new Whose Side Are You On? Investigating the Political Stance of Large Language Models

Authors: Pagnarasmey Pit, Xingjun Ma, Mike Conway, Qingyu Chen, James Bailey, Henry Pit, Putrasmey Keo, Watey Diep, Yu-Gang Jiang

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant popularity for their application in various everyday tasks such as text generation, summarization, and information retrieval. As the widespread adoption of LLMs continues to surge, it becomes increasingly crucial to ensure that these models yield responses that are politically impartial, with the aim of preventing information bubbles, upholding fairness in representation, and mitigating confirmation bias. In this paper, we propose a quantitative framework and pipeline designed to systematically investigate the political orientation of LLMs. Our investigation delves into the political alignment of LLMs across a spectrum of eight polarizing topics, spanning from abortion to LGBTQ issues. Across topics, the results indicate that LLMs exhibit a tendency to provide responses that closely align with liberal or left-leaning perspectives rather than conservative or right-leaning ones when user queries include details pertaining to occupation, race, or political affiliation. The findings presented in this study not only reaffirm earlier observations regarding the left-leaning characteristics of LLMs but also surface particular attributes, such as occupation, that are particularly susceptible to such inclinations even when directly steered towards conservatism. As a recommendation to avoid these models providing politicised responses, users should be mindful when crafting queries, and exercise caution in selecting neutral prompt language.

new Train & Constrain: Phonologically Informed Tongue-Twister Generation from Topics and Paraphrases

Authors: Tyler Loakman, Chen Tang, Chenghua Lin

Abstract: Previous work in phonologically and phonetically grounded language generation has mainly focused on domains such as puns and poetry. In this article, we present new work on the generation of tongue-twisters - a form of language that is required to be conditioned on a phoneme level to maximize sound overlap, whilst maintaining semantic consistency with an input topic and still being grammatically correct. We present TwisterLister, a pipeline for generating phonologically informed tongue-twisters from Large Language Models (LLMs) that we use to generate TwistList 2.0, the largest annotated dataset of tongue-twisters to date, consisting of 17K+ examples from a combination of human and LLM authors. Our generation pipeline involves the use of a phonologically constrained vocabulary alongside LLM prompting to generate novel, non-derivative tongue-twister examples. We additionally present the results of automatic and human evaluation of smaller models trained on our generated dataset to demonstrate the extent to which phonologically motivated language types can be generated without explicit injection of phonological knowledge. Additionally, we introduce a Phoneme-Aware Constrained Decoding module (PACD) that can be integrated into any causal language model and demonstrate that this method generates good quality tongue-twisters both with and without fine-tuning the underlying language model. We also design and implement a range of automatic metrics for the task of tongue-twister generation that is phonologically motivated and captures the unique essence of tongue-twisters based on Phonemic Edit Distance (PED).

new Leveraging Linguistically Enhanced Embeddings for Open Information Extraction

Authors: Fauzan Farooqui, Thanmay Jayakumar, Pulkit Mathur, Mansi Radke

Abstract: Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a structured prediction (SP) task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims to extract structured $n$-ary tuples - usually subject-relation-object triples - from free text. The word embeddings in the input text can be enhanced with linguistic features, usually Part-of-Speech (PoS) and Syntactic Dependency Parse (SynDP) labels. However, past enhancement techniques cannot leverage the power of pretrained language models (PLMs), which themselves have been hardly used for OIE. To bridge this gap, we are the first to leverage linguistic features with a Seq2Seq PLM for OIE. We do so by introducing two methods - Weighted Addition and Linearized Concatenation. Our work can give any neural OIE architecture the key performance boost from both PLMs and linguistic features in one go. In our settings, this shows wide improvements of up to 24.9%, 27.3% and 14.9% on Precision, Recall and F1 scores respectively over the baseline. Beyond this, we address other important challenges in the field: to reduce compute overheads with the features, we are the first ones to exploit Semantic Dependency Parse (SemDP) tags; to address flaws in current datasets, we create a clean synthetic dataset; finally, we contribute the first known study of OIE behaviour in SP models.

new Visually Grounded Speech Models have a Mutual Exclusivity Bias

Authors: Leanne Nortje, Dan Onea\c{t}\u{a}, Yevgen Matusevych, Herman Kamper

Abstract: When children learn new words, they employ constraints such as the mutual exclusivity (ME) bias: a novel word is mapped to a novel object rather than a familiar one. This bias has been studied computationally, but only in models that use discrete word representations as input, ignoring the high variability of spoken words. We investigate the ME bias in the context of visually grounded speech models that learn from natural images and continuous speech audio. Concretely, we train a model on familiar words and test its ME bias by asking it to select between a novel and a familiar object when queried with a novel word. To simulate prior acoustic and visual knowledge, we experiment with several initialisation strategies using pretrained speech and vision networks. Our findings reveal the ME bias across the different initialisation approaches, with a stronger bias in models with more prior (in particular, visual) knowledge. Additional tests confirm the robustness of our results, even when different loss functions are considered.

new Reducing Large Language Model Bias with Emphasis on 'Restricted Industries': Automated Dataset Augmentation and Prejudice Quantification

Authors: Devam Mondal, Carlo Lipizzi

Abstract: Despite the growing capabilities of large language models, there exists concerns about the biases they develop. In this paper, we propose a novel, automated mechanism for debiasing through specified dataset augmentation in the lens of bias producers and in the context of 'restricted industries' with limited data. We additionally create two new additional metrics, the mb-index and db-index, to quantify bias, considering the idea that bias occurs due to both intrinsic model architecture and dataset.

new Evaluating Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction Methods for Pretrained Sentence Embeddings

Authors: Gaifan Zhang, Yi Zhou, Danushka Bollegala

Abstract: Sentence embeddings produced by Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have received wide attention from the NLP community due to their superior performance when representing texts in numerous downstream applications. However, the high dimensionality of the sentence embeddings produced by PLMs is problematic when representing large numbers of sentences in memory- or compute-constrained devices. As a solution, we evaluate unsupervised dimensionality reduction methods to reduce the dimensionality of sentence embeddings produced by PLMs. Our experimental results show that simple methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) can reduce the dimensionality of sentence embeddings by almost $50\%$, without incurring a significant loss in performance in multiple downstream tasks. Surprisingly, reducing the dimensionality further improves performance over the original high-dimensional versions for the sentence embeddings produced by some PLMs in some tasks.

new On Prompt Sensitivity of ChatGPT in Affective Computing

Authors: Mostafa M. Amin, Bj\"orn W. Schuller

Abstract: Recent studies have demonstrated the emerging capabilities of foundation models like ChatGPT in several fields, including affective computing. However, accessing these emerging capabilities is facilitated through prompt engineering. Despite the existence of some prompting techniques, the field is still rapidly evolving and many prompting ideas still require investigation. In this work, we introduce a method to evaluate and investigate the sensitivity of the performance of foundation models based on different prompts or generation parameters. We perform our evaluation on ChatGPT within the scope of affective computing on three major problems, namely sentiment analysis, toxicity detection, and sarcasm detection. First, we carry out a sensitivity analysis on pivotal parameters in auto-regressive text generation, specifically the temperature parameter $T$ and the top-$p$ parameter in Nucleus sampling, dictating how conservative or creative the model should be during generation. Furthermore, we explore the efficacy of several prompting ideas, where we explore how giving different incentives or structures affect the performance. Our evaluation takes into consideration performance measures on the affective computing tasks, and the effectiveness of the model to follow the stated instructions, hence generating easy-to-parse responses to be smoothly used in downstream applications.

new A New Massive Multilingual Dataset for High-Performance Language Technologies

Authors: Ona de Gibert, Graeme Nail, Nikolay Arefyev, Marta Ba\~n\'on, Jelmer van der Linde, Shaoxiong Ji, Jaume Zaragoza-Bernabeu, Mikko Aulamo, Gema Ram\'irez-S\'anchez, Andrey Kutuzov, Sampo Pyysalo, Stephan Oepen, J\"org Tiedemann

Abstract: We present the HPLT (High Performance Language Technologies) language resources, a new massive multilingual dataset including both monolingual and bilingual corpora extracted from CommonCrawl and previously unused web crawls from the Internet Archive. We describe our methods for data acquisition, management and processing of large corpora, which rely on open-source software tools and high-performance computing. Our monolingual collection focuses on low- to medium-resourced languages and covers 75 languages and a total of ~5.6 trillion word tokens de-duplicated on the document level. Our English-centric parallel corpus is derived from its monolingual counterpart and covers 18 language pairs and more than 96 million aligned sentence pairs with roughly 1.4 billion English tokens. The HPLT language resources are one of the largest open text corpora ever released, providing a great resource for language modeling and machine translation training. We publicly release the corpora, the software, and the tools used in this work.

new Ax-to-Grind Urdu: Benchmark Dataset for Urdu Fake News Detection

Authors: Sheetal Harris, Jinshuo Liu, Hassan Jalil Hadi, Yue Cao

Abstract: Misinformation can seriously impact society, affecting anything from public opinion to institutional confidence and the political horizon of a state. Fake News (FN) proliferation on online websites and Online Social Networks (OSNs) has increased profusely. Various fact-checking websites include news in English and barely provide information about FN in regional languages. Thus the Urdu FN purveyors cannot be discerned using factchecking portals. SOTA approaches for Fake News Detection (FND) count upon appropriately labelled and large datasets. FND in regional and resource-constrained languages lags due to the lack of limited-sized datasets and legitimate lexical resources. The previous datasets for Urdu FND are limited-sized, domain-restricted, publicly unavailable and not manually verified where the news is translated from English into Urdu. In this paper, we curate and contribute the first largest publicly available dataset for Urdu FND, Ax-to-Grind Urdu, to bridge the identified gaps and limitations of existing Urdu datasets in the literature. It constitutes 10,083 fake and real news on fifteen domains collected from leading and authentic Urdu newspapers and news channel websites in Pakistan and India. FN for the Ax-to-Grind dataset is collected from websites and crowdsourcing. The dataset contains news items in Urdu from the year 2017 to the year 2023. Expert journalists annotated the dataset. We benchmark the dataset with an ensemble model of mBERT,XLNet, and XLM RoBERTa. The selected models are originally trained on multilingual large corpora. The results of the proposed model are based on performance metrics, F1-score, accuracy, precision, recall and MCC value.

new A Taxonomy of Ambiguity Types for NLP

Authors: Margaret Y. Li, Alisa Liu, Zhaofeng Wu, Noah A. Smith

Abstract: Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language understanding because they may not handle ambiguities at the level that humans naturally do in communication. Additionally, different types of ambiguity may serve different purposes and require different approaches for resolution, and we aim to investigate how language models' abilities vary across types. We propose a taxonomy of ambiguity types as seen in English to facilitate NLP analysis. Our taxonomy can help make meaningful splits in language ambiguity data, allowing for more fine-grained assessments of both datasets and model performance.

new Benchmarking Chinese Commonsense Reasoning of LLMs: From Chinese-Specifics to Reasoning-Memorization Correlations

Authors: Jiaxing Sun, Weiquan Huang, Jiang Wu, Chenya Gu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Hang Yan, Conghui He

Abstract: We introduce CHARM, the first benchmark for comprehensively and in-depth evaluating the commonsense reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in Chinese, which covers both globally known and Chinese-specific commonsense. We evaluated 7 English and 12 Chinese-oriented LLMs on CHARM, employing 5 representative prompt strategies for improving LLMs' reasoning ability, such as Chain-of-Thought. Our findings indicate that the LLM's language orientation and the task's domain influence the effectiveness of the prompt strategy, which enriches previous research findings. We built closely-interconnected reasoning and memorization tasks, and found that some LLMs struggle with memorizing Chinese commonsense, affecting their reasoning ability, while others show differences in reasoning despite similar memorization performance. We also evaluated the LLMs' memorization-independent reasoning abilities and analyzed the typical errors. Our study precisely identified the LLMs' strengths and weaknesses, providing the clear direction for optimization. It can also serve as a reference for studies in other fields. We will release CHARM at https://github.com/opendatalab/CHARM .

URLs: https://github.com/opendatalab/CHARM

new From Handcrafted Features to LLMs: A Brief Survey for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Authors: Haofei Zhao, Yilun Liu, Shimin Tao, Weibin Meng, Yimeng Chen, Xiang Geng, Chang Su, Min Zhang, Hao Yang

Abstract: Machine Translation Quality Estimation (MTQE) is the task of estimating the quality of machine-translated text in real time without the need for reference translations, which is of great importance for the development of MT. After two decades of evolution, QE has yielded a wealth of results. This article provides a comprehensive overview of QE datasets, annotation methods, shared tasks, methodologies, challenges, and future research directions. It begins with an introduction to the background and significance of QE, followed by an explanation of the concepts and evaluation metrics for word-level QE, sentence-level QE, document-level QE, and explainable QE. The paper categorizes the methods developed throughout the history of QE into those based on handcrafted features, deep learning, and Large Language Models (LLMs), with a further division of deep learning-based methods into classic deep learning and those incorporating pre-trained language models (LMs). Additionally, the article details the advantages and limitations of each method and offers a straightforward comparison of different approaches. Finally, the paper discusses the current challenges in QE research and provides an outlook on future research directions.

new M$^3$AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset

Authors: Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang

Abstract: Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emergent and prevalent approach to sharing knowledge online. Such videos carry rich multimodal information including speech, the facial and body movements of the speakers, as well as the texts and pictures in the slides and possibly even the papers. Although multiple academic video datasets have been constructed and released, few of them support both multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks, which is partially due to the lack of high-quality human annotations. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset (M$^3$AV), which has almost 367 hours of videos from five sources covering computer science, mathematics, and medical and biology topics. With high-quality human annotations of the spoken and written words, in particular high-valued name entities, the dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. Evaluations performed on contextual speech recognition, speech synthesis, and slide and script generation tasks demonstrate that the diversity of M$^3$AV makes it a challenging dataset.

new MMIDR: Teaching Large Language Model to Interpret Multimodal Misinformation via Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Longzheng Wang, Xiaohan Xu, Lei Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Yongxiu Xu, Hongbo Xu, Chuang Zhang

Abstract: Automatic detection of multimodal misinformation has gained a widespread attention recently. However, the potential of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) for multimodal misinformation detection remains underexplored. Besides, how to teach LLMs to interpret multimodal misinformation in cost-effective and accessible way is still an open question. To address that, we propose MMIDR, a framework designed to teach LLMs in providing fluent and high-quality textual explanations for their decision-making process of multimodal misinformation. To convert multimodal misinformation into an appropriate instruction-following format, we present a data augmentation perspective and pipeline. This pipeline consists of a visual information processing module and an evidence retrieval module. Subsequently, we prompt the proprietary LLMs with processed contents to extract rationales for interpreting the authenticity of multimodal misinformation. Furthermore, we design an efficient knowledge distillation approach to distill the capability of proprietary LLMs in explaining multimodal misinformation into open-source LLMs. To explore several research questions regarding the performance of LLMs in multimodal misinformation detection tasks, we construct an instruction-following multimodal misinformation dataset and conduct comprehensive experiments. The experimental findings reveal that our MMIDR exhibits sufficient detection performance and possesses the capacity to provide compelling rationales to support its assessments.

new Context Quality Matters in Training Fusion-in-Decoder for Extractive Open-Domain Question Answering

Authors: Kosuke Akimoto, Kunihiro Takeoka, Masafumi Oyamada

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation models augment knowledge encoded in a language model by providing additional relevant external knowledge (context) during generation. Although it has been shown that the quantity and quality of context impact the performance of retrieval-augmented generation models during inference, limited research explores how these characteristics affect model training. This paper explores how context quantity and quality during model training affect the performance of Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD), the state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented generation model, in extractive open-domain question answering tasks. Experimental results suggest that FiD models overfit to context quality during training and show suboptimal performance when evaluated on different context quality. Through the experimental results, we also reveal FiD models trained with different context quality have different cross-attention distribution patterns. Specifically, as context quality during training increases, FiD models tend to attend more uniformly to each passage in context. Finally, based on these observations, we propose a method to mitigate overfitting to specific context quality by introducing bias to the cross-attention distribution, which we demonstrate to be effective in improving the performance of FiD models on different context quality.

new Automatic Annotation of Grammaticality in Child-Caregiver Conversations

Authors: Mitja Nikolaus (ILCB, LPL, LIS, TALEP), Abhishek Agrawal (ILCB, LIS, TALEP), Petros Kaklamanis (SED), Alex Warstadt (SED), Abdellah Fourtassi (ILCB, LIS, TALEP)

Abstract: The acquisition of grammar has been a central question to adjudicate between theories of language acquisition. In order to conduct faster, more reproducible, and larger-scale corpus studies on grammaticality in child-caregiver conversations, tools for automatic annotation can offer an effective alternative to tedious manual annotation. We propose a coding scheme for context-dependent grammaticality in child-caregiver conversations and annotate more than 4,000 utterances from a large corpus of transcribed conversations. Based on these annotations, we train and evaluate a range of NLP models. Our results show that fine-tuned Transformer-based models perform best, achieving human inter-annotation agreement levels.As a first application and sanity check of this tool, we use the trained models to annotate a corpus almost two orders of magnitude larger than the manually annotated data and verify that children's grammaticality shows a steady increase with age.This work contributes to the growing literature on applying state-of-the-art NLP methods to help study child language acquisition at scale.

new Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment

Authors: Zhao Yukun, Yan Lingyong, Sun Weiwei, Xing Guoliang, Wang Shuaiqiang, Meng Chong, Cheng Zhicong, Ren Zhaochun, Yin Dawei

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses due to minor changes in the verbalized instructions. Recent literature has explored this inconsistency issue, highlighting the importance of continued improvement in the robustness of response generation. However, systematic analysis and solutions are still lacking. In this paper, we quantitatively define the inconsistency problem and propose a two-stage training framework consisting of instruction-augmented supervised fine-tuning and consistency alignment training. The first stage helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations. In the second stage, we improve the diversity and help the model understand which responses are more aligned with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses. The training process is accomplished by self-rewards inferred from the trained model at the first stage without referring to external human preference resources. We conduct extensive experiments on recent publicly available LLMs on instruction-following tasks and demonstrate the effectiveness of our training framework.

new Large-Scale Label Interpretation Learning for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Authors: Jonas Golde, Felix Hamborg, Alan Akbik

Abstract: Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) detects named entities within text using only a few annotated examples. One promising line of research is to leverage natural language descriptions of each entity type: the common label PER might, for example, be verbalized as ''person entity.'' In an initial label interpretation learning phase, the model learns to interpret such verbalized descriptions of entity types. In a subsequent few-shot tagset extension phase, this model is then given a description of a previously unseen entity type (such as ''music album'') and optionally a few training examples to perform few-shot NER for this type. In this paper, we systematically explore the impact of a strong semantic prior to interpret verbalizations of new entity types by massively scaling up the number and granularity of entity types used for label interpretation learning. To this end, we leverage an entity linking benchmark to create a dataset with orders of magnitude of more distinct entity types and descriptions as currently used datasets. We find that this increased signal yields strong results in zero- and few-shot NER in in-domain, cross-domain, and even cross-lingual settings. Our findings indicate significant potential for improving few-shot NER through heuristical data-based optimization.

new Reinforcement Learning from Reflective Feedback (RLRF): Aligning and Improving LLMs via Fine-Grained Self-Reflection

Authors: Kyungjae Lee, Dasol Hwang, Sunghyun Park, Youngsoo Jang, Moontae Lee

Abstract: Despite the promise of RLHF in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it often leads to superficial alignment, prioritizing stylistic changes over improving downstream performance of LLMs. Underspecified preferences could obscure directions to align the models. Lacking exploration restricts identification of desirable outputs to improve the models. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework: Reinforcement Learning from Reflective Feedback (RLRF), which leverages fine-grained feedback based on detailed criteria to improve the core capabilities of LLMs. RLRF employs a self-reflection mechanism to systematically explore and refine LLM responses, then fine-tuning the models via a RL algorithm along with promising responses. Our experiments across Just-Eval, Factuality, and Mathematical Reasoning demonstrate the efficacy and transformative potential of RLRF beyond superficial surface-level adjustment.

new Dermacen Analytica: A Novel Methodology Integrating Multi-Modal Large Language Models with Machine Learning in tele-dermatology

Authors: Dimitrios P. Panagoulias, Evridiki Tsoureli-Nikita, Maria Virvou, George A. Tsihrintzis

Abstract: The rise of Artificial Intelligence creates great promise in the field of medical discovery, diagnostics and patient management. However, the vast complexity of all medical domains require a more complex approach that combines machine learning algorithms, classifiers, segmentation algorithms and, lately, large language models. In this paper, we describe, implement and assess an Artificial Intelligence-empowered system and methodology aimed at assisting the diagnosis process of skin lesions and other skin conditions within the field of dermatology that aims to holistically address the diagnostic process in this domain. The workflow integrates large language, transformer-based vision models and sophisticated machine learning tools. This holistic approach achieves a nuanced interpretation of dermatological conditions that simulates and facilitates a dermatologist's workflow. We assess our proposed methodology through a thorough cross-model validation technique embedded in an evaluation pipeline that utilizes publicly available medical case studies of skin conditions and relevant images. To quantitatively score the system performance, advanced machine learning and natural language processing tools are employed which focus on similarity comparison and natural language inference. Additionally, we incorporate a human expert evaluation process based on a structured checklist to further validate our results. We implemented the proposed methodology in a system which achieved approximate (weighted) scores of 0.87 for both contextual understanding and diagnostic accuracy, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in enhancing dermatological analysis. The proposed methodology is expected to prove useful in the development of next-generation tele-dermatology applications, enhancing remote consultation capabilities and access to care, especially in underserved areas.

new LayoutLLM: Large Language Model Instruction Tuning for Visually Rich Document Understanding

Authors: Masato Fujitake

Abstract: This paper proposes LayoutLLM, a more flexible document analysis method for understanding imaged documents. Visually Rich Document Understanding tasks, such as document image classification and information extraction, have gained significant attention due to their importance. Existing methods have been developed to enhance document comprehension by incorporating pre-training awareness of images, text, and layout structure. However, these methods require fine-tuning for each task and dataset, and the models are expensive to train and operate. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new LayoutLLM that integrates these with large-scale language models (LLMs). By leveraging the strengths of existing research in document image understanding and LLMs' superior language understanding capabilities, the proposed model, fine-tuned with multimodal instruction datasets, performs an understanding of document images in a single model. Our experiments demonstrate improvement over the baseline model in various document analysis tasks.

new K-Act2Emo: Korean Commonsense Knowledge Graph for Indirect Emotional Expression

Authors: Kyuhee Kim, Surin Lee, Sangah Lee

Abstract: In many literary texts, emotions are indirectly conveyed through descriptions of actions, facial expressions, and appearances, necessitating emotion inference for narrative understanding. In this paper, we introduce K-Act2Emo, a Korean commonsense knowledge graph (CSKG) comprising 1,900 indirect emotional expressions and the emotions inferable from them. We categorize reasoning types into inferences in positive situations, inferences in negative situations, and inferences when expressions do not serve as emotional cues. Unlike existing CSKGs, K-Act2Emo specializes in emotional contexts, and experimental results validate its effectiveness for training emotion inference models. Significantly, the BART-based knowledge model fine-tuned with K-Act2Emo outperforms various existing Korean large language models, achieving performance levels comparable to GPT-4 Turbo.

new ERD: A Framework for Improving LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Classification

Authors: Sehee Lim, Yejin Kim, Chi-Hyun Choi, Jy-yong Sohn, Byung-Hoon Kim

Abstract: Improving the accessibility of psychotherapy with the aid of Large Language Models (LLMs) is garnering a significant attention in recent years. Recognizing cognitive distortions from the interviewee's utterances can be an essential part of psychotherapy, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy. In this paper, we propose ERD, which improves LLM-based cognitive distortion classification performance with the aid of additional modules of (1) extracting the parts related to cognitive distortion, and (2) debating the reasoning steps by multiple agents. Our experimental results on a public dataset show that ERD improves the multi-class F1 score as well as binary specificity score. Regarding the latter score, it turns out that our method is effective in debiasing the baseline method which has high false positive rate, especially when the summary of multi-agent debate is provided to LLMs.

new LLM-based Extraction of Contradictions from Patents

Authors: Stefan Trapp, Joachim Warschat

Abstract: Already since the 1950s TRIZ shows that patents and the technical contradictions they solve are an important source of inspiration for the development of innovative products. However, TRIZ is a heuristic based on a historic patent analysis and does not make use of the ever-increasing number of latest technological solutions in current patents. Because of the huge number of patents, their length, and, last but not least, their complexity there is a need for modern patent retrieval and patent analysis to go beyond keyword-oriented methods. Recent advances in patent retrieval and analysis mainly focus on dense vectors based on neural AI Transformer language models like Google BERT. They are, for example, used for dense retrieval, question answering or summarization and key concept extraction. A research focus within the methods for patent summarization and key concept extraction are generic inventive concepts respectively TRIZ concepts like problems, solutions, advantage of invention, parameters, and contradictions. Succeeding rule-based approaches, finetuned BERT-like language models for sentence-wise classification represent the state-of-the-art of inventive concept extraction. While they work comparatively well for basic concepts like problems or solutions, contradictions - as a more complex abstraction - remain a challenge for these models. This paper goes one step further, as it presents a method to extract TRIZ contradictions from patent texts based on Prompt Engineering using a generative Large Language Model (LLM), namely OpenAI's GPT-4. Contradiction detection, sentence extraction, contradiction summarization, parameter extraction and assignment to the 39 abstract TRIZ engineering parameters are all performed in a single prompt using the LangChain framework. Our results show that "off-the-shelf" GPT-4 is a serious alternative to existing approaches.

new Is Reference Necessary in the Evaluation of NLG Systems? When and Where?

Authors: Shuqian Sheng, Yi Xu, Luoyi Fu, Jiaxin Ding, Lei Zhou, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou

Abstract: The majority of automatic metrics for evaluating NLG systems are reference-based. However, the challenge of collecting human annotation results in a lack of reliable references in numerous application scenarios. Despite recent advancements in reference-free metrics, it has not been well understood when and where they can be used as an alternative to reference-based metrics. In this study, by employing diverse analytical approaches, we comprehensively assess the performance of both metrics across a wide range of NLG tasks, encompassing eight datasets and eight evaluation models. Based on solid experiments, the results show that reference-free metrics exhibit a higher correlation with human judgment and greater sensitivity to deficiencies in language quality. However, their effectiveness varies across tasks and is influenced by the quality of candidate texts. Therefore, it's important to assess the performance of reference-free metrics before applying them to a new task, especially when inputs are in uncommon form or when the answer space is highly variable. Our study can provide insight into the appropriate application of automatic metrics and the impact of metric choice on evaluation performance.

new ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Authors: Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), establishing itself as a primary approach to solving complex reasoning tasks. Existing CoT synthesis approaches usually focus on simpler reasoning tasks and thus result in low-quality and inconsistent CoT prompts. In response to this challenge, we present an empirical investigation of CoT prompting and introduce CoTGenius, a novel framework designed for the automatic generation of superior CoT prompts. CoTGenius is developed based on three major evolution strategies, i.e., complicate, diversify, and specify-alongside two filtering mechanisms: evolutionary success judgement and correctness verification. We further employ CoTGenius to create an extensive CoT dataset, and subsequently fine-tune the Llama 2-Chat 7B and 13B models on this dataset. We call the resulting model ChainLM. To deal with the cumulative error issue in reasoning steps, we propose a step-level debating method, wherein multiple debaters discuss each reasoning step to arrive at the correct answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ChainLM models exhibit enhanced proficiency in addressing a spectrum of complex reasoning problems compared to existing models. In addition, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the impact of data categories within CoTGenius on the model performance. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ChainLM.

URLs: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ChainLM.

new Beyond Surface Similarity: Detecting Subtle Semantic Shifts in Financial Narratives

Authors: Jiaxin Liu, Yi Yang, Kar Yan Tam

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Financial-STS task, a financial domain-specific NLP task designed to measure the nuanced semantic similarity between pairs of financial narratives. These narratives originate from the financial statements of the same company but correspond to different periods, such as year-over-year comparisons. Measuring the subtle semantic differences between these paired narratives enables market stakeholders to gauge changes over time in the company's financial and operational situations, which is critical for financial decision-making. We find that existing pretrained embedding models and LLM embeddings fall short in discerning these subtle financial narrative shifts. To address this gap, we propose an LLM-augmented pipeline specifically designed for the Financial-STS task. Evaluation on a human-annotated dataset demonstrates that our proposed method outperforms existing methods trained on classic STS tasks and generic LLM embeddings.

new WikiFactDiff: A Large, Realistic, and Temporally Adaptable Dataset for Atomic Factual Knowledge Update in Causal Language Models

Authors: Hichem Ammar Khodja, Fr\'ed\'eric B\'echet, Quentin Brabant, Alexis Nasr, Gw\'enol\'e Lecorv\'e

Abstract: The factuality of large language model (LLMs) tends to decay over time since events posterior to their training are "unknown" to them. One way to keep models up-to-date could be factual update: the task of inserting, replacing, or removing certain simple (atomic) facts within the model. To study this task, we present WikiFactDiff, a dataset that describes the evolution of factual knowledge between two dates as a collection of simple facts divided into three categories: new, obsolete, and static. We describe several update scenarios arising from various combinations of these three types of basic update. The facts are represented by subject-relation-object triples; indeed, WikiFactDiff was constructed by comparing the state of the Wikidata knowledge base at 4 January 2021 and 27 February 2023. Those fact are accompanied by verbalization templates and cloze tests that enable running update algorithms and their evaluation metrics. Contrary to other datasets, such as zsRE and CounterFact, WikiFactDiff constitutes a realistic update setting that involves various update scenarios, including replacements, archival, and new entity insertions. We also present an evaluation of existing update algorithms on WikiFactDiff.

new FIT-RAG: Black-Box RAG with Factual Information and Token Reduction

Authors: Yuren Mao, Xuemei Dong, Wenyi Xu, Yunjun Gao, Bin Wei, Ying Zhang

Abstract: Due to the extraordinarily large number of parameters, fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to update long-tail or out-of-date knowledge is impractical in lots of applications. To avoid fine-tuning, we can alternatively treat a LLM as a black-box (i.e., freeze the parameters of the LLM) and augment it with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, namely black-box RAG. Recently, black-box RAG has achieved success in knowledge-intensive tasks and has gained much attention. Existing black-box RAG methods typically fine-tune the retriever to cater to LLMs' preferences and concatenate all the retrieved documents as the input, which suffers from two issues: (1) Ignorance of Factual Information. The LLM preferred documents may not contain the factual information for the given question, which can mislead the retriever and hurt the effectiveness of black-box RAG; (2) Waste of Tokens. Simply concatenating all the retrieved documents brings large amounts of unnecessary tokens for LLMs, which degenerates the efficiency of black-box RAG. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel black-box RAG framework which utilizes the factual information in the retrieval and reduces the number of tokens for augmentation, dubbed FIT-RAG. FIT-RAG utilizes the factual information by constructing a bi-label document scorer. Besides, it reduces the tokens by introducing a self-knowledge recognizer and a sub-document-level token reducer. FIT-RAG achieves both superior effectiveness and efficiency, which is validated by extensive experiments across three open-domain question-answering datasets: TriviaQA, NQ and PopQA. FIT-RAG can improve the answering accuracy of Llama2-13B-Chat by 14.3\% on TriviaQA, 19.9\% on NQ and 27.5\% on PopQA, respectively. Furthermore, it can save approximately half of the tokens on average across the three datasets.

new Editing Knowledge Representation of Language Lodel via Rephrased Prefix Prompts

Authors: Yuchen Cai, Ding Cao, Rongxi Guo, Yaqin Wen, Guiquan Liu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Neural language models (LMs) have been extensively trained on vast corpora to store factual knowledge about various aspects of the world described in texts. Current technologies typically employ knowledge editing methods or specific prompts to modify LM outputs. However, existing knowledge editing methods are costly and inefficient, struggling to produce appropriate text. Additionally, prompt engineering is opaque and requires significant effort to find suitable prompts. To address these issues, we introduce a new method called PSPEM (Prefix Soft Prompt Editing Method), that can be used for a lifetime with just one training. It resolves the inefficiencies and generalizability issues in knowledge editing methods and overcomes the opacity of prompt engineering by automatically seeking optimal soft prompts. Specifically, PSPEM utilizes a prompt encoder and an encoding converter to refine key information in prompts and uses prompt alignment techniques to guide model generation, ensuring text consistency and adherence to the intended structure and content, thereby maintaining an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. We have validated the effectiveness of PSPEM through knowledge editing and attribute inserting. On the COUNTERFACT dataset, PSPEM achieved nearly 100\% editing accuracy and demonstrated the highest level of fluency. We further analyzed the similarities between PSPEM and original prompts and their impact on the model's internals. The results indicate that PSPEM can serve as an alternative to original prompts, supporting the model in effective editing.

new From Large to Tiny: Distilling and Refining Mathematical Expertise for Math Word Problems with Weakly Supervision

Authors: Qingwen Lin, Boyan Xu, Zhengting Huang, Ruichu Cai

Abstract: Addressing the challenge of high annotation costs in solving Math Word Problems (MWPs) through full supervision with intermediate equations, recent works have proposed weakly supervised task settings that rely solely on the final answer as a supervised signal. Existing leading approaches typically employ various search techniques to infer intermediate equations, but cannot ensure their semantic consistency with natural language descriptions. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has opened up new possibilities for addressing MWPs directly. However, the computational demands of LLMs make them less than ideal for use in settings where resources are tight. In light of these challenges, we introduce an innovative two-stage framework that adeptly transfers mathematical Expertise from large to tiny language models. In \emph{Distillation Stage}, we propose a series of extraction processes that satisfy the properties of MWPs to distill mathematical knowledge from LLMs to construct problem-equation pairs required for supervised training. In \emph{Refinement Stage}, Due to Knowledge distilling method cannot guarantee the full utilization of all data, we further utilize the unsuccessfully searched data effectively by Knowledge Refine method. Finally, We train a small model using distilled data generated through two-stage methods. As our method fully leverages the semantic understanding capabilities during the searching 'problem-equation' pair, it demonstrates significantly improved performance on the Math23K and Weak12K datasets compared to existing small model methods, while maintaining a much lower computational cost than ChatGPT.

new Building Accurate Translation-Tailored LLMs with Language Aware Instruction Tuning

Authors: Changtong Zan, Liang Ding, Li Shen, Yibing Zhen, Weifeng Liu, Dacheng Tao

Abstract: Translation-tailored Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable translation capabilities, even competing with supervised-trained commercial translation systems. However, off-target translation remains an unsolved problem, especially for low-resource languages, hindering us from developing accurate LLMs-based translation models. To mitigate the off-target translation problem and enhance the performance of LLMs on translation, recent works have either designed advanced prompting strategies to highlight the functionality of translation instructions or exploited the in-context learning ability of LLMs by feeding few-shot demonstrations. However, these methods essentially do not improve LLM's ability to follow translation instructions, especially the language direction information. In this work, we design a two-stage fine-tuning algorithm to improve the instruction-following ability (especially the translation direction) of LLMs. Specifically, we first tune LLMs with the maximum likelihood estimation loss on the translation dataset to elicit the basic translation capabilities. In the second stage, we construct instruction-conflicting samples by randomly replacing the translation directions with a wrong one within the instruction, and then introduce an extra unlikelihood loss to learn those samples. Experiments on IWSLT and WMT benchmarks upon the LLaMA model spanning 16 zero-shot directions show that, compared to the competitive baseline -- translation-finetuned LLama, our method could effectively reduce the off-target translation ratio (averagely -53.3\%), thus improving translation quality with average +5.7 SacreBLEU and +16.4 BLEURT. Analysis shows that our method could preserve the model's general task performance on AlpacaEval. Code and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/alphadl/LanguageAware_Tuning}.

URLs: https://github.com/alphadl/LanguageAware_Tuning

new Adaptive-RAG: Learning to Adapt Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models through Question Complexity

Authors: Soyeong Jeong, Jinheon Baek, Sukmin Cho, Sung Ju Hwang, Jong C. Park

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (LLMs), which incorporate the non-parametric knowledge from external knowledge bases into LLMs, have emerged as a promising approach to enhancing response accuracy in several tasks, such as Question-Answering (QA). However, even though there are various approaches dealing with queries of different complexities, they either handle simple queries with unnecessary computational overhead or fail to adequately address complex multi-step queries; yet, not all user requests fall into only one of the simple or complex categories. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive QA framework, that can dynamically select the most suitable strategy for (retrieval-augmented) LLMs from the simplest to the most sophisticated ones based on the query complexity. Also, this selection process is operationalized with a classifier, which is a smaller LM trained to predict the complexity level of incoming queries with automatically collected labels, obtained from actual predicted outcomes of models and inherent inductive biases in datasets. This approach offers a balanced strategy, seamlessly adapting between the iterative and single-step retrieval-augmented LLMs, as well as the no-retrieval methods, in response to a range of query complexities. We validate our model on a set of open-domain QA datasets, covering multiple query complexities, and show that ours enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of QA systems, compared to relevant baselines including the adaptive retrieval approaches. Code is available at: https://github.com/starsuzi/Adaptive-RAG.

URLs: https://github.com/starsuzi/Adaptive-RAG.

new Locating and Mitigating Gender Bias in Large Language Models

Authors: Yuchen Cai, Ding Cao, Rongxi Guo, Yaqin Wen, Guiquan Liu, Enhong Chen

Abstract: Large language models(LLM) are pre-trained on extensive corpora to learn facts and human cognition which contain human preferences. However, this process can inadvertently lead to these models acquiring biases and stereotypes prevalent in society. Prior research has typically tackled the issue of bias through a one-dimensional perspective, concentrating either on locating or mitigating it. This limited perspective has created obstacles in facilitating research on bias to synergistically complement and progressively build upon one another. In this study, we integrate the processes of locating and mitigating bias within a unified framework. Initially, we use causal mediation analysis to trace the causal effects of different components' activation within a large language model. Building on this, we propose the LSDM (Least Square Debias Method), a knowledge-editing based method for mitigating gender bias in occupational pronouns, and compare it against two baselines on three gender bias datasets and seven knowledge competency test datasets. The experimental results indicate that the primary contributors to gender bias are the bottom MLP modules acting on the last token of occupational pronouns and the top attention module acting on the final word in the sentence. Furthermore, LSDM mitigates gender bias in the model more effectively than the other baselines, while fully preserving the model's capabilities in all other aspects.

new Emergent communication and learning pressures in language models: a language evolution perspective

Authors: Lukas Galke, Limor Raviv

Abstract: Language models and humans are two types of learning systems. Finding or facilitating commonalities could enable major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition and evolution of language. Many theories of language evolution rely heavily on learning biases and learning pressures. Yet due to substantial differences in learning pressures, it is questionable whether the similarity between humans and machines is sufficient for insights to carry over and to be worth testing with human participants. Here, we review the emergent communication literature, a subfield of multi-agent reinforcement learning, from a language evolution perspective. We find that the emergent communication literature excels at designing and adapting models to recover initially absent linguistic phenomena of natural languages. Based on a short literature review, we identify key pressures that have recovered initially absent human patterns in emergent communication models: communicative success, efficiency, learnability, and other psycho-/sociolinguistic factors. We argue that this may serve as inspiration for how to design language models for language acquisition and language evolution research.

new A Multimodal Approach to Device-Directed Speech Detection with Large Language Models

Authors: Dominik Wager, Alexander Churchill, Siddharth Sigtia, Panayiotis Georgiou, Matt Mirsamadi, Aarshee Mishra, Erik Marchi

Abstract: Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users must begin each command with a trigger phrase. We explore this task in three ways: First, we train classifiers using only acoustic information obtained from the audio waveform. Second, we take the decoder outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, such as 1-best hypotheses, as input features to a large language model (LLM). Finally, we explore a multimodal system that combines acoustic and lexical features, as well as ASR decoder signals in an LLM. Using multimodal information yields relative equal-error-rate improvements over text-only and audio-only models of up to 39% and 61%. Increasing the size of the LLM and training with low-rank adaption leads to further relative EER reductions of up to 18% on our dataset.

new More than Just Statistical Recurrence: Human and Machine Unsupervised Learning of M\=aori Word Segmentation across Morphological Processes

Authors: Ashvini Varatharaj, Simon Todd

Abstract: Non-M\=aori-speaking New Zealanders (NMS)are able to segment M\=aori words in a highlysimilar way to fluent speakers (Panther et al.,2024). This ability is assumed to derive through the identification and extraction of statistically recurrent forms. We examine this assumption by asking how NMS segmentations compare to those produced by Morfessor, an unsupervised machine learning model that operates based on statistical recurrence, across words formed by a variety of morphological processes. Both NMS and Morfessor succeed in segmenting words formed by concatenative processes (compounding and affixation without allomorphy), but NMS also succeed for words that invoke templates (reduplication and allomorphy) and other cues to morphological structure, implying that their learning process is sensitive to more than just statistical recurrence.

new Prediction of Translation Techniques for the Translation Process

Authors: Fan Zhou, Vincent Vandeghinste

Abstract: Machine translation (MT) encompasses a variety of methodologies aimed at enhancing the accuracy of translations. In contrast, the process of human-generated translation relies on a wide range of translation techniques, which are crucial for ensuring linguistic adequacy and fluency. This study suggests that these translation techniques could further optimize machine translation if they are automatically identified before being applied to guide the translation process effectively. The study differentiates between two scenarios of the translation process: from-scratch translation and post-editing. For each scenario, a specific set of experiments has been designed to forecast the most appropriate translation techniques. The findings indicate that the predictive accuracy for from-scratch translation reaches 82%, while the post-editing process exhibits even greater potential, achieving an accuracy rate of 93%.

new gTBLS: Generating Tables from Text by Conditional Question Answering

Authors: Anirudh Sundar, Christopher Richardson, Larry Heck

Abstract: Distilling large, unstructured text into a structured, condensed form such as tables is an open research problem. One of the primary challenges in automatically generating tables is ensuring their syntactic validity. Prior approaches address this challenge by including additional parameters in the Transformer's attention mechanism to attend to specific rows and column headers. In contrast to this single-stage method, this paper presents a two-stage approach called Generative Tables (gTBLS). The first stage infers table structure (row and column headers) from the text. The second stage formulates questions using these headers and fine-tunes a causal language model to answer them. Furthermore, the gTBLS approach is amenable to the utilization of pre-trained Large Language Models in a zero-shot configuration, presenting a solution for table generation in situations where fine-tuning is not feasible. gTBLS improves prior approaches by up to 10% in BERTScore on the table construction task and up to 20% on the table content generation task of the E2E, WikiTableText, WikiBio, and RotoWire datasets.

new Multi-Level Explanations for Generative Language Models

Authors: Lucas Monteiro Paes, Dennis Wei, Hyo Jin Do, Hendrik Strobelt, Ronny Luss, Amit Dhurandhar, Manish Nagireddy, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Prasanna Sattigeri, Werner Geyer, Soumya Ghosh

Abstract: Perturbation-based explanation methods such as LIME and SHAP are commonly applied to text classification. This work focuses on their extension to generative language models. To address the challenges of text as output and long text inputs, we propose a general framework called MExGen that can be instantiated with different attribution algorithms. To handle text output, we introduce the notion of scalarizers for mapping text to real numbers and investigate multiple possibilities. To handle long inputs, we take a multi-level approach, proceeding from coarser levels of granularity to finer ones, and focus on algorithms with linear scaling in model queries. We conduct a systematic evaluation, both automated and human, of perturbation-based attribution methods for summarization and context-grounded question answering. The results show that our framework can provide more locally faithful explanations of generated outputs.

new ChatGPT Alternative Solutions: Large Language Models Survey

Authors: Hanieh Alipour, Nick Pendar, Kohinoor Roy

Abstract: In recent times, the grandeur of Large Language Models (LLMs) has not only shone in the realm of natural language processing but has also cast its brilliance across a vast array of applications. This remarkable display of LLM capabilities has ignited a surge in research contributions within this domain, spanning a diverse spectrum of topics. These contributions encompass advancements in neural network architecture, context length enhancements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency improvements, and more. Recent years have witnessed a dynamic synergy between academia and industry, propelling the field of LLM research to new heights. A notable milestone in this journey is the introduction of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot grounded in LLMs, which has garnered widespread societal attention. The evolving technology of LLMs has begun to reshape the landscape of the entire AI community, promising a revolutionary shift in the way we create and employ AI algorithms. Given this swift-paced technical evolution, our survey embarks on a journey to encapsulate the recent strides made in the world of LLMs. Through an exploration of the background, key discoveries, and prevailing methodologies, we offer an up-to-the-minute review of the literature. By examining multiple LLM models, our paper not only presents a comprehensive overview but also charts a course that identifies existing challenges and points toward potential future research trajectories. This survey furnishes a well-rounded perspective on the current state of generative AI, shedding light on opportunities for further exploration, enhancement, and innovation.

new Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing

Authors: Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen

Abstract: This paper investigates using knowledge editing techniques to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs). We construct a benchmark, SafeEdit, which covers nine unsafe categories with various powerful attack prompts and equips comprehensive metrics for systematic evaluation. We conduct experiments to compare knowledge editing approaches with previous baselines, indicating that knowledge editing has the potential to efficiently detoxify LLMs with limited impact on general performance. Then, we propose a simple yet effective baseline, dubbed Detoxifying with Intraoperative Neural Monitoring (DINM), to diminish the toxicity of LLMs within a few tuning steps via only one instance. We further provide an in-depth analysis of the internal mechanism for various detoxify approaches, demonstrating that previous methods like SFT and DPO may merely suppress the activations of toxic parameters, while DINM mitigates the toxicity of the toxic parameters to a certain extent, making permanent adjustments. We hope that these insights could shed light on future work of developing detoxifying approaches and the underlying knowledge mechanisms of LLMs. Code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

URLs: https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

new Building a Language-Learning Game for Brazilian Indigenous Languages: A Case of Study

Authors: Gustavo Polleti

Abstract: In this paper we discuss a first attempt to build a language learning game for brazilian indigenous languages and the challenges around it. We present a design for the tool with gamification aspects. Then we describe a process to automatically generate language exercises and questions from a dependency treebank and a lexical database for Tupian languages. We discuss the limitations of our prototype highlighting ethical and practical implementation concerns. Finally, we conclude that new data gathering processes should be established in partnership with indigenous communities and oriented for educational purposes.

new EDT: Improving Large Language Models' Generation by Entropy-based Dynamic Temperature Sampling

Authors: Shimao Zhang, Yu Bao, Shujian Huang

Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of downstream language tasks. Temperature sampling is a commonly used decoding strategy for LLMs' generation process. However, a fixed temperature parameter is used in most cases, which may not always be an optimal choice for balancing generation quality and diversity. In this paper, we propose an effective Entropy-based Dynamic Temperature (EDT) Sampling method, to achieve a more balanced performance in terms of both generation quality and diversity by dynamically selecting the temperature parameter. Additionally, we also show model performance and comprehensive analyses for 4 different generation benchmarks. Our experiments show that EDT significantly outperforms the existing strategies across different tasks.

new Lexicon-Level Contrastive Visual-Grounding Improves Language Modeling

Authors: Chengxu Zhuang, Evelina Fedorenko, Jacob Andreas

Abstract: Today's most accurate language models are trained on orders of magnitude more language data than human language learners receive - but with no supervision from other sensory modalities that play a crucial role in human learning. Can we make LMs' representations and predictions more accurate (and more human-like) with more ecologically plausible supervision? This paper describes LexiContrastive Grounding (LCG), a grounded language learning procedure that leverages visual supervision to improve textual representations. LexiContrastive Grounding combines a next token prediction strategy with a contrastive visual grounding objective, focusing on early-layer representations that encode lexical information. Across multiple word-learning and sentence-understanding benchmarks, LexiContrastive Grounding not only outperforms standard language-only models in learning efficiency, but also improves upon vision-and-language learning procedures including CLIP, GIT, Flamingo, and Vokenization. Moreover, LexiContrastive Grounding improves perplexity by around 5% on multiple language modeling tasks. This work underscores the potential of incorporating visual grounding into language models, aligning more closely with the multimodal nature of human language acquisition.

new The Era of Semantic Decoding

Authors: Maxime Peyrard, Martin Josifoski, Robert West

Abstract: Recent work demonstrated great promise in the idea of orchestrating collaborations between LLMs, human input, and various tools to address the inherent limitations of LLMs. We propose a novel perspective called semantic decoding, which frames these collaborative processes as optimization procedures in semantic space. Specifically, we conceptualize LLMs as semantic processors that manipulate meaningful pieces of information that we call semantic tokens (known thoughts). LLMs are among a large pool of other semantic processors, including humans and tools, such as search engines or code executors. Collectively, semantic processors engage in dynamic exchanges of semantic tokens to progressively construct high-utility outputs. We refer to these orchestrated interactions among semantic processors, optimizing and searching in semantic space, as semantic decoding algorithms. This concept draws a direct parallel to the well-studied problem of syntactic decoding, which involves crafting algorithms to best exploit auto-regressive language models for extracting high-utility sequences of syntactic tokens. By focusing on the semantic level and disregarding syntactic details, we gain a fresh perspective on the engineering of AI systems, enabling us to imagine systems with much greater complexity and capabilities. In this position paper, we formalize the transition from syntactic to semantic tokens as well as the analogy between syntactic and semantic decoding. Subsequently, we explore the possibilities of optimizing within the space of semantic tokens via semantic decoding algorithms. We conclude with a list of research opportunities and questions arising from this fresh perspective. The semantic decoding perspective offers a powerful abstraction for search and optimization directly in the space of meaningful concepts, with semantic tokens as the fundamental units of a new type of computation.

new A Chain-of-Thought Prompting Approach with LLMs for Evaluating Students' Formative Assessment Responses in Science

Authors: Clayton Cohn, Nicole Hutchins, Tuan Le, Gautam Biswas

Abstract: This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to score and explain short-answer assessments in K-12 science. While existing methods can score more structured math and computer science assessments, they often do not provide explanations for the scores. Our study focuses on employing GPT-4 for automated assessment in middle school Earth Science, combining few-shot and active learning with chain-of-thought reasoning. Using a human-in-the-loop approach, we successfully score and provide meaningful explanations for formative assessment responses. A systematic analysis of our method's pros and cons sheds light on the potential for human-in-the-loop techniques to enhance automated grading for open-ended science assessments.

new Large Language Models for Multi-Choice Question Classification of Medical Subjects

Authors: V\'ictor Ponce-L\'opez

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether large language models trained on multi-choice question data can be used to discriminate between medical subjects. This is an important and challenging task for automatic question answering. To achieve this goal, we train deep neural networks for multi-class classification of questions into the inferred medical subjects. Using our Multi-Question (MQ) Sequence-BERT method, we outperform the state-of-the-art results on the MedMCQA dataset with an accuracy of 0.68 and 0.60 on their development and test sets, respectively. In this sense, we show the capability of AI and LLMs in particular for multi-classification tasks in the Healthcare domain.

cross OSCaR: Object State Captioning and State Change Representation

Authors: Nguyen Nguyen, Jing Bi, Ali Vosoughi, Yapeng Tian, Pooyan Fazli, Chenliang Xu

Abstract: The capability of intelligent models to extrapolate and comprehend changes in object states is a crucial yet demanding aspect of AI research, particularly through the lens of human interaction in real-world settings. This task involves describing complex visual environments, identifying active objects, and interpreting their changes as conveyed through language. Traditional methods, which isolate object captioning and state change detection, offer a limited view of dynamic environments. Moreover, relying on a small set of symbolic words to represent changes has restricted the expressiveness of the language. To address these challenges, in this paper, we introduce the Object State Captioning and State Change Representation (OSCaR) dataset and benchmark. OSCaR consists of 14,084 annotated video segments with nearly 1,000 unique objects from various egocentric video collections. It sets a new testbed for evaluating multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our experiments demonstrate that while MLLMs show some skill, they lack a full understanding of object state changes. The benchmark includes a fine-tuned model that, despite initial capabilities, requires significant improvements in accuracy and generalization ability for effective understanding of these changes. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/nguyennm1024/OSCaR.

URLs: https://github.com/nguyennm1024/OSCaR.

cross Quantitative Analysis of AI-Generated Texts in Academic Research: A Study of AI Presence in Arxiv Submissions using AI Detection Tool

Authors: Arslan Akram

Abstract: Many people are interested in ChatGPT since it has become a prominent AIGC model that provides high-quality responses in various contexts, such as software development and maintenance. Misuse of ChatGPT might cause significant issues, particularly in public safety and education, despite its immense potential. The majority of researchers choose to publish their work on Arxiv. The effectiveness and originality of future work depend on the ability to detect AI components in such contributions. To address this need, this study will analyze a method that can see purposely manufactured content that academic organizations use to post on Arxiv. For this study, a dataset was created using physics, mathematics, and computer science articles. Using the newly built dataset, the following step is to put originality.ai through its paces. The statistical analysis shows that Originality.ai is very accurate, with a rate of 98%.

cross Measuring Diversity in Co-creative Image Generation

Authors: Francisco Ibarrola, Kazjon Grace

Abstract: Quality and diversity have been proposed as reasonable heuristics for assessing content generated by co-creative systems, but to date there has been little agreement around what constitutes the latter or how to measure it. Proposed approaches for assessing generative models in terms of diversity have limitations in that they compare the model's outputs to a ground truth that in the era of large pre-trained generative models might not be available, or entail an impractical number of computations. We propose an alternative based on entropy of neural network encodings for comparing diversity between sets of images that does not require ground-truth knowledge and is easy to compute. We also compare two pre-trained networks and show how the choice relates to the notion of diversity that we want to evaluate. We conclude with a discussion of the potential applications of these measures for ideation in interactive systems, model evaluation, and more broadly within computational creativity.

cross Bridging Text and Molecule: A Survey on Multimodal Frameworks for Molecule

Authors: Yi Xiao, Xiangxin Zhou, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang

Abstract: Artificial intelligence has demonstrated immense potential in scientific research. Within molecular science, it is revolutionizing the traditional computer-aided paradigm, ushering in a new era of deep learning. With recent progress in multimodal learning and natural language processing, an emerging trend has targeted at building multimodal frameworks to jointly model molecules with textual domain knowledge. In this paper, we present the first systematic survey on multimodal frameworks for molecules research. Specifically,we begin with the development of molecular deep learning and point out the necessity to involve textual modality. Next, we focus on recent advances in text-molecule alignment methods, categorizing current models into two groups based on their architectures and listing relevant pre-training tasks. Furthermore, we delves into the utilization of large language models and prompting techniques for molecular tasks and present significant applications in drug discovery. Finally, we discuss the limitations in this field and highlight several promising directions for future research.

cross SMART: Automatically Scaling Down Language Models with Accuracy Guarantees for Reduced Processing Fees

Authors: Saehan Jo, Immanuel Trummer

Abstract: The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly boosted performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the deployment of high-performance LLMs incurs substantial costs, primarily due to the increased number of parameters aimed at enhancing model performance. This has made the use of state-of-the-art LLMs more expensive for end-users. AI service providers, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, often offer multiple versions of LLMs with varying prices and performance. However, end-users still face challenges in choosing the appropriate LLM for their tasks that balance result quality with cost. We introduce SMART, Scaling Models Adaptively for Reduced Token Fees, a novel LLM framework designed to minimize the inference costs of NLP tasks while ensuring sufficient result quality. It enables users to specify an accuracy constraint in terms of the equivalence of outputs to those of the most powerful LLM. SMART then generates results that deviate from the outputs of this LLM only with a probability below a user-defined threshold. SMART employs a profiling phase that evaluates the performance of multiple LLMs to identify those that meet the user-defined accuracy level. SMART optimizes the tradeoff between profiling overheads and the anticipated cost savings resulting from profiling. Moreover, our approach significantly reduces inference costs by strategically leveraging a mix of LLMs. Our experiments on three real-world datasets show that, based on OpenAI models, SMART achieves significant cost savings, up to 25.6x in comparison to GPT-4.

cross The NeurIPS 2023 Machine Learning for Audio Workshop: Affective Audio Benchmarks and Novel Data

Authors: Alice Baird, Rachel Manzelli, Panagiotis Tzirakis, Chris Gagne, Haoqi Li, Sadie Allen, Sander Dieleman, Brian Kulis, Shrikanth S. Narayanan, Alan Cowen

Abstract: The NeurIPS 2023 Machine Learning for Audio Workshop brings together machine learning (ML) experts from various audio domains. There are several valuable audio-driven ML tasks, from speech emotion recognition to audio event detection, but the community is sparse compared to other ML areas, e.g., computer vision or natural language processing. A major limitation with audio is the available data; with audio being a time-dependent modality, high-quality data collection is time-consuming and costly, making it challenging for academic groups to apply their often state-of-the-art strategies to a larger, more generalizable dataset. In this short white paper, to encourage researchers with limited access to large-datasets, the organizers first outline several open-source datasets that are available to the community, and for the duration of the workshop are making several propriety datasets available. Namely, three vocal datasets, Hume-Prosody, Hume-VocalBurst, an acted emotional speech dataset Modulate-Sonata, and an in-game streamer dataset Modulate-Stream. We outline the current baselines on these datasets but encourage researchers from across audio to utilize them outside of the initial baseline tasks.

cross M3: A Multi-Task Mixed-Objective Learning Framework for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Dense Sentence Retrieval

Authors: Yang Bai, Anthony Colas, Christan Grant, Daisy Zhe Wang

Abstract: In recent research, contrastive learning has proven to be a highly effective method for representation learning and is widely used for dense retrieval. However, we identify that relying solely on contrastive learning can lead to suboptimal retrieval performance. On the other hand, despite many retrieval datasets supporting various learning objectives beyond contrastive learning, combining them efficiently in multi-task learning scenarios can be challenging. In this paper, we introduce M3, an advanced recursive Multi-hop dense sentence retrieval system built upon a novel Multi-task Mixed-objective approach for dense text representation learning, addressing the aforementioned challenges. Our approach yields state-of-the-art performance on a large-scale open-domain fact verification benchmark dataset, FEVER. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/TonyBY/M3

URLs: https://github.com/TonyBY/M3

cross A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants

Authors: Mina Lee, Katy Ilonka Gero, John Joon Young Chung, Simon Buckingham Shum, Vipul Raheja, Hua Shen, Subhashini Venugopalan, Thiemo Wambsganss, David Zhou, Emad A. Alghamdi, Tal August, Avinash Bhat, Madiha Zahrah Choksi, Senjuti Dutta, Jin L. C. Guo, Md Naimul Hoque, Yewon Kim, Seyed Parsa Neshaei, Agnia Sergeyuk, Antonette Shibani, Disha Shrivastava, Lila Shroff, Jessi Stark, Sarah Sterman, Sitong Wang, Antoine Bosselut, Daniel Buschek, Joseph Chee Chang, Sherol Chen, Max Kreminski, Joonsuk Park, Roy Pea, Eugenia H. Rho, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Pao Siangliulue

Abstract: In our era of rapid technological advancement, the research landscape for writing assistants has become increasingly fragmented across various research communities. We seek to address this challenge by proposing a design space as a structured way to examine and explore the multidimensional space of intelligent and interactive writing assistants. Through a large community collaboration, we explore five aspects of writing assistants: task, user, technology, interaction, and ecosystem. Within each aspect, we define dimensions (i.e., fundamental components of an aspect) and codes (i.e., potential options for each dimension) by systematically reviewing 115 papers. Our design space aims to offer researchers and designers a practical tool to navigate, comprehend, and compare the various possibilities of writing assistants, and aid in the envisioning and design of new writing assistants.

cross C-TPT: Calibrated Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models via Text Feature Dispersion

Authors: Hee Suk Yoon, Eunseop Yoon, Joshua Tian Jin Tee, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Yingzhen Li, Chang D. Yoo

Abstract: In deep learning, test-time adaptation has gained attention as a method for model fine-tuning without the need for labeled data. A prime exemplification is the recently proposed test-time prompt tuning for large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP. Unfortunately, these prompts have been mainly developed to improve accuracy, overlooking the importance of calibration-a crucial aspect for quantifying prediction uncertainty. However, traditional calibration methods rely on substantial amounts of labeled data, making them impractical for test-time scenarios. To this end, this paper explores calibration during test-time prompt tuning by leveraging the inherent properties of CLIP. Through a series of observations, we find that the prompt choice significantly affects the calibration in CLIP, where the prompts leading to higher text feature dispersion result in better-calibrated predictions. Introducing the Average Text Feature Dispersion (ATFD), we establish its relationship with calibration error and present a novel method, Calibrated Test-time Prompt Tuning (C-TPT), for optimizing prompts during test-time with enhanced calibration. Through extensive experiments on different CLIP architectures and datasets, we show that C-TPT can effectively improve the calibration of test-time prompt tuning without needing labeled data.

cross A Unified Framework for Model Editing

Authors: Akshat Gupta, Dev Sajnani, Gopala Anumanchipalli

Abstract: Model editing is a growing area focused on updating the knowledge embedded within models. Among the various methodologies, ROME and MEMIT stand out as leading "locate-and-edit" model editing techniques. While MEMIT enables batched editing of memories, ROME is limited to changing one fact at a time. This paper introduces a unifying framework that brings ROME and MEMIT under a single conceptual umbrella, optimizing for the same goal, which we call the "preservation-memorization" objective. This objective aims to preserve the representations of certain selected vectors while memorizing the representations of new factual information. Specifically, ROME optimizes this objective using an equality constraint, whereas MEMIT employs a more flexible least-square constraint. In addition to making batched edits, MEMIT also edits the model at multiple layers. We disentangle the distribution of edits to multiple layers from the optimization objective of MEMIT and show that these edit-distribution algorithms should be considered separate entities worthy of their own line of research. Finally, we present EMMET - an Equality-constrained Mass Model Editing algorithm for Transformers, a new batched memory-editing algorithm. With EMMET, we present a closed form solution for the equality-constrained version of the preservation-memorization objective. We show that EMMET is able to perform batched-edits on par with MEMIT up to a batch-size of 256 and discuss the challenges in stabilizing EMMET. By articulating the "locate-and-edit" model editing algorithms under a simple conceptual framework of "preservation-memorization", we aim to bridge the gap between intuition and mathematics and hope to simplify the journey for future researchers in model editing.

cross Scene-Graph ViT: End-to-End Open-Vocabulary Visual Relationship Detection

Authors: Tim Salzmann, Markus Ryll, Alex Bewley, Matthias Minderer

Abstract: Visual relationship detection aims to identify objects and their relationships in images. Prior methods approach this task by adding separate relationship modules or decoders to existing object detection architectures. This separation increases complexity and hinders end-to-end training, which limits performance. We propose a simple and highly efficient decoder-free architecture for open-vocabulary visual relationship detection. Our model consists of a Transformer-based image encoder that represents objects as tokens and models their relationships implicitly. To extract relationship information, we introduce an attention mechanism that selects object pairs likely to form a relationship. We provide a single-stage recipe to train this model on a mixture of object and relationship detection data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art relationship detection performance on Visual Genome and on the large-vocabulary GQA benchmark at real-time inference speeds. We provide analyses of zero-shot performance, ablations, and real-world qualitative examples.

cross $\nabla \tau$: Gradient-based and Task-Agnostic machine Unlearning

Authors: Daniel Trippa, Cesare Campagnano, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Gabriele Tolomei, Fabrizio Silvestri

Abstract: Machine Unlearning, the process of selectively eliminating the influence of certain data examples used during a model's training, has gained significant attention as a means for practitioners to comply with recent data protection regulations. However, existing unlearning methods face critical drawbacks, including their prohibitively high cost, often associated with a large number of hyperparameters, and the limitation of forgetting only relatively small data portions. This often makes retraining the model from scratch a quicker and more effective solution. In this study, we introduce Gradient-based and Task-Agnostic machine Unlearning ($\nabla \tau$), an optimization framework designed to remove the influence of a subset of training data efficiently. It applies adaptive gradient ascent to the data to be forgotten while using standard gradient descent for the remaining data. $\nabla \tau$ offers multiple benefits over existing approaches. It enables the unlearning of large sections of the training dataset (up to 30%). It is versatile, supporting various unlearning tasks (such as subset forgetting or class removal) and applicable across different domains (images, text, etc.). Importantly, $\nabla \tau$ requires no hyperparameter adjustments, making it a more appealing option than retraining the model from scratch. We evaluate our framework's effectiveness using a set of well-established Membership Inference Attack metrics, demonstrating up to 10% enhancements in performance compared to state-of-the-art methods without compromising the original model's accuracy.

cross XLAVS-R: Cross-Lingual Audio-Visual Speech Representation Learning for Noise-Robust Speech Perception

Authors: HyoJung Han, Mohamed Anwar, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu, Marine Carpuat, Bowen Shi, Changhan Wang

Abstract: Speech recognition and translation systems perform poorly on noisy inputs, which are frequent in realistic environments. Augmenting these systems with visual signals has the potential to improve robustness to noise. However, audio-visual (AV) data is only available in limited amounts and for fewer languages than audio-only resources. To address this gap, we present XLAVS-R, a cross-lingual audio-visual speech representation model for noise-robust speech recognition and translation in over 100 languages. It is designed to maximize the benefits of limited multilingual AV pre-training data, by building on top of audio-only multilingual pre-training and simplifying existing pre-training schemes. Extensive evaluation on the MuAViC benchmark shows the strength of XLAVS-R on downstream audio-visual speech recognition and translation tasks, where it outperforms the previous state of the art by up to 18.5% WER and 4.7 BLEU given noisy AV inputs, and enables strong zero-shot audio-visual ability with audio-only fine-tuning.

cross Language Models Can Reduce Asymmetry in Information Markets

Authors: Nasim Rahaman, Martin Weiss, Manuel W\"uthrich, Yoshua Bengio, Li Erran Li, Chris Pal, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf

Abstract: This work addresses the buyer's inspection paradox for information markets. The paradox is that buyers need to access information to determine its value, while sellers need to limit access to prevent theft. To study this, we introduce an open-source simulated digital marketplace where intelligent agents, powered by language models, buy and sell information on behalf of external participants. The central mechanism enabling this marketplace is the agents' dual capabilities: they not only have the capacity to assess the quality of privileged information but also come equipped with the ability to forget. This ability to induce amnesia allows vendors to grant temporary access to proprietary information, significantly reducing the risk of unauthorized retention while enabling agents to accurately gauge the information's relevance to specific queries or tasks. To perform well, agents must make rational decisions, strategically explore the marketplace through generated sub-queries, and synthesize answers from purchased information. Concretely, our experiments (a) uncover biases in language models leading to irrational behavior and evaluate techniques to mitigate these biases, (b) investigate how price affects demand in the context of informational goods, and (c) show that inspection and higher budgets both lead to higher quality outcomes.

cross Towards Single-System Illusion in Software-Defined Vehicles -- Automated, AI-Powered Workflow

Authors: Krzysztof Lebioda, Viktor Vorobev, Nenad Petrovic, Fengjunjie Pan, Vahid Zolfaghari, Alois Knoll

Abstract: We propose a novel model- and feature-based approach to development of vehicle software systems, where the end architecture is not explicitly defined. Instead, it emerges from an iterative process of search and optimization given certain constraints, requirements and hardware architecture, while retaining the property of single-system illusion, where applications run in a logically uniform environment. One of the key points of the presented approach is the inclusion of modern generative AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), in the loop. With the recent advances in the field, we expect that the LLMs will be able to assist in processing of requirements, generation of formal system models, as well as generation of software deployment specification and test code. The resulting pipeline is automated to a large extent, with feedback being generated at each step.

cross Recourse for reclamation: Chatting with generative language models

Authors: Jennifer Chien, Kevin R. McKee, Jackie Kay, William Isaac

Abstract: Researchers and developers increasingly rely on toxicity scoring to moderate generative language model outputs, in settings such as customer service, information retrieval, and content generation. However, toxicity scoring may render pertinent information inaccessible, rigidify or "value-lock" cultural norms, and prevent language reclamation processes, particularly for marginalized people. In this work, we extend the concept of algorithmic recourse to generative language models: we provide users a novel mechanism to achieve their desired prediction by dynamically setting thresholds for toxicity filtering. Users thereby exercise increased agency relative to interactions with the baseline system. A pilot study ($n = 30$) supports the potential of our proposed recourse mechanism, indicating improvements in usability compared to fixed-threshold toxicity-filtering of model outputs. Future work should explore the intersection of toxicity scoring, model controllability, user agency, and language reclamation processes -- particularly with regard to the bias that many communities encounter when interacting with generative language models.

cross ReAct Meets ActRe: Autonomous Annotations of Agent Trajectories for Contrastive Self-Training

Authors: Zonghan Yang, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Yang Liu

Abstract: Language agents have demonstrated autonomous decision-making abilities by reasoning with foundation models. Recently, efforts have been made to train language agents for performance improvement, with multi-step reasoning and action trajectories as the training data. However, collecting such trajectories still requires considerable human effort, by either artificial annotations or implementations of diverse prompting frameworks. In this work, we propose A$^3$T, a framework that enables the Autonomous Annotation of Agent Trajectories in the style of ReAct. The central role is an ActRe prompting agent, which explains the reason for an arbitrary action. When randomly sampling an external action, the ReAct-style agent could query the ActRe agent with the action to obtain its textual rationales. Novel trajectories are then synthesized by prepending the posterior reasoning from ActRe to the sampled action. In this way, the ReAct-style agent executes multiple trajectories for the failed tasks, and selects the successful ones to supplement its failed trajectory for contrastive self-training. Realized by policy gradient methods with binarized rewards, the contrastive self-training with accumulated trajectories facilitates a closed loop for multiple rounds of language agent self-improvement. We conduct experiments using QLoRA fine-tuning with the open-sourced Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2. In AlfWorld, the agent trained with A$^3$T obtains a 1-shot success rate of 96%, and 100% success with 4 iterative rounds. In WebShop, the 1-shot performance of the A$^3$T agent matches human average, and 4 rounds of iterative refinement lead to the performance approaching human experts. A$^3$T agents significantly outperform existing techniques, including prompting with GPT-4, advanced agent frameworks, and fully fine-tuned LLMs.

cross MathVerse: Does Your Multi-modal LLM Truly See the Diagrams in Visual Math Problems?

Authors: Renrui Zhang, Dongzhi Jiang, Yichi Zhang, Haokun Lin, Ziyu Guo, Pengshuo Qiu, Aojun Zhou, Pan Lu, Kai-Wei Chang, Peng Gao, Hongsheng Li

Abstract: The remarkable progress of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has garnered unparalleled attention, due to their superior performance in visual contexts. However, their capabilities in visual math problem-solving remain insufficiently evaluated and understood. We investigate current benchmarks to incorporate excessive visual content within textual questions, which potentially assist MLLMs in deducing answers without truly interpreting the input diagrams. To this end, we introduce MathVerse, an all-around visual math benchmark designed for an equitable and in-depth evaluation of MLLMs. We meticulously collect 2,612 high-quality, multi-subject math problems with diagrams from publicly available sources. Each problem is then transformed by human annotators into six distinct versions, each offering varying degrees of information content in multi-modality, contributing to 15K test samples in total. This approach allows MathVerse to comprehensively assess whether and how much MLLMs can truly understand the visual diagrams for mathematical reasoning. In addition, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy for a fine-grained assessment of the output answers. Rather than naively judging True or False, we employ GPT-4(V) to adaptively extract crucial reasoning steps, and then score each step with detailed error analysis, which can reveal the intermediate CoT reasoning quality by MLLMs. We hope the MathVerse benchmark may provide unique insights to guide the future development of MLLMs. Project page: https://mathverse-cuhk.github.io

URLs: https://mathverse-cuhk.github.io

replace Pre-training Language Model Incorporating Domain-specific Heterogeneous Knowledge into A Unified Representation

Authors: Hongyin Zhu, Hao Peng, Zhiheng Lyu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Jinghui Xiao

Abstract: Existing technologies expand BERT from different perspectives, e.g. designing different pre-training tasks, different semantic granularities, and different model architectures. Few models consider expanding BERT from different text formats. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous knowledge language model (\textbf{HKLM}), a unified pre-trained language model (PLM) for all forms of text, including unstructured text, semi-structured text, and well-structured text. To capture the corresponding relations among these multi-format knowledge, our approach uses masked language model objective to learn word knowledge, uses triple classification objective and title matching objective to learn entity knowledge and topic knowledge respectively. To obtain the aforementioned multi-format text, we construct a corpus in the tourism domain and conduct experiments on 5 tourism NLP datasets. The results show that our approach outperforms the pre-training of plain text using only 1/4 of the data. We further pre-train the domain-agnostic HKLM and achieve performance gains on the XNLI dataset.

replace Multi-Scale Contrastive Knowledge Co-Distillation for Event Temporal Relation Extraction

Authors: Hao-Ren Yao, Luke Breitfeller, Aakanksha Naik, Chunxiao Zhou, Carolyn Rose

Abstract: Event Temporal Relation Extraction (ETRE) is a crucial yet challenging problem. Event pairs are situated within a discourse at different distances, which we refer to as proximity bands. The temporal ordering communicated about event pairs situated at more remote (i.e., ``long'') or less remote (i.e., ``short'') proximity bands is encoded differently. SOTA ETRE models have tended to perform well on events situated at either short or long proximity bands, but not both. Yet, real-world, natural texts contain all types of temporal event-pairs. In this paper, we present MulCo: Multi-Scale Contrastive Knowledge Co-Distillation, a fusion approach that shares knowledge across multiple event pair proximity bands in order to improve performance on all types of temporal datasets. Our experimental results show that MulCo successfully integrates linguistic cues pertaining to temporal reasoning across both short and long proximity bands and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several ETRE benchmark datasets.

replace Effective Structured Prompting by Meta-Learning and Representative Verbalizer

Authors: Weisen Jiang, Yu Zhang, James T. Kwok

Abstract: Prompt tuning for pre-trained masked language models (MLM) has shown promising performance in natural language processing tasks with few labeled examples. It tunes a prompt for the downstream task, and a verbalizer is used to bridge the predicted token and label prediction. Due to the limited training data, prompt initialization is crucial for prompt tuning. Recently, MetaPrompting (Hou et al., 2022) uses meta-learning to learn a shared initialization for all task-specific prompts. However, a single initialization is insufficient to obtain good prompts for all tasks and samples when the tasks are complex. Moreover, MetaPrompting requires tuning the whole MLM, causing a heavy burden on computation and memory as the MLM is usually large. To address these issues, we use a prompt pool to extract more task knowledge and construct instance-dependent prompts via attention. We further propose a novel soft verbalizer (RepVerb) which constructs label embedding from feature embeddings directly. Combining meta-learning the prompt pool and RepVerb, we propose MetaPrompter for effective structured prompting. MetaPrompter is parameter-efficient as only the pool is required to be tuned. Experimental results demonstrate that MetaPrompter performs better than the recent state-of-the-arts and RepVerb outperforms existing soft verbalizers.

replace Pluggable Neural Machine Translation Models via Memory-augmented Adapters

Authors: Yuzhuang Xu, Shuo Wang, Peng Li, Xuebo Liu, Xiaolong Wang, Weidong Liu, Yang Liu

Abstract: Although neural machine translation (NMT) models perform well in the general domain, it remains rather challenging to control their generation behavior to satisfy the requirement of different users. Given the expensive training cost and the data scarcity challenge of learning a new model from scratch for each user requirement, we propose a memory-augmented adapter to steer pretrained NMT models in a pluggable manner. Specifically, we construct a multi-granular memory based on the user-provided text samples and propose a new adapter architecture to combine the model representations and the retrieved results. We also propose a training strategy using memory dropout to reduce spurious dependencies between the NMT model and the memory. We validate our approach on both style- and domain-specific experiments and the results indicate that our method can outperform several representative pluggable baselines.

replace Metacognitive Prompting Improves Understanding in Large Language Models

Authors: Yuqing Wang, Yun Zhao

Abstract: In Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been consistent advancements in task-specific performance, largely influenced by effective prompt design. Recent advancements in prompting have enhanced reasoning in logic-intensive tasks for LLMs, yet the nuanced understanding abilities of these models, crucial for processing and interpreting complex information, remain underexplored. In this study, we introduce Metacognitive Prompting (MP), a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes. Using MP, LLMs undergo a systematic series of structured, self-aware evaluations, drawing on both their vast inherent knowledge and new insights. We conduct extensive experiments on four prevalent LLMs: Llama2, PaLM2, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, across ten natural language understanding (NLU) datasets from GLUE, SuperGLUE, BLUE, and LexGLUE benchmarks. Additionally, we compare our method with chain-of-thought prompting and its advanced versions. The results show that GPT-4 consistently excels across all tasks, while other models have shown significant progress in some tasks when used in conjunction with MP. Furthermore, MP consistently outperforms existing prompting methods in both general and domain-specific NLU tasks. This study underscores the potential to amplify the understanding abilities of LLMs and highlights the benefits of mirroring human introspective reasoning in NLU tasks.

replace Reranking Passages with Coarse-to-Fine Neural Retriever Enhanced by List-Context Information

Authors: Hongyin Zhu

Abstract: Passage reranking is a critical task in various applications, particularly when dealing with large volumes of documents. Existing neural architectures have limitations in retrieving the most relevant passage for a given question because the semantics of the segmented passages are often incomplete, and they typically match the question to each passage individually, rarely considering contextual information from other passages that could provide comparative and reference information. This paper presents a list-context attention mechanism to augment the passage representation by incorporating the list-context information from other candidates. The proposed coarse-to-fine (C2F) neural retriever addresses the out-of-memory limitation of the passage attention mechanism by dividing the list-context modeling process into two sub-processes with a cache policy learning algorithm, enabling the efficient encoding of context information from a large number of candidate answers. This method can be generally used to encode context information from any number of candidate answers in one pass. Different from most multi-stage information retrieval architectures, this model integrates the coarse and fine rankers into the joint optimization process, allowing for feedback between the two layers to update the model simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

replace RoDia: A New Dataset for Romanian Dialect Identification from Speech

Authors: Codrut Rotaru, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Radu Tudor Ionescu

Abstract: We introduce RoDia, the first dataset for Romanian dialect identification from speech. The RoDia dataset includes a varied compilation of speech samples from five distinct regions of Romania, covering both urban and rural environments, totaling 2 hours of manually annotated speech data. Along with our dataset, we introduce a set of competitive models to be used as baselines for future research. The top scoring model achieves a macro F1 score of 59.83% and a micro F1 score of 62.08%, indicating that the task is challenging. We thus believe that RoDia is a valuable resource that will stimulate research aiming to address the challenges of Romanian dialect identification. We release our dataset at https://github.com/codrut2/RoDia.

URLs: https://github.com/codrut2/RoDia.

replace Facilitating NSFW Text Detection in Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Huachuan Qiu, Shuai Zhang, Hongliang He, Anqi Li, Zhenzhong Lan

Abstract: NSFW (Not Safe for Work) content, in the context of a dialogue, can have severe side effects on users in open-domain dialogue systems. However, research on detecting NSFW language, especially sexually explicit content, within a dialogue context has significantly lagged behind. To address this issue, we introduce CensorChat, a dialogue monitoring dataset aimed at NSFW dialogue detection. Leveraging knowledge distillation techniques involving GPT-4 and ChatGPT, this dataset offers a cost-effective means of constructing NSFW content detectors. The process entails collecting real-life human-machine interaction data and breaking it down into single utterances and single-turn dialogues, with the chatbot delivering the final utterance. ChatGPT is employed to annotate unlabeled data, serving as a training set. Rationale validation and test sets are constructed using ChatGPT and GPT-4 as annotators, with a self-criticism strategy for resolving discrepancies in labeling. A BERT model is fine-tuned as a text classifier on pseudo-labeled data, and its performance is assessed. The study emphasizes the importance of AI systems prioritizing user safety and well-being in digital conversations while respecting freedom of expression. The proposed approach not only advances NSFW content detection but also aligns with evolving user protection needs in AI-driven dialogues.

replace Sequence-to-Sequence Spanish Pre-trained Language Models

Authors: Vladimir Araujo, Maria Mihaela Trusca, Rodrigo Tufi\~no, Marie-Francine Moens

Abstract: In recent years, significant advancements in pre-trained language models have driven the creation of numerous non-English language variants, with a particular emphasis on encoder-only and decoder-only architectures. While Spanish language models based on BERT and GPT have demonstrated proficiency in natural language understanding and generation, there remains a noticeable scarcity of encoder-decoder models explicitly designed for sequence-to-sequence tasks, which aim to map input sequences to generate output sequences conditionally. This paper breaks new ground by introducing the implementation and evaluation of renowned encoder-decoder architectures exclusively pre-trained on Spanish corpora. Specifically, we present Spanish versions of BART, T5, and BERT2BERT-style models and subject them to a comprehensive assessment across various sequence-to-sequence tasks, including summarization, question answering, split-and-rephrase, dialogue, and translation. Our findings underscore the competitive performance of all models, with the BART- and T5-based models emerging as top performers across all tasks. We have made all models publicly available to the research community to foster future explorations and advancements in Spanish NLP: https://github.com/vgaraujov/Seq2Seq-Spanish-PLMs.

URLs: https://github.com/vgaraujov/Seq2Seq-Spanish-PLMs.

replace SignBank+: Preparing a Multilingual Sign Language Dataset for Machine Translation Using Large Language Models

Authors: Amit Moryossef, Zifan Jiang

Abstract: We introduce SignBank+, a clean version of the SignBank dataset, optimized for machine translation between spoken language text and SignWriting, a phonetic sign language writing system. In addition to previous work that employs complex factorization techniques to enable translation between text and SignWriting, we show that a traditional text-to-text translation approach performs equally effectively on the cleaned SignBank+ dataset. Our evaluation results indicate that models trained on SignBank+ surpass those on the original dataset, establishing a new benchmark for SignWriting-based sign language translation and providing an open resource for future research.

replace Detecting Sexual Content at the Sentence Level in First Millennium Latin Texts

Authors: Thibault Cl\'erice (ALMAnaCH, CJM)

Abstract: In this study, we propose to evaluate the use of deep learning methods for semantic classification at the sentence level to accelerate the process of corpus building in the field of humanities and linguistics, a traditional and time-consuming task. We introduce a novel corpus comprising around 2500 sentences spanning from 300 BCE to 900 CE including sexual semantics (medical, erotica, etc.). We evaluate various sentence classification approaches and different input embedding layers, and show that all consistently outperform simple token-based searches. We explore the integration of idiolectal and sociolectal metadata embeddings (centuries, author, type of writing), but find that it leads to overfitting. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, achieving high precision and true positive rates (TPR) of respectively 70.60% and 86.33% using HAN. We evaluate the impact of the dataset size on the model performances (420 instead of 2013), and show that, while our models perform worse, they still offer a high enough precision and TPR, even without MLM, respectively 69% and 51%. Given the result, we provide an analysis of the attention mechanism as a supporting added value for humanists in order to produce more data.

replace AutoDAN: Generating Stealthy Jailbreak Prompts on Aligned Large Language Models

Authors: Xiaogeng Liu, Nan Xu, Muhao Chen, Chaowei Xiao

Abstract: The aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful language understanding and decision-making tools that are created through extensive alignment with human feedback. However, these large models remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to elicit malicious outputs that should not be given by aligned LLMs. Investigating jailbreak prompts can lead us to delve into the limitations of LLMs and further guide us to secure them. Unfortunately, existing jailbreak techniques suffer from either (1) scalability issues, where attacks heavily rely on manual crafting of prompts, or (2) stealthiness problems, as attacks depend on token-based algorithms to generate prompts that are often semantically meaningless, making them susceptible to detection through basic perplexity testing. In light of these challenges, we intend to answer this question: Can we develop an approach that can automatically generate stealthy jailbreak prompts? In this paper, we introduce AutoDAN, a novel jailbreak attack against aligned LLMs. AutoDAN can automatically generate stealthy jailbreak prompts by the carefully designed hierarchical genetic algorithm. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that AutoDAN not only automates the process while preserving semantic meaningfulness, but also demonstrates superior attack strength in cross-model transferability, and cross-sample universality compared with the baseline. Moreover, we also compare AutoDAN with perplexity-based defense methods and show that AutoDAN can bypass them effectively.

replace Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification

Authors: Jian Guan, Jesse Dodge, David Wadden, Minlie Huang, Hao Peng

Abstract: Recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) owes much to remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, LLMs frequently "hallucinate," resulting in non-factual outputs. Our carefully-designed human evaluation substantiates the serious hallucination issue, revealing that even GPT-3.5 produces factual outputs less than 25% of the time. This underscores the importance of fact verifiers in order to measure and incentivize progress. Our systematic investigation affirms that LLMs can be repurposed as effective fact verifiers with strong correlations with human judgments. Surprisingly, FLAN-T5-11B, the least factual generator in our study, performs the best as a fact verifier, even outperforming more capable LLMs like GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Delving deeper, we analyze the reliance of these LLMs on high-quality evidence, as well as their deficiencies in robustness and generalization ability. Our study presents insights for developing trustworthy generation models.

replace Evaluating, Understanding, and Improving Constrained Text Generation for Large Language Models

Authors: Xiang Chen, Xiaojun Wan

Abstract: Advancements in natural language generation (NLG) and large language models (LLMs) have led to proficient text generation in various tasks. However, integrating intricate constraints into neural text generation, due to LLMs' opacity, remains challenging. This study investigates constrained text generation for LLMs, where predefined constraints are applied during LLM's generation process. Our research mainly focuses on mainstream open-source LLMs, categorizing constraints into lexical, structural, and relation-based types. We also present various benchmarks to facilitate fair evaluation. The study addresses some key research questions, including evaluating, understanding and improving constrained text generation for LLMs. Results illuminate LLMs' capacity and deficiency to incorporate constraints and provide insights for future developments in constrained text generation. Codes and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

replace Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method

Authors: Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, recent literature reveals that LLMs generate nonfactual responses intermittently, which impedes the LLMs' reliability for further utilization. In this paper, we propose a novel self-detection method to detect which questions that a LLM does not know that are prone to generate nonfactual results. Specifically, we first diversify the textual expressions for a given question and collect the corresponding answers. Then we examine the divergencies between the generated answers to identify the questions that the model may generate falsehoods. All of the above steps can be accomplished by prompting the LLMs themselves without referring to any other external resources. We conduct comprehensive experiments and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on recently released LLMs, e.g., Vicuna, ChatGPT, and GPT-4.

replace Self-Improving for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

Authors: Tingyu Xie, Qi Li, Yan Zhang, Zuozhu Liu, Hongwei Wang

Abstract: Exploring the application of powerful large language models (LLMs) on the named entity recognition (NER) task has drawn much attention recently. This work pushes the performance boundary of zero-shot NER with LLMs by proposing a training-free self-improving framework, which utilizes an unlabeled corpus to stimulate the self-learning ability of LLMs. First, we use the LLM to make predictions on the unlabeled corpus using self-consistency and obtain a self-annotated dataset. Second, we explore various strategies to select reliable annotations to form a reliable self-annotated dataset. Finally, for each test input, we retrieve demonstrations from the reliable self-annotated dataset and perform inference via in-context learning. Experiments on four benchmarks show substantial performance improvements achieved by our framework. Through comprehensive experimental analysis, we find that increasing the size of unlabeled corpus or iterations of self-improving does not guarantee further improvement, but the performance might be boosted via more advanced strategies for reliable annotation selection. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Emma1066/Self-Improve-Zero-Shot-NER

URLs: https://github.com/Emma1066/Self-Improve-Zero-Shot-NER

replace TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables

Authors: Tianshu Zhang, Xiang Yue, Yifei Li, Huan Sun

Abstract: Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 5-44 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model's generalizability. We open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.

replace CoachLM: Automatic Instruction Revisions Improve the Data Quality in LLM Instruction Tuning

Authors: Yilun Liu, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Ming Zhu, Wenbing Ma, Junhao Zhu, Chang Su, Yutai Hou, Miao Zhang, Min Zhang, Hongxia Ma, Li Zhang, Hao Yang, Yanfei Jiang

Abstract: Instruction tuning is crucial for enabling Language Learning Models (LLMs) in responding to human instructions. The quality of instruction pairs used for tuning greatly affects the performance of LLMs. However, the manual creation of high-quality instruction datasets is costly, leading to the adoption of automatic generation of instruction pairs by LLMs as a popular alternative. To ensure the high quality of LLM-generated instruction datasets, several approaches have been proposed. Nevertheless, existing methods either compromise dataset integrity by filtering a large proportion of samples, or are unsuitable for industrial applications. In this paper, instead of discarding low-quality samples, we propose CoachLM, a novel approach to enhance the quality of instruction datasets through automatic revisions on samples in the dataset. CoachLM is trained from the samples revised by human experts and significantly increases the proportion of high-quality samples in the dataset from 17.7% to 78.9%. The effectiveness of CoachLM is further assessed on various real-world instruction test sets. The results show that CoachLM improves the instruction-following capabilities of the instruction-tuned LLM by an average of 29.9%, which even surpasses larger LLMs with nearly twice the number of parameters. Furthermore, CoachLM is successfully deployed in a data management system for LLMs at Huawei, resulting in an efficiency improvement of up to 20% in the cleaning of 40k real-world instruction pairs. We release various assets of CoachLM, including the training data, code and test set (https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

URLs: https://github.com/lunyiliu/CoachLM).

replace Generating Explanations to Understand and Repair Embedding-based Entity Alignment

Authors: Xiaobin Tian, Zequn Sun, Wei Hu

Abstract: Entity alignment (EA) seeks identical entities in different knowledge graphs, which is a long-standing task in the database research. Recent work leverages deep learning to embed entities in vector space and align them via nearest neighbor search. Although embedding-based EA has gained marked success in recent years, it lacks explanations for alignment decisions. In this paper, we present the first framework that can generate explanations for understanding and repairing embedding-based EA results. Given an EA pair produced by an embedding model, we first compare its neighbor entities and relations to build a matching subgraph as a local explanation. We then construct an alignment dependency graph to understand the pair from an abstract perspective. Finally, we repair the pair by resolving three types of alignment conflicts based on dependency graphs. Experiments on a variety of EA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, generalization, and robustness of our framework in explaining and repairing embedding-based EA results.

replace DenseFormer: Enhancing Information Flow in Transformers via Depth Weighted Averaging

Authors: Matteo Pagliardini, Amirkeivan Mohtashami, Francois Fleuret, Martin Jaggi

Abstract: The transformer architecture by Vaswani et al. (2017) is now ubiquitous across application domains, from natural language processing to speech processing and image understanding. We propose DenseFormer, a simple modification to the standard architecture that improves the perplexity of the model without increasing its size -- adding a few thousand parameters for large-scale models in the 100B parameters range. Our approach relies on an additional averaging step after each transformer block, which computes a weighted average of current and past representations -- we refer to this operation as Depth-Weighted-Average (DWA). The learned DWA weights exhibit coherent patterns of information flow, revealing the strong and structured reuse of activations from distant layers. Experiments demonstrate that DenseFormer is more data efficient, reaching the same perplexity of much deeper transformer models, and that for the same perplexity, these new models outperform transformer baselines in terms of memory efficiency and inference time.

replace EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models

Authors: Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Yida Xue, Runnan Fang, Kangwei Liu, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen

Abstract: In recent years, instruction tuning has gained increasing attention and emerged as a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). To construct high-quality instruction datasets, many instruction processing approaches have been proposed, aiming to achieve a delicate balance between data quantity and data quality. Nevertheless, due to inconsistencies that persist among various instruction processing methods, there is no standard open-source instruction processing implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from further developing and advancing. To facilitate instruction processing research and development, we present EasyInstruct, an easy-to-use instruction processing framework for LLMs, which modularizes instruction generation, selection, and prompting, while also considering their combination and interaction. EasyInstruct is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct, along with an online demo app and a demo video for quick-start, calling for broader research centered on instruction data and synthetic data.

URLs: https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct,

replace ANLS* -- A Universal Document Processing Metric for Generative Large Language Models

Authors: David Peer, Philemon Sch\"opf, Volckmar Nebendahl, Alexander Rietzler, Sebastian Stabinger

Abstract: Traditionally, discriminative models have been the predominant choice for tasks like document classification and information extraction. These models make predictions that fall into a limited number of predefined classes, facilitating a binary true or false evaluation and enabling the direct calculation of metrics such as the F1 score. However, recent advancements in generative large language models (GLLMs) have prompted a shift in the field due to their enhanced zero-shot capabilities, which eliminate the need for a downstream dataset and computationally expensive fine-tuning. However, evaluating GLLMs presents a challenge as the binary true or false evaluation used for discriminative models is not applicable to the predictions made by GLLMs. This paper introduces a new metric for generative models called ANLS* for evaluating a wide variety of tasks, including information extraction and classification tasks. The ANLS* metric extends existing ANLS metrics as a drop-in-replacement and is still compatible with previously reported ANLS scores. An evaluation of 7 different datasets, 6 different GLLMs and 3 different prompting methods using the ANLS* metric is also provided, demonstrating the importance of the proposed metric. We also benchmark a novel approach to generate prompts for documents, called SFT, against other prompting techniques such as LATIN. In 27 out of 35 cases, SFT outperforms other techniques and improves the state-of-the-art, sometimes by as much as $18$ percentage points. Sources are available at https://github.com/deepopinion/anls_star_metric

URLs: https://github.com/deepopinion/anls_star_metric

replace LLMs and the Human Condition

Authors: Peter Wallis

Abstract: This paper presents three established theories of human decision-making and describes how they can be integrated to provide a model of purposive human action. Taking seriously the idea of language as action the model is then applied to the conversational user interfaces. Theory based AI research has had a hard time recently and the aim here is to revitalise interest in understanding what LLMs are actually doing other than running poorly understood machine learning routines over all the data the relevant Big Tech company can hoover up. When a raspberry pi computer for under 50USD is up to 400 times faster than the first commercial Cray super computer~\cite{crayVpi}, Big Tech can get really close to having an infinite number of monkeys typing at random and producing text, some of which will make sense. By understanding where ChatGPT's apparent intelligence comes from, perhaps we can perform the magic with fewer resources and at the same time gain some understanding about our relationship with our world.

replace Assessing the Reasoning Abilities of ChatGPT in the Context of Claim Verification

Authors: John Dougrez-Lewis, Mahmud Elahi Akhter, Yulan He, Maria Liakata

Abstract: The reasoning capabilities of LLMs are currently hotly debated. We examine the issue from the perspective of claim/rumour verification. We propose the first logical reasoning framework designed to break down any claim or rumour paired with evidence into the atomic reasoning steps necessary for verification. Based on our framework, we curate two annotated collections of such claim/evidence pairs: a synthetic dataset from Wikipedia and a real-world set stemming from rumours circulating on Twitter. We use them to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 (hereinafter referred to as ChatGPT) within the context of our framework, providing a thorough analysis. Our results show that ChatGPT struggles in abductive reasoning, although this can be somewhat mitigated by using manual Chain of Thought (CoT) as opposed to Zero-Shot (ZS) and ZS CoT approaches. Our study contributes to the growing body of research suggesting that ChatGPT's reasoning processes are unlikely to mirror human-like reasoning, and that LLMs need to be more rigorously evaluated to distinguish between hype and actual capabilities, especially in high-stakes real-world tasks such as claim verification.

replace NewsBench: Systematic Evaluation of LLMs for Writing Proficiency and Safety Adherence in Chinese Journalistic Editorial Applications

Authors: Miao Li, Ming-Bin Chen, Bo Tang, Shengbin Hou, Pengyu Wang, Haiying Deng, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Keming Mao, Peng Cheng, Yi Luo

Abstract: This study presents NewsBench, a novel benchmark framework developed to evaluate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chinese Journalistic Writing Proficiency (JWP) and their Safety Adherence (SA), addressing the gap between journalistic ethics and the risks associated with AI utilization. Comprising 1,267 tasks across 5 editorial applications, 7 aspects (including safety and journalistic writing with 4 detailed facets), and spanning 24 news topics domains, NewsBench employs two GPT-4 based automatic evaluation protocols validated by human assessment. Our comprehensive analysis of 10 LLMs highlighted GPT-4 and ERNIE Bot as top performers, yet revealed a relative deficiency in journalistic ethic adherence during creative writing tasks. These findings underscore the need for enhanced ethical guidance in AI-generated journalistic content, marking a step forward in aligning AI capabilities with journalistic standards and safety considerations.

replace Uncertainty-Aware Relational Graph Neural Network for Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion

Authors: Qian Li, Shu Guo, Yinjia Chen, Cheng Ji, Jiawei Sheng, Jianxin Li

Abstract: Few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC) aims to query the unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. The side effect of noises due to the uncertainty of entities and triples may limit the few-shot learning, but existing FKGC works neglect such uncertainty, which leads them more susceptible to limited reference samples with noises. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware few-shot KG completion framework (UFKGC) to model uncertainty for a better understanding of the limited data by learning representations under Gaussian distribution. Uncertainty representation is first designed for estimating the uncertainty scope of the entity pairs after transferring feature representations into a Gaussian distribution. Further, to better integrate the neighbors with uncertainty characteristics for entity features, we design an uncertainty-aware relational graph neural network (UR-GNN) to conduct convolution operations between the Gaussian distributions. Then, multiple random samplings are conducted for reference triples within the Gaussian distribution to generate smooth reference representations during the optimization. The final completion score for each query instance is measured by the designed uncertainty optimization to make our approach more robust to the noises in few-shot scenarios. Experimental results show that our approach achieves excellent performance on two benchmark datasets compared to its competitors.

replace Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs

Authors: Xuhui Zhou, Zhe Su, Tiwalayo Eisape, Hyunwoo Kim, Maarten Sap

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLM) have enabled richer social simulations, allowing for the study of various social phenomena with LLM-based agents. However, most work has used an omniscient perspective on these simulations (e.g., single LLM to generate all interlocutors), which is fundamentally at odds with the non-omniscient, information asymmetric interactions that humans have. To examine these differences, we develop an evaluation framework to simulate social interactions with LLMs in various settings (omniscient, non-omniscient). Our experiments show that interlocutors simulated omnisciently are much more successful at accomplishing social goals compared to non-omniscient agents, despite the latter being the more realistic setting. Furthermore, we demonstrate that learning from omniscient simulations improves the apparent naturalness of interactions but scarcely enhances goal achievement in cooperative scenarios. Our findings indicate that addressing information asymmetry remains a fundamental challenge for LLM-based agents.

replace Training Small Multimodal Models to Bridge Biomedical Competency Gap: A Case Study in Radiology Imaging

Authors: Juan Manuel Zambrano Chaves, Shih-Cheng Huang, Yanbo Xu, Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Sheng Zhang, Fei Wang, Yujia Xie, Mahmoud Khademi, Ziyi Yang, Hany Awadalla, Julia Gong, Houdong Hu, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Yu Gu, Cliff Wong, Mu Wei, Tristan Naumann, Muhao Chen, Matthew P. Lungren, Serena Yeung-Levy, Curtis P. Langlotz, Sheng Wang, Hoifung Poon

Abstract: The scaling laws and extraordinary performance of large foundation models motivate the development and utilization of such large models in biomedicine. However, despite early promising results on some biomedical benchmarks, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed before these models can be used in real-world applications. Frontier models such as GPT-4V still have major competency gaps in multimodal capabilities for biomedical applications. Moreover, pragmatic issues such as access, cost, latency, and compliance make it hard for clinicians to use privately-hosted state-of-the-art large models directly on private patient data. In this paper, we explore training open-source small multimodal models (SMMs) to bridge biomedical competency gaps for unmet clinical needs. To maximize data efficiency, we adopt a modular approach by incorporating state-of-the-art pre-trained models for image and text modalities, and focusing on training a lightweight adapter to ground each modality to the text embedding space. We conduct a comprehensive study of this approach on radiology imaging. For training, we assemble a large dataset with over 1 million image-text pairs. For evaluation, we propose a clinically driven novel approach using GPT-4 and demonstrate its parity with expert evaluation. We also study grounding qualitatively using attention. For best practice, we conduct a systematic ablation study on various choices in data engineering and multimodal training. The resulting LLaVA-Rad (7B) model attains state-of-the-art results on radiology tasks such as report generation and cross-modal retrieval, even outperforming much larger models such as GPT-4V and Med-PaLM M (84B). LLaVA-Rad is fast and can be run on a single V100 GPU in private settings, offering a promising state-of-the-art tool for real-world clinical applications.

replace Less is More: Data Value Estimation for Visual Instruction Tuning

Authors: Zikang Liu, Kun Zhou, Wayne Xin Zhao, Dawei Gao, Yaliang Li, Ji-Rong Wen

Abstract: Visual instruction tuning is the key to building multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which greatly improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in vision scenario. However, existing MLLMs mostly rely on a mixture of multiple highly diverse visual instruction datasets for training (even more than a million instructions), which may introduce data redundancy. To investigate this issue, we conduct a series of empirical studies, which reveal a significant redundancy within the visual instruction datasets, and show that greatly reducing the amount of several instruction dataset even do not affect the performance. Based on the findings, we propose a new data selection approach TIVE, to eliminate redundancy within visual instruction data. TIVE first estimates the task-level and instance-level value of the visual instructions based on computed gradients. Then, according to the estimated values, TIVE determines the task proportion within the visual instructions, and selects representative instances to compose a smaller visual instruction subset for training. Experiments on LLaVA-1.5 show that our approach using only about 7.5% data can achieve comparable performance as the full-data fine-tuned model across seven benchmarks, even surpassing it on four of the benchmarks. Our code and data will be publicly released.

replace Optimizing Language Augmentation for Multilingual Large Language Models: A Case Study on Korean

Authors: ChangSu Choi, Yongbin Jeong, Seoyoon Park, InHo Won, HyeonSeok Lim, SangMin Kim, Yejee Kang, Chanhyuk Yoon, Jaewan Park, Yiseul Lee, HyeJin Lee, Younggyun Hahm, Hansaem Kim, KyungTae Lim

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) use pretraining to predict the subsequent word; however, their expansion requires significant computing resources. Numerous big tech companies and research institutes have developed multilingual LLMs (MLLMs) to meet current demands, overlooking less-resourced languages (LRLs). This study proposed three strategies to enhance the performance of LRLs based on the publicly available MLLMs. First, the MLLM vocabularies of LRLs were expanded to enhance expressiveness. Second, bilingual data were used for pretraining to align the high- and less-resourced languages. Third, a high-quality small-scale instruction dataset was constructed and instruction-tuning was performed to augment the LRL. The experiments employed the Llama2 model and Korean was used as the LRL, which was quantitatively evaluated against other developed LLMs across eight tasks. Furthermore, a qualitative assessment was performed based on human evaluation and GPT4. Experimental results showed that our proposed Bllossom model exhibited superior performance in qualitative analyses compared to previously proposed Korean monolingual models.

replace A Challenge Dataset and Effective Models for Conversational Stance Detection

Authors: Fuqiang Niu, Min Yang, Ang Li, Baoquan Zhang, Xiaojiang Peng, Bowen Zhang

Abstract: Previous stance detection studies typically concentrate on evaluating stances within individual instances, thereby exhibiting limitations in effectively modeling multi-party discussions concerning the same specific topic, as naturally transpire in authentic social media interactions. This constraint arises primarily due to the scarcity of datasets that authentically replicate real social media contexts, hindering the research progress of conversational stance detection. In this paper, we introduce a new multi-turn conversation stance detection dataset (called \textbf{MT-CSD}), which encompasses multiple targets for conversational stance detection. To derive stances from this challenging dataset, we propose a global-local attention network (\textbf{GLAN}) to address both long and short-range dependencies inherent in conversational data. Notably, even state-of-the-art stance detection methods, exemplified by GLAN, exhibit an accuracy of only 50.47\%, highlighting the persistent challenges in conversational stance detection. Furthermore, our MT-CSD dataset serves as a valuable resource to catalyze advancements in cross-domain stance detection, where a classifier is adapted from a different yet related target. We believe that MT-CSD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of stance detection research. Our source code, data, and models are available at \url{https://github.com/nfq729/MT-CSD}.

URLs: https://github.com/nfq729/MT-CSD

replace RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners

Authors: Chi Hu, Yuan Ge, Xiangnan Ma, Hang Cao, Qiang Li, Yonghua Yang, Tong Xiao, Jingbo Zhu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various reasoning tasks. However, even state-of-the-art LLMs such as ChatGPT are prone to logical errors during their reasoning processes. Traditional approaches to mitigate these errors involve human or tool-based feedback, such as employing task-specific verifiers or aggregating multiple reasoning paths. These methods, however, either depend heavily on human input or struggle with inconsistent responses. To overcome these limitations, we present RankPrompt, an innovative prompting strategy that empowers LLMs to autonomously rank their responses without needing extra resources. RankPrompt simplifies the ranking challenge into comparative evaluations among different responses, leveraging LLMs' innate ability to generate comparative examples within context. Our experiments across 11 arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks show that RankPrompt significantly enhances the reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4, with improvements of up to 13%. Furthermore, RankPrompt shows exceptional performance in LLM-based automatic evaluations for open-ended tasks, matching human judgments 74% of the time in the AlpacaEval dataset. It also proves to be robust against changes in response order and inconsistency. Overall, our findings endorse RankPrompt as an effective method for extracting high-quality feedback directly from language models.

replace Arcee's MergeKit: A Toolkit for Merging Large Language Models

Authors: Charles Goddard, Shamane Siriwardhana, Malikeh Ehghaghi, Luke Meyers, Vlad Karpukhin, Brian Benedict, Mark McQuade, Jacob Solawetz

Abstract: The rapid expansion of the open-source language model landscape presents an opportunity to merge the competencies of these model checkpoints by combining their parameters. Advances in transfer learning, the process of fine-tuning pretrained models for specific tasks, has resulted in the development of vast amounts of task-specific models, typically specialized in individual tasks and unable to utilize each other's strengths. Model merging facilitates the creation of multitask models without the need for additional training, offering a promising avenue for enhancing model performance and versatility. By preserving the intrinsic capabilities of the original models, model merging addresses complex challenges in AI - including the difficulties of catastrophic forgetting and multitask learning. To support this expanding area of research, we introduce MergeKit, a comprehensive, open-source library designed to facilitate the application of model merging strategies. MergeKit offers an extensible framework to efficiently merge models on any hardware, providing utility to researchers and practitioners. To date, thousands of models have been merged by the open-source community, leading to the creation of some of the worlds most powerful open-source model checkpoints, as assessed by the Open LLM Leaderboard. The library is accessible at https://github.com/arcee-ai/MergeKit.

URLs: https://github.com/arcee-ai/MergeKit.

replace LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models

Authors: Yaowei Zheng, Richong Zhang, Junhao Zhang, Yanhan Ye, Zheyan Luo, Yongqiang Ma

Abstract: Efficient fine-tuning is vital for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks. However, it requires non-trivial efforts to implement these methods on different models. We present LlamaFactory, a unified framework that integrates a suite of cutting-edge efficient training methods. It allows users to flexibly customize the fine-tuning of 100+ LLMs without the need for coding through the built-in web UI LlamaBoard. We empirically validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our framework on language modeling and text generation tasks. It has been released at https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory and already received over 13,000 stars and 1,600 forks.

URLs: https://github.com/hiyouga/LLaMA-Factory

replace Do Not Worry if You Do Not Have Data: Building Pretrained Language Models Using Translationese

Authors: Meet Doshi, Raj Dabre, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the utility of Translationese as synthetic data created using machine translation for pre-training language models (LMs). Pre-training requires vast amounts of monolingual data, which is mostly unavailable for languages other than English. Recently, there has been a growing interest in using synthetic data to address this data scarcity. We take the case of English and Indic languages and translate web-crawled monolingual documents (clean) into the target language. Then, we train language models containing 28M and 85M parameters on this translationese data (synthetic). We show that their performance on downstream natural language understanding and generative tasks is only 3.56% poorer on NLU tasks and 1.51% on NLG tasks than LMs pre-trained on clean data. Further, we propose the use of lightweight TinyLMs pre-trained on clean data to filter synthetic data efficiently which significantly improves the performance of our models. We also find that LMs trained on synthetic data strongly benefit from extended pretraining on a tiny fraction (10%) of clean data. We release the data we collected and created as a part of this work, IndicMonoDoc, the largest collection of monolingual document-level corpora, which we hope will help bridge the gap between English and non-English performance for large language models.

replace RoleInteract: Evaluating the Social Interaction of Role-Playing Agents

Authors: Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Xing Gao, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of various AI conversational agents, including role-playing conversational agents that mimic diverse characters and human behaviors. While prior research has predominantly focused on enhancing the conversational capability, role-specific knowledge, and stylistic attributes of these agents, there has been a noticeable gap in assessing their social intelligence. In this paper, we introduce RoleInteract, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the sociality of role-playing conversational agents at both individual and group levels of social interactions. The benchmark is constructed from a variety of sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on this benchmark using mainstream open-source and closed-source LLMs. We find that agents excelling in individual level does not imply their proficiency in group level. Moreover, the behavior of individuals may drift as a result of the influence exerted by other agents within the group. Experimental results on RoleInteract confirm its significance as a testbed for assessing the social interaction of role-playing conversational agents. The benchmark is publicly accessible at https://github.com/X-PLUG/RoleInteract.

URLs: https://github.com/X-PLUG/RoleInteract.

replace-cross ComCLIP: Training-Free Compositional Image and Text Matching

Authors: Kenan Jiang, Xuehai He, Ruize Xu, Xin Eric Wang

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has demonstrated great zero-shot performance for matching images and text. However, it is still challenging to adapt vision-lanaguage pretrained models like CLIP to compositional image and text matching -- a more challenging image and text matching task requiring the model understanding of compositional word concepts and visual components. Towards better compositional generalization in zero-shot image and text matching, in this paper, we study the problem from a causal perspective: the erroneous semantics of individual entities are essentially confounders that cause the matching failure. Therefore, we propose a novel \textbf{\textit{training-free}} compositional CLIP model (ComCLIP). ComCLIP disentangles input images into subjects, objects, and action sub-images and composes CLIP's vision encoder and text encoder to perform evolving matching over compositional text embedding and sub-image embeddings. In this way, ComCLIP can mitigate spurious correlations introduced by the pretrained CLIP models and dynamically evaluate the importance of each component. Experiments on four compositional image-text matching datasets: SVO, ComVG, Winoground, and VL-checklist, and two general image-text retrieval datasets: Flick30K, and MSCOCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our plug-and-play method, which boosts the \textbf{\textit{zero-shot}} inference ability of CLIP, SLIP, and BLIP2 even without further training or fine-tuning. Our codes can be found at https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/ComCLIP.

URLs: https://github.com/eric-ai-lab/ComCLIP.

replace-cross ChatGPT4PCG Competition: Character-like Level Generation for Science Birds

Authors: Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Febri Abdullah, Mury F. Dewantoro, Ruck Thawonmas, Julian Togelius, Jochen Renz

Abstract: This paper presents the first ChatGPT4PCG Competition at the 2023 IEEE Conference on Games. The objective of this competition is for participants to create effective prompts for ChatGPT--enabling it to generate Science Birds levels with high stability and character-like qualities--fully using their creativity as well as prompt engineering skills. ChatGPT is a conversational agent developed by OpenAI. Science Birds is selected as the competition platform because designing an Angry Birds-like level is not a trivial task due to the in-game gravity; the quality of the levels is determined by their stability. To lower the entry barrier to the competition, we limit the task to the generation of capitalized English alphabetical characters. We also allow only a single prompt to be used for generating all the characters. Here, the quality of the generated levels is determined by their stability and similarity to the given characters. A sample prompt is provided to participants for their reference. An experiment is conducted to determine the effectiveness of several modified versions of this sample prompt on level stability and similarity by testing them on several characters. To the best of our knowledge, we believe that ChatGPT4PCG is the first competition of its kind and hope to inspire enthusiasm for prompt engineering in procedural content generation.

replace-cross Gammatonegram Representation for End-to-End Dysarthric Speech Processing Tasks: Speech Recognition, Speaker Identification, and Intelligibility Assessment

Authors: Aref Farhadipour, Hadi Veisi

Abstract: Dysarthria is a disability that causes a disturbance in the human speech system and reduces the quality and intelligibility of a person's speech. Because of this effect, the normal speech processing systems can not work properly on impaired speech. This disability is usually associated with physical disabilities. Therefore, designing a system that can perform some tasks by receiving voice commands in the smart home can be a significant achievement. In this work, we introduce gammatonegram as an effective method to represent audio files with discriminative details, which is used as input for the convolutional neural network. On the other word, we convert each speech file into an image and propose image recognition system to classify speech in different scenarios. Proposed CNN is based on the transfer learning method on the pre-trained Alexnet. In this research, the efficiency of the proposed system for speech recognition, speaker identification, and intelligibility assessment is evaluated. According to the results on the UA dataset, the proposed speech recognition system achieved 91.29% accuracy in speaker-dependent mode, the speaker identification system acquired 87.74% accuracy in text-dependent mode, and the intelligibility assessment system achieved 96.47% accuracy in two-class mode. Finally, we propose a multi-network speech recognition system that works fully automatically. This system is located in a cascade arrangement with the two-class intelligibility assessment system, and the output of this system activates each one of the speech recognition networks. This architecture achieves an accuracy of 92.3% WRR. The source code of this paper is available.

replace-cross TiC-CLIP: Continual Training of CLIP Models

Authors: Saurabh Garg, Mehrdad Farajtabar, Hadi Pouransari, Raviteja Vemulapalli, Sachin Mehta, Oncel Tuzel, Vaishaal Shankar, Fartash Faghri

Abstract: Keeping large foundation models up to date on latest data is inherently expensive. To avoid the prohibitive costs of constantly retraining, it is imperative to continually train these models. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of any large scale continual learning benchmarks or baselines. We introduce the first set of web-scale Time-Continual (TiC) benchmarks for training vision-language models: TiC-DataComp, TiC-YFCC, and TiC-Redcaps. TiC-DataComp, our largest dataset, contains over 12.7B timestamped image-text pairs spanning 9 years (2014-2022). We first use our benchmarks to curate various dynamic evaluations to measure temporal robustness of existing models. We show OpenAI's CLIP (trained on data up to 2020) loses $\approx 8\%$ zero-shot accuracy on our curated retrieval task from 2021-2022 compared with more recently trained models in OpenCLIP repository. We then study how to efficiently train models on time-continuous data. We demonstrate that a simple rehearsal-based approach that continues training from the last checkpoint and replays old data reduces compute by $2.5\times$ when compared to the standard practice of retraining from scratch. Code is available at https://github.com/apple/ml-tic-clip.

URLs: https://github.com/apple/ml-tic-clip.

replace-cross Moral Judgments in Narratives on Reddit: Investigating Moral Sparks via Social Commonsense and Linguistic Signals

Authors: Ruijie Xi, Munindar P. Singh

Abstract: Machine ethics ensures ethical conduct in Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and agents. Examining real-life applications benefit learning practical ethics in many situations, offering valuable data to grasp the complexities of human ethics in diverse contexts. In this paper, we examine social media platforms for understanding real-life ethical scenarios and human moral judgments. We examine posts from a popular Reddit subreddit (i.e., a subcommunity) called r/AmITheAsshole, where authors and commenters share their moral judgments on who is blameworthy. We employ computational techniques to investigate the underlying reasoning influencing moral judgments. We focus on excerpts-which we term moral sparks-from original posts that commenters include to indicate what motivates their judgments. To this end, we examine how (1) events activating social commonsense and (2) linguistic signals affect moral sparks assignment and their subsequent judgments. By examining over 24 672 posts and 175988 comments, we find that event-related negative character traits (e.g., immature and rude) attract attention and stimulate blame, implying a dependent relationship between character traits and moral values. Specially, we focus on causal graph involving events (c-events) that activate social commonsense. We observe that c-events are perceived with varying levels of informativeness, influencing moral spark and judgment assignment in distinct ways. This observation is reinforced by examining linguistic features describing semantically similar c-events. Moreover, language influencing commenters' cognitive processes enhances the probability of an excerpt becoming a moral spark, while factual and concrete descriptions tend to inhibit this effect.

replace-cross VQPy: An Object-Oriented Approach to Modern Video Analytics

Authors: Shan Yu, Zhenting Zhu, Yu Chen, Hanchen Xu, Pengzhan Zhao, Yang Wang, Arthi Padmanabhan, Hugo Latapie, Harry Xu

Abstract: Video analytics is widely used in contemporary systems and services. At the forefront of video analytics are video queries that users develop to find objects of particular interest. Building upon the insight that video objects (e.g., human, animals, cars, etc.), the center of video analytics, are similar in spirit to objects modeled by traditional object-oriented languages, we propose to develop an object-oriented approach to video analytics. This approach, named VQPy, consists of a frontend$\unicode{x2015}$a Python variant with constructs that make it easy for users to express video objects and their interactions$\unicode{x2015}$as well as an extensible backend that can automatically construct and optimize pipelines based on video objects. We have implemented and open-sourced VQPy, which has been productized in Cisco as part of its DeepVision framework.

replace-cross Prompt Highlighter: Interactive Control for Multi-Modal LLMs

Authors: Yuechen Zhang, Shengju Qian, Bohao Peng, Shu Liu, Jiaya Jia

Abstract: This study targets a critical aspect of multi-modal LLMs' (LLMs&VLMs) inference: explicit controllable text generation. Multi-modal LLMs empower multi-modality understanding with the capability of semantic generation yet bring less explainability and heavier reliance on prompt contents due to their autoregressive generative nature. While manipulating prompt formats could improve outputs, designing specific and precise prompts per task can be challenging and ineffective. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel inference method, Prompt Highlighter, which enables users to highlight specific prompt spans to interactively control the focus during generation. Motivated by the classifier-free diffusion guidance, we form regular and unconditional context pairs based on highlighted tokens, demonstrating that the autoregressive generation in models can be guided in a classifier-free way. Notably, we find that, during inference, guiding the models with highlighted tokens through the attention weights leads to more desired outputs. Our approach is compatible with current LLMs and VLMs, achieving impressive customized generation results without training. Experiments confirm its effectiveness in focusing on input contexts and generating reliable content. Without tuning on LLaVA-v1.5, our method secured 70.7 in the MMBench test and 1552.5 in MME-perception. The code is available at: https://github.com/dvlab-research/Prompt-Highlighter/

URLs: https://github.com/dvlab-research/Prompt-Highlighter/

replace-cross The LLM Surgeon

Authors: Tycho F. A. van der Ouderaa, Markus Nagel, Mart van Baalen, Yuki M. Asano, Tijmen Blankevoort

Abstract: State-of-the-art language models are becoming increasingly large in an effort to achieve the highest performance on large corpora of available textual data. However, the sheer size of the Transformer architectures makes it difficult to deploy models within computational, environmental or device-specific constraints. We explore data-driven compression of existing pretrained models as an alternative to training smaller models from scratch. To do so, we scale Kronecker-factored curvature approximations of the target loss landscape to large language models. In doing so, we can compute both the dynamic allocation of structures that can be removed as well as updates of remaining weights that account for the removal. We provide a general framework for unstructured, semi-structured and structured pruning and improve upon weight updates to capture more correlations between weights, while remaining computationally efficient. Experimentally, our method can prune rows and columns from a range of OPT models and Llamav2-7B by 20%-30%, with a negligible loss in performance, and achieve state-of-the-art results in unstructured and semi-structured pruning of large language models.

replace-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.

replace-cross m&m's: A Benchmark to Evaluate Tool-Use for multi-step multi-modal Tasks

Authors: Zixian Ma, Weikai Huang, Jieyu Zhang, Tanmay Gupta, Ranjay Krishna

Abstract: Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 6 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms), https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

replace-cross From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards

Authors: Khaoula Chehbouni, Megha Roshan, Emmanuel Ma, Futian Andrew Wei, Afaf Taik, Jackie CK Cheung, Golnoosh Farnadi

Abstract: Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations. Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.