new Elements of World Knowledge (EWOK): A cognition-inspired framework for evaluating basic world knowledge in language models

Authors: Anna A. Ivanova, Aalok Sathe, Benjamin Lipkin, Unnathi Kumar, Setayesh Radkani, Thomas H. Clark, Carina Kauf, Jennifer Hu, R. T. Pramod, Gabriel Grand, Vivian Paulun, Maria Ryskina, Ekin Akyurek, Ethan Wilcox, Nafisa Rashid, Leshem Chosen, Roger Levy, Evelina Fedorenko, Joshua Tenenbaum, Jacob Andreas

Abstract: The ability to build and leverage world models is essential for a general-purpose AI agent. Testing such capabilities is hard, in part because the building blocks of world models are ill-defined. We present Elements of World Knowledge (EWOK), a framework for evaluating world modeling in language models by testing their ability to use knowledge of a concept to match a target text with a plausible/implausible context. EWOK targets specific concepts from multiple knowledge domains known to be vital for world modeling in humans. Domains range from social interactions (help/hinder) to spatial relations (left/right). Both, contexts and targets are minimal pairs. Objects, agents, and locations in the items can be flexibly filled in enabling easy generation of multiple controlled datasets. We then introduce EWOK-CORE-1.0, a dataset of 4,374 items covering 11 world knowledge domains. We evaluate 20 openweights large language models (1.3B--70B parameters) across a battery of evaluation paradigms along with a human norming study comprising 12,480 measurements. The overall performance of all tested models is worse than human performance, with results varying drastically across domains. These data highlight simple cases where even large models fail and present rich avenues for targeted research on LLM world modeling capabilities.

new Simulating Policy Impacts: Developing a Generative Scenario Writing Method to Evaluate the Perceived Effects of Regulation

Authors: Julia Barnett, Kimon Kieslich, Nicholas Diakopoulos

Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI technologies yields numerous future impacts on individuals and society. Policy-makers are therefore tasked to react quickly and establish policies that mitigate those impacts. However, anticipating the effectiveness of policies is a difficult task, as some impacts might only be observable in the future and respective policies might not be applicable to the future development of AI. In this work we develop a method for using large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the efficacy of a given piece of policy at mitigating specified negative impacts. We do so by using GPT-4 to generate scenarios both pre- and post-introduction of policy and translating these vivid stories into metrics based on human perceptions of impacts. We leverage an already established taxonomy of impacts of generative AI in the media environment to generate a set of scenario pairs both mitigated and non-mitigated by the transparency legislation of Article 50 of the EU AI Act. We then run a user study (n=234) to evaluate these scenarios across four risk-assessment dimensions: severity, plausibility, magnitude, and specificity to vulnerable populations. We find that this transparency legislation is perceived to be effective at mitigating harms in areas such as labor and well-being, but largely ineffective in areas such as social cohesion and security. Through this case study on generative AI harms we demonstrate the efficacy of our method as a tool to iterate on the effectiveness of policy on mitigating various negative impacts. We expect this method to be useful to researchers or other stakeholders who want to brainstorm the potential utility of different pieces of policy or other mitigation strategies.

new Spectral Editing of Activations for Large Language Model Alignment

Authors: Yifu Qiu, Zheng Zhao, Yftah Ziser, Anna Korhonen, Edoardo M. Ponti, Shay B. Cohen

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviours, such as generating untruthful or biased content. Editing their internal representations has been shown to be effective in mitigating such behaviours on top of the existing alignment methods. We propose a novel inference-time editing method, namely spectral editing of activations (SEA), to project the input representations into directions with maximal covariance with the positive demonstrations (e.g., truthful) while minimising covariance with the negative demonstrations (e.g., hallucinated). We also extend our method to non-linear editing using feature functions. We run extensive experiments on benchmarks concerning truthfulness and bias with six open-source LLMs of different sizes and model families. The results demonstrate the superiority of SEA in effectiveness, generalisation to similar tasks, as well as inference and data efficiency. We also show that SEA editing only has a limited negative impact on other model capabilities.

new SCI 3.0: A Web-based Schema Curation Interface for Graphical Event Representations

Authors: Reece Suchocki, Mary Martin, Martha Palmer, Susan Brown

Abstract: To understand the complexity of global events, one must navigate a web of interwoven sub-events, identifying those most impactful elements within the larger, abstract macro-event framework at play. This concept can be extended to the field of natural language processing (NLP) % original: by defining abstract event representations as structured event schemas. through the creation of structured event schemas which can serve as representations of these abstract events. Central to our approach is the Schema Curation Interface 3.0 (SCI 3.0), a web application that facilitates real-time editing of event schema properties within a generated graph e.g., adding, removing, or editing sub-events, entities, and relations directly through an interface.

new An Analysis of Sentential Neighbors in Implicit Discourse Relation Prediction

Authors: Evi Judge, Reece Suchocki, Konner Syed

Abstract: Discourse relation classification is an especially difficult task without explicit context markers \cite{Prasad2008ThePD}. Current approaches to implicit relation prediction solely rely on two neighboring sentences being targeted, ignoring the broader context of their surrounding environments \cite{Atwell2021WhereAW}. In this research, we propose three new methods in which to incorporate context in the task of sentence relation prediction: (1) Direct Neighbors (DNs), (2) Expanded Window Neighbors (EWNs), and (3) Part-Smart Random Neighbors (PSRNs). Our findings indicate that the inclusion of context beyond one discourse unit is harmful in the task of discourse relation classification.

new Many Hands Make Light Work: Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Module-Based Mixture-of-Experts

Authors: Ruolin Su, Biing-Hwang Juang

Abstract: Task-oriented dialogue systems are broadly used in virtual assistants and other automated services, providing interfaces between users and machines to facilitate specific tasks. Nowadays, task-oriented dialogue systems have greatly benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their task-solving performance is constrained by the inherent capacities of PLMs, and scaling these models is expensive and complex as the model size becomes larger. To address these challenges, we propose Soft Mixture-of-Expert Task-Oriented Dialogue system (SMETOD) which leverages an ensemble of Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) to excel at subproblems and generate specialized outputs for task-oriented dialogues. SMETOD also scales up a task-oriented dialogue system with simplicity and flexibility while maintaining inference efficiency. We extensively evaluate our model on three benchmark functionalities: intent prediction, dialogue state tracking, and dialogue response generation. Experimental results demonstrate that SMETOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on most evaluated metrics. Moreover, comparisons against existing strong baselines show that SMETOD has a great advantage in the cost of inference and correctness in problem-solving.

new Unsupervised Extractive Dialogue Summarization in Hyperdimensional Space

Authors: Seongmin Park, Kyungho Kim, Jaejin Seo, Jihwa Lee

Abstract: We present HyperSum, an extractive summarization framework that captures both the efficiency of traditional lexical summarization and the accuracy of contemporary neural approaches. HyperSum exploits the pseudo-orthogonality that emerges when randomly initializing vectors at extremely high dimensions ("blessing of dimensionality") to construct representative and efficient sentence embeddings. Simply clustering the obtained embeddings and extracting their medoids yields competitive summaries. HyperSum often outperforms state-of-the-art summarizers -- in terms of both summary accuracy and faithfulness -- while being 10 to 100 times faster. We open-source HyperSum as a strong baseline for unsupervised extractive summarization.

new Optimization Techniques for Sentiment Analysis Based on LLM (GPT-3)

Authors: Tong Zhan, Chenxi Shi, Yadong Shi, Huixiang Li, Yiyu Lin

Abstract: With the rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) technology, large-scale pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have become a popular research object in NLP field. This paper aims to explore sentiment analysis optimization techniques based on large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 to improve model performance and effect and further promote the development of natural language processing (NLP). By introducing the importance of sentiment analysis and the limitations of traditional methods, GPT-3 and Fine-tuning techniques are introduced in this paper, and their applications in sentiment analysis are explained in detail. The experimental results show that the Fine-tuning technique can optimize GPT-3 model and obtain good performance in sentiment analysis task. This study provides an important reference for future sentiment analysis using large-scale language models.

new SecureLLM: Using Compositionality to Build Provably Secure Language Models for Private, Sensitive, and Secret Data

Authors: Abdulrahman Alabdulakreem, Christian M Arnold, Yerim Lee, Pieter M Feenstra, Boris Katz, Andrei Barbu

Abstract: Traditional security mechanisms isolate resources from users who should not access them. We reflect the compositional nature of such security mechanisms back into the structure of LLMs to build a provably secure LLM; that we term SecureLLM. Other approaches to LLM safety attempt to protect against bad actors or bad outcomes, but can only do so to an extent making them inappropriate for sensitive data. SecureLLM blends access security with fine-tuning methods. Each data silo has associated with it a separate fine-tuning and a user has access only to the collection of fine-tunings that they have permission for. The model must then perform on compositional tasks at the intersection of those data silos with the combination of those individual fine-tunings. While applicable to any task like document QA or making API calls, in this work we concern ourselves with models that learn the layouts of new SQL databases to provide natural-language-to-SQL translation capabilities. Existing fine-tuning composition methods fail in this challenging environment, as they are not well-equipped for handling compositional tasks. Compositionality remains a challenge for LLMs. We contribute both a difficult new compositional natural-language-to-SQL translation task and a new perspective on LLM security that allows models to be deployed to secure environments today.

new Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models

Authors: Chameleon Team

Abstract: We present Chameleon, a family of early-fusion token-based mixed-modal models capable of understanding and generating images and text in any arbitrary sequence. We outline a stable training approach from inception, an alignment recipe, and an architectural parameterization tailored for the early-fusion, token-based, mixed-modal setting. The models are evaluated on a comprehensive range of tasks, including visual question answering, image captioning, text generation, image generation, and long-form mixed modal generation. Chameleon demonstrates broad and general capabilities, including state-of-the-art performance in image captioning tasks, outperforms Llama-2 in text-only tasks while being competitive with models such as Mixtral 8x7B and Gemini-Pro, and performs non-trivial image generation, all in a single model. It also matches or exceeds the performance of much larger models, including Gemini Pro and GPT-4V, according to human judgments on a new long-form mixed-modal generation evaluation, where either the prompt or outputs contain mixed sequences of both images and text. Chameleon marks a significant step forward in a unified modeling of full multimodal documents.

new Enhancing Semantics in Multimodal Chain of Thought via Soft Negative Sampling

Authors: Guangmin Zheng, Jin Wang, Xiaobing Zhou, Xuejie Zhang

Abstract: Chain of thought (CoT) has proven useful for problems requiring complex reasoning. Many of these problems are both textual and multimodal. Given the inputs in different modalities, a model generates a rationale and then uses it to answer a question. Because of the hallucination issue, the generated soft negative rationales with high textual quality but illogical semantics do not always help improve answer accuracy. This study proposes a rationale generation method using soft negative sampling (SNSE-CoT) to mitigate hallucinations in multimodal CoT. Five methods were applied to generate soft negative samples that shared highly similar text but had different semantics from the original. Bidirectional margin loss (BML) was applied to introduce them into the traditional contrastive learning framework that involves only positive and negative samples. Extensive experiments on the ScienceQA dataset demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code and data are released at https://github.com/zgMin/SNSE-CoT.

URLs: https://github.com/zgMin/SNSE-CoT.

new On the relevance of pre-neural approaches in natural language processing pedagogy

Authors: Aditya Joshi, Jake Renzella, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Saurav Jha, Xiangyu Zhang

Abstract: While neural approaches using deep learning are the state-of-the-art for natural language processing (NLP) today, pre-neural algorithms and approaches still find a place in NLP textbooks and courses of recent years. In this paper, we compare two introductory NLP courses taught in Australia and India, and examine how Transformer and pre-neural approaches are balanced within the lecture plan and assessments of the courses. We also draw parallels with the objects-first and objects-later debate in CS1 education. We observe that pre-neural approaches add value to student learning by building an intuitive understanding of NLP problems, potential solutions and even Transformer-based models themselves. Despite pre-neural approaches not being state-of-the-art, the paper makes a case for their inclusion in NLP courses today.

new IGOT: Information Gain Optimized Tokenizer on Domain Adaptive Pretraining

Authors: Dawei Feng, Yihai Zhang, Zhixuan Xu

Abstract: Pretrained Large Language Models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Claude, etc. have demonstrated strong capabilities in various fields of natural language generation. However, there are still many problems when using LLM in specialized domain-specific fields. When using generative AI to process downstream tasks, a common approach is to add new knowledge (e.g., private domain knowledge, cutting-edge information) to a pretrained model through continued training or fine-tuning. However, whether there is a universal paradigm for domain adaptation training is still an open question. In this article, we proposed Information Gain Optimized Tokenizer (IGOT), which analyzes the special token set of downstream tasks, constructs a new subset using heuristic function $\phi$ with the special token and its information gain, to build new domain-specific tokenizer, and continues pretraining on the downstream task data. We explored the many positive effects of this method's customized tokenizer on domain-adaptive pretraining and verified this method can perform better than the ordinary method of just collecting data and fine-tuning. Based on our experiment, the continued pretraining process of IGOT with LLaMA-7B achieved 11.9\% token saving, 12.2\% training time saving, and 5.8\% maximum GPU VRAM usage saving, combined with the T5 model, we can even reach a 31.5\% of training time saving, making porting general generative AI to specific domains more effective than before. In domain-specific tasks, supervised $IGOT_\tau$ shows great performance on reducing both the convergence radius and convergence point during keep pretraining.

new TransMI: A Framework to Create Strong Baselines from Multilingual Pretrained Language Models for Transliterated Data

Authors: Yihong Liu, Chunlan Ma, Haotian Ye, Hinrich Sch\"utze

Abstract: Transliterating related languages that use different scripts into a common script shows effectiveness in improving crosslingual transfer in downstream tasks. However, this methodology often makes pretraining a model from scratch unavoidable, as transliteration brings about new subwords not covered in existing multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs). This is not desired because it takes a lot of computation budget for pretraining. A more promising way is to make full use of available mPLMs. To this end, this paper proposes a simple but effective framework: Transliterate-Merge-Initialize (TransMI), which can create a strong baseline well-suited for data that is transliterated into a common script by exploiting an mPLM and its accompanied tokenizer. TransMI has three stages: (a) transliterate the vocabulary of an mPLM into a common script; (b) merge the new vocabulary with the original vocabulary; and (c) initialize the embeddings of the new subwords. We applied TransMI to three recent strong mPLMs, and our experiments demonstrate that TransMI not only preserves their ability to handle non-transliterated data, but also enables the models to effectively process transliterated data: the results show a consistent improvement of 3% to 34%, varying across different models and tasks. We make our code and models publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/TransMI}.

URLs: https://github.com/cisnlp/TransMI

new DEBATE: Devil's Advocate-Based Assessment and Text Evaluation

Authors: Alex Kim, Keonwoo Kim, Sangwon Yoon

Abstract: As natural language generation (NLG) models have become prevalent, systematically assessing the quality of machine-generated texts has become increasingly important. Recent studies introduce LLM-based evaluators that operate as reference-free metrics, demonstrating their capability to adeptly handle novel tasks. However, these models generally rely on a single-agent approach, which, we argue, introduces an inherent limit to their performance. This is because there exist biases in LLM agent's responses, including preferences for certain text structure or content. In this work, we propose DEBATE, an NLG evaluation framework based on multi-agent scoring system augmented with a concept of Devil's Advocate. Within the framework, one agent is instructed to criticize other agents' arguments, potentially resolving the bias in LLM agent's answers. DEBATE substantially outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in two meta-evaluation benchmarks in NLG evaluation, SummEval and TopicalChat. We also show that the extensiveness of debates among agents and the persona of an agent can influence the performance of evaluators.

new SciQAG: A Framework for Auto-Generated Scientific Question Answering Dataset with Fine-grained Evaluation

Authors: Yuwei Wan, Aswathy Ajith, Yixuan Liu, Ke Lu, Clara Grazian, Bram Hoex, Wenjie Zhang, Chunyu Kit, Tong Xie, Ian Foster

Abstract: The use of question-answer (QA) pairs for training and evaluating large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable attention. Yet few available QA datasets are based on knowledge from the scientific literature. Here we bridge this gap by presenting Automatic Generation of Scientific Question Answers (SciQAG), a framework for automatic generation and evaluation of scientific QA pairs sourced from published scientific literature. We fine-tune an open-source LLM to generate \num{960000} scientific QA pairs from full-text scientific papers and propose a five-dimensional metric to evaluate the quality of the generated QA pairs. We show via LLM-based evaluation that the generated QA pairs consistently achieve an average score of 2.5 out of 3 across five dimensions, indicating that our framework can distill key knowledge from papers into high-quality QA pairs at scale. We make the dataset, models, and evaluation codes publicly available.

new Mitigating Text Toxicity with Counterfactual Generation

Authors: Milan Bhan, Jean-Noel Vittaut, Nina Achache, Victor Legrand, Nicolas Chesneau, Annabelle Blangero, Juliette Murris, Marie-Jeanne Lesot

Abstract: Toxicity mitigation consists in rephrasing text in order to remove offensive or harmful meaning. Neural natural language processing (NLP) models have been widely used to target and mitigate textual toxicity. However, existing methods fail to detoxify text while preserving the initial non-toxic meaning at the same time. In this work, we propose to apply counterfactual generation methods from the eXplainable AI (XAI) field to target and mitigate textual toxicity. In particular, we perform text detoxification by applying local feature importance and counterfactual generation methods to a toxicity classifier distinguishing between toxic and non-toxic texts. We carry out text detoxification through counterfactual generation on three datasets and compare our approach to three competitors. Automatic and human evaluations show that recently developed NLP counterfactual generators can mitigate toxicity accurately while better preserving the meaning of the initial text as compared to classical detoxification methods. Finally, we take a step back from using automated detoxification tools, and discuss how to manage the polysemous nature of toxicity and the risk of malicious use of detoxification tools. This work is the first to bridge the gap between counterfactual generation and text detoxification and paves the way towards more practical application of XAI methods.

new FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering

Authors: Jian Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Yingxin Loh, Kehui Chen, Ziyuan Li, Bing Zhu, Junwei Liang

Abstract: Accurate evaluation of financial question answering (QA) systems necessitates a comprehensive dataset encompassing diverse question types and contexts. However, current financial QA datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. This work introduces FinTextQA, a novel dataset for long-form question answering (LFQA) in finance. FinTextQA comprises 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites.Moreover, we developed a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based LFQA system, comprising an embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator. A multi-faceted evaluation approach, including human ranking, automatic metrics, and GPT-4 scoring, was employed to benchmark the performance of different LFQA system configurations under heightened noisy conditions. The results indicate that: (1) Among all compared generators, Baichuan2-7B competes closely with GPT-3.5-turbo in accuracy score; (2) The most effective system configuration on our dataset involved setting the embedder, retriever, reranker, and generator as Ada2, Automated Merged Retrieval, Bge-Reranker-Base, and Baichuan2-7B, respectively; (3) models are less susceptible to noise after the length of contexts reaching a specific threshold.

new Listen Again and Choose the Right Answer: A New Paradigm for Automatic Speech Recognition with Large Language Models

Authors: Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Chengwei Qin, Qiushi Zhu, Eng Siong Chng, Ruizhe Li

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), which aims to predict the ground-truth transcription from the decoded N-best hypotheses. Thanks to the strong language generation ability of LLMs and rich information in the N-best list, GER shows great effectiveness in enhancing ASR results. However, it still suffers from two limitations: 1) LLMs are unaware of the source speech during GER, which may lead to results that are grammatically correct but violate the source speech content, 2) N-best hypotheses usually only vary in a few tokens, making it redundant to send all of them for GER, which could confuse LLM about which tokens to focus on and thus lead to increased miscorrection. In this paper, we propose ClozeGER, a new paradigm for ASR generative error correction. First, we introduce a multimodal LLM (i.e., SpeechGPT) to receive source speech as extra input to improve the fidelity of correction output. Then, we reformat GER as a cloze test with logits calibration to remove the input information redundancy and simplify GER with clear instructions. Experiments show that ClozeGER achieves a new breakthrough over vanilla GER on 9 popular ASR datasets.

new SynthesizRR: Generating Diverse Datasets with Retrieval Augmentation

Authors: Abhishek Divekar, Greg Durrett

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are versatile and can address many tasks, but for computational efficiency, it is often desirable to distill their capabilities into smaller student models. One way to do this for classification tasks is via dataset synthesis, which can be accomplished by generating examples of each label from the LLM. Prior approaches to synthesis use few-shot prompting, which relies on the LLM's parametric knowledge to generate usable examples. However, this leads to issues of repetition, bias towards popular entities, and stylistic differences from human text. In this work, we propose Synthesize by Retrieval and Refinement (SynthesizRR), which uses retrieval augmentation to introduce variety into the dataset synthesis process: as retrieved passages vary, the LLM is "seeded" with different content to generate its examples. We empirically study the synthesis of six datasets, covering topic classification, sentiment analysis, tone detection, and humor, requiring complex synthesis strategies. We find SynthesizRR greatly improves lexical and semantic diversity, similarity to human-written text, and distillation performance, when compared to standard 32-shot prompting and six baseline approaches.

new Distilling Implicit Multimodal Knowledge into LLMs for Zero-Resource Dialogue Generation

Authors: Bo Zhang, Hui Ma, Jian Ding, Jian Wang, Bo Xu, Hongfei Lin

Abstract: Integrating multimodal knowledge into large language models (LLMs) represents a significant advancement in dialogue generation capabilities. However, the effective incorporation of such knowledge in zero-resource scenarios remains a substantial challenge due to the scarcity of diverse, high-quality dialogue datasets. To address this, we propose the Visual Implicit Knowledge Distillation Framework (VIKDF), an innovative approach aimed at enhancing LLMs for enriched dialogue generation in zero-resource contexts by leveraging implicit multimodal knowledge. VIKDF comprises two main stages: knowledge distillation, using an Implicit Query Transformer to extract and encode visual implicit knowledge from image-text pairs into knowledge vectors; and knowledge integration, employing a novel Bidirectional Variational Information Fusion technique to seamlessly integrate these distilled vectors into LLMs. This enables the LLMs to generate dialogues that are not only coherent and engaging but also exhibit a deep understanding of the context through implicit multimodal cues, effectively overcoming the limitations of zero-resource scenarios. Our extensive experimentation across two dialogue datasets shows that VIKDF outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in generating high-quality dialogues. The code will be publicly available following acceptance.

new Red Teaming Language Models for Contradictory Dialogues

Authors: Xiaofei Wen, Bangzheng Li, Tenghao Huang, Muhao Chen

Abstract: Most language models currently available are prone to self-contradiction during dialogues. To mitigate this issue, this study explores a novel contradictory dialogue processing task that aims to detect and modify contradictory statements in a conversation. This task is inspired by research on context faithfulness and dialogue comprehension, which have demonstrated that the detection and understanding of contradictions often necessitate detailed explanations. We develop a dataset comprising contradictory dialogues, in which one side of the conversation contradicts itself. Each dialogue is accompanied by an explanatory label that highlights the location and details of the contradiction. With this dataset, we present a Red Teaming framework for contradictory dialogue processing. The framework detects and attempts to explain the dialogue, then modifies the existing contradictory content using the explanation. Our experiments demonstrate that the framework improves the ability to detect contradictory dialogues and provides valid explanations. Additionally, it showcases distinct capabilities for modifying such dialogues. Our study highlights the importance of the logical inconsistency problem in conversational AI.

new StyloAI: Distinguishing AI-Generated Content with Stylometric Analysis

Authors: Chidimma Opara

Abstract: The emergence of large language models (LLMs) capable of generating realistic texts and images has sparked ethical concerns across various sectors. In response, researchers in academia and industry are actively exploring methods to distinguish AI-generated content from human-authored material. However, a crucial question remains: What are the unique characteristics of AI-generated text? Addressing this gap, this study proposes StyloAI, a data-driven model that uses 31 stylometric features to identify AI-generated texts by applying a Random Forest classifier on two multi-domain datasets. StyloAI achieves accuracy rates of 81% and 98% on the test set of the AuTextification dataset and the Education dataset, respectively. This approach surpasses the performance of existing state-of-the-art models and provides valuable insights into the differences between AI-generated and human-authored texts.

new Turkronicles: Diachronic Resources for the Fast Evolving Turkish Language

Authors: Togay Yazar, Mucahid Kutlu, \.Isa Kerem Bay{\i}rl{\i}

Abstract: Over the past century, the Turkish language has undergone substantial changes, primarily driven by governmental interventions. In this work, our goal is to investigate the evolution of the Turkish language since the establishment of T\"urkiye in 1923. Thus, we first introduce Turkronicles which is a diachronic corpus for Turkish derived from the Official Gazette of T\"urkiye. Turkronicles contains 45,375 documents, detailing governmental actions, making it a pivotal resource for analyzing the linguistic evolution influenced by the state policies. In addition, we expand an existing diachronic Turkish corpus which consists of the records of the Grand National Assembly of T\"urkiye by covering additional years. Next, combining these two diachronic corpora, we seek answers for two main research questions: How have the Turkish vocabulary and the writing conventions changed since the 1920s? Our analysis reveals that the vocabularies of two different time periods diverge more as the time between them increases, and newly coined Turkish words take the place of their old counterparts. We also observe changes in writing conventions. In particular, the use of circumflex noticeably decreases and words ending with the letters "-b" and "-d" are successively replaced with "-p" and "-t" letters, respectively. Overall, this study quantitatively highlights the dramatic changes in Turkish from various aspects of the language in a diachronic perspective.

new PL-MTEB: Polish Massive Text Embedding Benchmark

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

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Polish Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (PL-MTEB), a comprehensive benchmark for text embeddings in Polish. The PL-MTEB consists of 28 diverse NLP tasks from 5 task types. We adapted the tasks based on previously used datasets by the Polish NLP community. In addition, we created a new PLSC (Polish Library of Science Corpus) dataset consisting of titles and abstracts of scientific publications in Polish, which was used as the basis for two novel clustering tasks. We evaluated 15 publicly available models for text embedding, including Polish and multilingual ones, and collected detailed results for individual tasks and aggregated results for each task type and the entire benchmark. PL-MTEB comes with open-source code at https://github.com/rafalposwiata/pl-mteb.

URLs: https://github.com/rafalposwiata/pl-mteb.

new Speaker Verification in Agent-Generated Conversations

Authors: Yizhe Yang, Heyan Huang, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim

Abstract: The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has attracted widespread interest to develop role-playing conversational agents personalized to the characteristics and styles of different speakers to enhance their abilities to perform both general and special purpose dialogue tasks. However, the ability to personalize the generated utterances to speakers, whether conducted by human or LLM, has not been well studied. To bridge this gap, our study introduces a novel evaluation challenge: speaker verification in agent-generated conversations, which aimed to verify whether two sets of utterances originate from the same speaker. To this end, we assemble a large dataset collection encompassing thousands of speakers and their utterances. We also develop and evaluate speaker verification models under experiment setups. We further utilize the speaker verification models to evaluate the personalization abilities of LLM-based role-playing models. Comprehensive experiments suggest that the current role-playing models fail in accurately mimicking speakers, primarily due to their inherent linguistic characteristics.

new LFED: A Literary Fiction Evaluation Dataset for Large Language Models

Authors: Linhao Yu, Qun Liu, Deyi Xiong

Abstract: The rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has ushered in the need for comprehensive assessments of their performance across various dimensions. In this paper, we propose LFED, a Literary Fiction Evaluation Dataset, which aims to evaluate the capability of LLMs on the long fiction comprehension and reasoning. We collect 95 literary fictions that are either originally written in Chinese or translated into Chinese, covering a wide range of topics across several centuries. We define a question taxonomy with 8 question categories to guide the creation of 1,304 questions. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis to ascertain how specific attributes of literary fictions (e.g., novel types, character numbers, the year of publication) impact LLM performance in evaluations. Through a series of experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs, we demonstrate that these models face considerable challenges in effectively addressing questions related to literary fictions, with ChatGPT reaching only 57.08% under the zero-shot setting. The dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/LFED.git

URLs: https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/LFED.git

new Hierarchical Attention Graph for Scientific Document Summarization in Global and Local Level

Authors: Chenlong Zhao, Xiwen Zhou, Xiaopeng Xie, Yong Zhang

Abstract: Scientific document summarization has been a challenging task due to the long structure of the input text. The long input hinders the simultaneous effective modeling of both global high-order relations between sentences and local intra-sentence relations which is the most critical step in extractive summarization. However, existing methods mostly focus on one type of relation, neglecting the simultaneous effective modeling of both relations, which can lead to insufficient learning of semantic representations. In this paper, we propose HAESum, a novel approach utilizing graph neural networks to locally and globally model documents based on their hierarchical discourse structure. First, intra-sentence relations are learned using a local heterogeneous graph. Subsequently, a novel hypergraph self-attention layer is introduced to further enhance the characterization of high-order inter-sentence relations. We validate our approach on two benchmark datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HAESum and the importance of considering hierarchical structures in modeling long scientific documents. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/MoLICHENXI/HAESum}

URLs: https://github.com/MoLICHENXI/HAESum

new CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinations

Authors: Jiahao Zhao, Jingwei Zhu, Minghuan Tan, Min Yang, Di Yang, Chenhao Zhang, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel psychological benchmark, CPsyExam, constructed from questions sourced from Chinese language examinations. CPsyExam is designed to prioritize psychological knowledge and case analysis separately, recognizing the significance of applying psychological knowledge to real-world scenarios. From the pool of 22k questions, we utilize 4k to create the benchmark that offers balanced coverage of subjects and incorporates a diverse range of case analysis techniques.Furthermore, we evaluate a range of existing large language models~(LLMs), spanning from open-sourced to API-based models. Our experiments and analysis demonstrate that CPsyExam serves as an effective benchmark for enhancing the understanding of psychology within LLMs and enables the comparison of LLMs across various granularities.

new A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models for Natural Language Generation Tasks

Authors: Xuanfan Ni, Piji Li

Abstract: Recent efforts have evaluated large language models (LLMs) in areas such as commonsense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has specifically investigated the performance of LLMs in natural language generation (NLG) tasks, a pivotal criterion for determining model excellence. Thus, this paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation of well-known and high-performing LLMs, namely ChatGPT, ChatGLM, T5-based models, LLaMA-based models, and Pythia-based models, in the context of NLG tasks. We select English and Chinese datasets encompassing Dialogue Generation and Text Summarization. Moreover, we propose a common evaluation setting that incorporates input templates and post-processing strategies. Our study reports both automatic results, accompanied by a detailed analysis.

new Keep It Private: Unsupervised Privatization of Online Text

Authors: Calvin Bao, Marine Carpuat

Abstract: Authorship obfuscation techniques hold the promise of helping people protect their privacy in online communications by automatically rewriting text to hide the identity of the original author. However, obfuscation has been evaluated in narrow settings in the NLP literature and has primarily been addressed with superficial edit operations that can lead to unnatural outputs. In this work, we introduce an automatic text privatization framework that fine-tunes a large language model via reinforcement learning to produce rewrites that balance soundness, sense, and privacy. We evaluate it extensively on a large-scale test set of English Reddit posts by 68k authors composed of short-medium length texts. We study how the performance changes among evaluative conditions including authorial profile length and authorship detection strategy. Our method maintains high text quality according to both automated metrics and human evaluation, and successfully evades several automated authorship attacks.

new Revisiting OPRO: The Limitations of Small-Scale LLMs as Optimizers

Authors: Tuo Zhang, Jinyue Yuan, Salman Avestimehr

Abstract: Numerous recent works aim to enhance the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) through strategic prompting. In particular, the Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO) approach provides state-of-the-art performance by leveraging LLMs as optimizers where the optimization task is to find instructions that maximize the task accuracy. In this paper, we revisit OPRO for automated prompting with relatively small-scale LLMs, such as LLaMa-2 family and Mistral 7B. Our investigation reveals that OPRO shows limited effectiveness in small-scale LLMs, with limited inference capabilities constraining optimization ability. We suggest future automatic prompting engineering to consider both model capabilities and computational costs. Additionally, for small-scale LLMs, we recommend direct instructions that clearly outline objectives and methodologies as robust prompt baselines, ensuring efficient and effective prompt engineering in ongoing research.

new Timeline-based Sentence Decomposition with In-Context Learning for Temporal Fact Extraction

Authors: Jianhao Chen, Haoyuan Ouyang, Junyang Ren, Wentao Ding, Wei Hu, Yuzhong Qu

Abstract: Facts extraction is pivotal for constructing knowledge graphs. Recently, the increasing demand for temporal facts in downstream tasks has led to the emergence of the task of temporal fact extraction. In this paper, we specifically address the extraction of temporal facts from natural language text. Previous studies fail to handle the challenge of establishing time-to-fact correspondences in complex sentences. To overcome this hurdle, we propose a timeline-based sentence decomposition strategy using large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning, ensuring a fine-grained understanding of the timeline associated with various facts. In addition, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for direct temporal fact extraction and get unsatisfactory results. To this end, we introduce TSDRE, a method that incorporates the decomposition capabilities of LLMs into the traditional fine-tuning of smaller pre-trained language models (PLMs). To support the evaluation, we construct ComplexTRED, a complex temporal fact extraction dataset. Our experiments show that TSDRE achieves state-of-the-art results on both HyperRED-Temporal and ComplexTRED datasets.

cross Unveiling Hallucination in Text, Image, Video, and Audio Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Review

Authors: Pranab Sahoo, Prabhash Meharia, Akash Ghosh, Sriparna Saha, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha

Abstract: The rapid advancement of foundation models (FMs) across language, image, audio, and video domains has shown remarkable capabilities in diverse tasks. However, the proliferation of FMs brings forth a critical challenge: the potential to generate hallucinated outputs, particularly in high-stakes applications. The tendency of foundation models to produce hallucinated content arguably represents the biggest hindrance to their widespread adoption in real-world scenarios, especially in domains where reliability and accuracy are paramount. This survey paper presents a comprehensive overview of recent developments that aim to identify and mitigate the problem of hallucination in FMs, spanning text, image, video, and audio modalities. By synthesizing recent advancements in detecting and mitigating hallucination across various modalities, the paper aims to provide valuable insights for researchers, developers, and practitioners. Essentially, it establishes a clear framework encompassing definition, taxonomy, and detection strategies for addressing hallucination in multimodal foundation models, laying the foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

cross LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less

Authors: Dan Biderman, Jose Gonzalez Ortiz, Jacob Portes, Mansheej Paul, Philip Greengard, Connor Jennings, Daniel King, Sam Havens, Vitaliy Chiley, Jonathan Frankle, Cody Blakeney, John P. Cunningham

Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely-used parameter-efficient finetuning method for large language models. LoRA saves memory by training only low rank perturbations to selected weight matrices. In this work, we compare the performance of LoRA and full finetuning on two target domains, programming and mathematics. We consider both the instruction finetuning ($\approx$100K prompt-response pairs) and continued pretraining ($\approx$10B unstructured tokens) data regimes. Our results show that, in most settings, LoRA substantially underperforms full finetuning. Nevertheless, LoRA exhibits a desirable form of regularization: it better maintains the base model's performance on tasks outside the target domain. We show that LoRA provides stronger regularization compared to common techniques such as weight decay and dropout; it also helps maintain more diverse generations. We show that full finetuning learns perturbations with a rank that is 10-100X greater than typical LoRA configurations, possibly explaining some of the reported gaps. We conclude by proposing best practices for finetuning with LoRA.

cross STAR: A Benchmark for Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos

Authors: Bo Wu, Shoubin Yu, Zhenfang Chen, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan

Abstract: Reasoning in the real world is not divorced from situations. How to capture the present knowledge from surrounding situations and perform reasoning accordingly is crucial and challenging for machine intelligence. This paper introduces a new benchmark that evaluates the situated reasoning ability via situation abstraction and logic-grounded question answering for real-world videos, called Situated Reasoning in Real-World Videos (STAR Benchmark). This benchmark is built upon the real-world videos associated with human actions or interactions, which are naturally dynamic, compositional, and logical. The dataset includes four types of questions, including interaction, sequence, prediction, and feasibility. We represent the situations in real-world videos by hyper-graphs connecting extracted atomic entities and relations (e.g., actions, persons, objects, and relationships). Besides visual perception, situated reasoning also requires structured situation comprehension and logical reasoning. Questions and answers are procedurally generated. The answering logic of each question is represented by a functional program based on a situation hyper-graph. We compare various existing video reasoning models and find that they all struggle on this challenging situated reasoning task. We further propose a diagnostic neuro-symbolic model that can disentangle visual perception, situation abstraction, language understanding, and functional reasoning to understand the challenges of this benchmark.

cross SOK-Bench: A Situated Video Reasoning Benchmark with Aligned Open-World Knowledge

Authors: Andong Wang, Bo Wu, Sunli Chen, Zhenfang Chen, Haotian Guan, Wei-Ning Lee, Li Erran Li, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan

Abstract: Learning commonsense reasoning from visual contexts and scenes in real-world is a crucial step toward advanced artificial intelligence. However, existing video reasoning benchmarks are still inadequate since they were mainly designed for factual or situated reasoning and rarely involve broader knowledge in the real world. Our work aims to delve deeper into reasoning evaluations, specifically within dynamic, open-world, and structured context knowledge. We propose a new benchmark (SOK-Bench), consisting of 44K questions and 10K situations with instance-level annotations depicted in the videos. The reasoning process is required to understand and apply situated knowledge and general knowledge for problem-solving. To create such a dataset, we propose an automatic and scalable generation method to generate question-answer pairs, knowledge graphs, and rationales by instructing the combinations of LLMs and MLLMs. Concretely, we first extract observable situated entities, relations, and processes from videos for situated knowledge and then extend to open-world knowledge beyond the visible content. The task generation is facilitated through multiple dialogues as iterations and subsequently corrected and refined by our designed self-promptings and demonstrations. With a corpus of both explicit situated facts and implicit commonsense, we generate associated question-answer pairs and reasoning processes, finally followed by manual reviews for quality assurance. We evaluated recent mainstream large vision-language models on the benchmark and found several insightful conclusions. For more information, please refer to our benchmark at www.bobbywu.com/SOKBench.

cross Many-Shot In-Context Learning in Multimodal Foundation Models

Authors: Yixing Jiang, Jeremy Irvin, Ji Hun Wang, Muhammad Ahmed Chaudhry, Jonathan H. Chen, Andrew Y. Ng

Abstract: Large language models are well-known to be effective at few-shot in-context learning (ICL). Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have enabled unprecedentedly long context windows, presenting an opportunity to explore their capability to perform ICL with many more demonstrating examples. In this work, we evaluate the performance of multimodal foundation models scaling from few-shot to many-shot ICL. We benchmark GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro across 10 datasets spanning multiple domains (natural imagery, medical imagery, remote sensing, and molecular imagery) and tasks (multi-class, multi-label, and fine-grained classification). We observe that many-shot ICL, including up to almost 2,000 multimodal demonstrating examples, leads to substantial improvements compared to few-shot (<100 examples) ICL across all of the datasets. Further, Gemini 1.5 Pro performance continues to improve log-linearly up to the maximum number of tested examples on many datasets. Given the high inference costs associated with the long prompts required for many-shot ICL, we also explore the impact of batching multiple queries in a single API call. We show that batching up to 50 queries can lead to performance improvements under zero-shot and many-shot ICL, with substantial gains in the zero-shot setting on multiple datasets, while drastically reducing per-query cost and latency. Finally, we measure ICL data efficiency of the models, or the rate at which the models learn from more demonstrating examples. We find that while GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro achieve similar zero-shot performance across the datasets, Gemini 1.5 Pro exhibits higher ICL data efficiency than GPT-4o on most datasets. Our results suggest that many-shot ICL could enable users to efficiently adapt multimodal foundation models to new applications and domains. Our codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ManyICL .

URLs: https://github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ManyICL

cross MediSyn: Text-Guided Diffusion Models for Broad Medical 2D and 3D Image Synthesis

Authors: Joseph Cho, Cyril Zakka, Rohan Shad, Ross Wightman, Akshay Chaudhari, William Hiesinger

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently gained significant traction due to their ability to generate high-fidelity and diverse images and videos conditioned on text prompts. In medicine, this application promises to address the critical challenge of data scarcity, a consequence of barriers in data sharing, stringent patient privacy regulations, and disparities in patient population and demographics. By generating realistic and varying medical 2D and 3D images, these models offer a rich, privacy-respecting resource for algorithmic training and research. To this end, we introduce MediSyn, a pair of instruction-tuned text-guided latent diffusion models with the ability to generate high-fidelity and diverse medical 2D and 3D images across specialties and modalities. Through established metrics, we show significant improvement in broad medical image and video synthesis guided by text prompts.

cross "Hunt Takes Hare": Theming Games Through Game-Word Vector Translation

Authors: Rabii Youn\`es, Cook Michael

Abstract: A game's theme is an important part of its design -- it conveys narrative information, rhetorical messages, helps the player intuit strategies, aids in tutorialisation and more. Thematic elements of games are notoriously difficult for AI systems to understand and manipulate, however, and often rely on large amounts of hand-written interpretations and knowledge. In this paper we present a technique which connects game embeddings, a recent method for modelling game dynamics from log data, and word embeddings, which models semantic information about language. We explain two different approaches for using game embeddings in this way, and show evidence that game embeddings enhance the linguistic translations of game concepts from one theme to another, opening up exciting new possibilities for reasoning about the thematic elements of games in the future.

cross Zero-Shot Hierarchical Classification on the Common Procurement Vocabulary Taxonomy

Authors: Federico Moiraghi, Matteo Palmonari, Davide Allavena, Federico Morando

Abstract: Classifying public tenders is a useful task for both companies that are invited to participate and for inspecting fraudulent activities. To facilitate the task for both participants and public administrations, the European Union presented a common taxonomy (\textit{Common Procurement Vocabulary}, CPV) which is mandatory for tenders of certain importance; however, the contracts in which a CPV label is mandatory are the minority compared to all the Public Administrations activities. Classifying over a real-world taxonomy introduces some difficulties that can not be ignored. First of all, some fine-grained classes have an insufficient (if any) number of observations in the training set, while other classes are far more frequent (even thousands of times) than the average. To overcome those difficulties, we present a zero-shot approach, based on a pre-trained language model that relies only on label description and respects the label taxonomy. To train our proposed model, we used industrial data, which comes from \url{contrattipubblici.org}, a service by \href{https://spaziodati.eu}{SpazioDati s.r.l}. that collects public contracts stipulated in Italy in the last 25 years. Results show that the proposed model achieves better performance in classifying low-frequent classes compared to three different baselines, and is also able to predict never-seen classes.

URLs: https://spaziodati.eu

cross Natural Language Can Help Bridge the Sim2Real Gap

Authors: Albert Yu, Adeline Foote, Raymond Mooney, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in

Abstract: The main challenge in learning image-conditioned robotic policies is acquiring a visual representation conducive to low-level control. Due to the high dimensionality of the image space, learning a good visual representation requires a considerable amount of visual data. However, when learning in the real world, data is expensive. Sim2Real is a promising paradigm for overcoming data scarcity in the real-world target domain by using a simulator to collect large amounts of cheap data closely related to the target task. However, it is difficult to transfer an image-conditioned policy from sim to real when the domains are very visually dissimilar. To bridge the sim2real visual gap, we propose using natural language descriptions of images as a unifying signal across domains that captures the underlying task-relevant semantics. Our key insight is that if two image observations from different domains are labeled with similar language, the policy should predict similar action distributions for both images. We demonstrate that training the image encoder to predict the language description or the distance between descriptions of a sim or real image serves as a useful, data-efficient pretraining step that helps learn a domain-invariant image representation. We can then use this image encoder as the backbone of an IL policy trained simultaneously on a large amount of simulated and a handful of real demonstrations. Our approach outperforms widely used prior sim2real methods and strong vision-language pretraining baselines like CLIP and R3M by 25 to 40%.

cross MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking

Authors: Leyi Pan, Aiwei Liu, Zhiwei He, Zitian Gao, Xuandong Zhao, Yijian Lu, Binglin Zhou, Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Irwin King

Abstract: LLM watermarking, which embeds imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in model outputs to identify LLM-generated text, has become crucial in mitigating the potential misuse of large language models. However, the abundance of LLM watermarking algorithms, their intricate mechanisms, and the complex evaluation procedures and perspectives pose challenges for researchers and the community to easily experiment with, understand, and assess the latest advancements. To address these issues, we introduce MarkLLM, an open-source toolkit for LLM watermarking. MarkLLM offers a unified and extensible framework for implementing LLM watermarking algorithms, while providing user-friendly interfaces to ensure ease of access. Furthermore, it enhances understanding by supporting automatic visualization of the underlying mechanisms of these algorithms. For evaluation, MarkLLM offers a comprehensive suite of 12 tools spanning three perspectives, along with two types of automated evaluation pipelines. Through MarkLLM, we aim to support researchers while improving the comprehension and involvement of the general public in LLM watermarking technology, fostering consensus and driving further advancements in research and application. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/MarkLLM.

URLs: https://github.com/THU-BPM/MarkLLM.

cross Building a Luganda Text-to-Speech Model From Crowdsourced Data

Authors: Sulaiman Kagumire, Andrew Katumba, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, John Quinn

Abstract: Text-to-speech (TTS) development for African languages such as Luganda is still limited, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality, single-speaker recordings essential for training TTS models. Prior work has focused on utilizing the Luganda Common Voice recordings of multiple speakers aged between 20-49. Although the generated speech is intelligible, it is still of lower quality than the model trained on studio-grade recordings. This is due to the insufficient data preprocessing methods applied to improve the quality of the Common Voice recordings. Furthermore, speech convergence is more difficult to achieve due to varying intonations, as well as background noise. In this paper, we show that the quality of Luganda TTS from Common Voice can improve by training on multiple speakers of close intonation in addition to further preprocessing of the training data. Specifically, we selected six female speakers with close intonation determined by subjectively listening and comparing their voice recordings. In addition to trimming out silent portions from the beginning and end of the recordings, we applied a pre-trained speech enhancement model to reduce background noise and enhance audio quality. We also utilized a pre-trained, non-intrusive, self-supervised Mean Opinion Score (MOS) estimation model to filter recordings with an estimated MOS over 3.5, indicating high perceived quality. Subjective MOS evaluations from nine native Luganda speakers demonstrate that our TTS model achieves a significantly better MOS of 3.55 compared to the reported 2.5 MOS of the existing model. Moreover, for a fair comparison, our model trained on six speakers outperforms models trained on a single-speaker (3.13 MOS) or two speakers (3.22 MOS). This showcases the effectiveness of compensating for the lack of data from one speaker with data from multiple speakers of close intonation to improve TTS quality.

cross Words as Trigger Points in Social Media Discussions

Authors: Dimosthenis Antypas, Christian Arnold, Jose Camacho-Collados, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Carla Perez Almendros

Abstract: Trigger points are a concept introduced by Mau, Lux, and Westheuser (2023) to study qualitative focus group interviews and understand polarisation in Germany. When people communicate, trigger points represent moments when individuals feel that their understanding of what is fair, normal, or appropriate in society is questioned. In the original studies, individuals react affectively to such triggers and show strong and negative emotional responses. In this paper, we introduce the first systematic study of the large-scale effect of individual words as trigger points by analysing a large amount of social media posts. We examine online deliberations on Reddit between 2020 and 2022 and collect >100 million posts from subreddits related to a set of words identified as trigger points in UK politics. We find that such trigger words affect user engagement and have noticeable consequences on animosity in online discussions. We share empirical evidence of trigger words causing animosity, and how they provide incentives for hate speech, adversarial debates, and disagreements. Our work is the first to introduce trigger points to computational studies of online communication. Our findings are relevant to researchers interested in online harms and who examine how citizens debate politics and society in light of affective polarisation.

cross A Tale of Two Languages: Large-Vocabulary Continuous Sign Language Recognition from Spoken Language Supervision

Authors: Charles Raude, K R Prajwal, Liliane Momeni, Hannah Bull, Samuel Albanie, Andrew Zisserman, G\"ul Varol

Abstract: In this work, our goals are two fold: large-vocabulary continuous sign language recognition (CSLR), and sign language retrieval. To this end, we introduce a multi-task Transformer model, CSLR2, that is able to ingest a signing sequence and output in a joint embedding space between signed language and spoken language text. To enable CSLR evaluation in the large-vocabulary setting, we introduce new dataset annotations that have been manually collected. These provide continuous sign-level annotations for six hours of test videos, and will be made publicly available. We demonstrate that by a careful choice of loss functions, training the model for both the CSLR and retrieval tasks is mutually beneficial in terms of performance -- retrieval improves CSLR performance by providing context, while CSLR improves retrieval with more fine-grained supervision. We further show the benefits of leveraging weak and noisy supervision from large-vocabulary datasets such as BOBSL, namely sign-level pseudo-labels, and English subtitles. Our model significantly outperforms the previous state of the art on both tasks.

cross Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models as Decision-Making Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Yuexiang Zhai, Hao Bai, Zipeng Lin, Jiayi Pan, Shengbang Tong, Yifei Zhou, Alane Suhr, Saining Xie, Yann LeCun, Yi Ma, Sergey Levine

Abstract: Large vision-language models (VLMs) fine-tuned on specialized visual instruction-following data have exhibited impressive language reasoning capabilities across various scenarios. However, this fine-tuning paradigm may not be able to efficiently learn optimal decision-making agents in multi-step goal-directed tasks from interactive environments. To address this challenge, we propose an algorithmic framework that fine-tunes VLMs with reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, our framework provides a task description and then prompts the VLM to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, enabling the VLM to efficiently explore intermediate reasoning steps that lead to the final text-based action. Next, the open-ended text output is parsed into an executable action to interact with the environment to obtain goal-directed task rewards. Finally, our framework uses these task rewards to fine-tune the entire VLM with RL. Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed framework enhances the decision-making capabilities of VLM agents across various tasks, enabling 7b models to outperform commercial models such as GPT4-V or Gemini. Furthermore, we find that CoT reasoning is a crucial component for performance improvement, as removing the CoT reasoning results in a significant decrease in the overall performance of our method.

cross How Far Are We From AGI

Authors: Tao Feng, Chuanyang Jin, Jingyu Liu, Kunlun Zhu, Haoqin Tu, Zirui Cheng, Guanyu Lin, Jiaxuan You

Abstract: The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly impacted human society, driving significant advancements in multiple sectors. Yet, the escalating demands on AI have highlighted the limitations of AI's current offerings, catalyzing a movement towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI, distinguished by its ability to execute diverse real-world tasks with efficiency and effectiveness comparable to human intelligence, reflects a paramount milestone in AI evolution. While existing works have summarized specific recent advancements of AI, they lack a comprehensive discussion of AGI's definitions, goals, and developmental trajectories. Different from existing survey papers, this paper delves into the pivotal questions of our proximity to AGI and the strategies necessary for its realization through extensive surveys, discussions, and original perspectives. We start by articulating the requisite capability frameworks for AGI, integrating the internal, interface, and system dimensions. As the realization of AGI requires more advanced capabilities and adherence to stringent constraints, we further discuss necessary AGI alignment technologies to harmonize these factors. Notably, we emphasize the importance of approaching AGI responsibly by first defining the key levels of AGI progression, followed by the evaluation framework that situates the status-quo, and finally giving our roadmap of how to reach the pinnacle of AGI. Moreover, to give tangible insights into the ubiquitous impact of the integration of AI, we outline existing challenges and potential pathways toward AGI in multiple domains. In sum, serving as a pioneering exploration into the current state and future trajectory of AGI, this paper aims to foster a collective comprehension and catalyze broader public discussions among researchers and practitioners on AGI.

replace Building Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems with Graph-Based Semantic Modeling

Authors: Yizhe Yang, Heyan Huang, Yang Gao, Jiawei Li and

Abstract: The knowledge-grounded dialogue task aims to generate responses that convey information from given knowledge documents. However, it is a challenge for the current sequence-based model to acquire knowledge from complex documents and integrate it to perform correct responses without the aid of an explicit semantic structure. To address these issues, we propose a novel graph structure, Grounded Graph ($G^2$), that models the semantic structure of both dialogue and knowledge to facilitate knowledge selection and integration for knowledge-grounded dialogue generation. We also propose a Grounded Graph Aware Transformer ($G^2AT$) model that fuses multi-forms knowledge (both sequential and graphic) to enhance knowledge-grounded response generation. Our experiments results show that our proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods with more than 10\% gains in response generation and nearly 20\% improvement in factual consistency. Further, our model reveals good generalization ability and robustness. By incorporating semantic structures as prior knowledge in deep neural networks, our model provides an effective way to aid language generation.

replace Escaping the sentence-level paradigm in machine translation

Authors: Matt Post, Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt

Abstract: It is well-known that document context is vital for resolving a range of translation ambiguities, and in fact the document setting is the most natural setting for nearly all translation. It is therefore unfortunate that machine translation -- both research and production -- largely remains stuck in a decades-old sentence-level translation paradigm. It is also an increasingly glaring problem in light of competitive pressure from large language models, which are natively document-based. Much work in document-context machine translation exists, but for various reasons has been unable to catch hold. This paper suggests a path out of this rut by addressing three impediments at once: what architectures should we use? where do we get document-level information for training them? and how do we know whether they are any good? In contrast to work on specialized architectures, we show that the standard Transformer architecture is sufficient, provided it has enough capacity. Next, we address the training data issue by taking document samples from back-translated data only, where the data is not only more readily available, but is also of higher quality compared to parallel document data, which may contain machine translation output. Finally, we propose generative variants of existing contrastive metrics that are better able to discriminate among document systems. Results in four large-data language pairs (DE$\rightarrow$EN, EN$\rightarrow$DE, EN$\rightarrow$FR, and EN$\rightarrow$RU) establish the success of these three pieces together in improving document-level performance.

replace Enhancing Small Medical Learners with Privacy-preserving Contextual Prompting

Authors: Xinlu Zhang, Shiyang Li, Xianjun Yang, Chenxin Tian, Yao Qin, Linda Ruth Petzold

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable medical expertise, but data privacy concerns impede their direct use in healthcare environments. Although offering improved data privacy protection, domain-specific small language models (SLMs) often underperform LLMs, emphasizing the need for methods that reduce this performance gap while alleviating privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method that harnesses LLMs' medical proficiency to boost SLM performance in medical tasks under privacy-restricted scenarios. Specifically, we mitigate patient privacy issues by extracting keywords from medical data and prompting the LLM to generate a medical knowledge-intensive context by simulating clinicians' thought processes. This context serves as additional input for SLMs, augmenting their decision-making capabilities. Our method significantly enhances performance in both few-shot and full training settings across three medical knowledge-intensive tasks, achieving up to a 22.57% increase in absolute accuracy compared to SLM fine-tuning without context, and sets new state-of-the-art results in two medical tasks within privacy-restricted scenarios. Further out-of-domain testing and experiments in two general domain datasets showcase its generalizability and broad applicability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.

URLs: https://github.com/XZhang97666/PrivacyBoost-SLM.

replace Advancing African-Accented Speech Recognition: Epistemic Uncertainty-Driven Data Selection for Generalizable ASR Models

Authors: Bonaventure F. P. Dossou

Abstract: Accents play a pivotal role in shaping human communication, enhancing our ability to convey and comprehend messages with clarity and cultural nuance. While there has been significant progress in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), African-accented English ASR has been understudied due to a lack of training datasets, which are often expensive to create and demand colossal human labor. Combining several active learning paradigms and the core-set approach, we propose a new multi-rounds adaptation process that uses epistemic uncertainty to automate the annotation process, significantly reducing the associated costs and human labor. This novel method streamlines data annotation and strategically selects data samples that contribute most to model uncertainty, thereby enhancing training efficiency. We define a new metric called U-WER to track model adaptation to hard accents. We evaluate our approach across several domains, datasets, and high-performing speech models. Our results show that our approach leads to a 69.44\% WER improvement while requiring on average 45\% less data than established baselines. Our approach also improves out-of-distribution generalization for very low-resource accents, demonstrating its viability for building generalizable ASR models in the context of accented African ASR. We open-source the code \href{https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/active_learning_african_asr}{here}.

URLs: https://github.com/bonaventuredossou/active_learning_african_asr

replace A blind spot for large language models: Supradiegetic linguistic information

Authors: Julia Witte Zimmerman, Denis Hudon, Kathryn Cramer, Jonathan St. Onge, Mikaela Fudolig, Milo Z. Trujillo, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT reflect profound changes in the field of Artificial Intelligence, achieving a linguistic fluency that is impressively, even shockingly, human-like. The extent of their current and potential capabilities is an active area of investigation by no means limited to scientific researchers. It is common for people to frame the training data for LLMs as "text" or even "language". We examine the details of this framing using ideas from several areas, including linguistics, embodied cognition, cognitive science, mathematics, and history. We propose that considering what it is like to be an LLM like ChatGPT, as Nagel might have put it, can help us gain insight into its capabilities in general, and in particular, that its exposure to linguistic training data can be productively reframed as exposure to the diegetic information encoded in language, and its deficits can be reframed as ignorance of extradiegetic information, including supradiegetic linguistic information. Supradiegetic linguistic information consists of those arbitrary aspects of the physical form of language that are not derivable from the one-dimensional relations of context -- frequency, adjacency, proximity, co-occurrence -- that LLMs like ChatGPT have access to. Roughly speaking, the diegetic portion of a word can be thought of as its function, its meaning, as the information in a theoretical vector in a word embedding, while the supradiegetic portion of the word can be thought of as its form, like the shapes of its letters or the sounds of its syllables. We use these concepts to investigate why LLMs like ChatGPT have trouble handling palindromes, the visual characteristics of symbols, translating Sumerian cuneiform, and continuing integer sequences.

replace PACE: Improving Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing for Large Language Model

Authors: Yihong Dong, Kangcheng Luo, Xue Jiang, Zhi Jin, Ge Li

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable potential across various tasks by conditioning on prompts. However, the quality of different human-written prompts leads to substantial discrepancies in LLMs' performance, and improving prompts usually necessitates considerable human effort and expertise. To this end, this paper proposes Prompt with Actor-Critic Editing (PACE) for LLMs to enable automatic prompt editing. Drawing inspiration from the actor-critic algorithm in reinforcement learning, PACE leverages LLMs as the dual roles of actors and critics, conceptualizing prompt as a type of policy. PACE refines prompt, taking into account the feedback from both actors performing prompt and critics criticizing response. This process helps LLMs better align prompt to a specific task, thanks to real responses and thinking from LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on 24 instruction induction tasks and 21 big-bench tasks. Experimental results indicate that PACE elevates the relative performance of medium/low-quality human-written prompts by up to 98\%, which has comparable performance to high-quality human-written prompts. Moreover, PACE also exhibits notable efficacy for prompt generation.

replace ALBA: Adaptive Language-based Assessments for Mental Health

Authors: Vasudha Varadarajan, Sverker Sikstr\"om, Oscar N. E. Kjell, H. Andrew Schwartz

Abstract: Mental health issues differ widely among individuals, with varied signs and symptoms. Recently, language-based assessments have shown promise in capturing this diversity, but they require a substantial sample of words per person for accuracy. This work introduces the task of Adaptive Language-Based Assessment ALBA, which involves adaptively ordering questions while also scoring an individual's latent psychological trait using limited language responses to previous questions. To this end, we develop adaptive testing methods under two psychometric measurement theories: Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory. We empirically evaluate ordering and scoring strategies, organizing into two new methods: a semi-supervised item response theory-based method ALIRT and a supervised Actor-Critic model. While we found both methods to improve over non-adaptive baselines, We found ALIRT to be the most accurate and scalable, achieving the highest accuracy with fewer questions (e.g., Pearson r ~ 0.93 after only 3 questions as compared to typically needing at least 7 questions). In general, adaptive language-based assessments of depression and anxiety were able to utilize a smaller sample of language without compromising validity or large computational costs.

replace Capturing Perspectives of Crowdsourced Annotators in Subjective Learning Tasks

Authors: Negar Mokhberian, Myrl G. Marmarelis, Frederic R. Hopp, Valerio Basile, Fred Morstatter, Kristina Lerman

Abstract: Supervised classification heavily depends on datasets annotated by humans. However, in subjective tasks such as toxicity classification, these annotations often exhibit low agreement among raters. Annotations have commonly been aggregated by employing methods like majority voting to determine a single ground truth label. In subjective tasks, aggregating labels will result in biased labeling and, consequently, biased models that can overlook minority opinions. Previous studies have shed light on the pitfalls of label aggregation and have introduced a handful of practical approaches to tackle this issue. Recently proposed multi-annotator models, which predict labels individually per annotator, are vulnerable to under-determination for annotators with few samples. This problem is exacerbated in crowdsourced datasets. In this work, we propose \textbf{Annotator Aware Representations for Texts (AART)} for subjective classification tasks. Our approach involves learning representations of annotators, allowing for exploration of annotation behaviors. We show the improvement of our method on metrics that assess the performance on capturing individual annotators' perspectives. Additionally, we demonstrate fairness metrics to evaluate our model's equability of performance for marginalized annotators compared to others.

replace Should agentic conversational AI change how we think about ethics? Characterising an interactional ethics centred on respect

Authors: Lize Alberts, Geoff Keeling, Amanda McCroskery

Abstract: With the growing popularity of conversational agents based on large language models (LLMs), we need to ensure their behaviour is ethical and appropriate. Work in this area largely centres around the 'HHH' criteria: making outputs more helpful and honest, and avoiding harmful (biased, toxic, or inaccurate) statements. Whilst this semantic focus is useful when viewing LLM agents as mere mediums or output-generating systems, it fails to account for pragmatic factors that can make the same speech act seem more or less tactless or inconsiderate in different social situations. With the push towards agentic AI, wherein systems become increasingly proactive in chasing goals and performing actions in the world, considering the pragmatics of interaction becomes essential. We propose an interactional approach to ethics that is centred on relational and situational factors. We explore what it means for a system, as a social actor, to treat an individual respectfully in a (series of) interaction(s). Our work anticipates a set of largely unexplored risks at the level of situated social interaction, and offers practical suggestions to help agentic LLM technologies treat people well.

replace Sowing the Wind, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Impact of Editing Language Models

Authors: Rima Hazra, Sayan Layek, Somnath Banerjee, Soujanya Poria

Abstract: In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of Red-Teaming or Jailbreaking large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and enhancing the safety and robustness of these models. This paper investigates the intricate consequences of such modifications through model editing, uncovering a complex relationship between enhancing model accuracy and preserving its ethical integrity. Our in-depth analysis reveals a striking paradox: while injecting accurate information is crucial for model reliability, it can paradoxically destabilize the model's foundational framework, resulting in unpredictable and potentially unsafe behaviors. Additionally, we propose a benchmark dataset NicheHazardQA to investigate this unsafe behavior both within the same and cross topical domain. This aspect of our research sheds light on how the edits, impact the model's safety metrics and guardrails. Our findings show that model editing serves as a cost-effective tool for topical red-teaming by methodically applying targeted edits and evaluating the resultant model behavior.

replace GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators

Authors: Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ruizhe Li, Dong Zhang, Zhehuai Chen, Eng Siong Chng

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. However, both translation tasks typically utilize beam search decoding and top-1 hypothesis selection for inference. These techniques struggle to fully exploit the rich information in the diverse N-best hypotheses, making them less optimal for translation tasks that require a single, high-quality output sequence. In this paper, we propose a new generative paradigm for translation tasks, namely "GenTranslate", which builds upon LLMs to generate better results from the diverse translation versions in N-best list. Leveraging the rich linguistic knowledge and strong reasoning abilities of LLMs, our new paradigm can integrate the rich information in N-best candidates to generate a higher-quality translation result. Furthermore, to support LLM finetuning, we build and release a HypoTranslate dataset that contains over 592K hypotheses-translation pairs in 11 languages. Experiments on various speech and machine translation benchmarks (e.g., FLEURS, CoVoST-2, WMT) demonstrate that our GenTranslate significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model.

replace Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models

Authors: Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Huanyu Liu, Zhi Jin, Ge Li

Abstract: Recent statements about the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are usually supported by evaluating on open-access benchmarks. Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs' training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data, leading to LLMs being more susceptible to data contamination. However, due to the opacity of training data, the black-box access of models, and the rapid growth of synthetic training data, detecting and mitigating data contamination for LLMs faces significant challenges. In this paper, we propose CDD, which stands for Contamination Detection via output Distribution for LLMs. CDD necessitates only the sampled texts to detect data contamination, by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution. To mitigate the impact of data contamination in evaluation, we also present TED: Trustworthy Evaluation via output Distribution, based on the correction of LLM's output distribution. To facilitate this study, we introduce two benchmarks, i.e., DetCon and ComiEval, for data contamination detection and contamination mitigation evaluation tasks. Extensive experimental results show that CDD achieves the average relative improvements of 21.8\%-30.2\% over other contamination detection approaches in terms of Accuracy, F1 Score, and AUC metrics, and can effectively detect contamination caused by the variants of test data. TED significantly mitigates performance improvements up to 66.9\% attributed to data contamination across 24 settings and 21 contamination degrees. In real-world applications, we reveal that ChatGPT exhibits a high potential to suffer from data contamination on HumanEval benchmark.

replace A Modular Approach for Multimodal Summarization of TV Shows

Authors: Louis Mahon, Mirella Lapata

Abstract: In this paper we address the task of summarizing television shows, which touches key areas in AI research: complex reasoning, multiple modalities, and long narratives. We present a modular approach where separate components perform specialized sub-tasks which we argue affords greater flexibility compared to end-to-end methods. Our modules involve detecting scene boundaries, reordering scenes so as to minimize the number of cuts between different events, converting visual information to text, summarizing the dialogue in each scene, and fusing the scene summaries into a final summary for the entire episode. We also present a new metric, PREFS (Precision and Recall Evaluation of Summary FactS), to measure both precision and recall of generated summaries, which we decompose into atomic facts. Tested on the recently released SummScreen3D dataset Papalampidi and Lapata (2023), our method produces higher quality summaries than comparison models, as measured with ROUGE and our new fact-based metric.

replace Retrieval augmented text-to-SQL generation for epidemiological question answering using electronic health records

Authors: Angelo Ziletti, Leonardo D'Ambrosi

Abstract: Electronic health records (EHR) and claims data are rich sources of real-world data that reflect patient health status and healthcare utilization. Querying these databases to answer epidemiological questions is challenging due to the intricacy of medical terminology and the need for complex SQL queries. Here, we introduce an end-to-end methodology that combines text-to-SQL generation with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to answer epidemiological questions using EHR and claims data. We show that our approach, which integrates a medical coding step into the text-to-SQL process, significantly improves the performance over simple prompting. Our findings indicate that although current language models are not yet sufficiently accurate for unsupervised use, RAG offers a promising direction for improving their capabilities, as shown in a realistic industry setting.

replace FEEL: A Framework for Evaluating Emotional Support Capability with Large Language Models

Authors: Huaiwen Zhang, Yu Chen, Ming Wang, Shi Feng

Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a typical dialogue that can effectively assist the user in mitigating emotional pressures. However, owing to the inherent subjectivity involved in analyzing emotions, current non-artificial methodologies face challenges in effectively appraising the emotional support capability. These metrics exhibit a low correlation with human judgments. Concurrently, manual evaluation methods extremely will cause high costs. To solve these problems, we propose a novel model FEEL (Framework for Evaluating Emotional Support Capability with Large Lan-guage Models), employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators to assess emotional support capabilities. The model meticulously considers various evaluative aspects of ESC to apply a more comprehensive and accurate evaluation method for ESC. Additionally, it employs a probability distribution approach for a more stable result and integrates an ensemble learning strategy, leveraging multiple LLMs with assigned weights to enhance evaluation accuracy. To appraise the performance of FEEL, we conduct extensive experiments on existing ESC model dialogues. Experimental results demonstrate our model exhibits a substantial enhancement in alignment with human evaluations compared to the baselines. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ansisy/FEEL.

URLs: https://github.com/Ansisy/FEEL.

replace Interpreting Key Mechanisms of Factual Recall in Transformer-Based Language Models

Authors: Ang Lv, Yuhan Chen, Kaiyi Zhang, Yulong Wang, Lifeng Liu, Ji-Rong Wen, Jian Xie, Rui Yan

Abstract: In this paper, we deeply explore several mechanisms employed by Transformer-based language models in factual recall tasks. In zero-shot scenarios, given a prompt like ``The capital of France is,'' task-specific attention heads extract the topic entity, such as ``France,'' from the context and pass it to subsequent MLPs to recall the required answer such as ``Paris.'' We introduce a novel analysis method aimed at decomposing the outputs of the MLP into components understandable by humans. Through this method, we quantify the function of the MLP layer following these task-specific heads. In the residual stream, it either erases or amplifies the information originating from individual heads. Moreover, it generates a component that redirects the residual stream towards the direction of its expected answer. These zero-shot mechanisms are also employed in few-shot scenarios. Additionally, we observed a widely existent anti-overconfidence mechanism in the final layer of models, which suppresses correct predictions. We mitigate this suppression by leveraging our interpretation to improve factual recall confidence. Our interpretations have been evaluated across various language models, including the GPT-2 families, 1.3B OPT, and 7B Llama-2, encompassing diverse tasks spanning various domains of factual knowledge.

replace TRABSA: Interpretable Sentiment Analysis of Tweets using Attention-based BiLSTM and Twitter-RoBERTa

Authors: Md Abrar Jahin, Md Sakib Hossain Shovon, M. F. Mridha, Md Rashedul Islam, Yutaka Watanobe

Abstract: Sentiment analysis is crucial for understanding public opinion and consumer behavior. Existing models face challenges with linguistic diversity, generalizability, and explainability. We propose TRABSA, a hybrid framework integrating transformer-based architectures, attention mechanisms, and BiLSTM networks to address this. Leveraging RoBERTa-trained on 124M tweets, we bridge gaps in sentiment analysis benchmarks, ensuring state-of-the-art accuracy. Augmenting datasets with tweets from 32 countries and US states, we compare six word-embedding techniques and three lexicon-based labeling techniques, selecting the best for optimal sentiment analysis. TRABSA outperforms traditional ML and deep learning models with 94% accuracy and significant precision, recall, and F1-score gains. Evaluation across diverse datasets demonstrates consistent superiority and generalizability. SHAP and LIME analyses enhance interpretability, improving confidence in predictions. Our study facilitates pandemic resource management, aiding resource planning, policy formation, and vaccination tactics.

replace A Mathematical Theory for Learning Semantic Languages by Abstract Learners

Authors: Kuo-Yu Liao, Cheng-Shang Chang, Y. -W. Peter Hong

Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the emergence of capabilities (learned skills) when the number of system parameters and the size of training data surpass certain thresholds. The exact mechanisms behind such phenomena are not fully understood and remain a topic of active research. Inspired by the skill-text bipartite graph model proposed by Arora and Goyal for modeling semantic languages, we develop a mathematical theory to explain the emergence of learned skills, taking the learning (or training) process into account. Our approach models the learning process for skills in the skill-text bipartite graph as an iterative decoding process in Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes and Irregular Repetition Slotted ALOHA (IRSA). Using density evolution analysis, we demonstrate the emergence of learned skills when the ratio of the number of training texts to the number of skills exceeds a certain threshold. Our analysis also yields a scaling law for testing errors relative to this ratio. Upon completion of the training, the association of learned skills can also be acquired to form a skill association graph. We use site percolation analysis to derive the conditions for the existence of a giant component in the skill association graph. Our analysis can also be extended to the setting with a hierarchy of skills, where a fine-tuned model is built upon a foundation model. It is also applicable to the setting with multiple classes of skills and texts. As an important application, we propose a method for semantic compression and discuss its connections to semantic communication.

replace Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model

Authors: Hengyuan Zhang, Yanru Wu, Dawei Li, Zacc Yang, Rui Zhao, Yong Jiang, Fei Tan

Abstract: Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) showcase remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. Meanwhile, aligned LLMs are also expected to exhibit speciality, excelling in specific applications. However, fine-tuning with extra data, a common practice to gain speciality, often leads to catastrophic forgetting (CF) of previously acquired versatility, hindering the model's performance across diverse tasks. In response to this challenge, we propose CoFiTune, a coarse to fine framework in an attempt to strike the balance between speciality and versatility. At the coarse-grained level, an empirical tree-search algorithm is utilized to pinpoint and update specific modules that are crucial for speciality, while keeping other parameters frozen; at the fine-grained level, a soft-masking mechanism regulates the update to the LLMs, mitigating the CF issue without harming speciality. In an overall evaluation of both speciality and versatility, CoFiTune consistently outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. Compared to the full-parameter SFT, CoFiTune leads to about 14% versatility improvement and marginal speciality loss on a 13B model. Lastly, based on further analysis, we provide a speculative insight into the information forwarding process in LLMs, which helps explain the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/CoFiTune.

URLs: https://github.com/rattlesnakey/CoFiTune.

replace Self-Explore to Avoid the Pit: Improving the Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models with Fine-grained Rewards

Authors: Hyeonbin Hwang, Doyoung Kim, Seungone Kim, Seonghyeon Ye, Minjoon Seo

Abstract: Training on large amounts of rationales (i.e., CoT Fine-tuning) is effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, acquiring human-authored rationales or augmenting rationales from proprietary models is costly and not scalable. In this paper, we study the problem of whether LLMs could self-improve their reasoning capabilities. To this end, we propose Self-Explore, where the LLM is tasked to explore the first wrong step (i.e., the first pit) within the rationale and use such signals as fine-grained rewards for further improvement. On the GSM8K and MATH test set, Self-Explore achieves 11.57% and 2.89% improvement on average across three LLMs compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our code is available at https://github.com/hbin0701/Self-Explore.

URLs: https://github.com/hbin0701/Self-Explore.

replace Protecting Your LLMs with Information Bottleneck

Authors: Zichuan Liu, Zefan Wang, Linjie Xu, Jinyu Wang, Lei Song, Tianchun Wang, Chunlin Chen, Wei Cheng, Jiang Bian

Abstract: The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing, yet they might be attacked to produce harmful content. Despite efforts to ethically align LLMs, these are often fragile and can be circumvented by jailbreaking attacks through optimized or manual adversarial prompts. To address this, we introduce the Information Bottleneck Protector (IBProtector), a defense mechanism grounded in the information bottleneck principle, and we modify the objective to avoid trivial solutions. The IBProtector selectively compresses and perturbs prompts, facilitated by a lightweight and trainable extractor, preserving only essential information for the target LLMs to respond with the expected answer. Moreover, we further consider a situation where the gradient is not visible to be compatible with any LLM. Our empirical evaluations show that IBProtector outperforms current defense methods in mitigating jailbreak attempts, without overly affecting response quality or inference speed. Its effectiveness and adaptability across various attack methods and target LLMs underscore the potential of IBProtector as a novel, transferable defense that bolsters the security of LLMs without requiring modifications to the underlying models.

replace FlashBack:Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling for Long Context Inference

Authors: Runheng Liu, Xingchen Xiao, Heyan Huang, Zewen Chi, Zhijing Wu

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) by integrating large language models (LLM) with relevant documents from an external corpus is a proven method for enabling the LLM to generate information beyond the scope of its pre-training corpus. Previous work utilizing retrieved content by simply prepending it to the input poses a high runtime issue, which degrades the inference efficiency of the LLMs because they fail to use the Key-Value (KV) cache efficiently. In this paper, we propose FlashBack, a modular RALM designed to improve the inference efficiency of RALM with appending context pattern while maintaining decent performance after fine-tuning by Low-Rank Adaption. FlashBack appends retrieved documents at the end of the context for efficiently utilizing the KV cache instead of prepending them. And we introduce Marking Token as two special prompt tokens for marking the boundary of the appending context during fine-tuning. Our experiments on testing generation quality show that FlashBack can remain decent generation quality in perplexity. And the inference speed of FlashBack is up to $4\times$ faster than the prepending counterpart on a 7B LLM (Llama 2) in the runtime test. Via bypassing unnecessary re-computation, it demonstrates an advancement by achieving significantly faster inference speed, and this heightened efficiency will substantially reduce inferential cost.

replace DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model

Authors: DeepSeek-AI

Abstract: We present DeepSeek-V2, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model characterized by economical training and efficient inference. It comprises 236B total parameters, of which 21B are activated for each token, and supports a context length of 128K tokens. DeepSeek-V2 adopts innovative architectures including Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE. MLA guarantees efficient inference through significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector, while DeepSeekMoE enables training strong models at an economical cost through sparse computation. Compared with DeepSeek 67B, DeepSeek-V2 achieves significantly stronger performance, and meanwhile saves 42.5% of training costs, reduces the KV cache by 93.3%, and boosts the maximum generation throughput to 5.76 times. We pretrain DeepSeek-V2 on a high-quality and multi-source corpus consisting of 8.1T tokens, and further perform Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to fully unlock its potential. Evaluation results show that, even with only 21B activated parameters, DeepSeek-V2 and its chat versions still achieve top-tier performance among open-source models.

replace E2TP: Element to Tuple Prompting Improves Aspect Sentiment Tuple Prediction

Authors: Mohammad Ghiasvand Mohammadkhani, Niloofar Ranjbar, Saeedeh Momtazi

Abstract: Generative approaches have significantly influenced Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), garnering considerable attention. However, existing studies often predict target text components monolithically, neglecting the benefits of utilizing single elements for tuple prediction. In this paper, we introduce Element to Tuple Prompting (E2TP), employing a two-step architecture. The former step focuses on predicting single elements, while the latter step completes the process by mapping these predicted elements to their corresponding tuples. E2TP is inspired by human problem-solving, breaking down tasks into manageable parts, using the first step's output as a guide in the second step. Within this strategy, three types of paradigms, namely E2TP($diet$), E2TP($f_1$), and E2TP($f_2$), are designed to facilitate the training process. Beyond dataset-specific experiments, our paper addresses cross-domain scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of the approach. By conducting a comprehensive analysis on various benchmarks, we show that E2TP achieves new state-of-the-art results in nearly all cases.

replace OpenLLM-Ro -- Technical Report on Open-source Romanian LLMs

Authors: Mihai Masala, Denis C. Ilie-Ablachim, Dragos Corlatescu, Miruna Zavelca, Marius Leordeanu, Horia Velicu, Marius Popescu, Mihai Dascalu, Traian Rebedea

Abstract: In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English. Hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds their performance in other languages. This document presents our approach to training and evaluating the first foundational and chat LLM specialized for Romanian.

replace Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models in Biomedical NLP: Application, Robustness, and Self-Awareness

Authors: Mingchen Li, Zaifu Zhan, Han Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Jiatan Huang, Rui Zhang

Abstract: Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tasks, leveraging the demonstration within the input context to adapt to new tasks. However, LLM is sensitive to the selection of demonstrations. To address the hallucination issue inherent in LLM, retrieval-augmented LLM (RAL) offers a solution by retrieving pertinent information from an established database. Nonetheless, existing research work lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented large language models on different biomedical NLP tasks. This deficiency makes it challenging to ascertain the capabilities of RAL within the biomedical domain. Moreover, the outputs from RAL are affected by retrieving the unlabeled, counterfactual, or diverse knowledge that is not well studied in the biomedical domain. However, such knowledge is common in the real world. Finally, exploring the self-awareness ability is also crucial for the RAL system. So, in this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of RALs on 5 different biomedical tasks (triple extraction, link prediction, classification, question answering, and natural language inference). We analyze the performance of RALs in four fundamental abilities, including unlabeled robustness, counterfactual robustness, diverse robustness, and negative awareness. To this end, we proposed an evaluation framework to assess the RALs' performance on different biomedical NLP tasks and establish four different testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities. Then, we evaluate 3 representative LLMs with 3 different retrievers on 5 tasks over 9 datasets.

replace LLM-Assisted Rule Based Machine Translation for Low/No-Resource Languages

Authors: Jared Coleman, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, Khalil Iskarous, Ruben Rosales

Abstract: We propose a new paradigm for machine translation that is particularly useful for no-resource languages (those without any publicly available bilingual or monolingual corpora): LLM-RBMT (LLM-Assisted Rule Based Machine Translation). Using the LLM-RBMT paradigm, we design the first language education/revitalization-oriented machine translator for Owens Valley Paiute (OVP), a critically endangered Indigenous American language for which there is virtually no publicly available data. We present a detailed evaluation of the translator's components: a rule-based sentence builder, an OVP to English translator, and an English to OVP translator. We also discuss the potential of the paradigm, its limitations, and the many avenues for future research that it opens up.

replace-cross BEIR-PL: Zero Shot Information Retrieval Benchmark for the Polish Language

Authors: Konrad Wojtasik, Vadim Shishkin, Kacper Wo{\l}owiec, Arkadiusz Janz, Maciej Piasecki

Abstract: The BEIR dataset is a large, heterogeneous benchmark for Information Retrieval (IR) in zero-shot settings, garnering considerable attention within the research community. However, BEIR and analogous datasets are predominantly restricted to the English language. Our objective is to establish extensive large-scale resources for IR in the Polish language, thereby advancing the research in this NLP area. In this work, inspired by mMARCO and Mr.~TyDi datasets, we translated all accessible open IR datasets into Polish, and we introduced the BEIR-PL benchmark -- a new benchmark which comprises 13 datasets, facilitating further development, training and evaluation of modern Polish language models for IR tasks. We executed an evaluation and comparison of numerous IR models on the newly introduced BEIR-PL benchmark. Furthermore, we publish pre-trained open IR models for Polish language,d marking a pioneering development in this field. Additionally, the evaluation revealed that BM25 achieved significantly lower scores for Polish than for English, which can be attributed to high inflection and intricate morphological structure of the Polish language. Finally, we trained various re-ranking models to enhance the BM25 retrieval, and we compared their performance to identify their unique characteristic features. To ensure accurate model comparisons, it is necessary to scrutinise individual results rather than to average across the entire benchmark. Thus, we thoroughly analysed the outcomes of IR models in relation to each individual data subset encompassed by the BEIR benchmark. The benchmark data is available at URL {\bf https://huggingface.co/clarin-knext}.

URLs: https://huggingface.co/clarin-knext

replace-cross MagicBrush: A Manually Annotated Dataset for Instruction-Guided Image Editing

Authors: Kai Zhang, Lingbo Mo, Wenhu Chen, Huan Sun, Yu Su

Abstract: Text-guided image editing is widely needed in daily life, ranging from personal use to professional applications such as Photoshop. However, existing methods are either zero-shot or trained on an automatically synthesized dataset, which contains a high volume of noise. Thus, they still require lots of manual tuning to produce desirable outcomes in practice. To address this issue, we introduce MagicBrush (https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/MagicBrush/), the first large-scale, manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing that covers diverse scenarios: single-turn, multi-turn, mask-provided, and mask-free editing. MagicBrush comprises over 10K manually annotated triplets (source image, instruction, target image), which supports trainining large-scale text-guided image editing models. We fine-tune InstructPix2Pix on MagicBrush and show that the new model can produce much better images according to human evaluation. We further conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current image editing baselines from multiple dimensions including quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations. The results reveal the challenging nature of our dataset and the gap between current baselines and real-world editing needs.

URLs: https://osu-nlp-group.github.io/MagicBrush/),

replace-cross Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning

Authors: Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yuheng Li, Yong Jae Lee

Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMM) have recently shown encouraging progress with visual instruction tuning. In this note, we show that the fully-connected vision-language cross-modal connector in LLaVA is surprisingly powerful and data-efficient. With simple modifications to LLaVA, namely, using CLIP-ViT-L-336px with an MLP projection and adding academic-task-oriented VQA data with simple response formatting prompts, we establish stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art across 11 benchmarks. Our final 13B checkpoint uses merely 1.2M publicly available data, and finishes full training in ~1 day on a single 8-A100 node. We hope this can make state-of-the-art LMM research more accessible. Code and model will be publicly available.

replace-cross Large Language Model-Enhanced Algorithm Selection: Towards Comprehensive Algorithm Representation

Authors: Xingyu Wu, Yan Zhong, Jibin Wu, Bingbing Jiang, Kay Chen Tan

Abstract: Algorithm selection, a critical process of automated machine learning, aims to identify the most suitable algorithm for solving a specific problem prior to execution. Mainstream algorithm selection techniques heavily rely on problem features, while the role of algorithm features remains largely unexplored. Due to the intrinsic complexity of algorithms, effective methods for universally extracting algorithm information are lacking. This paper takes a significant step towards bridging this gap by introducing Large Language Models (LLMs) into algorithm selection for the first time. By comprehending the code text, LLM not only captures the structural and semantic aspects of the algorithm, but also demonstrates contextual awareness and library function understanding. The high-dimensional algorithm representation extracted by LLM, after undergoing a feature selection module, is combined with the problem representation and passed to the similarity calculation module. The selected algorithm is determined by the matching degree between a given problem and different algorithms. Extensive experiments validate the performance superiority of the proposed model and the efficacy of each key module. Furthermore, we present a theoretical upper bound on model complexity, showcasing the influence of algorithm representation and feature selection modules. This provides valuable theoretical guidance for the practical implementation of our method.

replace-cross From Matching to Generation: A Survey on Generative Information Retrieval

Authors: Xiaoxi Li, Jiajie Jin, Yujia Zhou, Yuyao Zhang, Peitian Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Zhicheng Dou

Abstract: Information Retrieval (IR) systems are crucial tools for users to access information, widely applied in scenarios like search engines, question answering, and recommendation systems. Traditional IR methods, based on similarity matching to return ranked lists of documents, have been reliable means of information acquisition, dominating the IR field for years. With the advancement of pre-trained language models, generative information retrieval (GenIR) has emerged as a novel paradigm, gaining increasing attention in recent years. Currently, research in GenIR can be categorized into two aspects: generative document retrieval (GR) and reliable response generation. GR leverages the generative model's parameters for memorizing documents, enabling retrieval by directly generating relevant document identifiers without explicit indexing. Reliable response generation, on the other hand, employs language models to directly generate the information users seek, breaking the limitations of traditional IR in terms of document granularity and relevance matching, offering more flexibility, efficiency, and creativity, thus better meeting practical needs. This paper aims to systematically review the latest research progress in GenIR. We will summarize the advancements in GR regarding model training, document identifier, incremental learning, downstream tasks adaptation, multi-modal GR and generative recommendation, as well as progress in reliable response generation in aspects of internal knowledge memorization, external knowledge augmentation, generating response with citations and personal information assistant. We also review the evaluation, challenges and future prospects in GenIR systems. This review aims to offer a comprehensive reference for researchers in the GenIR field, encouraging further development in this area.