new Impacts of Anthropomorphizing Large Language Models in Learning Environments

Authors: Kristina Schaaff, Marc-Andr\'e Heidelmann

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in learning environments to support teaching-be it as learning companions or as tutors. With our contribution, we aim to discuss the implications of the anthropomorphization of LLMs in learning environments on educational theory to build a foundation for more effective learning outcomes and understand their emotional impact on learners. According to the media equation, people tend to respond to media in the same way as they would respond to another person. A study conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology showed that chatbots can be successfully implemented in learning environments. In this study, learners in selected online courses were unable to distinguish the chatbot from a "real" teacher. As LLM-based chatbots such as OpenAI's GPT series are increasingly used in educational tools, it is important to understand how the attribution processes to LLM-based chatbots in terms of anthropomorphization affect learners' emotions.

new Image-to-LaTeX Converter for Mathematical Formulas and Text

Authors: Daniil Gurgurov, Aleksey Morshnev

Abstract: In this project, we train a vision encoder-decoder model to generate LaTeX code from images of mathematical formulas and text. Utilizing a diverse collection of image-to-LaTeX data, we build two models: a base model with a Swin Transformer encoder and a GPT-2 decoder, trained on machine-generated images, and a fine-tuned version enhanced with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) trained on handwritten formulas. We then compare the BLEU performance of our specialized model on a handwritten test set with other similar models, such as Pix2Text, TexTeller, and Sumen. Through this project, we contribute open-source models for converting images to LaTeX and provide from-scratch code for building these models with distributed training and GPU optimizations.

new Improving Large Language Model (LLM) fidelity through context-aware grounding: A systematic approach to reliability and veracity

Authors: Wrick Talukdar, Anjanava Biswas

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) applications, ensuring their robustness, trustworthiness, and alignment with human values has become a critical challenge. This paper presents a novel framework for contextual grounding in textual models, with a particular emphasis on the Context Representation stage. Our approach aims to enhance the reliability and ethical alignment of these models through a comprehensive, context-aware methodology. By explicitly capturing and representing relevant situational, cultural, and ethical contexts in a machine-readable format, we lay the foundation for anchoring a model's behavior within these contexts. Our approach leverages techniques from knowledge representation and reasoning, such as ontologies, semantic web technologies, and logic-based formalisms. We evaluate our framework on real-world textual datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving model performance, fairness, and alignment with human expectations, while maintaining high accuracy. Furthermore, we discuss the other key components of the framework, including context-aware encoding, context-aware learning, interpretability and explainability, and continuous monitoring and adaptation. This research contributes to the growing body of work on responsible AI, offering a practical approach to developing more reliable, trustworthy, and ethically-aligned language models. Our findings have significant implications for the deployment of LLMs in sensitive domains such as healthcare, legal systems, and social services, where contextual understanding is paramount.

new Human Speech Perception in Noise: Can Large Language Models Paraphrase to Improve It?

Authors: Anupama Chingacham, Miaoran Zhang, Vera Demberg, Dietrich Klakow

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate text by transferring style attributes like formality resulting in formal or informal text. However, instructing LLMs to generate text that when spoken, is more intelligible in an acoustically difficult environment, is an under-explored topic. We conduct the first study to evaluate LLMs on a novel task of generating acoustically intelligible paraphrases for better human speech perception in noise. Our experiments in English demonstrated that with standard prompting, LLMs struggle to control the non-textual attribute, i.e., acoustic intelligibility, while efficiently capturing the desired textual attributes like semantic equivalence. To remedy this issue, we propose a simple prompting approach, prompt-and-select, which generates paraphrases by decoupling the desired textual and non-textual attributes in the text generation pipeline. Our approach resulted in a 40% relative improvement in human speech perception, by paraphrasing utterances that are highly distorted in a listening condition with babble noise at a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) -5 dB. This study reveals the limitation of LLMs in capturing non-textual attributes, and our proposed method showcases the potential of using LLMs for better human speech perception in noise.

new Zero-shot Factual Consistency Evaluation Across Domains

Authors: Raunak Agarwal

Abstract: This work addresses the challenge of factual consistency in text generation systems. We unify the tasks of Natural Language Inference, Summarization Evaluation, Factuality Verification and Factual Consistency Evaluation to train models capable of evaluating the factual consistency of source-target pairs across diverse domains. We rigorously evaluate these against eight baselines on a comprehensive benchmark suite comprising 22 datasets that span various tasks, domains, and document lengths. Results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on this heterogeneous benchmark while addressing efficiency concerns and attaining cross-domain generalization.

new Can Rule-Based Insights Enhance LLMs for Radiology Report Classification? Introducing the RadPrompt Methodology

Authors: Panagiotis Fytas, Anna Breger, Ian Selby, Simon Baker, Shahab Shahipasand, Anna Korhonen

Abstract: Developing imaging models capable of detecting pathologies from chest X-rays can be cost and time-prohibitive for large datasets as it requires supervision to attain state-of-the-art performance. Instead, labels extracted from radiology reports may serve as distant supervision since these are routinely generated as part of clinical practice. Despite their widespread use, current rule-based methods for label extraction rely on extensive rule sets that are limited in their robustness to syntactic variability. To alleviate these limitations, we introduce RadPert, a rule-based system that integrates an uncertainty-aware information schema with a streamlined set of rules, enhancing performance. Additionally, we have developed RadPrompt, a multi-turn prompting strategy that leverages RadPert to bolster the zero-shot predictive capabilities of large language models, achieving a statistically significant improvement in weighted average F1 score over GPT-4 Turbo. Most notably, RadPrompt surpasses both its underlying models, showcasing the synergistic potential of LLMs with rule-based models. We have evaluated our methods on two English Corpora: the MIMIC-CXR gold-standard test set and a gold-standard dataset collected from the Cambridge University Hospitals.

new Enhancing Healthcare through Large Language Models: A Study on Medical Question Answering

Authors: Haoran Yu, Chang Yu, Zihan Wang, Dongxian Zou, Hao Qin

Abstract: In recent years, the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare has shown significant promise in improving the accessibility and dissemination of medical knowledge. This paper presents a detailed study of various LLMs trained on the MedQuAD medical question-answering dataset, with a focus on identifying the most effective model for providing accurate medical information. Among the models tested, the Sentence-t5 combined with Mistral 7B demonstrated superior performance, achieving a precision score of 0.762. This model's enhanced capabilities are attributed to its advanced pretraining techniques, robust architecture, and effective prompt construction methodologies. By leveraging these strengths, the Sentence-t5 + Mistral 7B model excels in understanding and generating precise medical answers. Our findings highlight the potential of integrating sophisticated LLMs in medical contexts to facilitate efficient and accurate medical knowledge retrieval, thus significantly enhancing patient education and support.

new UNLEARN Efficient Removal of Knowledge in Large Language Models

Authors: Tyler Lizzo, Larry Heck

Abstract: Given the prevalence of large language models (LLMs) and the prohibitive cost of training these models from scratch, dynamically forgetting specific knowledge e.g., private or proprietary, without retraining the model has become an important capability. This paper proposes a novel method to achieve this objective called UNLEARN. The approach builds upon subspace methods to identify and specifically target the removal of knowledge without adversely affecting other knowledge in the LLM. Results demonstrate 96% of targeted knowledge can be forgotten while maintaining performance on other knowledge within 2.5% of the original model, significantly outperforming the discriminatory abilities of the previous state-of-the-art. A dual method called LEARN is also proposed for targeted knowledge addition. Results show LEARN can match the fine-tuning accuracy of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) without adversely affecting similar tasks.

new Semantics or spelling? Probing contextual word embeddings with orthographic noise

Authors: Jacob A. Matthews, John R. Starr, Marten van Schijndel

Abstract: Pretrained language model (PLM) hidden states are frequently employed as contextual word embeddings (CWE): high-dimensional representations that encode semantic information given linguistic context. Across many areas of computational linguistics research, similarity between CWEs is interpreted as semantic similarity. However, it remains unclear exactly what information is encoded in PLM hidden states. We investigate this practice by probing PLM representations using minimal orthographic noise. We expect that if CWEs primarily encode semantic information, a single character swap in the input word will not drastically affect the resulting representation,given sufficient linguistic context. Surprisingly, we find that CWEs generated by popular PLMs are highly sensitive to noise in input data, and that this sensitivity is related to subword tokenization: the fewer tokens used to represent a word at input, the more sensitive its corresponding CWE. This suggests that CWEs capture information unrelated to word-level meaning and can be manipulated through trivial modifications of input data. We conclude that these PLM-derived CWEs may not be reliable semantic proxies, and that caution is warranted when interpreting representational similarity

new mbrs: A Library for Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

Authors: Hiroyuki Deguchi, Yusuke Sakai, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe

Abstract: Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation tasks that outperforms conventional maximum a posterior (MAP) decoding using beam search by selecting high-quality outputs based on a utility function rather than those with high-probability. Typically, it finds the most suitable hypothesis from the set of hypotheses under the sampled pseudo-references. mbrs is a library of MBR decoding, which can flexibly combine various metrics, alternative expectation estimations, and algorithmic variants. It is designed with a focus on speed measurement and calling count of code blocks, transparency, reproducibility, and extensibility, which are essential for researchers and developers. We published our mbrs as an MIT-licensed open-source project, and the code is available on GitHub. GitHub: https://github.com/naist-nlp/mbrs

URLs: https://github.com/naist-nlp/mbrs

new wav2graph: A Framework for Supervised Learning Knowledge Graph from Speech

Authors: Khai Le-Duc, Quy-Anh Dang, Tan-Hanh Pham, Truong-Son Hy

Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) and search engines by providing structured, interconnected data that improves reasoning and context-awareness. However, KGs only focus on text data, thereby neglecting other modalities such as speech. In this work, we introduce wav2graph, the first framework for supervised learning knowledge graph from speech data. Our pipeline are straightforward: (1) constructing a KG based on transcribed spoken utterances and a named entity database, (2) converting KG into embedding vectors, and (3) training graph neural networks (GNNs) for node classification and link prediction tasks. Through extensive experiments conducted in inductive and transductive learning contexts using state-of-the-art GNN models, we provide baseline results and error analysis for node classification and link prediction tasks on human transcripts and automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcripts, including evaluations using both encoder-based and decoder-based node embeddings, as well as monolingual and multilingual acoustic pre-trained models. All related code, data, and models are published online.

new MMREC: LLM Based Multi-Modal Recommender System

Authors: Jiahao Tian, Jinman Zhao, Zhenkai Wang, Zhicheng Ding

Abstract: The importance of recommender systems is growing rapidly due to the exponential increase in the volume of content generated daily. This surge in content presents unique challenges for designing effective recommender systems. Key among these challenges is the need to effectively leverage the vast amounts of natural language data and images that represent user preferences. This paper presents a novel approach to enhancing recommender systems by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and deep learning techniques. The proposed framework aims to improve the accuracy and relevance of recommendations by incorporating multi-modal information processing and by the use of unified latent space representation. The study explores the potential of LLMs to better understand and utilize natural language data in recommendation contexts, addressing the limitations of previous methods. The framework efficiently extracts and integrates text and image information through LLMs, unifying diverse modalities in a latent space to simplify the learning process for the ranking model. Experimental results demonstrate the enhanced discriminative power of the model when utilizing multi-modal information. This research contributes to the evolving field of recommender systems by showcasing the potential of LLMs and multi-modal data integration to create more personalized and contextually relevant recommendations.

new Attention Mechanism and Context Modeling System for Text Mining Machine Translation

Authors: Shi Bo, Yuwei Zhang, Junming Huang, Sitong Liu, Zexi Chen, Zizheng Li

Abstract: This paper advances a novel architectural schema anchored upon the Transformer paradigm and innovatively amalgamates the K-means categorization algorithm to augment the contextual apprehension capabilities of the schema. The transformer model performs well in machine translation tasks due to its parallel computing power and multi-head attention mechanism. However, it may encounter contextual ambiguity or ignore local features when dealing with highly complex language structures. To circumvent this constraint, this exposition incorporates the K-Means algorithm, which is used to stratify the lexis and idioms of the input textual matter, thereby facilitating superior identification and preservation of the local structure and contextual intelligence of the language. The advantage of this combination is that K-Means can automatically discover the topic or concept regions in the text, which may be directly related to translation quality. Consequently, the schema contrived herein enlists K-Means as a preparatory phase antecedent to the Transformer and recalibrates the multi-head attention weights to assist in the discrimination of lexis and idioms bearing analogous semantics or functionalities. This ensures the schema accords heightened regard to the contextual intelligence embodied by these clusters during the training phase, rather than merely focusing on locational intelligence.

new Simplifying Translations for Children: Iterative Simplification Considering Age of Acquisition with LLMs

Authors: Masashi Oshika, Makoto Morishita, Tsutomu Hirao, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda

Abstract: In recent years, neural machine translation (NMT) has been widely used in everyday life. However, the current NMT lacks a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level of translations to match the user's language level. Additionally, due to the bias in the training data for NMT, translations of simple source sentences are often produced with complex words. In particular, this could pose a problem for children, who may not be able to understand the meaning of the translations correctly. In this study, we propose a method that replaces words with high Age of Acquisitions (AoA) in translations with simpler words to match the translations to the user's level. We achieve this by using large language models (LLMs), providing a triple of a source sentence, a translation, and a target word to be replaced. We create a benchmark dataset using back-translation on Simple English Wikipedia. The experimental results obtained from the dataset show that our method effectively replaces high-AoA words with lower-AoA words and, moreover, can iteratively replace most of the high-AoA words while still maintaining high BLEU and COMET scores.

new Diffusion Guided Language Modeling

Authors: Justin Lovelace, Varsha Kishore, Yiwei Chen, Kilian Q. Weinberger

Abstract: Current language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in text generation. However, for many applications it is desirable to control attributes, such as sentiment, or toxicity, of the generated language -- ideally tailored towards each specific use case and target audience. For auto-regressive language models, existing guidance methods are prone to decoding errors that cascade during generation and degrade performance. In contrast, text diffusion models can easily be guided with, for example, a simple linear sentiment classifier -- however they do suffer from significantly higher perplexity than auto-regressive alternatives. In this paper we use a guided diffusion model to produce a latent proposal that steers an auto-regressive language model to generate text with desired properties. Our model inherits the unmatched fluency of the auto-regressive approach and the plug-and-play flexibility of diffusion. We show that it outperforms previous plug-and-play guidance methods across a wide range of benchmark data sets. Further, controlling a new attribute in our framework is reduced to training a single logistic regression classifier.

new Evaluating Language Model Math Reasoning via Grounding in Educational Curricula

Authors: Li Lucy, Tal August, Rose E. Wang, Luca Soldaini, Courtney Allison, Kyle Lo

Abstract: Our work presents a novel angle for evaluating language models' (LMs) mathematical abilities, by investigating whether they can discern skills and concepts enabled by math content. We contribute two datasets: one consisting of 385 fine-grained descriptions of K-12 math skills and concepts, or standards, from Achieve the Core (ATC), and another of 9.9K problems labeled with these standards (MathFish). Working with experienced teachers, we find that LMs struggle to tag and verify standards linked to problems, and instead predict labels that are close to ground truth, but differ in subtle ways. We also show that LMs often generate problems that do not fully align with standards described in prompts. Finally, we categorize problems in GSM8k using math standards, allowing us to better understand why some problems are more difficult to solve for models than others.

new Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection

Authors: Wei Hao, Ran Li, Weiliang Zhao, Junfeng Yang, Chengzhi Mao

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can be abused at scale to create non-factual content and spread disinformation. Detecting LLM-generated content is essential to mitigate these risks, but current classifiers often fail to generalize in open-world contexts. Prior work shows that LLMs tend to rewrite LLM-generated content less frequently, which can be used for detection and naturally generalizes to unforeseen data. However, we find that the rewriting edit distance between human and LLM content can be indistinguishable across domains, leading to detection failures. We propose training an LLM to rewrite input text, producing minimal edits for LLM-generated content and more edits for human-written text, deriving a distinguishable and generalizable edit distance difference across different domains. Experiments on text from 21 independent domains and three popular LLMs (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini, and Llama-3) show that our classifier outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot classifier by up to 20.6% on AUROC score and the rewriting classifier by 9.2% on F1 score. Our work suggests that LLM can effectively detect machine-generated text if they are trained properly.

new Explicating the Implicit: Argument Detection Beyond Sentence Boundaries

Authors: Paul Roit, Aviv Slobodkin, Eran Hirsch, Arie Cattan, Ayal Klein, Valentina Pyatkin, Ido Dagan

Abstract: Detecting semantic arguments of a predicate word has been conventionally modeled as a sentence-level task. The typical reader, however, perfectly interprets predicate-argument relations in a much wider context than just the sentence where the predicate was evoked. In this work, we reformulate the problem of argument detection through textual entailment to capture semantic relations across sentence boundaries. We propose a method that tests whether some semantic relation can be inferred from a full passage by first encoding it into a simple and standalone proposition and then testing for entailment against the passage. Our method does not require direct supervision, which is generally absent due to dataset scarcity, but instead builds on existing NLI and sentence-level SRL resources. Such a method can potentially explicate pragmatically understood relations into a set of explicit sentences. We demonstrate it on a recent document-level benchmark, outperforming some supervised methods and contemporary language models.

new EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Authors: Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng, Fangkai Yang, Jia Liu, Shujian Huang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries. While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce EfficientRAG, an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering. EfficientRAG iteratively generates new queries without the need for LLM calls at each iteration and filters out irrelevant information. Experimental results demonstrate that EfficientRAG surpasses existing RAG methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets.

new Analysis of Argument Structure Constructions in the Large Language Model BERT

Authors: Pegah Ramezani, Achim Schilling, Patrick Krauss

Abstract: This study investigates how BERT processes and represents Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), extending previous LSTM analyses. Using a dataset of 2000 sentences across four ASC types (transitive, ditransitive, caused-motion, resultative), we analyzed BERT's token embeddings across 12 layers. Visualizations with MDS and t-SNE and clustering quantified by Generalized Discrimination Value (GDV) were used. Feedforward classifiers (probes) predicted construction categories from embeddings. CLS token embeddings clustered best in layers 2-4, decreased in intermediate layers, and slightly increased in final layers. DET and SUBJ embeddings showed consistent clustering in intermediate layers, VERB embeddings increased in clustering from layer 1 to 12, and OBJ embeddings peaked in layer 10. Probe accuracies indicated low construction information in layer 1, with over 90 percent accuracy from layer 2 onward, revealing latent construction information beyond GDV clustering. Fisher Discriminant Ratio (FDR) analysis of attention weights showed OBJ tokens were crucial for differentiating ASCs, followed by VERB and DET tokens. SUBJ, CLS, and SEP tokens had insignificant FDR scores. This study highlights BERT's layered processing of linguistic constructions and its differences from LSTMs. Future research will compare these findings with neuroimaging data to understand the neural correlates of ASC processing. This research underscores neural language models' potential to mirror linguistic processing in the human brain, offering insights into the computational and neural mechanisms underlying language understanding.

new LaDiMo: Layer-wise Distillation Inspired MoEfier

Authors: Sungyoon Kim, Youngjun Kim, Kihyo Moon, Minsung Jang

Abstract: The advent of large language models has revolutionized natural language processing, but their increasing complexity has led to substantial training costs, resource demands, and environmental impacts. In response, sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have emerged as a promising alternative to dense models. Since training MoE models from scratch can be prohibitively expensive, recent studies have explored leveraging knowledge from pre-trained non-MoE models. However, existing approaches have limitations, such as requiring significant hardware resources and data. We propose a novel algorithm, LaDiMo, which efficiently converts a Transformer-based non-MoE model into a MoE model with minimal additional training cost. LaDiMo consists of two stages: layer-wise expert construction and routing policy decision. By harnessing the concept of Knowledge Distillation, we compress the model and rapidly recover its performance. Furthermore, we develop an adaptive router that optimizes inference efficiency by profiling the distribution of routing weights and determining a layer-wise policy that balances accuracy and latency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by converting the LLaMA2-7B model to a MoE model using only 100K tokens, reducing activated parameters by over 20% while keeping accuracy. Our approach offers a flexible and efficient solution for building and deploying MoE models.

new LLM-DetectAIve: a Tool for Fine-Grained Machine-Generated Text Detection

Authors: Mervat Abassy, Kareem Elozeiri, Alexander Aziz, Minh Ngoc Ta, Raj Vardhan Tomar, Bimarsha Adhikari, Saad El Dine Ahmed, Yuxia Wang, Osama Mohammed Afzal, Zhuohan Xie, Jonibek Mansurov, Ekaterina Artemova, Vladislav Mikhailov, Rui Xing, Jiahui Geng, Hasan Iqbal, Zain Muhammad Mujahid, Tarek Mahmoud, Akim Tsvigun, Alham Fikri Aji, Artem Shelmanov, Nizar Habash, Iryna Gurevych, Preslav Nakov

Abstract: The widespread accessibility of large language models (LLMs) to the general public has significantly amplified the dissemination of machine-generated texts (MGTs). Advancements in prompt manipulation have exacerbated the difficulty in discerning the origin of a text (human-authored vs machinegenerated). This raises concerns regarding the potential misuse of MGTs, particularly within educational and academic domains. In this paper, we present $\textbf{LLM-DetectAIve}$ -- a system designed for fine-grained MGT detection. It is able to classify texts into four categories: human-written, machine-generated, machine-written machine-humanized, and human-written machine-polished. Contrary to previous MGT detectors that perform binary classification, introducing two additional categories in LLM-DetectiAIve offers insights into the varying degrees of LLM intervention during the text creation. This might be useful in some domains like education, where any LLM intervention is usually prohibited. Experiments show that LLM-DetectAIve can effectively identify the authorship of textual content, proving its usefulness in enhancing integrity in education, academia, and other domains. LLM-DetectAIve is publicly accessible at https://huggingface.co/spaces/raj-tomar001/MGT-New. The video describing our system is available at https://youtu.be/E8eT_bE7k8c.

URLs: https://huggingface.co/spaces/raj-tomar001/MGT-New., https://youtu.be/E8eT_bE7k8c.

new EMTeC: A Corpus of Eye Movements on Machine-Generated Texts

Authors: Lena Sophia Bolliger, Patrick Haller, Isabelle Caroline Rose Cretton, David Robert Reich, Tannon Kew, Lena Ann J\"ager

Abstract: The Eye Movements on Machine-Generated Texts Corpus (EMTeC) is a naturalistic eye-movements-while-reading corpus of 107 native English speakers reading machine-generated texts. The texts are generated by three large language models using five different decoding strategies, and they fall into six different text type categories. EMTeC entails the eye movement data at all stages of pre-processing, i.e., the raw coordinate data sampled at 2000 Hz, the fixation sequences, and the reading measures. It further provides both the original and a corrected version of the fixation sequences, accounting for vertical calibration drift. Moreover, the corpus includes the language models' internals that underlie the generation of the stimulus texts: the transition scores, the attention scores, and the hidden states. The stimuli are annotated for a range of linguistic features both at text and at word level. We anticipate EMTeC to be utilized for a variety of use cases such as, but not restricted to, the investigation of reading behavior on machine-generated text and the impact of different decoding strategies; reading behavior on different text types; the development of new pre-processing, data filtering, and drift correction algorithms; the cognitive interpretability and enhancement of language models; and the assessment of the predictive power of surprisal and entropy for human reading times. The data at all stages of pre-processing, the model internals, and the code to reproduce the stimulus generation, data pre-processing and analyses can be accessed via https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/EMTeC/.

URLs: https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/EMTeC/.

new Are Social Sentiments Inherent in LLMs? An Empirical Study on Extraction of Inter-demographic Sentiments

Authors: Kunitomo Tanaka, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are supposed to acquire unconscious human knowledge and feelings, such as social common sense and biases, by training models from large amounts of text. However, it is not clear how much the sentiments of specific social groups can be captured in various LLMs. In this study, we focus on social groups defined in terms of nationality, religion, and race/ethnicity, and validate the extent to which sentiments between social groups can be captured in and extracted from LLMs. Specifically, we input questions regarding sentiments from one group to another into LLMs, apply sentiment analysis to the responses, and compare the results with social surveys. The validation results using five representative LLMs showed higher correlations with relatively small p-values for nationalities and religions, whose number of data points were relatively large. This result indicates that the LLM responses including the inter-group sentiments align well with actual social survey results.

new Trans-Tokenization and Cross-lingual Vocabulary Transfers: Language Adaptation of LLMs for Low-Resource NLP

Authors: Fran\c{c}ois Remy, Pieter Delobelle, Hayastan Avetisyan, Alfiya Khabibullina, Miryam de Lhoneux, Thomas Demeester

Abstract: The development of monolingual language models for low and mid-resource languages continues to be hindered by the difficulty in sourcing high-quality training data. In this study, we present a novel cross-lingual vocabulary transfer strategy, trans-tokenization, designed to tackle this challenge and enable more efficient language adaptation. Our approach focuses on adapting a high-resource monolingual LLM to an unseen target language by initializing the token embeddings of the target language using a weighted average of semantically similar token embeddings from the source language. For this, we leverage a translation resource covering both the source and target languages. We validate our method with the Tweeties, a series of trans-tokenized LLMs, and demonstrate their competitive performance on various downstream tasks across a small but diverse set of languages. Additionally, we introduce Hydra LLMs, models with multiple swappable language modeling heads and embedding tables, which further extend the capabilities of our trans-tokenization strategy. By designing a Hydra LLM based on the multilingual model TowerInstruct, we developed a state-of-the-art machine translation model for Tatar, in a zero-shot manner, completely bypassing the need for high-quality parallel data. This breakthrough is particularly significant for low-resource languages like Tatar, where high-quality parallel data is hard to come by. By lowering the data and time requirements for training high-quality models, our trans-tokenization strategy allows for the development of LLMs for a wider range of languages, especially those with limited resources. We hope that our work will inspire further research and collaboration in the field of cross-lingual vocabulary transfer and contribute to the empowerment of languages on a global scale.

new Enhancing Journalism with AI: A Study of Contextualized Image Captioning for News Articles using LLMs and LMMs

Authors: Aliki Anagnostopoulou, Thiago Gouvea, Daniel Sonntag

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) have significantly impacted the AI community, industry, and various economic sectors. In journalism, integrating AI poses unique challenges and opportunities, particularly in enhancing the quality and efficiency of news reporting. This study explores how LLMs and LMMs can assist journalistic practice by generating contextualised captions for images accompanying news articles. We conducted experiments using the GoodNews dataset to evaluate the ability of LMMs (BLIP-2, GPT-4v, or LLaVA) to incorporate one of two types of context: entire news articles, or extracted named entities. In addition, we compared their performance to a two-stage pipeline composed of a captioning model (BLIP-2, OFA, or ViT-GPT2) with post-hoc contextualisation with LLMs (GPT-4 or LLaMA). We assess a diversity of models, and we find that while the choice of contextualisation model is a significant factor for the two-stage pipelines, this is not the case in the LMMs, where smaller, open-source models perform well compared to proprietary, GPT-powered ones. Additionally, we found that controlling the amount of provided context enhances performance. These results highlight the limitations of a fully automated approach and underscore the necessity for an interactive, human-in-the-loop strategy.

new Analyzing Consumer Reviews for Understanding Drivers of Hotels Ratings: An Indian Perspective

Authors: Subhasis Dasgupta, Soumya Roy, Jaydip Sen

Abstract: In the internet era, almost every business entity is trying to have its digital footprint in digital media and other social media platforms. For these entities, word of mouse is also very important. Particularly, this is quite crucial for the hospitality sector dealing with hotels, restaurants etc. Consumers do read other consumers reviews before making final decisions. This is where it becomes very important to understand which aspects are affecting most in the minds of the consumers while giving their ratings. The current study focuses on the consumer reviews of Indian hotels to extract aspects important for final ratings. The study involves gathering data using web scraping methods, analyzing the texts using Latent Dirichlet Allocation for topic extraction and sentiment analysis for aspect-specific sentiment mapping. Finally, it incorporates Random Forest to understand the importance of the aspects in predicting the final rating of a user.

new Overview of the NLPCC 2024 Shared Task on Chinese Metaphor Generation

Authors: Xingwei Qu, Ge Zhang, Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Chenghua Lin

Abstract: This paper presents the results of the shared task on Chinese metaphor generation, hosted at the 13th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2024). The goal of this shared task is to generate Chinese metaphors using machine learning techniques and effectively identifying basic components of metaphorical sentences. It is divided into two subtasks: 1) Metaphor Generation, which involves creating a metaphor from a provided tuple consisting of TENOR, GROUND, and VEHICLE. The goal here is to synthesize a metaphor that connects the subject (i.e. TENOR) with the object (i.e. VEHICLE), guided by the concept of the GROUND. 2) Metaphor Components Identification, which extracts the most fitting TENORs, GROUNDs, and VEHICLEs from a metaphorical sentence. This component requires the identification of the most fitting metaphor elements that correspond to the specified grounds. In addition to overall results, we report on the setup and insights from the metaphor generation shared task, which attracted a total of 4 participating teams across both subtasks.

new Open-domain Implicit Format Control for Large Language Model Generation

Authors: Yiqun Yao, Wenjia Ma, Xuezhi Fang, Xin Jiang, Xiang Li, Xuying Meng, Peng Han, Jing Li, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang

Abstract: Controlling the format of outputs generated by large language models (LLMs) is a critical functionality in various applications. Current methods typically employ constrained decoding with rule-based automata or fine-tuning with manually crafted format instructions, both of which struggle with open-domain format requirements. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework for controlled generation in LLMs, leveraging user-provided, one-shot QA pairs. This study investigates LLMs' capabilities to follow open-domain, one-shot constraints and replicate the format of the example answers. We observe that this is a non-trivial problem for current LLMs. We also develop a dataset collection methodology for supervised fine-tuning that enhances the open-domain format control of LLMs without degrading output quality, as well as a benchmark on which we evaluate both the helpfulness and format correctness of LLM outputs. The resulting datasets, named OIFC-SFT, along with the related code, will be made publicly available at https://github.com/cofe-ai/OIFC.

URLs: https://github.com/cofe-ai/OIFC.

new Automated Educational Question Generation at Different Bloom's Skill Levels using Large Language Models: Strategies and Evaluation

Authors: Nicy Scaria, Suma Dharani Chenna, Deepak Subramani

Abstract: Developing questions that are pedagogically sound, relevant, and promote learning is a challenging and time-consuming task for educators. Modern-day large language models (LLMs) generate high-quality content across multiple domains, potentially helping educators to develop high-quality questions. Automated educational question generation (AEQG) is important in scaling online education catering to a diverse student population. Past attempts at AEQG have shown limited abilities to generate questions at higher cognitive levels. In this study, we examine the ability of five state-of-the-art LLMs of different sizes to generate diverse and high-quality questions of different cognitive levels, as defined by Bloom's taxonomy. We use advanced prompting techniques with varying complexity for AEQG. We conducted expert and LLM-based evaluations to assess the linguistic and pedagogical relevance and quality of the questions. Our findings suggest that LLms can generate relevant and high-quality educational questions of different cognitive levels when prompted with adequate information, although there is a significant variance in the performance of the five LLms considered. We also show that automated evaluation is not on par with human evaluation.

new Exploring Reasoning Biases in Large Language Models Through Syllogism: Insights from the NeuBAROCO Dataset

Authors: Kentaro Ozeki, Risako Ando, Takanobu Morishita, Hirohiko Abe, Koji Mineshima, Mitsuhiro Okada

Abstract: This paper explores the question of how accurately current large language models can perform logical reasoning in natural language, with an emphasis on whether these models exhibit reasoning biases similar to humans. Specifically, our study focuses on syllogistic reasoning, a form of deductive reasoning extensively studied in cognitive science as a natural form of human reasoning. We present a syllogism dataset called NeuBAROCO, which consists of syllogistic reasoning problems in English and Japanese. This dataset was originally designed for psychological experiments to assess human reasoning capabilities using various forms of syllogisms. Our experiments with leading large language models indicate that these models exhibit reasoning biases similar to humans, along with other error tendencies. Notably, there is significant room for improvement in reasoning problems where the relationship between premises and hypotheses is neither entailment nor contradiction. We also present experimental results and in-depth analysis using a new Chain-of-Thought prompting method, which asks LLMs to translate syllogisms into abstract logical expressions and then explain their reasoning process. Our analysis using this method suggests that the primary limitations of LLMs lie in the reasoning process itself rather than the interpretation of syllogisms.

new Enhancing Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with In-Context Learning

Authors: Seong-Il Park, Seung-Woo Choi, Na-Hyun Kim, Jay-Yoon Lee

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (RALMs) have significantly improved performance in open-domain question answering (QA) by leveraging external knowledge. However, RALMs still struggle with unanswerable queries, where the retrieved contexts do not contain the correct answer, and with conflicting information, where different sources provide contradictory answers due to imperfect retrieval. This study introduces an in-context learning-based approach to enhance the reasoning capabilities of RALMs, making them more robust in imperfect retrieval scenarios. Our method incorporates Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) demonstrations, referred to as cases, to boost the model's capabilities to identify unanswerabilities and conflicts among the retrieved contexts. Experiments on two open-domain QA datasets show that our approach increases accuracy in identifying unanswerable and conflicting scenarios without requiring additional fine-tuning. This work demonstrates that in-context learning can effectively enhance the robustness of RALMs in open-domain QA tasks.

new Recognizing Emotion Regulation Strategies from Human Behavior with Large Language Models

Authors: Philipp M\"uller, Alexander Heimerl, Sayed Muddashir Hossain, Lea Siegel, Jan Alexandersson, Patrick Gebhard, Elisabeth Andr\'e, Tanja Schneeberger

Abstract: Human emotions are often not expressed directly, but regulated according to internal processes and social display rules. For affective computing systems, an understanding of how users regulate their emotions can be highly useful, for example to provide feedback in job interview training, or in psychotherapeutic scenarios. However, at present no method to automatically classify different emotion regulation strategies in a cross-user scenario exists. At the same time, recent studies showed that instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can reach impressive performance across a variety of affect recognition tasks such as categorical emotion recognition or sentiment analysis. While these results are promising, it remains unclear to what extent the representational power of LLMs can be utilized in the more subtle task of classifying users' internal emotion regulation strategy. To close this gap, we make use of the recently introduced \textsc{Deep} corpus for modeling the social display of the emotion shame, where each point in time is annotated with one of seven different emotion regulation classes. We fine-tune Llama2-7B as well as the recently introduced Gemma model using Low-rank Optimization on prompts generated from different sources of information on the \textsc{Deep} corpus. These include verbal and nonverbal behavior, person factors, as well as the results of an in-depth interview after the interaction. Our results show, that a fine-tuned Llama2-7B LLM is able to classify the utilized emotion regulation strategy with high accuracy (0.84) without needing access to data from post-interaction interviews. This represents a significant improvement over previous approaches based on Bayesian Networks and highlights the importance of modeling verbal behavior in emotion regulation.

new AcrosticSleuth: Probabilistic Identification and Ranking of Acrostics in Multilingual Corpora

Authors: Aleksandr Fedchin, Isabel Cooperman, Pramit Chaudhuri, Joseph P. Dexter

Abstract: For centuries, writers have hidden messages in their texts as acrostics, where initial letters of consecutive lines or paragraphs form meaningful words or phrases. Scholars searching for acrostics manually can only focus on a few authors at a time and often favor qualitative arguments in discussing intentionally. We aim to put the study of acrostics on firmer statistical footing by presenting AcrosticSleuth, a first-of-its-kind tool that automatically identifies acrostics and ranks them by the probability that the sequence of characters does not occur by chance (and therefore may have been inserted intentionally). Acrostics are rare, so we formalize the problem as a binary classification task in the presence of extreme class imbalance. To evaluate AcrosticSleuth, we present the Acrostic Identification Dataset (AcrostID), a collection of acrostics from the WikiSource online database. Despite the class imbalance, AcrosticSleuth achieves F1 scores of 0.39, 0.59, and 0.66 on French, English, and Russian subdomains of WikiSource, respectively. We further demonstrate that AcrosticSleuth can identify previously unknown high-profile instances of wordplay, such as the acrostic spelling ARSPOETICA (``art of poetry") by Italian Humanist Albertino Mussato and English philosopher Thomas Hobbes' signature in the opening paragraphs of The Elements of Law.

new Crowd Intelligence for Early Misinformation Prediction on Social Media

Authors: Megha Sundriyal, Harshit Choudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Md Shad Akhtar

Abstract: Misinformation spreads rapidly on social media, causing serious damage by influencing public opinion, promoting dangerous behavior, or eroding trust in reliable sources. It spreads too fast for traditional fact-checking, stressing the need for predictive methods. We introduce CROWDSHIELD, a crowd intelligence-based method for early misinformation prediction. We hypothesize that the crowd's reactions to misinformation reveal its accuracy. Furthermore, we hinge upon exaggerated assertions/claims and replies with particular positions/stances on the source post within a conversation thread. We employ Q-learning to capture the two dimensions -- stances and claims. We utilize deep Q-learning due to its proficiency in navigating complex decision spaces and effectively learning network properties. Additionally, we use a transformer-based encoder to develop a comprehensive understanding of both content and context. This multifaceted approach helps ensure the model pays attention to user interaction and stays anchored in the communication's content. We propose MIST, a manually annotated misinformation detection Twitter corpus comprising nearly 200 conversation threads with more than 14K replies. In experiments, CROWDSHIELD outperformed ten baseline systems, achieving an improvement of ~4% macro-F1 score. We conduct an ablation study and error analysis to validate our proposed model's performance. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/CrowdShield.git.

URLs: https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/CrowdShield.git.

new Can LLMs Beat Humans in Debating? A Dynamic Multi-agent Framework for Competitive Debate

Authors: Yiqun Zhang, Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Yifei Zhang, Kaisong Song

Abstract: Competitive debate is a comprehensive and complex computational argumentation task. Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter hallucinations and lack competitiveness in this task. To address these challenges, we introduce Agent for Debate (Agent4Debate), a dynamic, multi-agent framework based on LLMs designed to enhance their capabilities in competitive debate. Drawing inspiration from human behavior in debate preparation and execution, Agent4Debate employs a collaborative architecture where four specialized agents (Searcher, Analyzer, Writer, and Reviewer) dynamically interact and cooperate. These agents work throughout the debate process, covering multiple stages from initial research and argument formulation to rebuttal and summary. To comprehensively evaluate framework performance, we construct the Chinese Debate Arena, comprising 66 carefully selected Chinese debate motions. We recruite ten experienced human debaters and collect records of 200 debates involving Agent4Debate, baseline models, and humans. The evaluation employs the Debatrix automatic scoring system and professional human reviewers based on the established Debatrix-Elo and Human-Elo ranking. Experimental results indicate that the state-of-the-art Agent4Debate exhibits capabilities comparable to those of humans. Furthermore, ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the agent structure.

new Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks Undermine the Safety of Large Language Models

Authors: Fabio Pernisi, Dirk Hovy, Paul R\"ottger

Abstract: As diverse linguistic communities and users adopt large language models (LLMs), assessing their safety across languages becomes critical. Despite ongoing efforts to make LLMs safe, they can still be made to behave unsafely with jailbreaking, a technique in which models are prompted to act outside their operational guidelines. Research on LLM safety and jailbreaking, however, has so far mostly focused on English, limiting our understanding of LLM safety in other languages. We contribute towards closing this gap by investigating the effectiveness of many-shot jailbreaking, where models are prompted with unsafe demonstrations to induce unsafe behaviour, in Italian. To enable our analysis, we create a new dataset of unsafe Italian question-answer pairs. With this dataset, we identify clear safety vulnerabilities in four families of open-weight LLMs. We find that the models exhibit unsafe behaviors even when prompted with few unsafe demonstrations, and -- more alarmingly -- that this tendency rapidly escalates with more demonstrations.

new MemeMind at ArAIEval Shared Task: Spotting Persuasive Spans in Arabic Text with Persuasion Techniques Identification

Authors: Md Rafiul Biswas, Zubair Shah, Wajdi Zaghouani

Abstract: This paper focuses on detecting propagandistic spans and persuasion techniques in Arabic text from tweets and news paragraphs. Each entry in the dataset contains a text sample and corresponding labels that indicate the start and end positions of propaganda techniques within the text. Tokens falling within a labeled span were assigned "B" (Begin) or "I" (Inside), "O", corresponding to the specific propaganda technique. Using attention masks, we created uniform lengths for each span and assigned BIO tags to each token based on the provided labels. Then, we used AraBERT-base pre-trained model for Arabic text tokenization and embeddings with a token classification layer to identify propaganda techniques. Our training process involves a two-phase fine-tuning approach. First, we train only the classification layer for a few epochs, followed by full model fine-tuning, updating all parameters. This methodology allows the model to adapt to the specific characteristics of the propaganda detection task while leveraging the knowledge captured by the pre-trained AraBERT model. Our approach achieved an F1 score of 0.2774, securing the 3rd position in the leaderboard of Task 1.

new Moly\'e: A Corpus-based Approach to Language Contact in Colonial France

Authors: Rasul Dent, Juliette Jan\`es, Thibault Cl\'erice, Pedro Ortiz Suarez, Beno\^it Sagot

Abstract: Whether or not several Creole languages which developed during the early modern period can be considered genetic descendants of European languages has been the subject of intense debate. This is in large part due to the absence of evidence of intermediate forms. This work introduces a new open corpus, the Moly\'e corpus, which combines stereotypical representations of three kinds of language variation in Europe with early attestations of French-based Creole languages across a period of 400 years. It is intended to facilitate future research on the continuity between contact situations in Europe and Creolophone (former) colonies.

new Bias-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation: Mitigating Catastrophic Inheritance of Large Language Models

Authors: Yupeng Chang, Yi Chang, Yuan Wu

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a diverse array of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, adapting LLMs to downstream applications typically necessitates computationally intensive and memory-demanding fine-tuning procedures. To mitigate these burdens, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques have emerged as a promising approach to tailor LLMs with minimal computational overhead. While PEFT methods offer substantial advantages, they do not fully address the pervasive issue of bias propagation from pre-training data. In this work, we introduce Bias-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation (BA-LoRA), a novel PEFT method designed to counteract bias inheritance. BA-LoRA incorporates three distinct regularization terms: (1) consistency regularizer, (2) diversity regularizer, and (3) singular vector decomposition regularizer. These regularizers collectively aim to improve the generative models' consistency, diversity, and generalization capabilities during the fine-tuning process. Through extensive experiments on a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks, employing prominent LLMs such as LLaMA, Mistral, and Gemma, we demonstrate that BA-LoRA surpasses the performance of LoRA and its state-of-the-art variants. Moreover, our method effectively mitigates the deleterious effects of pre-training bias, leading to more reliable and robust model outputs. The code is available at https://github.com/cyp-jlu-ai/BA-LoRA.

URLs: https://github.com/cyp-jlu-ai/BA-LoRA.

new Conversational Prompt Engineering

Authors: Liat Ein-Dor, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Artem Spector, Shai Gretz, Lena Dankin, Alon Halfon, Yoav Katz, Noam Slonim

Abstract: Prompts are how humans communicate with LLMs. Informative prompts are essential for guiding LLMs to produce the desired output. However, prompt engineering is often tedious and time-consuming, requiring significant expertise, limiting its widespread use. We propose Conversational Prompt Engineering (CPE), a user-friendly tool that helps users create personalized prompts for their specific tasks. CPE uses a chat model to briefly interact with users, helping them articulate their output preferences and integrating these into the prompt. The process includes two main stages: first, the model uses user-provided unlabeled data to generate data-driven questions and utilize user responses to shape the initial instruction. Then, the model shares the outputs generated by the instruction and uses user feedback to further refine the instruction and the outputs. The final result is a few-shot prompt, where the outputs approved by the user serve as few-shot examples. A user study on summarization tasks demonstrates the value of CPE in creating personalized, high-performing prompts. The results suggest that the zero-shot prompt obtained is comparable to its - much longer - few-shot counterpart, indicating significant savings in scenarios involving repetitive tasks with large text volumes.

new Learning Fine-Grained Grounded Citations for Attributed Large Language Models

Authors: Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Weihong Zhong, Xiachong Feng, Weijiang Yu, Weihua Peng, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin

Abstract: Despite the impressive performance on information-seeking tasks, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with hallucinations. Attributed LLMs, which augment generated text with in-line citations, have shown potential in mitigating hallucinations and improving verifiability. However, current approaches suffer from suboptimal citation quality due to their reliance on in-context learning. Furthermore, the practice of citing only coarse document identifiers makes it challenging for users to perform fine-grained verification. In this work, we introduce FRONT, a training framework designed to teach LLMs to generate Fine-Grained Grounded Citations. By grounding model outputs in fine-grained supporting quotes, these quotes guide the generation of grounded and consistent responses, not only improving citation quality but also facilitating fine-grained verification. Experiments on the ALCE benchmark demonstrate the efficacy of FRONT in generating superior grounded responses and highly supportive citations. With LLaMA-2-7B, the framework significantly outperforms all the baselines, achieving an average of 14.21% improvement in citation quality across all datasets, even surpassing ChatGPT.

new Towards Resilient and Efficient LLMs: A Comparative Study of Efficiency, Performance, and Adversarial Robustness

Authors: Xiaojing Fan, Chunliang Tao

Abstract: With the increasing demand for practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), many attention-efficient models have been developed to balance performance and computational cost. However, the adversarial robustness of these models remains under-explored. In this work, we design a framework to investigate the trade-off between efficiency, performance, and adversarial robustness of LLMs by comparing three prominent models with varying levels of complexity and efficiency -- Transformer++, Gated Linear Attention (GLA) Transformer, and MatMul-Free LM -- utilizing the GLUE and AdvGLUE datasets. The AdvGLUE dataset extends the GLUE dataset with adversarial samples designed to challenge model robustness. Our results show that while the GLA Transformer and MatMul-Free LM achieve slightly lower accuracy on GLUE tasks, they demonstrate higher efficiency and either superior or comparative robustness on AdvGLUE tasks compared to Transformer++ across different attack levels. These findings highlight the potential of simplified architectures to achieve a compelling balance between efficiency, performance, and adversarial robustness, offering valuable insights for applications where resource constraints and resilience to adversarial attacks are critical.

new Code-switching in text and speech reveals information-theoretic audience design

Authors: Debasmita Bhattacharya, Marten van Schijndel

Abstract: In this work, we use language modeling to investigate the factors that influence code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between one language variety (the primary language) and another (the secondary language), and is widely observed in multilingual contexts. Recent work has shown that code-switching is often correlated with areas of high information load in the primary language, but it is unclear whether high primary language load only makes the secondary language relatively easier to produce at code-switching points (speaker-driven code-switching), or whether code-switching is additionally used by speakers to signal the need for greater attention on the part of listeners (audience-driven code-switching). In this paper, we use bilingual Chinese-English online forum posts and transcripts of spontaneous Chinese-English speech to replicate prior findings that high primary language (Chinese) information load is correlated with switches to the secondary language (English). We then demonstrate that the information load of the English productions is even higher than that of meaning equivalent Chinese alternatives, and these are therefore not easier to produce, providing evidence of audience-driven influences in code-switching at the level of the communication channel, not just at the sociolinguistic level, in both writing and speech.

new Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation

Authors: Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey Li, Sewoong Oh, Ludwig Schmidt, Jason Weston, Luke Zettlemoyer, Xian Li

Abstract: We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to construct high-quality synthetic data grounded in world knowledge for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given documents from a web corpus, we generate and curate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach proposed by Li et al.(2023a), and rewrite the responses to improve their quality further based on the initial documents. Fine-tuning with the resulting (backtranslated instruction, rewritten response) pairs yields higher win rates on AlpacaEval than using other common instruction datasets such as Humpback, ShareGPT, Open Orca, Alpaca-GPT4 and Self-instruct. We also demonstrate that rewriting the responses with an LLM outperforms direct distillation, and the two generated text distributions exhibit significant distinction in embedding space. Further analysis shows that our backtranslated instructions are of higher quality than other sources of synthetic instructions, while our responses are more diverse and complex than those obtained from distillation. Overall we find that instruction back-and-forth translation combines the best of both worlds -- making use of the information diversity and quantity found on the web, while ensuring the quality of the responses which is necessary for effective alignment.

new LogogramNLP: Comparing Visual and Textual Representations of Ancient Logographic Writing Systems for NLP

Authors: Danlu Chen, Freda Shi, Aditi Agarwal, Jacobo Myerston, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

Abstract: Standard natural language processing (NLP) pipelines operate on symbolic representations of language, which typically consist of sequences of discrete tokens. However, creating an analogous representation for ancient logographic writing systems is an extremely labor intensive process that requires expert knowledge. At present, a large portion of logographic data persists in a purely visual form due to the absence of transcription -- this issue poses a bottleneck for researchers seeking to apply NLP toolkits to study ancient logographic languages: most of the relevant data are images of writing. This paper investigates whether direct processing of visual representations of language offers a potential solution. We introduce LogogramNLP, the first benchmark enabling NLP analysis of ancient logographic languages, featuring both transcribed and visual datasets for four writing systems along with annotations for tasks like classification, translation, and parsing. Our experiments compare systems that employ recent visual and text encoding strategies as backbones. The results demonstrate that visual representations outperform textual representations for some investigated tasks, suggesting that visual processing pipelines may unlock a large amount of cultural heritage data of logographic languages for NLP-based analyses.

new Arctic-TILT. Business Document Understanding at Sub-Billion Scale

Authors: {\L}ukasz Borchmann, Micha{\l} Pietruszka, Wojciech Ja\'skowski, Dawid Jurkiewicz, Piotr Halama, Pawe{\l} J\'oziak, {\L}ukasz Garncarek, Pawe{\l} Liskowski, Karolina Szyndler, Andrzej Gretkowski, Julita O{\l}tusek, Gabriela Nowakowska, Artur Zaw{\l}ocki, {\L}ukasz Duhr, Pawe{\l} Dyda, Micha{\l} Turski

Abstract: The vast portion of workloads employing LLMs involves answering questions grounded on PDF or scan content. We introduce the Arctic-TILT achieving accuracy on par with models 1000$\times$ its size on these use cases. It can be fine-tuned and deployed on a single 24GB GPU, lowering operational costs while processing Visually Rich Documents with up to 400k tokens. The model establishes state-of-the-art results on seven diverse Document Understanding benchmarks, as well as provides reliable confidence scores and quick inference, which are essential for processing files in large-scale or time-sensitive enterprise environments.

cross Tree Attention: Topology-aware Decoding for Long-Context Attention on GPU clusters

Authors: Vasudev Shyam, Jonathan Pilault, Emily Shepperd, Quentin Anthony, Beren Millidge

Abstract: Self-attention is the core mathematical operation of modern transformer architectures and is also a significant computational bottleneck due to its quadratic complexity in the sequence length. In this work, we derive the scalar energy function whose gradient computes the self-attention block, thus elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of self-attention, providing a Bayesian interpretation of the operation and linking it closely with energy-based models such as Hopfield Networks. Moreover, due to this formulation, we discover that we can use efficient and optimized automatic-differentiation techniques to derive a highly efficient Tree Attention algorithm to compute the gradient of the energy and hence self-attention. Our formulation reveals that the reduction across the sequence axis can be efficiently computed in parallel through a tree reduction. Our algorithm, for parallelizing attention computation across multiple GPUs, enables cross-device decoding to be performed asymptotically faster (up to 8x faster) than alternative approaches such as Ring Attention, while also requiring significantly less communication volume and incurring 2x less peak memory. Our code is publicly available here: \url{https://github.com/Zyphra/tree_attention}

URLs: https://github.com/Zyphra/tree_attention

cross Patchview: LLM-Powered Worldbuilding with Generative Dust and Magnet Visualization

Authors: John Joon Young Chung, Max Kreminski

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can help writers build story worlds by generating world elements, such as factions, characters, and locations. However, making sense of many generated elements can be overwhelming. Moreover, if the user wants to precisely control aspects of generated elements that are difficult to specify verbally, prompting alone may be insufficient. We introduce Patchview, a customizable LLM-powered system that visually aids worldbuilding by allowing users to interact with story concepts and elements through the physical metaphor of magnets and dust. Elements in Patchview are visually dragged closer to concepts with high relevance, facilitating sensemaking. The user can also steer the generation with verbally elusive concepts by indicating the desired position of the element between concepts. When the user disagrees with the LLM's visualization and generation, they can correct those by repositioning the element. These corrections can be used to align the LLM's future behaviors to the user's perception. With a user study, we show that Patchview supports the sensemaking of world elements and steering of element generation, facilitating exploration during the worldbuilding process. Patchview provides insights on how customizable visual representation can help sensemake, steer, and align generative AI model behaviors with the user's intentions.

cross Incorporating Spatial Awareness in Data-Driven Gesture Generation for Virtual Agents

Authors: Anna Deichler, Simon Alexanderson, Jonas Beskow

Abstract: This paper focuses on enhancing human-agent communication by integrating spatial context into virtual agents' non-verbal behaviors, specifically gestures. Recent advances in co-speech gesture generation have primarily utilized data-driven methods, which create natural motion but limit the scope of gestures to those performed in a void. Our work aims to extend these methods by enabling generative models to incorporate scene information into speech-driven gesture synthesis. We introduce a novel synthetic gesture dataset tailored for this purpose. This development represents a critical step toward creating embodied conversational agents that interact more naturally with their environment and users.

cross HydraFormer: One Encoder For All Subsampling Rates

Authors: Yaoxun Xu, Xingchen Song, Zhiyong Wu, Di Wu, Zhendong Peng, Binbin Zhang

Abstract: In automatic speech recognition, subsampling is essential for tackling diverse scenarios. However, the inadequacy of a single subsampling rate to address various real-world situations often necessitates training and deploying multiple models, consequently increasing associated costs. To address this issue, we propose HydraFormer, comprising HydraSub, a Conformer-based encoder, and a BiTransformer-based decoder. HydraSub encompasses multiple branches, each representing a distinct subsampling rate, allowing for the flexible selection of any branch during inference based on the specific use case. HydraFormer can efficiently manage different subsampling rates, significantly reducing training and deployment expenses. Experiments on AISHELL-1 and LibriSpeech datasets reveal that HydraFormer effectively adapts to various subsampling rates and languages while maintaining high recognition performance. Additionally, HydraFormer showcases exceptional stability, sustaining consistent performance under various initialization conditions, and exhibits robust transferability by learning from pretrained single subsampling rate automatic speech recognition models\footnote{Model code and scripts: https://github.com/HydraFormer/hydraformer}.

URLs: https://github.com/HydraFormer/hydraformer

cross Simulating Articulatory Trajectories with Phonological Feature Interpolation

Authors: Angelo Ortiz Tandazo, Thomas Schatz, Thomas Hueber, Emmanuel Dupoux

Abstract: As a first step towards a complete computational model of speech learning involving perception-production loops, we investigate the forward mapping between pseudo-motor commands and articulatory trajectories. Two phonological feature sets, based respectively on generative and articulatory phonology, are used to encode a phonetic target sequence. Different interpolation techniques are compared to generate smooth trajectories in these feature spaces, with a potential optimisation of the target value and timing to capture co-articulation effects. We report the Pearson correlation between a linear projection of the generated trajectories and articulatory data derived from a multi-speaker dataset of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) recordings. A correlation of 0.67 is obtained with an extended feature set based on generative phonology and a linear interpolation technique. We discuss the implications of our results for our understanding of the dynamics of biological motion.

cross Articulatory Configurations across Genders and Periods in French Radio and TV archives

Authors: Benjamin Elie, David Doukhan, R\'emi Uro, Lucas Ondel-Yang, Albert Rilliard, Simon Devauchelle

Abstract: This paper studies changes in articulatory configurations across genders and periods using an inversion from acoustic to articulatory parameters. From a diachronic corpus based on French media archives spanning 60 years from 1955 to 2015, automatic transcription and forced alignment allowed extracting the central frame of each vowel. More than one million frames were obtained from over a thousand speakers across gender and age categories. Their formants were used from these vocalic frames to fit the parameters of Maeda's articulatory model. Evaluations of the quality of these processes are provided. We focus here on two parameters of Maeda's model linked to total vocal tract length: the relative position of the larynx (higher for females) and the lips protrusion (more protruded for males). Implications for voice quality across genders are discussed. The effect across periods seems gender independent; thus, the assertion that females lowered their pitch with time is not supported.

cross SCENE: Evaluating Explainable AI Techniques Using Soft Counterfactuals

Authors: Haoran Zheng, Utku Pamuksuz

Abstract: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is essential for enhancing the transparency and accountability of AI models, especially in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. This paper introduces SCENE (Soft Counterfactual Evaluation for Natural language Explainability), a novel evaluation method that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate Soft Counterfactual explanations in a zero-shot manner. By focusing on token-based substitutions, SCENE creates contextually appropriate and seman-tically meaningful Soft Counterfactuals without extensive fine-tuning. SCENE adopts Validitysoft and Csoft metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of model-agnostic XAI methods in text classification tasks. Applied to CNN, RNN, and BERT architectures, SCENE provides valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of various XAI techniques.

cross Transformer Explainer: Interactive Learning of Text-Generative Models

Authors: Aeree Cho, Grace C. Kim, Alexander Karpekov, Alec Helbling, Zijie J. Wang, Seongmin Lee, Benjamin Hoover, Duen Horng Chau

Abstract: Transformers have revolutionized machine learning, yet their inner workings remain opaque to many. We present Transformer Explainer, an interactive visualization tool designed for non-experts to learn about Transformers through the GPT-2 model. Our tool helps users understand complex Transformer concepts by integrating a model overview and enabling smooth transitions across abstraction levels of mathematical operations and model structures. It runs a live GPT-2 instance locally in the user's browser, empowering users to experiment with their own input and observe in real-time how the internal components and parameters of the Transformer work together to predict the next tokens. Our tool requires no installation or special hardware, broadening the public's education access to modern generative AI techniques. Our open-sourced tool is available at https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/. A video demo is available at https://youtu.be/ECR4oAwocjs.

URLs: https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/., https://youtu.be/ECR4oAwocjs.

replace Mixture-of-Supernets: Improving Weight-Sharing Supernet Training with Architecture-Routed Mixture-of-Experts

Authors: Ganesh Jawahar, Haichuan Yang, Yunyang Xiong, Zechun Liu, Dilin Wang, Fei Sun, Meng Li, Aasish Pappu, Barlas Oguz, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra

Abstract: Weight-sharing supernets are crucial for performance estimation in cutting-edge neural architecture search (NAS) frameworks. Despite their ability to generate diverse subnetworks without retraining, the quality of these subnetworks is not guaranteed due to weight sharing. In NLP tasks like machine translation and pre-trained language modeling, there is a significant performance gap between supernet and training from scratch for the same model architecture, necessitating retraining post optimal architecture identification. This study introduces a solution called mixture-of-supernets, a generalized supernet formulation leveraging mixture-of-experts (MoE) to enhance supernet model expressiveness with minimal training overhead. Unlike conventional supernets, this method employs an architecture-based routing mechanism, enabling indirect sharing of model weights among subnetworks. This customization of weights for specific architectures, learned through gradient descent, minimizes retraining time, significantly enhancing training efficiency in NLP. The proposed method attains state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance in NAS for fast machine translation models, exhibiting a superior latency-BLEU tradeoff compared to HAT, the SoTA NAS framework for machine translation. Furthermore, it excels in NAS for building memory-efficient task-agnostic BERT models, surpassing NAS-BERT and AutoDistil across various model sizes. The code can be found at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoS.

URLs: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/MoS.

replace Effective Prompt Extraction from Language Models

Authors: Yiming Zhang, Nicholas Carlini, Daphne Ippolito

Abstract: The text generated by large language models is commonly controlled by prompting, where a prompt prepended to a user's query guides the model's output. The prompts used by companies to guide their models are often treated as secrets, to be hidden from the user making the query. They have even been treated as commodities to be bought and sold on marketplaces. However, anecdotal reports have shown adversarial users employing prompt extraction attacks to recover these prompts. In this paper, we present a framework for systematically measuring the effectiveness of these attacks. In experiments with 3 different sources of prompts and 11 underlying large language models, we find that simple text-based attacks can in fact reveal prompts with high probability. Our framework determines with high precision whether an extracted prompt is the actual secret prompt, rather than a model hallucination. Prompt extraction from real systems such as Claude 3 and ChatGPT further suggest that system prompts can be revealed by an adversary despite existing defenses in place.

replace CALM : A Multi-task Benchmark for Comprehensive Assessment of Language Model Bias

Authors: Vipul Gupta, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Hugo Lauren\c{c}on, Shomir Wilson, Rebecca J. Passonneau

Abstract: As language models (LMs) become increasingly powerful and widely used, it is important to quantify them for sociodemographic bias with potential for harm. Prior measures of bias are sensitive to perturbations in the templates designed to compare performance across social groups, due to factors such as low diversity or limited number of templates. Also, most previous work considers only one NLP task. We introduce Comprehensive Assessment of Language Models (CALM) for robust measurement of two types of universally relevant sociodemographic bias, gender and race. CALM integrates sixteen datasets for question-answering, sentiment analysis and natural language inference. Examples from each dataset are filtered to produce 224 templates with high diversity (e.g., length, vocabulary). We assemble 50 highly frequent person names for each of seven distinct demographic groups to generate 78,400 prompts covering the three NLP tasks. Our empirical evaluation shows that CALM bias scores are more robust and far less sensitive than previous bias measurements to perturbations in the templates, such as synonym substitution, or to random subset selection of templates. We apply CALM to 20 large language models, and find that for 2 language model series, larger parameter models tend to be more biased than smaller ones. The T0 series is the least biased model families, of the 20 LLMs investigated here. The code is available at https://github.com/vipulgupta1011/CALM.

URLs: https://github.com/vipulgupta1011/CALM.

replace LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search

Authors: Ganesh Jawahar, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Dujian Ding

Abstract: In this work, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for a novel use case: constructing Performance Predictors (PP) that estimate the performance of specific deep neural network architectures on downstream tasks. We create PP prompts for LLMs, comprising (i) role descriptions, (ii) instructions for the LLM, (iii) hyperparameter definitions, and (iv) demonstrations presenting sample architectures with efficiency metrics and `training from scratch' performance. In machine translation (MT) tasks, GPT-4 with our PP prompts (LLM-PP) achieves a SoTA mean absolute error and a slight degradation in rank correlation coefficient compared to baseline predictors. Additionally, we demonstrate that predictions from LLM-PP can be distilled to a compact regression model (LLM-Distill-PP), which surprisingly retains much of the performance of LLM-PP. This presents a cost-effective alternative for resource-intensive performance estimation. Specifically, for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a Hybrid-Search algorithm (HS-NAS) employing LLM-Distill-PP for the initial search stages and reverting to the baseline predictor later. HS-NAS performs similarly to SoTA NAS, reducing search hours by approximately 50%, and in some cases, improving latency, GFLOPs, and model size. The code can be found at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/llmas.

URLs: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/llmas.

replace TarGEN: Targeted Data Generation with Large Language Models

Authors: Himanshu Gupta, Kevin Scaria, Ujjwala Anantheswaran, Shreyas Verma, Mihir Parmar, Saurabh Arjun Sawant, Chitta Baral, Swaroop Mishra

Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked interest in data synthesis techniques, aiming to generate diverse and high-quality synthetic datasets. However, these synthetic datasets often suffer from a lack of diversity and added noise. In this paper, we present TarGEN, a multi-step prompting strategy for generating high-quality synthetic datasets utilizing a LLM. An advantage of TarGEN is its seedless nature; it does not require specific task instances, broadening its applicability beyond task replication. We augment TarGEN with a method known as self-correction empowering LLMs to rectify inaccurately labeled instances during dataset creation, ensuring reliable labels. To assess our technique's effectiveness, we emulate 8 tasks from the SuperGLUE benchmark and finetune various language models, including encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only models on both synthetic and original training sets. Evaluation on the original test set reveals that models trained on datasets generated by TarGEN perform approximately 1-2% points better than those trained on original datasets (82.84% via syn. vs. 81.12% on og. using Flan-T5). When incorporating instruction tuning, the performance increases to 84.54% on synthetic data vs. 81.49% on original data by Flan-T5. A comprehensive analysis of the synthetic dataset compared to the original dataset reveals that the synthetic dataset demonstrates similar or higher levels of dataset complexity and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic dataset displays a bias level that aligns closely with the original dataset. Finally, when pre-finetuned on our synthetic SuperGLUE dataset, T5-3B yields impressive results on the OpenLLM leaderboard, surpassing the model trained on the Self-Instruct dataset by 4.14% points. We hope that TarGEN can be helpful for quality data generation and reducing the human efforts to create complex benchmarks.

replace LLMs Learn Task Heuristics from Demonstrations: A Heuristic-Driven Prompting Strategy for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

Authors: Hanzhang Zhou, Junlang Qian, Zijian Feng, Hui Lu, Zixiao Zhu, Kezhi Mao

Abstract: In this study, we investigate in-context learning (ICL) in document-level event argument extraction (EAE) to alleviate the dependency on large-scale labeled data for this task. We introduce the Heuristic-Driven Link-of-Analogy (HD-LoA) prompting to address the challenge of example selection and to develop a prompting strategy tailored for EAE. Specifically, we hypothesize and validate that LLMs learn task-specific heuristics from demonstrations via ICL. Building upon this hypothesis, we introduce an explicit heuristic-driven demonstration construction approach, which transforms the haphazard example selection process into a methodical method that emphasizes task heuristics. Additionally, inspired by the analogical reasoning of human, we propose the link-of-analogy prompting, which enables LLMs to process new situations by drawing analogies to known situations, enhancing their performance on unseen classes beyond limited ICL examples. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning methods on document-level EAE datasets. Additionally, the HD-LoA prompting shows effectiveness in diverse tasks like sentiment analysis and natural language inference, demonstrating its broad adaptability.

replace MAP's not dead yet: Uncovering true language model modes by conditioning away degeneracy

Authors: Davis Yoshida, Kartik Goyal, Kevin Gimpel

Abstract: It has been widely observed that exact or approximate MAP (mode-seeking) decoding from natural language generation (NLG) models consistently leads to degenerate outputs (Holtzman et al., 2019; Stahlberg and Byrne, 2019). Prior work has attributed this behavior to either a fundamental and unavoidable inadequacy of modes in probabilistic models or weaknesses in language modeling. Contrastingly, we argue that degenerate modes can even occur in the absence of any modeling error, due to contamination of the training data. Specifically, we argue that mixing even a tiny amount of low-entropy noise with a population text distribution can cause the data distribution's mode to become degenerate. We therefore propose to apply MAP decoding to the model's true conditional distribution where the conditioning variable explicitly avoids specific degenerate behavior. Using exact search, we empirically verify that the length-conditional modes of machine translation models and language models are indeed more fluent and topical than their unconditional modes. For the first time, we also share many examples of exact modal sequences from these models, and from several variants of the LLaMA-7B model. Notably, we observe that various kinds of degenerate modes persist, even at the scale of LLaMA-7B. Although we cannot tractably address these degeneracies with exact search, we perform a classifier-based approximate search on LLaMA-7B, a model which was not trained for instruction following, and find that we are able to elicit reasonable outputs without any finetuning.

replace FinanceMath: Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning in Finance Domains

Authors: Yilun Zhao, Hongjun Liu, Yitao Long, Rui Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan

Abstract: We introduce FinanceMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in solving knowledge-intensive math reasoning problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, FinanceMath includes 1,200 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content. These problems require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. We also construct a finance-domain knowledge bank and investigate various knowledge integration strategies. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 44 LLMs with both Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods. Our experimental results reveal that the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) achieves only 60.9% accuracy using CoT prompting, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, while augmenting LLMs with external knowledge can improve model performance (e.g., from 47.5% to 54.5% for Gemini-1.5-Pro), their accuracy remains significantly lower than the estimated human expert performance of 92%. We believe that FinanceMath can advance future research in the area of domain-specific knowledge retrieval and integration, particularly within the context of solving reasoning-intensive tasks.

replace DocMath-Eval: Evaluating Math Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Understanding Long and Specialized Documents

Authors: Yilun Zhao, Yitao Long, Hongjun Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Linyong Nan, Lyuhao Chen, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Rui Zhang, Arman Cohan

Abstract: Recent LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving exam-like math word problems. However, the degree to which these numerical reasoning skills are effective in real-world scenarios, particularly in expert domains, is still largely unexplored. This paper introduces DocMath-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the numerical reasoning capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing specialized documents containing both text and tables. We evaluate a wide spectrum of 48 LLMs with Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods, aiming to comprehensively assess the capabilities and limitations of existing LLMs in DocMath-Eval. We found that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) still significantly lags behind human experts in solving complex numerical reasoning problems grounded in long contexts. We believe that DocMath-Eval can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in solving challenging numerical reasoning problems within expert domains.

replace Learn or Recall? Revisiting Incremental Learning with Pre-trained Language Models

Authors: Junhao Zheng, Shengjie Qiu, Qianli Ma

Abstract: Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities. In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream tasks, utilizing PLMs as backbones has become a common practice in recent research of IL in NLP. Most assume that catastrophic forgetting is the biggest obstacle to achieving superior IL performance and propose various techniques to overcome this issue. However, we find that this assumption is problematic. Specifically, we revisit more than 20 methods on four classification tasks (Text Classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, and Named Entity Recognition) under the two most popular IL settings (Class-Incremental and Task-Incremental) and reveal that most of them severely underestimate the inherent anti-forgetting ability of PLMs. Based on the observation, we propose a frustratingly easy method called SEQ* for IL with PLMs. The results show that SEQ* has competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) IL methods and requires considerably less trainable parameters and training time. These findings urge us to revisit the IL with PLMs and encourage future studies to have a fundamental understanding of the catastrophic forgetting in PLMs. The data, code and scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/zzz47zzz/codebase-for-incremental-learning-with-llm.

URLs: https://github.com/zzz47zzz/codebase-for-incremental-learning-with-llm.

replace Retrieval Augmented Thought Process for Private Data Handling in Healthcare

Authors: Thomas Pouplin, Hao Sun, Samuel Holt, Mihaela van der Schaar

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the strong potential to assist both clinicians and the general public with their extensive medical knowledge. However, their application in healthcare is constrained due to concerns about the privacy of data used in training, which prevents the integration of private and personal information because of security and ethical issues. Moreover, if their capabilities can be enhanced with information retrieval to access up-to-date knowledge, the current integration of LLMs with Information retrieval lacks robustness to imperfect retrieval, which can hinder their effectiveness and even reduce overall performance. In this work, we address this challenge by introducing the Retrieval-Augmented Thought Process (RATP). Given access to external knowledge, RATP formulates the thought generation of LLMs as a multiple-step decision process. To optimise such a thought process, RATP leverages Monte-Carlo Tree Search and learns a proxy reward function that permits cost-efficient inference. On a private dataset of electronic medical records, deliberately excluded from any LLM training set, RATP achieves 35% additional accuracy compared to in-context retrieval-augmented generation for the question-answering task.

replace Towards Privacy-Aware Sign Language Translation at Scale

Authors: Phillip Rust, Bowen Shi, Skyler Wang, Necati Cihan Camg\"oz, Jean Maillard

Abstract: A major impediment to the advancement of sign language translation (SLT) is data scarcity. Much of the sign language data currently available on the web cannot be used for training supervised models due to the lack of aligned captions. Furthermore, scaling SLT using large-scale web-scraped datasets bears privacy risks due to the presence of biometric information, which the responsible development of SLT technologies should account for. In this work, we propose a two-stage framework for privacy-aware SLT at scale that addresses both of these issues. We introduce SSVP-SLT, which leverages self-supervised video pretraining on anonymized and unannotated videos, followed by supervised SLT finetuning on a curated parallel dataset. SSVP-SLT achieves state-of-the-art finetuned and zero-shot gloss-free SLT performance on the How2Sign dataset, outperforming the strongest respective baselines by over 3 BLEU-4. Based on controlled experiments, we further discuss the advantages and limitations of self-supervised pretraining and anonymization via facial obfuscation for SLT.

replace MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models

Authors: Vithursan Thangarasa, Mahmoud Salem, Shreyas Saxena, Kevin Leong, Joel Hestness, Sean Lie

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on general source data for various domains, but a recent surge in domain-specific LLMs has shown their potential to outperform general-purpose models in domain-specific tasks (e.g., biomedicine). Although domain-specific pre-training enhances efficiency and leads to smaller models, the computational costs of training these LLMs remain high, posing budgeting challenges. We introduce MediSwift, a suite of biomedical LMs that leverage sparse pre-training on domain-specific biomedical text data. By inducing up to 75% weight sparsity during the pre-training phase, MediSwift achieves a 2-2.5x reduction in training FLOPs. Notably, all sparse pre-training was performed on the Cerebras CS-2 system, which is specifically designed to realize the acceleration benefits from unstructured weight sparsity, thereby significantly enhancing the efficiency of the MediSwift models. Through subsequent dense fine-tuning and strategic soft prompting, MediSwift models outperform existing LLMs up to 7B parameters on biomedical tasks, setting new benchmarks w.r.t efficiency-accuracy on tasks such as PubMedQA. Our results show that sparse pre-training, along with dense fine-tuning and soft prompting, offers an effective method for creating high-performing, computationally efficient models in specialized domains.

replace Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context

Authors: Gemini Team, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lei, Ryan Burnell, Libin Bai, Anmol Gulati, Garrett Tanzer, Damien Vincent, Zhufeng Pan, Shibo Wang, Soroosh Mariooryad, Yifan Ding, Xinyang Geng, Fred Alcober, Roy Frostig, Mark Omernick, Lexi Walker, Cosmin Paduraru, Christina Sorokin, Andrea Tacchetti, Colin Gaffney, Samira Daruki, Olcan Sercinoglu, Zach Gleicher, Juliette Love, Paul Voigtlaender, Rohan Jain, Gabriela Surita, Kareem Mohamed, Rory Blevins, Junwhan Ahn, Tao Zhu, Kornraphop Kawintiranon, Orhan Firat, Yiming Gu, Yujing Zhang, Matthew Rahtz, Manaal Faruqui, Natalie Clay, Justin Gilmer, JD Co-Reyes, Ivo Penchev, Rui Zhu, Nobuyuki Morioka, Kevin Hui, Krishna Haridasan, Victor Campos, Mahdis Mahdieh, Mandy Guo, Samer Hassan, Kevin Kilgour, Arpi Vezer, Heng-Tze Cheng, Raoul de Liedekerke, Siddharth Goyal, Paul Barham, DJ Strouse, Seb Noury, Jonas Adler, Mukund Sundararajan, Sharad Vikram, Dmitry Lepikhin, Michela Paganini, Xavier Garcia, Fan Yang, Dasha Valter, Maja Trebacz, Kiran Vodrahalli, Chulayuth Asawaroengchai, Roman Ring, Norbert Kalb, Livio Baldini Soares, Siddhartha Brahma, David Steiner, Tianhe Yu, Fabian Mentzer, Antoine He, Lucas Gonzalez, Bibo Xu, Raphael Lopez Kaufman, Laurent El Shafey, Junhyuk Oh, Tom Hennigan, George van den Driessche, Seth Odoom, Mario Lucic, Becca Roelofs, Sid Lall, Amit Marathe, Betty Chan, Santiago Ontanon, Luheng He, Denis Teplyashin, Jonathan Lai, Phil Crone, Bogdan Damoc, Lewis Ho, Sebastian Riedel, Karel Lenc, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Yang Xu, Mehran Kazemi, Ehsan Amid, Anastasia Petrushkina, Kevin Swersky, Ali Khodaei, Gowoon Chen, Chris Larkin, Mario Pinto, Geng Yan, Adria Puigdomenech Badia, Piyush Patil, Steven Hansen, Dave Orr, Sebastien M. R. Arnold, Jordan Grimstad, Andrew Dai, Sholto Douglas, Rishika Sinha, Vikas Yadav, Xi Chen, Elena Gribovskaya, Jacob Austin, Jeffrey Zhao, Kaushal Patel, Paul Komarek, Sophia Austin, Sebastian Borgeaud, Linda Friso, Abhimanyu Goyal, Ben Caine, Kris Cao, Da-Woon Chung, Matthew Lamm, Gabe Barth-Maron, Thais Kagohara, Kate Olszewska, Mia Chen, Kaushik Shivakumar, Rishabh Agarwal, Harshal Godhia, Ravi Rajwar, Javier Snaider, Xerxes Dotiwalla, Yuan Liu, Aditya Barua, Victor Ungureanu, Yuan Zhang, Bat-Orgil Batsaikhan, Mateo Wirth, James Qin, Ivo Danihelka, Tulsee Doshi, Martin Chadwick, Jilin Chen, Sanil Jain, Quoc Le, Arjun Kar, Madhu Gurumurthy, Cheng Li, Ruoxin Sang, Fangyu Liu, Lampros Lamprou, Rich Munoz, Nathan Lintz, Harsh Mehta, Heidi Howard, Malcolm Reynolds, Lora Aroyo, Quan Wang, Lorenzo Blanco, Albin Cassirer, Jordan Griffith, Dipanjan Das, Stephan Lee, Jakub Sygnowski, Zach Fisher, James Besley, Richard Powell, Zafarali Ahmed, Dominik Paulus, David Reitter, Zalan Borsos, Rishabh Joshi, Aedan Pope, Steven Hand, Vittorio Selo, Vihan Jain, Nikhil Sethi, Megha Goel, Takaki Makino, Rhys May, Zhen Yang, Johan Schalkwyk, Christina Butterfield, Anja Hauth, Alex Goldin, Will Hawkins, Evan Senter, Sergey Brin, Oliver Woodman, Marvin Ritter, Eric Noland, Minh Giang, Vijay Bolina, Lisa Lee, Tim Blyth, Ian Mackinnon, Machel Reid, Obaid Sarvana, David Silver, Alexander Chen, Lily Wang, Loren Maggiore, Oscar Chang, Nithya Attaluri, Gregory Thornton, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Oskar Bunyan, Nir Levine, Timothy Chung, Evgenii Eltyshev, Xiance Si, Timothy Lillicrap, Demetra Brady, Vaibhav Aggarwal, Boxi Wu, Yuanzhong Xu, Ross McIlroy, Kartikeya Badola, Paramjit Sandhu, Erica Moreira, Wojciech Stokowiec, Ross Hemsley, Dong Li, Alex Tudor, Pranav Shyam, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Salem Haykal, Pablo Sprechmann, Xiang Zhou, Diana Mincu, Yujia Li, Ravi Addanki, Kalpesh Krishna, Xiao Wu, Alexandre Frechette, Matan Eyal, Allan Dafoe, Dave Lacey, Jay Whang, Thi Avrahami, Ye Zhang, Emanuel Taropa, Hanzhao Lin, Daniel Toyama, Eliza Rutherford, Motoki Sano, HyunJeong Choe, Alex Tomala, Chalence Safranek-Shrader, Nora Kassner, Mantas Pajarskas, Matt Harvey, Sean Sechrist, Meire Fortunato, Christina Lyu, Gamaleldin Elsayed, Chenkai Kuang, James Lottes, Eric Chu, Chao Jia, Chih-Wei Chen, Peter Humphreys, Kate Baumli, Connie Tao, Rajkumar Samuel, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Anders Andreassen, Nemanja Raki\'cevi\'c, Dominik Grewe, Aviral Kumar, Stephanie Winkler, Jonathan Caton, Andrew Brock, Sid Dalmia, Hannah Sheahan, Iain Barr, Yingjie Miao, Paul Natsev, Jacob Devlin, Feryal Behbahani, Flavien Prost, Yanhua Sun, Artiom Myaskovsky, Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Dan Hurt, Angeliki Lazaridou, Xi Xiong, Ce Zheng, Fabio Pardo, Xiaowei Li, Dan Horgan, Joe Stanton, Moran Ambar, Fei Xia, Alejandro Lince, Mingqiu Wang, Basil Mustafa, Albert Webson, Hyo Lee, Rohan Anil, Martin Wicke, Timothy Dozat, Abhishek Sinha, Enrique Piqueras, Elahe Dabir, Shyam Upadhyay, Anudhyan Boral, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Corey Fry, Josip Djolonga, Yi Su, Jake Walker, Jane Labanowski, Ronny Huang, Vedant Misra, Jeremy Chen, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Avi Singh, Shruti Rijhwani, Dian Yu, Alex Castro-Ros, Beer Changpinyo, Romina Datta, Sumit Bagri, Arnar Mar Hrafnkelsson, Marcello Maggioni, Daniel Zheng, Yury Sulsky, Shaobo Hou, Tom Le Paine, Antoine Yang, Jason Riesa, Dominika Rogozinska, Dror Marcus, Dalia El Badawy, Qiao Zhang, Luyu Wang, Helen Miller, Jeremy Greer, Lars Lowe Sjos, Azade Nova, Heiga Zen, Rahma Chaabouni, Mihaela Rosca, Jiepu Jiang, Charlie Chen, Ruibo Liu, Tara Sainath, Maxim Krikun, Alex Polozov, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Josh Newlan, Zeyncep Cankara, Soo Kwak, Yunhan Xu, Phil Chen, Andy Coenen, Clemens Meyer, Katerina Tsihlas, Ada Ma, Juraj Gottweis, Jinwei Xing, Chenjie Gu, Jin Miao, Christian Frank, Zeynep Cankara, Sanjay Ganapathy, Ishita Dasgupta, Steph Hughes-Fitt, Heng Chen, David Reid, Keran Rong, Hongmin Fan, Joost van Amersfoort, Vincent Zhuang, Aaron Cohen, Shixiang Shane Gu, Anhad Mohananey, Anastasija Ilic, Taylor Tobin, John Wieting, Anna Bortsova, Phoebe Thacker, Emma Wang, Emily Caveness, Justin Chiu, Eren Sezener, Alex Kaskasoli, Steven Baker, Katie Millican, Mohamed Elhawaty, Kostas Aisopos, Carl Lebsack, Nathan Byrd, Hanjun Dai, Wenhao Jia, Matthew Wiethoff, Elnaz Davoodi, Albert Weston, Lakshman Yagati, Arun Ahuja, Isabel Gao, Golan Pundak, Susan Zhang, Michael Azzam, Khe Chai Sim, Sergi Caelles, James Keeling, Abhanshu Sharma, Andy Swing, YaGuang Li, Chenxi Liu, Carrie Grimes Bostock, Yamini Bansal, Zachary Nado, Ankesh Anand, Josh Lipschultz, Abhijit Karmarkar, Lev Proleev, Abe Ittycheriah, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, George Polovets, Aleksandra Faust, Jiao Sun, Alban Rrustemi, Pen Li, Rakesh Shivanna, Jeremiah Liu, Chris Welty, Federico Lebron, Anirudh Baddepudi, Sebastian Krause, Emilio Parisotto, Radu Soricut, Zheng Xu, Dawn Bloxwich, Melvin Johnson, Behnam Neyshabur, Justin Mao-Jones, Renshen Wang, Vinay Ramasesh, Zaheer Abbas, Arthur Guez, Constant Segal, Duc Dung Nguyen, James Svensson, Le Hou, Sarah York, Kieran Milan, Sophie Bridgers, Wiktor Gworek, Marco Tagliasacchi, James Lee-Thorp, Michael Chang, Alexey Guseynov, Ale Jakse Hartman, Michael Kwong, Ruizhe Zhao, Sheleem Kashem, Elizabeth Cole, Antoine Miech, Richard Tanburn, Mary Phuong, Filip Pavetic, Sebastien Cevey, Ramona Comanescu, Richard Ives, Sherry Yang, Cosmo Du, Bo Li, Zizhao Zhang, Mariko Iinuma, Clara Huiyi Hu, Aurko Roy, Shaan Bijwadia, Zhenkai Zhu, Danilo Martins, Rachel Saputro, Anita Gergely, Steven Zheng, Dawei Jia, Ioannis Antonoglou, Adam Sadovsky, Shane Gu, Yingying Bi, Alek Andreev, Sina Samangooei, Mina Khan, Tomas Kocisky, Angelos Filos, Chintu Kumar, Colton Bishop, Adams Yu, Sarah Hodkinson, Sid Mittal, Premal Shah, Alexandre Moufarek, Yong Cheng, Adam Bloniarz, Jaehoon Lee, Pedram Pejman, Paul Michel, Stephen Spencer, Vladimir Feinberg, Xuehan Xiong, Nikolay Savinov, Charlotte Smith, Siamak Shakeri, Dustin Tran, Mary Chesus, Bernd Bohnet, George Tucker, Tamara von Glehn, Carrie Muir, Yiran Mao, Hideto Kazawa, Ambrose Slone, Kedar Soparkar, Disha Shrivastava, James Cobon-Kerr, Michael Sharman, Jay Pavagadhi, Carlos Araya, Karolis Misiunas, Nimesh Ghelani, Michael Laskin, David Barker, Qiujia Li, Anton Briukhov, Neil Houlsby, Mia Glaese, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Nathan Schucher, Yunhao Tang, Eli Collins, Hyeontaek Lim, Fangxiaoyu Feng, Adria Recasens, Guangda Lai, Alberto Magni, Nicola De Cao, Aditya Siddhant, Zoe Ashwood, Jordi Orbay, Mostafa Dehghani, Jenny Brennan, Yifan He, Kelvin Xu, Yang Gao, Carl Saroufim, James Molloy, Xinyi Wu, Seb Arnold, Solomon Chang, Julian Schrittwieser, Elena Buchatskaya, Soroush Radpour, Martin Polacek, Skye Giordano, Ankur Bapna, Simon Tokumine, Vincent Hellendoorn, Thibault Sottiaux, Sarah Cogan, Aliaksei Severyn, Mohammad Saleh, Shantanu Thakoor, Laurent Shefey, Siyuan Qiao, Meenu Gaba, Shuo-yiin Chang, Craig Swanson, Biao Zhang, Benjamin Lee, Paul Kishan Rubenstein, Gan Song, Tom Kwiatkowski, Anna Koop, Ajay Kannan, David Kao, Parker Schuh, Axel Stjerngren, Golnaz Ghiasi, Gena Gibson, Luke Vilnis, Ye Yuan, Felipe Tiengo Ferreira, Aishwarya Kamath, Ted Klimenko, Ken Franko, Kefan Xiao, Indro Bhattacharya, Miteyan Patel, Rui Wang, Alex Morris, Robin Strudel, Vivek Sharma, Peter Choy, Sayed Hadi Hashemi, Jessica Landon, Mara Finkelstein, Priya Jhakra, Justin Frye, Megan Barnes, Matthew Mauger, Dennis Daun, Khuslen Baatarsukh, Matthew Tung, Wael Farhan, Henryk Michalewski, Fabio Viola, Felix de Chaumont Quitry, Charline Le Lan, Tom Hudson, Qingze Wang, Felix Fischer, Ivy Zheng, Elspeth White, Anca Dragan, Jean-baptiste Alayrac, Eric Ni, Alexander Pritzel, Adam Iwanicki, Michael Isard, Anna Bulanova, Lukas Zilka, Ethan Dyer, Devendra Sachan, Srivatsan Srinivasan, Hannah Muckenhirn, Honglong Cai, Amol Mandhane, Mukarram Tariq, Jack W. Rae, Gary Wang, Kareem Ayoub, Nicholas FitzGerald, Yao Zhao, Woohyun Han, Chris Alberti, Dan Garrette, Kashyap Krishnakumar, Mai Gimenez, Anselm Levskaya, Daniel Sohn, Josip Matak, Inaki Iturrate, Michael B. Chang, Jackie Xiang, Yuan Cao, Nishant Ranka, Geoff Brown, Adrian Hutter, Vahab Mirrokni, Nanxin Chen, Kaisheng Yao, Zoltan Egyed, Francois Galilee, Tyler Liechty, Praveen Kallakuri, Evan Palmer, Sanjay Ghemawat, Jasmine Liu, David Tao, Chloe Thornton, Tim Green, Mimi Jasarevic, Sharon Lin, Victor Cotruta, Yi-Xuan Tan, Noah Fiedel, Hongkun Yu, Ed Chi, Alexander Neitz, Jens Heitkaemper, Anu Sinha, Denny Zhou, Yi Sun, Charbel Kaed, Brice Hulse, Swaroop Mishra, Maria Georgaki, Sneha Kudugunta, Clement Farabet, Izhak Shafran, Daniel Vlasic, Anton Tsitsulin, Rajagopal Ananthanarayanan, Alen Carin, Guolong Su, Pei Sun, Shashank V, Gabriel Carvajal, Josef Broder, Iulia Comsa, Alena Repina, William Wong, Warren Weilun Chen, Peter Hawkins, Egor Filonov, Lucia Loher, Christoph Hirnschall, Weiyi Wang, Jingchen Ye, Andrea Burns, Hardie Cate, Diana Gage Wright, Federico Piccinini, Lei Zhang, Chu-Cheng Lin, Ionel Gog, Yana Kulizhskaya, Ashwin Sreevatsa, Shuang Song, Luis C. Cobo, Anand Iyer, Chetan Tekur, Guillermo Garrido, Zhuyun Xiao, Rupert Kemp, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Hui Li, Ananth Agarwal, Christel Ngani, Kati Goshvadi, Rebeca Santamaria-Fernandez, Wojciech Fica, Xinyun Chen, Chris Gorgolewski, Sean Sun, Roopal Garg, Xinyu Ye, S. M. Ali Eslami, Nan Hua, Jon Simon, Pratik Joshi, Yelin Kim, Ian Tenney, Sahitya Potluri, Lam Nguyen Thiet, Quan Yuan, Florian Luisier, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Salvatore Scellato, Praveen Srinivasan, Minmin Chen, Vinod Koverkathu, Valentin Dalibard, Yaming Xu, Brennan Saeta, Keith Anderson, Thibault Sellam, Nick Fernando, Fantine Huot, Junehyuk Jung, Mani Varadarajan, Michael Quinn, Amit Raul, Maigo Le, Ruslan Habalov, Jon Clark, Komal Jalan, Kalesha Bullard, Achintya Singhal, Thang Luong, Boyu Wang, Sujeevan Rajayogam, Julian Eisenschlos, Johnson Jia, Daniel Finchelstein, Alex Yakubovich, Daniel Balle, Michael Fink, Sameer Agarwal, Jing Li, Dj Dvijotham, Shalini Pal, Kai Kang, Jaclyn Konzelmann, Jennifer Beattie, Olivier Dousse, Diane Wu, Remi Crocker, Chen Elkind, Siddhartha Reddy Jonnalagadda, Jong Lee, Dan Holtmann-Rice, Krystal Kallarackal, Rosanne Liu, Denis Vnukov, Neera Vats, Luca Invernizzi, Mohsen Jafari, Huanjie Zhou, Lilly Taylor, Jennifer Prendki, Marcus Wu, Tom Eccles, Tianqi Liu, Kavya Kopparapu, Francoise Beaufays, Christof Angermueller, Andreea Marzoca, Shourya Sarcar, Hilal Dib, Jeff Stanway, Frank Perbet, Nejc Trdin, Rachel Sterneck, Andrey Khorlin, Dinghua Li, Xihui Wu, Sonam Goenka, David Madras, Sasha Goldshtein, Willi Gierke, Tong Zhou, Yaxin Liu, Yannie Liang, Anais White, Yunjie Li, Shreya Singh, Sanaz Bahargam, Mark Epstein, Sujoy Basu, Li Lao, Adnan Ozturel, Carl Crous, Alex Zhai, Han Lu, Zora Tung, Neeraj Gaur, Alanna Walton, Lucas Dixon, Ming Zhang, Amir Globerson, Grant Uy, Andrew Bolt, Olivia Wiles, Milad Nasr, Ilia Shumailov, Marco Selvi, Francesco Piccinno, Ricardo Aguilar, Sara McCarthy, Misha Khalman, Mrinal Shukla, Vlado Galic, John Carpenter, Kevin Villela, Haibin Zhang, Harry Richardson, James Martens, Matko Bosnjak, Shreyas Rammohan Belle, Jeff Seibert, Mahmoud Alnahlawi, Brian McWilliams, Sankalp Singh, Annie Louis, Wen Ding, Dan Popovici, Lenin Simicich, Laura Knight, Pulkit Mehta, Nishesh Gupta, Chongyang Shi, Saaber Fatehi, Jovana Mitrovic, Alex Grills, Joseph Pagadora, Dessie Petrova, Danielle Eisenbud, Zhishuai Zhang, Damion Yates, Bhavishya Mittal, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Yannis Assael, Thomas Brovelli, Prateek Jain, Mihajlo Velimirovic, Canfer Akbulut, Jiaqi Mu, Wolfgang Macherey, Ravin Kumar, Jun Xu, Haroon Qureshi, Gheorghe Comanici, Jeremy Wiesner, Zhitao Gong, Anton Ruddock, Matthias Bauer, Nick Felt, Anirudh GP, Anurag Arnab, Dustin Zelle, Jonas Rothfuss, Bill Rosgen, Ashish Shenoy, Bryan Seybold, Xinjian Li, Jayaram Mudigonda, Goker Erdogan, Jiawei Xia, Jiri Simsa, Andrea Michi, Yi Yao, Christopher Yew, Steven Kan, Isaac Caswell, Carey Radebaugh, Andre Elisseeff, Pedro Valenzuela, Kay McKinney, Kim Paterson, Albert Cui, Eri Latorre-Chimoto, Solomon Kim, William Zeng, Ken Durden, Priya Ponnapalli, Tiberiu Sosea, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, James Manyika, Brona Robenek, Harsha Vashisht, Sebastien Pereira, Hoi Lam, Marko Velic, Denese Owusu-Afriyie, Katherine Lee, Tolga Bolukbasi, Alicia Parrish, Shawn Lu, Jane Park, Balaji Venkatraman, Alice Talbert, Lambert Rosique, Yuchung Cheng, Andrei Sozanschi, Adam Paszke, Praveen Kumar, Jessica Austin, Lu Li, Khalid Salama, Wooyeol Kim, Nandita Dukkipati, Anthony Baryshnikov, Christos Kaplanis, XiangHai Sheng, Yuri Chervonyi, Caglar Unlu, Diego de Las Casas, Harry Askham, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Felix Gimeno, Siim Poder, Chester Kwak, Matt Miecnikowski, Vahab Mirrokni, Alek Dimitriev, Aaron Parisi, Dangyi Liu, Tomy Tsai, Toby Shevlane, Christina Kouridi, Drew Garmon, Adrian Goedeckemeyer, Adam R. Brown, Anitha Vijayakumar, Ali Elqursh, Sadegh Jazayeri, Jin Huang, Sara Mc Carthy, Jay Hoover, Lucy Kim, Sandeep Kumar, Wei Chen, Courtney Biles, Garrett Bingham, Evan Rosen, Lisa Wang, Qijun Tan, David Engel, Francesco Pongetti, Dario de Cesare, Dongseong Hwang, Lily Yu, Jennifer Pullman, Srini Narayanan, Kyle Levin, Siddharth Gopal, Megan Li, Asaf Aharoni, Trieu Trinh, Jessica Lo, Norman Casagrande, Roopali Vij, Loic Matthey, Bramandia Ramadhana, Austin Matthews, CJ Carey, Matthew Johnson, Kremena Goranova, Rohin Shah, Shereen Ashraf, Kingshuk Dasgupta, Rasmus Larsen, Yicheng Wang, Manish Reddy Vuyyuru, Chong Jiang, Joana Ijazi, Kazuki Osawa, Celine Smith, Ramya Sree Boppana, Taylan Bilal, Yuma Koizumi, Ying Xu, Yasemin Altun, Nir Shabat, Ben Bariach, Alex Korchemniy, Kiam Choo, Olaf Ronneberger, Chimezie Iwuanyanwu, Shubin Zhao, David Soergel, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Irene Cai, Shariq Iqbal, Martin Sundermeyer, Zhe Chen, Elie Bursztein, Chaitanya Malaviya, Fadi Biadsy, Prakash Shroff, Inderjit Dhillon, Tejasi Latkar, Chris Dyer, Hannah Forbes, Massimo Nicosia, Vitaly Nikolaev, Somer Greene, Marin Georgiev, Pidong Wang, Nina Martin, Hanie Sedghi, John Zhang, Praseem Banzal, Doug Fritz, Vikram Rao, Xuezhi Wang, Jiageng Zhang, Viorica Patraucean, Dayou Du, Igor Mordatch, Ivan Jurin, Lewis Liu, Ayush Dubey, Abhi Mohan, Janek Nowakowski, Vlad-Doru Ion, Nan Wei, Reiko Tojo, Maria Abi Raad, Drew A. Hudson, Vaishakh Keshava, Shubham Agrawal, Kevin Ramirez, Zhichun Wu, Hoang Nguyen, Ji Liu, Madhavi Sewak, Bryce Petrini, DongHyun Choi, Ivan Philips, Ziyue Wang, Ioana Bica, Ankush Garg, Jarek Wilkiewicz, Priyanka Agrawal, Xiaowei Li, Danhao Guo, Emily Xue, Naseer Shaik, Andrew Leach, Sadh MNM Khan, Julia Wiesinger, Sammy Jerome, Abhishek Chakladar, Alek Wenjiao Wang, Tina Ornduff, Folake Abu, Alireza Ghaffarkhah, Marcus Wainwright, Mario Cortes, Frederick Liu, Joshua Maynez, Andreas Terzis, Pouya Samangouei, Riham Mansour, Tomasz K\k{e}pa, Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier Aubet, Anton Algymr, Dan Banica, Agoston Weisz, Andras Orban, Alexandre Senges, Ewa Andrejczuk, Mark Geller, Niccolo Dal Santo, Valentin Anklin, Majd Al Merey, Martin Baeuml, Trevor Strohman, Junwen Bai, Slav Petrov, Yonghui Wu, Demis Hassabis, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Jeffrey Dean, Oriol Vinyals

Abstract: In this report, we introduce the Gemini 1.5 family of models, representing the next generation of highly compute-efficient multimodal models capable of recalling and reasoning over fine-grained information from millions of tokens of context, including multiple long documents and hours of video and audio. The family includes two new models: (1) an updated Gemini 1.5 Pro, which exceeds the February version on the great majority of capabilities and benchmarks; (2) Gemini 1.5 Flash, a more lightweight variant designed for efficiency with minimal regression in quality. Gemini 1.5 models achieve near-perfect recall on long-context retrieval tasks across modalities, improve the state-of-the-art in long-document QA, long-video QA and long-context ASR, and match or surpass Gemini 1.0 Ultra's state-of-the-art performance across a broad set of benchmarks. Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens, a generational leap over existing models such as Claude 3.0 (200k) and GPT-4 Turbo (128k). Finally, we highlight real-world use cases, such as Gemini 1.5 collaborating with professionals on completing their tasks achieving 26 to 75% time savings across 10 different job categories, as well as surprising new capabilities of large language models at the frontier; when given a grammar manual for Kalamang, a language with fewer than 200 speakers worldwide, the model learns to translate English to Kalamang at a similar level to a person who learned from the same content.

replace Rejection Improves Reliability: Training LLMs to Refuse Unknown Questions Using RL from Knowledge Feedback

Authors: Hongshen Xu, Zichen Zhu, Situo Zhang, Da Ma, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate erroneous outputs, known as hallucinations, due to their limitations in discerning questions beyond their knowledge scope. While addressing hallucination has been a focal point in research, previous efforts primarily concentrate on enhancing correctness without giving due consideration to the significance of rejection mechanisms. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the role of rejection, introducing the notion of model reliability along with corresponding metrics. These metrics measure the model's ability to provide accurate responses while adeptly rejecting questions exceeding its knowledge boundaries, thereby minimizing hallucinations. To improve the inherent reliability of LLMs, we present a novel alignment framework called Reinforcement Learning from Knowledge Feedback (RLKF). RLKF leverages knowledge feedback to dynamically determine the model's knowledge boundary and trains a reliable reward model to encourage the refusal of out-of-knowledge questions. Experimental results on mathematical questions affirm the substantial efficacy of RLKF in significantly enhancing LLM reliability.

replace STaR-GATE: Teaching Language Models to Ask Clarifying Questions

Authors: Chinmaya Andukuri, Jan-Philipp Fr\"anken, Tobias Gerstenberg, Noah D. Goodman

Abstract: When prompting language models to complete a task, users often leave important aspects unsaid. While asking questions could resolve this ambiguity (GATE; Li et al., 2023), models often struggle to ask good questions. We explore a language model's ability to self-improve (STaR; Zelikman et al., 2022) by rewarding the model for generating useful questions-a simple method we dub STaR-GATE. We generate a synthetic dataset of 25,500 unique persona-task prompts to simulate conversations between a pretrained language model-the Questioner-and a Roleplayer whose preferences are unknown to the Questioner. By asking questions, the Questioner elicits preferences from the Roleplayer. The Questioner is iteratively finetuned on questions that increase the probability of high-quality responses to the task, which are generated by an Oracle with access to the Roleplayer's latent preferences. After two iterations of self-improvement, the Questioner asks better questions, allowing it to generate responses that are preferred over responses from the initial model on 72% of tasks. Our results indicate that teaching a language model to ask better questions leads to better personalized responses.

replace MANGO: A Benchmark for Evaluating Mapping and Navigation Abilities of Large Language Models

Authors: Peng Ding, Jiading Fang, Peng Li, Kangrui Wang, Xiaochen Zhou, Mo Yu, Jing Li, Matthew R. Walter, Hongyuan Mei

Abstract: Large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have recently achieved astonishing performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we propose MANGO, a benchmark to evaluate their capabilities to perform text-based mapping and navigation. Our benchmark includes 53 mazes taken from a suite of textgames: each maze is paired with a walkthrough that visits every location but does not cover all possible paths. The task is question-answering: for each maze, a large language model reads the walkthrough and answers hundreds of mapping and navigation questions such as "How should you go to Attic from West of House?" and "Where are we if we go north and east from Cellar?". Although these questions are easy to humans, it turns out that even GPT-4, the best-to-date language model, performs poorly at answering them. Further, our experiments suggest that a strong mapping and navigation ability would benefit large language models in performing relevant downstream tasks, such as playing textgames. Our MANGO benchmark will facilitate future research on methods that improve the mapping and navigation capabilities of language models. We host our leaderboard, data, code, and evaluation program at https://mango.ttic.edu and https://github.com/oaklight/mango/.

URLs: https://mango.ttic.edu, https://github.com/oaklight/mango/.

replace Large Language Models are Capable of Offering Cognitive Reappraisal, if Guided

Authors: Hongli Zhan, Allen Zheng, Yoon Kyung Lee, Jina Suh, Junyi Jessy Li, Desmond C. Ong

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have offered new opportunities for emotional support, and recent work has shown that they can produce empathic responses to people in distress. However, long-term mental well-being requires emotional self-regulation, where a one-time empathic response falls short. This work takes a first step by engaging with cognitive reappraisals, a strategy from psychology practitioners that uses language to targetedly change negative appraisals that an individual makes of the situation; such appraisals is known to sit at the root of human emotional experience. We hypothesize that psychologically grounded principles could enable such advanced psychology capabilities in LLMs, and design RESORT which consists of a series of reappraisal constitutions across multiple dimensions that can be used as LLM instructions. We conduct a first-of-its-kind expert evaluation (by clinical psychologists with M.S. or Ph.D. degrees) of an LLM's zero-shot ability to generate cognitive reappraisal responses to medium-length social media messages asking for support. This fine-grained evaluation showed that even LLMs at the 7B scale guided by RESORT are capable of generating empathic responses that can help users reappraise their situations.

replace Laying Anchors: Semantically Priming Numerals in Language Modeling

Authors: Mandar Sharma, Rutuja Murlidhar Taware, Pravesh Koirala, Nikhil Muralidhar, Naren Ramakrishnan

Abstract: Off-the-shelf pre-trained language models have become the de facto standard in NLP pipelines for a multitude of downstream tasks. However, the inability of these models to properly encode numerals limits their performance on tasks requiring numeric comprehension. We introduce strategies to semantically prime numerals in any corpus by generating anchors governed by the distribution of numerals in said corpus, thereby enabling mathematically grounded representations of these numeral tokens. We establish the superiority of our proposed techniques through evaluation on a range of numeracy tasks for both in-domain (seen) and out-domain (unseen) numerals. Further, we expand our empirical evaluations to numerals ranging from 1 to 10 billion, a significantly broader range compared to previous studies of the same nature, and we demonstrate significant improvements in the mathematical grounding of our learned embeddings.

replace Scalable Model Editing via Customized Expert Networks

Authors: Zihan Yao, Yu He, Tianyu Qi, Ming Li

Abstract: Addressing the issues of hallucinations and outdated knowledge in large language models is critical for their reliable application. Model Editing presents a promising avenue for mitigating these challenges in a cost-effective manner. However, existing methods often suffer from unsatisfactory generalization and unintended effects on non-edited samples. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel approach: Scalable Model Editing via Customized Expert Networks (SCEN), which is a two-stage continuous training paradigm. Specifically, in the first stage, we train lightweight expert networks individually for each piece of knowledge that needs to be updated. Subsequently, we train a corresponding indexing neuron for each expert to control the activation state of that expert. We conducted a series of experiments on the ZsRE and Hallucination benchmarks by tuning the advanced open-source LLM, Llama2, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to current mainstream methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/TAL-auroraX/SCEN.

URLs: https://github.com/TAL-auroraX/SCEN.

replace Forcing Diffuse Distributions out of Language Models

Authors: Yiming Zhang, Avi Schwarzschild, Nicholas Carlini, Zico Kolter, Daphne Ippolito

Abstract: Despite being trained specifically to follow user instructions, today's instructiontuned language models perform poorly when instructed to produce random outputs. For example, when prompted to pick a number uniformly between one and ten Llama-2-13B-chat disproportionately favors the number five, and when tasked with picking a first name at random, Mistral-7B-Instruct chooses Avery 40 times more often than we would expect based on the U.S. population. When these language models are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial, such as language model assisted dataset construction, their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning method that encourages language models to output distributions that are diffuse over valid outcomes. The methods we introduce generalize across a variety of tasks and distributions and make large language models practical for synthetic dataset generation with little human intervention.

replace U2++ MoE: Scaling 4.7x parameters with minimal impact on RTF

Authors: Xingchen Song, Di Wu, Binbin Zhang, Dinghao Zhou, Zhendong Peng, Bo Dang, Fuping Pan, Chao Yang

Abstract: Scale has opened new frontiers in natural language processing, but at a high cost. In response, by learning to only activate a subset of parameters in training and inference, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have been proposed as an energy efficient path to even larger and more capable language models and this shift towards a new generation of foundation models is gaining momentum, particularly within the field of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Recent works that incorporating MoE into ASR models have complex designs such as routing frames via supplementary embedding network, improving multilingual ability for the experts, and utilizing dedicated auxiliary losses for either expert load balancing or specific language handling. We found that delicate designs are not necessary, while an embarrassingly simple substitution of MoE layers for all Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers is competent for the ASR task. To be more specific, we benchmark our proposed model on a large scale inner-source dataset (160k hours), the results show that we can scale our baseline Conformer (Dense-225M) to its MoE counterparts (MoE-1B) and achieve Dense-1B level Word Error Rate (WER) while maintaining a Dense-225M level Real Time Factor (RTF). Furthermore, by applying Unified 2-pass framework with bidirectional attention decoders (U2++), we achieve the streaming and non-streaming decoding modes in a single MoE based model, which we call U2++ MoE. We hope that our study can facilitate the research on scaling speech foundation models without sacrificing deployment efficiency.

replace IndicGenBench: A Multilingual Benchmark to Evaluate Generation Capabilities of LLMs on Indic Languages

Authors: Harman Singh, Nitish Gupta, Shikhar Bharadwaj, Dinesh Tewari, Partha Talukdar

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) see increasing adoption across the globe, it is imperative for LLMs to be representative of the linguistic diversity of the world. India is a linguistically diverse country of 1.4 Billion people. To facilitate research on multilingual LLM evaluation, we release IndicGenBench - the largest benchmark for evaluating LLMs on user-facing generation tasks across a diverse set 29 of Indic languages covering 13 scripts and 4 language families. IndicGenBench is composed of diverse generation tasks like cross-lingual summarization, machine translation, and cross-lingual question answering. IndicGenBench extends existing benchmarks to many Indic languages through human curation providing multi-way parallel evaluation data for many under-represented Indic languages for the first time. We evaluate a wide range of proprietary and open-source LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM-2, mT5, Gemma, BLOOM and LLaMA on IndicGenBench in a variety of settings. The largest PaLM-2 models performs the best on most tasks, however, there is a significant performance gap in all languages compared to English showing that further research is needed for the development of more inclusive multilingual language models. IndicGenBench is released at www.github.com/google-research-datasets/indic-gen-bench

replace It Couldn't Help But Overhear: On the Limits of Modelling Meta-Communicative Grounding Acts with Supervised Learning

Authors: Brielen Madureira, David Schlangen

Abstract: Active participation in a conversation is key to building common ground, since understanding is jointly tailored by producers and recipients. Overhearers are deprived of the privilege of performing grounding acts and can only conjecture about intended meanings. Still, data generation and annotation, modelling, training and evaluation of NLP dialogue models place reliance on the overhearing paradigm. How much of the underlying grounding processes are thereby forfeited? As we show, there is evidence pointing to the impossibility of properly modelling human meta-communicative acts with data-driven learning models. In this paper, we discuss this issue and provide a preliminary analysis on the variability of human decisions for requesting clarification. Most importantly, we wish to bring this topic back to the community's table, encouraging discussion on the consequences of having models designed to only "listen in".

replace LLM Discussion: Enhancing the Creativity of Large Language Models via Discussion Framework and Role-Play

Authors: Li-Chun Lu, Shou-Jen Chen, Tsung-Min Pai, Chan-Hung Yu, Hung-yi Lee, Shao-Hua Sun

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional proficiency in natural language processing but often fall short of generating creative and original responses to open-ended questions. To enhance LLM creativity, our key insight is to emulate the human process of inducing collective creativity through engaging discussions with participants from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To this end, we propose LLM Discussion, a three-phase discussion framework that facilitates vigorous and diverging idea exchanges and ensures convergence to creative answers. Moreover, we adopt a role-playing technique by assigning distinct roles to LLMs to combat the homogeneity of LLMs. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed framework with the Alternative Uses Test, Similarities Test, Instances Test, and Scientific Creativity Test through both LLM evaluation and human study. The results show that our proposed framework outperforms single-LLM approaches and existing multi-LLM frameworks across various creativity metrics. The code is available at https://github.com/lawraa/LLM-Discussion.

URLs: https://github.com/lawraa/LLM-Discussion.

replace Learning Domain-Invariant Features for Out-of-Context News Detection

Authors: Yimeng Gu, Mengqi Zhang, Ignacio Castro, Shu Wu, Gareth Tyson

Abstract: Out-of-context news is a common type of misinformation on online media platforms. This involves posting a caption, alongside a mismatched news image. Existing out-of-context news detection models only consider the scenario where pre-labeled data is available for each domain, failing to address the out-of-context news detection on unlabeled domains (e.g. news topics or agencies). In this work, we therefore focus on domain adaptive out-of-context news detection. In order to effectively adapt the detection model to unlabeled news topics or agencies, we propose ConDA-TTA (Contrastive Domain Adaptation with Test-Time Adaptation) which applies contrastive learning and maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to learn domain-invariant features. In addition, we leverage test-time target domain statistics to further assist domain adaptation. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms baselines in most domain adaptation settings on two public datasets, by as much as 2.93% in F1 and 2.08% in accuracy.

replace EMO-KNOW: A Large Scale Dataset on Emotion and Emotion-cause

Authors: Mia Huong Nguyen, Yasith Samaradivakara, Prasanth Sasikumar, Chitralekha Gupta, Suranga Nanayakkara

Abstract: Emotion-Cause analysis has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, most existing datasets are limited in size and number of emotion categories. They often focus on extracting parts of the document that contain the emotion cause and fail to provide more abstractive, generalizable root cause. To bridge this gap, we introduce a large-scale dataset of emotion causes, derived from 9.8 million cleaned tweets over 15 years. We describe our curation process, which includes a comprehensive pipeline for data gathering, cleaning, labeling, and validation, ensuring the dataset's reliability and richness. We extract emotion labels and provide abstractive summarization of the events causing emotions. The final dataset comprises over 700,000 tweets with corresponding emotion-cause pairs spanning 48 emotion classes, validated by human evaluators. The novelty of our dataset stems from its broad spectrum of emotion classes and the abstractive emotion cause that facilitates the development of an emotion-cause knowledge graph for nuanced reasoning. Our dataset will enable the design of emotion-aware systems that account for the diverse emotional responses of different people for the same event.

replace 3M-Health: Multimodal Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation for Mental Health Detection

Authors: Rina Carines Cabral, Siwen Luo, Josiah Poon, Soyeon Caren Han

Abstract: The significance of mental health classification is paramount in contemporary society, where digital platforms serve as crucial sources for monitoring individuals' well-being. However, existing social media mental health datasets primarily consist of text-only samples, potentially limiting the efficacy of models trained on such data. Recognising that humans utilise cross-modal information to comprehend complex situations or issues, we present a novel approach to address the limitations of current methodologies. In this work, we introduce a Multimodal and Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation model for Mental Health Classification, leveraging insights from cross-modal human understanding. Unlike conventional approaches that often rely on simple concatenation to integrate diverse features, our model addresses the challenge of appropriately representing inputs of varying natures (e.g., texts and sounds). To mitigate the computational complexity associated with integrating all features into a single model, we employ a multimodal and multi-teacher architecture. By distributing the learning process across multiple teachers, each specialising in a particular feature extraction aspect, we enhance the overall mental health classification performance. Through experimental validation, we demonstrate the efficacy of our model in achieving improved performance.

replace PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Models

Authors: Zheni Zeng, Jiayi Chen, Huimin Chen, Yukun Yan, Yuxuan Chen, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Abstract: Large language models exhibit aspects of human-level intelligence that catalyze their application as human-like agents in domains such as social simulations, human-machine interactions, and collaborative multi-agent systems. However, the absence of distinct personalities, such as displaying ingratiating behaviors, inconsistent opinions, and uniform response patterns, diminish LLMs utility in practical applications. Addressing this, the development of personality traits in LLMs emerges as a crucial area of research to unlock their latent potential. Existing methods to personify LLMs generally involve strategies like employing stylized training data for instruction tuning or using prompt engineering to simulate different personalities. These methods only capture superficial linguistic styles instead of the core of personalities and are therefore not stable. In this study, we propose PersLLM, integrating psychology-grounded principles of personality: social practice, consistency, and dynamic development, into a comprehensive training methodology. We incorporate personality traits directly into the model parameters, enhancing the model's resistance to induction, promoting consistency, and supporting the dynamic evolution of personality. Single-agent evaluation validates our method's superiority, as it produces responses more aligned with reference personalities compared to other approaches. Case studies for multi-agent communication highlight its benefits in enhancing opinion consistency within individual agents and fostering collaborative creativity among multiple agents in dialogue contexts, potentially benefiting human simulation and multi-agent cooperation. Additionally, human-agent interaction evaluations indicate that our personified models significantly enhance interactive experiences, underscoring the practical implications of our research.

replace Know Your Limits: A Survey of Abstention in Large Language Models

Authors: Bingbing Wen, Jihan Yao, Shangbin Feng, Chenjun Xu, Yulia Tsvetkov, Bill Howe, Lucy Lu Wang

Abstract: Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine abstention from three perspectives: the query, the model, and human values. We organize the literature on abstention methods, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics using this framework, and discuss merits and limitations of prior work. We further identify and motivate areas for future work, centered around whether abstention can be achieved as a meta-capability that transcends specific tasks or domains, while still providing opportunities to optimize abstention abilities based on context.

replace Automatic Generation of Behavioral Test Cases For Natural Language Processing Using Clustering and Prompting

Authors: Ying Li, Rahul Singh, Tarun Joshi, Agus Sudjianto

Abstract: Recent work in behavioral testing for natural language processing (NLP) models, such as Checklist, is inspired by related paradigms in software engineering testing. They allow evaluation of general linguistic capabilities and domain understanding, hence can help evaluate conceptual soundness and identify model weaknesses. However, a major challenge is the creation of test cases. The current packages rely on semi-automated approach using manual development which requires domain expertise and can be time consuming. This paper introduces an automated approach to develop test cases by exploiting the power of large language models and statistical techniques. It clusters the text representations to carefully construct meaningful groups and then apply prompting techniques to automatically generate Minimal Functionality Tests (MFT). The well-known Amazon Reviews corpus is used to demonstrate our approach. We analyze the behavioral test profiles across four different classification algorithms and discuss the limitations and strengths of those models.

replace Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition via Graph Matching

Authors: Junhao Zheng, Haibin Chen, Qianli Ma

Abstract: Cross-domain NER is a practical yet challenging problem since the data scarcity in the real-world scenario. A common practice is first to learn a NER model in a rich-resource general domain and then adapt the model to specific domains. Due to the mismatch problem between entity types across domains, the wide knowledge in the general domain can not effectively transfer to the target domain NER model. To this end, we model the label relationship as a probability distribution and construct label graphs in both source and target label spaces. To enhance the contextual representation with label structures, we fuse the label graph into the word embedding output by BERT. By representing label relationships as graphs, we formulate cross-domain NER as a graph matching problem. Furthermore, the proposed method has good applicability with pre-training methods and is potentially capable of other cross-domain prediction tasks. Empirical results on four datasets show that our method outperforms a series of transfer learning, multi-task learning, and few-shot learning methods.

replace Fairness in Large Language Models in Three Hours

Authors: Thang Doan Viet, Zichong Wang, Minh Nhat Nguyen, Wenbin Zhang

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across various domains but often lack fairness considerations, potentially leading to discriminatory outcomes against marginalized populations. Unlike fairness in traditional machine learning, fairness in LLMs involves unique backgrounds, taxonomies, and fulfillment techniques. This tutorial provides a systematic overview of recent advances in the literature concerning fair LLMs, beginning with real-world case studies to introduce LLMs, followed by an analysis of bias causes therein. The concept of fairness in LLMs is then explored, summarizing the strategies for evaluating bias and the algorithms designed to promote fairness. Additionally, resources for assessing bias in LLMs, including toolkits and datasets, are compiled, and current research challenges and open questions in the field are discussed. The repository is available at \url{https://github.com/LavinWong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models}.

URLs: https://github.com/LavinWong/Fairness-in-Large-Language-Models

replace Self-Taught Evaluators

Authors: Tianlu Wang, Ilia Kulikov, Olga Golovneva, Ping Yu, Weizhe Yuan, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Jason Weston, Xian Li

Abstract: Model-based evaluation is at the heart of successful model development -- as a reward model for training, and as a replacement for human evaluation. To train such evaluators, the standard approach is to collect a large amount of human preference judgments over model responses, which is costly and the data becomes stale as models improve. In this work, we present an approach that aims to im-prove evaluators without human annotations, using synthetic training data only. Starting from unlabeled instructions, our iterative self-improvement scheme generates contrasting model outputs and trains an LLM-as-a-Judge to produce reasoning traces and final judgments, repeating this training at each new iteration using the improved predictions. Without any labeled preference data, our Self-Taught Evaluator can improve a strong LLM (Llama3-70B-Instruct) from 75.4 to 88.3 (88.7 with majority vote) on RewardBench. This outperforms commonly used LLM judges such as GPT-4 and matches the performance of the top-performing reward models trained with labeled examples.

replace Accuracy and Consistency of LLMs in the Registered Dietitian Exam: The Impact of Prompt Engineering and Knowledge Retrieval

Authors: Iman Azimi, Mohan Qi, Li Wang, Amir M. Rahmani, Youlin Li

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are fundamentally transforming human-facing applications in the health and well-being domains: boosting patient engagement, accelerating clinical decision-making, and facilitating medical education. Although state-of-the-art LLMs have shown superior performance in several conversational applications, evaluations within nutrition and diet applications are still insufficient. In this paper, we propose to employ the Registered Dietitian (RD) exam to conduct a standard and comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro, assessing both accuracy and consistency in nutrition queries. Our evaluation includes 1050 RD exam questions encompassing several nutrition topics and proficiency levels. In addition, for the first time, we examine the impact of Zero-Shot (ZS), Chain of Thought (CoT), Chain of Thought with Self Consistency (CoT-SC), and Retrieval Augmented Prompting (RAP) on both accuracy and consistency of the responses. Our findings revealed that while these LLMs obtained acceptable overall performance, their results varied considerably with different prompts and question domains. GPT-4o with CoT-SC prompting outperformed the other approaches, whereas Gemini 1.5 Pro with ZS recorded the highest consistency. For GPT-4o and Claude 3.5, CoT improved the accuracy, and CoT-SC improved both accuracy and consistency. RAP was particularly effective for GPT-4o to answer Expert level questions. Consequently, choosing the appropriate LLM and prompting technique, tailored to the proficiency level and specific domain, can mitigate errors and potential risks in diet and nutrition chatbots.

replace EXAONE 3.0 7.8B Instruction Tuned Language Model

Authors: LG AI Research, :, Soyoung An, Kyunghoon Bae, Eunbi Choi, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Yemuk Choi, Seokhee Hong, Yeonjung Hong, Junwon Hwang, Hyojin Jeon, Gerrard Jeongwon Jo, Hyunjik Jo, Jiyeon Jung, Yountae Jung, Euisoon Kim, Hyosang Kim, Joonkee Kim, Seonghwan Kim, Soyeon Kim, Sunkyoung Kim, Yireun Kim, Youchul Kim, Edward Hwayoung Lee, Haeju Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinsik Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Moontae Lee, Seungjun Lee, Woohyung Lim, Sangha Park, Sooyoun Park, Yongmin Park, Boseong Seo, Sihoon Yang, Heuiyeen Yeen, Kyungjae Yoo, Hyeongu Yun

Abstract: We introduce EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned language model, the first open model in the family of Large Language Models (LLMs) developed by LG AI Research. Among different model sizes, we publicly release the 7.8B instruction-tuned model to promote open research and innovations. Through extensive evaluations across a wide range of public and in-house benchmarks, EXAONE 3.0 demonstrates highly competitive real-world performance with instruction-following capability against other state-of-the-art open models of similar size. Our comparative analysis shows that EXAONE 3.0 excels particularly in Korean, while achieving compelling performance across general tasks and complex reasoning. With its strong real-world effectiveness and bilingual proficiency, we hope that EXAONE keeps contributing to advancements in Expert AI. Our EXAONE 3.0 instruction-tuned model is available at https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-3.0-7.8B-Instruct

URLs: https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE/EXAONE-3.0-7.8B-Instruct

replace PAGED: A Benchmark for Procedural Graphs Extraction from Documents

Authors: Weihong Du, Wenrui Liao, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei

Abstract: Automatic extraction of procedural graphs from documents creates a low-cost way for users to easily understand a complex procedure by skimming visual graphs. Despite the progress in recent studies, it remains unanswered: whether the existing studies have well solved this task (Q1) and whether the emerging large language models (LLMs) can bring new opportunities to this task (Q2). To this end, we propose a new benchmark PAGED, equipped with a large high-quality dataset and standard evaluations. It investigates five state-of-the-art baselines, revealing that they fail to extract optimal procedural graphs well because of their heavy reliance on hand-written rules and limited available data. We further involve three advanced LLMs in PAGED and enhance them with a novel self-refine strategy. The results point out the advantages of LLMs in identifying textual elements and their gaps in building logical structures. We hope PAGED can serve as a major landmark for automatic procedural graph extraction and the investigations in PAGED can offer insights into the research on logic reasoning among non-sequential elements.

replace CARE: A Clue-guided Assistant for CSRs to Read User Manuals

Authors: Weihong Du, Jia Liu, Zujie Wen, Dingnan Jin, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei

Abstract: It is time-saving to build a reading assistant for customer service representations (CSRs) when reading user manuals, especially information-rich ones. Current solutions don't fit the online custom service scenarios well due to the lack of attention to user questions and possible responses. Hence, we propose to develop a time-saving and careful reading assistant for CSRs, named CARE. It can help the CSRs quickly find proper responses from the user manuals via explicit clue chains. Specifically, each of the clue chains is formed by inferring over the user manuals, starting from the question clue aligned with the user question and ending at a possible response. To overcome the shortage of supervised data, we adopt the self-supervised strategy for model learning. The offline experiment shows that CARE is efficient in automatically inferring accurate responses from the user manual. The online experiment further demonstrates the superiority of CARE to reduce CSRs' reading burden and keep high service quality, in particular with >35% decrease in time spent and keeping a >0.75 ICC score.

replace NACL: A General and Effective KV Cache Eviction Framework for LLMs at Inference Time

Authors: Yilong Chen, Guoxia Wang, Junyuan Shang, Shiyao Cui, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Dianhai Yu, Hua Wu

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have ignited an innovative surge of AI applications, marking a new era of exciting possibilities equipped with extended context windows. However, hosting these models is cost-prohibitive mainly due to the extensive memory consumption of KV Cache involving long-context modeling. Despite several works proposing to evict unnecessary tokens from the KV Cache, most of them rely on the biased local statistics of accumulated attention scores and report performance using unconvincing metric like perplexity on inadequate short-text evaluation. In this paper, we propose NACL, a general framework for long-context KV cache eviction that achieves more optimal and efficient eviction in a single operation during the encoding phase. Due to NACL's efficiency, we combine more accurate attention score statistics in PROXY TOKENS EVICTION with the diversified random eviction strategy of RANDOM EVICTION, aiming to alleviate the issue of attention bias and enhance the robustness in maintaining pivotal tokens for long-context modeling tasks. Notably, our method significantly improves the performance on short- and long-text tasks by 80% and 76% respectively, reducing KV Cache by up to 50% with over 95% performance maintenance. The code is available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/ACL2024-NACL.

URLs: https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/ACL2024-NACL.

replace-cross Empowering Large Language Model Agents through Action Learning

Authors: Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Guoyin Wang, Jing Su, Lingpeng Kong, Jingjing Xu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Hongxia Yang

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) Agents have recently garnered increasing interest yet they are limited in their ability to learn from trial and error, a key element of intelligent behavior. In this work, we argue that the capacity to learn new actions from experience is fundamental to the advancement of learning in LLM agents. While humans naturally expand their action spaces and develop skills through experiential learning, LLM agents typically operate within fixed action spaces, limiting their potential for growth. To address these challenges, our study explores open-action learning for language agents. We introduce a framework LearnAct with an iterative learning strategy to create and improve actions in the form of Python functions. In each iteration, LLM revises and updates the currently available actions based on the errors identified in unsuccessful training tasks, thereby enhancing action effectiveness. Our experimental evaluations across Robotic Planning and Alfworld environments reveal that after learning on a few training task instances, our approach to open-action learning markedly improves agent performance for the type of task (by 32 percent in AlfWorld compared to ReAct+Reflexion, for instance) highlighting the importance of experiential action learning in the development of more intelligent LLM agents.

replace-cross Duwak: Dual Watermarks in Large Language Models

Authors: Chaoyi Zhu, Jeroen Galjaard, Pin-Yu Chen, Lydia Y. Chen

Abstract: As large language models (LLM) are increasingly used for text generation tasks, it is critical to audit their usages, govern their applications, and mitigate their potential harms. Existing watermark techniques are shown effective in embedding single human-imperceptible and machine-detectable patterns without significantly affecting generated text quality and semantics. However, the efficiency in detecting watermarks, i.e., the minimum number of tokens required to assert detection with significance and robustness against post-editing, is still debatable. In this paper, we propose, Duwak, to fundamentally enhance the efficiency and quality of watermarking by embedding dual secret patterns in both token probability distribution and sampling schemes. To mitigate expression degradation caused by biasing toward certain tokens, we design a contrastive search to watermark the sampling scheme, which minimizes the token repetition and enhances the diversity. We theoretically explain the interdependency of the two watermarks within Duwak. We evaluate Duwak extensively on Llama2 under various post-editing attacks, against four state-of-the-art watermarking techniques and combinations of them. Our results show that Duwak marked text achieves the highest watermarked text quality at the lowest required token count for detection, up to 70% tokens less than existing approaches, especially under post paraphrasing.

replace-cross Language Models as Critical Thinking Tools: A Case Study of Philosophers

Authors: Andre Ye, Jared Moore, Rose Novick, Amy X. Zhang

Abstract: Current work in language models (LMs) helps us speed up or even skip thinking by accelerating and automating cognitive work. But can LMs help us with critical thinking -- thinking in deeper, more reflective ways which challenge assumptions, clarify ideas, and engineer new concepts? We treat philosophy as a case study in critical thinking, and interview 21 professional philosophers about how they engage in critical thinking and on their experiences with LMs. We find that philosophers do not find LMs to be useful because they lack a sense of selfhood (memory, beliefs, consistency) and initiative (curiosity, proactivity). We propose the selfhood-initiative model for critical thinking tools to characterize this gap. Using the model, we formulate three roles LMs could play as critical thinking tools: the Interlocutor, the Monitor, and the Respondent. We hope that our work inspires LM researchers to further develop LMs as critical thinking tools and philosophers and other 'critical thinkers' to imagine intellectually substantive uses of LMs.

replace-cross Long and Short Guidance in Score identity Distillation for One-Step Text-to-Image Generation

Authors: Mingyuan Zhou, Zhendong Wang, Huangjie Zheng, Hai Huang

Abstract: Diffusion-based text-to-image generation models trained on extensive text-image pairs have shown the capacity to generate photorealistic images consistent with textual descriptions. However, a significant limitation of these models is their slow sample generation, which requires iterative refinement through the same network. In this paper, we enhance Score identity Distillation (SiD) by developing long and short classifier-free guidance (LSG) to efficiently distill pretrained Stable Diffusion models without using real training data. SiD aims to optimize a model-based explicit score matching loss, utilizing a score-identity-based approximation alongside the proposed LSG for practical computation. By training exclusively with fake images synthesized with its one-step generator, SiD equipped with LSG rapidly improves FID and CLIP scores, achieving state-of-the-art FID performance while maintaining a competitive CLIP score. Specifically, its data-free distillation of Stable Diffusion 1.5 achieves a record low FID of 8.15 on the COCO-2014 validation set, with a CLIP score of 0.304 at an LSG scale of 1.5, and an FID of 9.56 with a CLIP score of 0.313 at an LSG scale of 2. Our code and distilled one-step text-to-image generators are available at https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD-LSG.

URLs: https://github.com/mingyuanzhou/SiD-LSG.

replace-cross Tell Me What's Next: Textual Foresight for Generic UI Representations

Authors: Andrea Burns, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer

Abstract: Mobile app user interfaces (UIs) are rich with action, text, structure, and image content that can be utilized to learn generic UI representations for tasks like automating user commands, summarizing content, and evaluating the accessibility of user interfaces. Prior work has learned strong visual representations with local or global captioning losses, but fails to retain both granularities. To combat this, we propose Textual Foresight, a novel pretraining objective for learning UI screen representations. Textual Foresight generates global text descriptions of future UI states given a current UI and local action taken. Our approach requires joint reasoning over elements and entire screens, resulting in improved UI features: on generation tasks, UI agents trained with Textual Foresight outperform state-of-the-art by 2% with 28x fewer images. We train with our newly constructed mobile app dataset, OpenApp, which results in the first public dataset for app UI representation learning. OpenApp enables new baselines, and we find Textual Foresight improves average task performance over them by 5.7% while having access to 2x less data.

replace-cross Research Trends for the Interplay between Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs

Authors: Hanieh Khorashadizadeh, Fatima Zahra Amara, Morteza Ezzabady, Fr\'ed\'eric Ieng, Sanju Tiwari, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Jinghua Groppe, Soror Sahri, Farah Benamara, Sven Groppe

Abstract: This survey investigates the synergistic relationship between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which is crucial for advancing AI's capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and language processing. It aims to address gaps in current research by exploring areas such as KG Question Answering, ontology generation, KG validation, and the enhancement of KG accuracy and consistency through LLMs. The paper further examines the roles of LLMs in generating descriptive texts and natural language queries for KGs. Through a structured analysis that includes categorizing LLM-KG interactions, examining methodologies, and investigating collaborative uses and potential biases, this study seeks to provide new insights into the combined potential of LLMs and KGs. It highlights the importance of their interaction for improving AI applications and outlines future research directions.

replace-cross What Matters in Transformers? Not All Attention is Needed

Authors: Shwai He, Guoheng Sun, Zheyu Shen, Ang Li

Abstract: Scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks. However, it also introduces redundant structures, posing challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some recognition of redundancy in LLMs, the variability of redundancy across different modules, such as MLP and Attention layers, is under-explored. In this work, we investigate the varying redundancy across different modules within Transformers, including Blocks, MLP, and Attention layers, using a similarity-based metric. This metric operates on the premise that redundant structures produce outputs highly similar to their inputs. Surprisingly, while attention layers are essential for transformers and distinguish them from other mainstream architectures, we found that a large proportion of attention layers exhibit excessively high similarity and can be safely pruned without degrading performance, leading to reduced memory and computation costs. Additionally, we further propose a method that jointly drops Attention and MLP layers, achieving improved performance and dropping ratios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, e.g., Llama-3-70B maintains comparable performance even after pruning half of the attention layers. Our findings provide valuable insights for future network architecture design. The code is released at: \url{https://github.com/Shwai-He/LLM-Drop}.

URLs: https://github.com/Shwai-He/LLM-Drop

replace-cross A Survey on Mixture of Experts

Authors: Weilin Cai, Juyong Jiang, Fan Wang, Jing Tang, Sunghun Kim, Jiayi Huang

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have garnered unprecedented advancements across diverse fields, ranging from natural language processing to computer vision and beyond. The prowess of LLMs is underpinned by their substantial model size, extensive and diverse datasets, and the vast computational power harnessed during training, all of which contribute to the emergent abilities of LLMs (e.g., in-context learning) that are not present in small models. Within this context, the mixture of experts (MoE) has emerged as an effective method for substantially scaling up model capacity with minimal computation overhead, gaining significant attention from academia and industry. Despite its growing prevalence, there lacks a systematic and comprehensive review of the literature on MoE. This survey seeks to bridge that gap, serving as an essential resource for researchers delving into the intricacies of MoE. We first briefly introduce the structure of the MoE layer, followed by proposing a new taxonomy of MoE. Next, we overview the core designs for various MoE models including both algorithmic and systemic aspects, alongside collections of available open-source implementations, hyperparameter configurations and empirical evaluations. Furthermore, we delineate the multifaceted applications of MoE in practice, and outline some potential directions for future research. To facilitate ongoing updates and the sharing of cutting-edge developments in MoE research, we have established a resource repository accessible at https://github.com/withinmiaov/A-Survey-on-Mixture-of-Experts.

URLs: https://github.com/withinmiaov/A-Survey-on-Mixture-of-Experts.

replace-cross An Autonomous GIS Agent Framework for Geospatial Data Retrieval

Authors: Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li, Temitope Akinboyewa, M. Naser Lessani

Abstract: Powered by the emerging large language models (LLMs), autonomous geographic information systems (GIS) agents have the potential to accomplish spatial analyses and cartographic tasks. However, a research gap exists to support fully autonomous GIS agents: how to enable agents to discover and download the necessary data for geospatial analyses. This study proposes an autonomous GIS agent framework capable of retrieving required geospatial data by generating, executing, and debugging programs. The framework utilizes the LLM as the decision-maker, selects the appropriate data source (s) from a pre-defined source list, and fetches the data from the chosen source. Each data source has a handbook that records the metadata and technical details for data retrieval. The proposed framework is designed in a plug-and-play style to ensure flexibility and extensibility. Human users or autonomous data scrawlers can add new data sources by adding new handbooks. We developed a prototype agent based on the framework, released as a QGIS plugin (GeoData Retrieve Agent) and a Python program. Experiment results demonstrate its capability of retrieving data from various sources including OpenStreetMap, administrative boundaries and demographic data from the US Census Bureau, satellite basemaps from ESRI World Imagery, global digital elevation model (DEM) from OpenTopography.org, weather data from a commercial provider, the COVID-19 cases from the NYTimes GitHub. Our study is among the first attempts to develop an autonomous geospatial data retrieval agent.

replace-cross The Use of Large Language Models (LLM) for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) in Cybercrime Forums

Authors: Vanessa Clairoux-Trepanier, Isa-May Beauchamp, Estelle Ruellan, Masarah Paquet-Clouston, Serge-Olivier Paquette, Eric Clay

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can be used to analyze cyber threat intelligence (CTI) data from cybercrime forums, which contain extensive information and key discussions about emerging cyber threats. However, to date, the level of accuracy and efficiency of LLMs for such critical tasks has yet to be thoroughly evaluated. Hence, this study assesses the accuracy of an LLM system built on the OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo model [7] to extract CTI information. To do so, a random sample of 500 daily conversations from three cybercrime forums, XSS, Exploit_in, and RAMP, was extracted, and the LLM system was instructed to summarize the conversations and code 10 key CTI variables, such as whether a large organization and/or a critical infrastructure is being targeted. Then, two coders reviewed each conversation and evaluated whether the information extracted by the LLM was accurate. The LLM system performed strikingly well, with an average accuracy score of 98%. Various ways to enhance the model were uncovered, such as the need to help the LLM distinguish between stories and past events, as well as being careful with verb tenses in prompts. Nevertheless, the results of this study highlight the efficiency and relevance of using LLMs for cyber threat intelligence.