Authors: Brendon Boldt, David Mortensen
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for evaluating the overall quality of emergent languages using data-driven methods. Specifically, we interpret the notion of the "quality" of an emergent language as its similarity to human language within a deep learning framework. We measure this by using the emergent language as pretraining data for a downstream NLP tasks in human language -- the better the downstream performance, the better the emergent language. We implement this benchmark as an easy-to-use Python package that only requires a text file of utterances from the emergent language to be evaluated. Finally, we empirically test the benchmark's validity using human, synthetic, and emergent language baselines.
Authors: Sudha Rao, Weijia Xu, Michael Xu, Jorge Leandro, Ken Lobb, Gabriel DesGarennes, Chris Brockett, Bill Dolan
Abstract: The use of generative AI in video game development is on the rise, and as the conversational and other capabilities of large language models continue to improve, we expect LLM-driven non-player characters (NPCs) to become widely deployed. In this paper, we seek to understand how human players collaborate with LLM-driven NPCs to accomplish in-game goals. We design a minigame within Minecraft where a player works with two GPT4-driven NPCs to complete a quest. We perform a user study in which 28 Minecraft players play this minigame and share their feedback. On analyzing the game logs and recordings, we find that several patterns of collaborative behavior emerge from the NPCs and the human players. We also report on the current limitations of language-only models that do not have rich game-state or visual understanding. We believe that this preliminary study and analysis will inform future game developers on how to better exploit these rapidly improving generative AI models for collaborative roles in games.
Authors: Sundesh Donthi, Maximilian Spencer, Om Patel, Joon Doh, Eid Rodan
Abstract: For large language models (LLMs) like NLLB and GPT, translating idioms remains a challenge. Our goal is to enhance translation fidelity by improving LLM processing of idiomatic language while preserving the original linguistic style. This has a significant social impact, as it preserves cultural nuances and ensures translated texts retain their intent and emotional resonance, fostering better cross-cultural communication. Previous work has utilized knowledge bases like IdiomKB by providing the LLM with the meaning of an idiom to use in translation. Although this method yielded better results than a direct translation, it is still limited in its ability to preserve idiomatic writing style across languages. In this research, we expand upon the knowledge base to find corresponding idioms in the target language. Our research performs translations using two methods: The first method employs the SentenceTransformers model to semantically generate cosine similarity scores between the meanings of the original and target language idioms, selecting the best idiom (Cosine Similarity method). The second method uses an LLM to find a corresponding idiom in the target language for use in the translation (LLM-generated idiom method). As a baseline, we performed a direct translation without providing additional information. Human evaluations on the English -> Chinese, and Chinese -> English show the Cosine Similarity Lookup method out-performed others in all GPT4o translations. To further build upon IdiomKB, we developed a low-resource Urdu dataset containing Urdu idioms and their translations. Despite dataset limitations, the Cosine Similarity Lookup method shows promise, potentially overcoming language barriers and enabling the exploration of diverse literary works in Chinese and Urdu. For access to the code and replication of our experiments, please visit (https://github.com/ANON13222/ITR).
Authors: Md Nayem Uddin, Amir Saeidi, Divij Handa, Agastya Seth, Tran Cao Son, Eduardo Blanco, Steven R. Corman, Chitta Baral
Abstract: This paper introduces UnSeenTimeQA, a novel time-sensitive question-answering (TSQA) benchmark that diverges from traditional TSQA benchmarks by avoiding factual and web-searchable queries. We present a series of time-sensitive event scenarios decoupled from real-world factual information. It requires large language models (LLMs) to engage in genuine temporal reasoning, disassociating from the knowledge acquired during the pre-training phase. Our evaluation of six open-source LLMs (ranging from 2B to 70B in size) and three closed-source LLMs reveal that the questions from the UnSeenTimeQA present substantial challenges. This indicates the models' difficulties in handling complex temporal reasoning scenarios. Additionally, we present several analyses shedding light on the models' performance in answering time-sensitive questions.
Authors: Jayanta Sadhu, Maneesha Rani Saha, Rifat Shahriyar
Abstract: The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has put forward the study of biases as a crucial field. It is important to assess the influence of different types of biases embedded in LLMs to ensure fair use in sensitive fields. Although there have been extensive works on bias assessment in English, such efforts are rare and scarce for a major language like Bangla. In this work, we examine two types of social biases in LLM generated outputs for Bangla language. Our main contributions in this work are: (1) bias studies on two different social biases for Bangla (2) a curated dataset for bias measurement benchmarking (3) two different probing techniques for bias detection in the context of Bangla. This is the first work of such kind involving bias assessment of LLMs for Bangla to the best of our knowledge. All our code and resources are publicly available for the progress of bias related research in Bangla NLP.
Authors: Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Atreya Ghosal, Alexander Gill, Purbid Bambroo, Ana Marasovi\'c
Abstract: Is explainability a false promise? This debate has emerged from the insufficient evidence that explanations aid people in situations they are introduced for. More human-centered, application-grounded evaluations of explanations are needed to settle this. Yet, with no established guidelines for such studies in NLP, researchers accustomed to standardized proxy evaluations must discover appropriate measurements, tasks, datasets, and sensible models for human-AI teams in their studies. To help with this, we first review fitting existing metrics. We then establish requirements for datasets to be suitable for application-grounded evaluations. Among over 50 datasets available for explainability research in NLP, we find that 4 meet our criteria. By finetuning Flan-T5-3B, we demonstrate the importance of reassessing the state of the art to form and study human-AI teams. Finally, we present the exemplar studies of human-AI decision-making for one of the identified suitable tasks -- verifying the correctness of a legal claim given a contract.
Authors: Zhengping Jiang, Jingyu Zhang, Nathaniel Weir, Seth Ebner, Miriam Wanner, Kate Sanders, Daniel Khashabi, Anqi Liu, Benjamin Van Durme
Abstract: Hallucinations -- the generation of untrue claims -- pose a challenge to the application of large language models (LLMs) [1] thereby motivating the development of metrics to evaluate factual precision. We observe that popular metrics using the Decompose-Then-Verify framework, such as FActScore [2], can be manipulated by adding obvious or repetitive claims to artificially inflate scores. We expand the FActScore dataset to design and analyze factual precision metrics, demonstrating that models can be trained to achieve high scores under existing metrics through exploiting the issues we identify. This motivates our new customizable plug-and-play subclaim selection component called Core, which filters down individual subclaims according to their uniqueness and informativeness. Metrics augmented by Core are substantially more robust as shown in head-to-head comparisons. We release an evaluation framework supporting the modular use of Core (https://github.com/zipJiang/Core) and various decomposition strategies, and we suggest its adoption by the LLM community. [1] Hong et al., "The Hallucinations Leaderboard -- An Open Effort to Measure Hallucinations in Large Language Models", arXiv:2404.05904v2 [cs.CL]. [2] Min et al., "FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation", arXiv:2305.14251v2 [cs.CL].
Authors: Andrew Bouras
Abstract: Generating diverse, high-quality outputs from language models is crucial for applications in education and content creation. Achieving true randomness and avoiding repetition remains a significant challenge. This study uses the Linear Congruential Generator method for systematic fact selection, combined with AI-powered content generation. We ensured unique combinations of gastrointestinal physiology and pathology facts across multiple rounds, integrating these facts into prompts for GPT-4o to create clinically relevant, vignette-style outputs. Over 14 rounds, 98 unique outputs were generated, demonstrating LCG's effectiveness in producing diverse and high-quality content. This method addresses key issues of randomness and repetition, enhancing the quality and efficiency of language model-generated content for various applications.
Authors: Kazuaki Furumai, Roberto Legaspi, Julio Vizcarra, Yudai Yamazaki, Yasutaka Nishimura, Sina J. Semnani, Kazushi Ikeda, Weiyan Shi, Monica S. Lam
Abstract: Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots can accelerate the positive effects of persuasion in such applications. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. To address this issue, we propose a method to leverage the generalizability and inherent persuasive abilities of large language models (LLMs) in creating effective and truthful persuasive chatbot for any given domain in a zero-shot manner. Unlike previous studies which used pre-defined persuasion strategies, our method first uses an LLM to generate responses, then extracts the strategies used on the fly, and replaces any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots. Our study demonstrated that when persuasive chatbots are employed responsibly for social good, it is an enabler of positive individual and social change.
Authors: Grant Kruttschnitt, Jay Shim, Alyssa Ma, Daniel Kim, Benjamin Chek, Athul Anand, Kevin Zhu, Sean O'Brien
Abstract: Rapidly increasing model scales coupled with steering methods such as chain-of-thought prompting have led to drastic improvements in language model reasoning. At the same time, models struggle with compositional generalization and are far from human performance on many reasoning-based benchmarks. Leveraging the success of chain-of-thought prompting, and also taking inspiration from context-aware decoding (CAD), we explore input-based contrasting methods to further encourage the type of reasoning induced by chain-of-thought prompting. While work remains to stabilize these results across datasets and models, the improvements we find warrant further investigation into input-based steering methods for context-aware reasoning.
Authors: Zhiyang Xu, Minqian Liu, Ying Shen, Joy Rimchala, Jiaxin Zhang, Qifan Wang, Yu Cheng, Lifu Huang
Abstract: Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have led to the development of Vision-Language Generalists (VLGs) capable of understanding and generating interleaved images and text. Despite these advances, VLGs still struggle to follow user instructions for interleaved text and image generation. To address this issue, we introduce LeafInstruct, the first open-sourced interleaved instruction tuning data with over 30,000 high-quality instances across more than 10 domains. Due to the extensive size of existing VLGs, we opt for parameter-efficient tuning. However, we observe that VLGs tuned with a standard LoRA typically exhibit inferior performance in interleaved text-image generation. We attribute this problem to modality interference and the lack of modality-specialized adaptation design. Hence, we propose Lateralization LoRA, a novel modality-specialized adaptation method inspired by the concept of brain lateralization. Lateralization LoRA employs a hybrid approach, combining the traditional linear LoRA and a Convolutional LoRA for generating text and images, enabling the generation of high-quality text and images by leveraging modality-specific structures and parameter sets. We perform instruction tuning of the VLG (i.e., EMU2) using Lateralization LoRA on the LeafInstruct dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMU2 tuned with Lateralization LoRA achieve state-of-the-art performance, significantly surpassing baseline models in complex interleaved tasks.
Authors: Chang-Sheng Kao, Yun-Nung Chen
Abstract: Recent advancements in dialogue systems have highlighted the significance of integrating multimodal responses, which enable conveying ideas through diverse modalities rather than solely relying on text-based interactions. This enrichment not only improves overall communicative efficacy but also enhances the quality of conversational experiences. However, existing methods for dialogue-to-image retrieval face limitations due to the constraints of pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) in comprehending complex dialogues accurately. To address this, we present a novel approach leveraging the robust reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to generate precise dialogue-associated visual descriptors, facilitating seamless connection with images. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark data validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in deriving concise and accurate visual descriptors, leading to significant enhancements in dialogue-to-image retrieval performance. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the method's generalizability across diverse visual cues, various LLMs, and different datasets, underscoring its practicality and potential impact in real-world applications.
Authors: Brenden Smith, Dallin Baker, Clayton Chase, Myles Barney, Kaden Parker, Makenna Allred, Peter Hu, Alex Evans, Nancy Fulda
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have an unrivaled and invaluable ability to "align" their output to a diverse range of human preferences, by mirroring them in the text they generate. The internal characteristics of such models, however, remain largely opaque. This work presents the Injectable Realignment Model (IRM) as a novel approach to language model interpretability and explainability. Inspired by earlier work on Neural Programming Interfaces, we construct and train a small network -- the IRM -- to induce emotion-based alignments within a 7B parameter LLM architecture. The IRM outputs are injected via layerwise addition at various points during the LLM's forward pass, thus modulating its behavior without changing the weights of the original model. This isolates the alignment behavior from the complex mechanisms of the transformer model. Analysis of the trained IRM's outputs reveals a curious pattern. Across more than 24 training runs and multiple alignment datasets, patterns of IRM activations align themselves in striations associated with a neuron's index within each transformer layer, rather than being associated with the layers themselves. Further, a single neuron index (1512) is strongly correlated with all tested alignments. This result, although initially counterintuitive, is directly attributable to design choices present within almost all commercially available transformer architectures, and highlights a potential weak point in Meta's pretrained Llama 2 models. It also demonstrates the value of the IRM architecture for language model analysis and interpretability. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DRAGNLabs/injectable-alignment-model
URLs: https://github.com/DRAGNLabs/injectable-alignment-model
Authors: Dharunish Yugeswardeenoo, Kevin Zhu, Sean O'Brien
Abstract: Although LLMs have the potential to transform many fields, they still underperform humans in reasoning tasks. Existing methods induce the model to produce step-by-step calculations, but this research explores the question: Does making the LLM analyze the question improve its performance? We propose a novel prompting strategy called Question Analysis Prompting (QAP), in which the model is prompted to explain the question in $n$ words before solving. The value of $n$ influences the length of response generated by the model. QAP is evaluated on GPT 3.5 Turbo and GPT 4 Turbo on arithmetic datasets GSM8K, AQuA, and SAT and commonsense dataset StrategyQA. QAP is compared with other state-of-the-art prompts including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Plan and Solve Prompting (PS+) and Take A Deep Breath (TADB). QAP outperforms all state-of-the-art prompts on AQuA and SAT datasets on both GPT3.5 and GPT4. QAP consistently ranks among the top-2 prompts on 75\% of the tests. A key factor of QAP performance can be attributed to response length, where detailed responses are beneficial when answering harder questions, but can negatively affect easy questions.
Authors: Taeho Hwang, Soyeong Jeong, Sukmin Cho, SeungYoon Han, Jong C. Park
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved their performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with generating non-factual responses due to limitations in their parametric memory. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems address this issue by incorporating external knowledge with a retrieval module. Despite their successes, however, current RAG systems face challenges with retrieval failures and the limited ability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information. Therefore, in this work, we propose \textit{\textbf{DSLR}} (\textbf{D}ocument Refinement with \textbf{S}entence-\textbf{L}evel \textbf{R}e-ranking and Reconstruction), an unsupervised framework that decomposes retrieved documents into sentences, filters out irrelevant sentences, and reconstructs them again into coherent passages. We experimentally validate \textit{DSLR} on multiple open-domain QA datasets and the results demonstrate that \textit{DSLR} significantly enhances the RAG performance over conventional fixed-size passage. Furthermore, our \textit{DSLR} enhances performance in specific, yet realistic scenarios without the need for additional training, providing an effective and efficient solution for refining retrieved documents in RAG systems.
Authors: Chin Yuen Kwok, Jia Qi Yip, Eng Siong Chng
Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) involves fine-tuning pre-trained models with new data while maintaining the performance on the pre-trained data. This is particularly relevant for expanding multilingual ASR (MASR) capabilities. However, existing CL methods, mainly designed for computer vision and reinforcement learning tasks, often yield sub-optimal results when directly applied to MASR. We hypothesise that this is because CL of the auto-regressive decoder in the MASR model is difficult. To verify this, we propose four optimizations on the decoder. They include decoder-layer gradient surgery, freezing unused token embeddings, suppressing output of newly added tokens, and learning rate re-scaling. Our experiments on adapting Whisper to 10 unseen languages from the Common Voice dataset demonstrate that these optimizations reduce the Average Word Error Rate (AWER) of pretrained languages from 14.2% to 12.4% compared with Experience Replay, without compromising the AWER of new languages.
Authors: Georgios P. Georgiou
Abstract: While extensive research has focused on ChatGPT in recent years, very few studies have systematically quantified and compared linguistic features between human-written and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated language. This study aims to investigate how various linguistic components are represented in both types of texts, assessing the ability of AI to emulate human writing. Using human-authored essays as a benchmark, we prompted ChatGPT to generate essays of equivalent length. These texts were analyzed using Open Brain AI, an online computational tool, to extract measures of phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical constituents. Despite AI-generated texts appearing to mimic human speech, the results revealed significant differences across multiple linguistic features such as consonants, word stress, nouns, verbs, pronouns, direct objects, prepositional modifiers, and use of difficult words among others. These findings underscore the importance of integrating automated tools for efficient language assessment, reducing time and effort in data analysis. Moreover, they emphasize the necessity for enhanced training methodologies to improve the capacity of AI for producing more human-like text.
Authors: Amanda Dsouza, Christopher Glaze, Changho Shin, Frederic Sala
Abstract: Large language models are prominently used in real-world applications, often tasked with reasoning over large volumes of documents. An exciting development in this space is models boasting extended context capabilities, with some accommodating over 2 million tokens. Such long context model capabilities remain uncertain in production systems, motivating the need to benchmark their performance on real world use cases. We address this challenge by proposing SWiM, an evaluation framework that addresses the limitations of standard tests. Testing the framework on eight long context models, we find that even strong models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus degrade in performance when information is present in the middle of the context window (lost-in-the-middle effect). Next, in addition to our benchmark, we propose medoid voting, a simple, but effective training-free approach that helps alleviate this effect, by generating responses a few times, each time randomly permuting documents in the context, and selecting the medoid answer. We evaluate medoid voting on single document QA tasks, achieving up to a 24% lift in accuracy.
Authors: Jianhao Yan, Pingchuan Yan, Yulong Chen, Judy Li, Xianchao Zhu, Yue Zhang
Abstract: This study comprehensively evaluates the translation quality of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, against human translators of varying expertise levels across multiple language pairs and domains. Through carefully designed annotation rounds, we find that GPT-4 performs comparably to junior translators in terms of total errors made but lags behind medium and senior translators. We also observe the imbalanced performance across different languages and domains, with GPT-4's translation capability gradually weakening from resource-rich to resource-poor directions. In addition, we qualitatively study the translation given by GPT-4 and human translators, and find that GPT-4 translator suffers from literal translations, but human translators sometimes overthink the background information. To our knowledge, this study is the first to evaluate LLMs against human translators and analyze the systematic differences between their outputs, providing valuable insights into the current state of LLM-based translation and its potential limitations.
Authors: Ashutosh Sathe, Divyanshu Aggarwal, Sunayana Sitaram
Abstract: Prior research has demonstrated noticeable performance gains through the use of probabilistic tokenizations, an approach that involves employing multiple tokenizations of the same input string during the training phase of a language model. Despite these promising findings, modern large language models (LLMs) have yet to be trained using probabilistic tokenizations. Interestingly, while the tokenizers of these contemporary LLMs have the capability to generate multiple tokenizations, this property remains underutilized. In this work, we propose a novel method to leverage the multiple tokenization capabilities of modern LLM tokenizers, aiming to enhance the self-consistency of LLMs in reasoning tasks. Our experiments indicate that when utilizing probabilistic tokenizations, LLMs generate logically diverse reasoning paths, moving beyond mere surface-level linguistic diversity.We carefully study probabilistic tokenization and offer insights to explain the self consistency improvements it brings through extensive experimentation on 5 LLM families and 4 reasoning benchmarks.
Authors: Zhenyu Bi, Daniel Hajialigol, Zhongkai Sun, Jie Hao, Xuan Wang
Abstract: Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) requires a model to retrieve and integrate information from multiple passages to answer a complex question. Recent systems leverage the power of large language models and integrate evidence retrieval with reasoning prompts (e.g., chain-of-thought reasoning) for the MHQA task. However, the complexities in the question types (bridge v.s. comparison questions) and the reasoning types (sequential v.s. parallel reasonings) require more novel and fine-grained prompting methods to enhance the performance of MHQA under the zero-shot setting. In this paper, we propose STOC-TOT, a stochastic tree-of-thought reasoning prompting method with constrained decoding for MHQA and conduct a detailed comparison with other reasoning prompts on different question types and reasoning types. Specifically, we construct a tree-like reasoning structure by prompting the model to break down the original question into smaller sub-questions to form different reasoning paths. In addition, we prompt the model to provide a probability estimation for each reasoning path at each reasoning step. At answer time, we conduct constrained decoding on the model to generate more grounded answers and reduce hallucination. Experiments comparing STOC-TOT with two MHQA datasets and five large language models showed that our framework outperforms other reasoning prompts by a significant margin.
Authors: Litton Jose Kurisinkel, Pruthwik Mishra, Yue Zhang
Abstract: Time series models, typically trained on numerical data, are designed to forecast future values. These models often rely on weighted averaging techniques over time intervals. However, real-world time series data is seldom isolated and is frequently influenced by non-numeric factors. For instance, stock price fluctuations are impacted by daily random events in the broader world, with each event exerting a unique influence on price signals. Previously, forecasts in financial markets have been approached in two main ways: either as time-series problems over price sequence or sentiment analysis tasks. The sentiment analysis tasks aim to determine whether news events will have a positive or negative impact on stock prices, often categorizing them into discrete labels. Recognizing the need for a more comprehensive approach to accurately model time series prediction, we propose a collaborative modeling framework that incorporates textual information about relevant events for predictions. Specifically, we leverage the intuition of large language models about future changes to update real number time series predictions. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach on financial market data.
Authors: Darshan Prabhu, Yifan Peng, Preethi Jyothi, Shinji Watanabe
Abstract: Convolutions have become essential in state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition~(ASR) systems due to their efficient modelling of local context. Notably, its use in Conformers has led to superior performance compared to vanilla Transformer-based ASR systems. While components other than the convolution module in the Conformer have been reexamined, altering the convolution module itself has been far less explored. Towards this, we introduce Multi-Convformer that uses multiple convolution kernels within the convolution module of the Conformer in conjunction with gating. This helps in improved modeling of local dependencies at varying granularities. Our model rivals existing Conformer variants such as CgMLP and E-Branchformer in performance, while being more parameter efficient. We empirically compare our approach with Conformer and its variants across four different datasets and three different modelling paradigms and show up to 8% relative word error rate~(WER) improvements.
Authors: Darshan Prabhu, Abhishek Gupta, Omkar Nitsure, Preethi Jyothi, Sriram Ganapathy
Abstract: Speech accents present a serious challenge to the performance of state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Even with self-supervised learning and pre-training of ASR models, accent invariance is seldom achieved. In this work, we propose an accent-aware adaptation technique for self-supervised learning that introduces a trainable set of accent-specific codebooks to the self-supervised architecture. These learnable codebooks enable the model to capture accent specific information during pre-training, that is further refined during ASR finetuning. On the Mozilla Common Voice dataset, our proposed approach outperforms all other accent-adaptation approaches on both seen and unseen English accents, with up to 9% relative reduction in word error rate (WER).
Authors: Anar Yeginbergen, Maite Oronoz, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: Recent research on sequence labelling has been exploring different strategies to mitigate the lack of manually annotated data for the large majority of the world languages. Among others, the most successful approaches have been based on (i) the cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models (model-transfer), (ii) data translation and label projection (data-transfer) and (iii), prompt-based learning by reusing the mask objective to exploit the few-shot capabilities of pre-trained language models (few-shot). Previous work seems to conclude that model-transfer outperforms data-transfer methods and that few-shot techniques based on prompting are superior to updating the model's weights via fine-tuning. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that, for Argument Mining, a sequence labelling task which requires the detection of long and complex discourse structures, previous insights on cross-lingual transfer or few-shot learning do not apply. Contrary to previous work, we show that for Argument Mining data transfer obtains better results than model-transfer and that fine-tuning outperforms few-shot methods. Regarding the former, the domain of the dataset used for data-transfer seems to be a deciding factor, while, for few-shot, the type of task (length and complexity of the sequence spans) and sampling method prove to be crucial.
Authors: Morgane Casanova, Julien Chanson, Benjamin Icard, G\'eraud Faye, Guillaume Gadek, Guillaume Gravier, Paul \'Egr\'e
Abstract: This paper presents the HYBRINFOX method used to solve Task 2 of Subjectivity detection of the CLEF 2024 CheckThat! competition. The specificity of the method is to use a hybrid system, combining a RoBERTa model, fine-tuned for subjectivity detection, a frozen sentence-BERT (sBERT) model to capture semantics, and several scores calculated by the English version of the expert system VAGO, developed independently of this task to measure vagueness and subjectivity in texts based on the lexicon. In English, the HYBRINFOX method ranked 1st with a macro F1 score of 0.7442 on the evaluation data. For the other languages, the method used a translation step into English, producing more mixed results (ranking 1st in Multilingual and 2nd in Italian over the baseline, but under the baseline in Bulgarian, German, and Arabic). We explain the principles of our hybrid approach, and outline ways in which the method could be improved for other languages besides English.
Authors: Lei Yu, Jingcheng Niu, Zining Zhu, Gerald Penn
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive reformulation of the task known as Circuit Discovery, along with DiscoGP, a novel and effective algorithm based on differentiable masking for discovering circuits. Circuit discovery is the task of interpreting the computational mechanisms of language models (LMs) by dissecting their functions and capabilities into sparse subnetworks (circuits). We identified two major limitations in existing circuit discovery efforts: (1) a dichotomy between weight-based and connection-edge-based approaches forces researchers to choose between pruning connections or weights, thereby limiting the scope of mechanistic interpretation of LMs; (2) algorithms based on activation patching tend to identify circuits that are neither functionally faithful nor complete. The performance of these identified circuits is substantially reduced, often resulting in near-random performance in isolation. Furthermore, the complement of the circuit -- i.e., the original LM with the identified circuit removed -- still retains adequate performance, indicating that essential components of a complete circuits are missed by existing methods. DiscoGP successfully addresses the two aforementioned issues and demonstrates state-of-the-art faithfulness, completeness, and sparsity. The effectiveness of the algorithm and its novel structure open up new avenues of gathering new insights into the internal workings of generative AI.
Authors: Florian Schneider, Sunayana Sitaram
Abstract: Since the release of ChatGPT, the field of Natural Language Processing has experienced rapid advancements, particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs often exhibit significant performance disparities across different languages and cultural contexts, as demonstrated by various text-only benchmarks. However, current research lacks such benchmarks for multimodal visio-linguistic settings. This work fills this gap by introducing M5, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs on diverse vision-language tasks within a multilingual and multicultural context. M5 includes eight datasets covering five tasks and $41$ languages, with a focus on underrepresented languages and culturally diverse images. Furthermore, we introduce two novel datasets, M5-VGR and M5-VLOD, including a new Visio-Linguistic Outlier Detection task, in which all evaluated open-source models fail to significantly surpass the random baseline. Through extensive evaluation and analyses, we highlight substantial task-agnostic performance disparities between high- and low-resource languages. Moreover, we show that larger models do not necessarily outperform smaller ones in a multilingual setting.
Authors: Polina Tsvilodub, Michael Franke, Fausto Carcassi
Abstract: To what extent can LLMs be used as part of a cognitive model of language generation? In this paper, we approach this question by exploring a neuro-symbolic implementation of an algorithmic cognitive model of referential expression generation by Dale & Reiter (1995). The symbolic task analysis implements the generation as an iterative procedure that scaffolds symbolic and gpt-3.5-turbo-based modules. We compare this implementation to an ablated model and a one-shot LLM-only baseline on the A3DS dataset (Tsvilodub & Franke, 2023). We find that our hybrid approach is cognitively plausible and performs well in complex contexts, while allowing for more open-ended modeling of language generation in a larger domain.
Authors: Tiia Sildam, Andra Velve, Tanel Alum\"ae
Abstract: This paper investigates the finetuning of end-to-end models for bidirectional Estonian-English and Estonian-Russian conversational speech-to-text translation. Due to the limited availability of speech translation data for Estonian, we created additional training data by web scraping and synthesizing data from speech recognition datasets using machine translation. We evaluated three publicly available end-to-end models: Whisper, OWSM 3.1, and SeamlessM4T. Our results indicate that fine-tuning with synthetic data enhances translation accuracy by a large margin, with SeamlessM4T matching or surpassing cascaded speech translation systems that use state-of-the-art speech recognition and machine translation models.
Authors: Patr\'icia Pereira, Helena Moniz, Joao Paulo Carvalho
Abstract: Empathy and emotion prediction are key components in the development of effective and empathetic agents, amongst several other applications. The WASSA shared task on empathy and emotion prediction in interactions presents an opportunity to benchmark approaches to these tasks. Appropriately selecting and representing the historical context is crucial in the modelling of empathy and emotion in conversations. In our submissions, we model empathy, emotion polarity and emotion intensity of each utterance in a conversation by feeding the utterance to be classified together with its conversational context, i.e., a certain number of previous conversational turns, as input to an encoder Pre-trained Language Model, to which we append a regression head for prediction. We also model perceived counterparty empathy of each interlocutor by feeding all utterances from the conversation and a token identifying the interlocutor for which we are predicting the empathy. Our system officially ranked $1^{st}$ at the CONV-turn track and $2^{nd}$ at the CONV-dialog track.
Authors: John Mendon\c{c}a, Alon Lavie, Isabel Trancoso
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in various Natural Language Processing tasks. For automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation in particular, LLMs have been seamlessly integrated into evaluation frameworks, and together with human evaluation, compose the backbone of most evaluations. However, existing evaluation benchmarks often rely on outdated datasets and evaluate aspects like Fluency and Relevance, which fail to adequately capture the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art chatbot models. This paper critically examines current evaluation benchmarks, highlighting that the use of older response generators and quality aspects fail to accurately reflect modern chatbot capabilities. A small annotation experiment on a recent LLM-generated dataset (SODA) reveals that LLM evaluators such as GPT-4 struggle to detect actual deficiencies in dialogues generated by current LLM chatbots.
Authors: G\'eraud Faye, Morgane Casanova, Benjamin Icard, Julien Chanson, Guillaume Gadek, Guillaume Gravier, Paul \'Egr\'e
Abstract: This paper summarizes the experiments and results of the HYBRINFOX team for the CheckThat! 2024 - Task 1 competition. We propose an approach enriching Language Models such as RoBERTa with embeddings produced by triples (subject ; predicate ; object) extracted from the text sentences. Our analysis of the developmental data shows that this method improves the performance of Language Models alone. On the evaluation data, its best performance was in English, where it achieved an F1 score of 71.1 and ranked 12th out of 27 candidates. On the other languages (Dutch and Arabic), it obtained more mixed results. Future research tracks are identified toward adapting this processing pipeline to more recent Large Language Models.
Authors: Rapha\"el Milli\`ere, Charles Rathkopf
Abstract: Evaluating the cognitive capacities of large language models (LLMs) requires overcoming not only anthropomorphic but also anthropocentric biases. This article identifies two types of anthropocentric bias that have been neglected: overlooking how auxiliary factors can impede LLM performance despite competence (Type-I), and dismissing LLM mechanistic strategies that differ from those of humans as not genuinely competent (Type-II). Mitigating these biases necessitates an empirically-driven, iterative approach to mapping cognitive tasks to LLM-specific capacities and mechanisms, which can be done by supplementing carefully designed behavioral experiments with mechanistic studies.
Authors: Aleksei Dorkin, Kairit Sirts
Abstract: We present our submission to the AXOLOTL-24 shared task. The shared task comprises two subtasks: identifying new senses that words gain with time (when comparing newer and older time periods) and producing the definitions for the identified new senses. We implemented a conceptually simple and computationally inexpensive solution to both subtasks. We trained adapter-based binary classification models to match glosses with usage examples and leveraged the probability output of the models to identify novel senses. The same models were used to match examples of novel sense usages with Wiktionary definitions. Our submission attained third place on the first subtask and the first place on the second subtask.
Authors: Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, Yuqian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
Abstract: Controllability and proactivity are crucial properties of autonomous conversational agents (CAs). Controllability requires the CAs to follow the standard operating procedures (SOPs), such as verifying identity before activating credit cards. Proactivity requires the CAs to guide the conversation towards the goal during user uncooperation, such as persuasive dialogue. Existing research cannot be unified with controllability, proactivity, and low manual annotation. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework for planning-based conversational agents (PCA) powered by large language models (LLMs), which only requires humans to define tasks and goals for the LLMs. Before conversation, LLM plans the core and necessary SOP for dialogue offline. During the conversation, LLM plans the best action path online referring to the SOP, and generates responses to achieve process controllability. Subsequently, we propose a semi-automatic dialogue data creation framework and curate a high-quality dialogue dataset (PCA-D). Meanwhile, we develop multiple variants and evaluation metrics for PCA, e.g., planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (PCA-M), which searches for the optimal dialogue action while satisfying SOP constraints and achieving the proactive of the dialogue. Experiment results show that LLMs finetuned on PCA-D can significantly improve the performance and generalize to unseen domains. PCA-M outperforms other CoT and ToT baselines in terms of conversation controllability, proactivity, task success rate, and overall logical coherence, and is applicable in industry dialogue scenarios. The dataset and codes are available at XXXX.
Authors: Philipp Kohl, Yoka Kr\"amer, Claudia Fohry, Bodo Kraft
Abstract: We conducted a scoping review for active learning in the domain of natural language processing (NLP), which we summarize in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines as follows: Objective: Identify active learning strategies that were proposed for entity recognition and their evaluation environments (datasets, metrics, hardware, execution time). Design: We used Scopus and ACM as our search engines. We compared the results with two literature surveys to assess the search quality. We included peer-reviewed English publications introducing or comparing active learning strategies for entity recognition. Results: We analyzed 62 relevant papers and identified 106 active learning strategies. We grouped them into three categories: exploitation-based (60x), exploration-based (14x), and hybrid strategies (32x). We found that all studies used the F1-score as an evaluation metric. Information about hardware (6x) and execution time (13x) was only occasionally included. The 62 papers used 57 different datasets to evaluate their respective strategies. Most datasets contained newspaper articles or biomedical/medical data. Our analysis revealed that 26 out of 57 datasets are publicly accessible. Conclusion: Numerous active learning strategies have been identified, along with significant open questions that still need to be addressed. Researchers and practitioners face difficulties when making data-driven decisions about which active learning strategy to adopt. Conducting comprehensive empirical comparisons using the evaluation environment proposed in this study could help establish best practices in the domain.
Authors: Egil R{\o}nningstad, Roman Klinger, Erik Velldal, Lilja {\O}vrelid
Abstract: In sentiment analysis of longer texts, there may be a variety of topics discussed, of entities mentioned, and of sentiments expressed regarding each entity. We find a lack of studies exploring how such texts express their sentiment towards each entity of interest, and how these sentiments can be modelled. In order to better understand how sentiment regarding persons and organizations (each entity in our scope) is expressed in longer texts, we have collected a dataset of expert annotations where the overall sentiment regarding each entity is identified, together with the sentence-level sentiment for these entities separately. We show that the reader's perceived sentiment regarding an entity often differs from an arithmetic aggregation of sentiments at the sentence level. Only 70\% of the positive and 55\% of the negative entities receive a correct overall sentiment label when we aggregate the (human-annotated) sentiment labels for the sentences where the entity is mentioned. Our dataset reveals the complexity of entity-specific sentiment in longer texts, and allows for more precise modelling and evaluation of such sentiment expressions.
Authors: Jiahuan Cao, Dezhi Peng, Peirong Zhang, Yongxin Shi, Yang Liu, Kai Ding, Lianwen Jin
Abstract: Classical Chinese is a gateway to the rich heritage and wisdom of ancient China, yet its complexities pose formidable comprehension barriers for most modern people without specialized knowledge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), they struggle with Classical Chinese Understanding (CCU), especially in data-demanding and knowledge-intensive tasks. In response to this dilemma, we propose \textbf{TongGu} (mean understanding ancient and modern), the first CCU-specific LLM, underpinned by three core contributions. First, we construct a two-stage instruction-tuning dataset ACCN-INS derived from rich classical Chinese corpora, aiming to unlock the full CCU potential of LLMs. Second, we propose Redundancy-Aware Tuning (RAT) to prevent catastrophic forgetting, enabling TongGu to acquire new capabilities while preserving its foundational knowledge. Third, we present a CCU Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CCU-RAG) technique to reduce hallucinations based on knowledge-grounding. Extensive experiments across 24 diverse CCU tasks validate TongGu's superior ability, underscoring the effectiveness of RAT and CCU-RAG. The model and dataset will be public available.
Authors: Gianluca Michelli, Xiaoyu Tong, Ekaterina Shutova
Abstract: Metaphors are part of everyday language and shape the way in which we conceptualize the world. Moreover, they play a multifaceted role in communication, making their understanding and generation a challenging task for language models (LMs). While there has been extensive work in the literature linking metaphor to the fulfilment of individual intentions, no comprehensive taxonomy of such intentions, suitable for natural language processing (NLP) applications, is available to present day. In this paper, we propose a novel taxonomy of intentions commonly attributed to metaphor, which comprises 9 categories. We also release the first dataset annotated for intentions behind metaphor use. Finally, we use this dataset to test the capability of large language models (LLMs) in inferring the intentions behind metaphor use, in zero- and in-context few-shot settings. Our experiments show that this is still a challenge for LLMs.
Authors: Jo\~ao Rodrigues, Ant\'onio Branco
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation resorts to content retrieved from external sources in order to leverage the performance of large language models in downstream tasks. The excessive volume of retrieved content, the possible dispersion of its parts, or their out of focus range may happen nevertheless to eventually have a detrimental rather than an incremental effect. To mitigate this issue and improve retrieval-augmented generation, we propose a method to refine the retrieved content before it is included in the prompt by resorting to meta-prompting optimization. Put to empirical test with the demanding multi-hop question answering task from the StrategyQA dataset, the evaluation results indicate that this method outperforms a similar retrieval-augmented system but without this method by over 30%.
Authors: Young-Jun Lee, Dokyong Lee, Junyoung Youn, Kyeongjin Oh, Byungsoo Ko, Jonghwan Hyeon, Ho-Jin Choi
Abstract: Humans share a wide variety of images related to their personal experiences within conversations via instant messaging tools. However, existing works focus on (1) image-sharing behavior in singular sessions, leading to limited long-term social interaction, and (2) a lack of personalized image-sharing behavior. In this work, we introduce Stark, a large-scale long-term multi-modal conversation dataset that covers a wide range of social personas in a multi-modality format, time intervals, and images. To construct Stark automatically, we propose a novel multi-modal contextualization framework, Mcu, that generates long-term multi-modal dialogue distilled from ChatGPT and our proposed Plan-and-Execute image aligner. Using our Stark, we train a multi-modal conversation model, Ultron 7B, which demonstrates impressive visual imagination ability. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in human evaluation. We make our source code and dataset publicly available.
Authors: LLM-jp, :, Akiko Aizawa, Eiji Aramaki, Bowen Chen, Fei Cheng, Hiroyuki Deguchi, Rintaro Enomoto, Kazuki Fujii, Kensuke Fukumoto, Takuya Fukushima, Namgi Han, Yuto Harada, Chikara Hashimoto, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Shohei Hisada, Sosuke Hosokawa, Lu Jie, Keisuke Kamata, Teruhito Kanazawa, Hiroki Kanezashi, Hiroshi Kataoka, Satoru Katsumata, Daisuke Kawahara, Seiya Kawano, Atsushi Keyaki, Keisuke Kiryu, Hirokazu Kiyomaru, Takashi Kodama, Takahiro Kubo, Yohei Kuga, Ryoma Kumon, Shuhei Kurita, Sadao Kurohashi, Conglong Li, Taiki Maekawa, Hiroshi Matsuda, Yusuke Miyao, Kentaro Mizuki, Sakae Mizuki, Yugo Murawaki, Ryo Nakamura, Taishi Nakamura, Kouta Nakayama, Tomoka Nakazato, Takuro Niitsuma, Jiro Nishitoba, Yusuke Oda, Hayato Ogawa, Takumi Okamoto, Naoaki Okazaki, Yohei Oseki, Shintaro Ozaki, Koki Ryu, Rafal Rzepka, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Shota Sasaki, Satoshi Sekine, Kohei Suda, Saku Sugawara, Issa Sugiura, Hiroaki Sugiyama, Hisami Suzuki, Jun Suzuki, Toyotaro Suzumura, Kensuke Tachibana, Yu Takagi, Kyosuke Takami, Koichi Takeda, Masashi Takeshita, Masahiro Tanaka, Kenjiro Taura, Arseny Tolmachev, Nobuhiro Ueda, Zhen Wan, Shuntaro Yada, Sakiko Yahata, Yuya Yamamoto, Yusuke Yamauchi, Hitomi Yanaka, Rio Yokota, Koichiro Yoshino
Abstract: This paper introduces LLM-jp, a cross-organizational project for the research and development of Japanese large language models (LLMs). LLM-jp aims to develop open-source and strong Japanese LLMs, and as of this writing, more than 1,500 participants from academia and industry are working together for this purpose. This paper presents the background of the establishment of LLM-jp, summaries of its activities, and technical reports on the LLMs developed by LLM-jp. For the latest activities, visit https://llm-jp.nii.ac.jp/en/.
Authors: Fuxiang Zhang, Junyou Li, Yi-Chen Li, Zongzhang Zhang, Yang Yu, Deheng Ye
Abstract: Low sample efficiency is an enduring challenge of reinforcement learning (RL). With the advent of versatile large language models (LLMs), recent works impart common-sense knowledge to accelerate policy learning for RL processes. However, we note that such guidance is often tailored for one specific task but loses generalizability. In this paper, we introduce a framework that harnesses LLMs to extract background knowledge of an environment, which contains general understandings of the entire environment, making various downstream RL tasks benefit from one-time knowledge representation. We ground LLMs by feeding a few pre-collected experiences and requesting them to delineate background knowledge of the environment. Afterward, we represent the output knowledge as potential functions for potential-based reward shaping, which has a good property for maintaining policy optimality from task rewards. We instantiate three variants to prompt LLMs for background knowledge, including writing code, annotating preferences, and assigning goals. Our experiments show that these methods achieve significant sample efficiency improvements in a spectrum of downstream tasks from Minigrid and Crafter domains.
Authors: Amit Parekh, Nikolas Vitsakis, Alessandro Suglia, Ioannis Konstas
Abstract: Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that systematically examines the role of instructions and inputs in the generalisation abilities of such models, considering architectural design, input perturbations across language and vision modalities, and increased task complexity. The proposed framework uncovers the resilience of multimodal models to extreme instruction perturbations and their vulnerability to observational changes, raising concerns about overfitting to spurious correlations. By employing this evaluation framework on current Transformer-based multimodal models for robotic manipulation tasks, we uncover limitations and suggest future advancements should focus on architectural and training innovations that better integrate multimodal inputs, enhancing a model's generalisation prowess by prioritising sensitivity to input content over incidental correlations.
Authors: Hovhannes Tamoyan, Hendrik Schuff, Iryna Gurevych
Abstract: The development of chatbots requires collecting a large number of human-chatbot dialogues to reflect the breadth of users' sociodemographic backgrounds and conversational goals. However, the resource requirements to conduct the respective user studies can be prohibitively high and often only allow for a narrow analysis of specific dialogue goals and participant demographics. In this paper, we propose LLM-Roleplay: a goal-oriented, persona-based method to automatically generate diverse multi-turn dialogues simulating human-chatbot interaction. LLM-Roleplay can be applied to generate dialogues with any type of chatbot and uses large language models (LLMs) to play the role of textually described personas. To validate our method we collect natural human-chatbot dialogues from different sociodemographic groups and conduct a human evaluation to compare real human-chatbot dialogues with our generated dialogues. We compare the abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs in embodying personas and holding a conversation and find that our method can simulate human-chatbot dialogues with a high indistinguishability rate.
Authors: Bosi Wen, Pei Ke, Xiaotao Gu, Lindong Wu, Hao Huang, Jinfeng Zhou, Wenchuang Li, Binxin Hu, Wendy Gao, Jiaxin Xu, Yiming Liu, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
Abstract: Instruction following is one of the fundamental capabilities of large language models (LLMs). As the ability of LLMs is constantly improving, they have been increasingly applied to deal with complex human instructions in real-world scenarios. Therefore, how to evaluate the ability of complex instruction-following of LLMs has become a critical research problem. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on modeling different types of constraints in human instructions while neglecting the composition of different constraints, which is an indispensable constituent in complex instructions. To this end, we propose ComplexBench, a benchmark for comprehensively evaluating the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions composed of multiple constraints. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy for complex instructions, including 4 constraint types, 19 constraint dimensions, and 4 composition types, and manually collect a high-quality dataset accordingly. To make the evaluation reliable, we augment LLM-based evaluators with rules to effectively verify whether generated texts can satisfy each constraint and composition. Furthermore, we obtain the final evaluation score based on the dependency structure determined by different composition types. ComplexBench identifies significant deficiencies in existing LLMs when dealing with complex instructions with multiple constraints composition.
Authors: Yongjie Wang, Xiaoqi Qiu, Yu Yue, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Yuhong Feng, Zhiqi Shen
Abstract: Natural Language Counterfactual generation aims to minimally modify a given text such that the modified text will be classified into a different class. The generated counterfactuals provide insight into the reasoning behind a model's predictions by highlighting which words significantly influence the outcomes. Additionally, they can be used to detect model fairness issues or augment the training data to enhance the model's robustness. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to generate counterfactuals for various NLP tasks, employing different models and methodologies. With the rapid growth of studies in this field, a systematic review is crucial to guide future researchers and developers. To bridge this gap, this survey comprehensively overview textual counterfactual generation methods, particularly including those based on Large Language Models. We propose a new taxonomy that categorizes the generation methods into four groups and systematically summarize the metrics for evaluating the generation quality. Finally, we discuss ongoing research challenges and outline promising directions for future work.
Authors: Mingxu Tao, Chen Zhang, Quzhe Huang, Tianyao Ma, Songfang Huang, Dongyan Zhao, Yansong Feng
Abstract: Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource languages, failing to balance language modeling and task-solving capabilities. We thus propose model merging as an alternative for low-resource languages, combining models with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. We use model merging to develop task-solving LLMs for low-resource languages without SFT data in the target languages. Our experiments based on Llama-2-7B demonstrate that model merging effectively endows LLMs for low-resource languages with task-solving abilities, outperforming CT-then-SFT in scenarios with extremely scarce data. Observing performance saturation in model merging with more training tokens, we further analyze the merging process and introduce a slack variable to the model merging algorithm to mitigate the loss of important parameters, thereby enhancing performance. We hope that model merging can benefit more human languages suffering from data scarcity with its higher data efficiency.
Authors: Melis \c{C}elikkol, Lydia K\"orber, Wei Zhao
Abstract: Everlasting contact between language communities leads to constant changes in languages over time, and gives rise to language varieties and dialects. However, the communities speaking non-standard language are often overlooked by non-inclusive NLP technologies. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in studying diatopic and diachronic changes in dialect NLP, but there is currently no research exploring the intersection of both. Our work aims to fill this gap by systematically reviewing diachronic and diatopic papers from a unified perspective. In this work, we critically assess nine tasks and datasets across five dialects from three language families (Slavic, Romance, and Germanic) in both spoken and written modalities. The tasks covered are diverse, including corpus construction, dialect distance estimation, and dialect geolocation prediction, among others. Moreover, we outline five open challenges regarding changes in dialect use over time, the reliability of dialect datasets, the importance of speaker characteristics, limited coverage of dialects, and ethical considerations in data collection. We hope that our work sheds light on future research towards inclusive computational methods and datasets for language varieties and dialects.
Authors: Amy Xin, Yunjia Qi, Zijun Yao, Fangwei Zhu, Kaisheng Zeng, Xu Bin, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
Abstract: Entity Linking (EL) models are well-trained at mapping mentions to their corresponding entities according to a given context. However, EL models struggle to disambiguate long-tail entities due to their limited training data. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) are more robust at interpreting uncommon mentions. Yet, due to a lack of specialized training, LLMs suffer at generating correct entity IDs. Furthermore, training an LLM to perform EL is cost-intensive. Building upon these insights, we introduce LLM-Augmented Entity Linking LLMAEL, a plug-and-play approach to enhance entity linking through LLM data augmentation. We leverage LLMs as knowledgeable context augmenters, generating mention-centered descriptions as additional input, while preserving traditional EL models for task specific processing. Experiments on 6 standard datasets show that the vanilla LLMAEL outperforms baseline EL models in most cases, while the fine-tuned LLMAEL set the new state-of-the-art results across all 6 benchmarks.
Authors: Furkan \c{S}ahinu\c{c}, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, Iryna Gurevych
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) bring unprecedented flexibility in defining and executing complex, creative natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Yet, this flexibility brings new challenges, as it introduces new degrees of freedom in formulating the task inputs and instructions and in evaluating model performance. To facilitate the exploration of creative NLG tasks, we propose a three-component research framework that consists of systematic input manipulation, reference data, and output measurement. We use this framework to explore citation text generation -- a popular scholarly NLP task that lacks consensus on the task definition and evaluation metric and has not yet been tackled within the LLM paradigm. Our results highlight the importance of systematically investigating both task instruction and input configuration when prompting LLMs, and reveal non-trivial relationships between different evaluation metrics used for citation text generation. Additional human generation and human evaluation experiments provide new qualitative insights into the task to guide future research in citation text generation. We make our code and data publicly available.
Authors: Cong-Thanh Do, Shuhei Imai, Rama Doddipatla, Thomas Hain
Abstract: This paper investigates the use of unsupervised text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) as a data augmentation method to improve accented speech recognition. TTS systems are trained with a small amount of accented speech training data and their pseudo-labels rather than manual transcriptions, and hence unsupervised. This approach enables the use of accented speech data without manual transcriptions to perform data augmentation for accented speech recognition. Synthetic accented speech data, generated from text prompts by using the TTS systems, are then combined with available non-accented speech data to train automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. ASR experiments are performed in a self-supervised learning framework using a Wav2vec2.0 model which was pre-trained on large amount of unsupervised accented speech data. The accented speech data for training the unsupervised TTS are read speech, selected from L2-ARCTIC and British Isles corpora, while spontaneous conversational speech from the Edinburgh international accents of English corpus are used as the evaluation data. Experimental results show that Wav2vec2.0 models which are fine-tuned to downstream ASR task with synthetic accented speech data, generated by the unsupervised TTS, yield up to 6.1% relative word error rate reductions compared to a Wav2vec2.0 baseline which is fine-tuned with the non-accented speech data from Librispeech corpus.
Authors: Vorakit Vorakitphan, Milos Basic, Guilhaume Leroy Meline
Abstract: Introducing Entity-Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (EASTE), a novel Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) task which extends Target-Aspect-Sentiment Detection (TASD) by separating aspect categories (e.g., food#quality) into pre-defined entities (e.g., meal, drink) and aspects (e.g., taste, freshness) which add a fine-gainer level of complexity, yet help exposing true sentiment of chained aspect to its entity. We explore the task of EASTE solving capabilities of language models based on transformers architecture from our proposed unified-loss approach via token classification task using BERT architecture to text generative models such as Flan-T5, Flan-Ul2 to Llama2, Llama3 and Mixtral employing different alignment techniques such as zero/few-shot learning, Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The model performances are evaluated on the SamEval-2016 benchmark dataset representing the fair comparison to existing works. Our research not only aims to achieve high performance on the EASTE task but also investigates the impact of model size, type, and adaptation techniques on task performance. Ultimately, we provide detailed insights and achieving state-of-the-art results in complex sentiment analysis.
Authors: Peiran Yao, Kostyantyn Guzhva, Denilson Barbosa
Abstract: Symbolic sentence meaning representations, such as AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) provide expressive and structured semantic graphs that act as intermediates that simplify downstream NLP tasks. However, the instruction-following capability of large language models (LLMs) offers a shortcut to effectively solve NLP tasks, questioning the utility of semantic graphs. Meanwhile, recent work has also shown the difficulty of using meaning representations merely as a helpful auxiliary for LLMs. We revisit the position of semantic graphs in syntactic simplification, the task of simplifying sentence structures while preserving their meaning, which requires semantic understanding, and evaluate it on a new complex and natural dataset. The AMR-based method that we propose, AMRS$^3$, demonstrates that state-of-the-art meaning representations can lead to easy-to-implement simplification methods with competitive performance and unique advantages in cost, interpretability, and generalization. With AMRS$^3$ as an anchor, we discover that syntactic simplification is a task where semantic graphs are helpful in LLM prompting. We propose AMRCoC prompting that guides LLMs to emulate graph algorithms for explicit symbolic reasoning on AMR graphs, and show its potential for improving LLM on semantic-centered tasks like syntactic simplification.
Authors: Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sawsan Alqahtani, M Saiful Bari, Mizanur Rahman, Mohammad Abdullah Matin Khan, Haidar Khan, Israt Jahan, Amran Bhuiyan, Chee Wei Tan, Md Rizwan Parvez, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty, Jimmy Huang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their remarkable capabilities in performing diverse tasks across various domains. However, a thorough evaluation of these models is crucial before deploying them in real-world applications to ensure they produce reliable performance. Despite the well-established importance of evaluating LLMs in the community, the complexity of the evaluation process has led to varied evaluation setups, causing inconsistencies in findings and interpretations. To address this, we systematically review the primary challenges and limitations causing these inconsistencies and unreliable evaluations in various steps of LLM evaluation. Based on our critical review, we present our perspectives and recommendations to ensure LLM evaluations are reproducible, reliable, and robust.
Authors: Chengpeng Li, Guanting Dong, Mingfeng Xue, Ru Peng, Xiang Wang, Dayiheng Liu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have made impressive progress in handling simple math problems, yet they still struggle with more challenging and complex mathematical tasks. In this paper, we introduce a series of LLMs that employs the Decomposition of thought with code assistance and self-correction for mathematical reasoning, dubbed as DotaMath. DotaMath models tackle complex mathematical tasks by decomposing them into simpler logical subtasks, leveraging code to solve these subtasks, obtaining fine-grained feedback from the code interpreter, and engaging in self-reflection and correction. By annotating diverse interactive tool-use trajectories and employing query evolution on GSM8K and MATH datasets, we generate an instruction fine-tuning dataset called DotaMathQA with 574K query-response pairs. We train a series of base LLMs using imitation learning on DotaMathQA, resulting in DotaMath models that achieve remarkable performance compared to open-source LLMs across various in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Notably, DotaMath-deepseek-7B showcases an outstanding performance of 64.8% on the competitive MATH dataset and 86.7% on GSM8K. Besides, DotaMath-deepseek-7B maintains strong competitiveness on a series of in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks (Avg. 80.1%). Looking forward, we anticipate that the DotaMath paradigm will open new pathways for addressing intricate mathematical problems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChengpengLi1003/DotaMath.
Authors: Mariia Fedorova, Timothee Mickus, Niko Partanen, Janine Siewert, Elena Spaziani, Andrey Kutuzov
Abstract: This paper describes the organization and findings of AXOLOTL'24, the first multilingual explainable semantic change modeling shared task. We present new sense-annotated diachronic semantic change datasets for Finnish and Russian which were employed in the shared task, along with a surprise test-only German dataset borrowed from an existing source. The setup of AXOLOTL'24 is new to the semantic change modeling field, and involves subtasks of identifying unknown (novel) senses and providing dictionary-like definitions to these senses. The methods of the winning teams are described and compared, thus paving a path towards explainability in computational approaches to historical change of meaning.
Authors: Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Xinhua Zeng, Yang Liu, Xiang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yumeng Zhang, Yiran Wei, Wai Lam
Abstract: In the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing, dialogue systems primarily employ a single-step dialogue paradigm. Although this paradigm is efficient, it lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions and does not appear natural. We introduce a novel \textbf{Step}-by-Step Dialogue Paradigm (Stephanie), designed to mimic the ongoing dynamic nature of human conversations. By employing a dual learning strategy and a further-split post-editing method, we generated and utilized a high-quality step-by-step dialogue dataset to fine-tune existing large language models, enabling them to perform step-by-step dialogues. We thoroughly present Stephanie. Tailored automatic and human evaluations are conducted to assess its effectiveness compared to the traditional single-step dialogue paradigm. We will release code, Stephanie datasets, and Stephanie LLMs to facilitate the future of chatbot eras.
Authors: Yuyan Chen, Zhixu Li, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Bang Liu, Yunwen Chen
Abstract: Humor understanding is an important and challenging research in natural language processing. As the popularity of pre-trained language models (PLMs), some recent work makes preliminary attempts to adopt PLMs for humor recognition and generation. However, these simple attempts do not substantially answer the question: {\em whether PLMs are capable of humor understanding?} This paper is the first work that systematically investigates the humor understanding ability of PLMs. For this purpose, a comprehensive framework with three evaluation steps and four evaluation tasks is designed. We also construct a comprehensive Chinese humor dataset, which can fully meet all the data requirements of the proposed evaluation framework. Our empirical study on the Chinese humor dataset yields some valuable observations, which are of great guiding value for future optimization of PLMs in humor understanding and generation.
Authors: Yuyan Chen, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wu, Dayiheng Liu, Zhixu Li, Bang Liu, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. However, a good prompt is not solely defined by its wording, but also binds to the nature of the LLM in question. In this work, we first quantitatively demonstrate that different prompts should be adapted to different LLMs to enhance their capabilities across various downstream tasks in NLP. Then we novelly propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer (MAPO) method that optimizes the original prompts for each specific LLM in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method can effectively refine prompts for an LLM, leading to significant improvements over various downstream tasks.
Authors: Yuyan Chen, Qiang Fu, Yichen Yuan, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Dayiheng Liu, Dongmei Zhang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread adoption in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering and dialogue systems. However, a major drawback of LLMs is the issue of hallucination, where they generate unfaithful or inconsistent content that deviates from the input source, leading to severe consequences. In this paper, we propose a robust discriminator named RelD to effectively detect hallucination in LLMs' generated answers. RelD is trained on the constructed RelQA, a bilingual question-answering dialogue dataset along with answers generated by LLMs and a comprehensive set of metrics. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RelD successfully detects hallucination in the answers generated by diverse LLMs. Moreover, it performs well in distinguishing hallucination in LLMs' generated answers from both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. Additionally, we also conduct a thorough analysis of the types of hallucinations that occur and present valuable insights. This research significantly contributes to the detection of reliable answers generated by LLMs and holds noteworthy implications for mitigating hallucination in the future work.
Authors: Ya Gao, Hans Moen, Saila Koivusalo, Miika Koskinen, Pekka Marttinen
Abstract: Nursing notes, an important component of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), keep track of the progression of a patient's health status during a care episode. Distilling the key information in nursing notes through text summarization techniques can improve clinicians' efficiency in understanding patients' conditions when reviewing nursing notes. However, existing abstractive summarization methods in the clinical setting have often overlooked nursing notes and require the creation of reference summaries for supervision signals, which is time-consuming. In this work, we introduce QGSumm, a query-guided self-supervised domain adaptation framework for nursing note summarization. Using patient-related clinical queries as guidance, our approach generates high-quality, patient-centered summaries without relying on reference summaries for training. Through automatic and manual evaluation by an expert clinician, we demonstrate the strengths of our approach compared to the state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Ultimately, our approach provides a new perspective on conditional text summarization, tailored to the specific interests of clinical personnel.
Authors: Sachin Yadav, Tejaswi Choppa, Dominik Schlechtweg
Abstract: This paper explores using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to automate the data annotation process with automatic prompting techniques. The main aim of this paper is to reuse human annotation guidelines along with some annotated data to design automatic prompts for LLMs, focusing on the semantic proximity annotation task. Automatic prompts are compared to customized prompts. We further implement the prompting strategies into an open-source text annotation tool, enabling easy online use via the OpenAI API. Our study reveals the crucial role of accurate prompt design and suggests that prompting GPT-4 with human-like instructions is not straightforwardly possible for the semantic proximity task. We show that small modifications to the human guidelines already improve the performance, suggesting possible ways for future research.
Authors: Terry Tong, Jiashu Xu, Qin Liu, Muhao Chen
Abstract: The security of multi-turn conversational large language models (LLMs) is understudied despite it being one of the most popular LLM utilization. Specifically, LLMs are vulnerable to data poisoning backdoor attacks, where an adversary manipulates the training data to cause the model to output malicious responses to predefined triggers. Specific to the multi-turn dialogue setting, LLMs are at the risk of even more harmful and stealthy backdoor attacks where the backdoor triggers may span across multiple utterances, giving lee-way to context-driven attacks. In this paper, we explore a novel distributed backdoor trigger attack that serves to be an extra tool in an adversary's toolbox that can interface with other single-turn attack strategies in a plug and play manner. Results on two representative defense mechanisms indicate that distributed backdoor triggers are robust against existing defense strategies which are designed for single-turn user-model interactions, motivating us to propose a new defense strategy for the multi-turn dialogue setting that is more challenging. To this end, we also explore a novel contrastive decoding based defense that is able to mitigate the backdoor with a low computational tradeoff.
Authors: Brendon Boldt, David Mortensen
Abstract: We introduce the Emergent Language Corpus Collection (ELCC): a collection of corpora collected from open source implementations of emergent communication systems across the literature. These systems include a variety of signalling game environments as well as more complex tasks like a social deduction game and embodied navigation. Each corpus is annotated with metadata describing the characteristics of the source system as well as a suite of analyses of the corpus (e.g., size, entropy, average message length). Currently, research studying emergent languages requires directly running different systems which takes time away from actual analyses of such languages, limits the variety of languages that are studied, and presents a barrier to entry for researchers without a background in deep learning. The availability of a substantial collection of well-documented emergent language corpora, then, will enable new directions of research which focus their purview on the properties of emergent languages themselves rather than on experimental apparatus.
Authors: Xinglin Li, Xianwen He, Yao Li, Minhao Cheng
Abstract: Textual backdoor attacks present a substantial security risk to Large Language Models (LLM). It embeds carefully chosen triggers into a victim model at the training stage, and makes the model erroneously predict inputs containing the same triggers as a certain class. Prior backdoor defense methods primarily target special token-based triggers, leaving syntax-based triggers insufficiently addressed. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a novel online defense algorithm that effectively counters syntax-based as well as special token-based backdoor attacks. The algorithm replaces semantically meaningful words in sentences with entirely different ones but preserves the syntactic templates or special tokens, and then compares the predicted labels before and after the substitution to determine whether a sentence contains triggers. Experimental results confirm the algorithm's performance against these two types of triggers, offering a comprehensive defense strategy for model integrity.
Authors: Joshua Ashkinaze, Ruijia Guan, Laura Kurek, Eytan Adar, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are trained on broad corpora and then used in communities with specialized norms. Is providing LLMs with community rules enough for models to follow these norms? We evaluate LLMs' capacity to detect (Task 1) and correct (Task 2) biased Wikipedia edits according to Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy. LLMs struggled with bias detection, achieving only 64% accuracy on a balanced dataset. Models exhibited contrasting biases (some under- and others over-predicted bias), suggesting distinct priors about neutrality. LLMs performed better at generation, removing 79% of words removed by Wikipedia editors. However, LLMs made additional changes beyond Wikipedia editors' simpler neutralizations, resulting in high-recall but low-precision editing. Interestingly, crowdworkers rated AI rewrites as more neutral (70%) and fluent (61%) than Wikipedia-editor rewrites. Qualitative analysis found LLMs sometimes applied NPOV more comprehensively than Wikipedia editors but often made extraneous non-NPOV-related changes (such as grammar). LLMs may apply rules in ways that resonate with the public but diverge from community experts. While potentially effective for generation, LLMs may reduce editor agency and increase moderation workload (e.g., verifying additions). Even when rules are easy to articulate, having LLMs apply them like community members may still be difficult.
Authors: Shujun Liu, Xiaoyu Shen, Yuhang Lai, Siyuan Wang, Shengbin Yue, Zengfeng Huang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
Abstract: The reward model has become increasingly important in alignment, assessment, and data construction for large language models (LLMs). Most existing researchers focus on enhancing reward models through data improvements, following the conventional training framework for reward models that directly optimizes the predicted rewards. In this paper, we propose a hybrid alignment framework HaF-RM for reward model training by introducing an additional constraint on token-level policy probabilities in addition to the reward score. It can simultaneously supervise the internal preference model at the token level and optimize the mapping layer of the reward model at the sequence level. Theoretical justifications and experiment results on five datasets show the validity and effectiveness of our proposed hybrid framework for training a high-quality reward model. By decoupling the reward modeling procedure and incorporating hybrid supervision, our HaF-RM framework offers a principled and effective approach to enhancing the performance and alignment of reward models, a critical component in the responsible development of powerful language models. We release our code at https://haf-rm.github.io.
Authors: Maram Hasanain, Md. Arid Hasan, Fatema Ahmed, Reem Suwaileh, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Wajdi Zaghouani, Firoj Alam
Abstract: We present an overview of the second edition of the ArAIEval shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. In this edition, ArAIEval offers two tasks: (i) detection of propagandistic textual spans with persuasion techniques identification in tweets and news articles, and (ii) distinguishing between propagandistic and non-propagandistic memes. A total of 14 teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with 6 and 9 teams participating in Tasks 1 and 2, respectively. Finally, 11 teams submitted system description papers. Across both tasks, we observed that fine-tuning transformer models such as AraBERT was at the core of the majority of the participating systems. We provide a description of the task setup, including a description of the dataset construction and the evaluation setup. We further provide a brief overview of the participating systems. All datasets and evaluation scripts are released to the research community (https://araieval.gitlab.io/). We hope this will enable further research on these important tasks in Arabic.
Authors: Xincan Feng, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Katsuhiko Hayashi, Taro Watanabe
Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are fundamental resources in knowledge-intensive tasks in NLP. Due to the limitation of manually creating KGs, KG Completion (KGC) has an important role in automatically completing KGs by scoring their links with KG Embedding (KGE). To handle many entities in training, KGE relies on Negative Sampling (NS) loss that can reduce the computational cost by sampling. Since the appearance frequencies for each link are at most one in KGs, sparsity is an essential and inevitable problem. The NS loss is no exception. As a solution, the NS loss in KGE relies on smoothing methods like Self-Adversarial Negative Sampling (SANS) and subsampling. However, it is uncertain what kind of smoothing method is suitable for this purpose due to the lack of theoretical understanding. This paper provides theoretical interpretations of the smoothing methods for the NS loss in KGE and induces a new NS loss, Triplet Adaptive Negative Sampling (TANS), that can cover the characteristics of the conventional smoothing methods. Experimental results of TransE, DistMult, ComplEx, RotatE, HAKE, and HousE on FB15k-237, WN18RR, and YAGO3-10 datasets and their sparser subsets show the soundness of our interpretation and performance improvement by our TANS.
Authors: Jieying Xue, Minh Phuong Nguyen, Blake Matheny, Le Minh Nguyen
Abstract: In the Emotion Recognition in Conversation task, recent investigations have utilized attention mechanisms exploring relationships among utterances from intra- and inter-speakers for modeling emotional interaction between them. However, attributes such as speaker personality traits remain unexplored and present challenges in terms of their applicability to other tasks or compatibility with diverse model architectures. Therefore, this work introduces a novel framework named BiosERC, which investigates speaker characteristics in a conversation. By employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we extract the "biographical information" of the speaker within a conversation as supplementary knowledge injected into the model to classify emotional labels for each utterance. Our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on three famous benchmark datasets: IEMOCAP, MELD, and EmoryNLP, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of our model and showcasing its potential for adaptation to various conversation analysis tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yingjie7/BiosERC.
Authors: Haechan Kim, Junho Myung, Seoyoung Kim, Sungpah Lee, Dongyeop Kang, Juho Kim
Abstract: Prevalent ungrammatical expressions and disfluencies in spontaneous speech from second language (L2) learners pose unique challenges to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, few datasets are tailored to L2 learner speech. We publicly release LearnerVoice, a dataset consisting of 50.04 hours of audio and transcriptions of L2 learners' spontaneous speech. Our linguistic analysis reveals that transcriptions in our dataset contain L2S (L2 learner's Spontaneous speech) features, consisting of ungrammatical expressions and disfluencies (e.g., filler words, word repetitions, self-repairs, false starts), significantly more than native speech datasets. Fine-tuning whisper-small.en with LearnerVoice achieves a WER of 10.26%, 44.2% lower than vanilla whisper-small.en. Furthermore, our qualitative analysis indicates that 54.2% of errors from the vanilla model on LearnerVoice are attributable to L2S features, with 48.1% of them being reduced in the fine-tuned model.
Authors: Roman Aperdannier, Sigurd Schacht, Alexander Piazza
Abstract: In this paper, different online speaker diarization systems are evaluated on the same hardware with the same test data with regard to their latency. The latency is the time span from audio input to the output of the corresponding speaker label. As part of the evaluation, various model combinations within the DIART framework, a diarization system based on the online clustering algorithm UIS-RNN-SML, and the end-to-end online diarization system FS-EEND are compared. The lowest latency is achieved for the DIART-pipeline with the embedding model pyannote/embedding and the segmentation model pyannote/segmentation. The FS-EEND system shows a similarly good latency. In general there is currently no published research that compares several online diarization systems in terms of their latency. This makes this work even more relevant.
Authors: Chung-En Sun, Tuomas Oikarinen, Tsui-Wei Weng
Abstract: We introduce the Concept Bottleneck Large Language Model (CB-LLM), a pioneering approach to creating inherently interpretable Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike traditional black-box LLMs that rely on post-hoc interpretation methods with limited neuron function insights, CB-LLM sets a new standard with its built-in interpretability, scalability, and ability to provide clear, accurate explanations. This innovation not only advances transparency in language models but also enhances their effectiveness. Our unique Automatic Concept Correction (ACC) strategy successfully narrows the performance gap with conventional black-box LLMs, positioning CB-LLM as a model that combines the high accuracy of traditional LLMs with the added benefit of clear interpretability -- a feature markedly absent in existing LLMs.
Authors: Wen Ding, Fei Jia, Hainan Xu, Yu Xi, Junjie Lai, Boris Ginsburg
Abstract: We introduce romanization encoding for script-heavy languages to optimize multilingual and code-switching Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. By adopting romanization encoding alongside a balanced concatenated tokenizer within a FastConformer-RNNT framework equipped with a Roman2Char module, we significantly reduce vocabulary and output dimensions, enabling larger training batches and reduced memory consumption. Our method decouples acoustic modeling and language modeling, enhancing the flexibility and adaptability of the system. In our study, applying this method to Mandarin-English ASR resulted in a remarkable 63.51% vocabulary reduction and notable performance gains of 13.72% and 15.03% on SEAME code-switching benchmarks. Ablation studies on Mandarin-Korean and Mandarin-Japanese highlight our method's strong capability to address the complexities of other script-heavy languages, paving the way for more versatile and effective multilingual ASR systems.
Authors: Marion Bartl, Susan Leavy
Abstract: Gender bias is not only prevalent in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their training data, but also firmly ingrained into the structural aspects of language itself. Therefore, adapting linguistic structures within LLM training data to promote gender-inclusivity can make gender representations within the model more inclusive. The focus of our work are gender-exclusive affixes in English, such as in 'show-girl' or 'man-cave', which can perpetuate gender stereotypes and binary conceptions of gender. We use an LLM training dataset to compile a catalogue of 692 gender-exclusive terms along with gender-neutral variants and from this, develop a gender-inclusive fine-tuning dataset, the 'Tiny Heap'. Fine-tuning three different LLMs with this dataset, we observe an overall reduction in gender-stereotyping tendencies across the models. Our approach provides a practical method for enhancing gender inclusivity in LLM training data and contributes to incorporating queer-feminist linguistic activism in bias mitigation research in NLP.
Authors: Shashi Kumar, Srikanth Madikeri, Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, Iuliia Nigmatulina, Esa\'u Villatoro-Tello, Sergio Burdisso, Petr Motlicek, Karthik Pandia, Aravind Ganapathiraju
Abstract: In traditional conversational intelligence from speech, a cascaded pipeline is used, involving tasks such as voice activity detection, diarization, transcription, and subsequent processing with different NLP models for tasks like semantic endpointing and named entity recognition (NER). Our paper introduces TokenVerse, a single Transducer-based model designed to handle multiple tasks. This is achieved by integrating task-specific tokens into the reference text during ASR model training, streamlining the inference and eliminating the need for separate NLP models. In addition to ASR, we conduct experiments on 3 different tasks: speaker change detection, endpointing, and NER. Our experiments on a public and a private dataset show that the proposed method improves ASR by up to 7.7% in relative WER while outperforming the cascaded pipeline approach in individual task performance. Additionally, we present task transfer learning to a new task within an existing TokenVerse.
Authors: Samee Arif, Abdul Hameed Azeemi, Agha Ali Raza, Awais Athar
Abstract: In this paper, we compare general-purpose pretrained models, GPT-4-Turbo and Llama-3-8b-Instruct with special-purpose models fine-tuned on specific tasks, XLM-Roberta-large, mT5-large, and Llama-3-8b-Instruct. We focus on seven classification and six generation tasks to evaluate the performance of these models on Urdu language. Urdu has 70 million native speakers, yet it remains underrepresented in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite the frequent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance in low-resource languages, including Urdu, still needs to be explored. We also conduct a human evaluation for the generation tasks and compare the results with the evaluations performed by GPT-4-Turbo and Llama-3-8b-Instruct. We find that special-purpose models consistently outperform general-purpose models across various tasks. We also find that the evaluation done by GPT-4-Turbo for generation tasks aligns more closely with human evaluation compared to the evaluation by Llama-3-8b-Instruct. This paper contributes to the NLP community by providing insights into the effectiveness of general and specific-purpose LLMs for low-resource languages.
Authors: Markus Hisch, Xing David Wang
Abstract: We introduce the sequence classification problem CIViC Evidence to the field of medical NLP. CIViC Evidence denotes the multi-label classification problem of assigning labels of clinical evidence to abstracts of scientific papers which have examined various combinations of genomic variants, cancer types, and treatment approaches. We approach CIViC Evidence using different language models: We fine-tune pretrained checkpoints of BERT and RoBERTa on the CIViC Evidence dataset and challenge their performance with models of the same architecture which have been pretrained on domain-specific text. In this context, we find that BiomedBERT and BioLinkBERT can outperform BERT on CIViC Evidence (+0.8% and +0.9% absolute improvement in class-support weighted F1 score). All transformer-based models show a clear performance edge when compared to a logistic regression trained on bigram tf-idf scores (+1.5 - 2.7% improved F1 score). We compare the aforementioned BERT-like models to OpenAI's GPT-4 in a few-shot setting (on a small subset of our original test dataset), demonstrating that, without additional prompt-engineering or fine-tuning, GPT-4 performs worse on CIViC Evidence than our six fine-tuned models (66.1% weighted F1 score compared to 71.8% for the best fine-tuned model). However, performance gets reasonably close to the benchmark of a logistic regression model trained on bigram tf-idf scores (67.7% weighted F1 score).
Authors: Noa Nonkes, Sergei Agaronian, Evangelos Kanoulas, Roxana Petcu
Abstract: Large language models are extensively applied across a wide range of tasks, such as customer support, content creation, educational tutoring, and providing financial guidance. However, a well-known drawback is their predisposition to generate hallucinations. This damages the trustworthiness of the information these models provide, impacting decision-making and user confidence. We propose a method to detect hallucinations by looking at the structure of the latent space and finding associations within hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations. We create a graph structure that connects generations that lie closely in the embedding space. Moreover, we employ a Graph Attention Network which utilizes message passing to aggregate information from neighboring nodes and assigns varying degrees of importance to each neighbor based on their relevance. Our findings show that 1) there exists a structure in the latent space that differentiates between hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations, 2) Graph Attention Networks can learn this structure and generalize it to unseen generations, and 3) the robustness of our method is enhanced when incorporating contrastive learning. When evaluated against evidence-based benchmarks, our model performs similarly without access to search-based methods.
Authors: Aleksander Ficek, Jiaqi Zeng, Oleksii Kuchaiev
Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have become popular methods for adapting large language models while minimizing compute requirements. In this paper, we apply PEFT methods (P-tuning, Adapters, and LoRA) to a modified Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) and a baseline GPT model across several sizes, ranging from 823 million to 48 billion parameters. We show that RETRO models outperform GPT models in zero-shot settings due to their unique pre-training process but GPT models have higher performance potential with PEFT. Additionally, our study indicates that 8B parameter models strike an optimal balance between cost and performance and P-tuning lags behind other PEFT techniques. We further provide a comparative analysis of between applying PEFT to an Instruction-tuned RETRO model and base RETRO model. This work presents the first comprehensive comparison of various PEFT methods integrated with RAG, applied to both GPT and RETRO models, highlighting their relative performance.
Authors: Salima Mdhaffar, Haroun Elleuch, Fethi Bougares, Yannick Est\`eve
Abstract: Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource spoken Tunisian Arabic dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conduct experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We use speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through multimodal supervised teacher-student paradigm. This study yields numerous significant findings that we are discussing in this paper.
Authors: Ana-Cristina Rogoz, Maria Ilinca Nechita, Radu Tudor Ionescu
Abstract: We introduce PoPreRo, the first dataset for Popularity Prediction of Romanian posts collected from Reddit. The PoPreRo dataset includes a varied compilation of post samples from five distinct subreddits of Romania, totaling 28,107 data samples. Along with our novel dataset, we introduce a set of competitive models to be used as baselines for future research. Interestingly, the top-scoring model achieves an accuracy of 61.35% and a macro F1 score of 60.60% on the test set, indicating that the popularity prediction task on PoPreRo is very challenging. Further investigations based on few-shot prompting the Falcon-7B Large Language Model also point in the same direction. We thus believe that PoPreRo is a valuable resource that can be used to evaluate models on predicting the popularity of social media posts in Romanian. We release our dataset at https://github.com/ana-rogoz/PoPreRo.
Authors: Matthias Lindemann, Alexander Koller, Ivan Titov
Abstract: Models need appropriate inductive biases to effectively learn from small amounts of data and generalize systematically outside of the training distribution. While Transformers are highly versatile and powerful, they can still benefit from enhanced structural inductive biases for seq2seq tasks, especially those involving syntactic transformations, such as converting active to passive voice or semantic parsing. In this paper, we propose to strengthen the structural inductive bias of a Transformer by intermediate pre-training to perform synthetically generated syntactic transformations of dependency trees given a description of the transformation. Our experiments confirm that this helps with few-shot learning of syntactic tasks such as chunking, and also improves structural generalization for semantic parsing. Our analysis shows that the intermediate pre-training leads to attention heads that keep track of which syntactic transformation needs to be applied to which token, and that the model can leverage these attention heads on downstream tasks.
Authors: Jane Pan, He He, Samuel R. Bowman, Shi Feng
Abstract: Language models are capable of iteratively improving their outputs based on natural language feedback, thus enabling in-context optimization of user preference. In place of human users, a second language model can be used as an evaluator, providing feedback along with numerical ratings which the generator attempts to optimize. However, because the evaluator is an imperfect proxy of user preference, this optimization can lead to reward hacking, where the evaluator's ratings improve while the generation quality remains stagnant or even decreases as judged by actual user preference. The concern of reward hacking is heightened in iterative self-refinement where the generator and the evaluator use the same underlying language model, in which case the optimization pressure can drive them to exploit shared vulnerabilities. Using an essay editing task, we show that iterative self-refinement leads to deviation between the language model evaluator and human judgment, demonstrating that reward hacking can occur spontaneously in-context with the use of iterative self-refinement. In addition, we study conditions under which reward hacking occurs and observe two factors that affect reward hacking severity: model size and context sharing between the generator and the evaluator.
Authors: Aditya K Surikuchi, Raquel Fern\'andez, Sandro Pezzelle
Abstract: Visual storytelling consists in generating a natural language story given a temporally ordered sequence of images. This task is not only challenging for models, but also very difficult to evaluate with automatic metrics since there is no consensus about what makes a story 'good'. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that measures story quality in terms of human likeness regarding three key aspects highlighted in previous work: visual grounding, coherence, and repetitiveness. We then use this method to evaluate the stories generated by several models, showing that the foundation model LLaVA obtains the best result, but only slightly so compared to TAPM, a 50-times smaller visual storytelling model. Upgrading the visual and language components of TAPM results in a model that yields competitive performance with a relatively low number of parameters. Finally, we carry out a human evaluation study, whose results suggest that a 'good' story may require more than a human-like level of visual grounding, coherence, and repetition.
Authors: Cara Su-Yi Leong, Tal Linzen
Abstract: Although passivization is productive in English, it is not completely general -- some exceptions exist (e.g. *One hour was lasted by the meeting). How do English speakers learn these exceptions to an otherwise general pattern? Using neural network language models as theories of acquisition, we explore the sources of indirect evidence that a learner can leverage to learn whether a verb can passivize. We first characterize English speakers' judgments of exceptions to the passive, confirming that speakers find some verbs more passivizable than others. We then show that a neural network language model can learn restrictions to the passive that are similar to those displayed by humans, suggesting that evidence for these exceptions is available in the linguistic input. We test the causal role of two hypotheses for how the language model learns these restrictions by training models on modified training corpora, which we create by altering the existing training corpora to remove features of the input implicated by each hypothesis. We find that while the frequency with which a verb appears in the passive significantly affects its passivizability, the semantics of the verb does not. This study highlight the utility of altering a language model's training data for answering questions where complete control over a learner's input is vital.
Authors: Sergey Troshin, Vlad Niculae, Antske Fokkens
Abstract: Language models trained on large amounts of data require careful tuning to be safely deployed in real world. We revisit the guided decoding paradigm, where the goal is to augment the logits of the base language model using the scores from a task-specific reward model. We propose a simple but efficient parameterization of the autoregressive reward model enabling fast and effective guided decoding. On detoxification and sentiment control tasks, we show that our efficient parameterization performs on par with RAD, a strong but less efficient guided decoding approach.
Authors: Reza Averly, Xia Ning
Abstract: Clinical named entity recognition (NER) aims to retrieve important entities within clinical narratives. Recent works have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance in this task. While previous works focus on proprietary LLMs, we investigate how open NER LLMs, trained specifically for entity recognition, perform in clinical NER. In this paper, we aim to improve them through a novel framework, entity decomposition with filtering, or EDF. Our key idea is to decompose the entity recognition task into several retrievals of sub-entity types. We also introduce a filtering mechanism to remove incorrect entities. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our framework across all metrics, models, datasets, and entity types. Our analysis reveals that entity decomposition can recognize previously missed entities with substantial improvement. We further provide a comprehensive evaluation of our framework and an in-depth error analysis to pave future works.
Authors: Yuzhe Gu, Ziwei Ji, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations in long-form question-answering tasks across various domains and wide applications. Current hallucination detection and mitigation datasets are limited in domains and sizes, which struggle to scale due to prohibitive labor costs and insufficient reliability of existing hallucination annotators. To facilitate the scalable oversight of LLM hallucinations, this paper introduces an iterative self-training framework that simultaneously and progressively scales up the hallucination annotation dataset and improves the accuracy of the hallucination annotator. Based on the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, in each iteration, the framework first applies a hallucination annotation pipeline to annotate a scaled dataset and then trains a more accurate hallucination annotator on the dataset. This new hallucination annotator is adopted in the hallucination annotation pipeline used for the next iteration. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the finally obtained hallucination annotator with only 7B parameters surpasses the performance of GPT-4 and obtains new state-of-the-art hallucination detection results on HaluEval and HalluQA by zero-shot inference. Such an annotator can not only evaluate the hallucination levels of various LLMs on the large-scale dataset but also help to mitigate the hallucination of LLMs generations, with the Natural Language Inference (NLI) metric increasing from 25% to 37% on HaluEval.
Authors: Rudolf Laine, Bilal Chughtai, Jan Betley, Kaivalya Hariharan, Jeremy Scheurer, Mikita Balesni, Marius Hobbhahn, Alexander Meinke, Owain Evans
Abstract: AI assistants such as ChatGPT are trained to respond to users by saying, "I am a large language model". This raises questions. Do such models know that they are LLMs and reliably act on this knowledge? Are they aware of their current circumstances, such as being deployed to the public? We refer to a model's knowledge of itself and its circumstances as situational awareness. To quantify situational awareness in LLMs, we introduce a range of behavioral tests, based on question answering and instruction following. These tests form the $\textbf{Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD)}$, a benchmark comprising 7 task categories and over 13,000 questions. The benchmark tests numerous abilities, including the capacity of LLMs to (i) recognize their own generated text, (ii) predict their own behavior, (iii) determine whether a prompt is from internal evaluation or real-world deployment, and (iv) follow instructions that depend on self-knowledge. We evaluate 16 LLMs on SAD, including both base (pretrained) and chat models. While all models perform better than chance, even the highest-scoring model (Claude 3 Opus) is far from a human baseline on certain tasks. We also observe that performance on SAD is only partially predicted by metrics of general knowledge (e.g. MMLU). Chat models, which are finetuned to serve as AI assistants, outperform their corresponding base models on SAD but not on general knowledge tasks. The purpose of SAD is to facilitate scientific understanding of situational awareness in LLMs by breaking it down into quantitative abilities. Situational awareness is important because it enhances a model's capacity for autonomous planning and action. While this has potential benefits for automation, it also introduces novel risks related to AI safety and control. Code and latest results available at https://situational-awareness-dataset.org .
Authors: Iveta Be\v{c}kov\'a, \v{S}tefan P\'oco\v{s}, Giulia Belgiovine, Marco Matarese, Alessandra Sciutti, Carlo Mazzola
Abstract: The addressee estimation (understanding to whom somebody is talking) is a fundamental task for human activity recognition in multi-party conversation scenarios. Specifically, in the field of human-robot interaction, it becomes even more crucial to enable social robots to participate in such interactive contexts. However, it is usually implemented as a binary classification task, restricting the robot's capability to estimate whether it was addressed and limiting its interactive skills. For a social robot to gain the trust of humans, it is also important to manifest a certain level of transparency and explainability. Explainable artificial intelligence thus plays a significant role in the current machine learning applications and models, to provide explanations for their decisions besides excellent performance. In our work, we a) present an addressee estimation model with improved performance in comparison with the previous SOTA; b) further modify this model to include inherently explainable attention-based segments; c) implement the explainable addressee estimation as part of a modular cognitive architecture for multi-party conversation in an iCub robot; d) propose several ways to incorporate explainability and transparency in the aforementioned architecture; and e) perform a pilot user study to analyze the effect of various explanations on how human participants perceive the robot.
Authors: Mehant Kammakomati, Sameer Pimparkhede, Srikanth Tamilselvam, Prince Kumar, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Abstract: Recent work shows Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to understand natural language constraints for various text generation tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. While, in the code domain, there is wide usage of constraints in code format to maintain the integrity of code written in Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), yet there has been no work evaluating LLMs with these constraints. We propose two novel tasks to assess the controllability of LLMs using hard and soft constraints represented as code across five representations. Our findings suggest that LLMs struggle to comprehend constraints in all representations irrespective of their portions in the pre-training data. While models are better at comprehending constraints in JSON, YAML, and natural language representations, they struggle with constraints represented in XML and the resource-rich language Python.
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Akshay Goindani, Talha Chafekar, Leena Mathur, Haofei Yu, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency
Abstract: Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.
Authors: Dominika Woszczyk, Ranya Aloufi, Soteris Demetriou
Abstract: Speaker embeddings extracted from voice recordings have been proven valuable for dementia detection. However, by their nature, these embeddings contain identifiable information which raises privacy concerns. In this work, we aim to anonymize embeddings while preserving the diagnostic utility for dementia detection. Previous studies rely on adversarial learning and models trained on the target attribute and struggle in limited-resource settings. We propose a novel approach that leverages domain knowledge to disentangle prosody features relevant to dementia from speaker embeddings without relying on a dementia classifier. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach in preserving speaker privacy (speaker recognition F1-score .01%) while maintaining high dementia detection score F1-score of 74% on the ADReSS dataset. Our results are also on par with a more constrained classifier-dependent system on ADReSSo (.01% and .66%), and have no impact on synthesized speech naturalness.
Authors: Lilla Vicsek, Anna Vancs\'o, Mike Zajko, Judit Takacs
Abstract: Previous discussions have highlighted the need for generative AI tools to become more culturally sensitive, yet often neglect the complexities of handling content about minorities, who are perceived differently across cultures and religions. Our study examined how two generative AI systems respond to homophobic statements with varying cultural and religious context information. Findings showed ChatGPT 3.5's replies exhibited cultural relativism, in contrast to Bard's, which stressed human rights and provided more support for LGBTQ+ issues. Both demonstrated significant change in responses based on contextual information provided in the prompts, suggesting that AI systems may adjust in their responses the degree and forms of support for LGBTQ+ people according to information they receive about the user's background. The study contributes to understanding the social and ethical implications of AI responses and argues that any work to make generative AI outputs more culturally diverse requires a grounding in fundamental human rights.
Authors: Kunal Dhawan, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Ante Juki\'c, Ryan Langman, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg
Abstract: Discrete speech representations have garnered recent attention for their efficacy in training transformer-based models for various speech-related tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), translation, speaker verification, and joint speech-text foundational models. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis on building ASR systems with discrete codes. We investigate different methods for codec training such as quantization schemes and time-domain vs spectral feature encodings. We further explore ASR training techniques aimed at enhancing performance, training efficiency, and noise robustness. Drawing upon our findings, we introduce a codec ASR pipeline that outperforms Encodec at similar bit-rate. Remarkably, it also surpasses the state-of-the-art results achieved by strong self-supervised models on the 143 languages ML-SUPERB benchmark despite being smaller in size and pretrained on significantly less data.
Authors: Cinthia S\'anchez, Minh Duc Chu, Zihao He, Rebecca Dorn, Stuart Murray, Kristina Lerman
Abstract: The gendered expectations about ideal body types can lead to body image concerns, dissatisfaction, and in extreme cases, disordered eating and other psychopathologies across the gender spectrum. While research has focused on pro-anorexia online communities that glorify the 'thin ideal', less attention has been given to the broader spectrum of body image concerns or how emerging disorders like muscle dysmorphia ('bigorexia') present in online discussions. To address these gaps, we analyze 46 Reddit discussion forums related to diet, fitness, and associated mental health challenges. Using membership structure analysis and transformer-based language models, we project these communities along gender and body ideal axes, revealing complex interactions between gender, body ideals, and emotional expression. Our findings show that feminine-oriented communities generally express more negative emotions, particularly in thinness-promoting forums. Conversely, communities focused on the muscular ideal exhibit less negativity, regardless of gender orientation. We also uncover a gendered pattern in emotional indicators of mental health challenges, with communities discussing serious issues aligning more closely with thinness-oriented, predominantly feminine-leaning communities. By revealing the gendered emotional dynamics of online communities, our findings can inform the development of more effective content moderation approaches that facilitate supportive interactions, while minimizing exposure to potentially harmful content.
Authors: Sungnyun Kim, Kangwook Jang, Sangmin Bae, Hoirin Kim, Se-Young Yun
Abstract: Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) aims to transcribe human speech using both audio and video modalities. In practical environments with noise-corrupted audio, the role of video information becomes crucial. However, prior works have primarily focused on enhancing audio features in AVSR, overlooking the importance of video features. In this study, we strengthen the video features by learning three temporal dynamics in video data: context order, playback direction, and the speed of video frames. Cross-modal attention modules are introduced to enrich video features with audio information so that speech variability can be taken into account when training on the video temporal dynamics. Based on our approach, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the LRS2 and LRS3 AVSR benchmarks for the noise-dominant settings. Our approach excels in scenarios especially for babble and speech noise, indicating the ability to distinguish the speech signal that should be recognized from lip movements in the video modality. We support the validity of our methodology by offering the ablation experiments for the temporal dynamics losses and the cross-modal attention architecture design.
Authors: Xing Han L\`u
Abstract: We introduce BM25S, an efficient Python-based implementation of BM25 that only depends on Numpy and Scipy. BM25S achieves up to a 500x speedup compared to the most popular Python-based framework by eagerly computing BM25 scores during indexing and storing them into sparse matrices. It also achieves considerable speedups compared to highly optimized Java-based implementations, which are used by popular commercial products. Finally, BM25S reproduces the exact implementation of five BM25 variants based on Kamphuis et al. (2020) by extending eager scoring to non-sparse variants using a novel score shifting method. The code can be found at https://github.com/xhluca/bm25s
Authors: Haonan Chen, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Modeling contextual information in a search session has drawn more and more attention when understanding complex user intents. Recent methods are all data-driven, i.e., they train different models on large-scale search log data to identify the relevance between search contexts and candidate documents. The common training paradigm is to pair the search context with different candidate documents and train the model to rank the clicked documents higher than the unclicked ones. However, this paradigm neglects the symmetric nature of the relevance between the session context and document, i.e., the clicked documents can also be paired with different search contexts when training. In this work, we propose query-oriented data augmentation to enrich search logs and empower the modeling. We generate supplemental training pairs by altering the most important part of a search context, i.e., the current query, and train our model to rank the generated sequence along with the original sequence. This approach enables models to learn that the relevance of a document may vary as the session context changes, leading to a better understanding of users' search patterns. We develop several strategies to alter the current query, resulting in new training data with varying degrees of difficulty. Through experimentation on two extensive public search logs, we have successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.
Authors: Thong Nguyen, Yi Bin, Xiaobao Wu, Xinshuai Dong, Zhiyuan Hu, Khoi Le, Cong-Duy Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Luu Anh Tuan
Abstract: Data quality stands at the forefront of deciding the effectiveness of video-language representation learning. However, video-text pairs in previous data typically do not align perfectly with each other, which might lead to video-language representations that do not accurately reflect cross-modal semantics. Moreover, previous data also possess an uneven distribution of concepts, thereby hampering the downstream performance across unpopular subjects. To address these problems, we propose a contrastive objective with a subtractive angular margin to regularize cross-modal representations in their effort to reach perfect similarity. Furthermore, to adapt to the non-uniform concept distribution, we propose a multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-parameterized weighting function that maps loss values to sample weights which enable dynamic adjustment of the model's focus throughout the training. With the training guided by a small amount of unbiased meta-data and augmented by video-text data generated by large vision-language model, we improve video-language representations and achieve superior performances on commonly used video question answering and text-video retrieval datasets.
Authors: Bojian Jiang, Yi Jing, Tianhao Shen, Qing Yang, Deyi Xiong
Abstract: Manual Red teaming is a commonly-used method to identify vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs), which, is costly and unscalable. In contrast, automated red teaming uses a Red LLM to automatically generate adversarial prompts to the Target LLM, offering a scalable way for safety vulnerability detection. However, the difficulty of building a powerful automated Red LLM lies in the fact that the safety vulnerabilities of the Target LLM are dynamically changing with the evolution of the Target LLM. To mitigate this issue, we propose a Deep Adversarial Automated Red Teaming (DART) framework in which the Red LLM and Target LLM are deeply and dynamically interacting with each other in an iterative manner. In each iteration, in order to generate successful attacks as many as possible, the Red LLM not only takes into account the responses from the Target LLM, but also adversarially adjust its attacking directions by monitoring the global diversity of generated attacks across multiple iterations. Simultaneously, to explore dynamically changing safety vulnerabilities of the Target LLM, we allow the Target LLM to enhance its safety via an active learning based data selection mechanism. Experimential results demonstrate that DART significantly reduces the safety risk of the target LLM. For human evaluation on Anthropic Harmless dataset, compared to the instruction-tuning target LLM, DART eliminates the violation risks by 53.4\%. We will release the datasets and codes of DART soon.
Authors: Kamalkumar Rathinasamy, Balaji A J, Ankush Kumar, Gagan Gayari, Harshini K, Rajab Ali Mondal, Sreenivasa Raghavan K S, Swayam Singh
Abstract: This paper presents NT-Java-1.1B, an open-source specialized code language model built on StarCoderBase-1.1B, designed for coding tasks in Java programming. NT-Java-1.1B achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing its base model and majority of other models of similar size on MultiPL-E Java code benchmark. While there have been studies on extending large, generic pre-trained models to improve proficiency in specific programming languages like Python, similar investigations on small code models for other programming languages are lacking. Large code models require specialized hardware like GPUs for inference, highlighting the need for research into building small code models that can be deployed on developer desktops. This paper addresses this research gap by focusing on the development of a small Java code model, NT-Java-1.1B, and its quantized versions, which performs comparably to open models around 1.1B on MultiPL-E Java code benchmarks, making them ideal for desktop deployment. This paper establishes the foundation for specialized models across languages and sizes for a family of NT Models.
Authors: Shmuel Berman, Baishakhi Ray, Kathleen McKeown
Abstract: Prior research has enhanced the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve logic puzzles using techniques such as chain-of-thought prompting or introducing a symbolic representation. These frameworks are still usually insufficient to solve complicated logical problems, such as Zebra puzzles, due to the inherent complexity of translating natural language clues into logical statements. We introduce a multi-agent system, ZPS, that integrates LLMs with an off the shelf theorem prover. This system tackles the complex puzzle-solving task by breaking down the problem into smaller, manageable parts, generating SMT (Satisfiability Modulo Theories) code to solve them with a theorem prover, and using feedback between the agents to repeatedly improve their answers. We also introduce an automated grid puzzle grader to assess the correctness of our puzzle solutions and show that the automated grader is reliable by evaluating it in a user-study. Our approach shows improvement in all three LLMs we tested, with GPT-4 showing 166% improvement in the number of fully correct solutions.
Authors: Asma Alkhaldi, Raneem Alnajim, Layan Alabdullatef, Rawan Alyahya, Jun Chen, Deyao Zhu, Ahmed Alsinan, Mohamed Elhoseiny
Abstract: Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have precipitated significant breakthroughs in healthcare, particularly in refining diagnostic procedures. However, previous studies have often been constrained to limited functionalities. This study introduces MiniGPT-Med, a vision-language model derived from large-scale language models and tailored for medical applications. MiniGPT-Med demonstrates remarkable versatility across various imaging modalities, including X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs, enhancing its utility. The model is capable of performing tasks such as medical report generation, visual question answering (VQA), and disease identification within medical imagery. Its integrated processing of both image and textual clinical data markedly improves diagnostic accuracy. Our empirical assessments confirm MiniGPT-Med's superior performance in disease grounding, medical report generation, and VQA benchmarks, representing a significant step towards reducing the gap in assisting radiology practice. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on medical report generation, higher than the previous best model by 19\% accuracy. MiniGPT-Med promises to become a general interface for radiology diagnoses, enhancing diagnostic efficiency across a wide range of medical imaging applications.
Authors: Jin Peng Zhou, Katie Z Luo, Jingwen Gu, Jason Yuan, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Wen Sun
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to aligning large language models (LLMs) with individual human preferences, sometimes referred to as Reinforcement Learning from \textit{Personalized} Human Feedback (RLPHF). Given stated preferences along multiple dimensions, such as helpfulness, conciseness, or humor, the goal is to create an LLM without re-training that best adheres to this specification. Starting from specialized expert LLMs, each trained for one such particular preference dimension, we propose a black-box method that merges their outputs on a per-token level. We train a lightweight Preference Control Model (PCM) that dynamically translates the preference description and current context into next-token prediction weights. By combining the expert models' outputs at the token level, our approach dynamically generates text that optimizes the given preference. Empirical tests show that our method matches or surpasses existing preference merging techniques, providing a scalable, efficient alternative to fine-tuning LLMs for individual personalization.
Authors: Sibo Yi, Yule Liu, Zhen Sun, Tianshuo Cong, Xinlei He, Jiaxing Song, Ke Xu, Qi Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have performed exceptionally in various text-generative tasks, including question answering, translation, code completion, etc. However, the over-assistance of LLMs has raised the challenge of "jailbreaking", which induces the model to generate malicious responses against the usage policy and society by designing adversarial prompts. With the emergence of jailbreak attack methods exploiting different vulnerabilities in LLMs, the corresponding safety alignment measures are also evolving. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and detailed taxonomy of jailbreak attack and defense methods. For instance, the attack methods are divided into black-box and white-box attacks based on the transparency of the target model. Meanwhile, we classify defense methods into prompt-level and model-level defenses. Additionally, we further subdivide these attack and defense methods into distinct sub-classes and present a coherent diagram illustrating their relationships. We also conduct an investigation into the current evaluation methods and compare them from different perspectives. Our findings aim to inspire future research and practical implementations in safeguarding LLMs against adversarial attacks. Above all, although jailbreak remains a significant concern within the community, we believe that our work enhances the understanding of this domain and provides a foundation for developing more secure LLMs.
Authors: Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Xinyuan Niu, Hieu Dao, Jiangwei Chen, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Abstract: Protecting intellectual property (IP) of text such as articles and code is increasingly important, especially as sophisticated attacks become possible, such as paraphrasing by large language models (LLMs) or even unauthorized training of LLMs on copyrighted text to infringe such IP. However, existing text watermarking methods are not robust enough against such attacks nor scalable to millions of users for practical implementation. In this paper, we propose Waterfall, the first training-free framework for robust and scalable text watermarking applicable across multiple text types (e.g., articles, code) and languages supportable by LLMs, for general text and LLM data provenance. Waterfall comprises several key innovations, such as being the first to use LLM as paraphrasers for watermarking along with a novel combination of techniques that are surprisingly effective in achieving robust verifiability and scalability. We empirically demonstrate that Waterfall achieves significantly better scalability, robust verifiability, and computational efficiency compared to SOTA article-text watermarking methods, and also showed how it could be directly applied to the watermarking of code.
Authors: Nathan Herr, Fernando Acero, Roberta Raileanu, Mar\'ia P\'erez-Ortiz, Zhibin Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly used in real-world settings, yet their strategic abilities remain largely unexplored. Game theory provides a good framework for assessing the decision-making abilities of LLMs in interactions with other agents. Although prior studies have shown that LLMs can solve these tasks with carefully curated prompts, they fail when the problem setting or prompt changes. In this work we investigate LLMs' behaviour in strategic games, Stag Hunt and Prisoner Dilemma, analyzing performance variations under different settings and prompts. Our results show that the tested state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit at least one of the following systematic biases: (1) positional bias, (2) payoff bias, or (3) behavioural bias. Subsequently, we observed that the LLMs' performance drops when the game configuration is misaligned with the affecting biases. Performance is assessed based on the selection of the correct action, one which agrees with the prompted preferred behaviours of both players. Alignment refers to whether the LLM's bias aligns with the correct action. For example, GPT-4o's average performance drops by 34% when misaligned. Additionally, the current trend of "bigger and newer is better" does not hold for the above, where GPT-4o (the current best-performing LLM) suffers the most substantial performance drop. Lastly, we note that while chain-of-thought prompting does reduce the effect of the biases on most models, it is far from solving the problem at the fundamental level.
Authors: Hannes Kunstmann, Joseph Ollier, Joel Persson, Florian von Wangenheim
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) present an enormous evolution in the strategic potential of conversational recommender systems (CRS). Yet to date, research has predominantly focused upon technical frameworks to implement LLM-driven CRS, rather than end-user evaluations or strategic implications for firms, particularly from the perspective of a small to medium enterprises (SME) that makeup the bedrock of the global economy. In the current paper, we detail the design of an LLM-driven CRS in an SME setting, and its subsequent performance in the field using both objective system metrics and subjective user evaluations. While doing so, we additionally outline a short-form revised ResQue model for evaluating LLM-driven CRS, enabling replicability in a rapidly evolving field. Our results reveal good system performance from a user experience perspective (85.5% recommendation accuracy) but underscore latency, cost, and quality issues challenging business viability. Notably, with a median cost of $0.04 per interaction and a latency of 5.7s, cost-effectiveness and response time emerge as crucial areas for achieving a more user-friendly and economically viable LLM-driven CRS for SME settings. One major driver of these costs is the use of an advanced LLM as a ranker within the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technique. Our results additionally indicate that relying solely on approaches such as Prompt-based learning with ChatGPT as the underlying LLM makes it challenging to achieve satisfying quality in a production environment. Strategic considerations for SMEs deploying an LLM-driven CRS are outlined, particularly considering trade-offs in the current technical landscape.
Authors: Vyas Raina, Mark Gales
Abstract: Speech enabled foundation models, either in the form of flexible speech recognition based systems or audio-prompted large language models (LLMs), are becoming increasingly popular. One of the interesting aspects of these models is their ability to perform tasks other than automatic speech recognition (ASR) using an appropriate prompt. For example, the OpenAI Whisper model can perform both speech transcription and speech translation. With the development of audio-prompted LLMs there is the potential for even greater control options. In this work we demonstrate that with this greater flexibility the systems can be susceptible to model-control adversarial attacks. Without any access to the model prompt it is possible to modify the behaviour of the system by appropriately changing the audio input. To illustrate this risk, we demonstrate that it is possible to prepend a short universal adversarial acoustic segment to any input speech signal to override the prompt setting of an ASR foundation model. Specifically, we successfully use a universal adversarial acoustic segment to control Whisper to always perform speech translation, despite being set to perform speech transcription. Overall, this work demonstrates a new form of adversarial attack on multi-tasking speech enabled foundation models that needs to be considered prior to the deployment of this form of model.
Authors: Hang Gao, Yongfeng Zhang
Abstract: Vector retrieval algorithms are vital for semantic queries in the evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs). Retrieving vectors that simultaneously meet criteria for both similarity and diversity significantly enhances the capabilities of LLM-based agents. Despite the widespread use of the Maximal Marginal Relevance (MMR) in retrieval scenarios with relevance and diversity requirements, fluctuations caused by variations in the parameter $ \lambda $ within the MMR complicate the determination of the optimization trajectory in vector spaces, thus obscuring the direction of enhancement. Moreover, there is a lack of a robust theoretical analysis for the constraints of similarity and diversity in retrieval processes. This paper introduces a novel approach to characterizing both constraints through the relationship between the sum vector and the query vector. The proximity of these vectors addresses the similarity constraint, while necessitating that individual vectors within the sum vector divergently align with the query vector to satisfy the diversity constraint. We also formulate a new combinatorial optimization challenge, taking a selection of $k$ vectors from a set of candidates such that their sum vector maximally aligns with the query vector, a problem we demonstrate to be NP-complete. This establishes the profound difficulty of pursuing similarity and diversity simultaneously in vector retrieval and lays a theoretical groundwork for further research. Additionally, we present the heuristic algorithm Vectors Retrieval with Similarity and Diversity (VRSD) which not only has a definitive optimization goal and eschews the need for preset parameters but also offers a modest reduction in time complexity compared to MMR. Empirical validation further confirm that VRSD significantly surpasses MMR across various datasets.
Authors: Bolaji Yusuf, Murat Sara\c{c}lar
Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) approaches to keyword search (KWS) are considerably simpler in terms of training and indexing complexity when compared to approaches which use the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. This simplification however has drawbacks due to the loss of modularity. In particular, where ASR-based KWS systems can benefit from external unpaired text via a language model, current formulations of E2E KWS systems have no such mechanism. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multitask training objective which allows unpaired text to be integrated into E2E KWS without complicating indexing and search. In addition to training an E2E KWS model to retrieve text queries from spoken documents, we jointly train it to retrieve text queries from masked written documents. We show empirically that this approach can effectively leverage unpaired text for KWS, with significant improvements in search performance across a wide variety of languages. We conduct analysis which indicates that these improvements are achieved because the proposed method improves document representations for words in the unpaired text. Finally, we show that the proposed method can be used for domain adaptation in settings where in-domain paired data is scarce or nonexistent.
Authors: Yu Sun, Xinhao Li, Karan Dalal, Jiarui Xu, Arjun Vikram, Genghan Zhang, Yann Dubois, Xinlei Chen, Xiaolong Wang, Sanmi Koyejo, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Carlos Guestrin
Abstract: Self-attention performs well in long context but has quadratic complexity. Existing RNN layers have linear complexity, but their performance in long context is limited by the expressive power of their hidden state. We propose a new class of sequence modeling layers with linear complexity and an expressive hidden state. The key idea is to make the hidden state a machine learning model itself, and the update rule a step of self-supervised learning. Since the hidden state is updated by training even on test sequences, our layers are called Test-Time Training (TTT) layers. We consider two instantiations: TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP, whose hidden state is a linear model and a two-layer MLP respectively. We evaluate our instantiations at the scale of 125M to 1.3B parameters, comparing with a strong Transformer and Mamba, a modern RNN. Both TTT-Linear and TTT-MLP match or exceed the baselines. Similar to Transformer, they can keep reducing perplexity by conditioning on more tokens, while Mamba cannot after 16k context. With preliminary systems optimization, TTT-Linear is already faster than Transformer at 8k context and matches Mamba in wall-clock time. TTT-MLP still faces challenges in memory I/O, but shows larger potential in long context, pointing to a promising direction for future research.
Authors: Bolaji Yusuf, Murali Karthick Baskar, Andrew Rosenberg, Bhuvana Ramabhadran
Abstract: This paper explores speculative speech recognition (SSR), where we empower conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) with speculation capabilities, allowing the recognizer to run ahead of audio. We introduce a metric for measuring SSR performance and we propose a model which does SSR by combining a RNN-Transducer-based ASR system with an audio-prefixed language model (LM). The ASR system transcribes ongoing audio and feeds the resulting transcripts, along with an audio-dependent prefix, to the LM, which speculates likely completions for the transcriptions. We experiment with a variety of ASR datasets on which show the efficacy our method and the feasibility of SSR as a method of reducing ASR latency.
Authors: Bolaji Yusuf, Jan "Honza" \v{C}ernock\'y, Murat Sara\c{c}lar
Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) keyword search (KWS) has emerged as an alternative and complimentary approach to conventional keyword search which depends on the output of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. While E2E methods greatly simplify the KWS pipeline, they generally have worse performance than their ASR-based counterparts, which can benefit from pretraining with untranscribed data. In this work, we propose a method for pretraining E2E KWS systems with untranscribed data, which involves using acoustic unit discovery (AUD) to obtain discrete units for untranscribed data and then learning to locate sequences of such units in the speech. We conduct experiments across languages and AUD systems: we show that finetuning such a model significantly outperforms a model trained from scratch, and the performance improvements are generally correlated with the quality of the AUD system used for pretraining.
Authors: Tommaso Tosato, Pascal Jr Tikeng Notsawo, Saskia Helbling, Irina Rish, Guillaume Dumas
Abstract: Language Models (LMs) have achieved impressive performance on various linguistic tasks, but their relationship to human language processing in the brain remains unclear. This paper examines the gaps and overlaps between LMs and the brain at different levels of analysis, emphasizing the importance of looking beyond input-output behavior to examine and compare the internal processes of these systems. We discuss how insights from neuroscience, such as sparsity, modularity, internal states, and interactive learning, can inform the development of more biologically plausible language models. Furthermore, we explore the role of scaling laws in bridging the gap between LMs and human cognition, highlighting the need for efficiency constraints analogous to those in biological systems. By developing LMs that more closely mimic brain function, we aim to advance both artificial intelligence and our understanding of human cognition.
Authors: Yuanze Lin, Yunsheng Li, Dongdong Chen, Weijian Xu, Ronald Clark, Philip Torr, Lu Yuan
Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant strides by training on vast high-quality image-text datasets, enabling them to generally understand images well. However, the inherent difficulty in explicitly conveying fine-grained or spatially dense information in text, such as masks, poses a challenge for MLLMs, limiting their ability to answer questions requiring an understanding of detailed or localized visual elements. Drawing inspiration from the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) concept, this paper proposes a new visual prompt approach to integrate fine-grained external knowledge, gleaned from specialized vision models (e.g., instance segmentation/OCR models), into MLLMs. This is a promising yet underexplored direction for enhancing MLLMs' performance. Our approach diverges from concurrent works, which transform external knowledge into additional text prompts, necessitating the model to indirectly learn the correspondence between visual content and text coordinates. Instead, we propose embedding fine-grained knowledge information directly into a spatial embedding map as a visual prompt. This design can be effortlessly incorporated into various MLLMs, such as LLaVA and Mipha, considerably improving their visual understanding performance. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate that our method can enhance MLLM performance across nine benchmarks, amplifying their fine-grained context-aware capabilities.
Authors: Aaron Mueller
Abstract: Interpretability research takes counterfactual theories of causality for granted. Most causal methods rely on counterfactual interventions to inputs or the activations of particular model components, followed by observations of the change in models' output logits or behaviors. While this yields more faithful evidence than correlational methods, counterfactuals nonetheless have key problems that bias our findings in specific and predictable ways. Specifically, (i) counterfactual theories do not effectively capture multiple independently sufficient causes of the same effect, which leads us to miss certain causes entirely; and (ii) counterfactual dependencies in neural networks are generally not transitive, which complicates methods for extracting and interpreting causal graphs from neural networks. We discuss the implications of these challenges for interpretability researchers and propose concrete suggestions for future work.
Authors: Sara Papi, Marco Gaido, Andrea Pilzer, Matteo Negri
Abstract: Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of results. This assumption comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To address this issue, we posit that the current focus on reproducibility should go hand in hand with the emphasis on software quality. We present a case study in which we identify and fix three bugs in widely used implementations of the state-of-the-art Conformer architecture. Through experiments on speech recognition and translation in various languages, we demonstrate that the presence of bugs does not prevent the achievement of good and reproducible results, which however can lead to incorrect conclusions that potentially misguide future research. As a countermeasure, we propose a Code-quality Checklist and release pangoliNN, a library dedicated to testing neural models, with the goal of promoting coding best practices and improving research software quality within the NLP community.
Authors: Kunze Wang, Yihao Ding, Soyeon Caren Han
Abstract: Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Authors: Peiqin Lin, Chengzhi Hu, Zheyu Zhang, Andr\'e F. T. Martins, Hinrich Sch\"utze
Abstract: Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLMSim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLMSim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.
Authors: Jiawen Xie, Pengyu Cheng, Xiao Liang, Yong Dai, Nan Du
Abstract: Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models remain challenged by the task of long-sequence processing, because the computational cost of self-attention operations in transformers swells quadratically with the input sequence length. To alleviate the complexity of long-sequence processing, we propose a simple framework to enable the offthe-shelf pre-trained transformers to process much longer sequences, while the computation and memory costs remain growing linearly with the input sequence lengths. More specifically, our method divides each long-sequence input into a batch of chunks, then aligns the interchunk information during the encoding steps, and finally selects the most representative hidden states from the encoder for the decoding process. To extract inter-chunk semantic information, we align the start and end token embeddings among chunks in each encoding transformer block. To learn an effective hidden selection policy, we design a dual updating scheme inspired by reinforcement learning, which regards the decoders of transformers as environments, and the downstream performance metrics as the rewards to evaluate the hidden selection actions. Our empirical results on real-world long-text summarization and reading comprehension tasks demonstrate effective improvements compared to prior longsequence processing baselines.
Authors: Fan Zhang, Kebing Jin, Hankz Hankui Zhuo
Abstract: Despite the superior performance of large language models to generate natural language texts, it is hard to generate texts with correct logic according to a given task, due to the difficulties for neural models to capture implied rules from free-form texts. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based language model, Logical-GLM, to infuse logic into language models for more valid text generation and interpretability. Specifically, we first capture information from natural language instructions and construct logical bayes graphs that generally describe domains. Next, we generate logical skeletons to guide language model training, infusing domain knowledge into language models. Finally, we alternately optimize the searching policy of graphs and language models until convergence. The experimental results show that Logical-GLM is both effective and efficient compared with traditional language models, despite using smaller-scale training data and fewer parameters. Our approach can generate instructional texts with more correct logic owing to the internalized domain knowledge. Moreover, the usage of logical graphs reflects the inner mechanism of the language models, which improves the interpretability of black-box models.
Authors: Aman Bhargava, Cameron Witkowski, Shi-Zhuo Looi, Matt Thomson
Abstract: Prompt engineering is crucial for deploying LLMs but is poorly understood mathematically. We formalize LLM systems as a class of discrete stochastic dynamical systems to explore prompt engineering through the lens of control theory. We offer a mathematical analysis of the limitations on the controllability of self-attention as a function of the singular values of the parameter matrices. We present complementary empirical results on the controllability of a panel of LLMs, including Falcon-7b, Llama-7b, and Falcon-40b. Given initial state $\mathbf x_0$ from Wikitext and prompts of length $k \leq 10$ tokens, we find that the "correct" next token is reachable at least 97% of the time, and that the top 75 most likely next tokens are reachable at least 85% of the time. Intriguingly, short prompt sequences can dramatically alter the likelihood of specific outputs, even making the least likely tokens become the most likely ones. This control-theoretic analysis of LLMs demonstrates the significant and poorly understood role of input sequences in steering output probabilities, offering a foundational perspective for enhancing language model system capabilities.
Authors: Miguel Moura Ramos, Patrick Fernandes, Ant\'onio Farinhas, Andr\'e F. T. Martins
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a recent technique to improve the quality of the text generated by a language model, making it closer to what humans would generate. A core ingredient in RLHF's success in aligning and improving large language models (LLMs) is its reward model, trained using human feedback on model outputs. In machine translation (MT), where metrics trained from human annotations can readily be used as reward models, recent methods using minimum Bayes risk decoding and reranking have succeeded in improving the final quality of translation. In this study, we comprehensively explore and compare techniques for integrating quality metrics as reward models into the MT pipeline. This includes using the reward model for data filtering, during the training phase through RL, and at inference time by employing reranking techniques, and we assess the effects of combining these in a unified approach. Our experimental results, conducted across multiple translation tasks, underscore the crucial role of effective data filtering, based on estimated quality, in harnessing the full potential of RL in enhancing MT quality. Furthermore, our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of combining RL training with reranking techniques, showcasing substantial improvements in translation quality.
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Ahmed Jaafar, Beining Wang, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu
Abstract: This study examines the effect of prompt engineering on the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in clinical note generation. We introduce an Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) framework to refine initial prompts and compare the outputs of medical experts, non-medical experts, and APO-enhanced GPT3.5 and GPT4. Results highlight GPT4 APO's superior performance in standardizing prompt quality across clinical note sections. A human-in-the-loop approach shows that experts maintain content quality post-APO, with a preference for their own modifications, suggesting the value of expert customization. We recommend a two-phase optimization process, leveraging APO-GPT4 for consistency and expert input for personalization.
Authors: Victor Agostinelli, Max Wild, Matthew Raffel, Kazi Ahmed Asif Fuad, Lizhong Chen
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters and pretrained on massive amounts of data are now capable of near or better than state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream natural language processing tasks. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one such task that LLMs have been applied to with great success. However, little research has focused on applying LLMs to the more difficult subset of NMT called simultaneous translation (SimulMT), where translation begins before the entire source context is available to the model. In this paper, we address key challenges facing LLMs fine-tuned for SimulMT, validate classical SimulMT concepts and practices in the context of LLMs, explore adapting LLMs that are fine-tuned for NMT to the task of SimulMT, and introduce Simul-LLM, the first open-source fine-tuning and evaluation pipeline development framework for LLMs focused on SimulMT.
Authors: Nina Panickssery, Nick Gabrieli, Julian Schulz, Meg Tong, Evan Hubinger, Alexander Matt Turner
Abstract: We introduce Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), an innovative method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes "steering vectors" by averaging the difference in residual stream activations between pairs of positive and negative examples of a particular behavior, such as factual versus hallucinatory responses. During inference, these steering vectors are added at all token positions after the user's prompt with either a positive or negative coefficient, allowing precise control over the degree of the targeted behavior. We evaluate CAA's effectiveness on Llama 2 Chat using multiple-choice behavioral question datasets and open-ended generation tasks. We demonstrate that CAA significantly alters model behavior, is effective over and on top of traditional methods like finetuning and system prompt design, and minimally reduces capabilities. Moreover, we gain deeper insights into CAA's mechanisms by employing various activation space interpretation methods. CAA accurately steers model outputs and sheds light on how high-level concepts are represented in Large Language Models (LLMs).
Authors: Ankit Yadav, Himanshu Beniwal, Mayank Singh
Abstract: Driven by the surge in code generation using large language models (LLMs), numerous benchmarks have emerged to evaluate these LLMs capabilities. We conducted a large-scale human evaluation of HumanEval and MBPP, two popular benchmarks for Python code generation, analyzing their diversity and difficulty. Our findings unveil a critical bias towards a limited set of programming concepts, neglecting most of the other concepts entirely. Furthermore, we uncover a worrying prevalence of easy tasks, potentially inflating model performance estimations. To address these limitations, we propose a novel benchmark, PythonSaga, featuring 185 hand-crafted prompts on a balanced representation of 38 programming concepts across diverse difficulty levels. The robustness of our benchmark is demonstrated by the poor performance of existing Code-LLMs.
Authors: Wesley H. Holliday, Matthew Mandelkern, Cedegao E. Zhang
Abstract: The reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) are the topic of a growing body of research in AI and cognitive science. In this paper, we probe the extent to which twenty-five LLMs are able to distinguish logically correct inferences from logically fallacious ones. We focus on inference patterns involving conditionals (e.g., 'If Ann has a queen, then Bob has a jack') and epistemic modals (e.g., 'Ann might have an ace', 'Bob must have a king'). These inferences have been of special interest to logicians, philosophers, and linguists, since they play a central role in the fundamental human ability to reason about distal possibilities. Assessing LLMs on these inferences is thus highly relevant to the question of how much the reasoning abilities of LLMs match those of humans. Among the LLMs we tested, all but the GPT-4 model family often make basic mistakes with conditionals, though zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting helps them make fewer mistakes. Moreover, even the GPT-4 family displays logically inconsistent judgments across inference patterns involving epistemic modals, and almost all models give answers to certain complex conditional inferences widely discussed in the literature that do not match human judgments. These results highlight gaps in basic logical reasoning in today's LLMs.
Authors: Shangbin Feng, Herun Wan, Ningnan Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Minnan Luo, Yulia Tsvetkov
Abstract: Social media bot detection has always been an arms race between advancements in machine learning bot detectors and adversarial bot strategies to evade detection. In this work, we bring the arms race to the next level by investigating the opportunities and risks of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in social bot detection. To investigate the opportunities, we design novel LLM-based bot detectors by proposing a mixture-of-heterogeneous-experts framework to divide and conquer diverse user information modalities. To illuminate the risks, we explore the possibility of LLM-guided manipulation of user textual and structured information to evade detection. Extensive experiments with three LLMs on two datasets demonstrate that instruction tuning on merely 1,000 annotated examples produces specialized LLMs that outperform state-of-the-art baselines by up to 9.1% on both datasets, while LLM-guided manipulation strategies could significantly bring down the performance of existing bot detectors by up to 29.6% and harm the calibration and reliability of bot detection systems.
Authors: Alex Zhang, Khanh Nguyen, Jens Tuyls, Albert Lin, Karthik Narasimhan
Abstract: This paper introduces the concept of Language-Guided World Models (LWMs) -- probabilistic models that can simulate environments by reading texts. Agents equipped with these models provide humans with more extensive and efficient control, allowing them to simultaneously alter agent behaviors in multiple tasks via natural verbal communication. In this work, we take initial steps in developing robust LWMs that can generalize to compositionally novel language descriptions. We design a challenging world modeling benchmark based on the game of MESSENGER (Hanjie et al., 2021), featuring evaluation settings that require varying degrees of compositional generalization. Our experiments reveal the lack of generalizability of the state-of-the-art Transformer model, as it offers marginal improvements in simulation quality over a no-text baseline. We devise a more robust model by fusing the Transformer with the EMMA attention mechanism (Hanjie et al., 2021). Our model substantially outperforms the Transformer and approaches the performance of a model with an oracle semantic parsing and grounding capability. To demonstrate the practicality of this model in improving AI safety and transparency, we simulate a scenario in which the model enables an agent to present plans to a human before execution, and to revise plans based on their language feedback.
Authors: Xuanzhong Chen, Xiaohao Mao, Qihan Guo, Lun Wang, Shuyang Zhang, Ting Chen
Abstract: Generalist Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown considerable promise in various domains, including medical diagnosis. Rare diseases, affecting approximately 300 million people worldwide, often have unsatisfactory clinical diagnosis rates primarily due to a lack of experienced physicians and the complexity of differentiating among many rare diseases. In this context, recent news such as "ChatGPT correctly diagnosed a 4-year-old's rare disease after 17 doctors failed" underscore LLMs' potential, yet underexplored, role in clinically diagnosing rare diseases. To bridge this research gap, we introduce RareBench, a pioneering benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the capabilities of LLMs on 4 critical dimensions within the realm of rare diseases. Meanwhile, we have compiled the largest open-source dataset on rare disease patients, establishing a benchmark for future studies in this domain. To facilitate differential diagnosis of rare diseases, we develop a dynamic few-shot prompt methodology, leveraging a comprehensive rare disease knowledge graph synthesized from multiple knowledge bases, significantly enhancing LLMs' diagnostic performance. Moreover, we present an exhaustive comparative study of GPT-4's diagnostic capabilities against those of specialist physicians. Our experimental findings underscore the promising potential of integrating LLMs into the clinical diagnostic process for rare diseases. This paves the way for exciting possibilities in future advancements in this field.
Authors: Herun Wan, Shangbin Feng, Zhaoxuan Tan, Heng Wang, Yulia Tsvetkov, Minnan Luo
Abstract: Large language models are limited by challenges in factuality and hallucinations to be directly employed off-the-shelf for judging the veracity of news articles, where factual accuracy is paramount. In this work, we propose DELL that identifies three key stages in misinformation detection where LLMs could be incorporated as part of the pipeline: 1) LLMs could \emph{generate news reactions} to represent diverse perspectives and simulate user-news interaction networks; 2) LLMs could \emph{generate explanations} for proxy tasks (e.g., sentiment, stance) to enrich the contexts of news articles and produce experts specializing in various aspects of news understanding; 3) LLMs could \emph{merge task-specific experts} and provide an overall prediction by incorporating the predictions and confidence scores of varying experts. Extensive experiments on seven datasets with three LLMs demonstrate that DELL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 16.8\% in macro f1-score. Further analysis reveals that the generated reactions and explanations are greatly helpful in misinformation detection, while our proposed LLM-guided expert merging helps produce better-calibrated predictions.
Authors: Jian Wu, Linyi Yang, Zhen Wang, Manabu Okumura, Yue Zhang
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in question-answering (QA) tasks, their multi-step reasoning abilities on multiple evidence integration on Multi-hop QA tasks remain underexplored. LLMs sometimes generate answers that rely on internal memory rather than reasoning given context, which brings concerns about the evaluation quality of real reasoning abilities. The counterfactual QA task can separate internal memory from reasoning abilities, but focusing solely on final-QA performance without evaluating the multi-step reasoning process is insufficient for reporting LLMs' real reasoning abilities. Current Multi-hop QA (MHQA) benchmarks are factual and annotated on open-source corpora such as Wikipedia, although useful for multi-step reasoning evaluation, showing limitations due to potential data contamination in LLMs pre-training stage. To address this issue, we introduce the Inherent Reasoning Evaluation (IRE) method, a novel evaluation way that jointly evaluates the LLMs' chain-of-reasoning performance based on the first knowledge-edited counterfactual multi-hop QA data which involves editing the original Wikipedia passages, reducing data contamination risks. The IRE comprehensively assesses reasoning chains through sub-QA and final-QA evaluations. Our comparisons reveal significant performance gaps for several LLMs between Wikipedia-based benchmarks and IRE, deeming data contamination issues in existing benchmarks. We believe that the IRE benchmark will enhance and facilitate trustworthy LLM evaluations.
Authors: Himanshu Beniwal, Dishant Patel, Kowsik Nandagopan D, Hritik Ladia, Ankit Yadav, Mayank Singh
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly ubiquitous, yet their ability to retain and reason about temporal information remains limited, hindering their application in real-world scenarios where understanding the sequential nature of events is crucial. Our study experiments with 12 state-of-the-art models (ranging from 2B to 70B+ parameters) on a novel numerical-temporal dataset, \textbf{TempUN}, spanning from 10,000 BCE to 2100 CE, to uncover significant temporal retention and comprehension limitations. We propose six metrics to assess three learning paradigms to enhance temporal knowledge acquisition. Our findings reveal that open-source models exhibit knowledge gaps more frequently, suggesting a trade-off between limited knowledge and incorrect responses. Additionally, various fine-tuning approaches significantly improved performance, reducing incorrect outputs and impacting the identification of 'information not available' in the generations. The associated dataset and code are available at (https://github.com/lingoiitgn/TempUN).
Authors: Vyas Raina, Adian Liusie, Mark Gales
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful zero-shot assessors used in real-world situations such as assessing written exams and benchmarking systems. Despite these critical applications, no existing work has analyzed the vulnerability of judge-LLMs to adversarial manipulation. This work presents the first study on the adversarial robustness of assessment LLMs, where we demonstrate that short universal adversarial phrases can be concatenated to deceive judge LLMs to predict inflated scores. Since adversaries may not know or have access to the judge-LLMs, we propose a simple surrogate attack where a surrogate model is first attacked, and the learned attack phrase then transferred to unknown judge-LLMs. We propose a practical algorithm to determine the short universal attack phrases and demonstrate that when transferred to unseen models, scores can be drastically inflated such that irrespective of the assessed text, maximum scores are predicted. It is found that judge-LLMs are significantly more susceptible to these adversarial attacks when used for absolute scoring, as opposed to comparative assessment. Our findings raise concerns on the reliability of LLM-as-a-judge methods, and emphasize the importance of addressing vulnerabilities in LLM assessment methods before deployment in high-stakes real-world scenarios.
Authors: Xinpeng Wang, Bolei Ma, Chengzhi Hu, Leon Weber-Genzel, Paul R\"ottger, Frauke Kreuter, Dirk Hovy, Barbara Plank
Abstract: The open-ended nature of language generation makes the evaluation of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) challenging. One common evaluation approach uses multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to limit the response space. The model is then evaluated by ranking the candidate answers by the log probability of the first token prediction. However, first-tokens may not consistently reflect the final response output, due to model's diverse response styles such as starting with "Sure" or refusing to answer. Consequently, MCQ evaluation is not indicative of model behaviour when interacting with users. But by how much? We evaluate how aligned first-token evaluation is with the text output along several dimensions, namely final option choice, refusal rate, choice distribution and robustness under prompt perturbation. Our results show that the two approaches are severely misaligned on all dimensions, reaching mismatch rates over 60%. Models heavily fine-tuned on conversational or safety data are especially impacted. Crucially, models remain misaligned even when we increasingly constrain prompts, i.e., force them to start with an option letter or example template. Our findings i) underscore the importance of inspecting the text output as well and ii) caution against relying solely on first-token evaluation.
Authors: Carl Edwards, Qingyun Wang, Lawrence Zhao, Heng Ji
Abstract: Language-molecule models have emerged as an exciting direction for molecular discovery and understanding. However, training these models is challenging due to the scarcity of molecule-language pair datasets. At this point, datasets have been released which are 1) small and scraped from existing databases, 2) large but noisy and constructed by performing entity linking on the scientific literature, and 3) built by converting property prediction datasets to natural language using templates. In this document, we detail the $\textit{L+M-24}$ dataset, which has been created for the Language + Molecules Workshop shared task at ACL 2024. In particular, $\textit{L+M-24}$ is designed to focus on three key benefits of natural language in molecule design: compositionality, functionality, and abstraction.
Authors: Alexander Brinkmann, Nick Baumann, Christian Bizer
Abstract: Product offers on e-commerce websites often consist of a product title and a textual product description. In order to enable features such as faceted product search or to generate product comparison tables, it is necessary to extract structured attribute-value pairs from the unstructured product titles and descriptions and to normalize the extracted values to a single, unified scale for each attribute. This paper explores the potential of using large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, to extract and normalize attribute values from product titles and descriptions. We experiment with different zero-shot and few-shot prompt templates for instructing LLMs to extract and normalize attribute-value pairs. We introduce the Web Data Commons - Product Attribute Value Extraction (WDC-PAVE) benchmark dataset for our experiments. WDC-PAVE consists of product offers from 59 different websites which provide schema.org annotations. The offers belong to five different product categories, each with a specific set of attributes. The dataset provides manually verified attribute-value pairs in two forms: (i) directly extracted values and (ii) normalized attribute values. The normalization of the attribute values requires systems to perform the following types of operations: name expansion, generalization, unit of measurement conversion, and string wrangling. Our experiments demonstrate that GPT-4 outperforms the PLM-based extraction methods SU-OpenTag, AVEQA, and MAVEQA by 10%, achieving an F1-score of 91%. For the extraction and normalization of product attribute values, GPT-4 achieves a similar performance to the extraction scenario, while being particularly strong at string wrangling and name expansion.
Authors: Dingkang Yang, Mingcheng Li, Dongling Xiao, Yang Liu, Kun Yang, Zhaoyu Chen, Yuzheng Wang, Peng Zhai, Ke Li, Lihua Zhang
Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to understand human intentions by integrating emotion-related clues from diverse modalities, such as visual, language, and audio. Unfortunately, the current MSA task invariably suffers from unplanned dataset biases, particularly multimodal utterance-level label bias and word-level context bias. These harmful biases potentially mislead models to focus on statistical shortcuts and spurious correlations, causing severe performance bottlenecks. To alleviate these issues, we present a Multimodal Counterfactual Inference Sentiment (MCIS) analysis framework based on causality rather than conventional likelihood. Concretely, we first formulate a causal graph to discover harmful biases from already-trained vanilla models. In the inference phase, given a factual multimodal input, MCIS imagines two counterfactual scenarios to purify and mitigate these biases. Then, MCIS can make unbiased decisions from biased observations by comparing factual and counterfactual outcomes. We conduct extensive experiments on several standard MSA benchmarks. Qualitative and quantitative results show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Authors: Rui Yang, Haoran Liu, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Qingcheng Zeng, Yu He Ke, Wanxin Li, Lechao Cheng, Qingyu Chen, James Caverlee, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generative capabilities with the potential to innovate in medicine. However, the application of LLMs in real clinical settings remains challenging due to the lack of factual consistency in the generated content. In this work, we develop an augmented LLM framework, KG-Rank, which leverages a medical knowledge graph (KG) along with ranking and re-ranking techniques, to improve the factuality of long-form question answering (QA) in the medical domain. Specifically, when receiving a question, KG-Rank automatically identifies medical entities within the question and retrieves the related triples from the medical KG to gather factual information. Subsequently, KG-Rank innovatively applies multiple ranking techniques to refine the ordering of these triples, providing more relevant and precise information for LLM inference. To the best of our knowledge, KG-Rank is the first application of KG combined with ranking models in medical QA specifically for generating long answers. Evaluation on four selected medical QA datasets demonstrates that KG-Rank achieves an improvement of over 18% in ROUGE-L score. Additionally, we extend KG-Rank to open domains, including law, business, music, and history, where it realizes a 14% improvement in ROUGE-L score, indicating the effectiveness and great potential of KG-Rank.
Authors: Eunsu Kim, Juyoung Suk, Philhoon Oh, Haneul Yoo, James Thorne, Alice Oh
Abstract: Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) for the Korean language, there remains an obvious lack of benchmark datasets that test the requisite Korean cultural and linguistic knowledge. Because many existing Korean benchmark datasets are derived from the English counterparts through translation, they often overlook the different cultural contexts. For the few benchmark datasets that are sourced from Korean data capturing cultural knowledge, only narrow tasks such as bias and hate speech detection are offered. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean (CLIcK), a dataset comprising 1,995 QA pairs. CLIcK sources its data from official Korean exams and textbooks, partitioning the questions into eleven categories under the two main categories of language and culture. For each instance in CLIcK, we provide fine-grained annotation of which cultural and linguistic knowledge is required to answer the question correctly. Using CLIcK, we test 13 language models to assess their performance. Our evaluation uncovers insights into their performances across the categories, as well as the diverse factors affecting their comprehension. CLIcK offers the first large-scale comprehensive Korean-centric analysis of LLMs' proficiency in Korean culture and language.
Authors: Aviv Slobodkin, Eran Hirsch, Arie Cattan, Tal Schuster, Ido Dagan
Abstract: Recent efforts to address hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused on attributed text generation, which supplements generated texts with citations of supporting sources for post-generation fact-checking and corrections. Yet, these citations often point to entire documents or paragraphs, burdening users with extensive verification work. In this paper, we introduce a locally-attributable text generation approach, prioritizing concise attributions. Our method, named "Attribute First, then Generate", breaks down the conventional end-to-end generation process into three intuitive steps: content selection, sentence planning, and sequential sentence generation. By initially identifying relevant source segments ("select first") and then conditioning the generation process on them ("then generate"), we ensure these segments also act as the output's fine-grained attributions ("select" becomes "attribute"). Tested on Multi-document Summarization and Long-form Question-answering, our method not only yields more concise citations than the baselines but also maintains - and in some cases enhances - both generation quality and attribution accuracy. Furthermore, it significantly reduces the time required for fact verification by human assessors.
Authors: Luchang Li, Sheng Qian, Jie Lu, Lunxi Yuan, Rui Wang, Qin Xie
Abstract: The Large Language Model (LLM) is widely employed for tasks such as intelligent assistants, text summarization, translation, and multi-modality on mobile phones. However, the current methods for on-device LLM deployment maintain slow inference speed, which causes poor user experience. To facilitate high-efficiency LLM deployment on device GPUs, we propose four optimization techniques: (a) a symbolic expression-based approach to support dynamic shape model inference; (b) operator optimizations and execution priority setting to enhance inference speed and reduce phone lagging; (c) an FP4 quantization method termed M0E4 to reduce dequantization overhead; (d) a sub-tensor-based technique to eliminate the need for copying KV cache after LLM inference. Furthermore, we implement these methods in our mobile inference engine, Transformer-Lite, which is compatible with both Qualcomm and MTK processors. We evaluated Transformer-Lite's performance using LLMs with varied architectures and parameters ranging from 2B to 14B. Specifically, we achieved prefill and decoding speeds of 121 token/s and 14 token/s for ChatGLM2 6B, and 330 token/s and 30 token/s for smaller Gemma 2B, respectively. Compared with CPU-based FastLLM and GPU-based MLC-LLM, our engine attains over 10x speedup for the prefill speed and 2~3x speedup for the decoding speed.
Authors: Longwei Zou, Qingyang Wang, Han Zhao, Jiangang Kong, Yi Yang, Yangdong Deng
Abstract: The fast-growing large scale language models are delivering unprecedented performance on almost all natural language processing tasks. However, the effectiveness of large language models are reliant on an exponentially increasing number of parameters. The overwhelming computation complexity incurs a high inference latency that negatively affects user experience. Existing methods to improve inference efficiency, such as tensor parallelism and quantization, target to reduce per-layer computing latency, yet overlook the cumulative latency due to the number of layers. Recent works on reducing the cumulative latency through layer removing, however, lead to significant performance drop. Motivated by the similarity of inputs among adjacent layers, we propose to identify quasi-independent layers, which can be concurrently computed to significantly decrease inference latency. We also introduce a bypassing technique to mitigate the effect of information loss. Empirical experiments of the proposed approach on the LLaMA models confirm that Concurrent Computation of Quasi-Independent Layers (CQIL) can reduce latency by up to 48.3% on LLaMA-33B, while maintaining a close level of performance.
Authors: Hang Gao, Yongfeng Zhang
Abstract: The adaptation of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents to execute tasks via natural language prompts represents a significant advancement, notably eliminating the need for explicit retraining or fine tuning, but are constrained by the comprehensiveness and diversity of the provided examples, leading to outputs that often diverge significantly from expected results, especially when it comes to the open-ended questions. This paper introduces the Memory Sharing, a framework which integrates the real-time memory filter, storage and retrieval to enhance the In-Context Learning process. This framework allows for the sharing of memories among multiple agents, whereby the interactions and shared memories between different agents effectively enhance the diversity of the memories. The collective self-enhancement through interactive learning among multiple agents facilitates the evolution from individual intelligence to collective intelligence. Besides, the dynamically growing memory pool is utilized not only to improve the quality of responses but also to train and enhance the retriever. We evaluated our framework across three distinct domains involving specialized tasks of agents. The experimental results demonstrate that the MS framework significantly improves the agents' performance in addressing open-ended questions.
Authors: Dongfang Li, Zhenyu Liu, Xinshuo Hu, Zetian Sun, Baotian Hu, Min Zhang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an impressive ability to perform In-Context Learning (ICL) from only a few examples. Recent works have indicated that the functions learned by ICL can be represented through compressed vectors derived from the transformer. However, the working mechanisms and optimization of these vectors are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a comprehensive analysis of these compressed vectors, drawing parallels to the parameters trained with gradient descent, and introduce the concept of state vector. Inspired by the works on model soup and momentum-based gradient descent, we propose inner and momentum optimization methods that are applied to refine the state vector progressively as test-time adaptation. Moreover, we simulate state vector aggregation in the multiple example setting, where demonstrations comprising numerous examples are usually too lengthy for regular ICL, and further propose a divide-and-conquer aggregation method to address this challenge. We conduct extensive experiments using Llama-2 and GPT-J in both zero-shot setting and few-shot setting. The experimental results show that our optimization method effectively enhances the state vector and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on diverse tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/ICL-State-Vector
Authors: Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Zheye Deng, Wei Fan, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked substantial interest and debate concerning their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. Theory of mind evaluations currently focuses on testing models using machine-generated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations, which lacks evaluation of machine ToM ability in real-world human interaction scenarios. This poses a pressing demand to develop new real-world scenario benchmarks. We introduce NegotiationToM, a new benchmark designed to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states (i.e., desires, beliefs, and intentions). Our benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent modeling theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. Our findings demonstrate that NegotiationToM is challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs, as they consistently perform significantly worse than humans, even when employing the chain-of-thought (CoT) method.
Authors: Neha Sharma, Kairit Sirts
Abstract: Research exploring linguistic markers in individuals with depression has demonstrated that language usage can serve as an indicator of mental health. This study investigates the impact of discussion topic as context on linguistic markers and emotional expression in depression, using a Reddit dataset to explore interaction effects. Contrary to common findings, our sentiment analysis revealed a broader range of emotional intensity in depressed individuals, with both higher negative and positive sentiments than controls. This pattern was driven by posts containing no emotion words, revealing the limitations of the lexicon based approaches in capturing the full emotional context. We observed several interesting results demonstrating the importance of contextual analyses. For instance, the use of 1st person singular pronouns and words related to anger and sadness correlated with increased positive sentiments, whereas a higher rate of present-focused words was associated with more negative sentiments. Our findings highlight the importance of discussion contexts while interpreting the language used in depression, revealing that the emotional intensity and meaning of linguistic markers can vary based on the topic of discussion.
Authors: Xianghe Ma, Dominik Schlechtweg, Wei Zhao
Abstract: There has been a surge of interest in computational modeling of semantic change. The foci of previous works are on detecting and interpreting word senses gained over time; however, it remains unclear whether the gained senses are covered by dictionaries. In this work, we aim to fill this research gap by comparing detected word senses with dictionary sense inventories in order to bridge between the communities of lexical semantic change detection and lexicography. We evaluate our system in the AXOLOTL-24 shared task for Finnish, Russian and German languages \cite{fedorova-etal-2024-axolotl}. Our system is fully unsupervised. It leverages a graph-based clustering approach to predict mappings between unknown word usages and dictionary entries for Subtask 1, and generates dictionary-like definitions for those novel word usages through the state-of-the-art Large Language Models such as GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 for Subtask 2. In Subtask 1, our system outperforms the baseline system by a large margin, and it offers interpretability for the mapping results by distinguishing between matched and unmatched (novel) word usages through our graph-based clustering approach. Our system ranks first in Finnish and German, and ranks second in Russian on the Subtask 2 test-phase leaderboard. These results show the potential of our system in managing dictionary entries, particularly for updating dictionaries to include novel sense entries. Our code and data are made publicly available\footnote{\url{https://github.com/xiaohemaikoo/axolotl24-ABDN-NLP}}.
Authors: Kun Zhu, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiyuan Du, Yuxuan Gu, Weijiang Yu, Haotian Wang, Qianglong Chen, Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Bing Qin
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation integrates the capabilities of large language models with relevant information retrieved from an extensive corpus, yet encounters challenges when confronted with real-world noisy data. One recent solution is to train a filter module to find relevant content but only achieve suboptimal noise compression. In this paper, we propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation. Our approach involves the filtration of noise by simultaneously maximizing the mutual information between compression and ground output, while minimizing the mutual information between compression and retrieved passage. In addition, we derive the formula of information bottleneck to facilitate its application in novel comprehensive evaluations, the selection of supervised fine-tuning data, and the construction of reinforcement learning rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements across various question answering datasets, not only in terms of the correctness of answer generation but also in the conciseness with $2.5\%$ compression rate.
Authors: Simone Alghisi, Massimo Rizzoli, Gabriel Roccabruna, Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Giuseppe Riccardi
Abstract: We study the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for the task of response generation in human-machine dialogue. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature for different dialogue types (e.g., Open-Domain). However, the evaluations of these techniques have been limited in terms of base LLMs, dialogue types and evaluation metrics. In this work, we extensively analyze different LLM adaptation techniques when applied to different dialogue types. We have selected two base LLMs, Llama-2 and Mistral, and four dialogue types Open-Domain, Knowledge-Grounded, Task-Oriented, and Question Answering. We evaluate the performance of in-context learning and fine-tuning techniques across datasets selected for each dialogue type. We assess the impact of incorporating external knowledge to ground the generation in both scenarios of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and gold knowledge. We adopt consistent evaluation and explainability criteria for automatic metrics and human evaluation protocols. Our analysis shows that there is no universal best-technique for adapting large language models as the efficacy of each technique depends on both the base LLM and the specific type of dialogue. Last but not least, the assessment of the best adaptation technique should include human evaluation to avoid false expectations and outcomes derived from automatic metrics.
Authors: Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Maulana Akbar, Lester James V. Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno P. Kampman, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Railey Montalan, Ryan Ignatius, Joanito Agili Lopo, William Nixon, B\"orje F. Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Amadeus, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Halim Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Adha Ryanda, Sonny Lazuardi Hermawan, Dan John Velasco, Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Willy Fitra Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Ngee Chia Tai, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Fikri Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Indra Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng-Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
Abstract: Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA.
Authors: Prisha Samadarshi, Mariam Mustafa, Anushka Kulkarni, Raven Rothkopf, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Smaranda Muresan
Abstract: The New York Times Connections game has emerged as a popular and challenging pursuit for word puzzle enthusiasts. We collect 200 Connections games to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) against expert and novice human players. Our results show that even the best-performing LLM, GPT-4o, which has otherwise shown impressive reasoning abilities on a wide variety of benchmarks, can only fully solve 8% of the games. Compared to GPT-4o, novice and expert players perform better, with expert human players significantly outperforming GPT-4o. To deepen our understanding we create a taxonomy of the knowledge types required to successfully categorize words in the Connections game, revealing that LLMs struggle with associative, encyclopedic, and linguistic knowledge. Our findings establish the New York Times Connections game as a challenging benchmark for evaluating abstract reasoning capabilities in humans and AI systems.
Authors: Miao Su, Zixuan Li, Zhuo Chen, Long Bai, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo
Abstract: Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) has been a long-standing field to answer questions based on knowledge bases. Recently, the evolving dynamics of knowledge have attracted a growing interest in Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA), an emerging task to answer temporal questions. However, this field grapples with ambiguities in defining temporal questions and lacks a systematic categorization of existing methods for TKGQA. In response, this paper provides a thorough survey from two perspectives: the taxonomy of temporal questions and the methodological categorization for TKGQA. Specifically, we first establish a detailed taxonomy of temporal questions engaged in prior studies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of TKGQA techniques of two categories: semantic parsing-based and TKG embedding-based. Building on this review, the paper outlines potential research directions aimed at advancing the field of TKGQA. This work aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for TKGQA and to stimulate further research.
Authors: Allen Roush, Yusuf Shabazz, Arvind Balaji, Peter Zhang, Stefano Mezza, Markus Zhang, Sanjay Basu, Sriram Vishwanath, Mehdi Fatemi, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv
Abstract: We introduce OpenDebateEvidence, a comprehensive dataset for argument mining and summarization sourced from the American Competitive Debate community. This dataset includes over 3.5 million documents with rich metadata, making it one of the most extensive collections of debate evidence. OpenDebateEvidence captures the complexity of arguments in high school and college debates, providing valuable resources for training and evaluation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of fine-tuning state-of-the-art large language models for argumentative abstractive summarization across various methods, models, and datasets. By providing this comprehensive resource, we aim to advance computational argumentation and support practical applications for debaters, educators, and researchers. OpenDebateEvidence is publicly available to support further research and innovation in computational argumentation. Access it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yusuf5/OpenCaselist
Authors: Tim Schopf, Florian Matthes
Abstract: Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.
Authors: Meiling Tao, Xuechen Liang, Yiling Tao, Tianyu Shi
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have unlocked the potential for generating high-quality game commentary. However, producing insightful and engaging commentary for complex games with incomplete information remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel commentary method that combine Reinforcement Learning (RL) and LLMs, tailored specifically for the Chinese card game \textit{Guandan}. Our system leverages RL to generate intricate card-playing scenarios and employs LLMs to generate corresponding commentary text, effectively emulating the strategic analysis and narrative prowess of professional commentators. The framework comprises a state commentary guide, a Theory of Mind (ToM)-based strategy analyzer, and a style retrieval module, which seamlessly collaborate to deliver detailed and context-relevant game commentary in the Chinese language environment. We empower LLMs with ToM capabilities and refine both retrieval and information filtering mechanisms. This facilitates the generation of personalized commentary content. Our experimental results showcase the substantial enhancement in performance achieved by the proposed commentary framework when applied to open-source LLMs, surpassing the performance of GPT-4 across multiple evaluation metrics.
Authors: Yang Wang, Alberto Garcia Hernandez, Roman Kyslyi, Nicholas Kersting
Abstract: We present a comprehensive study of answer quality evaluation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications using vRAG-Eval, a novel grading system that is designed to assess correctness, completeness, and honesty. We further map the grading of quality aspects aforementioned into a binary score, indicating an accept or reject decision, mirroring the intuitive "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" gesture commonly used in chat applications. This approach suits factual business settings where a clear decision opinion is essential. Our assessment applies vRAG-Eval to two Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating the quality of answers generated by a vanilla RAG application. We compare these evaluations with human expert judgments and find a substantial alignment between GPT-4's assessments and those of human experts, reaching 83% agreement on accept or reject decisions. This study highlights the potential of LLMs as reliable evaluators in closed-domain, closed-ended settings, particularly when human evaluations require significant resources.
Authors: Xiangyu Wu, Hailiang Zhang, Yang Yang, Jianfeng Lu
Abstract: In this paper, we present our champion solution to the Global Artificial Intelligence Technology Innovation Competition Track 1: Medical Imaging Diagnosis Report Generation. We select CPT-BASE as our base model for the text generation task. During the pre-training stage, we delete the mask language modeling task of CPT-BASE and instead reconstruct the vocabulary, adopting a span mask strategy and gradually increasing the number of masking ratios to perform the denoising auto-encoder pre-training task. In the fine-tuning stage, we design iterative retrieval augmentation and noise-aware similarity bucket prompt strategies. The retrieval augmentation constructs a mini-knowledge base, enriching the input information of the model, while the similarity bucket further perceives the noise information within the mini-knowledge base, guiding the model to generate higher-quality diagnostic reports based on the similarity prompts. Surprisingly, our single model has achieved a score of 2.321 on leaderboard A, and the multiple model fusion scores are 2.362 and 2.320 on the A and B leaderboards respectively, securing first place in the rankings.
Authors: Zihan Wang, Deli Chen, Damai Dai, Runxin Xu, Zhuoshu Li, Y. Wu
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is crucial for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) with constrained resources. Although there have been various PEFT methods for dense-architecture LLMs, PEFT for sparse-architecture LLMs is still underexplored. In this work, we study the PEFT method for LLMs with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and the contents of this work are mainly threefold: (1) We investigate the dispersion degree of the activated experts in customized tasks, and found that the routing distribution for a specific task tends to be highly concentrated, while the distribution of activated experts varies significantly across different tasks. (2) We propose Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning, or ESFT, which tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts and modules; experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves the tuning efficiency, but also matches or even surpasses the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning. (3) We further analyze the impact of the MoE architecture on expert-specialized fine-tuning. We find that MoE models with finer-grained experts are more advantageous in selecting the combination of experts that are most relevant to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing both the training efficiency and effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/ESFT.
Authors: Chenlong Deng, Kelong Mao, Yuyao Zhang, Zhicheng Dou
Abstract: Legal judgment prediction is essential for enhancing judicial efficiency. In this work, we identify that existing large language models (LLMs) underperform in this domain due to challenges in understanding case complexities and distinguishing between similar charges. To adapt LLMs for effective legal judgment prediction, we introduce the Ask-Discriminate-Predict (ADAPT) reasoning framework inspired by human judicial reasoning. ADAPT involves decomposing case facts, discriminating among potential charges, and predicting the final judgment. We further enhance LLMs through fine-tuning with multi-task synthetic trajectories to improve legal judgment prediction accuracy and efficiency under our ADAPT framework. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely-used datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in legal judgment prediction, particularly when dealing with complex and confusing charges.
Authors: Rui Liu, Haolin Zuo, Zheng Lian, Xiaofen Xing, Bj\"orn W. Schuller, Haizhou Li
Abstract: Emotion and Intent Joint Understanding in Multimodal Conversation (MC-EIU) aims to decode the semantic information manifested in a multimodal conversational history, while inferring the emotions and intents simultaneously for the current utterance. MC-EIU is enabling technology for many human-computer interfaces. However, there is a lack of available datasets in terms of annotation, modality, language diversity, and accessibility. In this work, we propose an MC-EIU dataset, which features 7 emotion categories, 9 intent categories, 3 modalities, i.e., textual, acoustic, and visual content, and two languages, i.e., English and Mandarin. Furthermore, it is completely open-source for free access. To our knowledge, MC-EIU is the first comprehensive and rich emotion and intent joint understanding dataset for multimodal conversation. Together with the release of the dataset, we also develop an Emotion and Intent Interaction (EI$^2$) network as a reference system by modeling the deep correlation between emotion and intent in the multimodal conversation. With comparative experiments and ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EI$^2$ method on the MC-EIU dataset. The dataset and codes will be made available at: https://github.com/MC-EIU/MC-EIU.
Authors: Dineth Jayakody, Koshila Isuranda, A V A Malkith, Nisansa de Silva, Sachintha Rajith Ponnamperuma, G G N Sandamali, K L K Sudheera
Abstract: Since the dawn of the digitalisation era, customer feedback and online reviews are unequivocally major sources of insights for businesses. Consequently, conducting comparative analyses of such sources has become the de facto modus operandi of any business that wishes to give itself a competitive edge over its peers and improve customer loyalty. Sentiment analysis is one such method instrumental in gauging public interest, exposing market trends, and analysing competitors. While traditional sentiment analysis focuses on overall sentiment, as the needs advance with time, it has become important to explore public opinions and sentiments on various specific subjects, products and services mentioned in the reviews on a finer-granular level. To this end, Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), supported by advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques which have contributed to a paradigm shift from simple word-level analysis to tone and context-aware analyses, focuses on identifying specific aspects within the text and determining the sentiment associated with each aspect. In this study, we compare several deep-NN methods for ABSA on two benchmark datasets (Restaurant14 and Laptop-14) and found that FAST LSA obtains the best overall results of 87.6% and 82.6% accuracy but does not pass LSA+DeBERTa which reports 90.33% and 86.21% accuracy respectively.
Authors: Faris Alasmary, Orjuwan Zaafarani, Ahmad Ghannam
Abstract: Tashkeel, or Arabic Text Diacritization (ATD), greatly enhances the comprehension of Arabic text by removing ambiguity and minimizing the risk of misinterpretations caused by its absence. It plays a crucial role in improving Arabic text processing, particularly in applications such as text-to-speech and machine translation. This paper introduces a new approach to training ATD models. First, we finetuned two transformers, encoder-only and encoder-decoder, that were initialized from a pretrained character-based BERT. Then, we applied the Noisy-Student approach to boost the performance of the best model. We evaluated our models alongside 11 commercial and open-source models using two manually labeled benchmark datasets: WikiNews and our CATT dataset. Our findings show that our top model surpasses all evaluated models by relative Diacritic Error Rates (DERs) of 30.83\% and 35.21\% on WikiNews and CATT, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art in ATD. In addition, we show that our model outperforms GPT-4-turbo on CATT dataset by a relative DER of 9.36\%. We open-source our CATT models and benchmark dataset for the research community\footnote{https://github.com/abjadai/catt}.
Authors: Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Nicu Sebe
Abstract: Most curriculum learning methods require an approach to sort the data samples by difficulty, which is often cumbersome to perform. In this work, we propose a novel curriculum learning approach termed Learning Rate Curriculum (LeRaC), which leverages the use of a different learning rate for each layer of a neural network to create a data-agnostic curriculum during the initial training epochs. More specifically, LeRaC assigns higher learning rates to neural layers closer to the input, gradually decreasing the learning rates as the layers are placed farther away from the input. The learning rates increase at various paces during the first training iterations, until they all reach the same value. From this point on, the neural model is trained as usual. This creates a model-level curriculum learning strategy that does not require sorting the examples by difficulty and is compatible with any neural network, generating higher performance levels regardless of the architecture. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 12 data sets from the computer vision (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, ImageNet-200, Food-101, UTKFace, PASCAL VOC), language (BoolQ, QNLI, RTE) and audio (ESC-50, CREMA-D) domains, considering various convolutional (ResNet-18, Wide-ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, YOLOv5), recurrent (LSTM) and transformer (CvT, BERT, SepTr) architectures. We compare our approach with the conventional training regime, as well as with Curriculum by Smoothing (CBS), a state-of-the-art data-agnostic curriculum learning approach. Unlike CBS, our performance improvements over the standard training regime are consistent across all data sets and models. Furthermore, we significantly surpass CBS in terms of training time (there is no additional cost over the standard training regime for LeRaC). Our code is freely available at: https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/LeRaC.
Authors: Marcin P. Joachimiak, J. Harry Caufield, Nomi L. Harris, Hyeongsik Kim, Christopher J. Mungall
Abstract: Molecular biologists frequently interpret gene lists derived from high-throughput experiments and computational analysis. This is typically done as a statistical enrichment analysis that measures the over- or under-representation of biological function terms associated with genes or their properties, based on curated assertions from a knowledge base (KB) such as the Gene Ontology (GO). Interpreting gene lists can also be framed as a textual summarization task, enabling the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), potentially utilizing scientific texts directly and avoiding reliance on a KB. We developed SPINDOCTOR (Structured Prompt Interpolation of Natural Language Descriptions of Controlled Terms for Ontology Reporting), a method that uses GPT models to perform gene set function summarization as a complement to standard enrichment analysis. This method can use different sources of gene functional information: (1) structured text derived from curated ontological KB annotations, (2) ontology-free narrative gene summaries, or (3) direct model retrieval. We demonstrate that these methods are able to generate plausible and biologically valid summary GO term lists for gene sets. However, GPT-based approaches are unable to deliver reliable scores or p-values and often return terms that are not statistically significant. Crucially, these methods were rarely able to recapitulate the most precise and informative term from standard enrichment, likely due to an inability to generalize and reason using an ontology. Results are highly nondeterministic, with minor variations in prompt resulting in radically different term lists. Our results show that at this point, LLM-based methods are unsuitable as a replacement for standard term enrichment analysis and that manual curation of ontological assertions remains necessary.
Authors: Young-Jun Lee, Dokyong Lee, Joo Won Sung, Jonghwan Hyeon, Ho-Jin Choi
Abstract: This paper explores the image-sharing capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 and LLaMA 2, in a zero-shot setting. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs, we introduce the PhotoChat++ dataset, which includes enriched annotations (i.e., intent, triggering sentence, image description, and salient information). Furthermore, we present the gradient-free and extensible Decide, Describe, and Retrieve (DribeR) framework. With extensive experiments, we unlock the image-sharing capability of DribeR equipped with LLMs in zero-shot prompting, with ChatGPT achieving the best performance. Our findings also reveal the emergent image-sharing ability in LLMs under zero-shot conditions, validating the effectiveness of DribeR. We use this framework to demonstrate its practicality and effectiveness in two real-world scenarios: (1) human-bot interaction and (2) dataset augmentation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to assess the image-sharing ability of various LLMs in a zero-shot setting. We make our source code and dataset publicly available at https://github.com/passing2961/DribeR.
Authors: Shentong Mo, Louis-Philippe Morency, Russ Salakhutdinov, Paul Pu Liang
Abstract: The next generation of machine learning systems must be adept at perceiving and interacting with the physical world through a diverse array of sensory channels. Commonly referred to as the `Internet of Things (IoT)' ecosystem, sensory data from motion, thermal, geolocation, depth, wireless signals, video, and audio are increasingly used to model the states of physical environments and the humans inside them. Despite the potential for understanding human wellbeing, controlling physical devices, and interconnecting smart cities, the community has seen limited benchmarks for building machine learning systems for IoT. Existing efforts are often specialized to a single sensory modality or prediction task, which makes it difficult to study and train large-scale models across many IoT sensors and tasks. To accelerate the development of new machine learning technologies for IoT, this paper proposes MultiIoT, the most expansive and unified IoT benchmark to date, encompassing over 1.15 million samples from 12 modalities and 8 real-world tasks. MultiIoT introduces unique challenges involving (1) generalizable learning from many sensory modalities, (2) multimodal interactions across long temporal ranges, (3) extreme heterogeneity due to unique structure and noise topologies in real-world sensors, and (4) complexity during training and inference. We evaluate a comprehensive set of models on MultiIoT, including modality and task-specific methods, multisensory and multitask supervised models, and large multisensory foundation models. Our results highlight opportunities for ML to make a significant impact in IoT, but many challenges in scalable learning from heterogeneous, long-range, and imperfect sensory modalities still persist. We release all code and data to accelerate future research in machine learning for IoT.
Authors: Joshua Ashkinaze, Julia Mendelsohn, Li Qiwei, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert
Abstract: Exposure to large language model output is rapidly increasing. How will seeing AI-generated ideas affect human ideas? We conducted an experiment (800+ participants, 40+ countries) where participants viewed creative ideas that were from ChatGPT or prior experimental participants and then brainstormed their own idea. We varied the number of AI-generated examples (none, low, or high exposure) and if the examples were labeled as 'AI' (disclosure). Our dynamic experiment design -- ideas from prior participants in an experimental condition are used as stimuli for future participants in the same experimental condition -- speaks to the interdependent process of cultural creation: creative ideas are built upon prior ideas. Hence, we capture the compounding effects of having LLMs 'in the culture loop'. We find that high AI exposure (but not low AI exposure) did not affect the creativity of individual ideas but did increase the average amount and rate of change of collective idea diversity. AI made ideas different, not better. There were no main effects of disclosure. We also found that self-reported creative people were less influenced by knowing an idea was from AI and that participants may knowingly adopt AI ideas when the task is difficult. Our findings suggest that introducing AI ideas may increase collective diversity but not individual creativity.
Authors: Dong Huang, Yuhao Qing, Weiyi Shang, Heming Cui, Jie M. Zhang
Abstract: Code generation models have increasingly become integral to aiding software development. Although current research has thoroughly examined the correctness of the code produced by code generation models, a vital aspect that plays a pivotal role in green computing and sustainability efforts has often been neglected. This paper presents EffiBench, a benchmark with 1,000 efficiency-critical coding problems to assess the efficiency of code generated by code generation models. EffiBench contains a diverse set of LeetCode coding problems. Each problem is paired with an executable human-written canonical solution, which obtains the SOTA efficiency on the LeetCode solution leaderboard. With EffiBench, we empirically examine the ability of 42 large language models (35 open-source and 7 closed-source) to generate efficient code. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the efficiency of the code generated by LLMs is generally worse than the efficiency of human-written canonical solutions. For example, GPT-4 generated code has an average \textbf{3.12} times execution time that of the human-written canonical solutions. In the most extreme cases, the execution time and total memory usage of GPT-4 generated code are \textbf{13.89} and \textbf{43.92} times that of the canonical solutions. The source code of EffiBench is released on https://github.com/huangd1999/EffiBench. We also provide the LeaderBoard at https://huggingface.co/spaces/EffiBench/effibench-leaderboard.
URLs: https://github.com/huangd1999/EffiBench., https://huggingface.co/spaces/EffiBench/effibench-leaderboard.
Authors: Jinghong Li, Huy Phan, Wen Gu, Koichi Ota, Shinobu Hasegawa
Abstract: Research surveys have always posed a challenge for beginner researchers who lack of research training. These researchers struggle to understand the directions within their research topic, and the discovery of new research findings within a short time. One way to provide intuitive assistance to beginner researchers is by offering relevant knowledge graphs(KG) and recommending related academic papers. However, existing navigation knowledge graphs primarily rely on keywords in the research field and often fail to present the logical hierarchy among multiple related papers clearly. Moreover, most recommendation systems for academic papers simply rely on high text similarity, which can leave researchers confused as to why a particular article is being recommended. They may lack of grasp important information about the insight connection between "Issue resolved" and "Issue finding" that they hope to obtain. To address these issues, this study aims to support research insight surveys for beginner researchers by establishing a hierarchical tree-structured knowledge graph that reflects the inheritance insight of research topics and the relevance insight among the academic papers.
Authors: Soufiane Hayou, Nikhil Ghosh, Bin Yu
Abstract: In this paper, we show that Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) as originally introduced in Hu et al. (2021) leads to suboptimal finetuning of models with large width (embedding dimension). This is due to the fact that adapter matrices A and B in LoRA are updated with the same learning rate. Using scaling arguments for large width networks, we demonstrate that using the same learning rate for A and B does not allow efficient feature learning. We then show that this suboptimality of LoRA can be corrected simply by setting different learning rates for the LoRA adapter matrices A and B with a well-chosen ratio. We call this proposed algorithm LoRA$+$. In our extensive experiments, LoRA$+$ improves performance (1-2 $\%$ improvements) and finetuning speed (up to $\sim$ 2X SpeedUp), at the same computational cost as LoRA.
Authors: Hengyuan Zhang, Zitao Liu, Shuyan Huang, Chenming Shang, Bojun Zhan, Yong Jiang
Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate student's knowledge mastery based on their historical interactions. Recently, the deep learning based KT (DLKT) approaches have achieved impressive performance in the KT task. These DLKT models heavily rely on the large number of available student interactions. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, observed interactions are very limited in many real-world scenarios, a.k.a, low-resource KT datasets. Directly training a DLKT model on a low-resource KT dataset may lead to overfitting and it is difficult to choose the appropriate deep neural architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a low-resource KT framework called LoReKT to address above challenges. Inspired by the prevalent "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, we aim to learn transferable parameters and representations from rich-resource KT datasets during the pre-training stage and subsequently facilitate effective adaptation to low-resource KT datasets. Specifically, we simplify existing sophisticated DLKT model architectures with purely a stack of transformer decoders. We design an encoding mechanism to incorporate student interactions from multiple KT data sources and develop an importance mechanism to prioritize updating parameters with high importance while constraining less important ones during the fine-tuning stage. We evaluate LoReKT on six public KT datasets and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of AUC and Accuracy. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LoReKT-C619.
Authors: Khaoula Chehbouni, Megha Roshan, Emmanuel Ma, Futian Andrew Wei, Afaf Taik, Jackie CK Cheung, Golnoosh Farnadi
Abstract: Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations. Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.
Authors: Weidi Luo, Siyuan Ma, Xiaogeng Liu, Xiaoyu Guo, Chaowei Xiao
Abstract: With the rapid advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), securing these models against malicious inputs while aligning them with human values has emerged as a critical challenge. In this paper, we investigate an important and unexplored question of whether techniques that successfully jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) can be equally effective in jailbreaking MLLMs. To explore this issue, we introduce JailBreakV-28K, a pioneering benchmark designed to assess the transferability of LLM jailbreak techniques to MLLMs, thereby evaluating the robustness of MLLMs against diverse jailbreak attacks. Utilizing a dataset of 2, 000 malicious queries that is also proposed in this paper, we generate 20, 000 text-based jailbreak prompts using advanced jailbreak attacks on LLMs, alongside 8, 000 image-based jailbreak inputs from recent MLLMs jailbreak attacks, our comprehensive dataset includes 28, 000 test cases across a spectrum of adversarial scenarios. Our evaluation of 10 open-source MLLMs reveals a notably high Attack Success Rate (ASR) for attacks transferred from LLMs, highlighting a critical vulnerability in MLLMs that stems from their text-processing capabilities. Our findings underscore the urgent need for future research to address alignment vulnerabilities in MLLMs from both textual and visual inputs.
Authors: Navonil Majumder, Chia-Yu Hung, Deepanway Ghosal, Wei-Ning Hsu, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
Abstract: Generative multimodal content is increasingly prevalent in much of the content creation arena, as it has the potential to allow artists and media personnel to create pre-production mockups by quickly bringing their ideas to life. The generation of audio from text prompts is an important aspect of such processes in the music and film industry. Many of the recent diffusion-based text-to-audio models focus on training increasingly sophisticated diffusion models on a large set of datasets of prompt-audio pairs. These models do not explicitly focus on the presence of concepts or events and their temporal ordering in the output audio with respect to the input prompt. Our hypothesis is focusing on how these aspects of audio generation could improve audio generation performance in the presence of limited data. As such, in this work, using an existing text-to-audio model Tango, we synthetically create a preference dataset where each prompt has a winner audio output and some loser audio outputs for the diffusion model to learn from. The loser outputs, in theory, have some concepts from the prompt missing or in an incorrect order. We fine-tune the publicly available Tango text-to-audio model using diffusion-DPO (direct preference optimization) loss on our preference dataset and show that it leads to improved audio output over Tango and AudioLDM2, in terms of both automatic- and manual-evaluation metrics.
Authors: Jiaqi Li, Xiaobo Wang, Wentao Ding, Zihao Wang, Yipeng Kang, Zixia Jia, Zilong Zheng
Abstract: We introduce an innovative RAG-based framework with an ever-improving memory. Inspired by humans'pedagogical process, RAM utilizes recursively reasoning-based retrieval and experience reflections to continually update the memory and learn from users' communicative feedback, namely communicative learning. Extensive experiments with both simulated and real users demonstrate significant improvements over traditional RAG and self-knowledge methods, particularly excelling in handling false premise and multi-hop questions. Furthermore, RAM exhibits promising adaptability to various feedback and retrieval methods, showcasing its potential for advancing AI capabilities in dynamic knowledge acquisition and lifelong learning.
Authors: Tetsuro Morimura, Mitsuki Sakamoto, Yuu Jinnai, Kenshi Abe, Kaito Ariu
Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) plays a crucial role in aligning language models with human preferences. While the significance of dataset quality is generally recognized, explicit investigations into its impact within the RLHF framework, to our knowledge, have been limited. This paper addresses the issue of text quality within the preference dataset by focusing on direct preference optimization (DPO), an increasingly adopted reward-model-free RLHF method. We confirm that text quality significantly influences the performance of models optimized with DPO more than those optimized with reward-model-based RLHF. Building on this new insight, we propose an extension of DPO, termed filtered direct preference optimization (fDPO). fDPO uses a trained reward model to monitor the quality of texts within the preference dataset during DPO training. Samples of lower quality are discarded based on comparisons with texts generated by the model being optimized, resulting in a more accurate dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that fDPO enhances the final model performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/CyberAgentAILab/filtered-dpo.
Authors: Jiaqi Xu, Xinyi Zou, Kunzhe Huang, Yunkuo Chen, Bo Liu, MengLi Cheng, Xing Shi, Jun Huang
Abstract: This paper presents EasyAnimate, an advanced method for video generation that leverages the power of transformer architecture for high-performance outcomes. We have expanded the DiT framework originally designed for 2D image synthesis to accommodate the complexities of 3D video generation by incorporating a motion module block. It is used to capture temporal dynamics, thereby ensuring the production of consistent frames and seamless motion transitions. The motion module can be adapted to various DiT baseline methods to generate video with different styles. It can also generate videos with different frame rates and resolutions during both training and inference phases, suitable for both images and videos. Moreover, we introduce slice VAE, a novel approach to condense the temporal axis, facilitating the generation of long duration videos. Currently, EasyAnimate exhibits the proficiency to generate videos with 144 frames. We provide a holistic ecosystem for video production based on DiT, encompassing aspects such as data pre-processing, VAE training, DiT models training (both the baseline model and LoRA model), and end-to-end video inference. Code is available at: https://github.com/aigc-apps/EasyAnimate. We are continuously working to enhance the performance of our method.
Authors: Zengding Liu, Chen Chen, Jiannong Cao, Minglei Pan, Jikui Liu, Nan Li, Fen Miao, Ye Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have captured significant interest from both academia and industry due to their impressive performance across various textual tasks. However, the potential of LLMs to analyze physiological time-series data remains an emerging research field. Particularly, there is a notable gap in the utilization of LLMs for analyzing wearable biosignals to achieve cuffless blood pressure (BP) measurement, which is critical for the management of cardiovascular diseases. This paper presents the first work to explore the capacity of LLMs to perform cuffless BP estimation based on wearable biosignals. We extracted physiological features from electrocardiogram (ECG) and photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals and designed context-enhanced prompts by combining these features with BP domain knowledge and user information. Subsequently, we adapted LLMs to BP estimation tasks through fine-tuning. To evaluate the proposed approach, we conducted assessments of ten advanced LLMs using a comprehensive public dataset of wearable biosignals from 1,272 participants. The experimental results demonstrate that the optimally fine-tuned LLM significantly surpasses conventional task-specific baselines, achieving an estimation error of 0.00 $\pm$ 9.25 mmHg for systolic BP and 1.29 $\pm$ 6.37 mmHg for diastolic BP. Notably, the ablation studies highlight the benefits of our context enhancement strategy, leading to an 8.9% reduction in mean absolute error for systolic BP estimation. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs for cuffless BP measurement, providing a potential solution to enhance the accuracy of cuffless BP measurement.
Authors: Yusu Qian, Hanrong Ye, Jean-Philippe Fauconnier, Peter Grasch, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan
Abstract: We introduce MIA-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their ability to strictly adhere to complex instructions. Our benchmark comprises a diverse set of 400 image-prompt pairs, each crafted to challenge the models' compliance with layered instructions in generating accurate responses that satisfy specific requested patterns. Evaluation results from a wide array of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal significant variations in performance, highlighting areas for improvement in instruction fidelity. Additionally, we create extra training data and explore supervised fine-tuning to enhance the models' ability to strictly follow instructions without compromising performance on other tasks. We hope this benchmark not only serves as a tool for measuring MLLM adherence to instructions, but also guides future developments in MLLM training methods.
Authors: Jiexin Wang, Xitong Luo, Liuwen Cao, Hongkui He, Hailin Huang, Jiayuan Xie, Adam Jatowt, Yi Cai
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant advancements to code generation and code repair, benefiting both novice and experienced developers. However, their training using unsanitized data from open-source repositories, like GitHub, raises the risk of inadvertently propagating security vulnerabilities. Despite numerous studies investigating the safety of code LLMs, there remains a gap in comprehensively addressing their security features. In this work, we aim to present a comprehensive study aimed at precisely evaluating and enhancing the security aspects of code LLMs. To support our research, we introduce CodeSecEval, a meticulously curated dataset designed to address 44 critical vulnerability types with 180 distinct samples. CodeSecEval serves as the foundation for the automatic evaluation of code models in two crucial tasks: code generation and code repair, with a strong emphasis on security. Our experimental results reveal that current models frequently overlook security issues during both code generation and repair processes, resulting in the creation of vulnerable code. In response, we propose different strategies that leverage vulnerability-aware information and insecure code explanations to mitigate these security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, our findings highlight that certain vulnerability types particularly challenge model performance, influencing their effectiveness in real-world applications. Based on these findings, we believe our study will have a positive impact on the software engineering community, inspiring the development of improved methods for training and utilizing LLMs, thereby leading to safer and more trustworthy model deployment.
Authors: Shashank Kirtania, Priyanshu Gupta, Arjun Radhakirshna
Abstract: In this paper we examine the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning tasks. Although recent works have started to employ formal languages as an intermediate representation for reasoning tasks, they often face challenges in accurately generating and refining these formal specifications to ensure correctness. To address these issues, this paper proposes Logic-LM++, an improvement on Logic-LM . It uses the ability of LLMs to do pairwise comparisons, allowing the evaluation of the refinements suggested by the LLM. The paper demonstrates that Logic-LM++ outperforms Logic-LM and other contemporary techniques across natural language reasoning tasks on three datasets, FOLIO, ProofWriter and AR-LSAT, with an average improvement of 18.5% on standard prompting, 12.3% on chain of thought prompting and 5% on Logic-LM.
Authors: Waleed Iqbal, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro
Abstract: How similar are politicians to those who vote for them? This is a critical question at the heart of democratic representation and particularly relevant at times when political dissatisfaction and populism are on the rise. To answer this question we compare the online discourse of elected politicians and their constituents. We collect a two and a half years (September 2020 - February 2023) constituency-level dataset for USA and UK that includes: (i) the Twitter timelines (5.6 Million tweets) of elected political representatives (595 UK Members of Parliament and 433 USA Representatives), (ii) the Nextdoor posts (21.8 Million posts) of the constituency (98.4% USA and 91.5% UK constituencies). We find that elected politicians tend to be equally similar to their constituents in terms of content and style regardless of whether a constituency elects a right or left-wing politician. The size of the electoral victory and the level of income of a constituency shows a nuanced picture. The narrower the electoral victory, the more similar the style and the more dissimilar the content is. The lower the income of a constituency, the more similar the content is. In terms of style, poorer constituencies tend to have a more similar sentiment and more dissimilar psychological text traits (i.e. measured with LIWC categories).