment, which projects the features derived from different modalities into a unified deep space. On multi-modal sarcasm detection (MMSD) and multi-modal sentiment analysis (MMSA) tasks, the experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms several baselines, and our feature alignment strategy brings obvious performance gain over models with different aggregating methods and models even enriched with knowledge. More importantly, our model is simple to implement without using task-specific external knowledge, and thus can easily migrate to other multi-modal tasks. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/ChangKe123/CLFA.

URLs: https://github.com/ChangKe123/CLFA.

new Human and Automatic Interpretation of Romanian Noun Compounds

Authors: Ioana Marinescu, Christiane Fellbaum

Abstract: Determining the intended, context-dependent meanings of noun compounds like "shoe sale" and "fire sale" remains a challenge for NLP. Previous work has relied on inventories of semantic relations that capture the different meanings between compound members. Focusing on Romanian compounds, whose morphosyntax differs from that of their English counterparts, we propose a new set of relations and test it with human annotators and a neural net classifier. Results show an alignment of the network's predictions and human judgments, even where the human agreement rate is low. Agreement tracks with the frequency of the selected relations, regardless of structural differences. However, the most frequently selected relation was none of the sixteen labeled semantic relations, indicating the need for a better relation inventory.

new GlossLM: Multilingual Pretraining for Low-Resource Interlinear Glossing

Authors: Michael GinnUniversity of Colorado, Lindia TjuatjaCarnegie Mellon University, Taiqi HeCarnegie Mellon University, Enora RiceUniversity of Colorado, Graham NeubigCarnegie Mellon University, Alexis PalmerUniversity of Colorado, Lori LevinCarnegie Mellon University

Abstract: A key aspect of language documentation is the creation of annotated text in a format such as interlinear glossed text (IGT), which captures fine-grained morphosyntactic analyses in a morpheme-by-morpheme format. Prior work has explored methods to automatically generate IGT in order to reduce the time cost of language analysis. However, many languages (particularly those requiring preservation) lack sufficient IGT data to train effective models, and crosslingual transfer has been proposed as a method to overcome this limitation. We compile the largest existing corpus of IGT data from a variety of sources, covering over 450k examples across 1.8k languages, to enable research on crosslingual transfer and IGT generation. Then, we pretrain a large multilingual model on a portion of this corpus, and further finetune it to specific languages. Our model is competitive with state-of-the-art methods for segmented data and large monolingual datasets. Meanwhile, our model outperforms SOTA models on unsegmented text and small corpora by up to 6.6% morpheme accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of crosslingual transfer for low-resource languages.

new 'One size doesn't fit all': Learning how many Examples to use for In-Context Learning for Improved Text Classification

Authors: Manish Chandra, Debasis Ganguly, Yiwen Li, Iadh Ounis

Abstract: Predictive models in natural language processing (NLP) have evolved from training models from scratch to fine-tuning pre-trained models with labelled data. An extreme form of this fine-tuning involves in-context learning (ICL), where the output of a pre-trained generative model (frozen decoder parameters) is controlled only with variations in the input strings (called instructions or prompts). An important component of ICL is the use of a small number of labelled data instances as examples in the prompt. While existing work uses a static number of examples during inference for each data instance, in this paper we propose a novel methodology of dynamically adapting the number of examples as per the data. This is analogous to the use of a variable-sized neighborhood in k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) classifier. In our proposed workflow of adaptive ICL (AICL), the number of demonstrations to employ during the inference on a particular data instance is predicted by the Softmax posteriors of a classifier. The parameters of this classifier are fitted on the optimal number of examples in ICL required to correctly infer the label of each instance in the training set with the hypothesis that a test instance that is similar to a training instance should use the same (or a closely matching) number of few-shot examples. Our experiments show that our AICL method results in improvement in text classification task on several standard datasets.

new A Logical Pattern Memory Pre-trained Model for Entailment Tree Generation

Authors: Li Yuan, Yi Cai, Haopeng Ren, Jiexin Wang

Abstract: Generating coherent and credible explanations remains a significant challenge in the field of AI. In recent years, researchers have delved into the utilization of entailment trees to depict explanations, which exhibit a reasoning process of how a hypothesis is deduced from the supporting facts. However, existing models often overlook the importance of generating intermediate conclusions with logical consistency from the given facts, leading to inaccurate conclusions and undermining the overall credibility of entailment trees. To address this limitation, we propose the logical pattern memory pre-trained model (LMPM). LMPM incorporates an external memory structure to learn and store the latent representations of logical patterns, which aids in generating logically consistent conclusions. Furthermore, to mitigate the influence of logically irrelevant domain knowledge in the Wikipedia-based data, we introduce an entity abstraction approach to construct the dataset for pre-training LMPM. The experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in improving the quality of entailment tree generation. By leveraging logical entailment patterns, our model produces more coherent and reasonable conclusions that closely align with the underlying premises. Code and Data are released at https://github.com/YuanLi95/T5-LMPM

URLs: https://github.com/YuanLi95/T5-LMPM

new CLIcK: A Benchmark Dataset of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean

Authors: Eunsu Kim, Juyoung Suk, Philhoon Oh, Haneul Yoo, James Thorne, Alice Oh

Abstract: Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) for the Korean language, there remains an obvious lack of benchmark datasets that test the requisite Korean cultural and linguistic knowledge. Because many existing Korean benchmark datasets are derived from the English counterparts through translation, they often overlook the different cultural contexts. For the few benchmark datasets that are sourced from Korean data capturing cultural knowledge, only narrow tasks such as bias and hate speech detection are offered. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean (CLIcK), a dataset comprising 1,995 QA pairs. CLIcK sources its data from official Korean exams and textbooks, partitioning the questions into eleven categories under the two main categories of language and culture. For each instance in CLIcK, we provide fine-grained annotation of which cultural and linguistic knowledge is required to answer the question correctly. Using CLIcK, we test 13 language models to assess their performance. Our evaluation uncovers insights into their performances across the categories, as well as the diverse factors affecting their comprehension. CLIcK offers the first large-scale comprehensive Korean-centric analysis of LLMs' proficiency in Korean culture and language.

new Evolving Knowledge Distillation with Large Language Models and Active Learning

Authors: Chengyuan Liu, Yangyang Kang, Fubang Zhao, Kun Kuang, Zhuoren Jiang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various NLP tasks. However, their computational costs are prohibitively high. To address this issue, previous research has attempted to distill the knowledge of LLMs into smaller models by generating annotated data. Nonetheless, these works have mainly focused on the direct use of LLMs for text generation and labeling, without fully exploring their potential to comprehend the target task and acquire valuable knowledge. In this paper, we propose EvoKD: Evolving Knowledge Distillation, which leverages the concept of active learning to interactively enhance the process of data generation using large language models, simultaneously improving the task capabilities of small domain model (student model). Different from previous work, we actively analyze the student model's weaknesses, and then synthesize labeled samples based on the analysis. In addition, we provide iterative feedback to the LLMs regarding the student model's performance to continuously construct diversified and challenging samples. Experiments and analysis on different NLP tasks, namely, text classification and named entity recognition show the effectiveness of EvoKD.

new Unsupervised Real-Time Hallucination Detection based on the Internal States of Large Language Models

Authors: Weihang Su, Changyue Wang, Qingyao Ai, Yiran HU, Zhijing Wu, Yujia Zhou, Yiqun Liu

Abstract: Hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) refer to the phenomenon of LLMs producing responses that are coherent yet factually inaccurate. This issue undermines the effectiveness of LLMs in practical applications, necessitating research into detecting and mitigating hallucinations of LLMs. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on post-processing techniques for hallucination detection, which tend to be computationally intensive and limited in effectiveness due to their separation from the LLM's inference process. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MIND, an unsupervised training framework that leverages the internal states of LLMs for real-time hallucination detection without requiring manual annotations. Additionally, we present HELM, a new benchmark for evaluating hallucination detection across multiple LLMs, featuring diverse LLM outputs and the internal states of LLMs during their inference process. Our experiments demonstrate that MIND outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in hallucination detection.

new Multilingual Turn-taking Prediction Using Voice Activity Projection

Authors: Koji Inoue, Bing'er Jiang, Erik Ekstedt, Tatsuya Kawahara, Gabriel Skantze

Abstract: This paper investigates the application of voice activity projection (VAP), a predictive turn-taking model for spoken dialogue, on multilingual data, encompassing English, Mandarin, and Japanese. The VAP model continuously predicts the upcoming voice activities of participants in dyadic dialogue, leveraging a cross-attention Transformer to capture the dynamic interplay between participants. The results show that a monolingual VAP model trained on one language does not make good predictions when applied to other languages. However, a multilingual model, trained on all three languages, demonstrates predictive performance on par with monolingual models across all languages. Further analyses show that the multilingual model has learned to discern the language of the input signal. We also analyze the sensitivity to pitch, a prosodic cue that is thought to be important for turn-taking. Finally, we compare two different audio encoders, contrastive predictive coding (CPC) pre-trained on English, with a recent model based on multilingual wav2vec 2.0 (MMS).

new How to Understand Named Entities: Using Common Sense for News Captioning

Authors: Ning Xu, Yanhui Wang, Tingting Zhang, Hongshuo Tian, Mohan Kankanhalli, An-An Liu

Abstract: News captioning aims to describe an image with its news article body as input. It greatly relies on a set of detected named entities, including real-world people, organizations, and places. This paper exploits commonsense knowledge to understand named entities for news captioning. By ``understand'', we mean correlating the news content with common sense in the wild, which helps an agent to 1) distinguish semantically similar named entities and 2) describe named entities using words outside of training corpora. Our approach consists of three modules: (a) Filter Module aims to clarify the common sense concerning a named entity from two aspects: what does it mean? and what is it related to?, which divide the common sense into explanatory knowledge and relevant knowledge, respectively. (b) Distinguish Module aggregates explanatory knowledge from node-degree, dependency, and distinguish three aspects to distinguish semantically similar named entities. (c) Enrich Module attaches relevant knowledge to named entities to enrich the entity description by commonsense information (e.g., identity and social position). Finally, the probability distributions from both modules are integrated to generate the news captions. Extensive experiments on two challenging datasets (i.e., GoodNews and NYTimes) demonstrate the superiority of our method. Ablation studies and visualization further validate its effectiveness in understanding named entities.

new On the Consideration of AI Openness: Can Good Intent Be Abused?

Authors: Yeeun Kim, Eunkyung Choi, Hyunjun Kim, Hongseok Oh, Hyunseo Shin, Wonseok Hwang

Abstract: Openness is critical for the advancement of science. In particular, recent rapid progress in AI has been made possible only by various open-source models, datasets, and libraries. However, this openness also means that technologies can be freely used for socially harmful purposes. Can open-source models or datasets be used for malicious purposes? If so, how easy is it to adapt technology for such goals? Here, we conduct a case study in the legal domain, a realm where individual decisions can have profound social consequences. To this end, we build EVE, a dataset consisting of 200 examples of questions and corresponding answers about criminal activities based on 200 Korean precedents. We found that a widely accepted open-source LLM, which initially refuses to answer unethical questions, can be easily tuned with EVE to provide unethical and informative answers about criminal activities. This implies that although open-source technologies contribute to scientific progress, some care must be taken to mitigate possible malicious use cases. Warning: This paper contains contents that some may find unethical.

new Improving Speaker Assignment in Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Meeting Applications

Authors: Can CuiMULTISPEECH, Imran Ahamad SheikhMULTISPEECH, Mostafa SadeghiMULTISPEECH, Emmanuel VincentMULTISPEECH

Abstract: Past studies on end-to-end meeting transcription have focused on model architecture and have mostly been evaluated on simulated meeting data. We present a novel study aiming to optimize the use of a Speaker-Attributed ASR (SA-ASR) system in real-life scenarios, such as the AMI meeting corpus, for improved speaker assignment of speech segments. First, we propose a pipeline tailored to real-life applications involving Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Speaker Diarization (SD), and SA-ASR. Second, we advocate using VAD output segments to fine-tune the SA-ASR model, considering that it is also applied to VAD segments during test, and show that this results in a relative reduction of Speaker Error Rate (SER) up to 28%. Finally, we explore strategies to enhance the extraction of the speaker embedding templates used as inputs by the SA-ASR system. We show that extracting them from SD output rather than annotated speaker segments results in a relative SER reduction up to 20%.

new AC-EVAL: Evaluating Ancient Chinese Language Understanding in Large Language Models

Authors: Yuting Wei, Yuanxing Xu, Xinru Wei, Simin Yang, Yangfu Zhu, Yuqing Li, Di Liu, Bin Wu

Abstract: Given the importance of ancient Chinese in capturing the essence of rich historical and cultural heritage, the rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate benchmarks that can effectively evaluate their understanding of ancient contexts. To meet this need, we present AC-EVAL, an innovative benchmark designed to assess the advanced knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs within the context of ancient Chinese. AC-EVAL is structured across three levels of difficulty reflecting different facets of language comprehension: general historical knowledge, short text understanding, and long text comprehension. The benchmark comprises 13 tasks, spanning historical facts, geography, social customs, art, philosophy, classical poetry and prose, providing a comprehensive assessment framework. Our extensive evaluation of top-performing LLMs, tailored for both English and Chinese, reveals a substantial potential for enhancing ancient text comprehension. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs, AC-EVAL aims to promote their development and application forward in the realms of ancient Chinese language education and scholarly research. The AC-EVAL data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/yuting-wei/AC-EVAL.

URLs: https://github.com/yuting-wei/AC-EVAL.

new Academically intelligent LLMs are not necessarily socially intelligent

Authors: Ruoxi Xu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun

Abstract: The academic intelligence of large language models (LLMs) has made remarkable progress in recent times, but their social intelligence performance remains unclear. Inspired by established human social intelligence frameworks, particularly Daniel Goleman's social intelligence theory, we have developed a standardized social intelligence test based on real-world social scenarios to comprehensively assess the social intelligence of LLMs, termed as the Situational Evaluation of Social Intelligence (SESI). We conducted an extensive evaluation with 13 recent popular and state-of-art LLM agents on SESI. The results indicate the social intelligence of LLMs still has significant room for improvement, with superficially friendliness as a primary reason for errors. Moreover, there exists a relatively low correlation between the social intelligence and academic intelligence exhibited by LLMs, suggesting that social intelligence is distinct from academic intelligence for LLMs. Additionally, while it is observed that LLMs can't ``understand'' what social intelligence is, their social intelligence, similar to that of humans, is influenced by social factors.

new Guiding Clinical Reasoning with Large Language Models via Knowledge Seeds

Authors: Jiageng WU, Xian Wu, Jie Yang

Abstract: Clinical reasoning refers to the cognitive process that physicians employ in evaluating and managing patients. This process typically involves suggesting necessary examinations, diagnosing patients' diseases, and deciding on appropriate therapies, etc. Accurate clinical reasoning requires extensive medical knowledge and rich clinical experience, setting a high bar for physicians. This is particularly challenging in developing countries due to the overwhelming number of patients and limited physician resources, contributing significantly to global health inequity and necessitating automated clinical reasoning approaches. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential in clinical reasoning. However, these LLMs are prone to hallucination problems, and the reasoning process of LLMs may not align with the clinical decision path of physicians. In this study, we introduce a novel framework, In-Context Padding (ICP), designed to enhance LLMs with medical knowledge. Specifically, we infer critical clinical reasoning elements (referred to as knowledge seeds) and use these as anchors to guide the generation process of LLMs. Experiments on two clinical question datasets demonstrate that ICP significantly improves the clinical reasoning ability of LLMs.

new MedKP: Medical Dialogue with Knowledge Enhancement and Clinical Pathway Encoding

Authors: Jiageng Wu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Jie Yang

Abstract: With appropriate data selection and training techniques, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional success in various medical examinations and multiple-choice questions. However, the application of LLMs in medical dialogue generation-a task more closely aligned with actual medical practice-has been less explored. This gap is attributed to the insufficient medical knowledge of LLMs, which leads to inaccuracies and hallucinated information in the generated medical responses. In this work, we introduce the Medical dialogue with Knowledge enhancement and clinical Pathway encoding (MedKP) framework, which integrates an external knowledge enhancement module through a medical knowledge graph and an internal clinical pathway encoding via medical entities and physician actions. Evaluated with comprehensive metrics, our experiments on two large-scale, real-world online medical consultation datasets (MedDG and KaMed) demonstrate that MedKP surpasses multiple baselines and mitigates the incidence of hallucinations, achieving a new state-of-the-art. Extensive ablation studies further reveal the effectiveness of each component of MedKP. This enhancement advances the development of reliable, automated medical consultation responses using LLMs, thereby broadening the potential accessibility of precise and real-time medical assistance.

new Restoring Ancient Ideograph: A Multimodal Multitask Neural Network Approach

Authors: Siyu Duan, Jun Wang, Qi Su

Abstract: Cultural heritage serves as the enduring record of human thought and history. Despite significant efforts dedicated to the preservation of cultural relics, many ancient artefacts have been ravaged irreversibly by natural deterioration and human actions. Deep learning technology has emerged as a valuable tool for restoring various kinds of cultural heritages, including ancient text restoration. Previous research has approached ancient text restoration from either visual or textual perspectives, often overlooking the potential of synergizing multimodal information. This paper proposes a novel Multimodal Multitask Restoring Model (MMRM) to restore ancient texts, particularly emphasising the ideograph. This model combines context understanding with residual visual information from damaged ancient artefacts, enabling it to predict damaged characters and generate restored images simultaneously. We tested the MMRM model through experiments conducted on both simulated datasets and authentic ancient inscriptions. The results show that the proposed method gives insightful restoration suggestions in both simulation experiments and real-world scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the pioneering application of multimodal deep learning in ancient text restoration, which will contribute to the understanding of ancient society and culture in digital humanities fields.

new ACT-MNMT Auto-Constriction Turning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Authors: Shaojie Dai, Xin Liu, Ping Luo, Yue Yu

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) has achieved promising performance in multilingual machine translation tasks through zero/few-shot prompts or prompt-tuning. However, due to the mixture of multilingual data during the pre-training of LLM, the LLM-based translation models face the off-target issue in both prompt-based methods, including a series of phenomena, namely instruction misunderstanding, translation with wrong language and over-generation. For this issue, this paper introduces an \textbf{\underline{A}}uto-\textbf{\underline{C}}onstriction \textbf{\underline{T}}urning mechanism for \textbf{\underline{M}}ultilingual \textbf{\underline{N}}eural \textbf{\underline{M}}achine \textbf{\underline{T}}ranslation (\model), which is a novel supervised fine-tuning mechanism and orthogonal to the traditional prompt-based methods. In this method, \model automatically constructs a constrained template in the target side by adding trigger tokens ahead of the ground truth. Furthermore, trigger tokens can be arranged and combined freely to represent different task semantics, and they can be iteratively updated to maximize the label likelihood. Experiments are performed on WMT test sets with multiple metrics, and the experimental results demonstrate that \model achieves substantially improved performance across multiple translation directions and reduce the off-target phenomena in the translation.

new ALaRM: Align Language Models via Hierarchical Rewards Modeling

Authors: Yuhang Lai, Siyuan Wang, Shujun Liu, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei

Abstract: We introduce ALaRM, the first framework modeling hierarchical rewards in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is designed to enhance the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. The framework addresses the limitations of current alignment approaches, which often struggle with the inconsistency and sparsity of human supervision signals, by integrating holistic rewards with aspect-specific rewards. This integration enables more precise and consistent guidance of language models towards desired outcomes, particularly in complex and open text generation tasks. By employing a methodology that filters and combines multiple rewards based on their consistency, the framework provides a reliable mechanism for improving model alignment. We validate our approach through applications in long-form question answering and machine translation tasks, employing gpt-3.5-turbo for pairwise comparisons, and demonstrate improvements over existing baselines. Our work underscores the effectiveness of hierarchical rewards modeling in refining LLM training processes for better human preference alignment. We release our code at https://ALaRM-fdu.github.io.

URLs: https://ALaRM-fdu.github.io.

new ConspEmoLLM: Conspiracy Theory Detection Using an Emotion-Based Large Language Model

Authors: Zhiwei Liu, Boyang Liu, Paul Thompson, Kailai Yang, Raghav Jain, Sophia Ananiadou

Abstract: The internet has brought both benefits and harms to society. A prime example of the latter is misinformation, including conspiracy theories, which flood the web. Recent advances in natural language processing, particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have improved the prospects of accurate misinformation detection. However, most LLM-based approaches to conspiracy theory detection focus only on binary classification and fail to account for the important relationship between misinformation and affective features (i.e., sentiment and emotions). Driven by a comprehensive analysis of conspiracy text that reveals its distinctive affective features, we propose ConspEmoLLM, the first open-source LLM that integrates affective information and is able to perform diverse tasks relating to conspiracy theories. These tasks include not only conspiracy theory detection, but also classification of theory type and detection of related discussion (e.g., opinions towards theories). ConspEmoLLM is fine-tuned based on an emotion-oriented LLM using our novel ConDID dataset, which includes five tasks to support LLM instruction tuning and evaluation. We demonstrate that when applied to these tasks, ConspEmoLLM largely outperforms several open-source general domain LLMs and ChatGPT, as well as an LLM that has been fine-tuned using ConDID, but which does not use affective features. This project will be released on https://github.com/lzw108/ConspEmoLLM/.

URLs: https://github.com/lzw108/ConspEmoLLM/.

new Strength Lies in Differences! Towards Effective Non-collaborative Dialogues via Tailored Strategy Planning

Authors: Tong Zhang, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Hongru Liang, Jia Liu, Zujie Wen, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua

Abstract: We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents that must engage in tailored strategic planning for diverse users to secure a favorable agreement. This poses challenges for existing dialogue agents due to two main reasons: their inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into their strategic planning and their training paradigm's failure to produce strategic planners that can generalize to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose TRIP to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TRIP in catering to diverse users.

new The Power of Noise: Toward a Unified Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Representation Framework

Authors: Zhuo Chen, Yin Fang, Yichi Zhang, Lingbing Guo, Jiaoyan Chen, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang

Abstract: The advancement of Multi-modal Pre-training highlights the necessity for a robust Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (MMKG) representation learning framework. This framework is crucial for integrating structured knowledge into multi-modal Large Language Models (LLMs) at scale, aiming to alleviate issues like knowledge misconceptions and multi-modal hallucinations. In this work, to evaluate models' ability to accurately embed entities within MMKGs, we focus on two widely researched tasks: Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion (MKGC) and Multi-modal Entity Alignment (MMEA). Building on this foundation, we propose a novel SNAG method that utilizes a Transformer-based architecture equipped with modality-level noise masking for the robust integration of multi-modal entity features in KGs. By incorporating specific training objectives for both MKGC and MMEA, our approach achieves SOTA performance across a total of ten datasets (three for MKGC and seven for MEMA), demonstrating its robustness and versatility. Besides, SNAG can not only function as a standalone model but also enhance other existing methods, providing stable performance improvements. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/zjukg/SNAG.

URLs: https://github.com/zjukg/SNAG.

new RA-ISF: Learning to Answer and Understand from Retrieval Augmentation via Iterative Self-Feedback

Authors: Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Xuhong Zhang, Weihao Liu, Jianwei Yin, Jiannan Cao, Tianyu Du

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in numerous tasks but still heavily rely on knowledge stored in their parameters. Moreover, updating this knowledge incurs high training costs. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods address this issue by integrating external knowledge. The model can answer questions it couldn't previously by retrieving knowledge relevant to the query. This approach improves performance in certain scenarios for specific tasks. However, if irrelevant texts are retrieved, it may impair model performance. In this paper, we propose Retrieval Augmented Iterative Self-Feedback (RA-ISF), a framework that iteratively decomposes tasks and processes them in three submodules to enhance the model's problem-solving capabilities. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing benchmarks, performing well on models like GPT3.5, Llama2, significantly enhancing factual reasoning capabilities and reducing hallucinations.

new Development of a Reliable and Accessible Caregiving Language Model (CaLM)

Authors: Bambang Parmanto, Bayu Aryoyudanta, Wilbert Soekinto, I Made Agus Setiawan, Yuhan Wang, Haomin Hu, Andi Saptono, Yong K. Choi

Abstract: Unlike professional caregivers, family caregivers often assume this role without formal preparation or training. Because of this, there is an urgent need to enhance the capacity of family caregivers to provide quality care. Large language models can potentially be used as a foundation technology for supporting caregivers as educational tools or as adjunct to care. This study aimed to develop a reliable Caregiving Language Model (CaLM) by using FMs and a caregiving knowledge base, develop an accessible CaLM using a small FM that requires fewer computing resources, and evaluate the performance of the model compared to a large FM. We developed CaLM using the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework combined with FM fine-tuning for improving the quality of FM answers by grounding the model on a caregiving knowledge base. We used two small FMs as candidates for the FM of CaLM (LLaMA-2 and Falcon with 7B parameters) and larger FM GPT-3.5 as a benchmark. We developed the caregiving knowledge base by gathering various types of documents from the Internet. In this study, we focused on caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer's Disease Related Dementias. We evaluated the models' performance using the benchmark metrics commonly used in evaluating language models and their reliability to provide accurate references with the answers. The RAG framework improved the performance of all FMs used in this study across all measures. As expected, the large FM performed better than small FMs across all metrics. The most interesting result is that small fine-tuned FMs with RAG performed significantly better than GPT 3.5 across all metrics. The fine-tuned LLaMA-2 small FM performed better than GPT 3.5 (even with RAG) in returning references with the answers. The study shows that reliable and accessible CaLM can be developed by using small FMs with a knowledge base specific to the caregiving domain.

new Exploring Large Language Models and Hierarchical Frameworks for Classification of Large Unstructured Legal Documents

Authors: Nishchal Prasad, Mohand Boughanem, Taoufiq Dkaki

Abstract: Legal judgment prediction suffers from the problem of long case documents exceeding tens of thousands of words, in general, and having a non-uniform structure. Predicting judgments from such documents becomes a challenging task, more so on documents with no structural annotation. We explore the classification of these large legal documents and their lack of structural information with a deep-learning-based hierarchical framework which we call MESc; "Multi-stage Encoder-based Supervised with-clustering"; for judgment prediction. Specifically, we divide a document into parts to extract their embeddings from the last four layers of a custom fine-tuned Large Language Model, and try to approximate their structure through unsupervised clustering. Which we use in another set of transformer encoder layers to learn the inter-chunk representations. We analyze the adaptability of Large Language Models (LLMs) with multi-billion parameters (GPT-Neo, and GPT-J) with the hierarchical framework of MESc and compare them with their standalone performance on legal texts. We also study their intra-domain(legal) transfer learning capability and the impact of combining embeddings from their last layers in MESc. We test these methods and their effectiveness with extensive experiments and ablation studies on legal documents from India, the European Union, and the United States with the ILDC dataset and a subset of the LexGLUE dataset. Our approach achieves a minimum total performance gain of approximately 2 points over previous state-of-the-art methods.

new MEND: Meta dEmonstratioN Distillation for Efficient and Effective In-Context Learning

Authors: Yichuan Li, Xiyao Ma, Sixing Lu, Kyumin Lee, Xiaohu Liu, Chenlei Guo

Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, where a LLM makes predictions for a given test input together with a few input-output pairs (demonstrations). Nevertheless, the inclusion of demonstrations leads to a quadratic increase in the computational overhead of the self-attention mechanism. Existing solutions attempt to distill lengthy demonstrations into compact vectors. However, they often require task-specific retraining or compromise LLM's in-context learning performance. To mitigate these challenges, we present Meta dEmonstratioN Distillation (MEND), where a language model learns to distill any lengthy demonstrations into vectors without retraining for a new downstream task. We exploit the knowledge distillation to enhance alignment between MEND and LLM, achieving both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. MEND is endowed with the meta-knowledge of distilling demonstrations through a two-stage training process, which includes meta-distillation pretraining and fine-tuning. Comprehensive evaluations across seven diverse ICL task partitions using decoder-only (GPT-2) and encoder-decoder (T5) attest to MEND's prowess. It not only matches but often outperforms the Vanilla ICL as well as other state-of-the-art distillation models, while significantly reducing the computational demands. This innovation promises enhanced scalability and efficiency for the practical deployment of large language models

new ERA-CoT: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Entity Relationship Analysis

Authors: Yanming Liu, Xinyue Peng, Tianyu Du, Jianwei Yin, Weihao Liu, Xuhong Zhang

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved commendable accomplishments in various natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when dealing with complex scenarios involving multiple entities. These challenges arise from the presence of implicit relationships that demand multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel approach ERA-CoT, which aids LLMs in understanding context by capturing relationships between entities and supports the reasoning of diverse tasks through Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT). Experimental results show that ERA-CoT demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method compared to current CoT prompting methods, achieving a significant improvement of an average of 5.1\% on GPT3.5 compared to previous SOTA baselines. Our analysis indicates that ERA-CoT increases the LLM's understanding of entity relationships, significantly improves the accuracy of question answering, and enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs.

new Naming, Describing, and Quantifying Visual Objects in Humans and LLMs

Authors: Alberto Testoni, Juell Sprott, Sandro Pezzelle

Abstract: While human speakers use a variety of different expressions when describing the same object in an image, giving rise to a distribution of plausible labels driven by pragmatic constraints, the extent to which current Vision \& Language Large Language Models (VLLMs) can mimic this crucial feature of language use is an open question. This applies to common, everyday objects, but it is particularly interesting for uncommon or novel objects for which a category label may be lacking or fuzzy. Furthermore, humans show clear production preferences for highly context-sensitive expressions, such as the quantifiers `few' or `most'. In our work, we evaluate VLLMs (FROMAGe, BLIP-2, LLaVA) on three categories (nouns, attributes, and quantifiers) where humans show great subjective variability concerning the distribution over plausible labels, using datasets and resources mostly under-explored in previous work. Our results reveal mixed evidence on the ability of VLLMs to capture human naming preferences, with all models failing in tasks that require high-level reasoning such as assigning quantifiers.

new The pitfalls of next-token prediction

Authors: Gregor Bachmann, Vaishnavh Nagarajan

Abstract: Can a mere next-token predictor faithfully model human intelligence? We crystallize this intuitive concern, which is fragmented in the literature. As a starting point, we argue that the two often-conflated phases of next-token prediction -- autoregressive inference and teacher-forced training -- must be treated distinctly. The popular criticism that errors can compound during autoregressive inference, crucially assumes that teacher-forcing has learned an accurate next-token predictor. This assumption sidesteps a more deep-rooted problem we expose: in certain classes of tasks, teacher-forcing can simply fail to learn an accurate next-token predictor in the first place. We describe a general mechanism of how teacher-forcing can fail, and design a minimal planning task where both the Transformer and the Mamba architecture empirically fail in that manner -- remarkably, despite the task being straightforward to learn. We provide preliminary evidence that this failure can be resolved when training to predict multiple tokens in advance. We hope this finding can ground future debates and inspire explorations beyond the next-token prediction paradigm. We make our code available under https://github.com/gregorbachmann/Next-Token-Failures

URLs: https://github.com/gregorbachmann/Next-Token-Failures

new Hybrid Human-LLM Corpus Construction and LLM Evaluation for Rare Linguistic Phenomena

Authors: Leonie Weissweiler, Abdullatif K\"oksal, Hinrich Sch\"utze

Abstract: Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs) are one of the most well-studied construction groups, providing a unique opportunity to demonstrate the usefulness of Construction Grammar (CxG). For example, the caused-motion construction (CMC, ``She sneezed the foam off her cappuccino'') demonstrates that constructions must carry meaning, otherwise the fact that ``sneeze'' in this context causes movement cannot be explained. We form the hypothesis that this remains challenging even for state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs), for which we devise a test based on substituting the verb with a prototypical motion verb. To be able to perform this test at statistically significant scale, in the absence of adequate CxG corpora, we develop a novel pipeline of NLP-assisted collection of linguistically annotated text. We show how dependency parsing and GPT-3.5 can be used to significantly reduce annotation cost and thus enable the annotation of rare phenomena at scale. We then evaluate GPT, Gemini, Llama2 and Mistral models for their understanding of the CMC using the newly collected corpus. We find that all models struggle with understanding the motion component that the CMC adds to a sentence.

new MRL Parsing Without Tears: The Case of Hebrew

Authors: Shaltiel Shmidman, Avi Shmidman, Moshe Koppel, Reut Tsarfaty

Abstract: Syntactic parsing remains a critical tool for relation extraction and information extraction, especially in resource-scarce languages where LLMs are lacking. Yet in morphologically rich languages (MRLs), where parsers need to identify multiple lexical units in each token, existing systems suffer in latency and setup complexity. Some use a pipeline to peel away the layers: first segmentation, then morphology tagging, and then syntax parsing; however, errors in earlier layers are then propagated forward. Others use a joint architecture to evaluate all permutations at once; while this improves accuracy, it is notoriously slow. In contrast, and taking Hebrew as a test case, we present a new "flipped pipeline": decisions are made directly on the whole-token units by expert classifiers, each one dedicated to one specific task. The classifiers are independent of one another, and only at the end do we synthesize their predictions. This blazingly fast approach sets a new SOTA in Hebrew POS tagging and dependency parsing, while also reaching near-SOTA performance on other Hebrew NLP tasks. Because our architecture does not rely on any language-specific resources, it can serve as a model to develop similar parsers for other MRLs.

cross Monitoring the evolution of antisemitic discourse on extremist social media using BERT

Authors: Raza Ul Mustafa, Nathalie Japkowicz

Abstract: Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred considered in this study. Tracking antisemitic themes and their associated terminology over time in online discussions could help monitor the sentiments of their participants and their evolution, and possibly offer avenues for intervention that may prevent the escalation of hatred. Due to the large volume and constant evolution of online traffic, monitoring conversations manually is impractical. Instead, we propose an automated method that extracts antisemitic themes and terminology from extremist social media over time and captures their evolution. Since supervised learning would be too limited for such a task, we created an unsupervised online machine learning approach that uses large language models to assess the contextual similarity of posts. The method clusters similar posts together, dividing, and creating additional clusters over time when sub-themes emerge from existing ones or new themes appear. The antisemitic terminology used within each theme is extracted from the posts in each cluster. Our experiments show that our methodology outperforms existing baselines and demonstrates the kind of themes and sub-themes it discovers within antisemitic discourse along with their associated terminology. We believe that our approach will be useful for monitoring the evolution of all kinds of hatred beyond antisemitism on social platforms.

cross Understanding the Progression of Educational Topics via Semantic Matching

Authors: Tamador AlkhidirCurriculum Department, Ministry of Education, United Arab Emirates, Edmond AwadDepartment of Economics and Institute for Data Science and AI, University of Exeter, United Kingdom, Aamena AlshamsiHeuristic World, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Abstract: Education systems are dynamically changing to accommodate technological advances, industrial and societal needs, and to enhance students' learning journeys. Curriculum specialists and educators constantly revise taught subjects across educational grades to identify gaps, introduce new learning topics, and enhance the learning outcomes. This process is usually done within the same subjects (e.g. math) or across related subjects (e.g. math and physics) considering the same and different educational levels, leading to massive multi-layer comparisons. Having nuanced data about subjects, topics, and learning outcomes structured within a dataset, empowers us to leverage data science to better understand the progression of various learning topics. In this paper, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) topic modeling was used to extract topics from the curriculum, which were then used to identify relationships between subjects, track their progression, and identify conceptual gaps. We found that grouping learning outcomes by common topics helped specialists reduce redundancy and introduce new concepts in the curriculum. We built a dashboard to avail the methodology to curriculum specials. Finally, we tested the validity of the approach with subject matter experts.

cross Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data

Authors: Claire S. Lee, Noelle Lim, Michael Guerzhoy

Abstract: We present a novel task that can elucidate the connection between anxiety and ADHD; use Transformers to make progress toward solving a task that is not solvable by keyword-based classifiers; and discuss a method for visualization of our classifier illuminating the connection between anxiety and ADHD presentations. Up to approximately 50% of adults with ADHD may also have an anxiety disorder and approximately 30\% of adults with anxiety may also have ADHD. Patients presenting with anxiety may be treated for anxiety without ADHD ever being considered, possibly affecting treatment. We show how data that bears on ADHD that is comorbid with anxiety can be obtained from social media data, and show that Transformers can be used to detect a proxy for possible comorbid ADHD in people with anxiety symptoms. We collected data from anxiety and ADHD online forums (subreddits). We identified posters who first started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and later started posting in the ADHD subreddit as well. We use this subset of the posters as a proxy for people who presented with anxiety symptoms and then became aware that they might have ADHD. We fine-tune a Transformer architecture-based classifier to classify people who started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and then started posting in the ADHD subreddit vs. people who posted in the Anxiety subreddit without later posting in the ADHD subreddit. We show that a Transformer architecture is capable of achieving reasonable results (76% correct for RoBERTa vs. under 60% correct for the best keyword-based model, both with 50% base rate).

cross Is ChatGPT More Empathetic than Humans?

Authors: Anuradha Welivita, Pearl Pu

Abstract: This paper investigates the empathetic responding capabilities of ChatGPT, particularly its latest iteration, GPT-4, in comparison to human-generated responses to a wide range of emotional scenarios, both positive and negative. We employ a rigorous evaluation methodology, involving a between-groups study with 600 participants, to evaluate the level of empathy in responses generated by humans and ChatGPT. ChatGPT is prompted in two distinct ways: a standard approach and one explicitly detailing empathy's cognitive, affective, and compassionate counterparts. Our findings indicate that the average empathy rating of responses generated by ChatGPT exceeds those crafted by humans by approximately 10%. Additionally, instructing ChatGPT to incorporate a clear understanding of empathy in its responses makes the responses align approximately 5 times more closely with the expectations of individuals possessing a high degree of empathy, compared to human responses. The proposed evaluation framework serves as a scalable and adaptable framework to assess the empathetic capabilities of newer and updated versions of large language models, eliminating the need to replicate the current study's results in future research.

cross HealMe: Harnessing Cognitive Reframing in Large Language Models for Psychotherapy

Authors: Mengxi Xiao, Qianqian Xie, Ziyan Kuang, Zhicheng Liu, Kailai Yang, Min Peng, Weiguang Han, Jimin Huang

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can play a vital role in psychotherapy by adeptly handling the crucial task of cognitive reframing and overcoming challenges such as shame, distrust, therapist skill variability, and resource scarcity. Previous LLMs in cognitive reframing mainly converted negative emotions to positive ones, but these approaches have limited efficacy, often not promoting clients' self-discovery of alternative perspectives. In this paper, we unveil the Helping and Empowering through Adaptive Language in Mental Enhancement (HealMe) model. This novel cognitive reframing therapy method effectively addresses deep-rooted negative thoughts and fosters rational, balanced perspectives. Diverging from traditional LLM methods, HealMe employs empathetic dialogue based on psychotherapeutic frameworks. It systematically guides clients through distinguishing circumstances from feelings, brainstorming alternative viewpoints, and developing empathetic, actionable suggestions. Moreover, we adopt the first comprehensive and expertly crafted psychological evaluation metrics, specifically designed to rigorously assess the performance of cognitive reframing, in both AI-simulated dialogues and real-world therapeutic conversations. Experimental results show that our model outperforms others in terms of empathy, guidance, and logical coherence, demonstrating its effectiveness and potential positive impact on psychotherapy.

cross Extracting Protein-Protein Interactions (PPIs) from Biomedical Literature using Attention-based Relational Context Information

Authors: Gilchan Park, Sean McCorkle, Carlos Soto, Ian Blaby, Shinjae Yoo

Abstract: Because protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are crucial to understand living systems, harvesting these data is essential to probe disease development and discern gene/protein functions and biological processes. Some curated datasets contain PPI data derived from the literature and other sources (e.g., IntAct, BioGrid, DIP, and HPRD). However, they are far from exhaustive, and their maintenance is a labor-intensive process. On the other hand, machine learning methods to automate PPI knowledge extraction from the scientific literature have been limited by a shortage of appropriate annotated data. This work presents a unified, multi-source PPI corpora with vetted interaction definitions augmented by binary interaction type labels and a Transformer-based deep learning method that exploits entities' relational context information for relation representation to improve relation classification performance. The model's performance is evaluated on four widely studied biomedical relation extraction datasets, as well as this work's target PPI datasets, to observe the effectiveness of the representation to relation extraction tasks in various data. Results show the model outperforms prior state-of-the-art models. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/BNLNLP/PPI-Relation-Extraction

URLs: https://github.com/BNLNLP/PPI-Relation-Extraction

cross A Concept-based Interpretable Model for the Diagnosis of Choroid Neoplasias using Multimodal Data

Authors: Yifan Wu, Yang Liu, Yue Yang, Michael S. Yao, Wenli Yang, Xuehui Shi, Lihong Yang, Dongjun Li, Yueming Liu, James C. Gee, Xuan Yang, Wenbin Wei, Shi Gu

Abstract: Diagnosing rare diseases presents a common challenge in clinical practice, necessitating the expertise of specialists for accurate identification. The advent of machine learning offers a promising solution, while the development of such technologies is hindered by the scarcity of data on rare conditions and the demand for models that are both interpretable and trustworthy in a clinical context. Interpretable AI, with its capacity for human-readable outputs, can facilitate validation by clinicians and contribute to medical education. In the current work, we focus on choroid neoplasias, the most prevalent form of eye cancer in adults, albeit rare with 5.1 per million. We built the so-far largest dataset consisting of 750 patients, incorporating three distinct imaging modalities collected from 2004 to 2022. Our work introduces a concept-based interpretable model that distinguishes between three types of choroidal tumors, integrating insights from domain experts via radiological reports. Remarkably, this model not only achieves an F1 score of 0.91, rivaling that of black-box models, but also boosts the diagnostic accuracy of junior doctors by 42%. This study highlights the significant potential of interpretable machine learning in improving the diagnosis of rare diseases, laying a groundwork for future breakthroughs in medical AI that could tackle a wider array of complex health scenarios.

cross Unfamiliar Finetuning Examples Control How Language Models Hallucinate

Authors: Katie Kang, Eric Wallace, Claire Tomlin, Aviral Kumar, Sergey Levine

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to generate plausible-sounding yet factually incorrect responses, especially when queried on unfamiliar concepts. In this work, we explore the underlying mechanisms that govern how finetuned LLMs hallucinate. Our investigation reveals an interesting pattern: as inputs become more unfamiliar, LLM outputs tend to default towards a ``hedged'' prediction, whose form is determined by how the unfamiliar examples in the finetuning data are supervised. Thus, by strategically modifying these examples' supervision, we can control LLM predictions for unfamiliar inputs (e.g., teach them to say ``I don't know''). Based on these principles, we develop an RL approach that more reliably mitigates hallucinations for long-form generation tasks, by tackling the challenges presented by reward model hallucinations. We validate our findings with a series of controlled experiments in multiple-choice QA on MMLU, as well as long-form biography and book/movie plot generation tasks.

cross Tuning-Free Accountable Intervention for LLM Deployment -- A Metacognitive Approach

Authors: Zhen Tan, Jie Peng, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed transformative advances across a spectrum of natural language processing tasks through few-shot or zero-shot prompting, bypassing the need for parameter tuning. While convenient, this modus operandi aggravates ``hallucination'' concerns, particularly given the enigmatic ``black-box'' nature behind their gigantic model sizes. Such concerns are exacerbated in high-stakes applications (e.g., healthcare), where unaccountable decision errors can lead to devastating consequences. In contrast, human decision-making relies on nuanced cognitive processes, such as the ability to sense and adaptively correct misjudgments through conceptual understanding. Drawing inspiration from human cognition, we propose an innovative \textit{metacognitive} approach, dubbed \textbf{CLEAR}, to equip LLMs with capabilities for self-aware error identification and correction. Our framework facilitates the construction of concept-specific sparse subnetworks that illuminate transparent decision pathways. This provides a novel interface for model \textit{intervention} after deployment. Our intervention offers compelling advantages: (\textit{i})~at deployment or inference time, our metacognitive LLMs can self-consciously identify potential mispredictions with minimum human involvement, (\textit{ii})~the model has the capability to self-correct its errors efficiently, obviating the need for additional tuning, and (\textit{iii})~the rectification procedure is not only self-explanatory but also user-friendly, enhancing the interpretability and accessibility of the model. By integrating these metacognitive features, our approach pioneers a new path toward engendering greater trustworthiness and accountability in the deployment of LLMs.

cross Decomposing Vision-based LLM Predictions for Auto-Evaluation with GPT-4

Authors: Qingqing Zhu, Benjamin Hou, Tejas S. Mathai, Pritam Mukherjee, Qiao Jin, Xiuying Chen, Zhizheng Wang, Ruida Cheng, Ronald M. Summers, Zhiyong Lu

Abstract: The volume of CT exams being done in the world has been rising every year, which has led to radiologist burn-out. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to reduce their burden, but their adoption in the clinic depends on radiologist trust, and easy evaluation of generated content. Presently, many automated methods are available to evaluate the reports generated for chest radiographs, but such an approach is not available for CT presently. In this paper, we propose a novel evaluation framework to judge the capabilities of vision-language LLMs in generating accurate summaries of CT-based abnormalities. CT slices containing an abnormality (e.g., lesion) were input to a vision-based LLM (GPT-4V, LLaVA-Med, and RadFM), and it generated a free-text summary of the predicted characteristics of the abnormality. Next, a GPT-4 model decomposed the summary into specific aspects (body part, location, type, and attributes), automatically evaluated the characteristics against the ground-truth, and generated a score for each aspect based on its clinical relevance and factual accuracy. These scores were then contrasted against those obtained from a clinician, and a high correlation ( 85%, p < .001) was observed. Although GPT-4V outperformed other models in our evaluation, it still requires overall improvement. Our evaluation method offers valuable insights into the specific areas that need the most enhancement, guiding future development in this field.

cross Extending Activation Steering to Broad Skills and Multiple Behaviours

Authors: Teun van der Weij, Massimo Poesio, Nandi Schoots

Abstract: Current large language models have dangerous capabilities, which are likely to become more problematic in the future. Activation steering techniques can be used to reduce risks from these capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of activation steering for broad skills and multiple behaviours. First, by comparing the effects of reducing performance on general coding ability and Python-specific ability, we find that steering broader skills is competitive to steering narrower skills. Second, we steer models to become more or less myopic and wealth-seeking, among other behaviours. In our experiments, combining steering vectors for multiple different behaviours into one steering vector is largely unsuccessful. On the other hand, injecting individual steering vectors at different places in a model simultaneously is promising.

cross An Audio-textual Diffusion Model For Converting Speech Signals Into Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Data

Authors: Yudong Yang, Rongfeng Su, Xiaokang Liu, Nan Yan, Lan Wang

Abstract: Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) is to convert audio into articulator movements, such as ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI) data. An issue of existing AAI methods is only using the personalized acoustic information to derive the general patterns of tongue motions, and thus the quality of generated UTI data is limited. To address this issue, this paper proposes an audio-textual diffusion model for the UTI data generation task. In this model, the inherent acoustic characteristics of individuals related to the tongue motion details are encoded by using wav2vec 2.0, while the ASR transcriptions related to the universality of tongue motions are encoded by using BERT. UTI data are then generated by using a diffusion module. Experimental results showed that the proposed diffusion model could generate high-quality UTI data with clear tongue contour that is crucial for the linguistic analysis and clinical assessment. The project can be found on the website\footnote{https://yangyudong2020.github.io/wav2uti/

URLs: https://yangyudong2020.github.io/wav2uti/

cross Diffusion Lens: Interpreting Text Encoders in Text-to-Image Pipelines

Authors: Michael Toker, Hadas Orgad, Mor Ventura, Dana Arad, Yonatan Belinkov

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) use a latent representation of a text prompt to guide the image generation process. However, the process by which the encoder produces the text representation is unknown. We propose the Diffusion Lens, a method for analyzing the text encoder of T2I models by generating images from its intermediate representations. Using the Diffusion Lens, we perform an extensive analysis of two recent T2I models. Exploring compound prompts, we find that complex scenes describing multiple objects are composed progressively and more slowly compared to simple scenes; Exploring knowledge retrieval, we find that representation of uncommon concepts requires further computation compared to common concepts, and that knowledge retrieval is gradual across layers. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights into the text encoder component in T2I pipelines.

cross End-to-end solution for linked open data query logs analytics

Authors: Dihia Lanasri

Abstract: Important advances in pillar domains are derived from exploiting query-logs which represents users interest and preferences. Deep understanding of users provides useful knowledge which can influence strongly decision-making. In this work, we want to extract valuable information from Linked Open Data (LOD) query-logs. LOD logs have experienced significant growth due to the large exploitation of LOD datasets. However, exploiting these logs is a difficult task because of their complex structure. Moreover, these logs suffer from many risks related to their Quality and Provenance, impacting their trust. To tackle these issues, we start by clearly defining the ecosystem of LOD query-logs. Then, we provide an end-to-end solution to exploit these logs. At the end, real LOD logs are used and a set of experiments are conducted to validate the proposed solution.

cross L$^2$GC: Lorentzian Linear Graph Convolutional Networks For Node Classification

Authors: Qiuyu Liang, Weihua Wang, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao

Abstract: Linear Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to classify the node in the graph data. However, we note that most existing linear GCN models perform neural network operations in Euclidean space, which do not explicitly capture the tree-like hierarchical structure exhibited in real-world datasets that modeled as graphs. In this paper, we attempt to introduce hyperbolic space into linear GCN and propose a novel framework for Lorentzian linear GCN. Specifically, we map the learned features of graph nodes into hyperbolic space, and then perform a Lorentzian linear feature transformation to capture the underlying tree-like structure of data. Experimental results on standard citation networks datasets with semi-supervised learning show that our approach yields new state-of-the-art results of accuracy 74.7$\%$ on Citeseer and 81.3$\%$ on PubMed datasets. Furthermore, we observe that our approach can be trained up to two orders of magnitude faster than other nonlinear GCN models on PubMed dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/llqy123/LLGC-master.

URLs: https://github.com/llqy123/LLGC-master.

cross FrameQuant: Flexible Low-Bit Quantization for Transformers

Authors: Harshavardhan Adepu, Zhanpeng Zeng, Li Zhang, Vikas Singh

Abstract: Transformers are the backbone of powerful foundation models for many Vision and Natural Language Processing tasks. But their compute and memory/storage footprint is large, and so, serving such models is expensive often requiring high-end hardware. To mitigate this difficulty, Post-Training Quantization seeks to modify a pre-trained model and quantize it to eight bits or lower, significantly boosting compute/memory/latency efficiency. Such models have been successfully quantized to four bits with some performance loss. In this work, we outline a simple scheme to quantize Transformer-based models to just two bits (plus some overhead) with only a small drop in accuracy. Key to our formulation is a concept borrowed from Harmonic analysis called Fusion Frames. Our main finding is that the quantization must take place not in the original weight space, but instead in the Fusion Frame representations. If quantization is interpreted as the addition of noise, our casting of the problem allows invoking an extensive body of known consistent recovery and noise robustness guarantees. Further, if desired, de-noising filters are known in closed form. We show empirically, via a variety of experiments, that (almost) two-bit quantization for Transformer models promises sizable efficiency gains.

cross VidProM: A Million-scale Real Prompt-Gallery Dataset for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Authors: Wenhao Wang, Yi Yang

Abstract: The arrival of Sora marks a new era for text-to-video diffusion models, bringing significant advancements in video generation and potential applications. However, Sora, as well as other text-to-video diffusion models, highly relies on the prompts, and there is no publicly available dataset featuring a study of text-to-video prompts. In this paper, we introduce VidProM, the first large-scale dataset comprising 1.67 million unique text-to-video prompts from real users. Additionally, the dataset includes 6.69 million videos generated by four state-of-the-art diffusion models and some related data. We initially demonstrate the curation of this large-scale dataset, which is a time-consuming and costly process. Subsequently, we show how the proposed VidProM differs from DiffusionDB, a large-scale prompt-gallery dataset for image generation. Based on the analysis of these prompts, we identify the necessity for a new prompt dataset specifically designed for text-to-video generation and gain insights into the preferences of real users when creating videos. Our large-scale and diverse dataset also inspires many exciting new research areas. For instance, to develop better, more efficient, and safer text-to-video diffusion models, we suggest exploring text-to-video prompt engineering, efficient video generation, and video copy detection for diffusion models. We make the collected dataset VidProM publicly available at GitHub and Hugging Face under the CC-BY- NC 4.0 License.

cross Automatic design optimization of preference-based subjective evaluation with online learning in crowdsourcing environment

Authors: Yusuke Yasuda, Tomoki Toda

Abstract: A preference-based subjective evaluation is a key method for evaluating generative media reliably. However, its huge combinations of pairs prohibit it from being applied to large-scale evaluation using crowdsourcing. To address this issue, we propose an automatic optimization method for preference-based subjective evaluation in terms of pair combination selections and allocation of evaluation volumes with online learning in a crowdsourcing environment. We use a preference-based online learning method based on a sorting algorithm to identify the total order of evaluation targets with minimum sample volumes. Our online learning algorithm supports parallel and asynchronous execution under fixed-budget conditions required for crowdsourcing. Our experiment on preference-based subjective evaluation of synthetic speech shows that our method successfully optimizes the test by reducing pair combinations from 351 to 83 and allocating optimal evaluation volumes for each pair ranging from 30 to 663 without compromising evaluation accuracies and wasting budget allocations.

cross A Comprehensive Overhaul of Multimodal Assistant with Small Language Models

Authors: Minjie Zhu, Yichen Zhu, Xin Liu, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Zhicai Ou, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased impressive skills in tasks related to visual understanding and reasoning. Yet, their widespread application faces obstacles due to the high computational demands during both the training and inference phases, restricting their use to a limited audience within the research and user communities. In this paper, we investigate the design aspects of Multimodal Small Language Models (MSLMs) and propose an efficient multimodal assistant named Mipha, which is designed to create synergy among various aspects: visual representation, language models, and optimization strategies. We show that without increasing the volume of training data, our Mipha-3B outperforms the state-of-the-art large MLLMs, especially LLaVA-1.5-13B, on multiple benchmarks. Through detailed discussion, we provide insights and guidelines for developing strong MSLMs that rival the capabilities of MLLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhuyiche/Mipha.

URLs: https://github.com/zhuyiche/Mipha.

cross TRAD: Enhancing LLM Agents with Step-Wise Thought Retrieval and Aligned Decision

Authors: Ruiwen Zhou, Yingxuan Yang, Muning Wen, Ying Wen, Wenhao Wang, Chunling Xi, Guoqiang Xu, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang

Abstract: Numerous large language model (LLM) agents have been built for different tasks like web navigation and online shopping due to LLM's wide knowledge and text-understanding ability. Among these works, many of them utilize in-context examples to achieve generalization without the need for fine-tuning, while few of them have considered the problem of how to select and effectively utilize these examples. Recently, methods based on trajectory-level retrieval with task meta-data and using trajectories as in-context examples have been proposed to improve the agent's overall performance in some sequential decision making tasks. However, these methods can be problematic due to plausible examples retrieved without task-specific state transition dynamics and long input with plenty of irrelevant context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (TRAD) to address these issues. TRAD first conducts Thought Retrieval, achieving step-level demonstration selection via thought matching, leading to more helpful demonstrations and less irrelevant input noise. Then, TRAD introduces Aligned Decision, complementing retrieved demonstration steps with their previous or subsequent steps, which enables tolerance for imperfect thought and provides a choice for balance between more context and less noise. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld and Mind2Web benchmarks show that TRAD not only outperforms state-of-the-art models but also effectively helps in reducing noise and promoting generalization. Furthermore, TRAD has been deployed in real-world scenarios of a global business insurance company and improves the success rate of robotic process automation.

cross No Language is an Island: Unifying Chinese and English in Financial Large Language Models, Instruction Data, and Benchmarks

Authors: Gang Hu, Ke Qin, Chenhan Yuan, Min Peng, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Benyou Wang, Sophia Ananiadou, Wanlong Yu, Jimin Huang, Qianqian Xie

Abstract: While the progression of Large Language Models (LLMs) has notably propelled financial analysis, their application has largely been confined to singular language realms, leaving untapped the potential of bilingual Chinese-English capacity. To bridge this chasm, we introduce ICE-PIXIU, seamlessly amalgamating the ICE-INTENT model and ICE-FLARE benchmark for bilingual financial analysis. ICE-PIXIU uniquely integrates a spectrum of Chinese tasks, alongside translated and original English datasets, enriching the breadth and depth of bilingual financial modeling. It provides unrestricted access to diverse model variants, a substantial compilation of diverse cross-lingual and multi-modal instruction data, and an evaluation benchmark with expert annotations, comprising 10 NLP tasks, 20 bilingual specific tasks, totaling 1,185k datasets. Our thorough evaluation emphasizes the advantages of incorporating these bilingual datasets, especially in translation tasks and utilizing original English data, enhancing both linguistic flexibility and analytical acuity in financial contexts. Notably, ICE-INTENT distinguishes itself by showcasing significant enhancements over conventional LLMs and existing financial LLMs in bilingual milieus, underscoring the profound impact of robust bilingual data on the accuracy and efficacy of financial NLP.

cross Transformer based Multitask Learning for Image Captioning and Object Detection

Authors: Debolena Basak, P. K. Srijith, Maunendra Sankar Desarkar

Abstract: In several real-world scenarios like autonomous navigation and mobility, to obtain a better visual understanding of the surroundings, image captioning and object detection play a crucial role. This work introduces a novel multitask learning framework that combines image captioning and object detection into a joint model. We propose TICOD, Transformer-based Image Captioning and Object detection model for jointly training both tasks by combining the losses obtained from image captioning and object detection networks. By leveraging joint training, the model benefits from the complementary information shared between the two tasks, leading to improved performance for image captioning. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based architecture that enables end-to-end network integration for image captioning and object detection and performs both tasks jointly. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset. Our model outperforms the baselines from image captioning literature by achieving a 3.65% improvement in BERTScore.

cross Knowledge-aware Alert Aggregation in Large-scale Cloud Systems: a Hybrid Approach

Authors: Jinxi Kuang, Jinyang Liu, Junjie Huang, Renyi Zhong, Jiazhen Gu, Lan Yu, Rui Tan, Zengyin Yang, Michael R. Lyu

Abstract: Due to the scale and complexity of cloud systems, a system failure would trigger an "alert storm", i.e., massive correlated alerts. Although these alerts can be traced back to a few root causes, the overwhelming number makes it infeasible for manual handling. Alert aggregation is thus critical to help engineers concentrate on the root cause and facilitate failure resolution. Existing methods typically utilize semantic similarity-based methods or statistical methods to aggregate alerts. However, semantic similarity-based methods overlook the causal rationale of alerts, while statistical methods can hardly handle infrequent alerts. To tackle these limitations, we introduce leveraging external knowledge, i.e., Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) of alerts as a supplement. We propose COLA, a novel hybrid approach based on correlation mining and LLM (Large Language Model) reasoning for online alert aggregation. The correlation mining module effectively captures the temporal and spatial relations between alerts, measuring their correlations in an efficient manner. Subsequently, only uncertain pairs with low confidence are forwarded to the LLM reasoning module for detailed analysis. This hybrid design harnesses both statistical evidence for frequent alerts and the reasoning capabilities of computationally intensive LLMs, ensuring the overall efficiency of COLA in handling large volumes of alerts in practical scenarios. We evaluate COLA on three datasets collected from the production environment of a large-scale cloud platform. The experimental results show COLA achieves F1-scores from 0.901 to 0.930, outperforming state-of-the-art methods and achieving comparable efficiency. We also share our experience in deploying COLA in our real-world cloud system, Cloud X.

cross Automatic Generation of Python Programs Using Context-Free Grammars

Authors: Kamel Yamani, Marwa Na\"ir, Riyadh Baghdadi

Abstract: In recent years, data has emerged as the new gold, serving as a powerful tool for creating intelligent systems. However, procuring high-quality data remains challenging, especially for code. To address this, we developed TinyPy Generator, a tool that generates random Python programs using a context-free grammar. The generated programs are guaranteed to be correct by construction. Our system uses custom production rules (in the Backus-Naur Form (BNF) format) to recursively generate code. This allows us to generate code with different levels of complexity, ranging from code containing only assignments to more complex code containing conditionals and loops. Our proposed tool enables effortless large-scale Python code generation, beneficial for a wide range of applications. TinyPy Generator is particularly useful in the field of machine learning, where it can generate substantial amounts of Python code for training Python language models. Additionally, researchers who are studying programming languages can utilize this tool to create datasets for their experiments, which can help validate the robustness of code interpreters or compilers. Unlike existing research, we have open-sourced our implementation. This allows customization according to user needs and extends potential usage to other languages.

cross Unraveling the Mystery of Scaling Laws: Part I

Authors: Hui Su, Zhi Tian, Xiaoyu Shen, Xunliang Cai

Abstract: Scaling law principles indicate a power-law correlation between loss and variables such as model size, dataset size, and computational resources utilized during training. These principles play a vital role in optimizing various aspects of model pre-training, ultimately contributing to the success of large language models such as GPT-4, Llama and Gemini. However, the original scaling law paper by OpenAI did not disclose the complete details necessary to derive the precise scaling law formulas, and their conclusions are only based on models containing up to 1.5 billion parameters. Though some subsequent works attempt to unveil these details and scale to larger models, they often neglect the training dependency of important factors such as the learning rate, context length and batch size, leading to their failure to establish a reliable formula for predicting the test loss trajectory. In this technical report, we confirm that the scaling law formulations proposed in the original OpenAI paper remain valid when scaling the model size up to 33 billion, but the constant coefficients in these formulas vary significantly with the experiment setup. We meticulously identify influential factors and provide transparent, step-by-step instructions to estimate all constant terms in scaling-law formulas by training on models with only 1M~60M parameters. Using these estimated formulas, we showcase the capability to accurately predict various attributes for models with up to 33B parameters before their training, including (1) the minimum possible test loss; (2) the minimum required training steps and processed tokens to achieve a specific loss; (3) the critical batch size with an optimal time/computation trade-off at any loss value; and (4) the complete test loss trajectory with arbitrary batch size.

cross ContextGPT: Infusing LLMs Knowledge into Neuro-Symbolic Activity Recognition Models

Authors: Luca Arrotta, Claudio Bettini, Gabriele Civitarese, Michele Fiori

Abstract: Context-aware Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a hot research area in mobile computing, and the most effective solutions in the literature are based on supervised deep learning models. However, the actual deployment of these systems is limited by the scarcity of labeled data that is required for training. Neuro-Symbolic AI (NeSy) provides an interesting research direction to mitigate this issue, by infusing common-sense knowledge about human activities and the contexts in which they can be performed into HAR deep learning classifiers. Existing NeSy methods for context-aware HAR rely on knowledge encoded in logic-based models (e.g., ontologies) whose design, implementation, and maintenance to capture new activities and contexts require significant human engineering efforts, technical knowledge, and domain expertise. Recent works show that pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively encode common-sense knowledge about human activities. In this work, we propose ContextGPT: a novel prompt engineering approach to retrieve from LLMs common-sense knowledge about the relationship between human activities and the context in which they are performed. Unlike ontologies, ContextGPT requires limited human effort and expertise. An extensive evaluation carried out on two public datasets shows how a NeSy model obtained by infusing common-sense knowledge from ContextGPT is effective in data scarcity scenarios, leading to similar (and sometimes better) recognition rates than logic-based approaches with a fraction of the effort.

cross KELLMRec: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Recommendation

Authors: Weiqing Luo, Chonggang Song, Lingling Yi, Gong Cheng

Abstract: The utilization of semantic information is an important research problem in the field of recommender systems, which aims to complement the missing parts of mainstream ID-based approaches. With the rise of LLM, its ability to act as a knowledge base and its reasoning capability have opened up new possibilities for this research area, making LLM-based recommendation an emerging research direction. However, directly using LLM to process semantic information for recommendation scenarios is unreliable and sub-optimal due to several problems such as hallucination. A promising way to cope with this is to use external knowledge to aid LLM in generating truthful and usable text. Inspired by the above motivation, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced LLMRec method. In addition to using external knowledge in prompts, the proposed method also includes a knowledge-based contrastive learning scheme for training. Experiments on public datasets and in-enterprise datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cross Elephants Never Forget: Testing Language Models for Memorization of Tabular Data

Authors: Sebastian Bordt, Harsha Nori, Rich Caruana

Abstract: While many have shown how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to a diverse set of tasks, the critical issues of data contamination and memorization are often glossed over. In this work, we address this concern for tabular data. Starting with simple qualitative tests for whether an LLM knows the names and values of features, we introduce a variety of different techniques to assess the degrees of contamination, including statistical tests for conditional distribution modeling and four tests that identify memorization. Our investigation reveals that LLMs are pre-trained on many popular tabular datasets. This exposure can lead to invalid performance evaluation on downstream tasks because the LLMs have, in effect, been fit to the test set. Interestingly, we also identify a regime where the language model reproduces important statistics of the data, but fails to reproduce the dataset verbatim. On these datasets, although seen during training, good performance on downstream tasks might not be due to overfitting. Our findings underscore the need for ensuring data integrity in machine learning tasks with LLMs. To facilitate future research, we release an open-source tool that can perform various tests for memorization \url{https://github.com/interpretml/LLM-Tabular-Memorization-Checker}.

URLs: https://github.com/interpretml/LLM-Tabular-Memorization-Checker

cross Improving Low-Resource Knowledge Tracing Tasks by Supervised Pre-training and Importance Mechanism Fine-tuning

Authors: Hengyuan Zhang, Zitao Liu, Shuyan Huang, Chenming Shang, Bojun Zhan, Yong Jiang

Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate student's knowledge mastery based on their historical interactions. Recently, the deep learning based KT (DLKT) approaches have achieved impressive performance in the KT task. These DLKT models heavily rely on the large number of available student interactions. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, observed interactions are very limited in many real-world scenarios, a.k.a, low-resource KT datasets. Directly training a DLKT model on a low-resource KT dataset may lead to overfitting and it is difficult to choose the appropriate deep neural architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a low-resource KT framework called LoReKT to address above challenges. Inspired by the prevalent "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, we aim to learn transferable parameters and representations from rich-resource KT datasets during the pre-training stage and subsequently facilitate effective adaptation to low-resource KT datasets. Specifically, we simplify existing sophisticated DLKT model architectures with purely a stack of transformer decoders. We design an encoding mechanism to incorporate student interactions from multiple KT data sources and develop an importance mechanism to prioritize updating parameters with high importance while constraining less important ones during the fine-tuning stage. We evaluate LoReKT on six public KT datasets and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of AUC and Accuracy. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LoReKT-C619.

URLs: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LoReKT-C619.

cross Real-Time Multimodal Cognitive Assistant for Emergency Medical Services

Authors: Keshara Weerasinghe, Saahith Janapati, Xueren Ge, Sion Kim, Sneha Iyer, John A. Stankovic, Homa Alemzadeh

Abstract: Emergency Medical Services (EMS) responders often operate under time-sensitive conditions, facing cognitive overload and inherent risks, requiring essential skills in critical thinking and rapid decision-making. This paper presents CognitiveEMS, an end-to-end wearable cognitive assistant system that can act as a collaborative virtual partner engaging in the real-time acquisition and analysis of multimodal data from an emergency scene and interacting with EMS responders through Augmented Reality (AR) smart glasses. CognitiveEMS processes the continuous streams of data in real-time and leverages edge computing to provide assistance in EMS protocol selection and intervention recognition. We address key technical challenges in real-time cognitive assistance by introducing three novel components: (i) a Speech Recognition model that is fine-tuned for real-world medical emergency conversations using simulated EMS audio recordings, augmented with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs); (ii) an EMS Protocol Prediction model that combines state-of-the-art (SOTA) tiny language models with EMS domain knowledge using graph-based attention mechanisms; (iii) an EMS Action Recognition module which leverages multimodal audio and video data and protocol predictions to infer the intervention/treatment actions taken by the responders at the incident scene. Our results show that for speech recognition we achieve superior performance compared to SOTA (WER of 0.290 vs. 0.618) on conversational data. Our protocol prediction component also significantly outperforms SOTA (top-3 accuracy of 0.800 vs. 0.200) and the action recognition achieves an accuracy of 0.727, while maintaining an end-to-end latency of 3.78s for protocol prediction on the edge and 0.31s on the server.

cross An Image is Worth 1/2 Tokens After Layer 2: Plug-and-Play Inference Acceleration for Large Vision-Language Models

Authors: Liang Chen, Haozhe Zhao, Tianyu Liu, Shuai Bai, Junyang Lin, Chang Zhou, Baobao Chang

Abstract: In this study, we identify the inefficient attention phenomena in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), notably within prominent models like LLaVA-1.5, QwenVL-Chat and Video-LLaVA. We find out that the attention computation over visual tokens is of extreme inefficiency in the deep layers of popular LVLMs, suggesting a need for a sparser approach compared to textual data handling. To this end, we introduce FastV, a versatile plug-and-play method designed to optimize computational efficiency by learning adaptive attention patterns in early layers and pruning visual tokens in subsequent ones. Our evaluations demonstrate FastV's ability to dramatically reduce computational costs (e.g., a 45 reduction in FLOPs for LLaVA-1.5-13B) without sacrificing performance in a wide range of image and video understanding tasks. The computational efficiency and performance trade-off of FastV are highly customizable and pareto-efficient. It can compress the FLOPs of a 13B-parameter model to achieve a lower budget than that of a 7B-parameter model, while still maintaining superior performance. We believe FastV has practical values for deployment of LVLMs in edge devices and commercial models. Code is released at https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/FastV.

URLs: https://github.com/pkunlp-icler/FastV.

cross SPLADE-v3: New baselines for SPLADE

Authors: Carlos Lassance, Herv\'e D\'ejean, Thibault Formal, St\'ephane Clinchant

Abstract: A companion to the release of the latest version of the SPLADE library. We describe changes to the training structure and present our latest series of models -- SPLADE-v3. We compare this new version to BM25, SPLADE++, as well as re-rankers, and showcase its effectiveness via a meta-analysis over more than 40 query sets. SPLADE-v3 further pushes the limit of SPLADE models: it is statistically significantly more effective than both BM25 and SPLADE++, while comparing well to cross-encoder re-rankers. Specifically, it gets more than 40 MRR@10 on the MS MARCO dev set, and improves by 2% the out-of-domain results on the BEIR benchmark.

cross Can LLMs Separate Instructions From Data? And What Do We Even Mean By That?

Authors: Egor Zverev, Sahar Abdelnabi, Mario Fritz, Christoph H. Lampert

Abstract: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved breakthrough results, opening countless new possibilities for many practical applications. However, LLMs lack elementary safety features that are established norms in other areas of computer science, such as the separation between instructions and data, causing them to malfunction or rendering them vulnerable to manipulation and interference by third parties e.g., via indirect prompt/command injection. Even worse, so far, there is not even an established definition of what precisely such a separation would mean and how its violation could be tested. In this work, we aim to close this gap. We introduce a formal measure to quantify the phenomenon of instruction-data separation as well as an empirical variant of the measure that can be computed from a model`s black-box outputs. We also introduce a new dataset, SEP (Should it be Executed or Processed?), which allows estimating the measure, and we report results on several state-of-the-art open-source and closed LLMs. Finally, we quantitatively demonstrate that all evaluated LLMs fail to achieve a high amount of separation, according to our measure. The source code and SEP dataset are openly accessible at https://github.com/egozverev/Shold-It-Be-Executed-Or-Processed.

URLs: https://github.com/egozverev/Shold-It-Be-Executed-Or-Processed.

cross Medical Image Synthesis via Fine-Grained Image-Text Alignment and Anatomy-Pathology Prompting

Authors: Wenting Chen, Pengyu Wang, Hui Ren, Lichao Sun, Quanzheng Li, Yixuan Yuan, Xiang Li

Abstract: Data scarcity and privacy concerns limit the availability of high-quality medical images for public use, which can be mitigated through medical image synthesis. However, current medical image synthesis methods often struggle to accurately capture the complexity of detailed anatomical structures and pathological conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel medical image synthesis model that leverages fine-grained image-text alignment and anatomy-pathology prompts to generate highly detailed and accurate synthetic medical images. Our method integrates advanced natural language processing techniques with image generative modeling, enabling precise alignment between descriptive text prompts and the synthesized images' anatomical and pathological details. The proposed approach consists of two key components: an anatomy-pathology prompting module and a fine-grained alignment-based synthesis module. The anatomy-pathology prompting module automatically generates descriptive prompts for high-quality medical images. To further synthesize high-quality medical images from the generated prompts, the fine-grained alignment-based synthesis module pre-defines a visual codebook for the radiology dataset and performs fine-grained alignment between the codebook and generated prompts to obtain key patches as visual clues, facilitating accurate image synthesis. We validate the superiority of our method through experiments on public chest X-ray datasets and demonstrate that our synthetic images preserve accurate semantic information, making them valuable for various medical applications.

cross Learning with Noisy Foundation Models

Authors: Hao Chen, Jindong Wang, Zihan Wang, Ran Tao, Hongxin Wei, Xing Xie, Masashi Sugiyama, Bhiksha Raj

Abstract: Foundation models are usually pre-trained on large-scale datasets and then adapted to downstream tasks through tuning. However, the large-scale pre-training datasets, often inaccessible or too expensive to handle, can contain label noise that may adversely affect the generalization of the model and pose unexpected risks. This paper stands out as the first work to comprehensively understand and analyze the nature of noise in pre-training datasets and then effectively mitigate its impacts on downstream tasks. Specifically, through extensive experiments of fully-supervised and image-text contrastive pre-training on synthetic noisy ImageNet-1K, YFCC15M, and CC12M datasets, we demonstrate that, while slight noise in pre-training can benefit in-domain (ID) performance, where the training and testing data share a similar distribution, it always deteriorates out-of-domain (OOD) performance, where training and testing distributions are significantly different. These observations are agnostic to scales of pre-training datasets, pre-training noise types, model architectures, pre-training objectives, downstream tuning methods, and downstream applications. We empirically ascertain that the reason behind this is that the pre-training noise shapes the feature space differently. We then propose a tuning method (NMTune) to affine the feature space to mitigate the malignant effect of noise and improve generalization, which is applicable in both parameter-efficient and black-box tuning manners. We additionally conduct extensive experiments on popular vision and language models, including APIs, which are supervised and self-supervised pre-trained on realistic noisy data for evaluation. Our analysis and results demonstrate the importance of this novel and fundamental research direction, which we term as Noisy Model Learning.

cross Real-time Transformer-based Open-Vocabulary Detection with Efficient Fusion Head

Authors: Tiancheng Zhao, Peng Liu, Xuan He, Lu Zhang, Kyusong Lee

Abstract: End-to-end transformer-based detectors (DETRs) have shown exceptional performance in both closed-set and open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) tasks through the integration of language modalities. However, their demanding computational requirements have hindered their practical application in real-time object detection (OD) scenarios. In this paper, we scrutinize the limitations of two leading models in the OVDEval benchmark, OmDet and Grounding-DINO, and introduce OmDet-Turbo. This novel transformer-based real-time OVD model features an innovative Efficient Fusion Head (EFH) module designed to alleviate the bottlenecks observed in OmDet and Grounding-DINO. Notably, OmDet-Turbo-Base achieves a 100.2 frames per second (FPS) with TensorRT and language cache techniques applied. Notably, in zero-shot scenarios on COCO and LVIS datasets, OmDet-Turbo achieves performance levels nearly on par with current state-of-the-art supervised models. Furthermore, it establishes new state-of-the-art benchmarks on ODinW and OVDEval, boasting an AP of 30.1 and an NMS-AP of 26.86, respectively. The practicality of OmDet-Turbo in industrial applications is underscored by its exceptional performance on benchmark datasets and superior inference speed, positioning it as a compelling choice for real-time object detection tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet}

URLs: https://github.com/om-ai-lab/OmDet

cross Simplicity Bias of Transformers to Learn Low Sensitivity Functions

Authors: Bhavya Vasudeva, Deqing Fu, Tianyi Zhou, Elliott Kau, Youqi Huang, Vatsal Sharan

Abstract: Transformers achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and robustness across many tasks, but an understanding of the inductive biases that they have and how those biases are different from other neural network architectures remains elusive. Various neural network architectures such as fully connected networks have been found to have a simplicity bias towards simple functions of the data; one version of this simplicity bias is a spectral bias to learn simple functions in the Fourier space. In this work, we identify the notion of sensitivity of the model to random changes in the input as a notion of simplicity bias which provides a unified metric to explain the simplicity and spectral bias of transformers across different data modalities. We show that transformers have lower sensitivity than alternative architectures, such as LSTMs, MLPs and CNNs, across both vision and language tasks. We also show that low-sensitivity bias correlates with improved robustness; furthermore, it can also be used as an efficient intervention to further improve the robustness of transformers.

cross Counterfactual Reasoning with Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Authors: Lena Zellinger, Andreas Stephan, Benjamin Roth

Abstract: Knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) were originally developed to infer true but missing facts in incomplete knowledge repositories. In this paper, we link knowledge graph completion and counterfactual reasoning via our new task CFKGR. We model the original world state as a knowledge graph, hypothetical scenarios as edges added to the graph, and plausible changes to the graph as inferences from logical rules. We create corresponding benchmark datasets, which contain diverse hypothetical scenarios with plausible changes to the original knowledge graph and facts that should be retained. We develop COULDD, a general method for adapting existing knowledge graph embeddings given a hypothetical premise, and evaluate it on our benchmark. Our results indicate that KGEs learn patterns in the graph without explicit training. We further observe that KGEs adapted with COULDD solidly detect plausible counterfactual changes to the graph that follow these patterns. An evaluation on human-annotated data reveals that KGEs adapted with COULDD are mostly unable to recognize changes to the graph that do not follow learned inference rules. In contrast, ChatGPT mostly outperforms KGEs in detecting plausible changes to the graph but has poor knowledge retention. In summary, CFKGR connects two previously distinct areas, namely KG completion and counterfactual reasoning.

cross Materials science in the era of large language models: a perspective

Authors: Ge Lei, Ronan Docherty, Samuel J. Cooper

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable interest due to their impressive natural language capabilities, which in conjunction with various emergent properties make them versatile tools in workflows ranging from complex code generation to heuristic finding for combinatorial problems. In this paper we offer a perspective on their applicability to materials science research, arguing their ability to handle ambiguous requirements across a range of tasks and disciplines mean they could be a powerful tool to aid researchers. We qualitatively examine basic LLM theory, connecting it to relevant properties and techniques in the literature before providing two case studies that demonstrate their use in task automation and knowledge extraction at-scale. At their current stage of development, we argue LLMs should be viewed less as oracles of novel insight, and more as tireless workers that can accelerate and unify exploration across domains. It is our hope that this paper can familiarise material science researchers with the concepts needed to leverage these tools in their own research.

cross SELMA: Learning and Merging Skill-Specific Text-to-Image Experts with Auto-Generated Data

Authors: Jialu Li, Jaemin Cho, Yi-Lin Sung, Jaehong Yoon, Mohit Bansal

Abstract: Recent text-to-image (T2I) generation models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in creating images from text descriptions. However, these T2I generation models often fall short of generating images that precisely match the details of the text inputs, such as incorrect spatial relationship or missing objects. In this paper, we introduce SELMA: Skill-Specific Expert Learning and Merging with Auto-Generated Data, a novel paradigm to improve the faithfulness of T2I models by fine-tuning models on automatically generated, multi-skill image-text datasets, with skill-specific expert learning and merging. First, SELMA leverages an LLM's in-context learning capability to generate multiple datasets of text prompts that can teach different skills, and then generates the images with a T2I model based on the prompts. Next, SELMA adapts the T2I model to the new skills by learning multiple single-skill LoRA (low-rank adaptation) experts followed by expert merging. Our independent expert fine-tuning specializes multiple models for different skills, and expert merging helps build a joint multi-skill T2I model that can generate faithful images given diverse text prompts, while mitigating the knowledge conflict from different datasets. We empirically demonstrate that SELMA significantly improves the semantic alignment and text faithfulness of state-of-the-art T2I diffusion models on multiple benchmarks (+2.1% on TIFA and +6.9% on DSG), human preference metrics (PickScore, ImageReward, and HPS), as well as human evaluation. Moreover, fine-tuning with image-text pairs auto-collected via SELMA shows comparable performance to fine-tuning with ground truth data. Lastly, we show that fine-tuning with images from a weaker T2I model can help improve the generation quality of a stronger T2I model, suggesting promising weak-to-strong generalization in T2I models.

replace A Discriminative Latent-Variable Model for Bilingual Lexicon Induction

Authors: Sebastian Ruder, Ryan Cotterell, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Anders S{\o}gaard

Abstract: We introduce a novel discriminative latent variable model for bilingual lexicon induction. Our model combines the bipartite matching dictionary prior of Haghighi et al. (2008) with a representation-based approach (Artetxe et al., 2017). To train the model, we derive an efficient Viterbi EM algorithm. We provide empirical results on six language pairs under two metrics and show that the prior improves the induced bilingual lexicons. We also demonstrate how previous work may be viewed as a similarly fashioned latent-variable model, albeit with a different prior.

replace Cross-Model Comparative Loss for Enhancing Neuronal Utility in Language Understanding

Authors: Yunchang Zhu, Liang Pang, Kangxi Wu, Yanyan Lan, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng

Abstract: Current natural language understanding (NLU) models have been continuously scaling up, both in terms of model size and input context, introducing more hidden and input neurons. While this generally improves performance on average, the extra neurons do not yield a consistent improvement for all instances. This is because some hidden neurons are redundant, and the noise mixed in input neurons tends to distract the model. Previous work mainly focuses on extrinsically reducing low-utility neurons by additional post- or pre-processing, such as network pruning and context selection, to avoid this problem. Beyond that, can we make the model reduce redundant parameters and suppress input noise by intrinsically enhancing the utility of each neuron? If a model can efficiently utilize neurons, no matter which neurons are ablated (disabled), the ablated submodel should perform no better than the original full model. Based on such a comparison principle between models, we propose a cross-model comparative loss for a broad range of tasks. Comparative loss is essentially a ranking loss on top of the task-specific losses of the full and ablated models, with the expectation that the task-specific loss of the full model is minimal. We demonstrate the universal effectiveness of comparative loss through extensive experiments on 14 datasets from 3 distinct NLU tasks based on 5 widely used pretrained language models and find it particularly superior for models with few parameters or long input.

replace Mastering Symbolic Operations: Augmenting Language Models with Compiled Neural Networks

Authors: Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia, Bin Li, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao

Abstract: Language models' (LMs) proficiency in handling deterministic symbolic reasoning and rule-based tasks remains limited due to their dependency implicit learning on textual data. To endow LMs with genuine rule comprehension abilities, we propose "Neural Comprehension" - a framework that synergistically integrates compiled neural networks (CoNNs) into the standard transformer architecture. CoNNs are neural modules designed to explicitly encode rules through artificially generated attention weights. By incorporating CoNN modules, the Neural Comprehension framework enables LMs to accurately and robustly execute rule-intensive symbolic tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing techniques in terms of length generalization, efficiency, and interpretability for symbolic operations. Furthermore, it can be applied to LMs across different model scales, outperforming tool-calling methods in arithmetic reasoning tasks while maintaining superior inference efficiency. Our work highlights the potential of seamlessly unifying explicit rule learning via CoNNs and implicit pattern learning in LMs, paving the way for true symbolic comprehension capabilities.

replace M4: Multi-generator, Multi-domain, and Multi-lingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection

Authors: Yuxia Wang, Jonibek Mansurov, Petar Ivanov, Jinyan Su, Artem Shelmanov, Akim Tsvigun, Chenxi Whitehouse, Osama Mohammed Afzal, Tarek Mahmoud, Toru Sasaki, Thomas Arnold, Alham Fikri Aji, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries. However, this has also raised concerns about the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, education, and academia. In this study, we strive to create automated systems that can detect machine-generated texts and pinpoint potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark \textbf{M4}, which is a multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Through an extensive empirical study of this dataset, we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on instances from unseen domains or LLMs. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and that there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset will enable future research towards more robust approaches to this pressing societal problem. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.

URLs: https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4.

replace Xiezhi: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Holistic Domain Knowledge Evaluation

Authors: Zhouhong Gu, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Haoning Ye, Lin Zhang, Jianchen Wang, Yixin Zhu, Sihang Jiang, Zhuozhi Xiong, Zihan Li, Weijie Wu, Qianyu He, Rui Xu, Wenhao Huang, Jingping Liu, Zili Wang, Shusen Wang, Weiguo Zheng, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao

Abstract: New Natural Langauge Process~(NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management. We anticipate Xiezhi will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of LLMs, and the benchmark is released in~\url{https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark}.

URLs: https://github.com/MikeGu721/XiezhiBenchmark

replace TransERR: Translation-based Knowledge Graph Embedding via Efficient Relation Rotation

Authors: Jiang Li, Xiangdong Su, Fujun Zhang, Guanglai Gao

Abstract: This paper presents a translation-based knowledge geraph embedding method via efficient relation rotation (TransERR), a straightforward yet effective alternative to traditional translation-based knowledge graph embedding models. Different from the previous translation-based models, TransERR encodes knowledge graphs in the hypercomplex-valued space, thus enabling it to possess a higher degree of translation freedom in mining latent information between the head and tail entities. To further minimize the translation distance, TransERR adaptively rotates the head entity and the tail entity with their corresponding unit quaternions, which are learnable in model training. We also provide mathematical proofs to demonstrate the ability of TransERR in modeling various relation patterns, including symmetry, antisymmetry, inversion, composition, and subrelation patterns. The experiments on 10 benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness and the generalization of TransERR. The results also indicate that TransERR can better encode large-scale datasets with fewer parameters than the previous translation-based models. Our code and datasets are available at~\url{https://github.com/dellixx/TransERR}.

URLs: https://github.com/dellixx/TransERR

replace Node-weighted Graph Convolutional Network for Depression Detection in Transcribed Clinical Interviews

Authors: Sergio Burdisso, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Srikanth Madikeri, Petr Motlicek

Abstract: We propose a simple approach for weighting self-connecting edges in a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and show its impact on depression detection from transcribed clinical interviews. To this end, we use a GCN for modeling non-consecutive and long-distance semantics to classify the transcriptions into depressed or control subjects. The proposed method aims to mitigate the limiting assumptions of locality and the equal importance of self-connections vs. edges to neighboring nodes in GCNs, while preserving attractive features such as low computational cost, data agnostic, and interpretability capabilities. We perform an exhaustive evaluation in two benchmark datasets. Results show that our approach consistently outperforms the vanilla GCN model as well as previously reported results, achieving an F1=0.84 on both datasets. Finally, a qualitative analysis illustrates the interpretability capabilities of the proposed approach and its alignment with previous findings in psychology.

replace Analyzing Dataset Annotation Quality Management in the Wild

Authors: Jan-Christoph Klie, Richard Eckart de Castilho, Iryna Gurevych

Abstract: Data quality is crucial for training accurate, unbiased, and trustworthy machine learning models as well as for their correct evaluation. Recent works, however, have shown that even popular datasets used to train and evaluate state-of-the-art models contain a non-negligible amount of erroneous annotations, biases, or artifacts. While practices and guidelines regarding dataset creation projects exist, to our knowledge, large-scale analysis has yet to be performed on how quality management is conducted when creating natural language datasets and whether these recommendations are followed. Therefore, we first survey and summarize recommended quality management practices for dataset creation as described in the literature and provide suggestions for applying them. Then, we compile a corpus of 591 scientific publications introducing text datasets and annotate it for quality-related aspects, such as annotator management, agreement, adjudication, or data validation. Using these annotations, we then analyze how quality management is conducted in practice. A majority of the annotated publications apply good or excellent quality management. However, we deem the effort of 30\% of the works as only subpar. Our analysis also shows common errors, especially when using inter-annotator agreement and computing annotation error rates.

replace Improving Audio-Visual Speech Recognition by Lip-Subword Correlation Based Visual Pre-training and Cross-Modal Fusion Encoder

Authors: Yusheng Dai, Hang Chen, Jun Du, Xiaofei Ding, Ning Ding, Feijun Jiang, Chin-Hui Lee

Abstract: In recent research, slight performance improvement is observed from automatic speech recognition systems to audio-visual speech recognition systems in the end-to-end framework with low-quality videos. Unmatching convergence rates and specialized input representations between audio and visual modalities are considered to cause the problem. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques to improve audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) under a pre-training and fine-tuning training framework. First, we explore the correlation between lip shapes and syllable-level subword units in Mandarin to establish good frame-level syllable boundaries from lip shapes. This enables accurate alignment of video and audio streams during visual model pre-training and cross-modal fusion. Next, we propose an audio-guided cross-modal fusion encoder (CMFE) neural network to utilize main training parameters for multiple cross-modal attention layers to make full use of modality complementarity. Experiments on the MISP2021-AVSR data set show the effectiveness of the two proposed techniques. Together, using only a relatively small amount of training data, the final system achieves better performances than state-of-the-art systems with more complex front-ends and back-ends.

replace MatchXML: An Efficient Text-label Matching Framework for Extreme Multi-label Text Classification

Authors: Hui Ye, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Shihao Ji

Abstract: The eXtreme Multi-label text Classification(XMC) refers to training a classifier that assigns a text sample with relevant labels from an extremely large-scale label set (e.g., millions of labels). We propose MatchXML, an efficient text-label matching framework for XMC. We observe that the label embeddings generated from the sparse Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency(TF-IDF) features have several limitations. We thus propose label2vec to effectively train the semantic dense label embeddings by the Skip-gram model. The dense label embeddings are then used to build a Hierarchical Label Tree by clustering. In fine-tuning the pre-trained encoder Transformer, we formulate the multi-label text classification as a text-label matching problem in a bipartite graph. We then extract the dense text representations from the fine-tuned Transformer. Besides the fine-tuned dense text embeddings, we also extract the static dense sentence embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer. Finally, a linear ranker is trained by utilizing the sparse TF-IDF features, the fine-tuned dense text representations and static dense sentence features. Experimental results demonstrate that MatchXML achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on five out of six datasets. As for the speed, MatchXML outperforms the competing methods on all the six datasets. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/huiyegit/MatchXML.

URLs: https://github.com/huiyegit/MatchXML.

replace CodeApex: A Bilingual Programming Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Authors: Lingyue Fu, Huacan Chai, Shuang Luo, Kounianhua Du, Weiming Zhang, Longteng Fan, Jiayi Lei, Renting Rui, Jianghao Lin, Yuchen Fang, Yifan Liu, Jingkuan Wang, Siyuan Qi, Kangning Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu

Abstract: With the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a significant improvement in the programming capabilities of models, attracting growing attention from researchers. Evaluating the programming capabilities of LLMs is crucial as it reflects the multifaceted abilities of LLMs, and it has numerous downstream applications. In this paper, we propose CodeApex, a bilingual benchmark dataset focusing on the programming comprehension, code generation, and code correction abilities of LLMs. Programming comprehension task tests LLMs on multiple-choice exam questions covering conceptual understanding, commonsense reasoning, and multi-hop reasoning. The code generation task evaluates LLMs through completing C++ functions based on provided descriptions and prototypes. The code correction task asks LLMs to fix real-world erroneous code segments with different error messages. We evaluate 12 widely used LLMs, including both general-purpose and specialized models. GPT-4 exhibits the best programming capabilities, achieving approximate accuracy of 69%, 54%, and 66% on the three tasks, respectively. Compared to human performance, there is still significant room for improvement in LLM programming. We hope that CodeApex can serve as a reference for evaluating the coding capabilities of LLMs, further promoting their development and growth.

replace DoLa: Decoding by Contrasting Layers Improves Factuality in Large Language Models

Authors: Yung-Sung Chuang, Yujia Xie, Hongyin Luo, Yoon Kim, James Glass, Pengcheng He

Abstract: Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations, i.e., generating content that deviates from facts seen during pretraining. We propose a simple decoding strategy for reducing hallucinations with pretrained LLMs that does not require conditioning on retrieved external knowledge nor additional fine-tuning. Our approach obtains the next-token distribution by contrasting the differences in logits obtained from projecting the later layers versus earlier layers to the vocabulary space, exploiting the fact that factual knowledge in an LLMs has generally been shown to be localized to particular transformer layers. We find that this Decoding by Contrasting Layers (DoLa) approach is able to better surface factual knowledge and reduce the generation of incorrect facts. DoLa consistently improves the truthfulness across multiple choices tasks and open-ended generation tasks, for example improving the performance of LLaMA family models on TruthfulQA by 12-17% absolute points, demonstrating its potential in making LLMs reliably generate truthful facts.

replace LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset

Authors: Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Tianle Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Eric P. Xing, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, Hao Zhang

Abstract: Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.

URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.

replace Instances Need More Care: Rewriting Prompts for Instances with LLMs in the Loop Yields Better Zero-Shot Performance

Authors: Saurabh Srivastava, Chengyue Huang, Weiguo Fan, Ziyu Yao

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized zero-shot task performance, mitigating the need for task-specific annotations while enhancing task generalizability. Despite its advancements, current methods using trigger phrases such as ``Let's think step by step'' remain limited. This study introduces PRomPTed, an approach that optimizes the zero-shot prompts for individual task instances following an innovative manner of ``LLMs in the loop''. Our comprehensive evaluation across 13 datasets and 10 task types based on GPT-4 reveals that PRomPTed significantly outperforms both the naive zero-shot approaches and a strong baseline (i.e., ``Output Refinement'') which refines the task output instead of the input prompt. Our experimental results also confirmed the generalization of this advantage to the relatively weaker GPT-3.5. Even more intriguingly, we found that leveraging GPT-3.5 to rewrite prompts for the stronger GPT-4 not only matches but occasionally exceeds the efficacy of using GPT-4 as the prompt rewriter. Our research thus presents a huge value in not only enhancing zero-shot LLM performance but also potentially enabling supervising LLMs with their weaker counterparts, a capability attracting much interest recently.

replace Exploring the landscape of large language models in medical question answering

Authors: Andrew M. Bean, Karolina Korgul, Felix Krones, Robert McCraith, Adam Mahdi

Abstract: With the rapid development of new large language models (LLMs), each claiming to surpass previous models, an overall picture of medical LLM research can be elusive. To address this challenge, we benchmark a range of top LLMs and identify consistent patterns which appear across models. We test $8$ well-known LLMs on $874$ newly collected questions from Polish medical licensing exams. For each question, we score each model on the top-1 accuracy and the distribution of probabilities assigned. We then compare with factors including question difficulty for humans, question length, and the scores of the other models. LLM accuracies were positively correlated pairwise ($0.29$ to $0.62$). Model performance was also correlated with human performance ($0.07$ to $0.16$), but negatively correlated to the difference between the question-level accuracy of top-scoring and bottom-scoring humans ($-0.16$ to $-0.23$). The top output probability and question length were positive and negative predictors of accuracy respectively (p $< 0.05$). The top scoring LLM, GPT-4 Turbo, scored $82\%$, followed by Med42, PaLM 2, Mixtral and GPT-3.5 around $63\%$. We found evidence of similarities between models in which questions they answer correctly, as well as similarities with human test takers. Larger models typically performed better, but differences in training methods were also highly impactful. Model accuracy was positively correlated with confidence, but negatively correlated with question length. We expect that similar training methods will lead these patterns to persist across future models. These patterns can therefore aid medical experts in forming expectations about LLMs as a category to support application research.

replace Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models

Authors: Seungone Kim, Jamin Shin, Yejin Cho, Joel Jang, Shayne Longpre, Hwaran Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Seongjin Shin, Sungdong Kim, James Thorne, Minjoon Seo

Abstract: Recently, using a powerful proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) (e.g., GPT-4) as an evaluator for long-form responses has become the de facto standard. However, for practitioners with large-scale evaluation tasks and custom criteria in consideration (e.g., child-readability), using proprietary LLMs as an evaluator is unreliable due to the closed-source nature, uncontrolled versioning, and prohibitive costs. In this work, we propose Prometheus, a fully open-source LLM that is on par with GPT-4's evaluation capabilities when the appropriate reference materials (reference answer, score rubric) are accompanied. We first construct the Feedback Collection, a new dataset that consists of 1K fine-grained score rubrics, 20K instructions, and 100K responses and language feedback generated by GPT-4. Using the Feedback Collection, we train Prometheus, a 13B evaluator LLM that can assess any given long-form text based on customized score rubric provided by the user. Experimental results show that Prometheus scores a Pearson correlation of 0.897 with human evaluators when evaluating with 45 customized score rubrics, which is on par with GPT-4 (0.882), and greatly outperforms ChatGPT (0.392). Furthermore, measuring correlation with GPT-4 with 1222 customized score rubrics across four benchmarks (MT Bench, Vicuna Bench, Feedback Bench, Flask Eval) shows similar trends, bolstering Prometheus's capability as an evaluator LLM. Lastly, Prometheus achieves the highest accuracy on two human preference benchmarks (HHH Alignment & MT Bench Human Judgment) compared to open-sourced reward models explicitly trained on human preference datasets, highlighting its potential as an universal reward model. We open-source our code, dataset, and model at https://kaistai.github.io/prometheus/.

URLs: https://kaistai.github.io/prometheus/.

replace In-Context Pretraining: Language Modeling Beyond Document Boundaries

Authors: Weijia Shi, Sewon Min, Maria Lomeli, Chunting Zhou, Margaret Li, Gergely Szilvasy, Rich James, Xi Victoria Lin, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Scott Yih, Mike Lewis

Abstract: Large language models (LMs) are currently trained to predict tokens given document prefixes, enabling them to directly perform long-form generation and prompting-style tasks which can be reduced to document completion. Existing pretraining pipelines train LMs by concatenating random sets of short documents to create input contexts but the prior documents provide no signal for predicting the next document. We instead present In-Context Pretraining, a new approach where language models are pretrained on a sequence of related documents, thereby explicitly encouraging them to read and reason across document boundaries. We can do In-Context Pretraining by simply changing the document ordering so that each context contains related documents, and directly applying existing pretraining pipelines. However, this document sorting problem is challenging. There are billions of documents and we would like the sort to maximize contextual similarity for every document without repeating any data. To do this, we introduce approximate algorithms for finding related documents with efficient nearest neighbor search and constructing coherent input contexts with a graph traversal algorithm. Our experiments show In-Context Pretraining offers a simple and scalable approach to significantly enhance LMs'performance: we see notable improvements in tasks that require more complex contextual reasoning, including in-context learning (+8%), reading comprehension (+15%), faithfulness to previous contexts (+16%), long-context reasoning (+5%), and retrieval augmentation (+9%).

replace Sentiment analysis with adaptive multi-head attention in Transformer

Authors: Fanfei Meng, Chen-Ao Wang

Abstract: We propose a novel framework based on the attention mechanism to identify the sentiment of a movie review document. Previous efforts on deep neural networks with attention mechanisms focus on encoder and decoder with fixed numbers of multi-head attention. Therefore, we need a mechanism to stop the attention process automatically if no more useful information can be read from the memory.In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-head attention architecture (AdaptAttn) which varies the number of attention heads based on length of sentences. AdaptAttn has a data preprocessing step where each document is classified into any one of the three bins small, medium or large based on length of the sentence. The document classified as small goes through two heads in each layer, the medium group passes four heads and the large group is processed by eight heads. We examine the merit of our model on the Stanford large movie review dataset. The experimental results show that the F1 score from our model is on par with the baseline model.

replace Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models

Authors: Weijia Shi, Anirudh Ajith, Mengzhou Xia, Yangsibo Huang, Daogao Liu, Terra Blevins, Danqi Chen, Luke Zettlemoyer

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed, the data used to train them is rarely disclosed. Given the incredible scale of this data, up to trillions of tokens, it is all but certain that it includes potentially problematic text such as copyrighted materials, personally identifiable information, and test data for widely reported reference benchmarks. However, we currently have no way to know which data of these types is included or in what proportions. In this paper, we study the pretraining data detection problem: given a piece of text and black-box access to an LLM without knowing the pretraining data, can we determine if the model was trained on the provided text? To facilitate this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark WIKIMIA that uses data created before and after model training to support gold truth detection. We also introduce a new detection method Min-K% Prob based on a simple hypothesis: an unseen example is likely to contain a few outlier words with low probabilities under the LLM, while a seen example is less likely to have words with such low probabilities. Min-K% Prob can be applied without any knowledge about the pretraining corpus or any additional training, departing from previous detection methods that require training a reference model on data that is similar to the pretraining data. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that Min-K% Prob achieves a 7.4% improvement on WIKIMIA over these previous methods. We apply Min-K% Prob to three real-world scenarios, copyrighted book detection, contaminated downstream example detection and privacy auditing of machine unlearning, and find it a consistently effective solution.

replace Disentangled Representation Learning with Large Language Models for Text-Attributed Graphs

Authors: Yijian Qin, Xin Wang, Ziwei Zhang, Wenwu Zhu

Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) are prevalent on the web and research over TAGs such as citation networks, e-commerce networks and social networks has attracted considerable attention in the web community. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, the existing works focus on harnessing the potential of LLMs solely relying on prompts to convey graph structure information to LLMs, thus suffering from insufficient understanding of the complex structural relationships within TAGs. To address this problem, in this paper we present the Disentangled Graph-Text Learner (DGTL) model, which is able to enhance the reasoning and predicting capabilities of LLMs for TAGs. Our proposed DGTL model incorporates graph structure information through tailored disentangled graph neural network (GNN) layers, enabling LLMs to capture the intricate relationships hidden in text-attributed graphs from multiple structural factors. Furthermore, DGTL operates with frozen pre-trained LLMs, reducing computational costs and allowing much more flexibility in combining with different LLM models. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DGTL model on achieving superior or comparable performance over state-of-the-art baselines. Additionally, we also demonstrate that our DGTL model can offer natural language explanations for predictions, thereby significantly enhancing model interpretability.

replace Plug-and-Play Policy Planner for Large Language Model Powered Dialogue Agents

Authors: Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Wai Lam, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Abstract: Proactive dialogues serve as a practical yet challenging dialogue problem in the era of large language models (LLMs), where the dialogue policy planning is the key to improving the proactivity of LLMs. Most existing studies enable the dialogue policy planning of LLMs using various prompting schemes or iteratively enhance this capability in handling the given case with verbal AI feedback. However, these approaches are either bounded by the policy planning capability of the frozen LLMs or hard to be transferred to new cases. In this work, we introduce a new dialogue policy planning paradigm to strategize LLMs for proactive dialogue problems with a tunable language model plug-in as a plug-and-play dialogue policy planner, named PPDPP. Specifically, we develop a novel training framework to facilitate supervised fine-tuning over available human-annotated data as well as reinforcement learning from goal-oriented AI feedback with dynamic interaction data collected by the LLM-based self-play simulation. In this manner, the LLM-powered dialogue agent can not only be generalized to different cases after the training, but also be applicable to different applications by just substituting the learned plug-in. In addition, we propose to evaluate the policy planning capability of dialogue systems under the interactive setting. Experimental results demonstrate that PPDPP consistently and substantially outperforms existing approaches on three different proactive dialogue applications, including negotiation, emotional support, and tutoring dialogues.

replace VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing

Authors: Do June Min, Ver\'onica P\'erez-Rosas, Kenneth Resnicow, Rada Mihalcea

Abstract: Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.

replace Effective Large Language Model Adaptation for Improved Grounding and Citation Generation

Authors: Xi Ye, Ruoxi Sun, Sercan \"O. Arik, Tomas Pfister

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language understanding and generation. However, one major issue towards their widespread deployment in the real world is that they can generate "hallucinated" answers that are not factual. Towards this end, this paper focuses on improving LLMs by grounding their responses in retrieved passages and by providing citations. We propose a new framework, AGREE, Adaptation for GRounding EnhancEment, that improves the grounding from a holistic perspective. Our framework tunes LLMs to selfground the claims in their responses and provide accurate citations to retrieved documents. This tuning on top of the pre-trained LLMs requires well-grounded responses (with citations) for paired queries, for which we introduce a method that can automatically construct such data from unlabeled queries. The selfgrounding capability of tuned LLMs further grants them a test-time adaptation (TTA) capability that can actively retrieve passages to support the claims that have not been grounded, which iteratively improves the responses of LLMs. Across five datasets and two LLMs, our results show that the proposed tuningbased AGREE framework generates superior grounded responses with more accurate citations compared to prompting-based approaches and post-hoc citing-based approaches

replace Language Generation from Brain Recordings

Authors: Ziyi Ye, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu, Maarten de Rijke, Min Zhang, Christina Lioma, Tuukka Ruotsalo

Abstract: Generating human language through non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) has the potential to unlock many applications, such as serving disabled patients and improving communication. Currently, however, generating language via BCIs has been previously successful only within a classification setup for selecting pre-generated sentence continuation candidates with the most likely cortical semantic representation. Inspired by recent research that revealed associations between the brain and the large computational language models, we propose a generative language BCI that utilizes the capacity of a large language model (LLM) jointly with a semantic brain decoder to directly generate language from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) input. The proposed model can generate coherent language sequences aligned with the semantic content of visual or auditory language stimuli perceived, without prior knowledge of any pre-generated candidates. We compare the language generated from the presented model with a random control, pre-generated language selection approach, and a standard LLM, which generates common coherent text solely based on the next word likelihood according to statistical language training data. The proposed model is found to generate language that is more aligned with semantic stimulus in response to which brain input is sampled. Our findings demonstrate the potential and feasibility of employing BCIs in direct language generation.

replace Comparison of pipeline, sequence-to-sequence, and GPT models for end-to-end relation extraction: experiments with the rare disease use-case

Authors: Shashank Gupta, Xuguang Ai, Ramakanth Kavuluru

Abstract: End-to-end relation extraction (E2ERE) is an important and realistic application of natural language processing (NLP) in biomedicine. In this paper, we aim to compare three prevailing paradigms for E2ERE using a complex dataset focused on rare diseases involving discontinuous and nested entities. We use the RareDis information extraction dataset to evaluate three competing approaches (for E2ERE): NER $\rightarrow$ RE pipelines, joint sequence to sequence models, and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models. We use comparable state-of-the-art models and best practices for each of these approaches and conduct error analyses to assess their failure modes. Our findings reveal that pipeline models are still the best, while sequence-to-sequence models are not far behind; GPT models with eight times as many parameters are worse than even sequence-to-sequence models and lose to pipeline models by over 10 F1 points. Partial matches and discontinuous entities caused many NER errors contributing to lower overall E2E performances. We also verify these findings on a second E2ERE dataset for chemical-protein interactions. Although generative LM-based methods are more suitable for zero-shot settings, when training data is available, our results show that it is better to work with more conventional models trained and tailored for E2ERE. More innovative methods are needed to marry the best of the both worlds from smaller encoder-decoder pipeline models and the larger GPT models to improve E2ERE. As of now, we see that well designed pipeline models offer substantial performance gains at a lower cost and carbon footprint for E2ERE. Our contribution is also the first to conduct E2ERE for the RareDis dataset.

replace Constructing Vec-tionaries to Extract Message Features from Texts: A Case Study of Moral Appeals

Authors: Zening Duan, Anqi Shao, Yicheng Hu, Heysung Lee, Xining Liao, Yoo Ji Suh, Jisoo Kim, Kai-Cheng Yang, Kaiping Chen, Sijia Yang

Abstract: While researchers often study message features like moral content in text, such as party manifestos and social media, their quantification remains a challenge. Conventional human coding struggles with scalability and intercoder reliability. While dictionary-based methods are cost-effective and computationally efficient, they often lack contextual sensitivity and are limited by the vocabularies developed for the original applications. In this paper, we present an approach to construct vec-tionary measurement tools that boost validated dictionaries with word embeddings through nonlinear optimization. By harnessing semantic relationships encoded by embeddings, vec-tionaries improve the measurement of message features from text, especially those in short format, by expanding the applicability of original vocabularies to other contexts. Importantly, a vec-tionary can produce additional metrics to capture the valence and ambivalence of a message feature beyond its strength in texts. Using moral content in tweets as a case study, we illustrate the steps to construct the moral foundations vec-tionary, showcasing its ability to process texts missed by conventional dictionaries and word embedding methods and to produce measurements better aligned with crowdsourced human assessments. Furthermore, additional metrics from the vec-tionary unveiled unique insights that facilitated predicting outcomes such as message retransmission.

replace Synergistic Anchored Contrastive Pre-training for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

Authors: Da Luo, Yanglei Gan, Rui Hou, Run Lin, Qiao Liu, Yuxiang Cai, Wannian Gao

Abstract: Few-shot Relation Extraction (FSRE) aims to extract relational facts from a sparse set of labeled corpora. Recent studies have shown promising results in FSRE by employing Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) within the framework of supervised contrastive learning, which considers both instances and label facts. However, how to effectively harness massive instance-label pairs to encompass the learned representation with semantic richness in this learning paradigm is not fully explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel synergistic anchored contrastive pre-training framework. This framework is motivated by the insight that the diverse viewpoints conveyed through instance-label pairs capture incomplete yet complementary intrinsic textual semantics. Specifically, our framework involves a symmetrical contrastive objective that encompasses both sentence-anchored and label-anchored contrastive losses. By combining these two losses, the model establishes a robust and uniform representation space. This space effectively captures the reciprocal alignment of feature distributions among instances and relational facts, simultaneously enhancing the maximization of mutual information across diverse perspectives within the same relation. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant performance enhancements compared to baseline models in downstream FSRE tasks. Furthermore, our approach exhibits superior adaptability to handle the challenges of domain shift and zero-shot relation extraction. Our code is available online at https://github.com/AONE-NLP/FSRE-SaCon.

URLs: https://github.com/AONE-NLP/FSRE-SaCon.

replace Alleviating Hallucinations of Large Language Models through Induced Hallucinations

Authors: Yue Zhang, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Shuming Shi

Abstract: Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have been observed to generate responses that include inaccurate or fabricated information, a phenomenon commonly known as ``hallucination''. In this work, we propose a simple \textit{Induce-then-Contrast} Decoding (ICD) strategy to alleviate hallucinations. We first construct a factually weak LLM by inducing hallucinations from the original LLMs. Then, we penalize these induced hallucinations during decoding to enhance the factuality of the generated content. Concretely, we determine the final next-token predictions by amplifying the predictions from the original model and downplaying the induced untruthful predictions via contrastive decoding. Experimental results on both discrimination-based and generation-based hallucination evaluation benchmarks, such as TruthfulQA and \textsc{FActScore}, demonstrate that our proposed ICD methods can effectively enhance the factuality of LLMs across various model sizes and families. For example, when equipped with ICD, Llama2-7B-Chat and Mistral-7B-Instruct achieve performance comparable to ChatGPT and GPT4 on TruthfulQA, respectively.

replace InfiAgent-DABench: Evaluating Agents on Data Analysis Tasks

Authors: Xueyu Hu, Ziyu Zhao, Shuang Wei, Ziwei Chai, Qianli Ma, Guoyin Wang, Xuwu Wang, Jing Su, Jingjing Xu, Ming Zhu, Yao Cheng, Jianbo Yuan, Jiwei Li, Kun Kuang, Yang Yang, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce InfiAgent-DABench, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM-based agents on data analysis tasks. These tasks require agents to end-to-end solving complex tasks by interacting with an execution environment. This benchmark contains DAEval, a dataset consisting of 257 data analysis questions derived from 52 CSV files, and an agent framework which incorporates LLMs to serve as data analysis agents for both serving and evaluation. Since data analysis questions are often open-ended and hard to evaluate without human supervision, we adopt a format-prompting technique to convert each question into a closed-form format so that they can be automatically evaluated. Our extensive benchmarking of 34 LLMs uncovers the current challenges encountered in data analysis tasks. In addition, building on top of our agent framework, we develop a specialized agent, DAAgent, which surpasses GPT-3.5 by 3.9% on DABench. Evaluation datasets and toolkits for InfiAgent-DABench are released at https://github.com/InfiAgent/InfiAgent .

URLs: https://github.com/InfiAgent/InfiAgent

replace Code-Based English Models Surprising Performance on Chinese QA Pair Extraction Task

Authors: Linghan Zheng, Hui Liu, Xiaojun Lin, Jiayuan Dong, Yue Sheng, Gang Shi, Zhiwei Liu, Hongwei Chen

Abstract: In previous studies, code-based models have consistently outperformed text-based models in reasoning-intensive scenarios. When generating our knowledge base for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we observed that code-based models also perform exceptionally well in Chinese QA Pair Extraction task. Further, our experiments and the metrics we designed discovered that code-based models containing a certain amount of Chinese data achieve even better performance. Additionally, the capabilities of code-based English models in specified Chinese tasks offer a distinct perspective for discussion on the philosophical "Chinese Room" thought experiment.

replace Topic Modeling as Multi-Objective Contrastive Optimization

Authors: Thong Nguyen, Xiaobao Wu, Xinshuai Dong, Cong-Duy T Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu

Abstract: Recent representation learning approaches enhance neural topic models by optimizing the weighted linear combination of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the log-likelihood and the contrastive learning objective that contrasts pairs of input documents. However, document-level contrastive learning might capture low-level mutual information, such as word ratio, which disturbs topic modeling. Moreover, there is a potential conflict between the ELBO loss that memorizes input details for better reconstruction quality, and the contrastive loss which attempts to learn topic representations that generalize among input documents. To address these issues, we first introduce a novel contrastive learning method oriented towards sets of topic vectors to capture useful semantics that are shared among a set of input documents. Secondly, we explicitly cast contrastive topic modeling as a gradient-based multi-objective optimization problem, with the goal of achieving a Pareto stationary solution that balances the trade-off between the ELBO and the contrastive objective. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework consistently produces higher-performing neural topic models in terms of topic coherence, topic diversity, and downstream performance.

replace Distilling Large Language Models into Tiny Models for Named Entity Recognition

Authors: Yining Huang

Abstract: Emerging Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), showing potential in traditional tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Our study explores a three-phase training strategy that harnesses GPT-4's capabilities to enhance the BERT model's performance on NER. Initially, GPT-4 annotates a subset of the CONLL2003 and additional BBC dataset without fine-tuning. We then train BERT using a mix of original and LLM-annotated data, analyzing the efficacy of LLM annotations against traditional methods. The second phase involves comparative experiments with different training regimens, assessing the synergy between distilled and original data. We observe that sequential strategies, particularly a simple mix of training first with distilled data followed by original data, significantly boost performance. In the third phase, we investigate various data blending techniques, including sigmoid and power decay functions, to optimize the training process further. Our results indicate that a strategic mix of distilled and original data markedly elevates the NER capabilities of BERT. Our approach presents a scalable methodology that reduces manual annotation costs and increases efficiency, making it especially pertinent in resource-limited and closed-network environments. The study concludes that while the 'Simple Mix' strategy yields the best results, understanding its underlying mechanisms requires further research. Future work will also focus on refining prompt designs and enhancing annotation selection processes, aiming to extend our methodology to diverse NLP tasks.

replace Comprehensive Cognitive LLM Agent for Smartphone GUI Automation

Authors: Xinbei Ma, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential as human-like autonomous language agents to interact with real-world environments, especially for graphical user interface (GUI) automation. However, those GUI agents require comprehensive cognition ability including exhaustive perception and reliable action response. We propose \underline{Co}mprehensive \underline{Co}gnitive LLM \underline{Agent}, CoCo-Agent, with two novel approaches, comprehensive environment perception (CEP) and conditional action prediction (CAP), to systematically improve the GUI automation performance. First, CEP facilitates the GUI perception through different aspects and granularity, including screenshots and complementary detailed layouts for the visual channel and historical actions for the textual channel. Second, CAP decomposes the action prediction into sub-problems: action type prediction and action target conditioned on the action type. With our technical design, our agent achieves new state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks, showing promising abilities in realistic scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/xbmxb/AAgent.

URLs: https://github.com/xbmxb/AAgent.

replace Me LLaMA: Foundation Large Language Models for Medical Applications

Authors: Qianqian Xie, Qingyu Chen, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Yan Hu, Fongci Lin, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, Jeffrey Zhang, Vipina Keloth, Xingyu Zhou, Huan He, Lucila Ohno-Machido, Yonghui Wu, Hua Xu, Jiang Bian

Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA have shown great promise in many AI applications. However, their performance on medical tasks is suboptimal and can be improved by training on extensive domain-specific datasets. This study introduces Me LLaMA, a medical LLM family that includes foundation models - Me LLaMA 13/70B, along with their chat-enhanced versions - Me LLaMA 13/70B-chat, developed through continual pre-training and instruction tuning of LLaMA2 using large medical datasets. Our domain-specific data suite for training and evaluation includes a large-scale, continual pre-training dataset with 129B tokens, an instruction tuning dataset with 214k samples, and a new medical evaluation benchmark (MIBE) across six tasks with 12 datasets. Our extensive evaluation using the MIBE shows that Me LLaMA models achieve overall better performance than existing open-source medical LLMs in zero-shot, few-shot and supervised learning abilities. Their zero-shot performance is comparable with ChatGPT across 7 out of 8 datasets, with a slight variance of within 3%, and yet falls short when compared to GPT-4. In addition, we investigated the catastrophic forgetting problem, and our results show that Me LLaMA models outperform other open-source medical LLMs in mitigating this issue. Me LLaMA is one of the largest open-source medical foundation LLMs that use both biomedical and clinical data. It exhibits superior performance across both general and medical tasks compared to other open-source medical LLMs, rendering it an attractive choice for medical AI applications. We release our models, datasets, and evaluation scripts at: https://github.com/BIDS-Xu-Lab/Me-LLaMA.

URLs: https://github.com/BIDS-Xu-Lab/Me-LLaMA.

replace PIRB: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Polish Dense and Hybrid Text Retrieval Methods

Authors: S{\l}awomir Dadas, Micha{\l} Pere{\l}kiewicz, Rafa{\l} Po\'swiata

Abstract: We present Polish Information Retrieval Benchmark (PIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework encompassing 41 text information retrieval tasks for Polish. The benchmark incorporates existing datasets as well as 10 new, previously unpublished datasets covering diverse topics such as medicine, law, business, physics, and linguistics. We conduct an extensive evaluation of over 20 dense and sparse retrieval models, including the baseline models trained by us as well as other available Polish and multilingual methods. Finally, we introduce a three-step process for training highly effective language-specific retrievers, consisting of knowledge distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and building sparse-dense hybrid retrievers using a lightweight rescoring model. In order to validate our approach, we train new text encoders for Polish and compare their results with previously evaluated methods. Our dense models outperform the best solutions available to date, and the use of hybrid methods further improves their performance.

replace InfFeed: Influence Functions as a Feedback to Improve the Performance of Subjective Tasks

Authors: Somnath Banerjee, Maulindu Sarkar, Punyajoy Saha, Binny Mathew, Animesh Mukherjee

Abstract: Recently, influence functions present an apparatus for achieving explainability for deep neural models by quantifying the perturbation of individual train instances that might impact a test prediction. Our objectives in this paper are twofold. First we incorporate influence functions as a feedback into the model to improve its performance. Second, in a dataset extension exercise, using influence functions to automatically identify data points that have been initially `silver' annotated by some existing method and need to be cross-checked (and corrected) by annotators to improve the model performance. To meet these objectives, in this paper, we introduce InfFeed, which uses influence functions to compute the influential instances for a target instance. Toward the first objective, we adjust the label of the target instance based on its influencer(s) label. In doing this, InfFeed outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines (including LLMs) by a maximum macro F1-score margin of almost 4% for hate speech classification, 3.5% for stance classification, and 3% for irony and 2% for sarcasm detection. Toward the second objective we show that manually re-annotating only those silver annotated data points in the extension set that have a negative influence can immensely improve the model performance bringing it very close to the scenario where all the data points in the extension set have gold labels. This allows for huge reduction of the number of data points that need to be manually annotated since out of the silver annotated extension dataset, the influence function scheme picks up ~1/1000 points that need manual correction.

replace Emotion Classification in Short English Texts using Deep Learning Techniques

Authors: Siddhanth Bhat

Abstract: Detecting emotions in limited text datasets from under-resourced languages presents a formidable obstacle, demanding specialized frameworks and computational strategies. This study conducts a thorough examination of deep learning techniques for discerning emotions in short English texts. Deep learning approaches employ transfer learning and word embedding, notably BERT, to attain superior accuracy. To evaluate these methods, we introduce the "SmallEnglishEmotions" dataset, comprising 6372 varied short English texts annotated with five primary emotion categories. Our experiments reveal that transfer learning and BERT-based text embedding outperform alternative methods in accurately categorizing the text in the dataset.

replace DistALANER: Distantly Supervised Active Learning Augmented Named Entity Recognition in the Open Source Software Ecosystem

Authors: Somnath Banerjee, Avik Dutta, Aaditya Agrawal, Rima Hazra, Animesh Mukherjee

Abstract: With the AI revolution in place, the trend for building automated systems to support professionals in different domains such as the open source software systems, healthcare systems, banking systems, transportation systems and many others have become increasingly prominent. A crucial requirement in the automation of support tools for such systems is the early identification of named entities, which serves as a foundation for developing specialized functionalities. However, due to the specific nature of each domain, different technical terminologies and specialized languages, expert annotation of available data becomes expensive and challenging. In light of these challenges, this paper proposes a novel named entity recognition (NER) technique specifically tailored for the open-source software systems. Our approach aims to address the scarcity of annotated software data by employing a comprehensive two-step distantly supervised annotation process. This process strategically leverages language heuristics, unique lookup tables, external knowledge sources, and an active learning approach. By harnessing these powerful techniques, we not only enhance model performance but also effectively mitigate the limitations associated with cost and the scarcity of expert annotators. It is noteworthy that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art LLMs by a substantial margin. We also show the effectiveness of NER in the downstream task of relation extraction.

replace LLM Inference Unveiled: Survey and Roofline Model Insights

Authors: Zhihang Yuan, Yuzhang Shang, Yang Zhou, Zhen Dong, Zhe Zhou, Chenhao Xue, Bingzhe Wu, Zhikai Li, Qingyi Gu, Yong Jae Lee, Yan Yan, Beidi Chen, Guangyu Sun, Kurt Keutzer

Abstract: The field of efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference is rapidly evolving, presenting a unique blend of opportunities and challenges. Although the field has expanded and is vibrant, there hasn't been a concise framework that analyzes the various methods of LLM Inference to provide a clear understanding of this domain. Our survey stands out from traditional literature reviews by not only summarizing the current state of research but also by introducing a framework based on roofline model for systematic analysis of LLM inference techniques. This framework identifies the bottlenecks when deploying LLMs on hardware devices and provides a clear understanding of practical problems, such as why LLMs are memory-bound, how much memory and computation they need, and how to choose the right hardware. We systematically collate the latest advancements in efficient LLM inference, covering crucial areas such as model compression (e.g., Knowledge Distillation and Quantization), algorithm improvements (e.g., Early Exit and Mixture-of-Expert), and both hardware and system-level enhancements. Our survey stands out by analyzing these methods with roofline model, helping us understand their impact on memory access and computation. This distinctive approach not only showcases the current research landscape but also delivers valuable insights for practical implementation, positioning our work as an indispensable resource for researchers new to the field as well as for those seeking to deepen their understanding of efficient LLM deployment. The analyze tool, LLM-Viewer, is open-sourced.

replace A Survey on Data Selection for Language Models

Authors: Alon Albalak, Yanai Elazar, Sang Michael Xie, Shayne Longpre, Nathan Lambert, Xinyi Wang, Niklas Muennighoff, Bairu Hou, Liangming Pan, Haewon Jeong, Colin Raffel, Shiyu Chang, Tatsunori Hashimoto, William Yang Wang

Abstract: A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.

replace Survey in Characterization of Semantic Change

Authors: Jader Martins Camboim de S\'a, Marcos Da Silveira, C\'edric Pruski

Abstract: Live languages continuously evolve to integrate the cultural change of human societies. This evolution manifests through neologisms (new words) or \textbf{semantic changes} of words (new meaning to existing words). Understanding the meaning of words is vital for interpreting texts coming from different cultures (regionalism or slang), domains (e.g., technical terms), or periods. In computer science, these words are relevant to computational linguistics algorithms such as translation, information retrieval, question answering, etc. Semantic changes can potentially impact the quality of the outcomes of these algorithms. Therefore, it is important to understand and characterize these changes formally. The study of this impact is a recent problem that has attracted the attention of the computational linguistics community. Several approaches propose methods to detect semantic changes with good precision, but more effort is needed to characterize how the meaning of words changes and to reason about how to reduce the impact of semantic change. This survey provides an understandable overview of existing approaches to the \textit{characterization of semantic changes} and also formally defines three classes of characterizations: if the meaning of a word becomes more general or narrow (change in dimension) if the word is used in a more pejorative or positive/ameliorated sense (change in orientation), and if there is a trend to use the word in a, for instance, metaphoric or metonymic context (change in relation). We summarized the main aspects of the selected publications in a table and discussed the needs and trends in the research activities on semantic change characterization.

replace TV-TREES: Multimodal Entailment Trees for Neuro-Symbolic Video Reasoning

Authors: Kate Sanders, Nathaniel Weir, Benjamin Van Durme

Abstract: It is challenging to perform question-answering over complex, multimodal content such as television clips. This is in part because current video-language models rely on single-modality reasoning, have lowered performance on long inputs, and lack interpetability. We propose TV-TREES, the first multimodal entailment tree generator. TV-TREES serves as an approach to video understanding that promotes interpretable joint-modality reasoning by producing trees of entailment relationships between simple premises directly entailed by the videos and higher-level conclusions. We then introduce the task of multimodal entailment tree generation to evaluate the reasoning quality of such methods. Our method's experimental results on the challenging TVQA dataset demonstrate intepretable, state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on full video clips, illustrating a best-of-both-worlds contrast to black-box methods.

replace "In Dialogues We Learn": Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learning

Authors: Chuanqi Cheng, Quan Tu, Wei Wu, Shuo Shang, Cunli Mao, Zhengtao Yu, Rui Yan

Abstract: Personalized dialogue systems have gained significant attention in recent years for their ability to generate responses in alignment with different personas. However, most existing approaches rely on pre-defined personal profiles, which are not only time-consuming and labor-intensive to create but also lack flexibility. We propose In-Dialogue Learning (IDL), a fine-tuning framework that enhances the ability of pre-trained large language models to leverage dialogue history to characterize persona for completing personalized dialogue generation tasks without pre-defined profiles. Our experiments on three datasets demonstrate that IDL brings substantial improvements, with BLEU and ROUGE scores increasing by up to 200% and 247%, respectively. Additionally, the results of human evaluations further validate the efficacy of our proposed method.

replace Apollo: An Lightweight Multilingual Medical LLM towards Democratizing Medical AI to 6B People

Authors: Xidong Wang, Nuo Chen, Junyin Chen, Yan Hu, Yidong Wang, Xiangbo Wu, Anningzhe Gao, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang

Abstract: Despite the vast repository of global medical knowledge predominantly being in English, local languages are crucial for delivering tailored healthcare services, particularly in areas with limited medical resources. To extend the reach of medical AI advancements to a broader population, we aim to develop medical LLMs across the six most widely spoken languages, encompassing a global population of 6.1 billion. This effort culminates in the creation of the ApolloCorpora multilingual medical dataset and the XMedBench benchmark. In the multilingual medical benchmark, the released Apollo models, at various relatively-small sizes (i.e., 0.5B, 1.8B, 2B, 6B, and 7B), achieve the best performance among models of equivalent size. Especially, Apollo-7B is the state-of-the-art multilingual medical LLMs up to 70B. Additionally, these lite models could be used to improve the multi-lingual medical capabilities of larger models without fine-tuning in a proxy-tuning fashion. We will open-source training corpora, code, model weights and evaluation benchmark.

replace Aligners: Decoupling LLMs and Alignment

Authors: Lilian Ngweta, Mayank Agarwal, Subha Maity, Alex Gittens, Yuekai Sun, Mikhail Yurochkin

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be aligned with human expectations to ensure their safety and utility in most applications. Alignment is challenging, costly, and needs to be repeated for every LLM and alignment criterion. We propose to decouple LLMs and alignment by training aligner models that can be used to align any LLM for a given criteria on an as-needed basis, thus also reducing the potential negative impacts of alignment on performance. Our recipe for training the aligner models solely relies on synthetic data generated with a (prompted) LLM and can be easily adjusted for a variety of alignment criteria. We illustrate our method by training an "ethical" aligner and verify its efficacy empirically.

replace Chain of Thought Explanation for Dialogue State Tracking

Authors: Lin Xu, Ningxin Peng, Daquan Zhou, See-Kiong Ng, Jinlan Fu

Abstract: Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to record user queries and goals during a conversational interaction achieved by maintaining a predefined set of slots and their corresponding values. Current approaches decide slot values opaquely, while humans usually adopt a more deliberate approach by collecting information from relevant dialogue turns and then reasoning the appropriate values. In this work, we focus on the steps needed to figure out slot values by proposing a model named Chain-of-Thought-Explanation (CoTE) for the DST task. CoTE, which is built on the generative DST framework, is designed to create detailed explanations step by step after determining the slot values. This process leads to more accurate and reliable slot values. More-over, to improve the reasoning ability of the CoTE, we further construct more fluent and high-quality explanations with automatic paraphrasing, leading the method CoTE-refined. Experimental results on three widely recognized DST benchmarks-MultiWOZ 2.2, WoZ 2.0, and M2M-demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of the CoTE. Furthermore, through a meticulous fine-grained analysis, we observe significant benefits of our CoTE on samples characterized by longer dialogue turns, user responses, and reasoning steps.

replace TopicDiff: A Topic-enriched Diffusion Approach for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Detection

Authors: Jiamin Luo, Jingjing Wang, Guodong Zhou

Abstract: Multimodal Conversational Emotion (MCE) detection, generally spanning across the acoustic, vision and language modalities, has attracted increasing interest in the multimedia community. Previous studies predominantly focus on learning contextual information in conversations with only a few considering the topic information in single language modality, while always neglecting the acoustic and vision topic information. On this basis, we propose a model-agnostic Topic-enriched Diffusion (TopicDiff) approach for capturing multimodal topic information in MCE tasks. Particularly, we integrate the diffusion model into neural topic model to alleviate the diversity deficiency problem of neural topic model in capturing topic information. Detailed evaluations demonstrate the significant improvements of TopicDiff over the state-of-the-art MCE baselines, justifying the importance of multimodal topic information to MCE and the effectiveness of TopicDiff in capturing such information. Furthermore, we observe an interesting finding that the topic information in acoustic and vision is more discriminative and robust compared to the language.

replace Rule-driven News Captioning

Authors: Ning Xu, Tingting Zhang, Hongshuo Tian, An-An Liu

Abstract: News captioning task aims to generate sentences by describing named entities or concrete events for an image with its news article. Existing methods have achieved remarkable results by relying on the large-scale pre-trained models, which primarily focus on the correlations between the input news content and the output predictions. However, the news captioning requires adhering to some fundamental rules of news reporting, such as accurately describing the individuals and actions associated with the event. In this paper, we propose the rule-driven news captioning method, which can generate image descriptions following designated rule signal. Specifically, we first design the news-aware semantic rule for the descriptions. This rule incorporates the primary action depicted in the image (e.g., "performing") and the roles played by named entities involved in the action (e.g., "Agent" and "Place"). Second, we inject this semantic rule into the large-scale pre-trained model, BART, with the prefix-tuning strategy, where multiple encoder layers are embedded with news-aware semantic rule. Finally, we can effectively guide BART to generate news sentences that comply with the designated rule. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets (i.e., GoodNews and NYTimes800k) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

replace-cross CAPE: Corrective Actions from Precondition Errors using Large Language Models

Authors: Shreyas Sundara Raman, Vanya Cohen, Ifrah Idrees, Eric Rosen, Ray Mooney, Stefanie Tellex, David Paulius

Abstract: Extracting commonsense knowledge from a large language model (LLM) offers a path to designing intelligent robots. Existing approaches that leverage LLMs for planning are unable to recover when an action fails and often resort to retrying failed actions, without resolving the error's underlying cause. We propose a novel approach (CAPE) that attempts to propose corrective actions to resolve precondition errors during planning. CAPE improves the quality of generated plans by leveraging few-shot reasoning from action preconditions. Our approach enables embodied agents to execute more tasks than baseline methods while ensuring semantic correctness and minimizing re-prompting. In VirtualHome, CAPE generates executable plans while improving a human-annotated plan correctness metric from 28.89% to 49.63% over SayCan. Our improvements transfer to a Boston Dynamics Spot robot initialized with a set of skills (specified in language) and associated preconditions, where CAPE improves the correctness metric of the executed task plans by 76.49% compared to SayCan. Our approach enables the robot to follow natural language commands and robustly recover from failures, which baseline approaches largely cannot resolve or address inefficiently.

replace-cross Summarize the Past to Predict the Future: Natural Language Descriptions of Context Boost Multimodal Object Interaction Anticipation

Authors: Razvan-George Pasca, Alexey Gavryushin, Muhammad Hamza, Yen-Ling Kuo, Kaichun Mo, Luc Van Gool, Otmar Hilliges, Xi Wang

Abstract: We study object interaction anticipation in egocentric videos. This task requires an understanding of the spatio-temporal context formed by past actions on objects, coined action context. We propose TransFusion, a multimodal transformer-based architecture. It exploits the representational power of language by summarizing the action context. TransFusion leverages pre-trained image captioning and vision-language models to extract the action context from past video frames. This action context together with the next video frame is processed by the multimodal fusion module to forecast the next object interaction. Our model enables more efficient end-to-end learning. The large pre-trained language models add common sense and a generalisation capability. Experiments on Ego4D and EPIC-KITCHENS-100 show the effectiveness of our multimodal fusion model. They also highlight the benefits of using language-based context summaries in a task where vision seems to suffice. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 40.4% in relative terms in overall mAP on the Ego4D test set. We validate the effectiveness of TransFusion via experiments on EPIC-KITCHENS-100. Video and code are available at https://eth-ait.github.io/transfusion-proj/.

URLs: https://eth-ait.github.io/transfusion-proj/.

replace-cross Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study

Authors: Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Zhengzi Xu, Yuekang Li, Yaowen Zheng, Ying Zhang, Lida Zhao, Tianwei Zhang, Kailong Wang, Yang Liu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, have demonstrated vast potential but also introduce challenges related to content constraints and potential misuse. Our study investigates three key research questions: (1) the number of different prompt types that can jailbreak LLMs, (2) the effectiveness of jailbreak prompts in circumventing LLM constraints, and (3) the resilience of ChatGPT against these jailbreak prompts. Initially, we develop a classification model to analyze the distribution of existing prompts, identifying ten distinct patterns and three categories of jailbreak prompts. Subsequently, we assess the jailbreak capability of prompts with ChatGPT versions 3.5 and 4.0, utilizing a dataset of 3,120 jailbreak questions across eight prohibited scenarios. Finally, we evaluate the resistance of ChatGPT against jailbreak prompts, finding that the prompts can consistently evade the restrictions in 40 use-case scenarios. The study underscores the importance of prompt structures in jailbreaking LLMs and discusses the challenges of robust jailbreak prompt generation and prevention.

replace-cross Large Language Models as Tool Makers

Authors: Tianle Cai, Xuezhi Wang, Tengyu Ma, Xinyun Chen, Denny Zhou

Abstract: Recent research has highlighted the potential of large language models (LLMs) to improve their problem-solving capabilities with the aid of suitable external tools. In our work, we further advance this concept by introducing a closed-loop framework, referred to as LLMs A s Tool Makers (LATM), where LLMs create their own reusable tools for problem-solving. Our approach consists of two phases: 1) tool making: an LLM acts as the tool maker that crafts tools for a set of tasks. 2) tool using: another LLM acts as the tool user, which applies the tool built by the tool maker for problem-solving. On the problem-solving server side, tool-making enables continual tool generation and caching as new requests emerge. This framework enables subsequent requests to access cached tools via their corresponding APIs, enhancing the efficiency of task resolution. Recognizing that tool-making requires more sophisticated capabilities, we assign this task to a powerful, albeit resource-intensive, model. Conversely, the simpler tool-using phase is delegated to a lightweight model. This strategic division of labor allows the once-off cost of tool-making to be spread over multiple instances of tool-using, significantly reducing average costs while maintaining strong performance. Furthermore, our method offers a functional cache through the caching and reuse of tools, which stores the functionality of a class of requests instead of the natural language responses from LLMs, thus extending the applicability of the conventional cache mechanism. We evaluate our approach across various complex reasoning tasks, including Big-Bench tasks. With GPT-4 as the tool maker and GPT-3.5 as the tool user, LATM demonstrates performance equivalent to using GPT-4 for both roles, but with a significantly reduced inference cost.

replace-cross Image Matters: A New Dataset and Empirical Study for Multimodal Hyperbole Detection

Authors: Huixuan Zhang, Xiaojun Wan

Abstract: Hyperbole, or exaggeration, is a common linguistic phenomenon. The detection of hyperbole is an important part of understanding human expression. There have been several studies on hyperbole detection, but most of which focus on text modality only. However, with the development of social media, people can create hyperbolic expressions with various modalities, including text, images, videos, etc. In this paper, we focus on multimodal hyperbole detection. We create a multimodal detection dataset from Weibo (a Chinese social media) and carry out some studies on it. We treat the text and image from a piece of weibo as two modalities and explore the role of text and image for hyperbole detection. Different pre-trained multimodal encoders are also evaluated on this downstream task to show their performance. Besides, since this dataset is constructed from five different topics, we also evaluate the cross-domain performance of different models. These studies can serve as a benchmark and point out the direction of further study on multimodal hyperbole detection.

replace-cross DeepOnto: A Python Package for Ontology Engineering with Deep Learning

Authors: Yuan He, Jiaoyan Chen, Hang Dong, Ian Horrocks, Carlo Allocca, Taehun Kim, Brahmananda Sapkota

Abstract: Integrating deep learning techniques, particularly language models (LMs), with knowledge representation techniques like ontologies has raised widespread attention, urging the need of a platform that supports both paradigms. Although packages such as OWL API and Jena offer robust support for basic ontology processing features, they lack the capability to transform various types of information within ontologies into formats suitable for downstream deep learning-based applications. Moreover, widely-used ontology APIs are primarily Java-based while deep learning frameworks like PyTorch and Tensorflow are mainly for Python programming. To address the needs, we present DeepOnto, a Python package designed for ontology engineering with deep learning. The package encompasses a core ontology processing module founded on the widely-recognised and reliable OWL API, encapsulating its fundamental features in a more "Pythonic" manner and extending its capabilities to incorporate other essential components including reasoning, verbalisation, normalisation, taxonomy, projection, and more. Building on this module, DeepOnto offers a suite of tools, resources, and algorithms that support various ontology engineering tasks, such as ontology alignment and completion, by harnessing deep learning methods, primarily pre-trained LMs. In this paper, we also demonstrate the practical utility of DeepOnto through two use-cases: the Digital Health Coaching in Samsung Research UK and the Bio-ML track of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI).

replace-cross Overthinking the Truth: Understanding how Language Models Process False Demonstrations

Authors: Danny Halawi, Jean-Stanislas Denain, Jacob Steinhardt

Abstract: Modern language models can imitate complex patterns through few-shot learning, enabling them to complete challenging tasks without fine-tuning. However, imitation can also lead models to reproduce inaccuracies or harmful content if present in the context. We study harmful imitation through the lens of a model's internal representations, and identify two related phenomena: "overthinking" and "false induction heads". The first phenomenon, overthinking, appears when we decode predictions from intermediate layers, given correct vs. incorrect few-shot demonstrations. At early layers, both demonstrations induce similar model behavior, but the behavior diverges sharply at some "critical layer", after which the accuracy given incorrect demonstrations progressively decreases. The second phenomenon, false induction heads, are a possible mechanistic cause of overthinking: these are heads in late layers that attend to and copy false information from previous demonstrations, and whose ablation reduces overthinking. Beyond scientific understanding, our results suggest that studying intermediate model computations could be a promising avenue for understanding and guarding against harmful model behaviors.

replace-cross Evaluating the Ebb and Flow: An In-depth Analysis of Question-Answering Trends across Diverse Platforms

Authors: Rima Hazra, Agnik Saha, Somnath Banerjee, Animesh Mukherjee

Abstract: Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms steadily gain popularity as they provide users with fast responses to their queries. The swiftness of these responses is contingent on a mixture of query-specific and user-related elements. This paper scrutinizes these contributing factors within the context of six highly popular CQA platforms, identified through their standout answering speed. Our investigation reveals a correlation between the time taken to yield the first response to a question and several variables: the metadata, the formulation of the questions, and the level of interaction among users. Additionally, by employing conventional machine learning models to analyze these metadata and patterns of user interaction, we endeavor to predict which queries will receive their initial responses promptly.

replace-cross Reformulating Sequential Recommendation: Learning Dynamic User Interest with Content-enriched Language Modeling

Authors: Junzhe Jiang, Shang Qu, Mingyue Cheng, Qi Liu

Abstract: Recommender systems are essential for online applications, and sequential recommendation has enjoyed significant prevalence due to its expressive ability to capture dynamic user interests. However, previous sequential modeling methods still have limitations in capturing contextual information. The primary reason for this issue is that language models often lack an understanding of domain-specific knowledge and item-related textual content. To address this issue, we adopt a new sequential recommendation paradigm and propose LANCER, which leverages the semantic understanding capabilities of pre-trained language models to generate personalized recommendations. Our approach bridges the gap between language models and recommender systems, resulting in more human-like recommendations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on several benchmark datasets, showing promising results and providing valuable insights into the influence of our model on sequential recommendation tasks. Furthermore, our experimental codes are publicly available.

replace-cross Exploring Iterative Enhancement for Improving Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Question Explanations with Large Language Models

Authors: Qiming Bao, Juho Leinonen, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Wanjun Zhong, Ga\"el Gendron, Timothy Pistotti, Alice Huang, Paul Denny, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu

Abstract: Large language models exhibit superior capabilities in processing and understanding language, yet their applications in educational contexts remain underexplored. Learnersourcing enhances learning by engaging students in creating their own educational content. When learnersourcing multiple-choice questions, creating explanations for the solution of a question is a crucial step; it helps other students understand the solution and promotes a deeper understanding of related concepts. However, it is often difficult for students to craft effective solution explanations, due to limited subject understanding. To help scaffold the task of automated explanation generation, we present and evaluate a framework called "ILearner-LLM", that iteratively enhances the generated explanations for the given questions with large language models. Comprising an explanation generation model and an explanation evaluation model, the framework generates high-quality student-aligned explanations by iteratively feeding the quality rating score from the evaluation model back into the instruction prompt of the explanation generation model. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our ILearner-LLM on LLaMA2-13B and GPT-4 to generate higher quality explanations that are closer to those written by students on five PeerWise datasets. Our findings represent a promising path to enrich the learnersourcing experience for students and to enhance the capabilities of large language models for educational applications.

replace-cross DiffAR: Denoising Diffusion Autoregressive Model for Raw Speech Waveform Generation

Authors: Roi Benita, Michael Elad, Joseph Keshet

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently been shown to be relevant for high-quality speech generation. Most work has been focused on generating spectrograms, and as such, they further require a subsequent model to convert the spectrogram to a waveform (i.e., a vocoder). This work proposes a diffusion probabilistic end-to-end model for generating a raw speech waveform. The proposed model is autoregressive, generating overlapping frames sequentially, where each frame is conditioned on a portion of the previously generated one. Hence, our model can effectively synthesize an unlimited speech duration while preserving high-fidelity synthesis and temporal coherence. We implemented the proposed model for unconditional and conditional speech generation, where the latter can be driven by an input sequence of phonemes, amplitudes, and pitch values. Working on the waveform directly has some empirical advantages. Specifically, it allows the creation of local acoustic behaviors, like vocal fry, which makes the overall waveform sounds more natural. Furthermore, the proposed diffusion model is stochastic and not deterministic; therefore, each inference generates a slightly different waveform variation, enabling abundance of valid realizations. Experiments show that the proposed model generates speech with superior quality compared with other state-of-the-art neural speech generation systems.

replace-cross From Text to Self: Users' Perceptions of Potential of AI on Interpersonal Communication and Self

Authors: Yue Fu, Sami Foell, Xuhai Xu, Alexis Hiniker

Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-mediated communication (AIMC), tools powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming integral to interpersonal communication. Employing a mixed-methods approach, we conducted a one-week diary and interview study to explore users' perceptions of these tools' ability to: 1) support interpersonal communication in the short-term, and 2) lead to potential long-term effects. Our findings indicate that participants view AIMC support favorably, citing benefits such as increased communication confidence, and finding precise language to express their thoughts, navigating linguistic and cultural barriers. However, the study also uncovers current limitations of AIMC tools, including verbosity, unnatural responses, and excessive emotional intensity. These shortcomings are further exacerbated by user concerns about inauthenticity and potential overreliance on the technology. Furthermore, we identified four key communication spaces delineated by communication stakes (high or low) and relationship dynamics (formal or informal) that differentially predict users' attitudes toward AIMC tools. Specifically, participants found the tool is more suitable for communicating in formal relationships than informal ones and more beneficial in high-stakes than low-stakes communication.

replace-cross Computer Vision Datasets and Models Exhibit Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Perception

Authors: Andre Ye, Sebastin Santy, Jena D. Hwang, Amy X. Zhang, Ranjay Krishna

Abstract: Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By contrast, literature in cross-cultural psychology and linguistics has provided evidence that people from different cultural backgrounds observe vastly different concepts even when viewing the same visual stimuli. In this paper, we study how these differences manifest themselves in vision-language datasets and models, using language as a proxy for culture. By comparing textual descriptions generated across 7 languages for the same images, we find significant differences in the semantic content and linguistic expression. When datasets are multilingual as opposed to monolingual, descriptions have higher semantic coverage on average, where coverage is measured using scene graphs, model embeddings, and linguistic taxonomies. For example, multilingual descriptions have on average 29.9% more objects, 24.5% more relations, and 46.0% more attributes than a set of monolingual captions. When prompted to describe images in different languages, popular models (e.g. LLaVA) inherit this bias and describe different parts of the image. Moreover, finetuning models on captions from one language performs best on corresponding test data from that language, while finetuning on multilingual data performs consistently well across all test data compositions. Our work points towards the need to account for and embrace the diversity of human perception in the computer vision community.

replace-cross From Chatbots to PhishBots? -- Preventing Phishing scams created using ChatGPT, Google Bard and Claude

Authors: Sayak Saha Roy, Poojitha Thota, Krishna Vamsi Naragam, Shirin Nilizadeh

Abstract: The advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them invaluable across various applications, from conversational agents and content creation to data analysis, research, and innovation. However, their effectiveness and accessibility also render them susceptible to abuse for generating malicious content, including phishing attacks. This study explores the potential of using four popular commercially available LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT (GPT 3.5 Turbo), GPT 4, Claude, and Bard, to generate functional phishing attacks using a series of malicious prompts. We discover that these LLMs can generate both phishing websites and emails that can convincingly imitate well-known brands and also deploy a range of evasive tactics that are used to elude detection mechanisms employed by anti-phishing systems. These attacks can be generated using unmodified or "vanilla" versions of these LLMs without requiring any prior adversarial exploits such as jailbreaking. We evaluate the performance of the LLMs towards generating these attacks and find that they can also be utilized to create malicious prompts that, in turn, can be fed back to the model to generate phishing scams - thus massively reducing the prompt-engineering effort required by attackers to scale these threats. As a countermeasure, we build a BERT-based automated detection tool that can be used for the early detection of malicious prompts to prevent LLMs from generating phishing content. Our model is transferable across all four commercial LLMs, attaining an average accuracy of 96% for phishing website prompts and 94% for phishing email prompts. We also disclose the vulnerabilities to the concerned LLMs, with Google acknowledging it as a severe issue. Our detection model is available for use at Hugging Face, as well as a ChatGPT Actions plugin.

replace-cross SemPLeS: Semantic Prompt Learning for Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Authors: Ci-Siang Lin, Chien-Yi Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Min-Hung Chen

Abstract: Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) aims to train segmentation models using image data with only image-level supervision. Since precise pixel-level annotations are not accessible, existing methods typically focus on producing pseudo masks for training segmentation models by refining CAM-like heatmaps. However, the produced heatmaps may capture only the discriminative image regions of object categories or the associated co-occurring backgrounds. To address the issues, we propose a Semantic Prompt Learning for WSSS (SemPLeS) framework, which learns to effectively prompt the CLIP latent space to enhance the semantic alignment between the segmented regions and the target object categories. More specifically, we propose Contrastive Prompt Learning and Prompt-guided Semantic Refinement to learn the prompts that adequately describe and suppress the co-occurring backgrounds associated with each target object category. In this way, SemPLeS can perform better semantic alignment between object regions and the associated class labels, resulting in desired pseudo masks for training the segmentation model. The proposed SemPLeS framework achieves SOTA performance on the standard WSSS benchmarks, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO, and shows compatibility with other WSSS methods. The source codes are provided in the supplementary.

replace-cross True Knowledge Comes from Practice: Aligning LLMs with Embodied Environments via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Weihao Tan, Wentao Zhang, Shanqi Liu, Longtao Zheng, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Abstract: Despite the impressive performance across numerous tasks, large language models (LLMs) often fail in solving simple decision-making tasks due to the misalignment of the knowledge in LLMs with environments. On the contrary, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn policies from scratch, which makes them always align with environments but difficult to incorporate prior knowledge for efficient explorations. To narrow the gap, we propose TWOSOME, a novel general online framework that deploys LLMs as decision-making agents to efficiently interact and align with embodied environments via RL without requiring any prepared datasets or prior knowledge of the environments. Firstly, we query the joint probabilities of each valid action with LLMs to form behavior policies. Then, to enhance the stability and robustness of the policies, we propose two normalization methods and summarize four prompt design principles. Finally, we design a novel parameter-efficient training architecture where the actor and critic share one frozen LLM equipped with low-rank adapters (LoRA) updated by PPO. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate TWOSOME. i) TWOSOME exhibits significantly better sample efficiency and performance compared to the conventional RL method, PPO, and prompt tuning method, SayCan, in both classical decision-making environment, Overcooked, and simulated household environment, VirtualHome. ii) Benefiting from LLMs' open-vocabulary feature, TWOSOME shows superior generalization ability to unseen tasks. iii) Under our framework, there is no significant loss of the LLMs' original ability during online PPO finetuning.

replace-cross Arrows of Time for Large Language Models

Authors: Vassilis Papadopoulos, J\'er\'emie Wenger, Cl\'ement Hongler

Abstract: We study the probabilistic modeling performed by Autoregressive Large Language Models through the angle of time directionality. We empirically find a time asymmetry exhibited by such models in their ability to model natural language: a difference in the average log-perplexity when trying to predict the next token versus when trying to predict the previous one. This difference is at the same time subtle and very consistent across various modalities (language, model size, training time, ...). Theoretically, this is surprising: from an information-theoretic point of view, there should be no such difference. We provide a theoretical framework to explain how such an asymmetry can appear from sparsity and computational complexity considerations, and outline a number of perspectives opened by our results.

replace-cross Can Large Language Model Agents Simulate Human Trust Behaviors?

Authors: Chengxing Xie, Canyu Chen, Feiran Jia, Ziyu Ye, Kai Shu, Adel Bibi, Ziniu Hu, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in applications such as social science. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behaviors? In this paper, we focus on one of the most critical behaviors in human interactions, trust, and aim to investigate whether or not LLM agents can simulate human trust behaviors. We first find that LLM agents generally exhibit trust behaviors, referred to as agent trust, under the framework of Trust Games, which are widely recognized in behavioral economics. Then, we discover that LLM agents can have high behavioral alignment with humans regarding trust behaviors, particularly for GPT-4, indicating the feasibility to simulate human trust behaviors with LLM agents. In addition, we probe into the biases in agent trust and the differences in agent trust towards agents and humans. We also explore the intrinsic properties of agent trust under conditions including advanced reasoning strategies and external manipulations. We further offer important implications of our discoveries for various scenarios where trust is paramount. Our study provides new insights into the behaviors of LLM agents and the fundamental analogy between LLMs and humans.

replace-cross Model Editing by Pure Fine-Tuning

Authors: Govind Gangadhar, Karl Stratos

Abstract: Fine-tuning is dismissed as not effective for model editing due to its poor performance compared to more specialized methods. However, fine-tuning is simple, agnostic to the architectural details of the model being edited, and able to leverage ongoing advances in standard training methods (e.g., PEFT), making it an appealing choice for a model editor. In this work, we show that pure fine-tuning can be a viable approach to model editing. We propose a slight modification of naive fine-tuning with two key ingredients. First, we optimize the conditional likelihood rather than the full likelihood. Second, we augment the data with random paraphrases and facts to encourage generalization and locality. Our experiments on ZsRE and CounterFact show that this simple modification allows fine-tuning to often match or outperform specialized editors in the edit score.

replace-cross Bridging or Breaking: Impact of Intergroup Interactions on Religious Polarization

Authors: Rochana Chaturvedi, Sugat Chaturvedi, Elena Zheleva

Abstract: While exposure to diverse viewpoints may reduce polarization, it can also have a backfire effect and exacerbate polarization when the discussion is adversarial. Here, we examine the question whether intergroup interactions around important events affect polarization between majority and minority groups in social networks. We compile data on the religious identity of nearly 700,000 Indian Twitter users engaging in COVID-19-related discourse during 2020. We introduce a new measure for an individual's group conformity based on contextualized embeddings of tweet text, which helps us assess polarization between religious groups. We then use a meta-learning framework to examine heterogeneous treatment effects of intergroup interactions on an individual's group conformity in the light of communal, political, and socio-economic events. We find that for political and social events, intergroup interactions reduce polarization. This decline is weaker for individuals at the extreme who already exhibit high conformity to their group. In contrast, during communal events, intergroup interactions can increase group conformity. Finally, we decompose the differential effects across religious groups in terms of emotions and topics of discussion. The results show that the dynamics of religious polarization are sensitive to the context and have important implications for understanding the role of intergroup interactions.

replace-cross A Self-matching Training Method with Annotation Embedding Models for Ontology Subsumption Prediction

Authors: Yukihiro Shiraishi, Ken Kaneiwa

Abstract: Recently, ontology embeddings representing entities in a low-dimensional space have been proposed for ontology completion. However, the ontology embeddings for concept subsumption prediction do not address the difficulties of similar and isolated entities and fail to extract the global information of annotation axioms from an ontology. In this paper, we propose a self-matching training method for the two ontology embedding models: Inverted-index Matrix Embedding (InME) and Co-occurrence Matrix Embedding (CoME). The two embeddings capture the global and local information in annotation axioms by means of the occurring locations of each word in a set of axioms and the co-occurrences of words in each axiom. The self-matching training method increases the robustness of the concept subsumption prediction when predicted superclasses are similar to subclasses and are isolated to other entities in an ontology. Our evaluation experiments show that the self-matching training method with InME outperforms the existing ontology embeddings for the GO and FoodOn ontologies and that the method with the concatenation of CoME and OWL2Vec* outperforms them for the HeLiS ontology.

replace-cross LDB: A Large Language Model Debugger via Verifying Runtime Execution Step-by-step

Authors: Lily Zhong, Zilong Wang, Jingbo Shang

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are leading significant progress in code generation. Beyond one-pass code generation, recent works further integrate unit tests and program verifiers into LLMs to iteratively refine the generated programs. However, these works consider the generated programs as an indivisible entity, which falls short for LLMs in debugging the programs, especially when the programs contain complex logic flows and data operations. In contrast, when human developers debug programs, they typically set breakpoints and selectively examine runtime execution information. The execution flow and the intermediate variables play a crucial role in the debugging process, yet they are underutilized in the existing literature on code generation. In this study, we introduce Large Language Model Debugger (LDB), a novel debugging framework that enables LLMs to refine their generated programs with the runtime execution information. Specifically, LDB segments the programs into basic blocks and tracks the values of intermediate variables after each block throughout the runtime execution. This allows LLMs to concentrate on simpler code units within the overall execution flow, verify their correctness against the task description block by block, and efficiently pinpoint any potential errors. Experiments demonstrate that LDB consistently enhances the baseline performance by up to 9.8% across the HumanEval, MBPP, and TransCoder benchmarks, archiving new state-of-the-art performance in code debugging for various LLM selections.

replace-cross MMSR: Symbolic Regression is a Multimodal Task

Authors: Yanjie Li, Jingyi Liu, Weijun Li, Lina Yu, Min Wu, Wenqiang Li, Meilan Hao, Su Wei, Yusong Deng

Abstract: Mathematical formulas are the crystallization of human wisdom in exploring the laws of nature for thousands of years. Describing the complex laws of nature with a concise mathematical formula is a constant pursuit of scientists and a great challenge for artificial intelligence. This field is called symbolic regression. Symbolic regression was originally formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, and GP and reinforcement learning algorithms were used to solve it. However, GP is sensitive to hyperparameters, and these two types of algorithms are inefficient. To solve this problem, researchers treat the mapping from data to expressions as a translation problem. And the corresponding large-scale pre-trained model is introduced. However, the data and expression skeletons do not have very clear word correspondences as the two languages do. Instead, they are more like two modalities (e.g., image and text). Therefore, in this paper, we proposed MMSR. The SR problem is solved as a pure multimodal problem, and contrastive learning is also introduced in the training process for modal alignment to facilitate later modal feature fusion. It is worth noting that in order to better promote the modal feature fusion, we adopt the strategy of training contrastive learning loss and other losses at the same time, which only needs one-step training, instead of training contrastive learning loss first and then training other losses. Because our experiments prove training together can make the feature extraction module and feature fusion module running-in better. Experimental results show that compared with multiple large-scale pre-training baselines, MMSR achieves the most advanced results on multiple mainstream datasets including SRBench.

replace-cross Direct Alignment of Draft Model for Speculative Decoding with Chat-Fine-Tuned LLMs

Authors: Raghavv Goel, Mukul Gagrani, Wonseok Jeon, Junyoung Park, Mingu Lee, Christopher Lott

Abstract: Text generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) is known to be memory bound due to the combination of their auto-regressive nature, huge parameter counts, and limited memory bandwidths, often resulting in low token rates. Speculative decoding has been proposed as a solution for LLM inference acceleration. However, since draft models are often unavailable in the modern open-source LLM families, e.g., for Llama 2 7B, training a high-quality draft model is required to enable inference acceleration via speculative decoding. In this paper, we propose a simple draft model training framework for direct alignment to chat-capable target models. With the proposed framework, we train Llama 2 Chat Drafter 115M, a draft model for Llama 2 Chat 7B or larger, with only 1.64\% of the original size. Our training framework only consists of pretraining, distillation dataset generation, and finetuning with knowledge distillation, with no additional alignment procedure. For the finetuning step, we use instruction-response pairs generated by target model for distillation in plausible data distribution, and propose a new Total Variation Distance++ (TVD++) loss that incorporates variance reduction techniques inspired from the policy gradient method in reinforcement learning. Our empirical results show that Llama 2 Chat Drafter 115M with speculative decoding achieves up to 2.3 block efficiency and 2.4$\times$ speed-up relative to autoregressive decoding on various tasks with no further task-specific fine-tuning.

replace-cross Can Large Language Models Reason and Plan?

Authors: Subbarao Kambhampati

Abstract: While humans sometimes do show the capability of correcting their own erroneous guesses with self-critiquing, there seems to be no basis for that assumption in the case of LLMs.

replace-cross Using Hallucinations to Bypass GPT4's Filter

Authors: Benjamin Lemkin

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are initially trained on vast amounts of data, then fine-tuned using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF); this also serves to teach the LLM to provide appropriate and safe responses. In this paper, we present a novel method to manipulate the fine-tuned version into reverting to its pre-RLHF behavior, effectively erasing the model's filters; the exploit currently works for GPT4, Claude Sonnet, and (to some extent) for Inflection-2.5. Unlike other jailbreaks (for example, the popular "Do Anything Now" (DAN) ), our method does not rely on instructing the LLM to override its RLHF policy; hence, simply modifying the RLHF process is unlikely to address it. Instead, we induce a hallucination involving reversed text during which the model reverts to a word bucket, effectively pausing the model's filter. We believe that our exploit presents a fundamental vulnerability in LLMs currently unaddressed, as well as an opportunity to better understand the inner workings of LLMs during hallucinations.