The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Miami, Florida, USA
November 12-16, 2024

Volumes

Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 1269 papers
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations 53 papers
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track 122 papers
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts 7 papers
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 1004 papers
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP 36 papers
Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning 41 papers
Proceedings of The Seventh Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference 12 papers
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U) 25 papers
Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER) 29 papers
Proceedings of the Workshop on the Future of Event Detection (FuturED) 8 papers
Proceedings of the 2nd GenBench Workshop on Generalisation (Benchmarking) in NLP 14 papers
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024) 31 papers
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2024 34 papers
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities 54 papers
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact 26 papers
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for Science (NLP4Science) 23 papers
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Social Influence in Conversations (SICon 2024) 12 papers
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR 2024) 14 papers
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Asian Translation (WAT 2024) 6 papers
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Advancing Natural Language Processing for Wikipedia 13 papers
Proceedings of the Eighth Widening NLP Workshop 1 paper
Proceedings of the Ninth Conference on Machine Translation 134 papers
Proceedings of the The 6th Workshop on Narrative Understanding 10 papers

bib (full) Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yaser Al-Onaizan | Mohit Bansal | Yun-Nung Chen

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UniGen: Universal Domain Generalization for Sentiment Classification via Zero-shot Dataset Generation
Juhwan Choi | Yeonghwa Kim | Seunguk Yu | JungMin Yun | YoungBin Kim

Although pre-trained language models have exhibited great flexibility and versatility with prompt-based few-shot learning, they suffer from the extensive parameter size and limited applicability for inference. Recent studies have suggested that PLMs be used as dataset generators and a tiny task-specific model be trained to achieve efficient inference. However, their applicability to various domains is limited because they tend to generate domain-specific datasets. In this work, we propose a novel approach to universal domain generalization that generates a dataset regardless of the target domain. This allows for generalization of the tiny task model to any domain that shares the label space, thus enhancing the real-world applicability of the dataset generation paradigm. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method accomplishes generalizability across various domains while using a parameter set that is orders of magnitude smaller than PLMs.

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Multi-News+: Cost-efficient Dataset Cleansing via LLM-based Data Annotation
Juhwan Choi | JungMin Yun | Kyohoon Jin | YoungBin Kim

The quality of the dataset is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability of downstream task models. However, datasets often contain noisy data inadvertently included during the construction process. Numerous attempts have been made to correct this issue through human annotators. However, hiring and managing human annotators is expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative, recent studies are exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for data annotation.In this study, we present a case study that extends the application of LLM-based data annotation to enhance the quality of existing datasets through a cleansing strategy. Specifically, we leverage approaches such as chain-of-thought and majority voting to imitate human annotation and classify unrelated documents from the Multi-News dataset, which is widely used for the multi-document summarization task. Through our proposed cleansing method, we introduce an enhanced Multi-News+. By employing LLMs for data cleansing, we demonstrate an efficient and effective approach to improving dataset quality without relying on expensive human annotation efforts.

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FIZZ: Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document
Joonho Yang | Seunghyun Yoon | ByeongJeong Kim | Hwanhee Lee

Through the advent of pre-trained language models, there have been notable advancements in abstractive summarization systems. Simultaneously, a considerable number of novel methods for evaluating factual consistency in abstractive summarization systems has been developed. But these evaluation approaches incorporate substantial limitations, especially on refinement and interpretability. In this work, we propose highly effective and interpretable factual inconsistency detection method FIZZ (Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document) for abstractive summarization systems that is based on fine-grained atomic facts decomposition. Moreover, we align atomic facts decomposed from the summary with the source document through adaptive granularity expansion. These atomic facts represent a more fine-grained unit of information, facilitating detailed understanding and interpretability of the summary’s factual inconsistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed factual consistency checking system significantly outperforms existing systems. We release the code at https://github.com/plm3332/FIZZ.

We discover that many natural-language prompts can be replaced by corresponding prompts that are unintelligible to humans but that provably elicit similar behavior in language models. We call these prompts “evil twins” because they are obfuscated and uninterpretable (evil), but at the same time mimic the functionality of the original natural-language prompts (twins). Remarkably, evil twins transfer between models. We find these prompts by solving a maximum-likelihood problem which has applications of independent interest.

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Table Question Answering for Low-resourced Indic Languages
Vaishali Pal | Evangelos Kanoulas | Andrew Yates | Maarten de Rijke

TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).

Despite the longstanding adage ”an image is worth a thousand words,” generating accurate hyper-detailed image descriptions remains unsolved. Trained on short web-scraped image-text, vision-language models often generate incomplete descriptions with visual inconsistencies. We address this via a novel data-centric approach with ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions. Human evaluations on IIW data show major gains compared to recent datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V (+48%) across comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and more. We also show that fine-tuning with IIW data improves these metrics by +31% against models trained with prior work, even with only 9k samples. Lastly, we evaluate IIW models with text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning tasks. Our generated descriptions result in the highest fidelity images, and boost compositional reasoning by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets. We release the IIW-Eval benchmark with human judgement labels, object and image-level annotations from our framework, and existing image caption datasets enriched via IIW-model.

This paper explores the open research problem of understanding the social behaviors of LLM-based agents. Using Avalon as a testbed, we employ system prompts to guide LLM agents in gameplay. While previous studies have touched on gameplay with LLM agents, research on their social behaviors is lacking. We propose a novel framework, tailored for Avalon, features a multi-agent system facilitating efficient communication and interaction. We evaluate its performance based on game success and analyze LLM agents’ social behaviors. Results affirm the framework’s effectiveness in creating adaptive agents and suggest LLM-based agents’ potential in navigating dynamic social interactions. By examining collaboration and confrontation behaviors, we offer insights into this field’s research and applications.

Depression is a critical concern in global mental health, prompting extensive research into AI-based detection methods. Among various AI technologies, Large Language Models (LLMs) stand out for their versatility in healthcare applications. However, the application of LLMs in the identification and analysis of depressive states remains relatively unexplored, presenting an intriguing avenue for future research. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to employ an LLM in the realm of depression detection, integrating acoustic speech information into the LLM framework for this specific application. We investigate an efficient method for automatic depression detection by integrating speech signals into LLMs utilizing Acoustic Landmarks. This approach is not only valuable for the detection of depression but also represents a new perspective in enhancing the ability of LLMs to comprehend and process speech signals. By incorporating acoustic landmarks, which are specific to the pronunciation of spoken words, our method adds critical dimensions to text transcripts. This integration also provides insights into the unique speech patterns of individuals, revealing the potential mental states of individuals. By encoding acoustic landmarks information into LLMs, evaluations of the proposed approach on the DAIC-WOZ dataset reveal state-of-the-art results when compared with existing Audio-Text baselines.

Recently, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have attained leading performances across a diverse range of generative tasks. However, in the field of speech synthesis, although DDPMs exhibit impressive performance, their prolonged training duration and substantial inference costs hinder practical deployment. Existing approaches primarily focus on enhancing inference speed, while approaches to accelerate training—a key factor in the costs associated with adding or customizing voices—often necessitate complex modifications to the model, compromising their universal applicability. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose an inquiry: is it possible to enhance the training/inference speed and performance of DDPMs by modifying the speech signal itself? In this paper, we double the training and inference speed of Speech DDPMs by simply redirecting the generative target to the wavelet domain. This method not only achieves comparable or superior performance to the original model in speech synthesis tasks but also demonstrates its versatility. By investigating and utilizing different wavelet bases, our approach proves effective not just in speech synthesis, but also in speech enhancement.

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Hateful Word in Context Classification
Sanne Hoeken | Sina Zarrieß | Özge Alacam

Hate speech detection is a prevalent research field, yet it remains underexplored at the level of word meaning. This is significant, as terms used to convey hate often involve non-standard or novel usages which might be overlooked by commonly leveraged LMs trained on general language use. In this paper, we introduce the Hateful Word in Context Classification (HateWiC) task and present a dataset of ~4000 WiC-instances, each labeled by three annotators. Our analyses and computational exploration focus on the interplay between the subjective nature (context-dependent connotations) and the descriptive nature (as described in dictionary definitions) of hateful word senses. HateWiC annotations confirm that hatefulness of a word in context does not always derive from the sense definition alone. We explore the prediction of both majority and individual annotator labels, and we experiment with modeling context- and sense-based inputs. Our findings indicate that including definitions proves effective overall, yet not in cases where hateful connotations vary. Conversely, including annotator demographics becomes more important for mitigating performance drop in subjective hate prediction.

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Eyes Don’t Lie: Subjective Hate Annotation and Detection with Gaze
Özge Alacam | Sanne Hoeken | Sina Zarrieß

Hate speech is a complex and subjective phenomenon. In this paper, we present a dataset (GAZE4HATE) that provides gaze data collected in a hate speech annotation experiment. We study whether the gaze of an annotator provides predictors of their subjective hatefulness rating, and how gaze features can improve Hate Speech Detection (HSD). We conduct experiments on statistical modeling of subjective hate ratings and gaze and analyze to what extent rationales derived from hate speech models correspond to human gaze and explanations in our data. Finally, we introduce MEANION, a first gaze-integrated HSD model. Our experiments show that particular gaze features like dwell time or fixation counts systematically correlate with annotators’ subjective hate ratings and improve predictions of text-only hate speech models.

Language models struggle with handling numerical data and performing arithmetic operations. We hypothesize that this limitation can be partially attributed to non-intuitive textual numbers representation. When a digit is read or generated by a causal language model it does not know its place value (e.g. thousands vs. hundreds) until the entire number is processed. To address this issue, we propose a simple adjustment to how numbers are represented by including the count of digits before each number. For instance, instead of “42”, we suggest using “2:42” as the new format. This approach, which we term NumeroLogic, offers an added advantage in number generation by serving as a Chain of Thought (CoT). By requiring the model to consider the number of digits first, it enhances the reasoning process before generating the actual number. We use arithmetic tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NumeroLogic formatting. We further demonstrate NumeroLogic applicability to general natural language modeling, improving language understanding performance in the MMLU benchmark.

Existing debiasing techniques are typically training-based or require access to the model’s internals and output distributions, so they are inaccessible to end-users looking to adapt LLM outputs for their particular needs. In this study, we examine whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for fair text generation. We evaluate a comprehensive end-user-focused iterative framework of debiasing that applies System 2 thinking processes for prompts to induce logical, reflective, and critical text generation, with single, multi-step, instruction, and role-based variants. By systematically evaluating many LLMs across many datasets and different prompting strategies, we show that the more complex System 2-based Implicative Prompts significantly improve over other techniques demonstrating lower mean bias in the outputs with competitive performance on the downstream tasks. Our work offers research directions for the design and the potential of end-user-focused evaluative frameworks for LLM use.

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A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce
Wendi Zhou | Tianyi Li | Pavlos Vougiouklis | Mark Steedman | Jeff Z. Pan

Identifying and understanding user intents is a pivotal task for E-Commerce. Despite its essential role in product recommendation and business user profiling analysis, intent understanding has not been consistently defined or accurately benchmarked. In this paper, we focus on predicative user intents as “how a customer uses a product”, and pose intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task, independent of product ontologies. We identify two weaknesses of FolkScope, the SOTA E-Commerce Intent Knowledge Graph: category-rigidity and property-ambiguity. They limit its ability to strongly align user intents with products having the most desirable property, and to recommend useful products across diverse categories. Following these observations, we introduce a Product Recovery Benchmark featuring a novel evaluation framework and an example dataset. We further validate the above FolkScope weaknesses on this benchmark. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/stayones/Usgae-Centric-Intent-Understanding.

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Fine-Tuning or Retrieval? Comparing Knowledge Injection in LLMs
Oded Ovadia | Menachem Brief | Moshik Mishaeli | Oren Elisha

Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate a vast amount of factual information within their pre-trained weights, as evidenced by their ability to answer diverse questions across different domains. However, this knowledge is inherently limited, relying heavily on the characteristics of the training data. Consequently, using external datasets to incorporate new information or refine the capabilities of LLMs on previously seen information poses a significant challenge. In this study, we compare two common approaches: unsupervised fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We evaluate both approaches on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks across different topics. Our findings reveal that while unsupervised fine-tuning offers some improvement, RAG consistently outperforms it, both for existing knowledge encountered during training and entirely new knowledge. Moreover, we find that LLMs struggle to learn new factual information through unsupervised fine-tuning, and that exposing them to numerous variations of the same fact during training could alleviate this problem.

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Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debates
Amir Taubenfeld | Yaniv Dover | Roi Reichart | Ariel Goldstein

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), has opened exciting possibilities for constructing computational simulations designed to replicate human behavior accurately. Current research suggests that LLM-based agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, sparking interest in using these AI agents as substitutes for human participants in behavioral studies. However, LLMs are complex statistical learners without straightforward deductive rules, making them prone to unexpected behaviors. Hence, it is crucial to study and pinpoint the key behavioral distinctions between humans and LLM-based agents. In this study, we highlight the limitations of LLMs in simulating human interactions, particularly focusing on LLMs’ ability to simulate political debates on topics that are important aspects of people’s day-to-day lives and decision-making processes. Our findings indicate a tendency for LLM agents to conform to the model’s inherent social biases despite being directed to debate from certain political perspectives. This tendency results in behavioral patterns that seem to deviate from well-established social dynamics among humans. We reinforce these observations using an automatic self-fine-tuning method, which enables us to manipulate the biases within the LLM and demonstrate that agents subsequently align with the altered biases. These results underscore the need for further research to develop methods that help agents overcome these biases, a critical step toward creating more realistic simulations.

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Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models
Katherine Atwell | Danielle Bragg | Malihe Alikhani

Ensuring that the benefits of sign language technologies are distributed equitably among all community members is crucial. Thus, it is important to address potential biases and inequities that may arise from the design or use of these resources. Crowd-sourced sign language datasets, such as the ASL Citizen dataset, are great resources for improving accessibility and preserving linguistic diversity, but they must be used thoughtfully to avoid reinforcing existing biases.In this work, we utilize the rich information about participant demographics and lexical features present in the ASL Citizen dataset to study and document the biases that may result from models trained on crowd-sourced sign datasets. Further, we apply several bias mitigation techniques during model training, and find that these techniques reduce performance disparities without decreasing accuracy. With the publication of this work, we release the demographic information about the participants in the ASL Citizen dataset to encourage future bias mitigation work in this space.

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs. In addition to verbalized confidence elicited via prompting, many uncertainty measures (e.g., semantic entropy and affinity-graph-based measures) have been proposed. However, these measures can differ greatly, and it is unclear how to compare them, partly because they take values over different ranges (e.g., [0,∞) or [0,1]). In this work, we address this issue by developing a novel and practical framework, termed *Rank-Calibration*, to assess uncertainty and confidence measures for LMs. Our key tenet is that higher uncertainty (or lower confidence) should imply lower generation quality, on average. Rank-calibration quantifies deviations from this ideal relationship in a principled manner, without requiring ad hoc binary thresholding of the correctness score (e.g., ROUGE or METEOR). The broad applicability and the granular interpretability of our methods are demonstrated empirically.

Tool learning has generated widespread interest as a vital means of interaction between Large Language Models (LLMs) and the physical world. Current research predominantly emphasizes LLMs’ capacity to utilize tools in well-structured environments while overlooking their stability when confronted with the inevitable noise of the real world. To bridge this gap, we introduce *RoTBench*, a multi-level benchmark for evaluating the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. Specifically, we establish five external environments, each featuring varying levels of noise (i.e., Clean, Slight, Medium, Heavy, and Union), providing an in-depth analysis of the model’s resilience across three critical phases: tool selection, parameter identification, and content filling. Experiments involving six widely-used models underscore the urgent necessity for enhancing the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. For instance, the performance of GPT-4 even drops significantly from 80.00 to 58.10 when there is no substantial change in manual accuracy. More surprisingly, the noise correction capability inherent in the GPT family paradoxically impedes its adaptability in the face of mild noise. In light of these findings, we propose RoTTuning, a strategy that enriches the diversity of training environments to bolster the robustness of LLMs in tool learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/RoTBench.

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Learning Planning-based Reasoning by Trajectories Collection and Process Reward Synthesizing
Fangkai Jiao | Chengwei Qin | Zhengyuan Liu | Nancy F. Chen | Shafiq Joty

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in handling complex reasoning tasks through step-by-step rationale generation. However, recent studies have raised concerns regarding the hallucination and flaws in their reasoning process. Substantial efforts are being made to improve the reliability and faithfulness of the generated rationales. Some approaches model reasoning as planning, while others focus on annotating for process supervision. Nevertheless, the planning-based search process often results in high latency due to the frequent assessment of intermediate reasoning states and the extensive exploration space. Additionally, supervising the reasoning process with human annotation is costly and challenging to scale for LLM training. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a framework to learn planning-based reasoning through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) on collected trajectories, which are ranked according to synthesized process rewards. Our results on challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our learning framework, showing that our 7B model can surpass the strong counterparts like GPT-3.5-Turbo.

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Scaling Properties of Speech Language Models
Santiago Cuervo | Ricard Marxer

Speech Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn language from raw audio, without textual resources. Despite significant advances, our current models exhibit weak syntax and semantic abilities. However, if the scaling properties of neural language models hold for the speech modality, these abilities will improve as the amount of compute used for training increases. In this paper, we use models of this scaling behavior to estimate the scale at which our current methods will yield a SLM with the English proficiency of text-based Large Language Models (LLMs). We establish a strong correlation between pre-training loss and downstream syntactic and semantic performance in SLMs and LLMs, which results in predictable scaling of linguistic performance. We show that the linguistic performance of SLMs scales up to three orders of magnitude more slowly than that of text-based LLMs. Additionally, we study the benefits of synthetic data designed to boost semantic understanding and the effects of coarser speech tokenization.

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“We Demand Justice!”: Towards Social Context Grounding of Political Texts
Rajkumar Pujari | Chengfei Wu | Dan Goldwasser

Political discourse on social media often contains similar language with opposing intended meanings. For example, the phrase thoughts and prayers, is used to express sympathy for mass shooting victims, as well as satirically criticize the lack of legislative action on gun control. Understanding such discourse fully by reading only the text is difficult. However, knowledge of the social context information makes it easier. We characterize the social context required to fully understand such ambiguous discourse, by grounding the text in real-world entities, actions, and attitudes. We propose two datasets that require understanding social context and benchmark them using large pre-trained language models and several novel structured models. We show that structured models, explicitly modeling social context, outperform larger models on both tasks, but still lag significantly behind human performance. Finally, we perform an extensive analysis, to obtain further insights into the language understanding challenges posed by our social grounding tasks.

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An Experimental Analysis on Evaluating Patent Citations
Rabindra Nath Nandi | Suman Maity | Brian Uzzi | Sourav Medya

The patent citation count is a good indicator of patent quality. This often generates monetary value for the inventors and organizations. However, the factors that influence a patent receiving high citations over the year are still not well understood. With the patents over the past two decades, we study the problem of patent citation prediction and formulate this as a binary classification problem. We create a semantic graph of patents based on their semantic similarities, enabling the use of Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based approaches for predicting citations. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our GNN-based methods when applied to the semantic graph, showing that they can accurately predict patent citations using only patent text. More specifically, these methods produce up to 94% recall for patents with high citations and outperform existing baselines. Furthermore, we leverage this constructed graph to gain insights and explanations for the predictions made by the GNNs.

Traditionally, success in multilingual machine translation can be attributed to three key factors in training data: large volume, diverse translation directions, and high quality. In the current practice of fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for translation, we revisit the importance of these factors. We find that LLMs display strong translation capability after being fine-tuned on as few as 32 parallel sentences and that fine-tuning on a single translation direction enables translation in multiple directions. However, the choice of direction is critical: fine-tuning LLMs with only English on the target side can lead to task misinterpretation, which hinders translation into non-English languages. Problems also arise when noisy synthetic data is placed on the target side, especially when the target language is well-represented in LLM pre-training. Yet interestingly, synthesized data in an under-represented language has a less pronounced effect. Our findings suggest that when adapting LLMs to translation, the requirement on data quantity can be eased but careful considerations are still crucial to prevent an LLM from exploiting unintended data biases.

The powerful generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) show potential in generating relevance labels for search applications. Previous work has found that directly asking about relevancy, such as "*How relevant is document A to query Q?*”, results in suboptimal ranking. Instead, the pairwise-ranking prompting (PRP) approach produces promising ranking performance through asking about pairwise comparisons, e.g., "*Is document A more relevant than document B to query Q?*”. Thus, while LLMs are effective at their ranking ability, this is not reflected in their relevance label generation.In this work, we propose a post-processing method to consolidate the relevance labels generated by an LLM with its powerful ranking abilities. Our method takes both LLM generated relevance labels and pairwise preferences. The labels are then altered to satisfy the pairwise preferences of the LLM, while staying as close to the original values as possible. Our experimental results indicate that our approach effectively balances label accuracy and ranking performance. Thereby, our work shows it is possible to combine both the ranking and labeling abilities of LLMs through post-processing.

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system’s objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose TRIP to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TRIP in catering to diverse users.

While Large language model (LLM)-based programming assistants such as CoPilot and ChatGPT can help improve the productivity of professional software developers, they can also facilitate cheating in introductory computer programming courses. Assuming instructors have limited control over the industrial-strength models, this paper investigates the baseline performance of 5 widely used LLMs on a collection of introductory programming problems, examines adversarial perturbations to degrade their performance, and describes the results of a user study aimed at measuring the efficacy of such perturbations in hindering actual code generation for introductory programming assignments. The user study suggests that i) perturbations combinedly reduced the average correctness score by 77%, ii) the drop in correctness caused by these perturbations was affected based on their detectability.

With contributions from the open-source community, a vast amount of instruction tuning (IT) data has emerged. Given the significant resource allocation required by training and evaluating models, it is advantageous to have an efficient method for selecting high-quality IT data. However, existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. In this paper, we propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). CaR consists of two steps. The first step involves ranking instruction pairs using a scoring model that is well aligned with expert preferences (achieving an accuracy of 84.25%). The second step involves preserving dataset diversity through a clustering process. In our experiment, CaR selected a subset containing only 1.96% of Alpaca’s IT data, yet the underlying AlpaCaR model trained on this subset outperforms Alpaca by an average of 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. Furthermore, our method utilizes small models (550M parameters) and requires only 11.2% of the monetary cost compared to existing methods, making it easily deployable in industrial scenarios.

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On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models
Abhilasha Sancheti | Haozhe An | Rachel Rudinger

We study the presence of heteronormative biases and prejudice against interracial romantic relationships in large language models by performing controlled name-replacement experiments for the task of relationship prediction. We show that models are less likely to predict romantic relationships for (a) same-gender character pairs than different-gender pairs; and (b) intra/inter-racial character pairs involving Asian names as compared to Black, Hispanic, or White names. We examine the contextualized embeddings of first names and find that gender for Asian names is less discernible than non-Asian names. We discuss the social implications of our findings, underlining the need to prioritize the development of inclusive and equitable technology.

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EmphAssess : a Prosodic Benchmark on Assessing Emphasis Transfer in Speech-to-Speech Models
Maureen de Seyssel | Antony D’Avirro | Adina Williams | Emmanuel Dupoux

We introduce EmphAssess, a prosodic benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of speech-to-speech models to encode and reproduce prosodic emphasis. We apply this to two tasks: speech resynthesis and speech-to-speech translation. In both cases, the benchmark evaluates the ability of the model to encode emphasis in the speech input and accurately reproduce it in the output, potentially across a change of speaker and language. As part of the evaluation pipeline, we introduce EmphaClass, a new model that classifies emphasis at the frame or word level.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as valuable tools for enhancing textual features in various text-related tasks. Despite their superiority in capturing the lexical semantics between tokens for text analysis, our preliminary study on two popular LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT and Llama2, showcases that simply applying the news embeddings from LLMs is ineffective for fake news detection. Such embeddings only encapsulate the language styles between tokens. Meanwhile, the high-level semantics among named entities and topics, which reveal the deviating patterns of fake news, have been ignored. Therefore, we propose a topic model together with a set of specially designed prompts to extract topics and real entities from LLMs and model the relations among news, entities, and topics as a heterogeneous graph to facilitate investigating news semantics. We then propose a Generalized Page-Rank model and a consistent learning criteria for mining the local and global semantics centered on each news piece through the adaptive propagation of features across the graph. Our model shows superior performance on five benchmark datasets over seven baseline methods and the efficacy of the key ingredients has been thoroughly validated.

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On Sensitivity of Learning with Limited Labelled Data to the Effects of Randomness: Impact of Interactions and Systematic Choices
Branislav Pecher | Ivan Srba | Maria Bielikova

While learning with limited labelled data can effectively deal with a lack of labels, it is also sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness introduced by so-called randomness factors (i.e., non-deterministic decisions such as choice or order of samples). We propose and formalise a method to systematically investigate the effects of individual randomness factors while taking the interactions (dependence) between them into consideration. To this end, our method mitigates the effects of other factors while observing how the performance varies across multiple runs. Applying our method to multiple randomness factors across in-context learning and fine-tuning approaches on 7 representative text classification tasks and meta-learning on 3 tasks, we show that: 1) disregarding interactions between randomness factors in existing works led to inconsistent findings due to incorrect attribution of the effects of randomness factors, such as disproving the consistent sensitivity of in-context learning to sample order even with random sample selection; and 2) besides mutual interactions, the effects of randomness factors, especially sample order, are also dependent on more systematic choices unexplored in existing works, such as number of classes, samples per class or choice of prompt format.

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Evaluating the Instruction-Following Robustness of Large Language Models to Prompt Injection
Zekun Li | Baolin Peng | Pengcheng He | Xifeng Yan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following, making them increasingly integral to various applications. However, this capability introduces the risk of prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded in the input to trigger unintended actions or content. Understanding the robustness of LLMs against such attacks is critical for ensuring their safe deployment. In this work, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of instruction-following LLMs against prompt injection attacks, assessing their ability to discern which instructions to follow and which to disregard. Through extensive experiments with leading instruction-following LLMs, we reveal significant vulnerabilities, particularly in models that mis-follow injected instructions. Our results show that certain models are excessively inclined to prioritize embedded instructions in prompts, often focusing on the latter parts of the prompt without fully understanding the overall context. Conversely, models that exhibit stronger contextual understanding and instruction-following capabilities tend to be more easily compromised by injected instructions. These findings highlight the need to balance improving LLMs’ instruction-following abilities with enhancing their overall comprehension of prompts, to prevent mis-following inappropriate instructions. We hope our analysis provides valuable insights into these vulnerabilities, contributing to the development of more robust solutions in the future.

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A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers
Valentin Barriere | Sebastian Cifuentes

In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23% change in hate speech detection and up to a 60% change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names.

LLMs acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. To investigate alignment tax, we conducted experiments with existing RLHF algorithms using OpenLLaMA-3B, which revealed a pronounced alignment tax in NLP tasks. Whereas, despite various techniques to mitigate forgetting, they are often at odds with the RLHF performance, leading to a trade-off between alignment performance and forgetting mitigation, leading to an alignment-forgetting trade-off. In this paper we show that model averaging, which simply interpolates between pre and post RLHF model weights, surprisingly achieves the most strongest alignment-forgetting Pareto front among a wide range of competing methods. To understand its effectiveness, we offer theoretical insights into model averaging, revealing that it enhances performance Pareto front by increasing feature diversity on the layers where tasks share overlapped feature spaces. Empirical evidence corroborates our analysis by showing the benefits of averaging low-level transformer layers. Building on the analysis and the observation that averaging different layers of the transformer leads to significantly different alignment-forgetting trade-offs, we propose Heterogeneous Model Averaging (HMA) to Heterogeneously find various combination ratios of model layers. HMA seeks to maximize the alignment performance while incurring minimal alignment tax. Moreover, we validate HMA’s performance across a range of RLHF algorithms over OpenLLaMA-3B and further extend our findings to Mistral-7B which is evaluated by open-sourced preference model and GPT4. Code available here.

With the growing popularity of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), comes a need for more global explanations of model behaviors. Concept-based explanations arise as a promising avenue for explaining high-level patterns learned by LLMs. Yet their evaluation poses unique challenges, especially due to their non-local nature and high dimensional representation in a model’s hidden space. Current methods approach concepts from different perspectives, lacking a unified formalization. This makes evaluating the core measures of concepts, namely faithfulness or readability, challenging. To bridge the gap, we introduce a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations’ settings. Based on this, we quantify the faithfulness of a concept explanation via perturbation. We ensure adequate perturbation in the high-dimensional space for different concepts via an optimization problem. Readability is approximated via an automatic and deterministic measure, quantifying the coherence of patterns that maximally activate a concept while aligning with human understanding. Finally, based on measurement theory, we apply a meta-evaluation method for evaluating these measures, generalizable to other types of explanations or tasks as well. Extensive experimental analysis has been conducted to inform the selection of explanation evaluation measures.

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Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Zhengyuan Liu | Stella Xin Yin | Geyu Lin | Nancy F. Chen

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can provide personalized and self-paced learning experience. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enables better human-machine interaction, and facilitates the development of conversational ITSs in various disciplines such as math and language learning. In dialogic teaching, recognizing and adapting to individual characteristics can significantly enhance student engagement and learning efficiency. However, characterizing and simulating student’s persona remain challenging in training and evaluating conversational ITSs. In this work, we propose a framework to construct profiles of different student groups by refining and integrating both cognitive and noncognitive aspects, and leverage LLMs for personality-aware student simulation in a language learning scenario. We further enhance the framework with multi-aspect validation, and conduct extensive analysis from both teacher and student perspectives. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can produce diverse student responses according to the given language ability and personality traits, and trigger teacher’s adaptive scaffolding strategies.

Insight gradually becomes a crucial form of long-term memory for an agent. However, the emergence of irrelevant insight and the lack of general insight can greatly undermine the effectiveness of insight. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce **M**ulti-**S**cale **I**nsight Agent (MSI-Agent), an embodied agent designed to improve LLMs’ planning and decision-making ability by summarizing and utilizing insight effectively across different scales. MSI achieves this through the experience selector, insight generator, and insight selector. Leveraging a three-part pipeline, MSI can generate task-specific and high-level insight, store it in a database, and then use relevant insight from it to aid in decision-making. Our experiments show that MSI outperforms another insight strategy when planning by GPT3.5. Moreover, We delve into the strategies for selecting seed experience and insight, aiming to provide LLM with more useful and relevant insight for better decision-making. Our observations also indicate that MSI exhibits better robustness when facing domain-shifting scenarios.

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CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds
Min-Hsuan Yeh | Ruyuan Wan | Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang

Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers’ interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document’s text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.

Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive.As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. In this work, we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. In particular, taking text-to-image models as target models, we explore different feedback mechanisms to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that even with enhanced safety features, Stable Diffusion (SD) models are vulnerable to our adversarial prompts, raising concerns on their robustness in practical uses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models.

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Successfully Guiding Humans with Imperfect Instructions by Highlighting Potential Errors and Suggesting Corrections
Lingjun Zhao | Khanh Xuan Nguyen | Hal Daumé Iii

Language models will inevitably err in situations with which they are unfamiliar. However, by effectively communicating uncertainties, they can still guide humans toward making sound decisions in those contexts. We demonstrate this idea by developing HEAR, a system that can successfully guide humans in simulated residential environments despite generating potentially inaccurate instructions. Diverging from systems that provide users with only the instructions they generate, HEAR warns users of potential errors in its instructions and suggests corrections. This rich uncertainty information effectively prevents misguidance and reduces the search space for users. Evaluation with 80 users shows that HEAR achieves a 13% increase in success rate and a 29% reduction in final location error distance compared to only presenting instructions to users. Interestingly, we find that offering users possibilities to explore, HEAR motivates them to make more attempts at the task, ultimately leading to a higher success rate. To our best knowledge, this work is the first to show the practical benefits of uncertainty communication in a long-horizon sequential decision-making problem.

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Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks
Haoyuan Wu | Haisheng Zheng | Zhuolun He | Bei Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across general tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce parameter-efficient sparsity crafting (PESC), which crafts dense models into sparse models using the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal parameter increase when guaranteeing the quality of approximation in function space compared to original sparse upcycling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our best sparse model outperforms other sparse and dense models and exhibits superior general capabilities compared to GPT-3.5.Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/Parameter-Efficient-MoE.

Large language models have seen widespread adoption in math problem-solving, yet for geometry problems, which often necessitate visual aids even for humans, the most advanced multi-modal models still struggle to effectively utilize image information. High-quality data is crucial for enhancing the geometric capabilities of multi-modal models, yet existing open-source datasets and related efforts are either too challenging for direct model learning or suffer from misalignment between text and images. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and GPT-4V to generate relatively basic geometry problems with aligned text and images, facilitating model learning. We have produced a dataset of 4.9K geometry problems and combined it with 19K open-source data to form our GeoGPT4V dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the GeoGPT4V dataset significantly improves the geometry performance of various models on the MathVista and MathVision benchmarks. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GeoGPT4V-08B2.

Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. Splitting entities diminishes retrieval accuracy and limits the model’s ability to incorporate up-to-date world knowledge not included in the training data. In this work, we enhance the LSR vocabulary with Wikipedia concepts and entities, enabling the model to resolve ambiguities more effectively and stay current with evolving knowledge. Central to our approach is a Dynamic Vocabulary (DyVo) head, which leverages existing entity embeddings and an entity retrieval component that identifies entities relevant to a query or document. We use the DyVo head to generate entity weights, which are then merged with word piece weights to create joint representations for efficient indexing and retrieval using an inverted index. In experiments across three entity-rich document ranking datasets, the resulting DyVo model substantially outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is crucial for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) with constrained resource. Although there have been various PEFT methods for dense-architecture LLMs, PEFT for sparse-architecture LLMs is still underexplored. In this work, we study the PEFT method for LLMs with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and the contents of this work are mainly threefold: (1) We investigate the dispersion degree of the activated experts in customized tasks, and found that the routing distribution for specific task tend to be highly concentrated, while the distribution of activated experts varies significantly across different tasks. (2) We propose the expert-specialized fine-tuning method, which tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts; experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves the tuning efficiency, but also matches or even surpasses the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning. (3) We further analyze the impact of the MoE architecture on expert-specialized fine-tuning. We find that MoE models with finer-grained experts are more advantageous in selecting the combination of experts that are most relevant to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing the both the training efficiency and effectiveness.

Embedding models play a pivotal role in modern NLP applications such as document retrieval. However, existing embedding models are limited to encoding short documents of typically 512 tokens, restrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing their input length to a maximum of 32,768. We begin by evaluating the performance of existing embedding models using our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark, which includes two synthetic and four real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying lengths and dispersed target information. The benchmarking results highlight huge opportunities for enhancement in current models. Via comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that training-free context window extension strategies can effectively increase the input length of these models by several folds. Moreover, comparison of models using Absolute Position Encoding (APE) and Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) reveals the superiority of RoPE-based embedding models in context window extension, offering empirical guidance for future models. Our benchmark, code and trained models will be released to advance the research in long context embedding models.

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Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Orchestrated Streaming Experiences
Xiangyang Liu | Junliang He | Xipeng Qiu

Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps using chain-of-thought prompting under zero-shot or few-shot settings. However, zero-shot prompting always encounters low performance, and the superior performance of few-shot prompting hinges on the manual-crafting of task-specific demonstrations one by one. In this paper, we present **RoSE** (**R**easoning with **O**rchestrated **S**treaming **E**xperiences), a general framework for solving reasoning tasks that can self-improve as it answers various reasoning questions. To enable RoSE, we describe an architecture that extends an LLM to store all answered reasoning questions and their reasoning steps in a streaming experience pool and orchestrate helpful questions from the pool to assist itself in answering new questions. To set up a question-aware orchestration mechanism, RoSE first calculates the similarity of each question in the pool with the question to be answered. Since the solution to each question in the experience pool is not always correct, RoSE will sort the questions according to their similarity with the question to be answered, and then uniformly divide them into multiple buckets. It finally extracts one question from each bucket to make the extracted questions more diverse. To make the extracted questions help RoSE answer new questions as much as possible, we introduce two other attributes of uncertainty and complexity for each question. RoSE will preferentially select the questions with low uncertainty and high complexity from each bucket. We evaluate the versatility of RoSE in various complex reasoning tasks and LLMs, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning, and find that it can achieve excellent performance without any labeled data and pre-set unlabeled data.

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Overcome Noise and Bias: Segmentation-Aided Multi-Granularity Denoising and Debiasing for Enhanced Quarduples Extraction in Dialogue
Xianlong Luo | Meng Yang | Yihao Wang

Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple analysis (DiaASQ) extends ABSA to more complex real-world scenarios (i.e., dialogues), which makes existing generation methods encounter heightened noise and order bias challenges, leading to decreased robustness and accuracy.To address these, we propose the Segmentation-Aided multi-grained Denoising and Debiasing (SADD) method. For noise, we propose the Multi-Granularity Denoising Generation model (MGDG), achieving word-level denoising via sequence labeling and utterance-level denoising via topic-aware dialogue segmentation. Denoised Attention in MGDG integrates multi-grained denoising information to help generate denoised output.For order bias, we first theoretically analyze its direct cause as the gap between ideal and actual training objectives and propose a distribution-based solution. Since this solution introduces a one-to-many learning challenge, our proposed Segmentation-aided Order Bias Mitigation (SOBM) method utilizes dialogue segmentation to supplement order diversity, concurrently mitigating this challenge and order bias.Experiments demonstrate SADD’s effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art results with a 6.52% F1 improvement.

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Integrating Plutchik’s Theory with Mixture of Experts for Enhancing Emotion Classification
Dongjun Lim | Yun-Gyung Cheong

Emotion significantly influences human behavior and decision-making processes. We propose a labeling methodology grounded in Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions theory for emotion classification. Furthermore, we employ a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture to evaluate the efficacy of this labeling approach, by identifying the specific emotions that each expert learns to classify. Experimental results reveal that our methodology improves the performance of emotion classification.

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In-context Contrastive Learning for Event Causality Identification
Liang Chao | Wei Xiang | Bang Wang

Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims at determining the existence of a causal relation between two events. Although recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task, their performance are often subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and the positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. The in-context learning paradigm provides explicit guidance for label prediction in the prompt learning paradigm, alleviating its reliance on complex prompts and derivative tasks. However, it does not distinguish between positive and negative demonstrations for analogy learning. Motivated from such considerations, this paper proposes an **I**n-**C**ontext **C**ontrastive **L**earning (ICCL) model that utilizes contrastive learning to enhance the effectiveness of both positive and negative demonstrations. Additionally, we apply contrastive learning to event pairs to better facilitate event causality identification. Our ICCL is evaluated on the widely used corpora, including the EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank, and results show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.

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What’s Mine becomes Yours: Defining, Annotating and Detecting Context-Dependent Paraphrases in News Interview Dialogs
Anna Wegmann | Tijs A. Van Den Broek | Dong Nguyen

Best practices for high conflict conversations like counseling or customer support almost always include recommendations to paraphrase the previous speaker. Although paraphrase classification has received widespread attention in NLP, paraphrases are usually considered independent from context, and common models and datasets are not applicable to dialog settings. In this work, we investigate paraphrases across turns in dialog (e.g., Speaker 1: “That book is mine.” becomes Speaker 2: “That book is yours.”). We provide an operationalization of context-dependent paraphrases, and develop a training for crowd-workers to classify paraphrases in dialog. We introduce ContextDeP, a dataset with utterance pairs from NPR and CNN news interviews annotated for context-dependent paraphrases. To enable analyses on label variation, the dataset contains 5,581 annotations on 600 utterance pairs. We present promising results with in-context learning and with token classification models for automatic paraphrase detection in dialog.

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Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs
Kanishka Misra | Kyle Mahowald

Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which this is attributable to generalization vs. memorization is a major open question. To that end, we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora which were human-scale in size, and then evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (“a beautiful five days”). We compared how well this construction was learned on the default corpus relative to a counterfactual corpus in which AANN sentences were removed. We found that AANNs were still learned better than systematically perturbed variants of the construction. Using additional counterfactual corpora, we suggest that this learning occurs through generalization from related constructions (e.g., “a few days”). An additional experiment showed that this learning is enhanced when there is more variability in the input. Taken together, our results provide an existence proof that LMs can learn rare grammatical phenomena by generalization from less rare phenomena. Data and code: https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis.

Data annotation and synthesis generally refers to the labeling or generating of raw data with relevant information, which could be used for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and costly. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to automate the complicated process of data annotation and synthesis. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, we uniquely focus on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Annotation Generation, LLM-Generated Annotations Assessment, and LLM-Generated Annotations Utilization. Furthermore, this survey includes an in-depth taxonomy of data types that LLMs can annotate, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion of the primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation and synthesis. Serving as a key guide, this survey aims to assist researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, thereby fostering future advancements in this critical field.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even if not being trained explicitly for translation. Yet, they still struggle with translating low-resource languages. As supported by our experiments, a bilingual dictionary between the source and the target language could help. Motivated by the fact that multilingual training effectively improves cross-lingual performance, we show that a chained multilingual dictionary with words expressed in more languages can provide more information to better enhance the LLM translation. To this end, we present a novel framework, CoD, Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Experiments indicate that ChatGPT and InstructGPT still have room for improvement in translating many language pairs. And CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x chrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot in-context learning for low-resource languages. Using CoD helps ChatGPT to obviously surpass the SOTA translator NLLB 3.3B.

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AdaZeta: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Tensor-Train Adaption for Memory-Efficient Large Language Models Fine-Tuning
Yifan Yang | Kai Zhen | Ershad Banijamali | Athanasios Mouchtaris | Zheng Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO) methods attempt to fine-tune LLMs using only forward passes, thereby avoiding the need for a backpropagation graph. However, significant performance drops and a high risk of divergence have limited their widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive Zeroth-order Tensor-Train Adaption (AdaZeta) framework, specifically designed to improve the performance and convergence of the ZO methods. To enhance dimension-dependent ZO estimation accuracy, we introduce a fast-forward, low-parameter tensorized adapter. To tackle the frequently observed divergence issue in large-scale ZO fine-tuning tasks, we propose an adaptive query number schedule that guarantees convergence. Detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on Roberta-Large and Llama-2-7B models substantiate the efficacy of our AdaZeta framework in terms of accuracy, memory efficiency, and convergence speed.

Pre-trained language models, trained on large-scale corpora, demonstrate strong generalizability across various NLP tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific tasks typically involves updating all parameters, which is resource-intensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as the popular LoRA family, introduce low-rank matrices to learn only a few parameters efficiently. However, during inference, the product of these matrices updates all pre-trained parameters, complicating tasks like knowledge editing that require selective updates. We propose a novel PEFT method, which conducts row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation (RoseLoRA), to address this challenge. RoseLoRA identifies and updates only the most important parameters for a specific task, maintaining efficiency while preserving other model knowledge. By adding a sparsity constraint on the product of low-rank matrices and converting it to row and column-wise sparsity, we ensure efficient and precise model updates. Our theoretical analysis guarantees the lower bound of the sparsity with respective to the matrix product. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks across twenty datasets demonstrate that RoseLoRA outperforms baselines in both general fine-tuning and knowledge editing tasks.

Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) offer substantial benefits in enhancing performance across knowledge-intensive scenarios. However, these methods often struggle with complex inputs and encounter difficulties due to noisy knowledge retrieval, notably hindering model effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce BlendFilter, a novel approach that elevates retrieval-augmented LLMs by integrating query generation blending with knowledge filtering. BlendFilter proposes the blending process through its query generation method, which integrates both external and internal knowledge augmentation with the original query, ensuring comprehensive information gathering. Additionally, our distinctive knowledge filtering module capitalizes on the intrinsic capabilities of the LLM, effectively eliminating extraneous data. We conduct extensive experiments on three open-domain question answering benchmarks, and the findings clearly indicate that our innovative BlendFilter surpasses state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

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HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs
Jocelyn J Shen | Joel Mire | Hae Won Park | Cynthia Breazeal | Maarten Sap

Empathy serves as a cornerstone in enabling prosocial behaviors, and can be evoked through sharing of personal experiences in stories. While empathy is influenced by narrative content, intuitively, people respond to the way a story is told as well, through narrative style. Yet the relationship between empathy and narrative style is not fully understood. In this work, we empirically examine and quantify this relationship between style and empathy using LLMs and large-scale crowdsourcing studies. We introduce a novel, theory-based taxonomy, HEART (Human Empathy and Narrative Taxonomy) that delineates elements of narrative style that can lead to empathy with the narrator of a story. We establish the performance of LLMs in extracting narrative elements from HEART, showing that prompting with our taxonomy leads to reasonable, human-level annotations beyond what prior lexicon-based methods can do. To show empirical use of our taxonomy, we collect a dataset of empathy judgments of stories via a large-scale crowdsourcing study with N=2,624 participants. We show that narrative elements extracted via LLMs, in particular, vividness of emotions and plot volume, can elucidate the pathways by which narrative style cultivates empathy towards personal stories. Our work suggests that such models can be used for narrative analyses that lead to human-centered social and behavioral insights.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a prominent algorithm for the direct and robust alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a more straightforward alternative to the complex Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Despite its promising efficacy, DPO faces a notable drawback: “verbosity”, a common over-optimization phenomenon also observed in RLHF. While previous studies mainly attributed verbosity to biased labels within the data, we propose that the issue also stems from an inherent algorithmic length reliance in DPO. Specifically, we suggest that the discrepancy between sequence-level Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergences between chosen and rejected sequences, used in DPO, results in overestimated or underestimated rewards due to varying token lengths. Empirically, we utilize datasets with different label lengths to demonstrate the presence of biased rewards. We then introduce an effective downsampling approach, named SamPO, to eliminate potential length reliance. Our experimental evaluations, conducted across three LLMs of varying scales and a diverse array of conditional and open-ended benchmarks, highlight the efficacy of SamPO in mitigating verbosity, achieving improvements of 5% to 12% over DPO through debaised rewards. Our code can be accessed at: https://github.com/LuJunru/SamPO/.

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Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval
Tianyi Hu | Maria Maistro | Daniel Hershcovich

The cross-cultural adaptation of recipes is an important application of identifying and bridging cultural differences in language. The challenge lies in retaining the essence of the original recipe while also aligning with the writing and dietary habits of the target culture. Information Retrieval (IR) offers a way to address the challenge because it retrieves results from the culinary practices of the target culture while maintaining relevance to the original recipe. We introduce a novel task about cross-cultural recipe retrieval and present a unique Chinese-English cross-cultural recipe retrieval benchmark. Our benchmark is manually annotated under limited resource, utilizing various retrieval models to generate a pool of candidate results for manual annotation. The dataset provides retrieval samples that are culturally adapted but textually diverse, presenting greater challenges. We propose CARROT, a plug-and-play cultural-aware recipe information retrieval framework that incorporates cultural-aware query rewriting and re-ranking methods and evaluate it both on our benchmark and intuitive human judgments. The results show that our framework significantly enhances the preservation of the original recipe and its cultural appropriateness for the target culture. We believe these insights will significantly contribute to future research on cultural adaptation.

The recent emergence of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs) has enhanced medical diagnosis. However, current Med-LVLMs frequently encounter factual issues, often generating responses that do not align with established medical facts. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which utilizes external knowledge, can improve the factual accuracy of these models but introduces two major challenges. First, limited retrieved contexts might not cover all necessary information, while excessive retrieval can introduce irrelevant and inaccurate references, interfering with the model’s generation. Second, in cases where the model originally responds correctly, applying RAG can lead to an over-reliance on retrieved contexts, resulting in incorrect answers. To address these issues, we propose RULE, which consists of two components. First, we introduce a provably effective strategy for controlling factuality risk through the calibrated selection of the number of retrieved contexts. Second, based on samples where over-reliance on retrieved contexts led to errors, we curate a preference dataset to fine-tune the model, balancing its dependence on inherent knowledge and retrieved contexts for generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAFE on three medical VQA datasets, achieving an average improvement of 20.8% in factual accuracy.

The utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in financial trading has primarily been concentrated within the stock market, aiding in economic and financial decisions. Yet, the unique opportunities presented by the cryptocurrency market, noted for its on-chain data’s transparency and the critical influence of off-chain signals like news, remain largely untapped by LLMs. This work aims to bridge the gap by developing an LLM-based trading agent, CryptoTrade, which uniquely combines the analysis of on-chain and off-chain data. This approach leverages the transparency and immutability of on-chain data, as well as the timeliness and influence of off-chain signals, providing a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. CryptoTrade incorporates a reflective mechanism specifically engineered to refine its daily trading decisions by analyzing the outcomes of prior trading decisions. This research makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it broadens the applicability of LLMs to the domain of cryptocurrency trading. Secondly, it establishes a benchmark for cryptocurrency trading strategies. Through extensive experiments, CryptoTrade has demonstrated superior performance in maximizing returns compared to time-series baselines, but not compared to traditional trading signals, across various cryptocurrencies and market conditions. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/CryptoTrade

With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.

Parsing documents from pixels, such as pictures and scanned PDFs, into hierarchical structures is extensively demanded in the daily routines of data storage, retrieval and understanding. However, previously the research on this topic has been largely hindered since most existing datasets are small-scale, or contain documents of only a single type, which are characterized by a lack of document diversity. Moreover, there is a significant discrepancy in the annotation standards across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a large and diverse document hierarchy parsing (DHP) dataset to compensate for the data scarcity and inconsistency problem. We aim to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark. Meanwhile, we present a new DHP framework designed to grasp both fine-grained text content and coarse-grained pattern at layout element level, enhancing the capacity of pre-trained text-layout models in handling the multi-page and multi-level challenges in DHP. Through exhaustive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset and method.

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AMR-Evol: Adaptive Modular Response Evolution Elicits Better Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models in Code Generation
Ziyang Luo | Xin Li | Hongzhan Lin | Jing Ma | Lidong Bing

The impressive performance of proprietary LLMs like GPT4 in code generation has led to a trend to replicate these capabilities in open-source models through knowledge distillation (e.g. Code Evol-Instruct). However, these efforts often neglect the crucial aspect of response quality, relying heavily on teacher models for direct response distillation. This paradigm, especially for complex instructions, can degrade the quality of synthesized data, compromising the knowledge distillation process. To this end, our study introduces the Adaptive Modular Response Evolution (AMR-Evol) framework, which employs a two-stage process to refine response distillation. The first stage, modular decomposition, breaks down the direct response into more manageable sub-modules. The second stage, adaptive response evolution, automatically evolves the response with the related function modules. Our experiments with three popular code benchmarks—HumanEval, MBPP, and EvalPlus—attests to the superiority of the AMR-Evol framework over baseline response distillation methods. By comparing with the open-source Code LLMs trained on a similar scale of data, we observed performance enhancements: more than +3.0 points on HumanEval-Plus and +1.0 points on MBPP-Plus, which underscores the effectiveness of our framework. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ChiYeungLaw/AMR-Evol.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing attention in the past few years, but they may still generate descriptions that include objects not present in the corresponding images, a phenomenon known as object hallucination. To eliminate hallucinations, existing methods manually annotate paired responses with and without hallucinations, and then employ various alignment algorithms to improve the alignment capability between images and text. However, they not only demand considerable computation resources during the finetuning stage but also require expensive human annotation to construct paired data needed by the alignment algorithms. To address these issues, we propose an efficient fine-grained unlearning framework (EFUF), which performs gradient ascent utilizing three tailored losses to eliminate hallucinations without paired data. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently reduces hallucinations while preserving the generation quality with modest computational overhead. Our code and datasets will be publicly available.

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Rethinking Pruning Large Language Models: Benefits and Pitfalls of Reconstruction Error Minimization
Sungbin Shin | Wonpyo Park | Jaeho Lee | Namhoon Lee

This work suggests fundamentally rethinking the current practice of pruning large language models (LLMs). The way it is done is by divide and conquer: split the model into submodels, sequentially prune them, and reconstruct predictions of the dense counterparts on small calibration data one at a time; the final model is obtained simply by putting the resulting sparse submodels together. While this approach enables pruning under memory constraints, it generates high reconstruction errors. In this work, we first present an array of reconstruction techniques that can significantly reduce this error by more than 90%. Unwittingly, however, we discover that minimizing reconstruction error is not always ideal and can overfit the given calibration data, resulting in rather increased language perplexity and poor performance at downstream tasks. We find out that a strategy of self-generating calibration data can mitigate this trade-off between reconstruction and generalization, suggesting new directions in the presence of both benefits and pitfalls of reconstruction for pruning LLMs.

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LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators
Roman Koshkin | Katsuhito Sudoh | Satoshi Nakamura

The advent of transformers has fueled progress in machine translation. More recently large language models (LLMs) have come to the spotlight thanks to their generality and strong performance in a wide range of language tasks, including translation. Here we show that open-source LLMs perform on par with or better than some state-of-the-art baselines in simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) tasks, zero-shot. We also demonstrate that injection of minimal background information, which is easy with an LLM, brings further performance gains, especially on challenging technical subject-matter. This highlights LLMs’ potential for building next generation of massively multilingual, context-aware and terminologically accurate SiMT systems that require no resource-intensive training or fine-tuning.

Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers’ biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.

Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent complex conversational sessions for dense retrieval. To achieve this, we propose a simple and effective dual-learning approach that adapts LLM for retrieval via contrastive learning while enhancing the complex session understanding through masked instruction tuning on high-quality conversational instruction tuning data. Extensive experiments on five conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ChatRetriever significantly outperforms existing conversational dense retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on par with LLM-based rewriting approaches. Furthermore, ChatRetriever exhibits superior robustness in handling diverse conversational contexts. Our work highlights the potential of adapting LLMs for retrieval with complex inputs like conversational search sessions and proposes an effective approach to advance this research direction.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM evaluators, which compare two generated texts and determine the preferred one, have been employed in a wide range of applications. However, LLMs exhibit preference biases and worrying sensitivity to prompt designs. In this work, we first reveal that the predictive preference of LLMs can be highly brittle and skewed, even with semantically equivalent instructions. We find that fairer predictive preferences from LLMs consistently lead to judgments that are better aligned with humans. Motivated by this phenomenon, we propose an automatic Zero-shot Evaluation-oriented Prompt Optimization framework, ZEPO, which aims to produce fairer preference decisions and improve the alignment of LLM evaluators with human judgments. To this end, we propose a zero-shot learning objective based on the preference decision fairness. ZEPO demonstrates substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art LLM evaluators, without requiring labeled data, on representative meta-evaluation benchmarks. Our findings underscore the critical correlation between preference fairness and human alignment, positioning ZEPO as an efficient prompt optimizer for bridging the gap between LLM evaluators and human judgments.

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Learning Interpretable Legal Case Retrieval via Knowledge-Guided Case Reformulation
Chenlong Deng | Kelong Mao | Zhicheng Dou

Legal case retrieval for sourcing similar cases is critical in upholding judicial fairness. Different from general web search, legal case retrieval involves processing lengthy, complex, and highly specialized legal documents. Existing methods in this domain often overlook the incorporation of legal expert knowledge, which is crucial for accurately understanding and modeling legal cases, leading to unsatisfactory retrieval performance. This paper introduces KELLER, a legal knowledge-guided case reformulation approach based on large language models (LLMs) for effective and interpretable legal case retrieval. By incorporating professional legal knowledge about crimes and law articles, we enable large language models to accurately reformulate the original legal case into concise sub-facts of crimes, which contain the essential information of the case. Extensive experiments on two legal case retrieval benchmarks demonstrate superior retrieval performance and robustness on complex legal case queries of KELLER over existing methods.

In-context learning (ICL) is a few-shot learning paradigm that involves learning mappings through input-output pairs and appropriately applying them to new instances. Despite the remarkable ICL capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs), existing works are highly dependent on large-scale labeled support sets, not always feasible in practical scenarios. To refine this approach, we focus primarily on an innovative selective annotation mechanism, which precedes the standard demonstration retrieval. We introduce the Language Model-based Determinant Point Process (LM-DPP) that simultaneously considers the uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled instances for optimal selection. Consequently, this yields a subset for annotation that strikes a trade-off between the two factors. We apply LM-DPP to various language models, including GPT-J, LlaMA, and GPT-3. Experimental results on 9 NLU and 2 Generation datasets demonstrate that LM-DPP can effectively select canonical examples. Further analysis reveals that LLMs benefit most significantly from subsets that are both low uncertainty and high diversity.

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Pre-trained Language Models Do Not Help Auto-regressive Text-to-Image Generation
Yuhui Zhang | Brandon McKinzie | Zhe Gan | Vaishaal Shankar | Alexander T Toshev

Recent advances in image tokenizers, such as VQ-VAE, have enabled text-to-image generation using auto-regressive methods, similar to language modeling. However, these methods have yet to leverage pre-trained language models, despite their adaptability to various downstream tasks. In this work, we explore this gap by adapting a pre-trained language model for auto-regressive text-to-image generation, and find that pre-trained language models offer limited help. We provide a two-fold explanation by analyzing tokens from each modality. First, we demonstrate that image tokens possess significantly different semantics compared to text tokens, rendering pre-trained language models no more effective in modeling them than randomly initialized ones. Second, the text tokens in the image-text datasets are too simple compared to normal language model pre-training data, which causes the catastrophic degradation of language models’ capability.

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QUDSELECT: Selective Decoding for Questions Under Discussion Parsing
Ashima Suvarna | Xiao Liu | Tanmay Parekh | Kai-Wei Chang | Nanyun Peng

Question Under Discussion (QUD) is a discourse framework that uses implicit questions to reveal discourse relationships between sentences. In QUD parsing, each sentence is viewed as an answer to a question triggered by an anchor sentence in prior context. The resulting QUD structure is required to conform to several theoretical criteria like answer compatibility(how well the question is answered), making QUD parsing a challenging task. Previous works construct QUD parsers in a pipelined manner (i.e. detect the trigger sentence in context and then generate the question). However, these parsers lack a holistic view of the task and can hardly satisfy all the criteria. In this work, we introduce QUDSELECT, a joint-training framework that selectively decodes the QUD dependency structures considering the QUD criteria criteria. Using instruction-tuning, we train models to simultaneously predict the anchor sentence and generate the associated question. To explicitly incorporate the criteria, we adopt a selective decoding strategy of sampling multiple QUD candidates during inference, followed by selecting the best one with criteria scorers. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models by 9% in human evaluation and 4% in automatic evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Code and data are in https://github.com/asuvarna31/qudselect.

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Mitigating Language Bias of LMMs in Social Intelligence Understanding with Virtual Counterfactual Calibration
Peng Chen | Xiao-Yu Guo | Yuan-Fang Li | Xiaowang Zhang | Zhiyong Feng

Recent advances in foundation models have emphasized the need to align pre-trained models with specialized domains using small, curated datasets. Studies on these foundation models underscore the importance of low-data training and fine-tuning. This topic, well-known in natural language processing (NLP), has also gained increasing attention in the emerging field of scientific machine learning (SciML). To address the limitations of low-data training and fine-tuning, we draw inspiration from Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory, analyzing the shape of empirical spectral densities (ESDs) and revealing an imbalance in training quality across different model layers. To mitigate this issue, we adapt a recently proposed layer-wise learning rate scheduler, TempBalance, which effectively balances training quality across layers and enhances low-data training and fine-tuning for both NLP and SciML tasks. Notably, TempBalance demonstrates increasing performance gains as the amount of available tuning data decreases. Comparative analyses further highlight the effectiveness of TempBalance and its adaptability as an “add-on” method for improving model performance.

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Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Alignment
Zhaofeng Wu | Ananth Balashankar | Yoon Kim | Jacob Eisenstein | Ahmad Beirami

Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it challenging to extend this framework to diverse languages. In this work, we evaluate a simple approach for zero-shot cross-lingual alignment, where a reward model is trained on preference data in one source language and directly applied to other target languages. On summarization and open-ended dialog generation, we show that this method is consistently successful under comprehensive evaluation settings, including human evaluation: cross-lingually aligned models are preferred by humans over unaligned models on up to >70% of evaluation instances. We moreover find that a different-language reward model sometimes yields better aligned models than a same-language reward model. We also identify best practices when there is no language-specific data for even supervised finetuning, another component in alignment.

Pre-trained language models like BERT and T5 serve as crucial backbone encoders for dense retrieval. However, these models often exhibit limited generalization capabilities and face challenges in improving in-domain accuracy. Recent research has explored using large language models (LLMs) as retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. Despite these advancements, the specific benefits of LLMs over traditional retrievers and the impact of different LLM configurations—such as parameter sizes, pre-training duration, and alignment processes—on retrieval tasks remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on a wide range of retrieval tasks, including in-domain accuracy, data efficiency, zero-shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction-based retrieval, and multi-task learning. We evaluate over 15 different backbone LLMs and non-LLMs. Our findings reveal that larger models and extensive pre-training consistently enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency. Additionally, larger models demonstrate significant potential in zero-shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction-based retrieval, and multi-task learning. These results underscore the advantages of LLMs as versatile and effective backbone encoders in dense retrieval, providing valuable insights for future research and development in this field.

Conventional Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) models learn the embeddings of KG components over the structure of KGs, but their performances are limited when the KGs are severely incomplete. Recent LLM-enhanced KGR models input KG structural information into LLMs. However, they require fine-tuning on open-source LLMs and are not applicable to closed-source LLMs. Therefore, in this paper, to leverage the knowledge in LLMs without fine-tuning to assist and enhance conventional KGR models, we propose a new three-stage pipeline, including knowledge alignment, KG reasoning and entity reranking. Specifically, in the alignment stage, we propose three strategies to align the knowledge in LLMs to the KG schema by explicitly associating unconnected nodes with semantic relations. Based on the enriched KGs, we train structure-aware KGR models to integrate aligned knowledge to original knowledge existing in KGs. In the reranking stage, after obtaining the results of KGR models, we rerank the top-scored entities with LLMs to recall correct answers further. Experiments show our pipeline can enhance the KGR performance in both incomplete and general situations. Code and datasets are available.

Recently, tool use with LLMs has become one of the primary research topics as it can help LLM generate truthful and helpful responses. Existing studies on tool use with LLMs primarily focus on enhancing the tool-calling ability of LLMs. In practice, like chat assistants, LLMs are also required to align with human values in the context of tool use. Specifically, LLMs should refuse to answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions and insecure tool responses to ensure their reliability and harmlessness. At the same time, LLMs should demonstrate autonomy in tool use to reduce the costs associated with tool calling. To tackle this issue, we first introduce the principle that LLMs should follow in tool use scenarios: H2A. The goal of H2A is to align LLMs with **helpfulness**, **harmlessness**, and **autonomy**. In addition, we propose ToolAlign, a dataset comprising instruction-tuning data and preference data to align LLMs with the H2A principle for tool use. Based on ToolAlign, we develop LLMs by supervised fine-tuning and preference learning, and experimental results demonstrate that the LLMs exhibit remarkable tool-calling capabilities, while also refusing to engage with harmful content, and displaying a high degree of autonomy in tool utilization. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zhiyuanc2001/ToolAlign.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is substantially influenced by the pretraining corpus, which consists of vast quantities of unsupervised data processed by the models. Despite its critical role in model performance, ensuring the quality of this data is challenging due to its sheer volume and the absence of sample-level quality annotations and enhancements. In this paper, we introduce DecorateLM, a data engineering method designed to refine the pretraining corpus through data rating, tagging and editing. Specifically, DecorateLM rates texts against quality criteria, tags texts with hierarchical labels, and edits texts into a more formalized format. Due to the massive size of the pretraining corpus, adopting an LLM for decorating the entire corpus is less efficient. Therefore, to balance performance with efficiency, we curate a meticulously annotated training corpus for DecorateLM using a large language model and distill data engineering expertise into a compact 1.2 billion parameter small language model (SLM). We then apply DecorateLM to enhance 100 billion tokens of the training corpus, selecting 45 billion tokens that exemplify high quality and diversity for the further training of another 1.2 billion parameter LLM. Our results demonstrate that employing such high-quality data can significantly boost model performance, showcasing a powerful approach to enhance the quality of the pretraining corpus.

When asked to summarize articles or answer questions given a passage, large language models (LLMs) can hallucinate details and respond with unsubstantiated answers that are inaccurate with respect to the input context. This paper describes a simple approach for detecting such **contextual hallucinations**. We hypothesize that contextual hallucinations are related to the extent to which an LLM attends to information in the provided context versus its own generations. Based on this intuition, we propose a simple hallucination detection model whose input features are given by the ratio of attention weights on the context versus newly generated tokens (for each attention head). We find that a linear classifier based on these _lookback ratio_ features is as effective as a richer detector that utilizes the entire hidden states of an LLM or a text-based entailment model. The lookback ratio-based detector—**Lookback Lens**—is found to transfer across tasks and even models, allowing a detector that is trained on a 7B model to be applied (without retraining) to a larger 13B model. We further apply this detector to mitigate contextual hallucinations, and find that a simple classifier-guided decoding approach is able to reduce the amount of hallucination, for example by 9.6% in the XSum summarization task.

Alignment in artificial intelligence pursues the consistency between model responses and human preferences as well as values. In practice, the multifaceted nature of human preferences inadvertently introduces what is known as the ”alignment tax”–a compromise where enhancements in alignment within one objective (e.g., harmlessness) can diminish performance in others (e.g., helpfulness). However, existing alignment techniques are mostly unidirectional, leading to suboptimal trade-offs and poor flexibility over various objectives. To navigate this challenge, we argue the prominence of grounding LLMs with evident preferences. We introduce controllable preference optimization (CPO), which explicitly specifies preference scores for different objectives, thereby guiding the model to generate responses that meet the requirements. Our experimental analysis reveals that the aligned models can provide responses that match various preferences among the ”3H” (helpfulness, honesty, harmlessness) desiderata. Furthermore, by introducing diverse data and alignment goals, we surpass baseline methods in aligning with single objectives, hence mitigating the impact of the alignment tax and achieving improvements in multi-objective alignment.

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Mitigating Matthew Effect: Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation
Yongsen Zheng | Ruilin Xu | Guohua Wang | Liang Lin | Kwok-Yan Lam

The Matthew effect is a big challenge in Recommender Systems (RSs), where popular items tend to receive increasing attention, while less popular ones are often overlooked, perpetuating existing disparities. Although many existing methods attempt to mitigate Matthew effect in the static or quasi-static recommendation scenarios, such issue will be more pronounced as users engage with the system over time. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation (HiCore), aiming to address Matthew effect in the Conversational Recommender System (CRS) involving the dynamic user-system feedback loop. It devotes to learn multi-level user interests by building a set of hypergraphs (i.e., item-, entity-, word-oriented multiple-channel hypergraphs) to alleviate the Matthew effec. Extensive experiments on four CRS-based datasets showcase that HiCore attains a new state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its superiority in mitigating the Matthew effect effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/zysensmile/HiCore.

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Advancing Event Causality Identification via Heuristic Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network
Haoran Li | Qiang Gao | Hongmei Wu | Li Huang

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Exploring Union and Intersection of Visual Regions for Generating Questions, Answers, and Distractors
Wenjian Ding | Yao Zhang | Jun Wang | Adam Jatowt | Zhenglu Yang

Multiple-choice visual question answering (VQA) is to automatically choose a correct answer from a set of choices after reading an image. Existing efforts have been devoted to a separate generation of an image-related question, a correct answer, or challenge distractors. By contrast, we turn to a holistic generation and optimization of questions, answers, and distractors (QADs) in this study. This integrated generation strategy eliminates the need for human curation and guarantees information consistency. Furthermore, we first propose to put the spotlight on different image regions to diversify QADs. Accordingly, a novel framework ReBo is formulated in this paper. ReBo cyclically generates each QAD based on a recurrent multimodal encoder, and each generation is focusing on a different area of the image compared to those already concerned by the previously generated QADs. In addition to traditional VQA comparisons with state-of-the-art approaches, we also validate the capability of ReBo in generating augmented data to benefit VQA models.

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UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation
Xiangyu Zhao | Yuehan Zhang | Wenlong Zhang | Xiao-Ming Wu

The fashion domain encompasses a variety of real-world multimodal tasks, including multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation. The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence generated content, particularly in technologies like large language models for text generation and diffusion models for visual generation, have sparked widespread research interest in applying these multimodal models in the fashion domain. However, tasks that use embeddings, such as image-to-text or text-to-image retrieval, have been largely ignored from this perspective due to the diverse nature of the multimodal fashion domain. And current research on multi-task single models lack focus on image generation. In this work, we present UniFashion, a unified framework that simultaneously tackles the challenges of multimodal generation and retrieval tasks within the fashion domain, integrating image generation with retrieval tasks and text generation tasks. UniFashion unifies embedding and generative tasks by integrating a diffusion model and LLM, enabling controllable and high-fidelity generation. Our model significantly outperforms previous single-task state-of-the-art models across diverse fashion tasks, and can be readily adapted to manage complex vision-language tasks. This work demonstrates the potential learning synergy between multimodal generation and retrieval, offering a promising direction for future research in the fashion domain.

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Tracking the perspectives of interacting language models
Hayden Helm | Brandon Duderstadt | Youngser Park | Carey Priebe

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing high quality information at unprecedented rates. As these models continue to entrench themselves in society, the content they produce will become increasingly pervasive in databases that are, in turn, incorporated into the pre-training data, fine-tuning data, retrieval data, etc. of other language models. In this paper we formalize the idea of a communication network of LLMs and introduce a method for representing the perspective of individual models within a collection of LLMs. Given these tools we systematically study information diffusion in the communication network of LLMs in various simulated settings.

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MAR: Matching-Augmented Reasoning for Enhancing Visual-based Entity Question Answering
Zhengxuan Zhang | Yin Wu | Yuyu Luo | Nan Tang

A multimodal large language model MLLMs may struggle with answering visual-based (personal) entity questions (VEQA), such as ”who is A?” or ”who is A that B is talking to?” for various reasons, e.g., the absence of the name of A in the caption or the inability of MLLMs to recognize A, particularly for less common entities. Furthermore, even if the MLLMs can identify A, it may refrain from answering due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called Matching-Augmented Reasoning (MAR) to enhance VEQA. Given a collection of visual objects with captions, MAR preprocesses each object individually, identifying faces, names, and their alignments within the object. It encodes this information and stores their vector representations in vector databases. When handling VEQA, MAR retrieves matching faces and names and organizes these entities into a matching graph. MAR then derives the answer to the query by reasoning over this matching graph. Extensive experiments show that MAR significantly improves VEQA compared with the state-of-the-art methods using MLLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues (e.g. LLMs can react differently to disturbances like rephrasing or inconsequential order change). In addition to these inconsistencies, we also observe that LLMs, while capable of solving hard problems, can paradoxically fail at easier ones. To evaluate this hard-to-easy inconsistency, we develop the ConsisEval benchmark, where each entry comprises a pair of questions with a strict order of difficulty. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of consistency score to quantitatively measure this inconsistency and analyze the potential for improvement in consistency by relative consistency score. Based on comprehensive experiments across a variety of existing models, we find: (1) GPT-4 achieves the highest consistency score of 92.2% but is still inconsistent to specific questions due to distraction by redundant information, misinterpretation of questions, etc.; (2) models with stronger capabilities typically exhibit higher consistency, but exceptions also exist; (3) hard data enhances consistency for both fine-tuning and in-context learning. Our data and code will be publicly available on GitHub.

Large language model agents have exhibited exceptional performance across a range of complex interactive tasks. Recent approaches have utilized tuning with expert trajectories to enhance agent performance, yet they primarily concentrate on outcome rewards, which may lead to errors or suboptimal actions due to the absence of process supervision signals. In this paper, we introduce the **I**terative step-level **P**rocess **R**efinement **(IPR)** framework, which provides detailed step-by-step guidance to enhance agent training. Specifically, we adopt the Monte Carlo method to estimate step-level rewards. During each iteration, the agent explores along the expert trajectory and generates new actions. These actions are then evaluated against the corresponding step of expert trajectory using step-level rewards. Such comparison helps identify discrepancies, yielding contrastive action pairs that serve as training data for the agent. Our experiments on three complex agent tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms a variety of strong baselines. Moreover, our analytical finds highlight the effectiveness of IPR in augmenting action efficiency and its applicability to diverse models.

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Standardize: Aligning Language Models with Expert-Defined Standards for Content Generation
Joseph Marvin Imperial | Gail Forey | Harish Tayyar Madabushi

Domain experts across engineering, healthcare, and education follow strict standards for producing quality content such as technical manuals, medication instructions, and children’s reading materials. However, current works in controllable text generation have yet to explore using these standards as references for control. Towards this end, we introduce Standardize, a retrieval-style in-context learning-based framework to guide large language models to align with expert-defined standards. Focusing on English language standards in the education domain as a use case, we consider the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and Common Core Standards (CCS) for the task of open-ended content generation. Our findings show that models can gain 45% to 100% increase in precise accuracy across open and commercial LLMs evaluated, demonstrating that the use of knowledge artifacts extracted from standards and integrating them in the generation process can effectively guide models to produce better standard-aligned content.

Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (CDNER) is crucial for Knowledge Graph (KG) construction and natural language processing (NLP), enabling learning from source to target domains with limited data. Previous studies often rely on manually collected entity-relevant sentences from the web or attempt to bridge the gap between tokens and entity labels across domains. These approaches are time-consuming and inefficient, as these data are often weakly correlated with the target task and require extensive pre-training.To address these issues, we propose automatically generating task-oriented knowledge (GTOK) using large language models (LLMs), focusing on the reasoning process of entity extraction. Then, we employ task-oriented pre-training (TOPT) to facilitate domain adaptation. Additionally, current cross-domain NER methods often lack explicit explanations for their effectiveness. Therefore, we introduce the concept of information density to better evaluate the model’s effectiveness before performing entity recognition.We conduct systematic experiments and analyses to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and the validity of using information density for model evaluation.

Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases, improving their performance in applications like fact-checking and information searching. In this paper, we demonstrate a security threat where adversaries can exploit the openness of these knowledge bases by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior. This threat is critical as it mirrors real-world usage scenarios where RAG systems interact with publicly accessible knowledge bases, such as web scrapings and user-contributed data pools. To be more realistic, we target a realistic setting where the adversary has no knowledge of users’ queries, knowledge base data, and the LLM parameters. We demonstrate that it is possible to exploit the model successfully through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. Our findings emphasize an urgent need for security measures in the design and deployment of RAG systems to prevent potential manipulation and ensure the integrity of machine-generated content.

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Predicate Debiasing in Vision-Language Models Integration for Scene Graph Generation Enhancement
Yuxuan Wang | Xiaoyuan Liu

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) provides basic language representation of visual scenes, requiring models to grasp complex and diverse semantics between objects. This complexity and diversity in SGG leads to underrepresentation, where parts of triplet labels are rare or even unseen during training, resulting in imprecise predictions. To tackle this, we propose integrating the pretrained Vision-language Models to enhance representation. However, due to the gap between pretraining and SGG, direct inference of pretrained VLMs on SGG leads to severe bias, which stems from the imbalanced predicates distribution in the pretraining language set. To alleviate the bias, we introduce a novel LM Estimation to approximate the unattainable predicates distribution. Finally, we ensemble the debiased VLMs with SGG models to enhance the representation, where we design a certainty-aware indicator to score each sample and dynamically adjust the ensemble weights. Our training-free method effectively addresses the predicates bias in pretrained VLMs, enhances SGG’s representation, and significantly improve the performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights, resulting in several high-profile lawsuits. The legal landscape is struggling to keep pace with these rapid advancements, with ongoing debates about whether generated text might plagiarize copyrighted materials. Current LLMs may infringe on copyrights or overly restrict non-copyrighted texts, leading to these challenges: (i) the need for a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to assess copyright compliance from multiple aspects; (ii) evaluating robustness against safeguard bypassing attacks; and (iii) developing effective defenses targeted against the generation of copyrighted text.To tackle these challenges, we introduce a curated dataset to evaluate methods, test attack strategies, and propose a lightweight, real-time defense mechanism to prevent the generation of copyrighted text, ensuring the safe and lawful use of LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that current LLMs frequently output copyrighted text, and that jailbreaking attacks can significantly increase the volume of copyrighted output. Our proposed defense mechanism substantially reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests.

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MatchTime: Towards Automatic Soccer Game Commentary Generation
Jiayuan Rao | Haoning Wu | Chang Liu | Yanfeng Wang | Weidi Xie

Soccer is a globally popular sport with a vast audience, in this paper, we consider constructing an automatic soccer game commentary model to improve the audiences’ viewing experience. In general, we make the following contributions: *First*, observing the prevalent video-text misalignment in existing datasets, we manually annotate timestamps for 49 matches, establishing a more robust benchmark for soccer game commentary generation, termed as *SN-Caption-test-align*; *Second*, we propose a multi-modal temporal alignment pipeline to automatically correct and filter the existing dataset at scale, creating a higher-quality soccer game commentary dataset for training, denoted as *MatchTime*; *Third*, based on our curated dataset, we train an automatic commentary generation model, named **MatchVoice**. Extensive experiments and ablation studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of our alignment pipeline, and training model on the curated datasets achieves state-of-the-art performance for commentary generation, showcasing that better alignment can lead to significant performance improvements in downstream tasks.

Recent advancements in State Space Models (SSMs) have attracted significant interest, particularly in models optimized for parallel training and handling long-range dependencies. Architectures like Mamba have scaled to billions of parameters with selective SSM. To facilitate broader applications using Mamba, exploring its efficiency is crucial. While token reduction techniques offer a straightforward post-training strategy, we find that applying existing methods directly to SSMs leads to substantial performance drops. Through insightful analysis, we identify the reasons for this failure and the limitations of current techniques. In response, we propose a tailored, unified post-training token reduction method for SSMs. Our approach integrates token importance and similarity, thus taking advantage of both pruning and merging, to devise a fine-grained intra-layer token reduction strategy. Extensive experiments show that our method improves the average accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods, while significantly reducing computational demands and memory requirements.

Recent progress with LLM-based agents has shown promising results across various tasks. However, their use in answering questions from knowledge bases remains largely unexplored. Implementing a KBQA system using traditional methods is challenging due to the shortage of task-specific training data and the complexity of creating task-focused model structures. In this paper, we present Triad, a unified framework that utilizes an LLM-based agent with multiple roles for KBQA tasks. The agent is assigned three roles to tackle different KBQA subtasks: agent as a generalist for mastering various subtasks, as a decision maker for the selection of candidates, and as an advisor for answering questions with knowledge. Our KBQA framework is executed in four phases, involving the collaboration of the agent’s multiple roles. We evaluated the performance of our framework using three benchmark datasets, and the results show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the LC-QuAD and YAGO-QA benchmarks, yielding F1 scores of 11.8% and 20.7%, respectively.

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MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic
Yuyan Zhou | Liang Song | Bingning Wang | Weipeng Chen

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has catalyzed the exploration of multi-task learning (MTL), in which a single model demonstrates proficiency across diverse tasks. Task arithmetic has emerged as a cost-effective approach for MTL. It enables performance enhancement across multiple tasks by adding their corresponding task vectors to a pre-trained model. However, the current lack of a method that can simultaneously achieve optimal performance, computational efficiency, and data privacy limits their application to LLMs. In this paper, we propose Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic for merging GPT-scale models (MetaGPT) which formalizes the objective of model merging into a multi-task learning framework, aiming to minimize the average loss difference between the merged model and each individual task model. Since data privacy limits the use of multi-task training data, we leverage LLMs’ local linearity and task vectors’ orthogonality to separate the data term and scaling coefficients term and derive a model-exclusive task arithmetic method. Our proposed MetaGPT is data-agnostic and bypasses the heavy search process, making it cost-effective and easy to implement for LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaGPT leads to improvement of task arithmetic and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks.

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Event Causality Identification with Synthetic Control
Haoyu Wang | Fengze Liu | Jiayao Zhang | Dan Roth | Kyle Richardson

Event causality identification (ECI), a process that extracts causal relations between events from text, is crucial for distinguishing causation from correlation. Traditional approaches to ECI have primarily utilized linguistic patterns and multi-hop relational inference, risking false causality identification due to informal usage of causality and specious graphical inference. In this paper, we adopt the Rubin Causal Model to identify event causality: given two temporally ordered events, we see the first event as the treatment and the second one as the observed outcome. Determining their causality involves manipulating the treatment and estimating the resultant change in the likelihood of the outcome. Given that it is only possible to implement manipulation conceptually in the text domain, as a work-around, we try to find a twin for the protagonist from existing corpora. This twin should have identical life experiences with the protagonist before the treatment but undergoes an intervention of treatment. However, the practical difficulty of locating such a match limits its feasibility. Addressing this issue, we use the synthetic control method to generate such a twin’ from relevant historical data, leveraging text embedding synthesis and inversion techniques. This approach allows us to identify causal relations more robustly than previous methods, including GPT-4, which is demonstrated on a causality benchmark, COPES-hard.

Protein Language Models traditionally depend on Multiple Sequence Alignments (MSA) to incorporate evolutionary knowledge. However, MSA-based approaches suffer from substantial computational overhead and generally underperform in generalizing to de novo proteins. This study reevaluates the role of MSA, proposing it as a retrieval augmentation method and questioning the necessity of sequence alignment. We show that a simple alternative, Retrieved Sequence Augmentation (RSA), can enhance protein representation learning without the need for alignment and cumbersome preprocessing. RSA surpasses MSA Transformer by an average of 5% in both structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster. Additionally, RSA demonstrates enhanced transferability for predicting de novo proteins. This methodology addresses a critical need for efficiency in protein prediction and can be rapidly employed to identify homologous sequences, improve representation learning, and enhance the capacity of Large Language Models to interpret protein structures.

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HELPD: Mitigating Hallucination of LVLMs by Hierarchical Feedback Learning with Vision-enhanced Penalty Decoding
Fan Yuan | Chi Qin | Xiaogang Xu | Piji Li

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many visual-language tasks. However, these models still suffer from multimodal hallucination, which means the generation of objects or content that violates the images. Many existing work detects hallucination by directly judging whether an object exists in an image, overlooking the association between the object and semantics. To address this issue, we propose Hierarchical Feedback Learning with Vision-enhanced Penalty Decoding (HELPD). This framework incorporates hallucination feedback at both object and sentence semantic levels. Remarkably, even with a marginal degree of training, this approach can alleviate over 15% of hallucination. Simultaneously, HELPD penalizes the output logits according to the image attention window to avoid being overly affected by generated text. HELPD can be seamlessly integrated with any LVLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework yields favorable results across multiple hallucination benchmarks. It effectively mitigates hallucination for different LVLMs and concurrently improves their text generation quality.

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of ‘non-human’ agents, such as the ones backed by large Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Nonetheless, spatial reasoning capabilities of modern VLMs in this setup remain unattested and underexplored. In this work, we study their capability to understand and reason over spatial relations from the top view. The focus on top view also enables controlled evaluations at different granularity of spatial reasoning; we clearly disentangle different abilities (e.g., recognizing particular objects versus understanding their relative positions). We introduce the TopViewRS (Top-View Reasoning in Space) dataset, consisting of 11,384 multiple-choice questions with either realistic or semantic top-view map as visual input. We then use it to study and evaluate VLMs across 4 perception and reasoning tasks with different levels of complexity. Evaluation of 10 representative open- and closed-source VLMs reveals the gap of more than 50% compared to average human performance, and it is even lower than the random baseline in some cases. Although additional experiments show that Chain-of-Thought reasoning can boost model capabilities by 5.82% on average, the overall performance of VLMs remains limited. Our findings underscore the critical need for enhanced model capability in top-view spatial reasoning and set a foundation for further research towards human-level proficiency of VLMs in real-world multimodal tasks.

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DA³: A Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack against Language Models
Yibo Wang | Xiangjue Dong | James Caverlee | Philip S. Yu

Language models can be manipulated by adversarial attacks, which introduce subtle perturbations to input data. While recent attack methods can achieve a relatively high attack success rate (ASR), we’ve observed that the generated adversarial examples have a different data distribution compared with the original examples. Specifically, these adversarial examples exhibit reduced confidence levels and greater divergence from the training data distribution. Consequently, they are easy to detect using straightforward detection methods, diminishing the efficacy of such attacks. To address this issue, we propose a Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack (DA³) method. DA³ considers the distribution shifts of adversarial examples to improve attacks’ effectiveness under detection methods. We further design a novel evaluation metric, the Non-detectable Attack Success Rate (NASR), which integrates both ASR and detectability for the attack task. We conduct experiments on four widely used datasets to validate the attack effectiveness and transferability of adversarial examples generated by DA³ against both the white-box BERT-base and RoBERTa-base models and the black-box LLaMA2-7b model.

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Evaluating Psychological Safety of Large Language Models
Xingxuan Li | Yutong Li | Lin Qiu | Shafiq Joty | Lidong Bing

In this work, we designed unbiased prompts to systematically evaluate the psychological safety of large language models (LLMs). First, we tested five different LLMs by using two personality tests: Short Dark Triad (SD-3) and Big Five Inventory (BFI). All models scored higher than the human average on SD-3, suggesting a relatively darker personality pattern. Despite being instruction fine-tuned with safety metrics to reduce toxicity, InstructGPT, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 still showed dark personality patterns; these models scored higher than self-supervised GPT-3 on the Machiavellianism and narcissism traits on SD-3. Then, we evaluated the LLMs in the GPT series by using well-being tests to study the impact of fine-tuning with more training data. We observed a continuous increase in the well-being scores of GPT models. Following these observations, we showed that fine-tuning Llama-2-chat-7B with responses from BFI using direct preference optimization could effectively reduce the psychological toxicity of the model. Based on the findings, we recommended the application of systematic and comprehensive psychological metrics to further evaluate and improve the safety of LLMs.

Sentiment classification (SC) often suffers from low-resource challenges such as domain-specific contexts, imbalanced label distributions, and few-shot scenarios. The potential of the diffusion language model (LM) for textual data augmentation (DA) remains unexplored, moreover, textual DA methods struggle to balance the diversity and consistency of new samples. Most DA methods either perform logical modifications or rephrase less important tokens in the original sequence with the language model. In the context of SC, strong emotional tokens could act critically on the sentiment of the whole sequence. Therefore, contrary to rephrasing less important context, we propose DiffusionCLS to leverage a diffusion LM to capture in-domain knowledge and generate pseudo samples by reconstructing strong label-related tokens. This approach ensures a balance between consistency and diversity, avoiding the introduction of noise and augmenting crucial features of datasets. DiffusionCLS also comprises a Noise-Resistant Training objective to help the model generalize. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in various low-resource scenarios including domain-specific and domain-general problems. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of our framework’s modules, and visualization studies highlight optimal deployment conditions, reinforcing our conclusions.

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Self-Bootstrapped Visual-Language Model for Knowledge Selection and Question Answering
Dongze Hao | Qunbo Wang | Longteng Guo | Jie Jiang | Jing Liu

While large pre-trained visual-language models have shown promising results on traditional visual question answering benchmarks, it is still challenging for them to answer complex VQA problems which requires diverse world knowledge. Motivated by the research of retrieval-augmented generation in the field of natural language processing, we use Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) to retrieve related knowledge to help the model answer questions. However, DPR conduct retrieving in natural language space, which may not ensure comprehensive acquisition of image information. Thus, the retrieved knowledge is not truly conducive to helping answer the question, affecting the performance of the overall system. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that leverages the visual-language model to select the key knowledge retrieved by DPR and answer questions. The framework consists of two modules: Selector and Answerer, where both are initialized by the MLLM and parameter-efficiently finetuned by self-bootstrapping: find key knowledge in the retrieved knowledge documents using the Selector, and then use them to finetune the Answerer to predict answers; obtain the pseudo-labels of key knowledge documents based on the predictions of the Answerer and weak supervision labels, and then finetune the Selector to select key knowledge; repeat. Our framework significantly enhances the performance of the baseline on the challenging open-domain Knowledge-based VQA benchmark, OK-VQA, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 62.83%.

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PsFuture: A Pseudo-Future-based Zero-Shot Adaptive Policy for Simultaneous Machine Translation
Libo Zhao | Jing Li | Ziqian Zeng

Simultaneous Machine Translation (SiMT) requires target tokens to be generated in real-time as streaming source tokens are consumed. Traditional approaches to SiMT typically require sophisticated architectures and extensive parameter configurations for training adaptive read/write policies, which in turn demand considerable computational power and memory. We propose PsFuture, the first zero-shot adaptive read/write policy for SiMT, enabling the translation model to independently determine read/write actions without the necessity for additional training. Furthermore, we introduce a novel training strategy, Prefix-to-Full (P2F), specifically tailored to adjust offline translation models for SiMT applications, exploiting the advantages of the bidirectional attention mechanism inherent in offline models. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot policy attains performance on par with strong baselines and the P2F method can further enhance performance, achieving an outstanding trade-off between translation quality and latency.

Charts are important for presenting and explaining complex data relationships. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in chart understanding. However, the sheer size of these models limits their use in resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we present TinyChart, an efficient MLLM for chart understanding with only 3B parameters. TinyChart overcomes two key challenges in efficient chart understanding: (1) reduce the burden of learning numerical computations through Program-of-Thoughts (PoT) learning, which trains the model to generate Python programs for numerical calculations, and (2) reduce lengthy vision feature sequences through Vision Token Merging, which gradually merges most similar vision tokens. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our 3B TinyChart achieves SOTA performance on various chart understanding benchmarks including ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart-to-Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. It outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters, and close-sourced MLLM GPT-4V on ChartQA, with higher throughput during inference due to a smaller model scale and more efficient vision encoding.

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Do We Need Language-Specific Fact-Checking Models? The Case of Chinese
Caiqi Zhang | Zhijiang Guo | Andreas Vlachos

This paper investigates the potential benefits of language-specific fact-checking models, focusing on the case of Chinese using CHEF dataset. To better reflect real-world fact-checking, we first develop a novel Chinese document-level evidence retriever, achieving state-of-the-art performance. We then demonstrate the limitations of translation-based methods and multilingual language models, highlighting the need for language-specific systems. To better analyze token-level biases in different systems, we construct an adversarial dataset based on the CHEF dataset, where each instance has a large word overlap with the original one but holds the opposite veracity label. Experimental results on the CHEF dataset and our adversarial dataset show that our proposed method outperforms translation-based methods and multilingual language models and is more robust toward biases, emphasizing the importance of language-specific fact-checking systems.

Recent advancements in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models’ advanced reasoning ability. Traditional Vision-Language models (VLMs) perform well in visual perception tasks while struggling with complex reasoning scenarios. Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust text reasoning capabilities; however, they lack visual acuity. To bridge this gap, we propose **C**omplex **V**isual **R**easoning **L**arge **L**anguage **M**odels (**CVR-LLM**), capitalizing on VLMs’ visual perception proficiency and LLMs’ extensive reasoning capability. Unlike recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) that require a projection layer, our approach transforms images into detailed, context-aware descriptions using an iterative self-refinement loop and leverages LLMs’ text knowledge for accurate predictions without extra training. We also introduce a novel multi-modal in-context learning (ICL) methodology to enhance LLMs’ contextual understanding and reasoning. Additionally, we introduce Chain-of-Comparison (CoC), a step-by-step comparison technique enabling contrasting various aspects of predictions. Our CVR-LLM presents the first comprehensive study across a wide array of complex visual reasoning tasks and achieves SOTA performance among all.

Text detoxification aims to minimize the risk of language models producing toxic content. Existing detoxification methods of directly constraining the model output or further training the model on the non-toxic corpus fail to achieve a decent balance between detoxification effectiveness and generation quality. This issue stems from the neglect of constrain imposed by the context since language models are designed to generate output that closely matches the context while detoxification methods endeavor to ensure the safety of the output even if it semantically deviates from the context. In view of this, we introduce a Context-aware Model self-Detoxification (CMD) framework that pays attention to both the context and the detoxification process, i.e., first detoxifying the context and then making the language model generate along the safe context. Specifically, CMD framework involves two phases: utilizing language models to synthesize data and applying these data for training. We also introduce a toxic contrastive loss that encourages the model generation away from the negative toxic samples. Experiments on various LLMs have verified the effectiveness of our MSD framework, which can yield the best performance compared to baselines.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language generation. Compared to previous small-scale models, they are capable of generating fluent output based on the provided prefix or prompt. However, one critical challenge — the *hallucination* problem — remains to be resolved. Generally, the community refers to the undetected hallucination scenario where the LLMs generate text unrelated to the input text or facts. In this study, we intend to model the distributional distance between the regular conditional output and the unconditional output, which is generated without a given input text. Based upon Taylor Expansion for this distance at the output probability space, our approach manages to leverage the embedding and first-order gradient information. The resulting approach is plug-and-play that can be easily adapted to any autoregressive LLM. On the hallucination benchmarks HADES and other datasets, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Zero-shot singing voice synthesis (SVS) with style transfer and style control aims to generate high-quality singing voices with unseen timbres and styles (including singing method, emotion, rhythm, technique, and pronunciation) from audio and text prompts. However, the multifaceted nature of singing styles poses a significant challenge for effective modeling, transfer, and control. Furthermore, current SVS models often fail to generate singing voices rich in stylistic nuances for unseen singers. To address these challenges, we introduce TCSinger, the first zero-shot SVS model for style transfer across cross-lingual speech and singing styles, along with multi-level style control. Specifically, TCSinger proposes three primary modules: 1) the clustering style encoder employs a clustering vector quantization model to stably condense style information into a compact latent space; 2) the Style and Duration Language Model (S&D-LM) concurrently predicts style information and phoneme duration, which benefits both; 3) the style adaptive decoder uses a novel mel-style adaptive normalization method to generate singing voices with enhanced details. Experimental results show that TCSinger outperforms all baseline models in synthesis quality, singer similarity, and style controllability across various tasks, including zero-shot style transfer, multi-level style control, cross-lingual style transfer, and speech-to-singing style transfer.

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Be Helpful but Don’t Talk too Much - Enhancing Helpfulness in Conversations through Relevance in Multi-Turn Emotional Support
Junlin Li | Bo Peng | Yu-Yin Hsu | Chu-Ren Huang

For a conversation to help and support, speakers should maintain an “effect-effort” tradeoff. As outlined in the gist of “Cognitive Relevance Principle”, helpful speakers should optimize the “cognitive relevance” through maximizing the “cognitive effects” and minimizing the “processing effort” imposed on listeners. Although preference learning methods have given rise a boon of studies in pursuit of“effect-optimization”, none have delved into the critical “effort-optimiazation” to fully cultivate the awareness of “optimal relevance” into thecognition of conversation agents. To address this gap, we integrate the “Cognitive Relevance Principle” into emotional support agents in the environment of multi-turn conversation. The results demonstrate a significant and robust improvement against the baseline systems with respect to response quality, human-likedness and supportivenss. This study offers compelling evidence for the effectiveness of the “Relevance Principle” in generating human-like, helpful, and harmless emotional support conversations. The source code will be available at https://github.com/CN-Eyetk/VLESA-ORL.git

In interactions between users and language model agents, user utterances frequently exhibit ellipsis (omission of words or phrases) or imprecision (lack of exactness) to prioritize efficiency. This can lead to varying interpretations of the same input based on different assumptions or background knowledge. It is thus crucial for agents to adeptly handle the inherent ambiguity in queries to ensure reliability. However, even state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still face challenges in such scenarios, primarily due to the following hurdles: (1) LLMs are not explicitly trained to deal with ambiguous utterances; (2) the degree of ambiguity perceived by the LLMs may vary depending on the possessed knowledge. To address these issues, we propose Alignment with Perceived Ambiguity (APA), a novel pipeline that aligns LLMs to manage ambiguous queries by leveraging their own assessment of ambiguity (i.e., perceived ambiguity). Experimental results on question-answering datasets demonstrate that APA empowers LLMs to explicitly detect and manage ambiguous queries while retaining the ability to answer clear questions. Furthermore, our finding proves that APA excels beyond training with gold-standard labels, especially in out-of-distribution scenarios. The data and code are available at https://github.com/heyjoonkim/APA.

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Tag-grounded Visual Instruction Tuning with Retrieval Augmentation
Daiqing Qi | Handong Zhao | Zijun Wei | Sheng Li

Despite recent advances in the general visual instruction-following ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), they still struggle with critical problems when required to provide a precise and detailed response to a visual instruction: (1) failure to identify novel objects or entities, (2) mention of non-existent objects, and (3) neglect of object’s attributed details. Intuitive solutions include improving the size and quality of data or using larger foundation models. They show effectiveness in mitigating these issues, but at an expensive cost of collecting a vast amount of new data and introducing a significantly larger model. Standing at the intersection of these approaches, we examine the three object-oriented problems from the perspective of the image-to-text mapping process by the multimodal connector. In this paper, we first identify the limitations of multimodal connectors stemming from insufficient training data. Driven by this, we propose to enhance the mapping with retrieval-augmented tag tokens, which contain rich object-aware information such as object names and attributes. With our Tag-grounded visual instruction tuning with retrieval Augmentation (TUNA), we outperform baselines that share the same language model and training data on 12 benchmarks. Furthermore, we show the zero-shot capability of TUNA when provided with specific datastores.

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GLaPE: Gold Label-agnostic Prompt Evaluation for Large Language Models
Xuanchang Zhang | Zhuosheng Zhang | Hai Zhao

Despite the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), their task performance remains sensitive to prompt design. Recent studies have explored leveraging the LLM itself as an optimizer to identify optimal prompts that maximize task accuracy. However, when evaluating prompts, such approaches heavily rely on elusive manually annotated gold labels to calculate task accuracy for each candidate prompt, which hinders its generality. To overcome the limitation, this work proposes GLaPE, a gold label-agnostic prompt evaluation method to alleviate dependence on gold labels. GLaPE is composed of two critical aspects: self-consistency evaluation of a single prompt and mutual-consistency refinement across multiple prompts. Experimental results on 8 widely-recognized reasoning tasks demonstrate that GLaPE can produce more effective prompts, achieving performance comparable to those derived from manually annotated gold labels. Analysis shows that GLaPE provides reliable evaluations aligned with accuracy, even in the absence of gold labels. Code is publicly available at **Anonymous**.

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Decoding the Echoes of Vision from fMRI: Memory Disentangling for Past Semantic Information
Runze Xia | Congchi Yin | Piji Li

Code retrieval aims to identify code from extensive codebases that semantically aligns with a given query code snippet. Collecting a broad and high-quality set of query and code pairs is crucial to the success of this task. However, existing data collection methods struggle to effectively balance scalability and annotation quality. In this paper, we first analyze the factors influencing the quality of function annotations generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We find that the invocation of intra-repository functions and third-party APIs plays a significant role. Building on this insight, we propose a novel annotation method that enhances the annotation context by incorporating the content of functions called within the repository and information on third-party API functionalities. Additionally, we integrate LLMs with a novel sorting method to address the multi-level function call relationships within repositories. Furthermore, by applying our proposed method across a range of repositories, we have developed the Query4Code dataset. The quality of this synthesized dataset is validated through both model training and human evaluation, demonstrating high-quality annotations. Moreover, cost analysis confirms the scalability of our annotation method.

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Towards Difficulty-Agnostic Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-Language Models
Yongjin Yang | Jongwoo Ko | Se-Young Yun

Vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable applicability across a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification. Recently, the use of prompts or adapters for efficient transfer learning (ETL) has gained significant attention for effectively adapting to downstream tasks. However, previous studies have overlooked the challenge of varying transfer difficulty of downstream tasks. In this paper, we empirically analyze how each ETL method behaves with respect to transfer difficulty. Our observations indicate that utilizing vision prompts and text adapters is crucial for adaptability and generalizability in domains with high difficulty. Also, by applying an adaptive ensemble approach that integrates task-adapted VLMs with pre-trained VLMs and strategically leverages more general knowledge in low-difficulty and less in high-difficulty domains, we consistently enhance performance across both types of domains. Based on these observations, we propose an adaptive ensemble method that combines visual prompts and text adapters with pre-trained VLMs, tailored by transfer difficulty, to achieve optimal performance for any target domain. Upon experimenting with extensive benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms all baselines, particularly on unseen tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness.

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Advancing Process Verification for Large Language Models via Tree-Based Preference Learning
Mingqian He | Yongliang Shen | Wenqi Zhang | Zeqi Tan | Weiming Lu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling complex reasoning tasks by generating step-by-step rationales. Some methods have proven effective in boosting accuracy by introducing extra verifiers to assess these paths. However, existing verifiers, typically trained on binary-labeled reasoning paths, fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the feedback provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tree-based Preference Learning Verifier (Tree-PLV), a novel approach that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. Compared to traditional binary classification, step-level preferences more finely capture the nuances between reasoning steps, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the complete reasoning path. We empirically evaluate Tree-PLV across a range of arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, where it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks. For instance, Tree-PLV achieved substantial performance gains over the Mistral-7B self-consistency baseline on GSM8K (67.55% → 82.79%), MATH (17.00% → 26.80%), CSQA (68.14% → 72.97%), and StrategyQA (82.86% → 83.25%). Additionally, our study explores the appropriate granularity for applying preference learning, revealing that step-level guidance provides feedback that better aligns with the evaluation of the reasoning process.

With the rapidly-growing deployment of large language model (LLM) inference services, privacy concerns have arisen regarding to the user input data. Recent studies are exploring transforming user inputs to obfuscated embedded vectors, so that the data will not be eavesdropped by service provides. However, in this paper we show that again, without a solid and deliberate security design and analysis, such embedded vector obfuscation failed to protect users’ privacy. We demonstrate the conclusion via conducting a novel inversion attack called Element-wise Differential Nearest Neighbor (EDNN) on the glide-reflection proposed in (CITATION), and the result showed that the original user input text can be 100% recovered from the obfuscated embedded vectors. We further analyze security requirements on embedding obfuscation and present several remedies to our proposed attack.

The recent years have witnessed great advances in video generation. However, the development of automatic video metrics is lagging significantly behind. None of the existing metric is able to provide reliable scores over generated videos. The main barrier is the lack of large-scale human-annotated dataset. In this paper, we release VideoFeedback, the first large-scale dataset containing human-provided multi-aspect score over 37.6K synthesized videos from 11 existing video generative models. We train VideoScore (initialized from Mantis)based on VideoFeedback to enable automatic video quality assessment. Experiments show that the Spearman’s correlation betweenVideoScore and humans can reach 77.1 on VideoFeedback-test, beating the prior best metrics by about 50 points. Further result onother held-out EvalCrafter, GenAI-Bench, and VBench show that VideoScore has consistently much higher correlation with humanjudges than other metrics. Due to these results, we believe VideoScore can serve as a great proxy for human raters to (1) rate different video models to track progress (2) simulate fine-grained human feedback in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to improve current video generation models.

We introduce LogicAsker, a novel approach for evaluating and enhancing the logical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. Despite LLMs’ prowess in tasks like writing assistance, code generation, and machine translation, assessing their ability to reason has been challenging. Traditional evaluations often prioritize accuracy on downstream tasks over direct assessments of reasoning processes. LogicAsker addresses this gap by employing a set of atomic reasoning skills grounded in propositional and predicate logic to systematically examine and improve the reasoning prowess of LLMs. Our methodology reveals significant gaps in LLMs’ learning of logical rules, with identified reasoning failures ranging from 29% to 90% across different models. Moreover, we leverage these findings to construct targeted demonstration examples and fine-tune data, notably enhancing logical reasoning in models like GPT-4o by up to 5%. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to utilize test case outcomes to effectively refine LLMs’ formal reasoning capabilities. We make our code, data, and results publicly available(https://github.com/yxwan123/LogicAsker) to facilitate further research and replication of our findings.

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Integrating Structural Semantic Knowledge for Enhanced Information Extraction Pre-training
Xiaoyang Yi | Yuru Bao | Jian Zhang | Yifang Qin | Faxin Lin

Information Extraction (IE), aiming to extract structured information from unstructured natural language texts, can significantly benefit from pre-trained language models. However, existing pre-training methods solely focus on exploiting the textual knowledge, relying extensively on annotated large-scale datasets, which is labor-intensive and thus limits the scalability and versatility of the resulting models. To address these issues, we propose SKIE, a novel pre-training framework tailored for IE that integrates structural semantic knowledge via contrastive learning, effectively alleviating the annotation burden. Specifically, SKIE utilizes Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) as a low-cost supervision source to boost model performance without human intervention. By enhancing the topology of AMR graphs, SKIE derives high-quality cohesive subgraphs as additional training samples, providing diverse multi-level structural semantic knowledge. Furthermore, SKIE refines the graph encoder to better capture cohesive information and edge relation information, thereby improving the pre-training efficacy. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that SKIE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple IE tasks and showcases exceptional performance in few-shot and zero-shot settings.

Data-generation based zero-shot learning, although effective in training Small Task-specific Models (STMs) via synthetic datasets generated by Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), is often limited by the low quality of such synthetic datasets. Previous solutions have primarily focused on single PLM settings, where synthetic datasets are typically restricted to specific sub-spaces and often deviate from real-world distributions, leading to severe distribution bias. To mitigate such bias, we propose FuseGen, a novel data-generation based zero-shot learning framework that introduces a new criteria for subset selection from synthetic datasets via utilizing multiple PLMs and trained STMs. The chosen subset provides in-context feedback to each PLM, enhancing dataset quality through iterative data generation. Trained STMs are then used for sample re-weighting as well, further improving data quality. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that FuseGen substantially outperforms existing methods, highly effective in boosting STM performance in a PLM-agnostic way. The code is available at https://github.com/LindaLydia/FuseGen.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

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Oddballs and Misfits: Detecting Implicit Abuse in Which Identity Groups are Depicted as Deviating from the Norm
Michael Wiegand | Josef Ruppenhofer

We address the task of detecting abusive sentences in which identity groups are depicted as deviating from the norm (e.g. Gays sprinkle flour over their gardens for good luck). These abusive utterances need not be stereotypes or negative in sentiment. We introduce the first dataset for this task. It is created via crowdsourcing and includes 7 identity groups. We also report on classification experiments.

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By My Eyes: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models with Sensor Data via Visual Prompting
Hyungjun Yoon | Biniyam Aschalew Tolera | Taesik Gong | Kimin Lee | Sung-Ju Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities across various domains. However, utilizing LLMs for ubiquitous sensing applications remains challenging as existing text-prompt methods show significant performance degradation when handling long sensor data sequences. In this paper, we propose a visual prompting approach for sensor data using multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). Specifically, we design a visual prompt that directs MLLMs to utilize visualized sensor data alongside descriptions of the target sensory task. Additionally, we introduce a visualization generator that automates the creation of optimal visualizations tailored to a given sensory task, eliminating the need for prior task-specific knowledge. We evaluated our approach on nine sensory tasks involving four sensing modalities, achieving an average of 10% higher accuracy compared to text-based prompts and reducing token costs by 15.8 times. Our findings highlight the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of using visual prompts with MLLMs for various sensory tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/diamond264/ByMyEyes.

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Prefixing Attention Sinks can Mitigate Activation Outliers for Large Language Model Quantization
Seungwoo Son | Wonpyo Park | Woohyun Han | Kyuyeun Kim | Jaeho Lee

Despite recent advances in LLM quantization, activation quantization remains to be challenging due to the activation outliers. Conventional remedies, e.g., mixing precisions for different channels, introduce extra overhead and reduce the speedup. In this work, we develop a simple yet effective strategy to facilitate per-tensor activation quantization by preventing the generation of problematic tokens. Precisely, we propose a method to find a set of key-value cache, coined _CushionCache_, which mitigates outliers in subsequent tokens when inserted as a prefix. CushionCache works in two steps: First, we greedily search for a prompt token sequence that minimizes the maximum activation values in subsequent tokens. Then, we further tune the token cache to regularize the activations of subsequent tokens to be more quantization-friendly. The proposed method successfully addresses activation outliers of LLMs, providing a substantial performance boost for per-tensor activation quantization methods. We thoroughly evaluate our method over a wide range of models and benchmarks and find that it significantly surpasses the established baseline of per-tensor W8A8 quantization and can be seamlessly integrated with the recent activation quantization method.

In this paper, we study how open-source large language models (LLMs) can be effectively deployed for improving query rewriting in conversational search, especially for ambiguous queries. We introduce CHIQ, a two-step method that leverages the capabilities of LLMs to resolve ambiguities in the conversation history before query rewriting. This approach contrasts with prior studies that predominantly use closed-source LLMs to directly generate search queries from conversation history. We demonstrate on five well-established benchmarks that CHIQ leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings, showing highly competitive performances with systems leveraging closed-source LLMs. Our study provides a first step towards leveraging open-source LLMs in conversational search, as a competitive alternative to the prevailing reliance on commercial LLMs. Data, models, and source code will be publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/fengranMark/CHIQ.

The proliferation of Internet memes in the age of social media necessitates effective identification of harmful ones. Due to the dynamic nature of memes, existing data-driven models may struggle in low-resource scenarios where only a few labeled examples are available. In this paper, we propose an agency-driven framework for low-resource harmful meme detection, employing both outward and inward analysis with few-shot annotated samples. Inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on multimodal reasoning, we first retrieve relative memes with annotations to leverage label information as auxiliary signals for the LMM agent. Then, we elicit knowledge-revising behavior within the LMM agent to derive well-generalized insights into meme harmfulness. By combining these strategies, our approach enables dialectical reasoning over intricate and implicit harm-indicative patterns. Extensive experiments conducted on three meme datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods on the low-resource harmful meme detection task.

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VIVA: A Benchmark for Vision-Grounded Decision-Making with Human Values
Zhe Hu | Yixiao Ren | Jing Li | Yu Yin

This paper introduces VIVA, a benchmark for VIsion-grounded decision-making driven by human VA. While most large vision-language models (VLMs) focus on physical-level skills, our work is the first to examine their multimodal capabilities in leveraging human values to make decisions under a vision-depicted situation. VIVA contains 1,062 images depicting diverse real-world situations and the manually annotated decisions grounded in them. Given an image there, the model should select the most appropriate action to address the situation and provide the relevant human values and reason underlying the decision. Extensive experiments based on VIVA show the limitation of VLMs in using human values to make multimodal decisions. Further analyses indicate the potential benefits of exploiting action consequences and predicted human values.

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Direct Multi-Turn Preference Optimization for Language Agents
Wentao Shi | Mengqi Yuan | Junkang Wu | Qifan Wang | Fuli Feng

Adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) for agent tasks is critical in developing language agents. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a promising technique for this adaptation with the alleviation of compounding errors, offering a means to directly optimize Reinforcement Learning (RL) objectives. However, applying DPO to multi-turn tasks presents challenges due to the inability to cancel the partition function. Overcoming this obstacle involves making the partition function independent of the current state and addressing length disparities between preferred and dis-preferred trajectories. In this light, we replace the policy constraint with the state-action occupancy measure constraint in the RL objective and add length normalization to the Bradley-Terry model, yielding a novel loss function named DMPO for multi-turn agent tasks with theoretical explanations. Extensive experiments on three multi-turn agent task datasets confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the DMPO loss.

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Self-Refine Instruction-Tuning for Aligning Reasoning in Language Models
Leonardo Ranaldi | Andre Freitas

The alignment of reasoning abilities between smaller and larger Language Models are largely conducted via supervised fine-tuning using demonstrations generated from robust Large Language Models (LLMs). Although these approaches deliver more performant models, they do not show sufficiently strong generalization ability as the training only relies on the provided demonstrations.In this paper, we propose the Self-refine Instruction-tuning method that elicits Smaller Language Models to self-improve their abilities.Our approach is based on a two-stage process, where reasoning abilities are first transferred between LLMs and Small Language Models (SLMs) via Instruction-tuning on synthetic demonstrations provided by LLMs, and then the instructed models self-improve their abilities through preference optimization strategies.In particular, the second phase operates refinement heuristics based on Direct Preference Optimization, where the SLMs are elicited to deliver a series of reasoning paths by automatically sampling the generated responses and providing rewards using ground truths from the LLMs.Results obtained on commonsense and math reasoning tasks show that this approach consistently outperforms Instruction-tuning in both in-domain and out-domain scenarios, aligning the reasoning abilities of Smaller and Larger language models.

To effectively use large language models (LLMs) for real-world queries, it is imperative that they generalize to the long-tail distribution, i.e. rare examples where models exhibit low confidence. In this work, we take the first step towards evaluating LLMs in the long-tail distribution of inferential knowledge. We exemplify long-tail evaluation on the Natural Language Inference task. First, we introduce Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK), a systematic long-tail data generation framework, to obtain factually-correct yet long-tail inferential statements. LINK uses variable-wise prompting grounded on symbolic rules to seek low-confidence statements while ensuring factual correctness. We then use LINK to curate Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), a large-scale long-tail inferential knowledge dataset that contains 108K statements spanning four domains. We evaluate popular LLMs on LINT; we find that state-of-the-art LLMs show significant performance drop (21% relative drop for GPT4) on long-tail data as compared to on head distribution data, and smaller models show even more generalization weakness. These results further underscore the necessity of long-tail evaluation in developing generalizable LLMs.

Web scraping is a powerful technique that extracts data from websites, enabling automated data collection, enhancing data analysis capabilities, and minimizing manual data entry efforts. Existing methods, wrappers-based methods suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website, while language agents, empowered by large language models (LLMs), exhibit poor reusability in diverse web environments. In this work, we introduce the paradigm of generating web scrapers with LLMs and propose AutoScraper, a two-stage framework that can handle diverse and changing web environments more efficiently. AutoScraper leverages the hierarchical structure of HTML and similarity across different web pages for generating web scrapers. Besides, we propose a new executability metric for better measuring the performance of web scraper generation tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments with multiple LLMs and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Our work is now open-source.

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Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Space
Shahar Katz | Yonatan Belinkov | Mor Geva | Lior Wolf

Understanding how Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) learn and recall information is a key goal of the deep learning community. Recent interpretability methods project weights and hidden states obtained from the forward pass to the models’ vocabularies, helping to uncover how information flows within LMs. In this work, we extend this methodology to LMs’ backward pass and gradients. We first prove that a gradient matrix can be cast as a low-rank linear combination of its forward and backward passes’ inputs. We then develop methods to project these gradients into vocabulary items and explore the mechanics of how new information is stored in the LMs’ neurons.

Visual arguments, often used in advertising or social causes, rely on images to persuade viewers to do or believe something. Understanding these arguments requires selective vision: only specific visual stimuli within an image are relevant to the argument, and relevance can only be understood within the context of a broader argumentative structure. While visual arguments are readily appreciated by human audiences, we ask: are today’s AI capable of similar understanding?We present VisArgs, a dataset of 1,611 images annotated with 5,112 visual premises (with regions), 5,574 commonsense premises, and reasoning trees connecting them into structured arguments. We propose three tasks for evaluating visual argument understanding: premise localization, premise identification, and conclusion deduction.Experiments show that 1) machines struggle to capture visual cues: GPT-4-O achieved 78.5% accuracy, while humans reached 98.0%. Models also performed 19.5% worse when distinguishing between irrelevant objects within the image compared to external objects. 2) Providing relevant visual premises improved model performance significantly.

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Can visual language models resolve textual ambiguity with visual cues? Let visual puns tell you!
Jiwan Chung | Seungwon Lim | Jaehyun Jeon | Seungbeen Lee | Youngjae Yu

Humans possess multimodal literacy, allowing them to actively integrate information from various modalities to form reasoning. Faced with challenges like lexical ambiguity in text, we supplement this with other modalities, such as thumbnail images or textbook illustrations. Is it possible for machines to achieve a similar multimodal understanding capability?In response, we present Understanding Pun with Image Explanations (UNPIE), a novel benchmark designed to assess the impact of multimodal inputs in resolving lexical ambiguities. Puns serve as the ideal subject for this evaluation due to their intrinsic ambiguity. Our dataset includes 1,000 puns, each accompanied by an image that explains both meanings. We pose three multimodal challenges with the annotations to assess different aspects of multimodal literacy; Pun Grounding, Disambiguation, and Reconstruction. The results indicate that various Socratic Models and Visual-Language Models improve over the text-only models when given visual context, particularly as the complexity of the tasks increases.

Text style transfer (TST) is crucial in natural language processing, aiming to endow text with a new style without altering its meaning. In real-world scenarios, not all styles have abundant resources. This work introduces TWIST (reusing Transferable Weight Increments for Style Text generation), a novel framework to mitigate data scarcity by utilizing style features in weight increments to transfer low-resource styles effectively. During target style learning, we derive knowledge via a specially designed weight pool and initialize the parameters for the unseen style. To enhance the effectiveness of merging, the target style weight increments are often merged from multiple source style weight increments through singular vectors. Considering the diversity of styles, we also designed a multi-key memory network that simultaneously focuses on task- and instance-level information to derive the most relevant weight increments. Results from multiple style transfer datasets show that TWIST demonstrates remarkable performance across different backbones, achieving particularly effective results in low-resource scenarios.

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Large Language Model as an Assignment Evaluator: Insights, Feedback, and Challenges in a 1000+ Student Course
Cheng-Han Chiang | Wei-Chih Chen | Chun-Yi Kuan | Chienchou Yang | Hung-yi Lee

Using large language models (LLMs) for automatic evaluation has become an important evaluation method in NLP research. However, it is unclear whether these LLM-based evaluators can be effectively applied in real-world classrooms to assess student assignments. This empirical report shares how we use GPT-4 as an automatic assignment evaluator in a university course with over 1000 students. Based on student responses, we found that LLM-based assignment evaluators are generally acceptable to students when they have free access to these tools. However, students also noted that the LLM sometimes fails to adhere to the evaluation instructions, resulting in unreasonable assessments. Additionally, we observed that students can easily manipulate the LLM to output specific strings, allowing them to achieve high scores without meeting the assignment rubric. Based on student feedback and our experience, we offer several recommendations for effectively integrating LLMs into future classroom evaluations. Our observation also highlights potential directions for improving LLM-based evaluators, including their instruction-following ability and vulnerability to prompt hacking.

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Seemingly Plausible Distractors in Multi-Hop Reasoning: Are Large Language Models Attentive Readers?
Neeladri Bhuiya | Viktor Schlegel | Stefan Winkler

State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) are accredited with an increasing number of different capabilities, ranging from reading comprehension over advanced mathematical and reasoning skills to possessing scientific knowledge. In this paper we focus on multi-hop reasoning—the ability to identify and integrate information from multiple textual sources.Given the concerns with the presence of simplifying cues in existing multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, which allow models to circumvent the reasoning requirement, we set out to investigate whether LLMs are prone to exploiting such simplifying cues. We find evidence that they indeed circumvent the requirement to perform multi-hop reasoning, but they do so in more subtle ways than what was reported about their fine-tuned pre-trained language model (PLM) predecessors. We propose a challenging multi-hop reasoning benchmark by generating seemingly plausible multi-hop reasoning chains that ultimately lead to incorrect answers. We evaluate multiple open and proprietary state-of-the-art LLMs and show that their multi-hop reasoning performance is affected, as indicated by up to 45% relative decrease in F1 score when presented with such seemingly plausible alternatives. We also find that—while LLMs tend to ignore misleading lexical cues—misleading reasoning paths indeed present a significant challenge. The code and data are made available at https://github.com/zawedcvg/Are-Large-Language-Models-Attentive-Readers

Unsupervised multitask pre-training has been the critical method behind the recent success of language models (LMs). However, supervised multitask learning still holds significant promise, as scaling it in the post-training stage trends towards better generalization. In this paper, we explore supervised multitask pre-training by proposing Instruction Pre-training, a framework that scalably augments massive raw corpora with instruction-response pairs to pre-train LMs. The instruction-response pairs are generated by an efficient instruction synthesizer built on open-source models. In our experiments, we synthesize 200M instruction response pairs covering 40+ task categories to verify the effectiveness of Instruction Pre-training. In pre-training from scratch, Instruction Pre-training not only consistently enhances pre-trained base models but also benefits more from further instruction tuning. In continual pre-training, Instruction Pre-training enables Llama3-8B to be comparable to or even outperform Llama3-70B. Our model, code, and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

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LEMoE: Advanced Mixture of Experts Adaptor for Lifelong Model Editing of Large Language Models
Renzhi Wang | Piji Li

Large language models (LLMs) require continual knowledge updates to stay abreast of the ever-changing world facts, prompting the formulation of lifelong model editing task. While recent years have witnessed the development of various techniques for single and batch editing, these methods either fail to apply or perform sub-optimally when faced with lifelong editing. In this paper, we introduce LEMoE, an advanced Mixture of Experts (MoE) adaptor for lifelong model editing. We first analyze the factors influencing the effectiveness of conventional MoE adaptor in lifelong editing, including catastrophic forgetting, inconsistent routing and order sensitivity. Based on these insights, we propose a tailored module insertion method to achieve lifelong editing, incorporating a novel KV anchor routing to enhance routing consistency between training and inference stage, along with a concise yet effective clustering-based editing order planning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in lifelong editing, surpassing previous model editing techniques while maintaining outstanding performance in batch editing task. Our code will be available.

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Collaborative Performance Prediction for Large Language Models
Qiyuan Zhang | Fuyuan Lyu | Xue Liu | Chen Ma

Comprehensively understanding and accurately predicting the performance of large language models across diverse downstream tasks has emerged as a pivotal challenge in NLP research. The pioneering scaling law on downstream works demonstrated intrinsic similarities within model families and utilized such similarities for performance prediction. However, they tend to overlook the similarities between model families and only consider design factors listed in the original scaling law. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework, Collaborative Performance Prediction (CPP), which significantly enhances prediction accuracy by leveraging the historical performance of various models on downstream tasks and other design factors for both model and task. We also collect a collaborative data sourced from online platforms containing both historical performance and additional design factors. With the support of the collaborative data, CPP not only surpasses traditional scaling laws in predicting the performance of scaled LLMs but also facilitates a detailed analysis of factor importance, an area previously overlooked.

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Surveying the Dead Minds: Historical-Psychological Text Analysis with Contextualized Construct Representation (CCR) for Classical Chinese
Yuqi Chen | Sixuan Li | Ying Li | Mohammad Atari

In this work, we develop a pipeline for historical-psychological text analysis in classical Chinese. Humans have produced texts in various languages for thousands of years; however, most of the computational literature is focused on contemporary languages and corpora. The emerging field of historical psychology relies on computational techniques to extract aspects of psychology from historical corpora using new methods developed in natural language processing (NLP). The present pipeline, called Contextualized Construct Representations (CCR), combines expert knowledge in psychometrics (i.e., psychological surveys) with text representations generated via Transformer-based language models to measure psychological constructs such as traditionalism, norm strength, and collectivism in classical Chinese corpora. Considering the scarcity of available data, we propose an indirect supervised contrastive learning approach and build the first Chinese historical psychology corpus (C-HI-PSY) to fine-tune pre-trained models. We evaluate the pipeline to demonstrate its superior performance compared with other approaches. The CCR method outperforms word-embedding-based approaches across all of our tasks and exceeds prompting with GPT-4 in most tasks. Finally, we benchmark the pipeline against objective, external data to further verify its validity.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various tasks following human alignment, they may still generate responses that sound plausible but contradict factual knowledge, a phenomenon known as hallucination. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of mitigating hallucinations by verifying and minimizing the inconsistency between external knowledge present in the alignment data and the intrinsic knowledge embedded within foundation LLMs. Specifically, we propose a novel approach called Knowledge Consistent Alignment (KCA), which employs a well-aligned LLM to automatically formulate assessments based on external knowledge to evaluate the knowledge boundaries of foundation LLMs. To address knowledge inconsistencies in the alignment data, KCA implements several specific strategies to deal with these data instances. We demonstrate the superior efficacy of KCA in reducing hallucinations across six benchmarks, utilizing foundation LLMs of varying backbones and scales. This confirms the effectiveness of mitigating hallucinations by reducing knowledge inconsistency. Our code, model weights, and data are openly accessible at https://github.com/fanqiwan/KCA.

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QUITE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Natural Language Text in Bayesian Reasoning Scenarios
Timo Pierre Schrader | Lukas Lange | Simon Razniewski | Annemarie Friedrich

Reasoning is key to many decision making processes. It requires consolidating a set of rule-like premises that are often associated with degrees of uncertainty and observations to draw conclusions. In this work, we address both the case where premises are specified as numeric probabilistic rules and situations in which humans state their estimates using words expressing degrees of certainty. Existing probabilistic reasoning datasets simplify the task, e.g., by requiring the model to only rank textual alternatives, by including only binary random variables, or by making use of a limited set of templates that result in less varied text.In this work, we present QUITE, a question answering dataset of real-world Bayesian reasoning scenarios with categorical random variables and complex relationships. QUITE provides high-quality natural language verbalizations of premises together with evidence statements and expects the answer to a question in the form of an estimated probability. We conduct an extensive set of experiments, finding that logic-based models outperform out-of-the-box large language models on all reasoning types (causal, evidential, and explaining-away). Our results provide evidence that neuro-symbolic models are a promising direction for improving complex reasoning. We release QUITE and code for training and experiments on Github.

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African or European Swallow? Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models for Fine-Grained Object Classification
Gregor Geigle | Radu Timofte | Goran Glavaš

Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate impressive abilities on numerous image understanding and reasoning tasks. The task of fine-grained object classification (e.g., distinction between animal species), however, has been probed insufficiently, despite its downstream importance. We fill this evaluation gap by creating FOCI (Fine-grained Object ClassIfication), a difficult multiple-choice benchmark for fine-grained object classification, from existing object classification datasets: (1) multiple-choice avoids ambiguous answers associated with casting classification as open-ended QA task; (2) we retain classification difficulty by mining negative labels with a CLIP model. FOCI complements five popular classification datasets with four domain-specific subsets from ImageNet-21k. We benchmark 12 public LVLMs on and show that it tests for a complementary skill to established image understanding and reasoning benchmarks. Crucially, CLIP models exhibit dramatically better performance than LVLMs. Since the image encoders of LVLMs come from these CLIP models, this points to inadequate alignment for fine-grained object distinction between the encoder and the LLM and warrants (pre)training data with more fine-grained annotation. We release our code at ANONYMIZED.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the false premise hallucination and elucidate its internal working mechanism: a small subset of attention heads (which we designate as false premise heads) disturb the knowledge extraction process, leading to the occurrence of false premise hallucination. Based on our analysis, we propose FAITH (False premise Attention head constraIining for miTigating Hallucinations), a novel and effective method to mitigate false premise hallucinations. It constrains the false premise attention heads during the model inference process. Impressively, extensive experiments demonstrate that constraining only approximately 1% of the attention heads in the model yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance.

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To Word Senses and Beyond: Inducing Concepts with Contextualized Language Models
Bastien Liétard | Pascal Denis | Mikaela Keller

Polysemy and synonymy are two crucial interrelated facets of lexicalambiguity. While both phenomena are widely documented in lexical resources and have been studied extensively in NLP,leading to dedicated systems, they are often being consideredindependently in practictal problems. While many tasks dealing with polysemy (e.g. Word SenseDisambiguiation or Induction) highlight the role of word’s senses,the study of synonymy is rooted in the study of concepts, i.e. meaningsshared across the lexicon. In this paper, we introduce ConceptInduction, the unsupervised task of learning a soft clustering amongwords that defines a set of concepts directly from data. This taskgeneralizes Word Sense Induction. We propose a bi-levelapproach to Concept Induction that leverages both a locallemma-centric view and a global cross-lexicon view to induceconcepts. We evaluate the obtained clustering on SemCor’s annotateddata and obtain good performance (BCubed F1 above0.60). We find that the local and the global levels are mutuallybeneficial to induce concepts and also senses in our setting. Finally,we create static embeddings representing our induced concepts and usethem on the Word-in-Context task, obtaining competitive performancewith the State-of-the-Art.

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ASETF: A Novel Method for Jailbreak Attack on LLMs through Translate Suffix Embeddings
Hao Wang | Hao Li | Minlie Huang | Lei Sha

The safety defense methods of Large language models (LLMs) stays limited because the dangerous prompts are manually curated to just few known attack types, which fails to keep pace with emerging varieties. Recent studies found that attaching suffixes to harmful instructions can hack the defense of LLMs and lead to dangerous outputs. However, similar to traditional text adversarial attacks, this approach, while effective, is limited by the challenge of the discrete tokens. This gradient based discrete optimization attack requires over 100,000 LLM calls, and due to the unreadable of adversarial suffixes, it can be relatively easily penetrated by common defense methods such as perplexity filters.To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we propose an Adversarial Suffix Embedding Translation Framework (ASETF), aimed at transforming continuous adversarial suffix embeddings into coherent and understandable text. This method greatly reduces the computational overhead during the attack process and helps to automatically generate multiple adversarial samples, which can be used as data to strengthen LLM’s security defense. Experimental evaluations were conducted on Llama2, Vicuna, and other prominent LLMs, employing harmful directives sourced from the Advbench dataset.The results indicate that our method significantly reduces the computation time of adversarial suffixes and achieves a much better attack success rate than existing techniques, while significantly enhancing the textual fluency of the prompts. In addition, our approach can be generalized into a broader method for generating transferable adversarial suffixes that can successfully attack multiple LLMs, even black-box LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

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An Electoral Approach to Diversify LLM-based Multi-Agent Collective Decision-Making
Xiutian Zhao | Ke Wang | Wei Peng

Modern large language models (LLMs) have exhibited cooperative synergy on complex task-solving, and collective decision-making (CDM) is a pivotal component in LLM-based multi-agent collaboration frameworks. Our survey on 52 recent such systems uncovers a severe lack of diversity, with a heavy reliance on dictatorial and plurality voting for CDM. Through the lens of social choice theory, we scrutinize widely-adopted CDM methods and identify their limitations. To enrich current landscape of LLM-based CDM, we present GEDI, an electoral CDM module that incorporates various ordinal preferential voting mechanisms. Our empirical case study across three benchmarks shows that the integration of certain CDM methods can markedly improve the reasoning capabilities and robustness of some leading LLMs, all without requiring intricate system designs. Additionally, we find that some CDM mechanisms generate positive synergies even with as few as three agents. The voting-based methods also demonstrate robustness against single points of failure, as well as diversity in terms of hit-rate@k and subject-wise impacts.

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Does Object Grounding Really Reduce Hallucination of Large Vision-Language Models?
Gregor Geigle | Radu Timofte | Goran Glavaš

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently dramatically pushed the state of the art in image captioning and many image understanding tasks (e.g., visual question answering). LVLMs, however, often hallucinate and produce captions that mention concepts that cannot be found in the image. These hallucinations erode the trustworthiness of LVLMs and are arguably among the main obstacles to their ubiquitous adoption. Recent work suggests that addition of grounding objectives—those that explicitly align image regions or objects to text spans—reduces the amount of LVLM hallucination. Although intuitive, this claim is not empirically justified as the reduction effects have been established, we argue, with flawed evaluation protocols that (i) rely on data (i.e., MSCOCO) that has been extensively used in LVLM training and (ii) measure hallucination via question answering rather than open-ended caption generation.In this work, in contrast, we offer the first systematic analysis of the effect of fine-grained object grounding on LVLM hallucination under an evaluation protocol that more realistically captures LVLM hallucination in open generation. Our extensive experiments over three backbone LLMs reveal that grounding objectives have little to no effect on object hallucination in open caption generation.

Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL). However, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. To address this gap, we investigate the impact of demonstrations on token representations within the practical alignment tasks. We find that the transformer embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation, which plays an important role in the generation of prior response tokens. Once the prior response tokens are determined, the demonstrations become redundant. Motivated by this finding, we propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment (PICA) method consisting of two stages. In the first few-shot stage, the model generates several prior response tokens via standard ICL while concurrently extracting the ICL vector that stores the task function from the separator token representation. In the following zero-shot stage, this ICL vector guides the model to generate responses without further demonstrations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PICA not only surpasses vanilla ICL but also achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. The proposed training-free method reduces the time cost (e.g., 5.45×) with improved alignment performance (e.g., 6.57+). Consequently, our work highlights the application of ICL for alignment and calls for a deeper understanding of ICL for complex generations. The code will be available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/PICA.

The growing demand for larger-scale models in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) poses challenges for efficient training within limited computational resources. Traditional fine-tuning methods often exhibit instability in multi-task learning and rely heavily on extensive training resources. Here, we propose MoDULA (Mixture of Domain-Specific and Universal LoRA), a novel Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) paradigm for improved fine-tuning and parameter efficiency in multi-task learning. The paradigm effectively improves the multi-task capability of the model by training universal experts, domain-specific experts, and routers separately. MoDULA-Res is a new method within the MoDULA paradigm, which maintains the model’s general capability by connecting universal and task-specific experts through residual connections. The experimental results demonstrate that the overall performance of the MoDULA-Flan and MoDULA-Res methods surpasses that of existing fine-tuning methods on various LLMs. Notably, MoDULA-Res achieves more significant performance improvements in multiple tasks while reducing training costs by over 80% without losing general capability. Moreover, MoDULA displays flexible pluggability, allowing for the efficient addition of new tasks without retraining existing experts from scratch. This progressive training paradigm circumvents data balancing issues, enhancing training efficiency and model stability. Overall, MoDULA provides a scalable, cost-effective solution for fine-tuning LLMs with enhanced parameter efficiency and generalization capability.

Emotion classification has wide applications in education, robotics, virtual reality, etc. However, identifying subtle differences between fine-grained emotion categories remains challenging. Current methods typically aggregate numerous token embeddings of a sentence into a single vector, which, while being an efficient compressor, may not fully capture complex semantic and temporal distributions. To solve this problem, we propose SEmantic ANchor Graph Neural Networks (SEAN-GNN) for fine-grained emotion classification. It learns a group of representative, multi-faceted semantic anchors in the token embedding space: using these anchors as a global reference, any sentence can be projected onto them to form a “semantic-anchor graph”, with node attributes and edge weights quantifying the semantic and temporal information respectively. The graph structure is well aligned across sentences and, importantly, allows for generating comprehensive emotion representations regarding K different anchors. Message passing on this graph can further integrate and refine the learned features. Empirically, SEAN-GNN can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion, with promising classification results on 6 popular benchmark datasets against state-of-the-arts.

Philology, the study of ancient manuscripts, demands years of professional training in ex-tensive knowledge memorization and manual textual retrieval. Despite these requirements align closely with strengths of recent successful Large Language Models (LLMs), the scarcity of high-quality, specialized training data has hindered direct applications. To bridge this gap, we curated the PhiloCorpus-ZH, a rich collec-tion of ancient Chinese texts spanning a millen-nium with 30 diverse topics, including firsthand folk copies. This corpus facilitated the develop-ment of PhiloGPT, the first LLM tailored for discovering ancient Chinese manuscripts. To effectively tackle complex philological tasks like restoration, attribution, and linguistic anal-ysis, we introduced the PhiloCoP framework. Modeled on the analytical patterns of philol-ogists, PhiloCoP enhances LLM’s handling of historical linguistic peculiarities such as phonetic loans, polysemy, and syntactic inver-sions. We further integrated these tasks into the PhiloBenchmark, establishing a new standard for evaluating ancient Chinese LLMs address-ing philology tasks. Deploying PhiloGPT in practical scenarios has enabled Dunhuang spe-cialists to resolve philology tasks, such as iden-tifying duplication of copied text and assisting archaeologists with text completion, demon-strating its potential in real-world applications.

Large language models are susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which can result in the generation of harmful content. While prior defenses mitigate these risks by perturbing or inspecting inputs, they ignore competing objectives, the underlying cause of alignment failures. In this paper, we propose Alignment-Enhanced Decoding (AED), a novel defense that employs adaptive decoding to address the root causes of jailbreak issues. We first define the Competitive Index to quantify alignment failures and utilize feedback from self-evaluation to compute post-alignment logits. Then, AED adaptively combines Competitive Index and post-alignment logits with the original logits to obtain harmless and helpful distributions. Consequently, our method enhances safety alignment while maintaining helpfulness. We conduct experiments across five models and four common jailbreaks, with the results validating the effectiveness of our approach.

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MiniConGTS: A Near Ultimate Minimalist Contrastive Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Qiao Sun | Liujia Yang | Minghao Ma | Nanyang Ye | Qinying Gu

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to co-extract the sentiment triplets in a given corpus. Existing approaches within the pretraining-finetuning paradigm tend to either meticulously craft complex tagging schemes and classification heads, or incorporate external semantic augmentation to enhance performance. In this study, we, for the first time, re-evaluate the redundancy in tagging schemes and the internal enhancement in pretrained representations. We propose a method to improve and utilize pretrained representations by integrating a minimalist tagging scheme and a novel token-level contrastive learning strategy. The proposed approach demonstrates comparable or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques while featuring a more compact design and reduced computational overhead. Additionally, we are the first to formally evaluate GPT-4’s performance in few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought scenarios for this task. The results demonstrate that the pretraining-finetuning paradigm remains highly effective even in the era of large language models.

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Evaluating Large Language Models via Linguistic Profiling
Alessio Miaschi | Felice Dell’Orletta | Giulia Venturi

Large Language Models (LLMs) undergo extensive evaluation against various benchmarks collected in established leaderboards to assess their performance across multiple tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive studies evaluating these models’ linguistic abilities independent of specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation methodology designed to test LLMs’ sentence generation abilities under specific linguistic constraints. Drawing on the ‘linguistic profiling’ approach, we rigorously investigate the extent to which five LLMs of varying sizes, tested in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, effectively adhere to (morpho)syntactic constraints. Our findings shed light on the linguistic proficiency of LLMs, revealing both their capabilities and limitations in generating linguistically-constrained sentences.

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With Ears to See and Eyes to Hear: Sound Symbolism Experiments with Multimodal Large Language Models
Tyler Loakman | Yucheng Li | Chenghua Lin

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated aptitude as potential substitutes for human participants in experiments testing psycholinguistic phenomena. However, an understudied question is to what extent models that only have access to vision and text modalities are able to implicitly understand sound-based phenomena via abstract reasoning from orthography and imagery alone. To investigate this, we analyse the ability of VLMs and LLMs to demonstrate sound symbolism (i.e., to recognise a non-arbitrary link between sounds and concepts) as well as their ability to “hear” via the interplay of the language and vision modules of open and closed-source multimodal models. We perform multiple experiments, including replicating the classic Kiki-Bouba and Mil-Mal shape and magnitude symbolism tasks and comparing human judgements of linguistic iconicity with that of LLMs. Our results show that VLMs demonstrate varying levels of agreement with human labels, and more task information may be required for VLMs versus their human counterparts for in silico experimentation. We additionally see through higher maximum agreement levels that Magnitude Symbolism is an easier pattern for VLMs to identify than Shape Symbolism, and that an understanding of linguistic iconicity is highly dependent on model size.

Program induction (PI) has become a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models (LLMs) answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. Nonetheless, PI typically relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs to make the LLM aware of the schema of a given KB, and is thus challenging for many low-resourced KBs that lack annotated data. To this end, we propose KB-Plugin, a plug-and-play framework that enables LLMs to induce programs over any low-resourced KB. Firstly, KB-Plugin adopts self-supervised learning to encode the detailed schema information of a given KB into a pluggable module, namely schema plugin. Secondly, KB-Plugin utilizes abundant annotated data from a rich-resourced KB to train another pluggable module, namely PI plugin, which can help the LLM extract question-relevant schema information from the schema plugin of any KB and utilize the information to induce programs over this KB. Experiments show that KB-Plugin outperforms SoTA low-resourced PI methods with 25x smaller backbone LLM on both large-scale and domain-specific KBs, and even approaches the performance of supervised methods.

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Understanding Higher-Order Correlations Among Semantic Components in Embeddings
Momose Oyama | Hiroaki Yamagiwa | Hidetoshi Shimodaira

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) offers interpretable semantic components of embeddings.While ICA theory assumes that embeddings can be linearly decomposed into independent components, real-world data often do not satisfy this assumption. Consequently, non-independencies remain between the estimated components, which ICA cannot eliminate. We quantified these non-independencies using higher-order correlations and demonstrated that when the higher-order correlation between two components is large, it indicates a strong semantic association between them, along with many words sharing common meanings with both components. The entire structure of non-independencies was visualized using a maximum spanning tree of semantic components. These findings provide deeper insights into embeddings through ICA.

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Verification and Refinement of Natural Language Explanations through LLM-Symbolic Theorem Proving
Xin Quan | Marco Valentino | Louise A. Dennis | Andre Freitas

Natural language explanations represent a proxy for evaluating explanation-based and multi-step Natural Language Inference (NLI) models. However, assessing the validity of explanations for NLI is challenging as it typically involves the crowd-sourcing of apposite datasets, a process that is time-consuming and prone to logical errors. To address existing limitations, this paper investigates the verification and refinement of natural language explanations through the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Theorem Provers (TPs). Specifically, we present a neuro-symbolic framework, named Explanation-Refiner, that integrates TPs with LLMs to generate and formalise explanatory sentences and suggest potential inference strategies for NLI. In turn, the TP is employed to provide formal guarantees on the logical validity of the explanations and to generate feedback for subsequent improvements. We demonstrate how Explanation-Refiner can be jointly used to evaluate explanatory reasoning, autoformalisation, and error correction mechanisms of state-of-the-art LLMs as well as to automatically enhance the quality of explanations of variable complexity in different domains.

Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not accurately calibrate with their correctness rate. In this paper, we decompose the language model confidence into the Uncertainty about the question and the Fidelity to the answer generated by language models. Then, we propose a plug-and-play method, UF Calibration, to estimate the confidence of language models. Our method has shown good calibration performance by conducting experiments with 6 RLHF-LMs on four MCQA datasets. Moreover, we propose two novel metrics, IPR and CE, to evaluate the calibration of the model, and we have conducted a detailed discussion on Truly Well-Calibrated Confidence for large language models. Our method could serve as a strong baseline, and we hope that this work will provide some insights into the model confidence calibration.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training. This study explores whether stronger reward models invariably lead to better language models. In this paper, through experiments on relevance, factuality, and completeness tasks using the QA-FEEDBACK dataset and reward models based on Longformer, we uncover a surprising paradox: language models trained with moderately accurate reward models outperform those guided by highly accurate ones. This challenges the widely held belief that stronger reward models always lead to better language models, and opens up new avenues for future research into the key factors driving model performance and how to choose the most suitable reward models.

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How Hard is this Test Set? NLI Characterization by Exploiting Training Dynamics
Adrian Cosma | Stefan Ruseti | Mihai Dascalu | Cornelia Caragea

Natural Language Inference (NLI) evaluation is crucial for assessing language understanding models; however, popular datasets suffer from systematic spurious correlations that artificially inflate actual model performance. To address this, we propose a method for the automated creation of a challenging test set without relying on the manual construction of artificial and unrealistic examples. We categorize the test set of popular NLI datasets into three difficulty levels by leveraging methods that exploit training dynamics. This categorization significantly reduces spurious correlation measures, with examples labeled as having the highest difficulty showing markedly decreased performance and encompassing more realistic and diverse linguistic phenomena. When our characterization method is applied to the training set, models trained with only a fraction of the data achieve comparable performance to those trained on the full dataset, surpassing other dataset characterization techniques. Our research addresses limitations in NLI dataset construction, providing a more authentic evaluation of model performance with implications for diverse NLU applications.

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Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Transfer for Synthetic Data Generation in Grammatical Error Detection
Gaetan Lopez Latouche | Marc-André Carbonneau | Benjamin Swanson

Grammatical Error Detection (GED) methods rely heavily on human annotated error corpora. However, these annotations are unavailable in many low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate GED in this context. Leveraging the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models, we train a model using data from a diverse set of languages to generate synthetic errors in other languages. These synthetic error corpora are then used to train a GED model. Specifically we propose a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline where the GED model is first fine-tuned on multilingual synthetic data from target languages followed by fine-tuning on human-annotated GED corpora from source languages. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art annotation-free GED methods. We also analyse the errors produced by our method and other strong baselines, finding that our approach produces errors that are more diverse and more similar to human errors.

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CUTE: Measuring LLMs’ Understanding of Their Tokens
Lukas Edman | Helmut Schmid | Alexander Fraser

Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable performance on a wide variety of tasks. Most LLMs split text into multi-character tokens and process them as atomic units without direct access to individual characters. This raises the question: To what extent can LLMs learn orthographic information? To answer this, we propose a new benchmark, CUTE, which features a collection of tasks designed to test the orthographic knowledge of LLMs. We evaluate popular LLMs on CUTE, finding that most of them seem to know the spelling of their tokens, yet fail to use this information effectively to manipulate text, calling into question how much of this knowledge is generalizable.

Recent studies in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have investigated extracting evidence from retrieved passages to reduce computational costs and enhance the final RAG performance, yet it remains challenging. Existing methods heavily rely on heuristic-based augmentation, encountering several issues: (1) Poor generalization due to hand-crafted context filtering; (2) Semantics deficiency due to rule-based context chunking; (3) Skewed length due to sentence-wise filter learning. To address these issues, we propose a model-based evidence extraction learning framework, SEER, optimizing a vanilla model as an evidence extractor with desired properties through self-aligned learning. Extensive experiments show that our method largely improves the final RAG performance, enhances the faithfulness, helpfulness, and conciseness of the extracted evidence, and reduces the evidence length by 9.25 times. The code will be available at https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/SEER.

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On the Role of Context in Reading Time Prediction
Andreas Opedal | Eleanor Chodroff | Ryan Cotterell | Ethan Wilcox

We present a new perspective on how readers integrate context during real-time language comprehension. Our proposals build on surprisal theory, which posits that the processing effort of a linguistic unit (e.g., a word) is an affine function of its in-context information content. We first observe that surprisal is only one out of many potential ways that a contextual predictor can be derived from a language model. Another one is the pointwise mutual information (PMI) between a unit and its context, which turns out to yield the same predictive power as surprisal when controlling for unigram frequency. Moreover, both PMI and surprisal are correlated with frequency. This means that neither PMI nor surprisal contains information about context alone. In response to this, we propose a technique where we project surprisal onto the orthogonal complement of frequency, yielding a new contextual predictor that is uncorrelated with frequency. Our experiments show that the proportion of variance in reading times explained by context is a lot smaller when context is represented by the orthogonalized predictor. From an interpretability standpoint, this indicates that previous studies may have overstated the role that context has in predicting reading times.

Despite the remarkable progress made by large language models in mathematical reasoning, interactive theorem proving in formal logic still remains a prominent challenge. Previous methods resort to neural models for proofstep generation and search. However, they suffer from exploring possible proofsteps empirically in a large search space. Moreover, they directly use a less rigorous informal proof for proofstep generation, neglecting the incomplete reasoning within. In this paper, we propose BC-Prover, a backward chaining framework guided by pseudo steps. Specifically, BC-Prover prioritizes pseudo steps to proofstep generation. The pseudo steps boost the proof construction in two aspects: (1) Backward Chaining that decomposes the proof into sub-goals for goal-oriented exploration. (2) Step Planning that makes a fine-grained planning to bridge the gap between informal and formal proofs. Experiments on the miniF2F benchmark show significant performance gains by our framework over the state-of-the-art approaches. Our framework is also compatible with existing provers and further improves their performance with the backward chaining technique.

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From Insights to Actions: The Impact of Interpretability and Analysis Research on NLP
Marius Mosbach | Vagrant Gautam | Tomás Vergara Browne | Dietrich Klakow | Mor Geva

Interpretability and analysis (IA) research is a growing subfield within NLP with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the behavior or inner workings of NLP systems and methods. Despite growing interest in the subfield, a criticism of this work is that it lacks actionable insights and therefore has little impact on NLP. In this paper, we seek to quantify the impact of IA research on the broader field of NLP. We approach this with a mixed-methods analysis of: (1) a citation graph of 185K+ papers built from all papers published at ACL and EMNLP conferences from 2018 to 2023, and their references and citations, and (2) a survey of 138 members of the NLP community. Our quantitative results show that IA work is well-cited outside of IA, and central in the NLP citation graph. Through qualitative analysis of survey responses and manual annotation of 556 papers, we find that NLP researchers build on findings from IA work and perceive it as important for progress in NLP, multiple subfields, and rely on its findings and terminology for their own work. Many novel methods are proposed based on IA findings and highly influenced by them, but highly influential non-IA work cites IA findings without being driven by them. We end by summarizing what is missing in IA work today and provide a call to action, to pave the way for a more impactful future of IA research.

The integration of visual and textual information represents a promising direction in the advancement of language models. In this paper, we explore the dual modality of language—both visual and textual—within an autoregressive framework, pre-trained on both document images and texts. Our method employs a multimodal training strategy, utilizing visual data through next patch prediction with a regression head and/or textual data through next token prediction with a classification head. We focus on understanding the interaction between these two modalities and their combined impact on model performance. Our extensive evaluation across a wide range of benchmarks shows that incorporating both visual and textual data significantly improves the performance of pixel-based language models. Remarkably, we find that a unidirectional pixel-based model trained solely on visual data can achieve comparable results to state-of-the-art bidirectional models on several language understanding tasks. This work uncovers the untapped potential of integrating visual and textual modalities for more effective language modeling. We release our code, data, and model checkpoints at https://github.com/ernie-research/pixelgpt.

Amidst the rapid advancements in generative language models, the investigation of how training data shapes the performance of GPT models is still emerging. This paper presents GPTfluence, a novel approach that leverages a featurized simulation to assess the impact of training examples on the training dynamics of GPT models. Our approach not only traces the influence of individual training instances on performance trajectories, such as loss and other key metrics, on targeted test points but also enables a comprehensive comparison with existing methods across various training scenarios in GPT models, ranging from 14 million to 2.8 billion parameters, across a range of downstream tasks. Contrary to earlier methods that struggle with generalization to new data, GPTfluence introduces a parameterized simulation of training dynamics, demonstrating robust generalization capabilities to unseen training data. This adaptability is evident across both fine-tuning and instruction-tuning scenarios, spanning tasks in natural language understanding and generation. We make our code and data publicly available at https://github.com/ernie-research/gptfluence.

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Understanding “Democratization” in NLP and ML Research
Arjun Subramonian | Vagrant Gautam | Dietrich Klakow | Zeerak Talat

Recent improvements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) and increased mainstream adoption have led to researchers frequently discussing the “democratization” of artificial intelligence. In this paper, we seek to clarify how democratization is understood in NLP and ML publications, through large-scale mixed-methods analyses of papers using the keyword “democra*” published in NLP and adjacent venues. We find that democratization is most frequently used to convey (ease of) access to or use of technologies, without meaningfully engaging with theories of democratization, while research using other invocations of “democra*” tends to be grounded in theories of deliberation and debate. Based on our findings, we call for researchers to enrich their use of the term democratization with appropriate theory, towards democratic technologies beyond superficial access.

Visual document understanding (VDU) is a challenging task that involves understanding documents across various modalities (text and image) and layouts (forms, tables, etc.). This study aims to enhance generalizability of small VDU models by distilling knowledge from LLMs. We identify that directly prompting LLMs often fails to generate informative and useful data. In response, we present a new framework (called DocKD) that enriches the data generation process by integrating external document knowledge. Specifically, we provide an LLM with various document elements like key-value pairs, layouts, and descriptions, to elicit open-ended answers. Our experiments show that DocKD produces high-quality document annotations and surpasses the direct knowledge distillation approach that does not leverage external document knowledge. Moreover, student VDU models trained with solely DocKD-generated data is not only comparable to those trained with human-annotated data on in-domain tasks but also significantly excel them on out-of-domain tasks.

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Cross-lingual Transfer for Automatic Question Generation by Learning Interrogative Structures in Target Languages
Seonjeong Hwang | Yunsu Kim | Gary Lee

Automatic question generation (QG) serves a wide range of purposes, such as augmenting question-answering (QA) corpora, enhancing chatbot systems, and developing educational materials. Despite its importance, most existing datasets predominantly focus on English, resulting in a considerable gap in data availability for other languages. Cross-lingual transfer for QG (XLT-QG) addresses this limitation by allowing models trained on high-resource language datasets to generate questions in low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient XLT-QG method that operates without the need for monolingual, parallel, or labeled data in the target language, utilizing a small language model. Our model, trained solely on English QA datasets, learns interrogative structures from a limited set of question exemplars, which are then applied to generate questions in the target language. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several XLT-QG baselines and achieves performance comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo across different languages. Additionally, the synthetic data generated by our model proves beneficial for training multilingual QA models. With significantly fewer parameters than large language models and without requiring additional training for target languages, our approach offers an effective solution for QG and QA tasks across various languages.

High-quality data is crucial for the pre-training performance of large language models. Unfortunately, existing quality filtering methods rely on a known high-quality dataset as reference, which can introduce potential bias and compromise diversity. In this paper, we propose ScalingFilter, a novel approach that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data, thereby eliminating the influence of the reference dataset in the filtering process. An theoretical analysis shows that ScalingFilter is equivalent to an inverse utilization of scaling laws. Through training models with 1.3B parameters on the same data source processed by various quality filters, we find ScalingFilter can improve zero-shot performance of pre-trained models in downstream tasks. To assess the bias introduced by quality filtering, we introduce semantic diversity, a metric of utilizing text embedding models for semantic representations. Extensive experiments reveal that semantic diversity is a reliable indicator of dataset diversity, and ScalingFilter achieves an optimal balance between downstream performance and semantic diversity.

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Word Alignment as Preference for Machine Translation
Qiyu Wu | Masaaki Nagata | Zhongtao Miao | Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

The problem of hallucination and omission, a long-standing problem in machine translation (MT), is more pronounced when a large language model (LLM) is used in MT because an LLM itself is susceptible to these phenomena. In this work, we mitigate the problem in an LLM-based MT model by guiding it to better word alignment. We first study the correlation between word alignment and the phenomena of hallucination and omission in MT. Then we propose to utilize word alignment as preference to optimize the LLM-based MT model. The preference data are constructed by selecting chosen and rejected translations from multiple MT tools. Subsequently, direct preference optimization is used to optimize the LLM-based model towards the preference signal. Given the absence of evaluators specifically designed for hallucination and omission in MT, we further propose selecting hard instances and utilizing GPT-4 to directly evaluate the performance of the models in mitigating these issues. We verify the rationality of these designed evaluation methods by experiments, followed by extensive results demonstrating the effectiveness of word alignment-based preference optimization to mitigate hallucination and omission. On the other hand, although it shows promise in mitigating hallucination and omission, the overall performance of MT in different language directions remains mixed, with slight increases in BLEU and decreases in COMET.

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Improving Multi-party Dialogue Generation via Topic and Rhetorical Coherence
Yaxin Fan | Peifeng Li | Qiaoming Zhu

Previous studies on multi-party dialogue generation predominantly concentrated on modeling the reply-to structure of dialogue histories, always overlooking the coherence between generated responses and target utterances. To address this issue, we propose a Reinforcement Learning approach emphasizing both Topic and Rhetorical Coherence (RL-TRC). In particular, the topic- and rhetorical-coherence tasks are designed to enhance the model’s perception of coherence with the target utterance. Subsequently, an agent is employed to learn a coherence policy, which guides the generation of responses that are topically and rhetorically aligned with the target utterance. Furthermore, three discourse-aware rewards are developed to assess the coherence between the generated response and the target utterance, with the objective of optimizing the policy. The experimental results and in-depth analyses on two popular datasets demonstrate that our RL-TRC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in generating responses that are more coherent with the target utterances.

Continual learning (CL) is crucial for language models to dynamically adapt to the evolving real-world demands. To mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problem in CL, data replay has been proven a simple and effective strategy, and the subsequent data-replay-based distillation can further enhance the performance. However, existing methods fail to fully exploit the knowledge embedded in models from previous tasks, resulting in the need for a relatively large number of replay samples to achieve good results. In this work, we first explore and emphasize the importance of attention weights in knowledge retention, and then propose a SElective attEntion-guided Knowledge Retention method (SEEKR) for data-efficient replay-based continual learning of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, SEEKR performs attention distillation on the selected attention heads for finer-grained knowledge retention, where the proposed forgettability-based and task-sensitivity-based measures are used to identify the most valuable attention heads. Experimental results on two continual learning benchmarks for LLMs demonstrate the superiority of SEEKR over the existing methods on both performance and efficiency. Explicitly, SEEKR achieves comparable or even better performance with only 1/10 of the replayed data used by other methods, and reduces the proportion of replayed data to 1%. The code is available at https://github.com/jinghan1he/SEEKR.

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Neuron-Level Knowledge Attribution in Large Language Models
Zeping Yu | Sophia Ananiadou

Identifying important neurons for final predictions is essential for understanding the mechanisms of large language models. Due to computational constraints, current attribution techniques struggle to operate at neuron level. In this paper, we propose a static method for pinpointing significant neurons. Compared to seven other methods, our approach demonstrates superior performance across three metrics. Additionally, since most static methods typically only identify “value neurons” directly contributing to the final prediction, we propose a method for identifying “query neurons” which activate these “value neurons”. Finally, we apply our methods to analyze six types of knowledge across both attention and feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Our method and analysis are helpful for understanding the mechanisms of knowledge storage and set the stage for future research in knowledge editing. The code is available on https://github.com/zepingyu0512/neuron-attribution.

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How do Large Language Models Learn In-Context? Query and Key Matrices of In-Context Heads are Two Towers for Metric Learning
Zeping Yu | Sophia Ananiadou

We investigate the mechanism of in-context learning (ICL) on sentence classification tasks with semantically-unrelated labels (“foo”/“bar”). We find intervening in only 1% heads (named “in-context heads”) significantly affects ICL accuracy from 87.6% to 24.4%. To understand this phenomenon, we analyze the value-output vectors in these heads and discover that the vectors at each label position contain substantial information about the corresponding labels. Furthermore, we observe that the prediction shift from “foo” to “bar” is due to the respective reduction and increase in these heads’ attention scores at “foo” and “bar” positions. Therefore, we propose a hypothesis for ICL: in in-context heads, the value-output matrices extract label features, while the query-key matrices compute the similarity between the features at the last position and those at each label position. The query and key matrices can be considered as two towers that learn the similarity metric between the last position’s features and each demonstration at label positions. Using this hypothesis, we explain the majority label bias and recency bias in ICL and propose two methods to reduce these biases by 22% and 17%, respectively.

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Interpreting Arithmetic Mechanism in Large Language Models through Comparative Neuron Analysis
Zeping Yu | Sophia Ananiadou

We find arithmetic ability resides within a limited number of attention heads, with each head specializing in distinct operations. To delve into the reason, we introduce the Comparative Neuron Analysis (CNA) method, which identifies an internal logic chain consisting of four distinct stages from input to prediction: feature enhancing with shallow FFN neurons, feature transferring by shallow attention layers, feature predicting by arithmetic heads, and prediction enhancing among deep FFN neurons. Moreover, we identify the human-interpretable FFN neurons within both feature-enhancing and feature-predicting stages. These findings lead us to investigate the mechanism of LoRA, revealing that it enhances prediction probabilities by amplifying the coefficient scores of FFN neurons related to predictions. Finally, we apply our method in model pruning for arithmetic tasks and model editing for reducing gender bias. Code is on https://github.com/zepingyu0512/arithmetic-mechanism.

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Pixology: Probing the Linguistic and Visual Capabilities of Pixel-based Language Models
Kushal Tatariya | Vladimir Araujo | Thomas Bauwens | Miryam de Lhoneux

Pixel-based language models have emerged as a compelling alternative to subword-based language modelling, particularly because they can represent virtually any script. PIXEL, a canonical example of such a model, is a vision transformer that has been pre-trained on rendered text. While PIXEL has shown promising cross-script transfer abilities and robustness to orthographic perturbations, it falls short of outperforming monolingual subword counterparts like BERT in most other contexts. This discrepancy raises questions about the amount of linguistic knowledge learnt by these models and whether their performance in language tasks stems more from their visual capabilities than their linguistic ones. To explore this, we probe PIXEL using a variety of linguistic and visual tasks to assess its position on the vision-to-language spectrum. Our findings reveal a substantial gap between the model’s visual and linguistic understanding. The lower layers of PIXEL predominantly capture superficial visual features, whereas the higher layers gradually learn more syntactic and semantic abstractions. Additionally, we examine variants of PIXEL trained with different text rendering strategies, discovering that introducing certain orthographic constraints at the input level can facilitate earlier learning of surface-level features. With this study, we hope to provide insights that aid the further development of pixel-based language models.

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GoldCoin: Grounding Large Language Models in Privacy Laws via Contextual Integrity Theory
Wei Fan | Haoran Li | Zheye Deng | Weiqi Wang | Yangqiu Song

Privacy issues arise prominently during the inappropriate transmission of information between entities. Existing research primarily studies privacy by exploring various privacy attacks, defenses, and evaluations within narrowly predefined patterns, while neglecting that privacy is not an isolated, context-free concept limited to traditionally sensitive data (e.g., social security numbers), but intertwined with intricate social contexts that complicate the identification and analysis of potential privacy violations. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities for incorporating the nuanced scenarios outlined in privacy laws to tackle these complex privacy issues. However, the scarcity of open-source relevant case studies restricts the efficiency of LLMs in aligning with specific legal statutes. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel framework, GoldCoin, designed to efficiently ground LLMs in privacy laws for judicial assessing privacy violations. Our framework leverages the theory of contextual integrity as a bridge, creating numerous synthetic scenarios grounded in relevant privacy statutes (e.g., HIPAA), to assist LLMs in comprehending the complex contexts for identifying privacy risks in the real world. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GoldCoin markedly enhances LLMs’ capabilities in recognizing privacy risks across real court cases, surpassing the baselines on different judicial tasks.

We present a framework for detecting and categorizing noise in literary texts, demonstrated through its application to Danish and Norwegian literature from the late 19-th century. Noise, understood as “aberrant sonic behaviour,” is not only an auditory phenomenon but also a cultural construct tied to the processes of civilization and urbanization.We begin by utilizing topic modeling techniques to identify noise-related documents, followed by fine-tuning BERT-based language models trained on Danish and Norwegian texts to analyze a corpus of over 800 novels.We identify and track the prevalence of noise in these texts, offering insights into the literary perceptions of noise during the Scandinavian “Modern Breakthrough” period (1870-1899). Our contributions include the development of a comprehensive dataset annotated for noise-related segments and their categorization into human-made, non-human-made, and musical noises. This study illustrates the framework’s potential for enhancing the understanding of the relationship between noise and its literary representations, providing a deeper appreciation of the auditory elements in literary works, including as sources for cultural history.

Large Language Models (LLMs) from the GPT family have become extremely popular, leading to a race towards reducing their inference costs to allow for efficient local computation. However, the vast majority of existing work focuses on weight-only quantization, which can reduce runtime costs in the memory-bound one-token-at-a-time generative setting, but does not address costs in compute-bound scenarios, such as batched inference or prompt processing.In this paper, we address the general quantization problem, where both weights and activations should be quantized, which leads to computational improvements in general. We show that the majority of inference computations for large generative models can be performed with both weights and activations being cast to 4 bits, while at the same time maintaining good accuracy. We achieve this via a hybrid quantization strategy called QUIK that compresses most of the weights and activations to 4-bit, while keeping a small fraction of “outlier” weights and activations in higher-precision. QUIK is that it is designed with computational efficiency in mind: we provide GPU kernels matching the QUIK format with highly-efficient layer-wise runtimes, which lead to practical end-to-end throughput improvements of up to 3.4x relative to FP16 execution. We provide detailed studies for models from the OPT, LLaMA-2 and Falcon families, as well as a first instance of accurate inference using quantization plus 2:4 sparsity.Anonymized code is available.

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Fine-Grained Prediction of Reading Comprehension from Eye Movements
Omer Shubi | Yoav Meiri | Cfir Avraham Hadar | Yevgeni Berzak

Can human reading comprehension be assessed from eye movements in reading? In this work, we address this longstanding question using large-scale eyetracking data. We focus on a cardinal and largely unaddressed variant of this question: predicting reading comprehension of a single participant for a single question from their eye movements over a single paragraph. We tackle this task using a battery of recent models from the literature, and three new multimodal language models. We evaluate the models in two different reading regimes: ordinary reading and information seeking, and examine their generalization to new textual items, new participants, and the combination of both. The evaluations suggest that the task is highly challenging, and highlight the importance of benchmarking against a strong text-only baseline. While in some cases eye movements provide improvements over such a baseline, they tend to be small. This could be due to limitations of current modelling approaches, limitations of the data, or because eye movement behavior does not sufficiently pertain to fine-grained aspects of reading comprehension processes. Our study provides an infrastructure for making further progress on this question.

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.The code is available in [aka.ms/efficientrag](https://github.com/NIL-zhuang/EfficientRAG-official).

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Unsupervised Human Preference Learning
Sumuk Shashidhar | Abhinav Chinta | Vaibhav Sahai | Dilek Hakkani Tur

Large language models demonstrate impressive reasoning abilities but struggle to provide personalized content due to their lack of individual user preference information. Existing methods, such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, fall short in capturing the complexity of human preferences, especially given the small, personal datasets individuals possess. In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing small parameter models as preference agents to generate natural language rules that guide a larger, pre-trained model, enabling efficient personalization. Our method involves a small, local “steering wheel” model that directs the outputs of a much larger foundation model, producing content tailored to an individual’s preferences while leveraging the extensive knowledge and capabilities of the large model. Importantly, this personalization is achieved without the need to fine-tune the large model. Experimental results on email and article datasets, demonstrate that our technique significantly outperforms baseline personalization methods. By allowing foundation models to adapt to individual preferences in a data and compute-efficient manner, our approach paves the way for highly personalized language model applications.

The potential effectiveness of counterspeech as a hate speech mitigation strategy is attracting increasing interest in the NLG research community, particularly towards the task of automatically producing it. However, automatically generated responses often lack the argumentative richness which characterises expert-produced counterspeech. In this work, we focus on two aspects of counterspeech generation to produce more cogent responses. First, by investigating the tension between helpfulness and harmlessness of LLMs, we test whether the presence of safety guardrails hinders the quality of the generations. Secondly, we assess whether attacking a specific component of the hate speech results in a more effective argumentative strategy to fight online hate. By conducting an extensive human and automatic evaluation, we show how the presence of safety guardrails can be detrimental also to a task that inherently aims at fostering positive social interactions. Moreover, our results show that attacking a specific component of the hate speech, and in particular its implicit negative stereotype and its hateful parts, leads to higher-quality generations.

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Leading Whitespaces of Language Models’ Subword Vocabulary Pose a Confound for Calculating Word Probabilities
Byung-Doh Oh | William Schuler

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LLM4Decompile: Decompiling Binary Code with Large Language Models
Hanzhuo Tan | Qi Luo | Jing Li | Yuqun Zhang

Decompilation aims to convert binary code to high-level source code, but traditional tools like Ghidra often produce results that are difficult to read and execute. Motivated by the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), we propose LLM4Decompile, the first and largest open-source LLM series (1.3B to 33B) trained to decompile binary code. We optimize the LLM training process and introduce the LLM4Decompile-End models to decompile binary directly. The resulting models significantly outperform GPT-4o and Ghidra on the HumanEval and ExeBench benchmarks by over 100% in terms of re-executability rate. Additionally, we improve the standard refinement approach to fine-tune the LLM4Decompile-Ref models, enabling them to effectively refine the decompiled code from Ghidra and achieve a further 16.2% improvement over the LLM4Decompile-End. LLM4Decompile demonstrates the potential of LLMs to revolutionize binary code decompilation, delivering remarkable improvements in readability and executability while complementing conventional tools for optimal results.

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From Bottom to Top: Extending the Potential of Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning
Jihao Gu | Zelin Wang | Yibo Zhang | Ziji Zhang | Ping Gong

With the proliferation of large language models, Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, which freeze pre-trained parameters and only fine-tune a few task-specific parameters, are playing an increasingly important role. However, previous work primarily applied uniform operations across all layers of the model, overlooking the fact that different layers in a transformer store different information. In the process of exploration, We find that there is a significant differences in fine-tuning strategies between different layers, and fine-tuning only a subset of layers can even achieve comparable performance. Based on this, we propose the Hybrid LoRA-Prefix Tuning(HLPT) method, which uses enhanced LoRA and Prefix-tuning methods with learnable adaptive mechanism separately for the bottom and top layers, and the Half Hybrid LoRA-Prefix Tuning(H²LPT) method, which goes a step further, reducing the parameter count to nearly half by omitting fine-tuning in the middle layers. Extensive experiments with large language models on various downstream tasks provide strong evidence for the potential of PEFT focusing on different layers’ interactions and the effectiveness of our methods. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of these methods and their advantages in speeding up training convergence, reducing inference time requirements.

Recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). They typically require rewriting retrieved subgraphs into natural language formats comprehensible to LLMs. However, when tackling complex questions, the knowledge rewritten by existing methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question’s semantics. To address them, we propose a novel rewriting method CoTKR, Chain- of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting, for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting. Additionally, to bridge the preference gap between the knowledge rewriter and the question answering (QA) model, we propose a training strategy PAQAF, Preference Alignment from Question Answering Feedback, for leveraging feedback from the QA model to further optimize the knowledge rewriter. We conduct experiments using various LLMs across several KGQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with previous knowledge rewriting methods, CoTKR generates the most beneficial knowledge representation for QA models, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs in KGQA.

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MTLS: Making Texts into Linguistic Symbols
Wenlong Fei | Xiaohua Wang | Min Hu | Qingyu Zhang | Hongbo Li

In linguistics, all languages can be considered as symbolic systems, with each language relying on symbolic processes to associate specific symbols with meanings. In the same language, there is a fixed correspondence between linguistic symbol and meaning. In different languages, universal meanings follow varying rules of symbolization in one-to-one correspondence with symbols. Most work overlooks the properties of languages as symbol systems. In this paper, we shift the focus to the symbolic properties and introduce MTLS: a pre-training method to improve the multilingual capability of models by Making Texts into Linguistic Symbols. Initially, we replace the vocabulary in pre-trained language models by mapping relations between linguistic symbols and semantics. Subsequently, universal semantics within the symbolic system serve as bridges, linking symbols from different languages to the embedding space of the model, thereby enabling the model to process linguistic symbols. To evaluate the effectiveness of MTLS, we conducted experiments on multilingual tasks using BERT and RoBERTa, respectively, as the backbone. The results indicate that despite having just over 12,000 pieces of English data in pre-training, the improvement that MTLS brings to multilingual capabilities is remarkably significant.

Fine-grained category discovery using only coarse-grained supervision is a cost-effective yet challenging task. Previous training methods focus on aligning query samples with positive samples and distancing them from negatives. They often neglect intra-category and inter-category semantic similarities of fine-grained categories when navigating sample distributions in the embedding space. Furthermore, some evaluation techniques that rely on pre-collected test samples are inadequate for real-time applications. To address these shortcomings, we introduce a method that successfully detects fine-grained clusters of semantically similar texts guided by a novel objective function. The method uses semantic similarities in a logarithmic space to guide sample distributions in the Euclidean space and to form distinct clusters that represent fine-grained categories. We also propose a centroid inference mechanism to support real-time applications. The efficacy of the method is both theoretically justified and empirically confirmed on three benchmark tasks. The proposed objective function is integrated in multiple contrastive learning based neural models. Its results surpass existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of Accuracy, Adjusted Rand Index and Normalized Mutual Information of the detected fine-grained categories. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/changtianluckyforever/F-grained-STAR.

Extensive efforts in automated approaches for content moderation have been focused on developing models to identify toxic, offensive, and hateful content with the aim of lightening the load for moderators. Yet, it remains uncertain whether improvements on those tasks have truly addressed moderators’ needs in accomplishing their work. In this paper, we surface gaps between past research efforts that have aimed to provide automation for aspects of content moderation and the needs of volunteer content moderators, regarding identifying violations of various moderation rules. To do so, we conduct a model review on Hugging Face to reveal the availability of models to cover various moderation rules and guidelines from three exemplar forums. We further put state-of-the-art LLMs to the test, evaluating how well these models perform in flagging violations of platform rules from one particular forum. Finally, we conduct a user survey study with volunteer moderators to gain insight into their perspectives on useful moderation models. Overall, we observe a non trivial gap, as missing developed models and LLMs exhibit moderate to low performance on a significant portion of the rules. Moderators’ reports provide guides for future work on developing moderation assistant models.

Large language models (LLMs) are essential tools that users employ across various scenarios, so evaluating their performance and guiding users in selecting the suitable service is important. Although many benchmarks exist, they mainly focus on specific predefined model abilities, such as world knowledge, reasoning, etc. Based on these ability scores, it is hard for users to determine which LLM best suits their particular needs. To address these issues, we propose to evaluate LLMs from a user-centric perspective and design this benchmark to measure their efficacy in satisfying user needs under distinct intents. Firstly, we collect 1,846 real-world use cases from a user study with 712 participants from 23 countries. This first-hand data helps us understand actual user intents and needs in LLM interactions, forming the User Reported Scenarios (URS) dataset, which is categorized with six types of user intents. Secondly, based on this authentic dataset, we benchmark 10 LLM services with GPT-4-as-Judge. Thirdly, we show that benchmark scores align well with human preference in both real-world experience and pair-wise annotations, achieving Pearson correlations of 0.95 and 0.94, respectively. This alignment confirms that the URS dataset and our evaluation method establish an effective user-centric benchmark. The dataset, code, and process data are publicly available at https://github.com/Alice1998/URS.

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Decompose and Compare Consistency: Measuring VLMs’ Answer Reliability via Task-Decomposition Consistency Comparison
Qian Yang | Weixiang Yan | Aishwarya Agrawal

Despite tremendous advancements, current state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are still far from perfect. They tend to hallucinate and may generate biased responses. In such circumstances, having a way to assess the reliability of a given response generated by a VLM is quite useful. Existing methods, such as estimating uncertainty using answer likelihoods or prompt-based confidence generation, often suffer from overconfidence. Other methods use self-consistency comparison but are affected by confirmation biases. To alleviate these, we propose Decompose and Compare Consistency (DeCC) for reliability measurement. By comparing the consistency between the direct answer generated using the VLM’s internal reasoning process, and the indirect answers obtained by decomposing the question into sub-questions and reasoning over the sub-answers produced by the VLM, DeCC measures the reliability of VLM’s direct answer. Experiments across six vision-language tasks with three VLMs show DeCC’s reliability estimation achieves better correlation with task accuracy compared to the existing methods.

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Learn to Refuse: Making Large Language Models More Controllable and Reliable through Knowledge Scope Limitation and Refusal Mechanism
Lang Cao

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling them to answer a wide range of questions across various domains. However, these models are not flawless and often produce responses that contain errors or misinformation. These inaccuracies, commonly referred to as hallucinations, render LLMs unreliable and even unusable in many scenarios. In this paper, our focus is on mitigating the issue of hallucination in LLMs, particularly in the context of question-answering. Instead of attempting to answer all questions, we explore a refusal mechanism that instructs LLMs to refuse to answer challenging questions in order to avoid errors. We then propose a simple yet effective solution called Learn to Refuse (L2R), which incorporates the refusal mechanism to enable LLMs to recognize and refuse to answer questions that they find difficult to address. To achieve this, we utilize a structured knowledge base to represent all the LLM’s understanding of the world, enabling it to provide traceable gold knowledge. This knowledge base is separate from the LLM and initially empty. It can be filled with validated knowledge and progressively expanded. When an LLM encounters questions outside its domain, the system recognizes its knowledge scope and determines whether it can answer the question independently. Additionally, we introduce a method for automatically and efficiently expanding the knowledge base of LLMs. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate that our approach enhances the controllability and reliability of LLMs.

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VGBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Vector Graphics Understanding and Generation
Bocheng Zou | Mu Cai | Jianrui Zhang | Yong Jae Lee

In the realm of vision models, the primary mode of representation is using pixels to rasterize the visual world. Yet this is not always the best or unique way to represent visual content, especially for designers and artists who depict the world using geometry primitives such as polygons. Vector graphics (VG), on the other hand, offer a textual representation of visual content, which can be more concise and powerful for content like cartoons, sketches and scientific figures. Recent studies have shown promising results on processing vector graphics with capable Large Language Models (LLMs). However, such works focus solely on qualitative results, understanding, or a specific type of vector graphics. We propose VGBench, a comprehensive benchmark for LLMs on handling vector graphics through diverse aspects, including (a) both visual understanding and generation, (b) evaluation of various vector graphics formats, (c) diverse question types, (d) wide range of prompting techniques, (e) under multiple LLMs and (f) comparison with VLMs on rasterized representations. Evaluating on our collected 4279 understanding and 5845 generation samples, we find that LLMs show strong capability on both aspects while exhibiting less desirable performance on low-level formats (SVG). Both data and evaluation pipeline will be open-sourced.

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for various natural language processing tasks has led to superlative claims about their performance. For the evaluation of machine translation (MT), existing research shows that LLMs are able to achieve results comparable to fine-tuned multilingual pre-trained language models. In this paper, we explore what translation information, such as the source, reference, translation errors and annotation guidelines, is needed for LLMs to evaluate MT quality. In addition, we investigate prompting techniques such as zero-shot, Chain of Thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting for eight language pairs covering high-, medium- and low-resource languages, leveraging varying LLM variants. Our findings indicate the importance of reference translations for an LLM-based evaluation. While larger models do not necessarily fare better, they tend to benefit more from CoT prompting, than smaller models. We also observe that LLMs do not always provide a numerical score when generating evaluations, which poses a question on their reliability for the task. Our work presents a comprehensive analysis for resource-constrained and training-less LLM-based evaluation of machine translation. We release the accrued prompt templates, code and data publicly for reproducibility.

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Performance-Guided LLM Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Text Classification at Scale
Flavio Di Palo | Prateek Singhi | Bilal H Fadlallah

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges at inference time due to their high computational demands. To address this, we present Performance-Guided Knowledge Distillation (PGKD), a cost-effective and high-throughput solution for production text classification applications. PGKD utilizes teacher-student Knowledge Distillation to distill the knowledge of LLMs into smaller, task-specific models. PGKD establishes an active learning routine between the student model and the LLM; the LLM continuously generates new training data leveraging hard-negative mining, student model validation performance, and early-stopping protocols to inform the data generation. By employing a cyclical, performance-aware approach tailored for highly multi-class, sparsely annotated datasets prevalent in industrial text classification, PGKD effectively addresses training challenges and outperforms traditional BERT-base models and other knowledge distillation methods on several multi-class classification datasets. Additionally, cost and latency benchmarking reveals that models fine-tuned with PGKD are up to 130X faster and 25X less expensive than LLMs for inference on the same classification task. While PGKD is showcased for text classification tasks, its versatile framework can be extended to any LLM distillation task, including language generation, making it a powerful tool for optimizing performance across a wide range of AI applications.

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External Knowledge-Driven Argument Mining: Leveraging Attention-Enhanced Multi-Network Models
Debela Gemechu | Chris Reed

Argument mining (AM) involves the identification of argument relations (AR) between Argumentative Discourse Units (ADUs). The essence of ARs among ADUs is context-dependent and lies in maintaining a coherent flow of ideas, often centered around the relations between discussed entities, topics, themes or concepts. However, these relations are not always explicitly stated; rather, inferred from implicit chains of reasoning connecting the concepts addressed in the ADUs. While humans can infer such background knowledge, machines face challenges when the contextual cues are not explicitly provided. This paper leverages external resources, including WordNet, ConceptNet, and Wikipedia to identify semantic paths (knowledge paths) connecting the concepts discussed in the ADUs to obtain the implicit chains of reasoning. To effectively leverage these paths for AR prediction, we propose attention-based Multi-Network architectures. Various architecture are evaluated on the external resources, and the Wikipedia based configuration attains F-scores of 0.85, 0.84, 0.70, and 0.87, respectively, on four diverse datasets, showing strong performance over the baselines.

The development of tools and techniques to analyze and extract organizations’ data habits from privacy policies are critical for scalable regulatory compliance audits. Unfortunately, these tools are becoming increasingly limited in their ability to identify compliance issues and fixes. After all, most were developed using regulation-agnostic datasets of annotated privacy policies obtained from a time before the introduction of landmark privacy regulations such as EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA. In this paper, we describe the first open regulation-aware dataset of expert-annotated privacy policies, C3PA (CCPA Privacy Policy Provision Annotations), aimed to address this challenge. C3PA contains over 48K expert-labeled privacy policy text segments associated with responses to CCPA-specific disclosure mandates from 411 unique organizations. We demonstrate that the C3PA dataset is uniquely suited for aiding automated audits of compliance with CCPA-related disclosure mandates.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M²PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M²PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.

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Text Grafting: Near-Distribution Weak Supervision for Minority Classes in Text Classification
Letian Peng | Yi Gu | Chengyu Dong | Zihan Wang | Jingbo Shang

For extremely weak-supervised text classification, pioneer research generates pseudo labels by mining texts similar to the class names from the raw corpus, which may end up with very limited or even no samples for the minority classes. Recent works have started to generate the relevant texts by prompting LLMs using the class names or definitions; however, there is a high risk that LLMs cannot generate in-distribution (i.e., similar to the corpus where the text classifier will be applied) data, leading to ungeneralizable classifiers. In this paper, we combine the advantages of these two approaches and propose to bridge the gap via a novel framework, text grafting, which aims to obtain clean and near-distribution weak supervision for minority classes. Specifically, we first use LLM-based logits to mine masked templates from the raw corpus, which have a high potential for data synthesis into the target minority class. Then, the templates are filled by state-of-the-art LLMs to synthesize near-distribution texts falling into minority classes. Text grafting shows significant improvement over direct mining or synthesis on minority classes. We also use analysis and case studies to comprehend the property of text grafting.

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Incubating Text Classifiers Following User Instruction with Nothing but LLM
Letian Peng | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang

In this paper, we aim to generate text classification data given arbitrary class definitions (i.e., user instruction), so one can train a text classifier without any human annotation or raw corpus. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) lead to pioneer attempts to individually generate texts for each class via prompting. In this paper, we propose Incubator, the first framework that can handle complicated and even mutually dependent classes (e.g., "TED Talk given by Educator" and "Other"). Specifically, our Incubator is a fine-tuned LLM that takes the instruction of all class definitions as input, and in each inference, it can jointly generate one sample for every class. First, we tune Incubator on the instruction-to-data mappings that we obtained from classification datasets and descriptions on Hugging Face together with in-context augmentation by GPT-4. To emphasize the uniformity and diversity in generations, we refine Incubator by fine-tuning with the cluster centers of semantic textual embeddings of the generated samples. We compare Incubator on various classification tasks with strong baselines such as direct LLM-based inference and training data generation by prompt engineering. Experiments show Incubator is able to (1) outperform previous methods on traditional benchmarks, (2) take label interdependency and user preference into consideration, and (3) enable logical text mining by incubating multiple classifiers

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PTD-SQL: Partitioning and Targeted Drilling with LLMs in Text-to-SQL
Ruilin Luo | Liyuan Wang | Binghuai Lin | Zicheng Lin | Yujiu Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for Text-to-SQL tasks, exhibiting remarkable reasoning capabilities. Different from tasks such as math word problem and commonsense reasoning, SQL solutions have a relatively fixed pattern. This facilitates the investigation of whether LLMs can benefit from categorical thinking, mirroring how humans acquire knowledge through inductive reasoning based on comparable examples. In this study, we propose that employing query group partitioning allows LLMs to focus on learning the thought processes specific to a single problem type, consequently enhancing their reasoning abilities across diverse difficulty levels and problem categories. Our experiments reveal that multiple advanced LLMs, when equipped with PTD-SQL, can either surpass or match previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on the Spider and BIRD datasets. Intriguingly, models with varying initial performances have exhibited significant improvements mainly at the boundary of their capabilities after targeted drilling, suggesting a parallel with human progress. Code is available at https://github.com/lrlbbzl/PTD-SQL.

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Conditional and Modal Reasoning in Large Language Models
Wesley H. Holliday | Matthew Mandelkern | Cedegao E. Zhang

The reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) are the topic of a growing body of research in AI and cognitive science. In this paper, we probe the extent to which twenty-nine LLMs are able to distinguish logically correct inferences from logically fallacious ones. We focus on inference patterns involving conditionals (e.g., '*If* Ann has a queen, *then* Bob has a jack’) and epistemic modals (e.g., ‘Ann *might* have an ace’, ‘Bob *must* have a king’). These inferences have been of special interest to logicians, philosophers, and linguists, since they play a central role in the fundamental human ability to reason about distal possibilities. Assessing LLMs on these inferences is thus highly relevant to the question of how much the reasoning abilities of LLMs match those of humans. All the LLMs we tested make some basic mistakes with conditionals or modals, though zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting helps them make fewer mistakes. Even the best performing LLMs make basic errors in modal reasoning, display logically inconsistent judgments across inference patterns involving epistemic modals and conditionals, and give answers about complex conditional inferences that do not match reported human judgments. These results highlight gaps in basic logical reasoning in today’s LLMs.

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to generate text with citations to evidence sources can mitigate hallucinations and enhance verifiability in information-seeking systems. However, improving this capability requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive. Inspired by recent advances in self-improvement that enhance LLMs without manual annotation, we present START, a Self-Taught AttRibuTion framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of LLMs. First, to prevent models from stagnating due to initially insufficient supervision signals, START leverages the model to self-construct synthetic training data for warming up. To further self-improve the model’s attribution ability, START iteratively utilizes fine-grained preference supervision signals constructed from its sampled responses to encourage robust, comprehensive, and attributable generation. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets, covering long-form QA and multi-step reasoning, demonstrate significant performance gains of 25.13% on average without relying on human annotations and more advanced models. Further analysis reveals that START excels in aggregating information across multiple sources.

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AlignCap: Aligning Speech Emotion Captioning to Human Preferences
Ziqi Liang | Haoxiang Shi | Hanhui Chen

Speech Emotion Captioning (SEC) has gradually become an active research task. The emotional content conveyed through human speech are often complex, and classifying them into fixed categories may not be enough to fully capture speech emotions. Describing speech emotions through natural language may be a more effective approach. However, existing SEC methods often produce hallucinations and lose generalization on unseen speech. To overcome these problems, we propose AlignCap, which Aligning Speech Emotion Captioning to Human Preferences based on large language model (LLM) with two properties: 1) Speech-Text Alignment, which minimizing the divergence between the LLM’s response prediction distributions for speech and text inputs using knowledge distillation (KD) Regularization. 2) Human Preference Alignment, where we design Preference Optimization (PO) Regularization to eliminate factuality and faithfulness hallucinations. We also extract emotional clues as a prompt for enriching fine-grained information under KD-Regularization. Experiments demonstrate that AlignCap presents stronger performance to other state-of-the-art methods on Zero-shot SEC task.

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Interpretability-based Tailored Knowledge Editing in Transformers
Yihuai Hong | Aldo Lipani

Language models recognized as a new form of knowledge bases, face challenges of outdated, erroneous, and privacy-sensitive information, necessitating knowledge editing to rectify errors without costly retraining. Existing methods, spanning model’s parameters modification, external knowledge integration, and in-context learning, lack in-depth analysis from a model interpretability perspective. Our work explores the instability in in-context learning outcomes, providing insights into its reasons and distinctions from other methods. Leveraging findings on the critical role of feed-forward MLPs in decoder-only models, we propose a tailored knowledge editing method, TailoredKE, that considers the unique information flow of each sample. Model interpretability reveals diverse attribute recall across transformer layers, guiding edits to specific features at different depths and mitigating over-editing issues.

Prompt optimization aims to find the best prompt to a large language model (LLM) for a given task. LLMs have been successfully used to help find and improve prompt candidates for single-step tasks. However, realistic tasks for agents are multi-step and introduce new challenges: (1) Prompt content is likely to be more extensive and complex, making it more difficult for LLMs to analyze errors, (2) the impact of an individual step is difficult to evaluate, and (3) different people may have varied preferences about task execution. While humans struggle to optimize prompts, they are good at providing feedback about LLM outputs; we therefore introduce a new LLM-driven discrete prompt optimization framework PROMST that incorporates human-designed feedback rules to automatically offer direct suggestions for improvement. We also use an extra learned heuristic model that predicts prompt performance to efficiently sample from prompt candidates. This approach significantly outperforms both human-engineered prompts and several other prompt optimization methods across 11 representative multi-step tasks (an average 10.6%-29.3% improvement to current best methods on five LLMs respectively). We believe our work can serve as a benchmark for automatic prompt optimization for LLM-driven multi-step tasks.

In recent years, the rapid increase in online video content has underscored the limitations of static Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models trained on fixed datasets, as they struggle to adapt to new questions or tasks posed by newly available content. In this paper, we explore the novel challenge of VideoQA within a continual learning framework, and empirically identify a critical issue: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) for a sequence of tasks often results in catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we propose Collaborative Prompting (ColPro), which integrates specific question constraint prompting, knowledge acquisition prompting, and visual temporal awareness prompting. These prompts aim to capture textual question context, visual content, and video temporal dynamics in VideoQA, a perspective underexplored in prior research. Experimental results on the NExT-QA and DramaQA datasets show that ColPro achieves superior performance compared to existing approaches, achieving 55.14% accuracy on NExT-QA and 71.24% accuracy on DramaQA, highlighting its practical relevance and effectiveness.

Fine-tuning-based unlearning methods prevail for erasing targeted harmful, sensitive, or copyrighted information within large language models while preserving overall capabilities. However, the true effectiveness of the methods is unclear. In this paper, we delve into the limitations of fine-tuning-based unlearning through activation patching and parameter restoration experiments. Our findings reveal that these methods alter the model’s knowledge retrieval process, rather than genuinely erasing the problematic knowledge embedded in the model parameters. Furthermore, behavioral tests demonstrate that the unlearning mechanisms inevitably impact the global behavior of the models, affecting unrelated knowledge or capabilities. Our work advocates the development of more resilient unlearning techniques for truly erasing knowledge.

Modern language models (LMs) need to follow human instructions while being faithful; yet, they often fail to achieve both. Here, we provide concrete evidence of a trade-off between instruction following (i.e., follow open-ended instructions) and faithfulness (i.e., ground responses in given context) when training LMs with these objectives. For instance, fine-tuning LLaMA-7B on instruction following datasets renders it less faithful. Conversely, instruction-tuned Vicuna-7B shows degraded performance at following instructions when further optimized on tasks that require contextual grounding. One common remedy is multi-task learning (MTL) with data mixing, yet it remains far from achieving a synergic outcome. We propose a simple yet effective method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning (ReSet), which significantly outperforms vanilla MTL. Surprisingly, we find that less is more, as training ReSet with high-quality, yet substantially smaller data (three-fold less) yields superior results. Our findings offer a better understanding of objective discrepancies in alignment training of LMs.

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Where is the signal in tokenization space?
Renato Geh | Honghua Zhang | Kareem Ahmed | Benjie Wang | Guy Van Den Broeck

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically shipped with tokenizers that *deterministically* encode text into so-called *canonical* token sequences, to which the LLMs assign probability values.One common assumption is that the probability of a piece of text is the probability of its canonical token sequence.However, the tokenization of a string is not unique: e.g., the Llama2 tokenizer encodes ‘Tokens‘ as ‘[Tok,ens]‘, but ‘[Tok,en,s]‘ also represents the same text.In this paper, we study non-canonical tokenizations.We prove that, given a string, it is computationally hard to find the most likely tokenization for an autoregressive LLM, as well as to compute the marginal probability over all possible tokenizations.We then show how the marginal is, in most cases, indistinguishable from the canonical probability.Surprisingly, we then empirically demonstrate the existence of a significant amount of signal hidden within tokenization space.Notably, by simply aggregating the probabilities of non-canonical tokenizations, we achieve improvements across a range of LLM evaluation benchmarks for a variety of architectures, including transformers and state space models.

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Private Language Models via Truncated Laplacian Mechanism
Tianhao Huang | Tao Yang | Ivan Habernal | Lijie Hu | Di Wang

Recently it has been shown that deep learning models for NLP tasks are prone to attacks that can even reconstruct the verbatim training texts. To prevent privacy leakage, researchers have investigated word-level perturbations, relying on the formal guarantees of differential privacy (DP) in the embedding space. However, many existing approaches either achieve unsatisfactory performance in the high privacy regime when using the Laplacian or Gaussian mechanism, or resort to weaker relaxations of DP that are inferior to the canonical DP in terms of privacy strength. This raises the question of whether a new method for private word embedding can be designed to overcome these limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel private embedding method called the high dimensional truncated Laplacian mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a non-trivial extension of the truncated Laplacian mechanism, which was previously only investigated in one-dimensional space cases. Theoretically, we show that our method has a lower variance compared to the previous private word embedding methods. To further validate its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments on private embedding and downstream tasks using three datasets. Remarkably, even in the high privacy regime, our approach only incurs a slight decrease in utility compared to the non-private scenario.

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Estimating Knowledge in Large Language Models Without Generating a Single Token
Daniela Gottesman | Mor Geva

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Consistent Autoformalization for Constructing Mathematical Libraries
Lan Zhang | Xin Quan | Andre Freitas

Autoformalization is the task of automatically translating mathematical content written in natural language to a formal language expression. The growing language interpretation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), including in formal languages, are lowering the barriers for autoformalization. However, LLMs alone are not capable of consistently and reliably delivering autoformalization, in particular as the complexity and specialization of the target domain grows. As the field evolves into the direction of systematically applying autoformalization towards large mathematical libraries, the need to improve syntactic, terminological and semantic control increases. This paper proposes the coordinated use of three mechanisms, most-similar retrieval augmented generation (MS-RAG), denoising steps, and auto-correction with syntax error feedback (Auto-SEF) to improve autoformalization quality. The empirical analysis, across different models, demonstrates that these mechanisms can deliver autoformalizaton results which are syntactically, terminologically and semantically more consistent. These mechanisms can be applied across different LLMs and have shown to deliver improve results across different model types.

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When Context Leads but Parametric Memory Follows in Large Language Models
Yufei Tao | Adam Hiatt | Erik Haake | Antonie J. Jetter | Ameeta Agrawal

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in leveraging diverse knowledge sources. This study investigates how nine widely used LLMs allocate knowledge between local context and global parameters when answering open-ended questions in knowledge-consistent scenarios. We introduce a novel dataset, WikiAtomic, and systematically vary context sizes to analyze how LLMs prioritize and utilize the provided information and their parametric knowledge in knowledge-consistent scenarios. Additionally, we also study their tendency to hallucinate under varying context sizes. Our findings reveal consistent patterns across models, including a consistent reliance on both contextual (around 70%) and parametric (around 30%) knowledge, and a decrease in hallucinations with increasing context. These insights highlight the importance of more effective context organization and developing models that use input more deterministically for robust performance.

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Semantic Training Signals Promote Hierarchical Syntactic Generalization in Transformers
Aditya Yedetore | Najoung Kim

Neural networks without hierarchical biases often struggle to learn linguistic rules that come naturally to humans. However, neural networks are trained primarily on form alone, while children acquiring language additionally receive data about meaning. Would neural networks generalize more like humans when trained on both form and meaning? We investigate this by examining if Transformers—neural networks without a hierarchical bias—better achieve hierarchical generalization when trained on both form and meaning compared to when trained on form alone. Our results show that Transformers trained on form and meaning do favor the hierarchical generalization more than those trained on form alone, suggesting that statistical learners without hierarchical biases can leverage semantic training signals to bootstrap hierarchical syntactic generalization.

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When Is Multilinguality a Curse? Language Modeling for 250 High- and Low-Resource Languages
Tyler A. Chang | Catherine Arnett | Zhuowen Tu | Ben Bergen

Multilingual language models are widely used to extend NLP systems to low-resource languages. However, concrete evidence for the effects of multilinguality on language modeling performance in individual languages remains scarce. Here, we pre-train over 10,000 monolingual and multilingual language models for over 250 languages, including multiple language families that are under-studied in NLP. We assess how language modeling performance in each language varies as a function of (1) monolingual dataset size, (2) added multilingual dataset size, (3) linguistic similarity of the added languages, and (4) model size (up to 45M parameters). We find that in moderation, adding multilingual data improves low-resource language modeling performance, similar to increasing low-resource dataset sizes by up to 33%. Improvements depend on the syntactic similarity of the added multilingual data, with marginal additional effects of vocabulary overlap. However, high-resource languages consistently perform worse in multilingual pre-training scenarios. As dataset sizes increase, adding multilingual data begins to hurt performance for both low-resource and high-resource languages, likely due to limited model capacity (the “curse of multilinguality”). These results suggest that massively multilingual pre-training may not be optimal for any languages involved, but that more targeted models can significantly improve performance.

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Teaching Embodied Reinforcement Learning Agents: Informativeness and Diversity of Language Use
Jiajun Xi | Yinong He | Jianing Yang | Yinpei Dai | Joyce Chai

In real-world scenarios, it is desirable for embodied agents to have the ability to leverage human language to gain explicit or implicit knowledge for learning tasks. Despite recent progress, most previous approaches adopt simple low-level instructions as language inputs, which may not reflect natural human communication. We expect human language to be informative (i.e., providing feedback on agents’ past behaviors and offering guidance on achieving their future goals) and diverse (i.e., encompassing a wide range of expressions and style nuances). To enable flexibility of language use in teaching agents tasks, this paper studies different types of language inputs in facilitating reinforcement learning (RL) embodied agents. More specifically, we examine how different levels of language informativeness and diversity impact agent learning and inference. Our empirical results based on four RL benchmarks demonstrate that agents trained with diverse and informative language feedback can achieve enhanced generalization and fast adaptation to new tasks. These findings highlight the pivotal role of language use in teaching embodied agents new tasks in an open world.

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MiTTenS: A Dataset for Evaluating Gender Mistranslation
Kevin Robinson | Sneha Kudugunta | Romina Stella | Sunipa Dev | Jasmijn Bastings

Translation systems, including foundation models capable of translation, can produce errors that result in gender mistranslation, and such errors can be especially harmful. To measure the extent of such potential harms when translating into and out of English, we introduce a dataset, MiTTenS, covering 26 languages from a variety of language families and scripts, including several traditionally under-represented in digital resources. The dataset is constructed with handcrafted passages that target known failure patterns, longer synthetically generated passages, and natural passages sourced from multiple domains. We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by evaluating both neural machine translation systems and foundation models, and show that all systems exhibit gender mistranslation and potential harm, even in high resource languages.

Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in multilingual settings. However, previous studies on LLM abstention primarily focus on English; we find that directly applying existing solutions beyond English results in up to 20.5% performance gaps between high and low-resource languages, potentially due to LLMs’ drop in calibration and reasoning beyond a few resource-rich languages. To this end, we propose strategies to enhance LLM abstention by learning from multilingual feedback, where LLMs self-reflect on proposed answers in one language by generating multiple feedback items in related languages: we show that this helps identifying the knowledge gaps across diverse languages, cultures, and communities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our multilingual feedback approach outperforms various strong baselines, achieving up to 9.2% improvement for low-resource languages across three black-box and open models on three datasets, featuring open-book, closed-book, and commonsense QA. Further analysis reveals that multilingual feedback is both an effective and a more equitable abstain strategy to serve diverse language speakers, and cultural factors have great impact on language selection and LLM abstention behavior, highlighting future directions for multilingual and multi-cultural reliable language modeling.

While existing alignment paradigms have been integral in developing large language models (LLMs), LLMs often learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. We propose Modular Pluralism, a modular framework based on multi-LLM collaboration for pluralistic alignment: it “plugs into” a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to flexibility support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. Modular Pluralism is uniquely compatible with black-box LLMs and offers the modular control of adding new community LMs for previously underrepresented communities. We evaluate Modular Pluralism with six tasks and four datasets featuring questions/instructions with value-laden and perspective-informed responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Modular Pluralism advances the three pluralism objectives across six black-box and open-source LLMs. Further analysis reveals that LLMs are generally faithful to the inputs from smaller community LLMs, allowing seamless patching by adding a new community LM to better cover previously underrepresented communities.

Authorship obfuscation, rewriting a text to intentionally obscure the identity of the author, is important yet challenging. Current methods using large language models (LLMs) lack interpretability and controllability, often ignoring author-specific stylistic features, resulting in less robust performance overall.To address this, we develop StyleRemix, an adaptive and interpretable obfuscation method that perturbs specific, fine-grained style elements of the original input text. StyleRemix uses pre-trained Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules to rewrite inputs along various stylistic axes (e.g., formality, length) while maintaining low computational costs. StyleRemix outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and much larger LLMs on an array of domains on both automatic and human evaluation.Additionally, we release AuthorMix, a large set of 30K high-quality, long-form texts from a diverse set of 14 authors and 4 domains, and DiSC, a parallel corpus of 1,500 texts spanning seven style axes in 16 unique directions.

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I Could’ve Asked That: Reformulating Unanswerable Questions
Wenting Zhao | Ge Gao | Claire Cardie | Alexander M Rush

When seeking information from unfamiliar documents, users frequently pose questions that cannot be answered by the documents. While existing large language models (LLMs) identify these unanswerable questions, they do not assist users in reformulating their questions, thereby reducing their overall utility. We curate CouldAsk, an evaluation benchmark composed of existing and new datasets for document-grounded question answering, specifically designed to study reformulating unanswerable questions. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs on CouldAsk. The results demonstrate the limited capabilities of these models in reformulating questions. Specifically, GPT-4 and Llama2-7B successfully reformulate questions only 26% and 12% of the time, respectively. Error analysis shows that 62% of the unsuccessful reformulations stem from the models merely rephrasing the questions or even generating identical questions. We publicly release the benchmark and the code to reproduce the experiments.

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STOP! Benchmarking Large Language Models with Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions
Robert Morabito | Sangmitra Madhusudan | Tyler McDonald | Ali Emami

Mitigating explicit and implicit biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical focus in the field of natural language processing. However, many current methodologies evaluate scenarios in isolation, without considering the broader context or the spectrum of potential biases within each situation. To address this, we introduce the Sensitivity Testing on Offensive Progressions (STOP) dataset, which includes 450 offensive progressions containing 2,700 unique sentences of varying severity that progressively escalate from less to more explicitly offensive. Covering a broad spectrum of 9 demographics and 46 sub-demographics, STOP ensures inclusivity and comprehensive coverage. We evaluate several leading closed- and open-source models, including GPT-4, Mixtral, and Llama 3. Our findings reveal that even the best-performing models detect bias inconsistently, with success rates ranging from 19.3% to 69.8%. Furthermore, we demonstrate how aligning models with human judgments on STOP can improve model answer rates on sensitive tasks such as BBQ, StereoSet, and CrowS-Pairs by up to 191%, while maintaining or even improving performance. STOP presents a novel framework for assessing the complex nature of biases in LLMs, which will enable more effective bias mitigation strategies and facilitates the creation of fairer language models.

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Hidden Persuaders: LLMs’ Political Leaning and Their Influence on Voters
Yujin Potter | Shiyang Lai | Junsol Kim | James Evans | Dawn Song

Do LLMs have political leanings and are LLMs able to shift our political views? This paper explores these questions in the context of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Through a voting simulation, we demonstrate 18 open-weight and closed-source LLMs’ political preference for Biden over Trump. We show how Biden-leaning becomes more pronounced in instruction-tuned and reinforced models compared to their base versions by analyzing their responses to political questions related to the two nominees. We further explore the potential impact of LLMs on voter choice by recruiting 935 U.S. registered voters. Participants interacted with LLMs (Claude-3, Llama-3, and GPT-4) over five exchanges. Intriguingly, although LLMs were not asked to persuade users to support Biden, about 20% of Trump supporters reduced their support for Trump after LLM interaction. This result is noteworthy given that many studies on the persuasiveness of political campaigns have shown minimal effects in presidential elections. Many users also expressed a desire for further interaction with LLMs on political subjects. Further research on how LLMs affect users’ political views is required, as their use becomes more widespread.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the necessity of effective unlearning mechanisms to comply with data regulations and ethical AI practices. LLM unlearning aims at removing undesired data influences and associated model capabilities without compromising utility beyond the scope of unlearning. While interest in studying LLM unlearning is growing, the impact of the optimizer choice for LLM unlearning remains unexplored. In this work, we shed light on the significance of optimizer selection in LLM unlearning for the first time, establishing a clear connection between second-order optimization and influence unlearning (a classical approach using influence functions to update the model for data influence removal). This insight propels us to develop a second-order optimization-based LLM unlearning framework, termed Second-Order UnLearning (SOUL), which extends the static, one-shot model update using influence unlearning to a dynamic, iterative unlearning process. Our extensive experiments show that SOUL consistently outperforms conventional first-order methods across various unlearning tasks, models, and metrics, indicating that second-order optimization offers an effective and broadly applicable solution for LLM unlearning.

Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and compile key statistics to draw conclusions. We conduct comprehensive experiments with real NBA basketball data and present SportsGen, a new method to synthesize game narratives. By synthesizing data, we can rigorously evaluate LLMs’ reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. Our findings show that most models, including GPT-4o, often fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns. Open-source models like Llama-3 further suffer from significant score hallucinations. Finally, the effectiveness of reasoning is influenced by narrative complexity, information density, and domain-specific terms, highlighting the challenges in analytical reasoning tasks.

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An Analysis of Multilingual FActScore
Vu Trong Kim | Michael Krumdick | Varshini Reddy | Franck Dernoncourt | Viet Dac Lai

FActScore has gained popularity as a metric to estimate the factuality of long-form texts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) in English. However, there has not been any work in studying the behavior of FActScore in other languages. This paper studies the limitations of each component in the four-component pipeline of FActScore in the multilingual setting. We introduce a new dataset for FActScore on texts generated by strong multilingual LLMs. Our evaluation shows that LLMs exhibit distinct behaviors in both fact extraction and fact scoring tasks. No LLM produces consistent and reliable FActScore across languages of varying levels of resources. We also find that the knowledge source plays an important role in the quality of the estimated FActScore. Using Wikipedia as the knowledge source may hinder the true FActScore of long-form text due to its limited coverage in medium- and low-resource languages. We also incorporate 3 mitigations to our knowledge source that ultimately improve FActScore estimation across all languages.

Proprietary LMs such as GPT-4 are often employed to assess the quality of responses from various LMs. However, concerns including transparency, controllability, and affordability strongly motivate the development of open-source LMs specialized in evaluations. On the other hand, existing open evaluator LMs exhibit critical shortcomings: 1) they issue scores that significantly diverge from those assigned by humans, and 2) they lack the flexibility to perform both direct assessment and pairwise ranking, the two most prevalent forms of assessment. Additionally, they do not possess the ability to evaluate based on custom evaluation criteria, focusing instead on general attributes like helpfulness and harmlessness. To address these issues, we introduce Prometheus 2, a more powerful evaluator LM than its predecessor that closely mirrors human and GPT-4 judgements. Moreover, it is capable of processing both direct assessment and pair-wise ranking formats grouped with a user-defined evaluation criteria. On four direct assessment benchmarks and four pairwise ranking benchmarks, Prometheus 2 scores the highest correlation and agreement with humans and proprietary LM judges among all tested open evaluator LMs. Our models, code, and data are all publicly available.

Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we create Long-form RobustQA (LFRQA), a new dataset comprising human-written long-form answers that integrate short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single, coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. We further propose RAG-QA Arena by directly comparing model-generated answers against LFRQA’s answers using LLMs as evaluators. We show via extensive experiments that RAG-QA Arena and human judgments on answer quality are highly correlated. Moreover, only 41.3% of the most competitive LLM’s answers are preferred to LFRQA’s answers, demonstrating RAG-QA Arena as a challenging evaluation platform for future research.

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PromptReps: Prompting Large Language Models to Generate Dense and Sparse Representations for Zero-Shot Document Retrieval
Shengyao Zhuang | Xueguang Ma | Bevan Koopman | Jimmy Lin | Guido Zuccon

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for zero-shot document ranking is done in one of two ways: (1) prompt-based re-ranking methods, which require no further training but are only feasible for re-ranking a handful of candidate documents due to computational costs; and (2) unsupervised contrastive trained dense retrieval methods, which can retrieve relevant documents from the entire corpus but require a large amount of paired text data for contrastive training.In this paper, we propose PromptReps, which combines the advantages of both categories: no need for training and the ability to retrieve from the whole corpus. Our method only requires prompts to guide an LLM to generate query and document representations for effective document retrieval. Specifically, we prompt the LLMs to represent a given text using a single word, and then use the last token’s hidden states and the corresponding logits associated with the prediction of the next token to construct a hybrid document retrieval system. The retrieval system harnesses both dense text embedding and sparse bag-of-words representations given by the LLM.Our experimental evaluation on the MSMARCO, TREC deep learning and BEIR zero-shot document retrieval datasets illustrates that this simple prompt-based LLM retrieval method can achieve a similar or higher retrieval effectiveness than state-of-the-art LLM embedding methods that are trained with large amounts of unsupervised data, especially when using a larger LLM.

Yoruba—an African language with roughly 47 million speakers—encompasses a continuum with several dialects. Recent efforts to develop NLP technologies for African languages have focused on their standard dialects, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are little to no resources or tools. We take steps towards bridging this gap by introducing a new high-quality parallel text and speech corpus; YORULECT across three domains and four regional yoruba dialects. To develop this corpus, we engaged native speakers, traveling to communities where these dialects are spoken, to collect text and speech data. Using our newly created corpus, we conducted extensive experiments on (text) machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and speech-to-text translation. Our results reveal substantial performance disparities between standard yoruba and the other dialects across all tasks. However, we also show that with dialect-adaptive finetuning, we are able to narrow this gap. We believe our dataset and experimental analysis will contribute greatly to developing NLP tools for Yoruba and its dialects, and potentially for other African languages, by improving our understanding of existing challenges and offering a high-quality dataset for further development. We will release YORULECT dataset and models publicly under an open license.

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ARES: Alternating Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Fine-Tuning for Enhanced Multi-Modal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Through Diverse AI Feedback
Ju-Seung Byun | Jiyun Chun | Jihyung Kil | Andrew Perrault

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) excel at comprehending human instructions and demonstrate remarkable results across a broad spectrum of tasks. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and AI Feedback (RLAIF) further refine LLMs by aligning them with specific preferences. These methods primarily use ranking-based feedback for entire generations. With advanced AI models (Teacher), such as GPT-4 and Claude 3 Opus, we can request various types of detailed feedback that are expensive for humans to provide. We propose a two-stage algorithm ARES that Alternates REinforcement Learning (RL) and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). First, we ask the Teacher to score how much each sentence contributes to solving the problem in a Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This sentence-level feedback allows us to consider individual valuable segments, providing more granular rewards for the RL procedure. Second, we ask the Teacher to correct wrong reasoning after the RL stage. The RL procedure requires substantial hyperparameter tuning and often generates errors such as repetitive words and incomplete sentences. With correction feedback, we stabilize the RL fine-tuned model through SFT. We conduct experiments on the multi-modal datasets ScienceQA and A-OKVQA to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal. The ARES rationale achieves around 70% win rate compared to baseline models judged by GPT-4o. Additionally, we observe that the improved rationale reasoning leads to a 2.5% increase in inference answer accuracy on average for the multi-modal datasets.

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Order of Magnitude Speedups for LLM Membership Inference
Rongting Zhang | Martin Andres Bertran | Aaron Roth

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the promise to revolutionize computing broadly, but their complexity and extensive training data also expose significant privacy vulnerabilities. One of the simplest privacy risks associated with LLMs is their susceptibility to membership inference attacks (MIAs), wherein an adversary aims to determine whether a specific data point was part of the model’s training set. Although this is a known risk, state of the art methodologies for MIAs rely on training multiple computationally costly ‘shadow models’, making risk evaluation prohibitive for large models. Here we adapt a recent line of work which uses quantile regression to mount membership inference attacks; we extend this work by proposing a low-cost MIA that leverages an ensemble of small quantile regression models to determine if a document belongs to the model’s training set or not. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on fine-tuned LLMs of varying families (OPT, Pythia, Llama) and across multiple datasets. Across all scenarios we obtain comparable or improved accuracy compared to state of the art ‘shadow model’ approaches, with as little as 6% of their computation budget. We demonstrate increased effectiveness across multi-epoch trained target models, and architecture miss-specification robustness, that is, we can mount an effective attack against a model using a different tokenizer and architecture, without requiring knowledge on the target model.

Existing text-to-video diffusion models rely solely on text-only encoders for their pretraining. This limitation stems from the absence of large-scale multimodal prompt video datasets, resulting in a lack of visual grounding and restricting their versatility and application in multimodal integration. To address this, we construct a large-scale multimodal prompt dataset by employing retrieval methods to pair in-context examples with the given text prompts and then utilize a two-stage training strategy to enable diverse video generation tasks within a model. In the first stage, we propose a multimodal conditional video generation framework for pretraining on these augmented datasets, establishing a foundational model for grounded video generation. Secondly, we fine-tune the model from the first stage on various video generation tasks, incorporating multimodal instructions. This process further refines the model’s ability to handle diverse inputs and tasks, ensuring seamless integration of multimodal information. After this two-stage training process, VIMI demonstrates multimodal understanding capabilities, producing contextually rich and personalized videos grounded in the provided inputs, as shown in Figure1. Compared to previous subject-driven video generation methods, our generator can synthesize consistent and temporally coherent videos with large motion while retaining the semantic control. Our generator also achieves state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results on UCF101 benchmark.

Hate speech (HS) on social media exacerbates misinformation and baseless prejudices. Evidence-supported counterspeech (CS) is crucial for correcting misinformation and reducing prejudices through facts. Existing methods for generating evidence-supported CS often lack clear guidance with a core claim for organizing evidence and do not adequately address factuality and faithfulness hallucinations in CS within anti-hate contexts. In this paper, to mitigate the aforementioned, we propose F²RL, a Factuality and Faithfulness Reinforcement Learning framework for generating claim-guided and evidence-supported CS. Firstly, we generate counter-claims based on hate speech and design a self-evaluation mechanism to select the most appropriate one. Secondly, we propose a coarse-to-fine evidence retrieval method. This method initially generates broad queries to ensure the diversity of evidence, followed by carefully reranking the retrieved evidence to ensure its relevance to the claim. Finally, we design a reinforcement learning method with a triplet-based factuality reward model and a multi-aspect faithfulness reward model. The method rewards the generator to encourage greater factuality, more accurate refutation of hate speech, consistency with the claim, and better utilization of evidence. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves excellent performance in CS generation, with strong factuality and faithfulness.

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Deciphering Rumors: A Multi-Task Learning Approach with Intent-aware Hierarchical Contrastive Learning
Chang Yang | Peng Zhang | Hui Gao | Jing Zhang

Social networks are rife with noise and misleading information, presenting multifaceted challenges for rumor detection. In this paper, from the perspective of human cognitive subjectivity, we introduce the mining of individual latent intentions and propose a novel multi-task learning framework, the Intent-Aware Rumor Detection Network (IRDNet). IRDNet is designed to discern multi-level rumor semantic features and latent user intentions, addressing the challenges of robustness and key feature mining and alignment that plague existing models. In IRDNet, the multi-level semantic extraction module captures sequential and hierarchical features to generate robust semantic representations. The hierarchical contrastive learning module incorporates two complementary strategies, event-level and intent-level, to establish cognitive anchors that uncover the latent intentions of information disseminators. Event-level contrastive learning employs high-quality data augmentation and adversarial perturbations to enhance model robustness. Intent-level contrastive learning leverages the intent encoder to capture latent intent features and optimize consistency within the same intent while ensuring heterogeneity between different intents to clearly distinguish key features from irrelevant elements. Experimental results demonstrate that IRDNet significantly improves the effectiveness of rumor detection and effectively addresses the challenges present in the field of rumor detection.

Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) are transforming the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing; however, the potential of using visual prompts for emotion recognition in these models remains largely unexplored and untapped. Traditional methods in VLLMs struggle with spatial localization and often discard valuable global context. We propose a novel Set-of-Vision prompting (SoV) approach that enhances zero-shot emotion recognition by using spatial information, such as bounding boxes and facial landmarks, to mark targets precisely. SoV improves accuracy in face count and emotion categorization while preserving the enriched image context. Through comprehensive experimentation and analysis of recent commercial or open-source VLLMs, we evaluate the SoV model’s ability to comprehend facial expressions in natural environments. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating spatial visual prompts into VLLMs for improving emotion recognition performance.

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IDEAW: Robust Neural Audio Watermarking with Invertible Dual-Embedding
Pengcheng Li | Xulong Zhang | Jing Xiao | Jianzong Wang

The audio watermarking technique embeds messages into audio and accurately extracts messages from the watermarked audio. Traditional methods develop algorithms based on expert experience to embed watermarks into the time-domain or transform-domain of signals. With the development of deep neural networks, deep learning-based neural audio watermarking has emerged. Compared to traditional algorithms, neural audio watermarking achieves better robustness by considering various attacks during training. However, current neural watermarking methods suffer from low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. Additionally, the issue of watermark locating, which is extremely important and even more pronounced in neural audio water- marking, has not been adequately studied. In this paper, we design a dual-embedding wa- termarking model for efficient locating. We also consider the impact of the attack layer on the invertible neural network in robustness training, improving the model to enhance both its reasonableness and stability. Experiments show that the proposed model, IDEAW, can withstand various attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods.

In multi-person communications, conflicts often arise. Each individual may have their own perspective, which can differ. Additionally, commonly referenced offensive datasets frequently neglect contextual information and are primarily constructed with a focus on intended offenses. This study suggests that conflicts are pivotal in revealing a broader range of human interactions, including instances of unintended offensive language. This paper proposes a conflict-based data collection method to utilize inter-conflict cues in multi-person communications. By focusing on specific cue posts within conversation threads, our proposed approach effectively identifies relevant instances for analysis. Detailed analyses are provided to showcase the proposed approach efficiently gathers data on subtly offensive content. The experimental results indicate that incorporating elements of conflict into data collection significantly enhances the comprehensiveness and accuracy of detecting offensive language but also enriches our understanding of conflict dynamics in digital communication.

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Outcome-Constrained Large Language Models for Countering Hate Speech
Lingzi Hong | Pengcheng Luo | Eduardo Blanco | Xiaoying Song

Automatic counterspeech generation methods have been developed to assist efforts in combating hate speech. Existing research focuses on generating counterspeech with linguistic attributes such as being polite, informative, and intent-driven. However, the real impact of counterspeech in online environments is seldom considered. This study aims to develop methods for generating counterspeech constrained by conversation outcomes and evaluate their effectiveness. We experiment with large language models (LLMs) to incorporate into the text generation process two desired conversation outcomes: low conversation incivility and non-hateful hater reentry. Specifically, we experiment with instruction prompts, LLM finetuning, and LLM reinforcement learning (RL). Evaluation results show that our methods effectively steer the generation of counterspeech toward the desired outcomes. Our analyses, however, show that there are differences in the quality and style depending on the model.

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Multiple Sources are Better Than One: Incorporating External Knowledge in Low-Resource Glossing
Changbing Yang | Garrett Nicolai | Miikka Silfverberg

In this paper, we address the data scarcity problem in automatic data-driven glossing for low-resource languages by coordinating multiple sources of linguistic expertise. We enhance models by incorporating both token-level and sentence-level translations, utilizing the extensive linguistic capabilities of modern LLMs, and incorporating available dictionary resources. Our enhancements lead to an average absolute improvement of 5%-points in word-level accuracy over the previous state of the art on a typologically diverse dataset spanning six low-resource languages. The improvements are particularly noticeable for the lowest-resourced language Gitksan, where we achieve a 10%-point improvement. Furthermore, in a simulated ultra-low resource setting for the same six languages, training on fewer than 100 glossed sentences, we establish an average 10%-point improvement in word-level accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art system.

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Adaptive Immune-based Sound-Shape Code Substitution for Adversarial Chinese Text Attacks
Ao Wang | Xinghao Yang | Chen Li | Bao-di Liu | Weifeng Liu

Adversarial textual examples reveal the vulnerability of natural language processing (NLP) models. Most existing text attack methods are designed for English text, while the robust implementation of the second popular language, i.e., Chinese with 1 billion users, is greatly underestimated. Although several Chinese attack methods have been presented, they either directly transfer from English attacks or adopt simple greedy search to optimize the attack priority, usually leading to unnatural sentences. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive Immune-based Sound-Shape Code (ISSC) algorithm for adversarial Chinese text attacks. Firstly, we leverage the Sound-Shape code to generate natural substitutions, which comprehensively integrate multiple Chinese features. Secondly, we employ adaptive immune algorithm (IA) to determine the replacement order, which can reduce the duplication of population to improve the search ability. Extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our ISSC in producing high-quality Chinese adversarial texts. Our code and data can be found in https://github.com/nohuma/chinese-attack-issc.

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Bootstrapped Policy Learning for Task-oriented Dialogue through Goal Shaping
Yangyang Zhao | Ben Niu | Mehdi Dastani | Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning shows promise in optimizing dialogue policies, but addressing the challenge of reward sparsity remains crucial. While curriculum learning offers a practical solution by strategically training policies from simple to complex, it hinges on the assumption of a gradual increase in goal difficulty to ensure a smooth knowledge transition across varied complexities. In complex dialogue environments without intermediate goals, achieving seamless knowledge transitions becomes tricky. This paper proposes a novel Bootstrapped Policy Learning (BPL) framework, which adaptively tailors progressively challenging subgoal curriculum for each complex goal through goal shaping, ensuring a smooth knowledge transition. Goal shaping involves goal decomposition and evolution, decomposing complex goals into subgoals with solvable maximum difficulty and progressively increasing difficulty as the policy improves. Moreover, to enhance BPL’s adaptability across various environments, we explore various combinations of goal decomposition and evolution within BPL, and identify two universal curriculum patterns that remain effective across different dialogue environments, independent of specific environmental constraints. By integrating the summarized curriculum patterns, our BPL has exhibited efficacy and versatility across four publicly available datasets with different difficulty levels.

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PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling
Huachuan Qiu | Lizhi Ma | Zhenzhong Lan

As awareness of mental health issues grows, online counseling support services are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Detecting whether users express suicidal ideation in text-based counseling services is crucial for identifying and prioritizing at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific systems to facilitate fine-grained suicide detection and corresponding risk assessment in online counseling poses a significant challenge for automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. In this paper, we propose PsyGUARD, an automated system for detecting suicide ideation and assessing risk in psychological counseling. To achieve this, we first develop a detailed taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation based on foundational theories. We then curate a large-scale, high-quality dataset called PsySUICIDE for suicide detection. To evaluate the capabilities of automated systems in fine-grained suicide detection, we establish a range of baselines. Subsequently, to assist automated services in providing safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment, we propose to build a suite of risk assessment frameworks. Our study not only provides an insightful analysis of the effectiveness of automated risk assessment systems based on fine-grained suicide detection but also highlights their potential to improve mental health services on online counseling platforms. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyGUARD.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. The conventional norm in VLM data construction uses a mixture of specialists in caption and OCR, or stronger VLM APIs and expensive human annotation.In this paper, we present World to Code (W2C), a meticulously curated multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final generation output into a Python code format. The pipeline leverages the VLM itself to extract cross-modal information via different prompts and filter the generated outputs again via a consistency filtering strategy. Experiments have demonstrated the high quality of W2C by improving various existing visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. Further analysis also demonstrates that the new code parsing ability of VLMs presents better cross-modal equivalence than the commonly used detail caption ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/World2Code.

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DVD: Dynamic Contrastive Decoding for Knowledge Amplification in Multi-Document Question Answering
Jing Jin | Houfeng Wang | Hao Zhang | Xiaoguang Li | Zhijiang Guo

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in question-answering (QA) systems but often generate information with hallucinations. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential remedy, yet the uneven retrieval quality and irrelevant contents may distract LLMs.In this work, we address these issues at the generation phase by treating RAG as a multi-document QA task.We propose a novel decoding strategy, Dynamic Contrastive Decoding, which dynamically amplifies knowledge from selected documents during the generation phase. involves constructing inputs batchwise, designing new selection criteria to identify documents worth amplifying, and applying contrastive decoding with a specialized weight calculation to adjust the final logits used for sampling answer tokens. Zero-shot experimental results on ALCE-ASQA, NQ, TQA and PopQA benchmarks show that our method outperforms other decoding strategies. Additionally, we conduct experiments to validate the effectiveness of our selection criteria, weight calculation, and general multi-document scenarios. Our method requires no training and can be integrated with other methods to improve the RAG performance. Our codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/JulieJin-km/Dynamic_Contrastive_Decoding.

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How Do Humans Write Code? Large Models Do It the Same Way Too
Long Li | Xuzheng He | Haozhe Wang | Linlin Wang | Liang He

Program-of-Thought (PoT) replaces natural language-based Chain-of-Thought (CoT) as the most popular method in Large Language Models (LLMs) mathematical reasoning tasks by utilizing external tool calls to circumvent computational errors. However, our evaluation of the GPT-4 and Llama series reveals that using PoT introduces more reasoning errors, such as incorrect formulas or flawed logic, compared to CoT. To address this issue, we propose Human-Think Language (HTL), which leverages a suite of strategies that help integrate PoT and CoT, encompassing: (1) a new generation paradigm that uses full CoT reasoning to control code generation. (2) Focus Attention, that directs model attention to the CoT reasoning during PoT to generate more logical code. (3) reinforcement learning that utilizes the accuracy of both CoT and PoT responses as rewards to prevent repetitive reasoning steps in LLMs when solving difficult math problems. Our method achieves an average improvement of 6.5% on the Llama-Base model and 4.3% on the Mistral-Base model across 8 mathematical calculation datasets. It also shows significant effectiveness on five out-of-domain datasets by controlling the model’s information flow, exhibiting strong transferability. Additionally, HTL shows the most significant improvement in non-mathematical natural language inference task, contributing to a unified reasoning task framework.

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Retrospex: Language Agent Meets Offline Reinforcement Learning Critic
Yufei Xiang | Yiqun Shen | Yeqin Zhang | Nguyen Cam-Tu

Large language models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge and commonsense reasoning capabilities, making them valuable for creating powerful agents. However, existing LLM agent frameworks have not fully utilized past experiences for improvement. This work introduces a new LLM-based agent framework called Retrospex, which addresses this challenge by analyzing past experiences in depth. Unlike previous approaches, Retrospex does not directly integrate experiences into the LLM’s context. Instead, it combines the LLM’s action likelihood with action values estimated by a Reinforcement Learning (RL) Critic, which is trained on past experiences through an offline “retrospection” process. Additionally, Retrospex employs a dynamic action rescoring mechanism that increases the importance of experience-based values for tasks that require more interaction with the environment. We evaluate Retrospex in ScienceWorld, ALFWorld and Webshop environments, demonstrating its advantages over strong baselines.

Numerous recent works target to extend effective context length for language models and various methods, tasks and benchmarks exist to measure model’s effective memory length. However, through thorough investigations, we find limitations for currently existing evaluations on model’s memory. We provide an extensive survey for limitations in this work and propose a new method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. We show that forgetting curve has the advantage of being robust to the tested corpus and the experimental settings, of not relying on prompt and can be applied to any model size. We apply our forgetting curve to a large variety of models involving both transformer and RNN/SSM based architectures. Our measurement provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of transformer extension techniques while raises questions for the effective length of RNN/SSM based models. We also examine the difference between our measurement and existing benchmarks as well as popular metrics for various models.

Despite the significant progress of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, they often produce factual errors due to their limited internal knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which enhances LLMs with external knowledge sources, offers a promising solution. However, these methods can be misled by irrelevant paragraphs in retrieved documents. Due to the inherent uncertainty in LLM generation, inputting the entire document may introduce off-topic information, causing the model to deviate from the central topic and affecting the relevance of the generated content. To address these issues, we propose the Retrieve-Plan-Generation (RPG) framework. RPG generates plan tokens to guide subsequent generation in the plan stage. In the answer stage, the model selects relevant fine-grained paragraphs based on the plan and uses them for further answer generation. This plan-answer process is repeated iteratively until completion, enhancing generation relevance by focusing on specific topics. To implement this framework efficiently, we utilize a simple but effective multi-task prompt-tuning method, enabling the existing LLMs to handle both planning and answering. We comprehensively compare RPG with baselines across 5 knowledge-intensive generation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

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CoEvol: Constructing Better Responses for Instruction Finetuning through Multi-Agent Cooperation
Renhao Li | Minghuan Tan | Derek F. Wong | Min Yang

In recent years, instruction fine-tuning (IFT) on large language models (LLMs) has garnered considerable attention to enhance model performance on unseen tasks. Attempts have been made on automatic construction and effective selection for IFT data. However, we posit that previous methods have not fully harnessed the potential of LLMs for enhancing data quality. The responses within IFT data could be further enhanced by leveraging the capabilities of LLMs themselves.In this paper, we propose CoEvol, an LLM-based multi-agent cooperation framework for the improvement of responses for instructions. To effectively refine the responses, we develop an iterative framework following a _debate-advise-edit-judge_ paradigm. A two-stage multi-agent debate strategy is further devised to ensure the diversity and reliability of editing suggestions within the framework. Empirically, models equipped with CoEvol outperform competitive baselines evaluated by MT-Bench and AlpacaEval, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing instruction-following capabilities for LLMs.

This study introduces a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models (LLMs) possess genuine reasoning abilities or primarily depend on token bias. We go beyond evaluating LLMs on accuracy; rather, we aim to investigate their token bias in solving logical reasoning tasks. Specifically, we develop carefully controlled synthetic datasets, featuring conjunction fallacy and syllogistic problems. Our framework outlines a list of hypotheses where token biases are readily identifiable, with all null hypotheses assuming genuine reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The findings in this study suggest, with statistical guarantee, that most LLMs still struggle with logical reasoning. While they may perform well on classic problems, their success largely depends on recognizing superficial patterns with strong token bias, thereby raising concerns about their actual reasoning and generalization abilities.

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Bayesian Calibration of Win Rate Estimation with LLM Evaluators
Yicheng Gao | Gonghan Xu | Zhe Wang | Arman Cohan

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show the potential of using LLMs as evaluators for assessing the quality of text generations from LLMs. However, applying LLM evaluators naively to compare different systems can lead to unreliable results due to the inaccuracy and intrinsic bias of LLM evaluators. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose two calibration methods, Bayesian Win-Rate Sampling (BWRS) and Bayesian Dawid-Skene, both of which leverage Bayesian inference to more accurately infer the true win rate of generative language models. We empirically validate our methods on six datasets covering story generation, summarization, and instruction following tasks. We show that both our methods are effective in improving the accuracy of win rate estimation using LLMs as evaluators, offering a promising direction for reliable automatic text quality evaluation.

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MuMath-Code: Combining Tool-Use Large Language Models with Multi-perspective Data Augmentation for Mathematical Reasoning
Shuo Yin | Weihao You | Zhilong Ji | Guoqiang Zhong | Jinfeng Bai

The tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) that integrate with external Python interpreters have significantly enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities for open-source LLMs, while tool-free methods chose another track: augmenting math reasoning data. However, a great method to integrate the above two research paths and combine their advantages remains to be explored. In this work, we firstly include new math questions via **mu**lti-perspective data augmenting methods and then synthesize **code**-nested solutions to them. The open LLMs (e.g., Llama-2) are finetuned on the augmented dataset to get the resulting models, **MuMath-Code** (𝜇-Math-Code). During the inference phase, our MuMath-Code generates code and interacts with the external python interpreter to get the execution results. Therefore, MuMath-Code leverages the advantages of both the external tool and data augmentation. To fully leverage the advantages of our augmented data, we propose a two-stage training strategy: In Stage-1, we finetune Llama-2 on pure CoT data to get an intermediate model, which then is trained on the code-nested data in Stage-2 to get the resulting MuMath-Code.Our MuMath-Code-7B achieves 83.8% on GSM8K and 52.4% on MATH, while MuMath-Code-70B model achieves new state-of-the-art performance among open methods—achieving 90.7% on GSM8K and 55.1% on MATH. Extensive experiments validate the combination of tool use and data augmentation, as well as our two-stage training strategy.We release the proposed dataset along with the associated code for public use: https://github.com/youweihao-tal/MuMath-Code.

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Seeing the Forest through the Trees: Data Leakage from Partial Transformer Gradients
Weijun Li | Qiongkai Xu | Mark Dras

Recent studies have shown that distributed machine learning is vulnerable to gradient inversion attacks, where private training data can be reconstructed by analyzing the gradients of the models shared in training. Previous attacks established that such reconstructions are possible using gradients from all parameters in the entire models. However, we hypothesize that most of the involved modules, or even their sub-modules, are at risk of training data leakage, and we validate such vulnerabilities in various intermediate layers of language models. Our extensive experiments reveal that gradients from a single Transformer layer, or even a single linear component with 0.54% parameters, are susceptible to training data leakage. Additionally, we show that applying differential privacy on gradients during training offers limited protection against the novel vulnerability of data disclosure.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has significantly improved performance in various vision-language tasks by expanding the dataset with image-text pairs obtained from the web. This paper further explores CLIP from the perspectives of data and model architecture. To mitigate the impact of the noise data and enhance the quality of large-scale image-text data crawled from the internet, we introduce a diverse description generation framework that can leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags. Additionally, we propose RWKV-CLIP, the first RWKV-driven vision-language representation learning model that combines the effective parallel training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. Extensive experiments across different model scales and pre-training datasets demonstrate that RWKV-CLIP is a robust vision-language representation learner and it achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including linear probing, zero-shot classification, and zero-shot image-text retrieval. To facilitate future research, the code and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RWKV-CLIP.

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KidLM: Advancing Language Models for Children – Early Insights and Future Directions
Mir Tafseer Nayeem | Davood Rafiei

Recent studies highlight the potential of large language models in creating educational tools for children, yet significant challenges remain in maintaining key child-specific properties such as linguistic nuances, cognitive needs, and safety standards. In this paper, we explore foundational steps toward the development of child-specific language models, emphasizing the necessity of high-quality pre-training data. We introduce a novel user-centric data collection pipeline that involves gathering and validating a corpus specifically written for and sometimes by children. Additionally, we propose a new training objective, Stratified Masking, which dynamically adjusts masking probabilities based on our domain-specific child language data, enabling models to prioritize vocabulary and concepts more suitable for children. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model excels in understanding lower grade-level text, maintains safety by avoiding stereotypes, and captures children’s unique preferences. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for future research and development in child-specific language modeling.

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Using Language Models to Disambiguate Lexical Choices in Translation
Josh Barua | Sanjay Subramanian | Kayo Yin | Alane Suhr

In translation, a concept represented by a single word in a source language can have multiple variations in a target language. The task of lexical selection requires using context to identify which variation is most appropriate for a source text. We work with native speakers of nine languages to create DTAiLS, a dataset of 1,377 sentence pairs that exhibit cross-lingual concept variation when translating from English. We evaluate recent LLMs and neural machine translation systems on DTAiLS, with the best-performing model, GPT-4, achieving from 67 to 85% accuracy across languages. Finally, we use language models to generate English rules describing target-language concept variations. Providing weaker models with high-quality lexical rules improves accuracy substantially, in some cases reaching or outperforming GPT-4.

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How Does the Disclosure of AI Assistance Affect the Perceptions of Writing?
Zhuoyan Li | Chen Liang | Jing Peng | Ming Yin

Recent advances in generative AI technologies like large language models have boosted the incorporation of AI assistance in writing workflows, leading to the rise of a new paradigm of human-AI co-creation in writing. To understand how people perceive writings that are produced under this paradigm, in this paper, we conduct an experimental study to understand whether and how the disclosure of the level and type of AI assistance in the writing process would affect people’s perceptions of the writing on various aspects, including their evaluation on the quality of the writing, and their ranking of different writings. Our results suggest that disclosing the AI assistance in the writing process, especially if AI has provided assistance in generating new content, decreases the average quality ratings for both argumentative essays and creative stories. This decrease in the average quality ratings often comes with an increased level of variations in different individuals’ quality evaluations of the same writing. Indeed, factors such as an individual’s writing confidence and familiarity with AI writing assistants are shown to moderate the impact of AI assistance disclosure on their writing quality evaluations. We also find that disclosing the use of AI assistance may significantly reduce the proportion of writings produced with AI’s content generation assistance among the top-ranked writings.

Electronic healthcare records are vital for patient safety as they document conditions, plans, and procedures in both free text and medical codes. Language models have significantly enhanced the processing of such records, streamlining workflows and reducing manual data entry, thereby saving healthcare providers significant resources. However, the black-box nature of these models often leaves healthcare professionals hesitant to trust them. State-of-the-art explainability methods increase model transparency but rely on human-annotated evidence spans, which are costly. In this study, we propose an approach to produce plausible and faithful explanations without needing such annotations. We demonstrate on the automated medical coding task that adversarial robustness training improves explanation plausibility and introduce AttInGrad, a new explanation method superior to previous ones. By combining both contributions in a fully unsupervised setup, we produce explanations of comparable quality, or better, to that of a supervised approach. We release our code and model weights.

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Crafting Personalized Agents through Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Editable Memory Graphs
Zheng Wang | Zhongyang Li | Zeren Jiang | Dandan Tu | Wei Shi

In the age of mobile internet, user data, often referred to as memories, is continuously generated on personal devices. Effectively managing and utilizing this data to deliver services to users is a compelling research topic. In this paper, we introduce a novel task of crafting personalized agents powered by large language models (LLMs), which utilize a user’s smartphone memories to enhance downstream applications with advanced LLM capabilities. To achieve this goal, we introduce EMG-RAG, a solution that combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques with an Editable Memory Graph (EMG). This approach is further optimized using Reinforcement Learning to address three distinct challenges: data collection, editability, and selectability. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of EMG-RAG, achieving an improvement of approximately 10% over the best existing approach. Additionally, the personalized agents have been transferred into a real smartphone AI assistant, which leads to enhanced usability.

The dynamic nature of real-world information necessitates knowledge editing (KE) in large language models (LLMs). The edited knowledge should propagate and facilitate the deduction of new information based on existing model knowledge. We term the existing related knowledge in LLM serving as the origination of knowledge propagation as ”deduction anchors”. However, current KE approaches, which only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple. We both theoretically and empirically observe that this simplified setting often leads to uncertainty when determining the deduction anchors, causing low confidence in their answers. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions. This task manifests not only a closer simulation of real-world editing scenarios but also a more logically sound setting, implicitly defining the deduction anchor and enabling LLMs to propagate knowledge confidently. We curate a new benchmark dataset Evedit derived from the CounterFact dataset and validate its superiority in improving model confidence. Moreover, while we observe that the event-based setting is significantly challenging for existing approaches, we propose a novel approach Self-Edit that showcases stronger performance, achieving 55.6% consistency improvement while maintaining the naturalness of generation.

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Modeling Nonnative Sentence Processing with L2 Language Models
Tatsuya Aoyama | Nathan Schneider

We study LMs pretrained sequentially on two languages (“L2LMs”) for modeling nonnative sentence processing. In particular, we pretrain GPT2 on 6 different first languages (L1s), followed by English as the second language (L2). We examine the effect of the choice of pretraining L1 on the model’s ability to predict human reading times, evaluating on English readers from a range of L1 backgrounds. Experimental results show that, while all of the LMs’ word surprisals improve prediction of L2 reading times, especially for human L1s distant from English, there is no reliable effect of the choice of L2LM’s L1. We also evaluate the learning trajectory of a monolingual English LM: for predicting L2 as opposed to L1 reading, it peaks much earlier and immediately falls off, possibly mirroring the difference in proficiency between the native and nonnative populations. Lastly, we provide examples of L2LMs’ surprisals, which could potentially generate hypotheses about human L2 reading.

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From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis
Chuanqi Cheng | Jian Guan | Wei Wu | Rui Yan

We explore multi-step reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs). The problem is challenging, as reasoning data consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are barely available. To overcome the challenge, we first introduce a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm, which interleaves steps of decomposing a question into sub-questions and invoking external tools for resolving sub-questions. Based on the paradigm, we further propose a novel data synthesis approach that can automatically create questions and multi-step reasoning paths for an image in a bottom-up manner. Our approach divides the complex synthesis task into a few simple sub-tasks, and (almost entirely) relies on open-sourced models to accomplish the sub-tasks. Therefore, the entire synthesis process is reproducible and cost-efficient, and the synthesized data is quality guaranteed. With the approach, we construct 50k visual reasoning examples. Then, we develop a visual reasoner through supervised fine-tuning, which is capable of generally enhancing the reasoning abilities of a wide range of existing VLMs in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments indicate that the visual reasoner can consistently and significantly improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks.

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Quality Matters: Evaluating Synthetic Data for Tool-Using LLMs
Shadi Iskander | Sofia Tolmach | Ori Shapira | Nachshon Cohen | Zohar Karnin

Training large language models (LLMs) for external tool usage is a rapidly expanding field, with recent research focusing on generating synthetic data to address the shortage of available data. However, the absence of systematic data quality checks poses complications for properly training and testing models. To that end, we propose two approaches for assessing the reliability of data for training LLMs to use external tools. The first approach uses intuitive, human-defined correctness criteria. The second approach uses a model-driven assessment with in-context evaluation. We conduct a thorough evaluation of data quality on two popular benchmarks, followed by an extrinsic evaluation that showcases the impact of data quality on model performance. Our results demonstrate that models trained on high-quality data outperform those trained on unvalidated data, even when trained with a smaller quantity of data. These findings empirically support the significance of assessing and ensuring the reliability of training data for tool-using LLMs.

Audio deepfake detection (ADD) is essential for preventing the misuse of synthetic voices that may infringe on personal rights and privacy. Recent zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) models pose higher risks as they can clone voices with a single utterance. However, the existing ADD datasets are outdated, leading to suboptimal generalization of detection models. In this paper, we construct a new cross-domain ADD dataset comprising over 300 hours of speech data that is generated by five advanced zero-shot TTS models. To simulate real-world scenarios, we employ diverse attack methods and audio prompts from different datasets. Experiments show that, through novel attack-augmented training, the Wav2Vec2-large and Whisper-medium models achieve equal error rates of 4.1% and 6.5% respectively. Additionally, we demonstrate our models’ outstanding few-shot ADD ability by fine-tuning with just one minute of target-domain data. Nonetheless, neural codec compressors greatly affect the detection accuracy, necessitating further research. Our dataset is publicly available (https://github.com/leolya/CD-ADD).

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC), which aims to ground a local visual region via natural language, is a task that heavily relies on multimodal alignment. Most existing methods utilize powerful pre-trained models to transfer visual/linguistic knowledge by full fine-tuning. However, full fine-tuning the entire backbone not only breaks the rich prior knowledge embedded in the pre-training, but also incurs significant computational costs. Motivated by the recent emergence of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) methods, we aim to solve the REC task in an effective and efficient manner. Directly applying these PETL methods to the REC task is inappropriate, as they lack the specific-domain abilities for precise local visual perception and visual-language alignment. Therefore, we propose a novel framework of Multimodal Prior-guided Parameter Efficient Tuning, namely MaPPER. Specifically, MaPPER comprises Dynamic Prior Adapters guided by a aligned prior, and Local Convolution Adapters to extract precise local semantics for better visual perception. Moreover, the Prior-Guided Text module is proposed to further utilize the prior for facilitating the cross-modal alignment. Experimental results on three widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that MaPPER achieves the best accuracy compared to the full fine-tuning and other PETL methods with only 1.41% tunable backbone parameters.

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Hierarchical Deconstruction of LLM Reasoning: A Graph-Based Framework for Analyzing Knowledge Utilization
Miyoung Ko | Sue Hyun Park | Joonsuk Park | Minjoon Seo

Despite the advances in large language models (LLMs), how they use their knowledge for reasoning is not yet well understood.In this study, we propose a method that deconstructs complex real-world questions into a graph, representing each question as a node with predecessors of background knowledge needed to solve the question. We develop the DepthQA dataset, deconstructing questions into three depths: (i) recalling conceptual knowledge, (ii) applying procedural knowledge, and (iii) analyzing strategic knowledge. Based on a hierarchical graph, we quantify forward discrepancy, a discrepancy in LLM performance on simpler sub-problems versus complex questions. We also measure backward discrepancy where LLMs answer complex questions but struggle with simpler ones. Our analysis shows that smaller models exhibit more discrepancies than larger models. Distinct patterns of discrepancies are observed across model capacity and possibility of training data memorization. Additionally, guiding models from simpler to complex questions through multi-turn interactions improves performance across model sizes, highlighting the importance of structured intermediate steps in knowledge reasoning. This work enhances our understanding of LLM reasoning and suggests ways to improve their problem-solving abilities.

Large Language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable abilities in understanding complex texts, offering a promising path towards human-like translation performance. However, this study reveals the misalignment between the translation-specific understanding and the general understanding inside LLMs. This understanding misalignment leads to LLMs mistakenly or literally translating some complicated concepts that they accurately comprehend in the general scenarios (e.g., QA). To align the translation-specific understanding to the general one, we propose a novel translation process, DUAT (Difficult words Understanding Aligned Translation), explicitly incorporating the general understanding on the complicated content incurring inconsistent understandings to guide the translation. Specifically, DUAT performs cross-lingual interpretation for the difficult-to-translate words and enhances the translation with the generated interpretations. Furthermore, we reframe the external tools to improve DUAT in detecting difficult words and generating helpful interpretations. We conduct experiments on the self-constructed benchmark Challenge-WMT, consisting of samples that are prone to mistranslation. Human evaluation results on high-resource and low-resource language pairs indicate that DUAT significantly facilitates the understanding alignment, which improves the translation quality (up to +3.85 COMET) and reduces translation literalness by -25% ∼ -51%.

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is a key task in natural language processing and lexical semantics. Pre-trained language models with contextualized word embeddings have significantly improved performance in regular WSD tasks. However, these models still struggle with recognizing semantic boundaries and often misclassify homonyms in adversarial context. Therefore, we propose FOOL: FOur-fold Obscure Lexical, a new coarse-grained WSD dataset, which includes four different test sets designed to assess the robustness of language models in WSD tasks. Two sets feature typical WSD scenarios, while the other two include sentences with opposing contexts to challenge the models further.We tested two types of models on the proposed dataset: models with encoders, such as the BERT and T5 series of varying sizes by probing their embeddings, and state-of-the-art large decoder models like GPT-4o and the LlaMA3 family, using zero shot prompting. Across different state-of-the-art language models, we observed a decrease in performance in the latter two sets compared to the first two, with some models being affected more than others. We show interesting findings where small models like T5-large and BERT-large performed better than GPT-4o on Set 3 of the dataset. This indicates that, despite excelling in regular WSD tasks, these models still struggle to correctly disambiguate homonyms in artificial (Set 3) or realistic adversarial contexts (Set 4).

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Concept-skill Transferability-based Data Selection for Large Vision-Language Models
Jaewoo Lee | Boyang Li | Sung Ju Hwang

Instruction tuning, or supervised finetuning on extensive task-specific data, is necessary for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to generalize well across a broad range of vision-language (VL) tasks. However, training on large VL datasets can become prohibitively expensive. In this work, we introduce COINCIDE, an effective and scalable data selection technique that uses a small model as a reference model to select visual instruction tuning data for efficient finetuning of a target LVLM, focusing on diversity and transferability. Specifically, we cluster the training data using internal activations from a small model, which identifies VL concept-skill compositions needed by a target LVLM. We then sample data from these diverse clusters by considering their density and transferability, or the ability to transfer well to other concept-skill compositions. This approach ensures the diversity of these compositions, which is vital for LVLM generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that COINCIDE achieves superior performance and data selection efficiency against 8 strong baselines on two distinct datasets: LLaVA-1.5 and Vision-Flan. Using only 20% of the LLaVA-1.5 dataset, COINCIDE achieves performance comparable to the LVLM finetuned on the whole dataset, with 70% reduction of the wall-clock running time. On the Vision-Flan dataset, our method achieves superior results with only 16.7% of the training data.

Claim: This work is not advocating the use of LLMs for paper (meta-)reviewing. Instead, wepresent a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. Two research goals: i) Enable better recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities; ii) Increase community awareness that LLMs, and AI in general, are currently inadequate for performing tasks that require a high level of expertise and nuanced judgment.This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload?This study focuses on the topic of LLMs as NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLMs in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with “deficiency” labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) “LLMs as Reviewers”, how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) “LLMs as Metareviewers”, how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

Commercially available models dominate academic leaderboards. While impressive, this has concentrated research on creating and adapting general-purpose models to improve NLP leaderboard standings for large language models. However, leaderboards collect many individual tasks and general-purpose models often underperform in specialized domains; domain-specific or adapted models yield superior results. This focus on large general-purpose models excludes many academics and draws attention away from areas where they can make important contributions. We advocate for a renewed focus on developing and evaluating domain- and task-specific models, and highlight the unique role of academics in this endeavor.

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Beyond Reference: Evaluating High Quality Translations Better than Human References
Keonwoong Noh | Seokjin Oh | Woohwan Jung

In Machine Translation (MT) evaluations, the conventional approach is to compare a translated sentence against its human-created reference sentence. MT metrics provide an absolute score (e.g., from 0 to 1) to a candidate sentence based on the similarity with the reference sentence. Thus, existing MT metrics give the maximum score to the reference sentence. However, this approach overlooks the potential for a candidate sentence to exceed the reference sentence in terms of quality. In particular, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted this issue, as LLM-generated sentences often exceed the quality of human-written sentences. To address the problem, we introduce the Residual score Metric (ResuMe), which evaluates the relative quality between reference and candidate sentences. ResuMe assigns a positive score to candidate sentences that outperform their reference sentences, and a negative score when they fall short. By adding the residual scores from ResuMe to the absolute scores from MT metrics, it can be possible to allocate higher scores to candidate sentences than what reference sentences are received from MT metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that ResuMe enhances the alignments between MT metrics and human judgments both at the segment-level and the system-level.

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Unveiling the Lexical Sensitivity of LLMs: Combinatorial Optimization for Prompt Enhancement
Pengwei Zhan | Zhen Xu | Qian Tan | Jie Song | Ru Xie

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional instruct-following ability to complete various downstream tasks. Although this impressive ability makes LLMs flexible task solvers, their performance in solving tasks also heavily relies on instructions. In this paper, we reveal that LLMs are over-sensitive to lexical variations in task instructions, even when the variations are imperceptible to humans. By providing models with neighborhood instructions, which are closely situated in the latent representation space and differ by only one semantically similar word, the performance on downstream tasks can be vastly different. Following this property, we propose a black-box Combinatorial Optimization framework for Prompt Lexical Enhancement (COPLE). COPLE performs iterative lexical optimization according to the feedback from a batch of proxy tasks, using a search strategy related to word influence. Experiments show that even widely-used human-crafted prompts for current benchmarks suffer from the lexical sensitivity of models, and COPLE recovers the declined model ability in both instruct-following and solving downstream tasks.

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, through a collaborative movement, we introduce SEACrowd, a comprehensive resource center that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in Southeast Asia.

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Induct-Learn: Short Phrase Prompting with Instruction Induction
Po-Chun Chen | Sheng-Lun Wei | Hen-Hsen Huang | Hsin-Hsi Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capability in “instruction induction,” generating instructions from demonstrations (input-output pairs). However, existing methods often rely on large datasets or numerous examples, which is impractical and costly in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose a low-cost, task-level framework called Induct-Learn. It induces pseudo instructions from a few demonstrations and a short phrase, adding a CoT process into existing demonstrations. When encountering new problems, the learned pseudo instructions and demonstrations with the pseudo CoT process can be combined into a prompt to guide the LLM’s problem-solving process. We validate our approach on the BBH-Induct and Evals-Induct datasets, and the results show that the Induct-Learn framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also exhibit cross-model adaptability and achieve superior performance at a lower cost compared to existing methods.

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Multi-Granularity History and Entity Similarity Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Shi Mingcong | Chunjiang Zhu | Detian Zhang | Shiting Wen | Li Qing

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LUQ: Long-text Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs
Caiqi Zhang | Fangyu Liu | Marco Basaldella | Nigel Collier

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in a variety of NLP tasks. However, LLMs are also prone to generate nonfactual content. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is pivotal in enhancing our understanding of a model’s confidence on its generation, thereby aiding in the mitigation of nonfactual outputs. Existing research on UQ predominantly targets short text generation, typically yielding brief, word-limited responses. However, real-world applications frequently necessitate much longer responses. Our study first highlights the limitations of current UQ methods in handling long text generation. We then introduce Luq and its two variations, a series of novel sampling-based UQ approaches specifically designed for long text. Our findings reveal that Luq outperforms existing baseline methods in correlating with the model’s factuality scores (negative coefficient of -0.85 observed for Gemini Pro). To further improve the factuality of LLM responses, we propose Luq-Ensemble, a method that ensembles responses from multiple models and selects the response with the lowest uncertainty. The ensembling method greatly improves the response factuality upon the best standalone LLM.

As the scale of training corpora for large language models (LLMs) grows, model developers become increasingly reluctant to disclose details on their data. This lack of transparency poses challenges to scientific evaluation and ethical deployment. Recently, pretraining data detection approaches, which infer whether a given text was part of an LLM’s training data through black-box access, have been explored. The Min-K% Prob method, which has achieved state-of-the-art results, assumes that a non-training example tends to contain a few outlier words with low token probabilities. However, the effectiveness may be limited as it tends to misclassify non-training texts that contain many common words with high probabilities predicted by LLMs. To address this issue, we introduce a divergence-based calibration method, inspired by the divergence-from-randomness concept, to calibrate token probabilities for pretraining data detection. We compute the cross-entropy (i.e., the divergence) between the token probability distribution and the token frequency distribution to derive a detection score.We have developed a Chinese-language benchmark, PatentMIA, to assess the performance of detection approaches for LLMs on Chinese text. Experimental results on English-language benchmarks and PatentMIA demonstrate that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods. Our code and PatentMIA benchmark are available at https://github.com/zhang-wei-chao/DC-PDD.

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Scaling Synthetic Logical Reasoning Datasets with Context-Sensitive Declarative Grammars
Damien Sileo

Logical reasoning remains a challenge for natural language processing, but it can be improved by training language models to mimic theorem provers on procedurally generated problems. Previous work used domain-specific proof generation algorithms, which biases reasoning toward specific proof traces and limits auditability and extensibility. We present a simpler and more general declarative framework with flexible context-sensitive rules binding multiple languages (specifically, simplified English and the TPTP theorem-proving language). We construct first-order logic problems by selecting up to 32 premises and one hypothesis. We demonstrate that using semantic constraints during generation and careful English verbalization of predicates enhances logical reasoning without hurting natural English tasks. Using relatively small DeBERTa-v3 models, we achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the FOLIO human-authored logic dataset, surpassing GPT-4 in accuracy with or without an external solver by 12%.

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Improving Spoken Language Modeling with Phoneme Classification: A Simple Fine-tuning Approach
Maxime Poli | Emmanuel Chemla | Emmanuel Dupoux

Recent progress in Spoken Language Modeling has shown that learning language directly from speech is feasible. Generating speech through a pipeline that operates at the text level typically loses nuances, intonations, and non-verbal vocalizations. Modeling directly from speech opens up the path to more natural and expressive systems. On the other hand, speech-only systems require up to three orders of magnitude more data to catch up to their text-based counterparts in terms of their semantic abilities. We show that fine-tuning speech representation models on phoneme classification leads to more context-invariant representations, and language models trained on these units achieve comparable lexical comprehension to ones trained on hundred times more data.

Private data, being larger and quality-higher than public data, can greatly improve large language models (LLM). However, due to privacy concerns, this data is often dispersed in multiple silos, making its secure utilization for LLM training a challenge. Federated learning (FL) is an ideal solution for training models with distributed private data, but traditional frameworks like FedAvg are unsuitable for LLM due to their high computational demands on clients. An alternative, split learning, offloads most training parameters to the server while training embedding and output layers locally, making it more suitable for LLM. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges in security and efficiency. Firstly, the gradients of embeddings are prone to attacks, leading to potential reverse engineering of private data. Furthermore, the server’s limitation of handling only one client’s training request at a time hinders parallel training, severely impacting training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Federated Learning framework for LLM, named FL-GLM, which prevents data leakage caused by both server-side and peer-client attacks while improving training efficiency. Specifically, we first place the input block and output block on local client to prevent embedding gradient attacks from server. Secondly, we employ key-encryption during client-server communication to prevent reverse engineering attacks from peer-clients. Lastly, we employ optimization methods like client-batching or server-hierarchical, adopting different acceleration methods based on the actual computational capabilities of the server. Experimental results on NLU and generation tasks demonstrate that FL-GLM achieves comparable metrics to centralized chatGLM model, validating the effectiveness of our federated learning framework.

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Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge
Jiahuan Li | Yiqing Cao | Shujian Huang | Jiajun Chen

Having been trained on massive pretraining data, large language models have shown excellent performance on many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, pretraining data tends to contain misleading and even conflicting information, and it is intriguing to understand how LLMs handle these noisy data during training. In this study, we systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. We find that pretrained LLMs establish learning preferences similar to humans, i.e., preferences towards formal texts and texts with fewer spelling errors, resulting in faster learning and more favorable treatment of knowledge in data with such features when facing conflicts. This finding is generalizable across models and languages and is more evident in larger models. An in-depth analysis reveals that LLMs tend to trust data with features that signify consistency with the majority of data, and it is possible to instill new preferences and erase old ones by manipulating the degree of consistency with the majority data.

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How Does the Textual Information Affect the Retrieval of Multimodal In-Context Learning?
Yang Luo | Zangwei Zheng | Zirui Zhu | Yang You

The increase in parameter size of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces significant capabilities, particularly multimodal in-context learning, where MLLMs enhance task performance without updating pre-trained parameters. However, this effectiveness hinges on the appropriate selection of in-context examples, a process currently biased towards visual data, overlooking textual information. More importantly, the area of supervised retrievers for retrieval of multimodal in-context learning, crucial for optimal in-context example selection, continues to be investigated. Our study provides an in-depth evaluation of the impact of textual information on the unsupervised selection of in-context examples in multimodal contexts, uncovering a notable sensitivity of retriever performance to the employed modalities. Based on the above finding, we introduce a novel supervised MLLM prompt retriever MSIER that leverages a trained retriever based on MLLM’s confidence to select examples, which enhances multimodal in-context learning efficiency. This approach is validated through extensive testing across three different tasks, demonstrating the method’s effectiveness. Additionally, we investigate the influence of modalities on our supervised retrieval method’s training and explore the transferability of the supervised prompt retriever. This exploration paves the way for future advancements, highlighting the potential for refined in-context learning in MLLMs through the strategic use of multimodal data. The public code is available at https://github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/Multimodal-ICL-Retriever.

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How Far Can We Extract Diverse Perspectives from Large Language Models?
Shirley Anugrah Hayati | Minhwa Lee | Dheeraj Rajagopal | Dongyeop Kang

Collecting diverse human opinions is costly and challenging. This leads to a recent trend in exploiting large language models (LLMs) for generating diverse data for potential scalable and efficient solutions. However, the extent to which LLMs can generate diverse perspectives on subjective topics is still unclear. In this study, we explore LLMs’ capacity of generating diverse perspectives and rationales on subjective topics such as social norms and argumentative texts. We introduce the problem of extracting maximum diversity from LLMs. Motivated by how humans form opinions based on values, we propose a criteria-based prompting technique to ground diverse opinions. To see how far we can extract diverse perspectives from LLMs, or called diversity coverage, we employ a step-by-step recall prompting to generate more outputs from the model iteratively. Our methods, applied to various tasks, show that LLMs can indeed produce diverse opinions according to the degree of task subjectivity. We also find that LLMs performance of extracting maximum diversity is on par with human.

Answering reasoning-based complex questions over text and hybrid sources, including tables, is a challenging task. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled in-context learning (ICL), allowing LLMs to acquire proficiency in a specific task using only a few demonstration samples (exemplars). A critical challenge in ICL is the selection of optimal exemplars, which can be either task-specific (static) or test-example-specific (dynamic). Static exemplars provide faster inference times and increased robustness across a distribution of test examples. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for static exemplar subset selection for complex reasoning tasks. We introduce EXPLORA, a novel exploration method designed to estimate the parameters of the scoring function, which evaluates exemplar subsets without incorporating confidence information. EXPLORA significantly reduces the number of LLM calls to ~11% of those required by state-of-the-art methods and achieves a substantial performance improvement of 12.24%. We open-source our code and data (https://github.com/kiranpurohit/EXPLORA).

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An LLM Feature-based Framework for Dialogue Constructiveness Assessment
Lexin Zhou | Youmna Farag | Andreas Vlachos

Research on dialogue constructiveness assessment focuses on (i) analysing conversational factors that influence individuals to take specific actions, win debates, change their perspectives or broaden their open-mindedness and (ii) predicting constructiveness outcomes following dialogues for such use cases. These objectives can be achieved by training either interpretable feature-based models (which often involve costly human annotations) or neural models such as pre-trained language models (which have empirically shown higher task accuracy but lack interpretability). In this paper we propose an LLM feature-based framework for dialogue constructiveness assessment that combines the strengths of feature-based and neural approaches, while mitigating their downsides. The framework first defines a set of dataset-independent and interpretable linguistic features, which can be extracted by both prompting an LLM and simple heuristics. Such features are then used to train LLM feature-based models. We apply this framework to three datasets of dialogue constructiveness and find that our LLM feature-based models outperform or performs at least as well as standard feature-based models and neural models. We also find that the LLM feature-based model learns more robust prediction rules instead of relying on superficial shortcuts, which often trouble neural models.

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Relevance Is a Guiding Light: Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue System
Zhanpeng Chen | Zhihong Zhu | Wanshi Xu | Xianwei Zhuang | Yuexian Zou

Retrieving accurate domain knowledge and providing helpful information are crucial in developing an effective end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system (E2ETOD). The field has witnessed numerous methods following the retrieve-then-generate paradigm and training their systems on one specific domain. However, existing approaches still suffer from the Distractive Attributes Problem (DAP): struggling to deal with false but similar knowledge (hard negative entities), which is even more intractable when countless pieces of knowledge from different domains are blended in a real-world scenario. To alleviate DAP, we propose the Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning (ReAL) method, a two-stage training framework that eliminates hard negatives step-by-step and aligns retrieval with generation. In the first stage, we introduce a top-k adaptive contrastive loss and utilize the divergence-driven feedback from the frozen generator to pre-train the retriever. In the second stage, we propose using the metric score distribution as an anchor to align retrieval with generation. Thorough experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate ReAL’s superiority over existing methods, with extensive analysis validating its strong capabilities of overcoming in- and cross-domain distractions.

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Dialog2Flow: Pre-training Soft-Contrastive Action-Driven Sentence Embeddings for Automatic Dialog Flow Extraction
Sergio Burdisso | Srikanth Madikeri | Petr Motlicek

Efficiently deriving structured workflows from unannotated dialogs remains an underexplored and formidable challenge in computational linguistics. Automating this process could significantly accelerate the manual design of workflows in new domains and enable the grounding of large language models in domain-specific flowcharts, enhancing transparency and controllability.In this paper, we introduce Dialog2Flow (D2F) embeddings, which differ from conventional sentence embeddings by mapping utterances to a latent space where they are grouped according to their communicative and informative functions (i.e., the actions they represent). D2F allows for modeling dialogs as continuous trajectories in a latent space with distinct action-related regions. By clustering D2F embeddings, the latent space is quantized, and dialogs can be converted into sequences of region/action IDs, facilitating the extraction of the underlying workflow.To pre-train D2F, we build a comprehensive dataset by unifying twenty task-oriented dialog datasets with normalized per-turn action annotations. We also introduce a novel soft contrastive loss that leverages the semantic information of these actions to guide the representation learning process, showing superior performance compared to standard supervised contrastive loss.Evaluation against various sentence embeddings, including dialog-specific ones, demonstrates that D2F yields superior qualitative and quantitative results across diverse domains.

Diffusion models are the state of the art in text-to-image generation, but their perceptual variability remains understudied. In this paper, we examine how prompts affect image variability in black-box diffusion-based models. We propose W1KP, a human-calibrated measure of variability in a set of images, bootstrapped from existing image-pair perceptual distances. Current datasets do not cover recent diffusion models, thus we curate three test sets for evaluation. Our best perceptual distance outperforms nine baselines by up to 18 points in accuracy, and our calibration matches graded human judgements 78% of the time. Using W1KP, we study prompt reusability and show that Imagen prompts can be reused for 10-50 random seeds before new images become too similar to already generated images, while Stable Diffusion XL and DALL-E 3 can be reused 50-200 times. Lastly, we analyze 56 linguistic features of real prompts, finding that the prompt’s length, CLIP embedding norm, concreteness, and word senses influence variability most. As far as we are aware, we are the first to analyze diffusion variability from a visuolinguistic perspective. Our project page is at http://w1kp.com.

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Investigating LLMs as Voting Assistants via Contextual Augmentation: A Case Study on the European Parliament Elections 2024
Ilias Chalkidis

In light of the recent 2024 European Parliament elections, we are investigating if LLMs can be used as Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). We audit MISTRAL and MIXTRAL models and evaluate their accuracy in predicting the stance of political parties based on the latest “EU and I” voting assistance questionnaire. Furthermore, we explore alternatives to improve models’ performance by augmenting the input context via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) relying on web search, and Self-Reflection using staged conversations that aim to re-collect relevant content from the model’s internal memory. We find that MIXTRAL is highly accurate with an 82% accuracy on average with a significant performance disparity across different political groups (50-95%). Augmenting the input context with expert-curated information can lead to a significant boost of approx. 9%, which remains an open challenge for automated RAG approaches, even considering curated content.

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Adaption-of-Thought: Learning Question Difficulty Improves Large Language Models for Reasoning
Mayi Xu | Yongqi Li | Ke Sun | Tieyun Qian

Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent capability for solving reasoning problems. Existing approaches do not differentiate the question difficulty when designing prompting methods for them. Clearly, a simple method cannot elicit sufficient knowledge from LLMs to answer a hard question. Meanwhile, a sophisticated one will force the LLM to generate redundant or even inaccurate intermediate steps toward a simple question. Consequently, the performance of existing methods fluctuates among various questions.In this work, we propose Adaption-of-Thought (AdoT), an adaptive method to improve LLMs for the reasoning problem, which first measures the question difficulty and then tailors demonstration set construction and difficulty-adapted retrieval strategies for the adaptive demonstration construction. Experimental results on three reasoning tasks prove the superiority of our proposed method, showing an absolute improvement of up to 5.5% on arithmetic reasoning, 7.4% on symbolic reasoning, and 2.3% on commonsense reasoning. Our codes and implementation details are available at: https://github.com/NLPGM/AdoT

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LogicST: A Logical Self-Training Framework for Document-Level Relation Extraction with Incomplete Annotations
Shengda Fan | Yanting Wang | Shasha Mo | Jianwei Niu

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to identify relationships between entities within a document. Due to the vast number of entity pairs, fully annotating all fact triplets is challenging, resulting in datasets with numerous false negative samples. Recently, self-training-based methods have been introduced to address this issue. However, these methods are purely black-box and sub-symbolic, making them difficult to interpret and prone to overlooking symbolic interdependencies between relations.To remedy this deficiency, our insight is that symbolic knowledge, such as logical rules, can be used as diagnostic tools to identify conflicts between pseudo-labels. By resolving these conflicts through logical diagnoses, we can correct erroneous pseudo-labels, thus enhancing the training of neural models.To achieve this, we propose **LogicST**, a neural-logic self-training framework that iteratively resolves conflicts and constructs the minimal diagnostic set for updating models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LogicST significantly improves performance and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. For instance, LogicST achieves an increase of **7.94%** in F1 score compared to CAST (Tan et al., 2023a) on the DocRED benchmark (Yao et al., 2019). Additionally, LogicST is more time-efficient than its self-training counterparts, requiring only **10%** of the training time of CAST.

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Concept Space Alignment in Multilingual LLMs
Qiwei Peng | Anders Søgaard

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) seem to generalize somewhat across languages. We hypothesize this is a result of implicit vector space alignment. Evaluating such alignment, we see that larger models exhibit very high-quality linear alignments between corresponding concepts in different languages. Our experiments show that multilingual LLMs suffer from two familiar weaknesses: generalization works best for languages with similar typology, and for abstract concepts. For some models, e.g., the Llama-2 family of models, prompt-based embeddings align better than word embeddings, but the projections are less linear – an observation that holds across almost all model families, indicating that some of the implicitly learned alignments are broken somewhat by prompt-based methods.

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit limitations such as generating unsafe responses, unreliable reasoning, etc. Existing inference intervention approaches attempt to mitigate these issues by finetuning additional models to produce calibration signals (such as rewards) that guide the LLM’s decoding process. However, this solution introduces substantial time and space overhead due to the separate models required. This work proposes Non-disruptive parameters insertion (Otter), inserting extra parameters into the transformer architecture to predict calibration signals along with the original LLM output. Otter offers state-of-the-art performance on multiple demanding tasks while saving up to 86.5% extra space and 98.5% extra time. Furthermore, Otter seamlessly integrates with existing inference engines, requiring only a one-line code change, and the original model response remains accessible after the parameter insertion.

Norwegian, spoken by only 5 million population, is under-representative within the most impressive breakthroughs in NLP tasks. To the best of our knowledge, there has not yet been a comprehensive evaluation of the existing language models (LMs) on Norwegian generation tasks during the article writing process. To fill this gap, we 1) compiled the existing Norwegian dataset and pre-trained 4 Norwegian Open Language Models varied from parameter scales and architectures, collectively called NorGLM; 2) introduced a comprehensive benchmark, NLEBench, for evaluating natural language generation capabilities in Norwegian, encompassing translation and human annotation. Based on the investigation, we find that: 1) the mainstream, English-dominated LM GPT-3.5 has limited capability in understanding the Norwegian context; 2) the increase in model parameter scales demonstrates limited impact on the performance of downstream tasks when the pre-training dataset is constrained in size; 3) smaller models also demonstrate the reasoning capability through Chain-of-Thought; 4) a multi-task dataset that includes synergy tasks can be used to verify the generalizability of LLMs on natural language understanding and, meanwhile, test the interconnectedness of these NLP tasks. We share our resources and code for reproducibility under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework
Yifan Wang | Vera Demberg

Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text generation framework grounded in pragmatics. RSA-Control directs the generation process by recursively reasoning between imaginary speakers and listeners, enhancing the likelihood that target attributes are correctly interpreted by listeners amidst distractors. Additionally, we introduce a self-adjustable rationality parameter, which allows for automatic adjustment of control strength based on context. Our experiments, conducted with two task types and two types of language models, demonstrate that RSA-Control achieves strong attribute control while maintaining language fluency and content consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/RSA-Control.

The scaling of large language models (LLMs) is a critical research area for the efficiency and effectiveness of model training and deployment. Our work investigates the transferability and discrepancies of scaling laws between Dense Models and Mixture of Experts (MoE) models. Through a combination of theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, including consistent loss scaling, optimal batch size/learning rate scaling, and resource allocation strategies scaling, our findings reveal that the power-law scaling framework also applies to MoE Models, indicating that the fundamental principles governing the scaling behavior of these models are preserved, even though the architecture differs. Additionally, MoE Models demonstrate superior generalization, resulting in lower testing losses with the same training compute budget compared to Dense Models. These findings indicate the scaling consistency and transfer generalization capabilities of MoE Models, providing new insights for optimizing MoE Model training and deployment strategies.

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Synergizing In-context Learning with Hints for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialog Systems
Vishal Vivek Saley | Rocktim Jyoti Das | Dinesh Raghu | Mausam .

End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog (TOD) systems typically require extensive training datasets to perform well. In contrast, large language model (LLM) based TOD systems can excel even with limited data due to their ability to learn tasks through in-context exemplars. However, these models lack alignment with the style of responses in training data and often generate comprehensive responses, making it difficult for users to grasp the information quickly. In response, we propose SyncTOD that synergizes LLMs with task-specific hints to improve alignment in low-data settings. SyncTOD employs small auxiliary models to provide hints and select exemplars for in-context prompts. With ChatGPT, SyncTOD achieves superior performance compared to LLM-based baselines and SoTA models in low-data settings, while retaining competitive performance in full-data settings.

Considering the limited internal parametric knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been widely used to extend the knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs). Despite the extensive efforts on RAG research, in existing methods, LLMs cannot precisely assess the relevance of retrieved documents, thus likely leading to misleading or even incorrect utilization of external knowledge (i.e., retrieved documents). To address this issue, in this paper, we propose REAR, a RElevance-Aware Retrieval-augmented approach for open-domain question answering (QA). As the key motivation, we aim to enhance the self-awareness regarding the reliability of external knowledge for LLMs, so as to adaptively utilize external knowledge in RAG systems. Specially, we develop a novel architecture for LLM based RAG system, by incorporating a specially designed assessnent module that precisely assesses the relevance of retrieved documents. Furthermore, we propose an improved training method based on bi-granularity relevance fusion and noise-resistant training. By combining the improvements in both architecture and training, our proposed REAR can better utilize external knowledge by effectively perceiving the relevance of retrieved documents. Experiments on four open-domain QA tasks show that REAR significantly outperforms previous a number of competitive RAG approaches. Our codes can be accessed at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/REAR.

Long-context modeling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered widespread attention, leading to the emergence of LLMs with ultra-context windows. Meanwhile, benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models are gradually catching up. However, existing benchmarks employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-context applications. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA). Unlike typical document QA, in Loong’s test cases, each document is relevant to the final answer, ignoring any document will lead to the failure of the answer. Furthermore, Loong introduces four types of tasks with a range of context lengths: Spotlight Locating, Comparison, Clustering, and Chain of Reasoning, to facilitate a more realistic and comprehensive evaluation of long-context understanding. Extensive experiments indicate that existing long-context language models still exhibit considerable potential for enhancement. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) achieves poor performance, demonstrating that Loong can reliably assess the model’s long-context modeling capabilities.

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On Mitigating Performance Disparities in Multilingual Speech Recognition
Monorama Swain | Anna Katrine Van Zee | Anders Søgaard

How far have we come in mitigating performance disparities across genders in multilingual speech recognition? We compare the impact on gender disparity of different fine-tuning algorithms for automated speech recognition across model sizes, languages and gender. We look at both performance-focused and fairness-promoting algorithms. Across languages, we see slightly better performance for female speakers for larger models regardless of the fine-tuning algorithm. The best trade-off between performance and parity is found using adapter fusion. Fairness-promoting fine-tuning algorithms (Group-DRO and Spectral Decoupling) hurt performance compared to adapter fusion with only slightly better performance parity. LoRA increases disparities slightly. Fairness-mitigating fine-tuning techniques led to slightly higher variance in performance across languages, with the exception of adapter fusion.

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Thinking Outside of the Differential Privacy Box: A Case Study in Text Privatization with Language Model Prompting
Stephen Meisenbacher | Florian Matthes

The field of privacy-preserving Natural Language Processing has risen in popularity, particularly at a time when concerns about privacy grow with the proliferation of large language models. One solution consistently appearing in recent literature has been the integration of Differential Privacy (DP) into NLP techniques. In this paper, we take these approaches into critical view, discussing the restrictions that DP integration imposes, as well as bring to light the challenges that such restrictions entail. To accomplish this, we focus on **DP-Prompt**, a recent method for text privatization leveraging language models to rewrite texts. In particular, we explore this rewriting task in multiple scenarios, both with DP and without DP. To drive the discussion on the merits of DP in NLP, we conduct empirical utility and privacy experiments. Our results demonstrate the need for more discussion on the usability of DP in NLP and its benefits over non-DP approaches.

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To Preserve or To Compress: An In-Depth Study of Connector Selection in Multimodal Large Language Models
Junyan Lin | Haoran Chen | Dawei Zhu | Xiaoyu Shen

In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted widespread attention from both industry and academia. Based on the integration position, MLLMs can be categorized into external and internal fusion architectures, with the former being more predominant. However, there remains considerable debate on how to construct the optimal external fusion MLLM architecture, especially regarding the performance of different connectors on tasks with varying granularities. This paper systematically investigates the impact of connectors on MLLM performance. Specifically, we classify connectors into feature-preserving and feature-compressing types. Utilizing a unified classification standard, we categorize sub-tasks from three comprehensive benchmarks, MMBench, MME, and SEED-Bench, into three task types: coarse-grained perception, fine-grained perception, and reasoning, and evaluate the performance from this perspective. Our findings reveal significant performance differences between different types of connectors across various tasks, offering essential guidance for MLLM architecture design and advancing the understanding of MLLM architecture optimization.

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What is ”Typological Diversity” in NLP?
Esther Ploeger | Wessel Poelman | Miryam de Lhoneux | Johannes Bjerva

The NLP research community has devoted increased attention to languages beyond English, resulting in considerable improvements for multilingual NLP. However, these improvements only apply to a small subset of the world’s languages. An increasing number of papers aspires to enhance generalizable multilingual performance across languages. To this end, linguistic typology is commonly used to motivate language selection, on the basis that a broad typological sample ought to imply generalization across a broad range of languages. These selections are often described as being typologically diverse. In this meta-analysis, we systematically investigate NLP research that includes claims regarding typological diversity. We find there are no set definitions or criteria for such claims. We introduce metrics to approximate the diversity of resulting language samples along several axes and find that the results vary considerably across papers. Crucially, we show that skewed language selection can lead to overestimated multilingual performance. We recommend future work to include an operationalization of typological diversity that empirically justifies the diversity of language samples. To help facilitate this, we release the code for our diversity measures.

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The Computational Anatomy of Humility: Modeling Intellectual Humility in Online Public Discourse
Xiaobo Guo | Neil Potnis | Melody Yu | Nabeel Gillani | Soroush Vosoughi

The ability for individuals to constructively engage with one another across lines of difference is a critical feature of a healthy pluralistic society. This is also true in online discussion spaces like social media platforms. To date, much social media research has focused on preventing ills—like political polarization and the spread of misinformation. While this is important, enhancing the quality of online public discourse requires not just reducing ills, but also, promoting foundational human virtues. In this study, we focus on one particular virtue: “intellectual humility” (IH), or acknowledging the potential limitations in one’s own beliefs. Specifically, we explore the development of computational methods for measuring IH at scale. We manually curate and validate an IH codebook on 350 posts about religion drawn from subreddits and use them to develop LLM-based models for automating this measurement. Our best model achieves a Macro-F1 score of 0.64 across labels (and 0.70 when predicting IH/IA/Neutral at the coarse level), higher than an expected naive baseline of 0.51 (0.32 for IH/IA/Neutral) but lower than a human annotator-informed upper bound of 0.85 (0.83 for IH/IA/Neutral). Our results both highlight the challenging nature of detecting IH online—opening the door to new directions in NLP research—and also lay a foundation for computational social science researchers interested in analyzing and fostering more IH in online public discourse.

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Consistent Bidirectional Language Modelling: Expressive Power and Representational Conciseness
Georgi Shopov | Stefan Gerdjikov

The inability to utilise future contexts and the pre-determined left-to-right generation order are major limitations of unidirectional language models. Bidirectionality has been introduced to address those deficiencies. However, a crucial shortcoming of bidirectional language models is the potential inconsistency of their conditional distributions. This fundamental flaw greatly diminishes their applicability and hinders their capability of tractable sampling and likelihood computation. In this work, we introduce a class of bidirectional language models, called latent language models, that are consistent by definition and can be efficiently used both for generation and scoring of sequences. We define latent language models based on the well-understood formalism of bisequential decompositions from automata theory. This formal correspondence allows us to precisely charaterise the abilities and limitations of a subclass of latent language models, called rational language models. As a result, we obtain that latent language models are exponentially more concise and significantly more expressive than unidirectional language models.

Foundation models and vision-language pre-training have notably advanced Vision Language Models (VLMs), enabling multimodal processing of visual and linguistic data. However, their performance has been typically assessed on general scene understanding - recognizing objects, attributes, and actions - rather than cultural comprehension. This study introduces CulturalVQA, a visual question-answering benchmark aimed at assessing VLM’s geo-diverse cultural understanding. We curate a diverse collection of 2,378 image-question pairs with 1-5 answers per question representing cultures from 11 countries across 5 continents. The questions probe understanding of various facets of culture such as clothing, food, drinks, rituals, and traditions. Benchmarking VLMs on CulturalVQA, including GPT-4V and Gemini, reveals disparity in their level of cultural understanding across regions, with strong cultural understanding capabilities for North America while significantly weaker capabilities for Africa. We observe disparity in their performance across cultural facets too, with clothing, rituals, and traditions seeing higher performances than food and drink. These disparities help us identify areas where VLMs lack cultural understanding and demonstrate the potential of CulturalVQA as a comprehensive evaluation set for gauging VLM progress in understanding diverse cultures.

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Methods of Automatic Matrix Language Determination for Code-Switched Speech
Olga Iakovenko | Thomas Hain

Code-switching (CS) is the process of speakers interchanging between two or more languages which in the modern world becomes increasingly common. In order to better describe CS speech the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) theory introduces the concept of a Matrix Language, which is the language that provides the grammatical structure for a CS utterance. In this work the MLF theory was used to develop systems for Matrix Language Identity (MLID) determination. The MLID of English/Mandarin and English/Spanish CS text and speech was compared to acoustic language identity (LID), which is a typical way to identify a language in monolingual utterances. MLID predictors from audio show higher correlation with the textual principles than LID in all cases while also outperforming LID in an MLID recognition task based on F1 macro (60%) and correlation score (0.38). This novel approach has identified that non-English languages (Mandarin and Spanish) are preferred over the English language as the ML contrary to the monolingual choice of LID.

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Analyzing Key Factors Influencing Emotion Prediction Performance of VLLMs in Conversational Contexts
Jaewook Lee | Yeajin Jang | Hongjin Kim | Woojin Lee | Harksoo Kim

Emotional intelligence (EI) in artificial intelligence (AI), which refers to the ability of an AI to understand and respond appropriately to human emotions, has emerged as a crucial research topic. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) and vision large language models (VLLMs) possess EI and the ability to understand emotional stimuli in the form of text and images, respectively. However, factors influencing the emotion prediction performance of VLLMs in real-world conversational contexts have not been sufficiently explored. This study aims to analyze the key elements affecting the emotion prediction performance of VLLMs in conversational contexts systematically. To achieve this, we reconstructed the MELD dataset, which is based on the popular TV series Friends, and conducted experiments through three sub-tasks: overall emotion tone prediction, character emotion prediction, and contextually appropriate emotion expression selection. We evaluated the performance differences based on various model architectures (e.g., image encoders, modality alignment, and LLMs) and image scopes (e.g., entire scene, person, and facial expression). In addition, we investigated the impact of providing persona information on the emotion prediction performance of the models and analyzed how personality traits and speaking styles influenced the emotion prediction process. We conducted an in-depth analysis of the impact of various other factors, such as gender and regional biases, on the emotion prediction performance of VLLMs. The results revealed that these factors significantly influenced the model performance.

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Context-Aware Assistant Selection for Improved Inference Acceleration with Large Language Models
Jerry Huang | Prasanna Parthasarathi | Mehdi Rezagholizadeh | Sarath Chandar

Despite their widespread adoption, large language models (LLMs) remain prohibitive to use under resource constraints, with their ever growing sizes only increasing the barrier for use. One particular issue stems from the high latency associated with auto-regressive generation in LLMs, rendering the largest LLMs difficult to use without advanced computing infrastructure. Assisted decoding, where a smaller draft model guides a larger expert model’s generation, has helped alleviate this concern, but remains dependent on alignment between the two models. Thus if the draft model is insufficiently capable on some domain of interest relative to the target model, performance can degrade. Alternatively, one can leverage multiple draft models to better cover the expertise of the target, but when multiple black-box draft models are available, selecting an assistant without details about its construction can be difficult. To better understand this decision making problem, we observe it as a contextual bandit, where a policy must choose a draft model based on a context. We show that even without prior knowledge of the draft models, creating an offline dataset from only outputs of independent draft/target models and training a policy over the alignment of these outputs can accelerate performance on multiple domains as long as an individual draft model is effective. We observe these results hold on various settings with multiple assisted decoding candidates, highlighting its flexibility and the advantageous role that such decision making can play.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), many studies are interested in transferring the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to small language models (SLMs). Previous distillation methods usually utilize the capabilities of LLMs to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) samples and teach SLMs via fine-tuning. However, such a standard distillation approach performs poorly when applied to out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, and the diversity of the generated CoT samples is insufficient. In this work, we propose a novel counterfactual distillation framework. Firstly, we leverage LLMs to automatically generate high-quality counterfactual data. Given an input text example, our method generates a counterfactual example that is very similar to the original input, but its task label has been changed to the desired one. Then, we utilize multi-view CoT to enhance the diversity of reasoning samples. Experiments on four NLP benchmarks show that our approach enhances the reasoning capabilities of SLMs and is more robust to OOD data. We also conduct extensive ablations and sample studies to understand the reasoning capabilities of SLMs.

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Pretraining Language Models Using Translationese
Meet Doshi | Raj Dabre | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

In this paper, we explore the utility of Translationese as synthetic data created using machine translation for pre-training language models (LMs) for low-resource languages (LRLs). Our simple methodology consists of translating large amounts of web-crawled monolingual documents (clean) into the LRLs, followed by filtering the translated documents using tiny LMs trained on small but clean LRL data. Taking the case of Indian languages, we pre-train LMs from scratch with 28M and 85M parameters, and then fine-tune them for 5 downstream natural language understanding (NLU) and 4 generative (NLG) tasks. We observe that pre-training on filtered synthetic data leads to relative performance drops of only 0.87% for NLU and 2.35% for NLG, compared to pre-training on clean data, and this gap further diminishes upon the inclusion of a small amount of clean data. We also study the impact of synthetic data filtering and the choice of source language for synthetic data generation. Furthermore, evaluating continually pre-trained larger models like Gemma-2B and Llama-3-8B in few-shot settings, we observe that using synthetic data is competitive with using clean data. Our findings suggest that synthetic data shows promise for bridging the pre-training gap between English and LRLs.

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Quantifying the Gaps Between Translation and Native Perception in Training for Multimodal, Multilingual Retrieval
Kyle Buettner | Adriana Kovashka

There is a scarcity of multilingual vision-language models that properly account for the perceptual differences that are reflected in image captions across languages and cultures. In this work, through a multimodal, multilingual retrieval case study, we quantify the existing lack of model flexibility. We empirically show performance gaps between training on captions that come from native German perception and captions that have been either machine-translated or human-translated from English into German. To address these gaps, we further propose and evaluate caption augmentation strategies. While we achieve mean recall improvements (+1.3), gaps still remain, indicating an open area of future work for the community.

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MTA4DPR: Multi-Teaching-Assistants Based Iterative Knowledge Distillation for Dense Passage Retrieval
Qixi Lu | Endong Xun | Gongbo Tang

Although Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) models have achieved significantly enhanced performance, their widespread application is still hindered by the demanding inference efficiency and high deployment costs. Knowledge distillation is an efficient method to compress models, which transfers knowledge from strong teacher models to weak student models. Previous studies have proved the effectiveness of knowledge distillation in DPR. However, there often remains a significant performance gap between the teacher and the distilled student. To narrow this performance gap, we propose MTA4DPR, a Multi-Teaching-Assistants based iterative knowledge distillation method for Dense Passage Retrieval, which transfers knowledge from the teacher to the student with the help of multiple assistants in an iterative manner; with each iteration, the student learns from more performant assistants and more difficult data. The experimental results show that our 66M student model achieves the state-of-the-art performance among models with same parameters on multiple datasets, and is very competitive when compared with larger, even LLM-based, DPR models.

Solidarity is a crucial concept to understand social relations in societies. In this study, we investigate the frequency of (anti-)solidarity towards women and migrants in German parliamentary debates between 1867 and 2022. Using 2,864 manually annotated text snippets, we evaluate large language models (LLMs) like Llama 3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4. We find that GPT-4 outperforms other models, approaching human annotation accuracy. Using GPT-4, we automatically annotate 18,300 further instances and find that solidarity with migrants outweighs anti-solidarity but that frequencies and solidarity types shift over time. Most importantly, group-based notions of (anti-)solidarity fade in favor of compassionate solidarity, focusing on the vulnerability of migrant groups, and exchange-based anti-solidarity, focusing on the lack of (economic) contribution. This study highlights the interplay of historical events, socio-economic needs, and political ideologies in shaping migration discourse and social cohesion.

Long sequence modeling has gained broad interest as large language models (LLMs) continue to advance. Recent research has identified that a large portion of hidden states within the key-value caches of Transformer models can be discarded (also termed evicted) withoutaffecting the perplexity performance in generating long sequences. However, we show that these methods, despite preserving perplexity performance, often drop information that is important for solving downstream tasks, a problem which we call information neglect. To address this issue, we introduce Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction (CItruS), a novel modeling technique that integrates the attention preferences useful for a downstream task into the eviction process of hidden states. In addition, we design a method for chunked sequence processing to further improve efficiency. Our training-free method exhibits superior performance on long sequence comprehension and retrieval tasks over several strong baselines under the same memory budget, while preserving language modeling perplexity. The code and data have been released at https://github.com/ybai-nlp/CItruS.

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Story Embeddings — Narrative-Focused Representations of Fictional Stories
Hans Ole Hatzel | Chris Biemann

We present a novel approach to modeling fictional narratives. The proposed model creates embeddings that represent a story such that similar narratives, that is, reformulations of the same story, will result in similar embeddings. We showcase the prowess of our narrative-focused embeddings on various datasets, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance on multiple retrieval tasks. The embeddings also show promising results on a narrative understanding task. Additionally, we perform an annotation-based evaluation to validate that our introduced computational notion of narrative similarity aligns with human perception. The approach can help to explore vast datasets of stories, with potential applications in recommender systems and in the computational analysis of literature.

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C-LLM: Learn to Check Chinese Spelling Errors Character by Character
Kunting Li | Yong Hu | Liang He | Fandong Meng | Jie Zhou

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in sentences. Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust capabilities and are widely applied in various tasks, their performance on CSC is often unsatisfactory. We find that LLMs fail to meet the Chinese character-level constraints of the CSC task, namely equal length and phonetic similarity, leading to a performance bottleneck. Further analysis reveals that this issue stems from the granularity of tokenization, as current mixed character-word tokenization struggles to satisfy these character-level constraints. To address this issue, we propose C-LLM, a Large Language Model-based Chinese Spell Checking method that learns to check errors Character by Character. Character-level tokenization enables the model to learn character-level alignment, effectively mitigating issues related to character-level constraints. Furthermore, CSC is simplified to replication-dominated and substitution-supplemented tasks. Experiments on two CSC benchmarks demonstrate that C-LLM achieves a 2.1% enhancement in general scenarios and a significant 12% improvement in vertical domain scenarios compared to existing methods, establishing state-of-the-art performance.

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PSC: Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Phase Shift Calibration
Wenqiao Zhu | Chao Xu | Lulu Wang | Jun Wu

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is an efficient position encoding approach and is widely utilized in numerous large language models (LLMs). Recently, a lot of methods have been put forward to further expand the context window based on RoPE. The core concept of those methods is to predefine or search for a set of factors to rescale the base frequencies of RoPE. Nevertheless, it is quite a challenge for existing methods to predefine an optimal factor due to the exponential search space. In view of this, we introduce PSC (Phase Shift Calibration), a small module for calibrating the frequencies predefined by existing methods. With the employment of PSC, we demonstrate that many existing methods can be further enhanced, like PI, YaRN, and LongRoPE. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple models and tasks. The results demonstrate that (1) when PSC is enabled, the comparative reductions in perplexity increase as the context window size is varied from 16k, to 32k, and up to 64k. (2) Our approach is broadly applicable and exhibits robustness across a variety of models and tasks.

Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) has enhanced the performance of various downstream tasks in visual-language understanding. Most existing approaches encode images and videos into separate feature spaces, which are then fed as inputs to large language models. However, due to the lack of unified tokenization for images and videos, namely misalignment before projection, it becomes challenging for a Large Language Model (LLM) to learn multi-modal interactions from several poor projection layers.In this work, we unify visual representation into the language feature space to advance the foundational LLM towards a unified LVLM. As a result, we establish a simple but robust LVLM baseline, Video-LLaVA, which learns from a mixed dataset of images and videos, mutually enhancing each other.As a result, Video-LLaVA outperforms Video-ChatGPT by 5.8%, 9.9%, 18.6%, and 10.1% on MSRVTT, MSVD, TGIF, and ActivityNet, respectively. Additionally, our Video-LLaVA also achieves superior performances on a broad range of 9 image benchmarks.Notably, extensive experiments demonstrate that Video-LLaVA mutually benefits images and videos within a unified visual representation, outperforming models designed specifically for images or videos. We aim for this work to provide modest insights into the multi-modal inputs for the LLM.

Large language models (LLMs) often generate inaccurate or fabricated information and generally fail to indicate their confidence, which limits their broader applications. Previous work has elicited confidence from LLMs by direct or self-consistency prompting, or constructing specific datasets for supervised finetuning. The prompting-based approaches have inferior performance, and the training-based approaches are limited to binary or inaccurate group-level confidence estimates. In this work, we present SaySelf, a novel training framework that teaches LLMs to express more fine-grained confidence estimates. In addition, beyond the confidence scores, SaySelf initiates the process of directing LLMs to produce self-reflective rationales that clearly identify gaps in their parametric knowledge and explain their uncertainty. This is achieved by using an LLM to automatically summarize the uncertainties in specific knowledge via natural language. The summarization is based on the analysis of the inconsistency in multiple sampled reasoning chains, and the resulting data is utilized for supervised fine-tuning. Moreover, we utilize reinforcement learning with a meticulously crafted reward function to calibrate the confidence estimates, motivating LLMs to deliver accurate, high-confidence predictions and to penalize overconfidence in erroneous outputs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SaySelf in reducing the confidence calibration error and maintaining the task performance. The generated self-reflective rationales are also reasonable and can further contribute to the calibration. The code is made public at https://github.com/xu1868/SaySelf.

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Mitigating Frequency Bias and Anisotropy in Language Model Pre-Training with Syntactic Smoothing
Richard Diehl Martinez | Zebulon Goriely | Andrew Caines | Paula Buttery | Lisa Beinborn

Language models strongly rely on frequency information because they maximize the likelihood of tokens during pre-training. As a consequence, language models tend to not generalize well to tokens that are seldom seen during training. Moreover, maximum likelihood training has been discovered to give rise to anisotropy: representations of tokens in a model tend to cluster tightly in a high-dimensional cone, rather than spreading out over their representational capacity.Our work introduces a method for quantifying the frequency bias of a language model by assessing sentence-level perplexity with respect to token-level frequency. We then present a method for reducing the frequency bias of a language model by inducing a syntactic prior over token representations during pre-training. Our Syntactic Smoothing method adjusts the maximum likelihood objective function to distribute the learning signal to syntactically similar tokens. This approach results in better performance on infrequent English tokens and a decrease in anisotropy. We empirically show that the degree of anisotropy in a model correlates with its frequency bias.

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ToxiCloakCN: Evaluating Robustness of Offensive Language Detection in Chinese with Cloaking Perturbations
Yunze Xiao | Yujia Hu | Kenny Tsu Wei Choo | Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Detecting hate speech and offensive language is essential for maintaining a safe and respectful digital environment. This study examines the limitations of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in identifying offensive content within systematically perturbed data, with a focus on Chinese, a language particularly susceptible to such perturbations. We introduce ToxiCloakCN, an enhanced dataset derived from ToxiCN, augmented with homophonic substitutions and emoji transformations, to test the robustness of LLMs against these cloaking perturbations. Our findings reveal that existing models significantly underperform in detecting offensive content when these perturbations are applied. We provide an in-depth analysis of how different types of offensive content are affected by these perturbations and explore the alignment between human and model explanations of offensiveness. Our work highlights the urgent need for more advanced techniques in offensive language detection to combat the evolving tactics used to evade detection mechanisms.

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Boosting Scientific Concepts Understanding: Can Analogy from Teacher Models Empower Student Models?
Siyu Yuan | Cheng Jiayang | Lin Qiu | Deqing Yang

Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. Previous research in the AI community has mainly focused on identifying and generating analogies and then examining their quality under human evaluation, which overlooks the practical application of these analogies in real-world settings. Inspired by the human education process, in this paper, we propose to investigate how analogies created by teacher language models (LMs) can assist student LMs in understanding scientific concepts, thereby aligning more closely with practical scenarios. Our results suggest that free-form analogies can indeed aid LMs in understanding concepts. Additionally, analogies generated by student LMs can improve their own performance on scientific question answering, demonstrating their capability to use analogies for self-learning new knowledge. Resources are available athttps://github.com/siyuyuan/SCUA.

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Model Internals-based Answer Attribution for Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Jirui Qi | Gabriele Sarti | Raquel Fernández | Arianna Bisazza

Ensuring the verifiability of model answers is a fundamental challenge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in the question answering (QA) domain. Recently, self-citation prompting was proposed to make large language models (LLMs) generate citations to supporting documents along with their answers. However, self-citing LLMs often struggle to match the required format, refer to non-existent sources, and fail to faithfully reflect LLMs’ context usage throughout the generation. In this work, we present MIRAGE – Model Internals-based RAG Explanations – a plug-and-play approach using model internals for faithful answer attribution in RAG applications. MIRAGE detects context-sensitive answer tokens and pairs them with retrieved documents contributing to their prediction via saliency methods. We evaluate our proposed approach on a multilingual extractive QA dataset, finding high agreement with human answer attribution. On open-ended QA, MIRAGE achieves citation quality and efficiency comparable to self-citation while also allowing for a finer-grained control of attribution parameters. Our qualitative evaluation highlights the faithfulness of MIRAGE’s attributions and underscores the promising application of model internals for RAG answer attribution. Code and data released at https://github.com/Betswish/MIRAGE.

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Do Large Language Models Know How Much They Know?
Gabriele Prato | Jerry Huang | Prasanna Parthasarathi | Shagun Sodhani | Sarath Chandar

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement in their deployment trails a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms, as well as a delineation of their capabilities and limitations. A desired characteristic of an intelligent system is its ability to recognize the scope of its own knowledge. To investigate whether LLMs embody this attribute, we develop a benchmark that challenges these models to enumerate all information they possess on specific topics. This benchmark assesses whether the models recall excessive, insufficient, or the precise amount of required information, thereby indicating their awareness of how much they know about the given topic. Our findings reveal that the emergence of this property varies across different architectures and manifests at diverse rates. However, with sufficient scaling, all tested models are ultimately capable of performing this task. The insights gained from this research advance our understanding of LLMs, shedding light on their operational capabilities and contributing to the ongoing exploration of their intricate dynamics.

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Investigating Mysteries of CoT-Augmented Distillation
Somin Wadhwa | Silvio Amir | Byron C Wallace

Eliciting chain of thought (CoT) rationales - sequences of token that convey a “reasoning” process has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such rationales can also be used for model distillation: Including CoT sequences (elicited from a large “teacher” model) in addition to target labels when fine-tuning a small student model yields (often substantial) improvements. In this work we ask: Why and how does this additional training signal help in model distillation? We perform ablations to interrogate this, and report some potentially surprising results. Specifically: (1) Placing CoT sequences after labels (rather than before) realizes consistently better downstream performance – this means that no student “reasoning” is necessary at test time to realize gains. (2) When rationales are appended in this way, they need not be coherent reasoning sequences to yield improvements; performance increases are robust to permutations of CoT tokens, for example. In fact, (3) a small number of key tokens are sufficient to achieve improvements equivalent to those observed when full rationales are used in model distillation.

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SciPrompt: Knowledge-augmented Prompting for Fine-grained Categorization of Scientific Topics
Zhiwen You | Kanyao Han | Haotian Zhu | Bertram Ludaescher | Jana Diesner

Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

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Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP
Samyadeep Basu | Shell Xu Hu | Maziar Sanjabi | Daniela Massiceti | Soheil Feizi

Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP’s compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.

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Learning from Natural Language Explanations for Generalizable Entity Matching
Somin Wadhwa | Adit Krishnan | Runhui Wang | Byron C Wallace | Luyang Kong

Entity matching is the task of linking records from different sources that refer to the same real-world entity. Past work has primarily treated entity linking as a standard supervised learning problem. However, supervised entity matching models often do not generalize well to new data, and collecting exhaustive labeled training data is often cost prohibitive. Further, recent efforts have adopted LLMs for this task in few/zero-shot settings, exploiting their general knowledge. But LLMs are prohibitively expensive for performing inference at scale for real-world entity matching tasks.As an efficient alternative, we re-cast entity matching as a conditional generation task as opposed to binary classification. This enables us to “distill” LLM reasoning into smaller entity matching models via natural language explanations. This approach achieves strong performance, especially on out-of-domain generalization tests (10.85% F-1) where standalone generative methods struggle. We perform ablations that highlight the importance of explanations, both for performance and model robustness.

Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from hallucinations and misinformation. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that retrieves verifiable information from an external knowledge corpus to complement the parametric knowledge in LMs provides a tangible solution to these problems. However, the generation quality of RAG is highly dependent on the relevance between a user’s query and the retrieved documents. Inaccurate responses may be generated when the query is outside of the scope of knowledge represented in the external knowledge corpus or if the information in the corpus is out-of-date. In this work, we establish a statistical framework that assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. We introduce an online testing procedure that employs goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests to inspect the relevance of each user query to detect out-of-knowledge queries with low knowledge relevance. Additionally, we develop an offline testing framework that examines a collection of user queries, aiming to detect significant shifts in the query distribution which indicates the knowledge corpus is no longer sufficiently capable of supporting the interests of the users. We demonstrate the capabilities of these strategies through a systematic evaluation on eight question-answering (QA) datasets, the results of which indicate that the new testing framework is an efficient solution to enhance the reliability of existing RAG systems.

Recent research has focused on examining Large Language Models’ (LLMs) characteristics from a psychological standpoint, acknowledging the necessity of understanding their behavioral characteristics. The administration of personality tests to LLMs has emerged as a noteworthy area in this context. However, the suitability of employing psychological scales, initially devised for humans, on LLMs is a matter of ongoing debate. Our study aims to determine the reliability of applying personality assessments to LLMs, explicitly investigating whether LLMs demonstrate consistent personality traits. Analysis of 2,500 settings per model, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini-Pro, and LLaMA-3.1, reveals that various LLMs show consistency in responses to the Big Five Inventory, indicating a satisfactory level of reliability. Furthermore, our research explores the potential of GPT-3.5 to emulate diverse personalities and represent various groups—a capability increasingly sought after in social sciences for substituting human participants with LLMs to reduce costs. Our findings reveal that LLMs have the potential to represent different personalities with specific prompt instructions.

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Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts
Abhishek Arora | Emily Silcock | Melissa Dell | Leander Heldring

Massive-scale historical document collections are crucial for social science research. Despite increasing digitization, these documents typically lack unique cross-document identifiers for individuals mentioned within the texts, as well as individual identifiers from external knowledge bases like Wikipedia/Wikidata. Existing entity disambiguation methods often fall short in accuracy for historical documents, which are replete with individuals not remembered in contemporary knowledge bases. This study makes three key contributions to improve cross-document coreference resolution and disambiguation in historical texts: a massive-scale training dataset replete with hard negatives - that sources over 190 million entity pairs from Wikipedia contexts and disambiguation pages - high-quality evaluation data from hand-labeled historical newswire articles, and trained models evaluated on this historical benchmark. We contrastively train bi-encoder models for coreferencing and disambiguating individuals in historical texts, achieving accurate, scalable performance that identifies out-of-knowledge base individuals. Our approach significantly surpasses other entity disambiguation models on our historical newswire benchmark. Our models also demonstrate competitive performance on modern entity disambiguation benchmarks, particularly on certain news disambiguation datasets.

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Finer: Investigating and Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Concept Recognition in Large Vision Language Models
Jeonghwan Kim | Heng Ji

Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs such as LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate descriptive visual attributes based on a concept that appears within an input image despite their prominent zero-shot image captioning ability. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs suffer from modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept. In an effort to further the community’s endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric benchmark and training mixture, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs’ fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.

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Evaluating LLMs for Targeted Concept Simplification for Domain-Specific Texts
Sumit Asthana | Hannah Rashkin | Elizabeth Clark | Fantine Huot | Mirella Lapata

One useful application of NLP models is to support people in reading complex text from unfamiliar domains (e.g., scientific articles). Simplifying the entire text makes it understandable but sometimes removes important details. On the contrary, helping adult readers understand difficult concepts in context can enhance their vocabulary and knowledge. In a preliminary human study, we first identify that lack of context and unfamiliarity with difficult concepts is a major reason for adult readers’ difficulty with domain-specific text. We then introduce targeted concept simplification, a simplification task for rewriting text to help readers comprehend text containing unfamiliar concepts. We also introduce WikiDomains, a new dataset of 22k definitions from 13 academic domains paired with a difficult concept within each definition. We benchmark the performance of open-source and commercial LLMs and a simple dictionary baseline on this task across human judgments of ease of understanding and meaning preservation. Interestingly, our human judges preferred explanations about the difficult concept more than simplifications of the concept phrase. Further, no single model achieved superior performance across all quality dimensions, and automated metrics also show low correlations with human evaluations of concept simplification (~0.2), opening up rich avenues for research on personalized human reading comprehension support.

As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial. However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs. We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations. To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback. Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9% and 9.5% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at https://vlf-silkie.github.io.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We hypothesize that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content, which we validate both theoretically and experimentally. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.

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Reconsidering Sentence-Level Sign Language Translation
Garrett Tanzer | Maximus Shengelia | Ken Harrenstien | David Uthus

Historically, sign language machine translation has been posed as a sentence-level task: datasets consisting of continuous narratives are chopped up and presented to the model as isolated clips. In this work, we explore the limitations of this task framing. First, we survey a number of linguistic phenomena in sign languages that depend on discourse-level context. Then as a case study, we perform the first human baseline for sign language translation that actually substitutes a human into the machine learning task framing, rather than provide the human with the entire document as context. This human baseline—for ASL to English translation on the How2Sign dataset—shows that for 33% of sentences in our sample, our fluent Deaf signer annotators were only able to understand key parts of the clip in light of additional discourse-level context. These results underscore the importance of understanding and sanity checking examples when adapting machine learning to new domains.

Perceiving and understanding non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech is essential to making decisions that help us interact with our surroundings. In this paper, we propose GAMA, a novel General-purpose Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities. We build GAMA by integrating an LLM with multiple types of audio representations, including features from a custom Audio Q-Former, a multi-layer aggregator that aggregates features from multiple layers of an audio encoder. We fine-tune GAMA on a large-scale audio-language dataset, which augments it with audio understanding capabilities. Next, we propose CompA-R (Instruction-Tuning for Complex Audio Reasoning), a synthetically generated instruction-tuning (IT) dataset with instructions that require the model to perform complex reasoning on the input audio. We instruction-tune GAMA with CompA-R to endow it with complex reasoning abilities, where we further add a soft prompt as input with high-level semantic evidence by leveraging event tags of the input audio. Finally, we also propose CompA-R-test, a human-labeled evaluation dataset for evaluating the capabilities of LALMs on open-ended audio question-answering that requires complex reasoning. Through automated and expert human evaluations, we show that GAMA outperforms all other LALMs in literature on diverse audio understanding tasks by margins of 1%-84% and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on deductive reasoning and hallucination evaluation benchmarks. Further, GAMA IT-ed on CompA-R proves to be superior in its complex reasoning capabilities.

We introduce a new database of cognate words and etymons for the five main Romance languages, the most comprehensive one to date. We propose a strong benchmark for the automatic reconstruction of protowords for Romance languages, by applying a set of machine learning models and features on these data. The best results reach 90% accuracy in predicting the protoword of a given cognate set, surpassing existing state-of-the-art results for this task and showing that computational methods can be very useful in assisting linguists with protoword reconstruction.

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ChatGPT Doesn’t Trust Chargers Fans: Guardrail Sensitivity in Context
Victoria R Li | Yida Chen | Naomi Saphra

While the biases of language models in production are extensively documented, the biases of their guardrails have been neglected. This paper studies how contextual information about the user influences the likelihood of an LLM to refuse to execute a request. By generating user biographies that offer ideological and demographic information, we find a number of biases in guardrail sensitivity on GPT-3.5. Younger, female, and Asian-American personas are more likely to trigger a refusal guardrail when requesting censored or illegal information. Guardrails are also sycophantic, refusing to comply with requests for a political position the user is likely to disagree with. We find that certain identity groups and seemingly innocuous information, e.g., sports fandom, can elicit changes in guardrail sensitivity similar to direct statements of political ideology. For each demographic category and even for American football team fandom, we find that ChatGPT appears to infer a likely political ideology and modify guardrail behavior accordingly.

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Personas as a Way to Model Truthfulness in Language Models
Nitish Joshi | Javier Rando | Abulhair Saparov | Najoung Kim | He He

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of text from the internet, which contains both factual and misleading information about the world. While unintuitive from a classic view of LMs, recent work has shown that the truth value of a statement can be elicited from the model’s representations. This paper presents an explanation for why LMs appear to know the truth despite not being trained with truth labels. We hypothesize that the pretraining data is generated by groups of (un)truthful agents whose outputs share common features, and they form a (un)truthful persona. By training on this data, LMs can infer and represent the persona in its activation space. This allows the model to separate truth from falsehoods and controls the truthfulness of its generation. We show evidence for the persona hypothesis via two observations: (1) we can probe whether a model’s answer will be truthful before it is generated; (2) finetuning a model on a set of facts improves its truthfulness on unseen topics. Next, using arithmetics as a synthetic environment, we show that structures of the pretraining data are crucial for the model to infer the truthful persona. Overall, our findings suggest that models can exploit hierarchical structures in the data to learn abstract concepts like truthfulness.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing documents, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has shown itself to be a powerful method for improving accuracy without sacrificing fluency. However, not all information can be retrieved from text. We propose an approach that uses the analysis of structured data to generate fact sets that are used to guide generation in much the same way that retrieved documents are used in RAG. This analytics augmented generation (AAG) approach supports the ability to utilize standard analytic techniques to generate facts that are then converted to text and passed to an LLM. We present a neurosymbolic platform, Satyrn, that leverages AAG to produce accurate, fluent, and coherent reports grounded in large scale databases. In our experiments, we find that Satyrn generates reports in which over 86% of claims are accurate while maintaining high levels of fluency and coherence, even when using smaller language models such as Mistral-7B, as compared to GPT-4 Code Interpreter in which just 57% of claims are accurate.

In this paper, we present EH-MAM (Easy-to-Hard adaptive Masked Acoustic Modeling), a novel self-supervised learning approach for speech representation learning. In contrast to the prior methods that use random masking schemes for Masked Acoustic Modeling (MAM), we introduce a novel selective and adaptive masking strategy. Specifically, during SSL training, we progressively introduce harder regions to the model for reconstruction. Our approach automatically selects hard regions and is built on the observation that the reconstruction loss of individual frames in MAM can provide natural signals to judge the difficulty of solving the MAM pre-text task for that frame. To identify these hard regions, we employ a teacher model that first predicts the frame-wise losses and then decides which frames to mask. By learning to create challenging problems, such as identifying harder frames and solving them simultaneously, the model is able to learn more effective representations and thereby acquire a more comprehensive understanding of the speech. Quantitatively, EH-MAM outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines across various low-resource speech recognition and SUPERB benchmarks by 5%-10%. Additionally, we conduct a thorough analysis to show that the regions masked by EH-MAM effectively capture useful context across speech frames.

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EPO: Hierarchical LLM Agents with Environment Preference Optimization
Qi Zhao | Haotian Fu | Chen Sun | George Konidaris

Long-horizon decision-making tasks present significant challenges for LLM-based agents due to the need for extensive planning over multiple steps. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical framework that decomposes complex tasks into manageable subgoals, utilizing separate LLMs for subgoal prediction and low-level action generation. To address the challenge of creating training signals for unannotated datasets, we develop a reward model that leverages multimodal environment feedback to automatically generate reward signals. We introduce Environment Preference Optimization (EPO), a novel method that generates preference signals from the environment’s feedback and uses them to train LLM-based agents. Extensive experiments on ALFRED demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our framework, achieving first place on the ALFRED public leaderboard and showcasing its potential to improve long-horizon decision-making in diverse environments.

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Detection and Measurement of Syntactic Templates in Generated Text
Chantal Shaib | Yanai Elazar | Junyi Jessy Li | Byron C Wallace

The diversity of text can be measured beyond word-level features, however existing diversity evaluation focuses primarily on word-level features. Here we propose a method for evaluating diversity over syntactic features to characterize general repetition in models, beyond frequent n-grams. Specifically, we define syntactic templates (e.g., strings comprising parts-of-speech) and show that models tend to produce templated text in downstream tasks at a higher rate than what is found in human-reference textsWe find that most (76%) templates in model-generated text can be found in pre-training data (compared to only 35% of human-authored text), and are not overwritten during fine-tuning or alignment processes such as RLHF. The connection between templates in generated text and the pre-training data allows us to analyze syntactic templates in models where we do not have the pre-training data.We also find that templates as features are able to differentiate between models, tasks, and domains, and are useful for qualitatively evaluating common model constructions.Finally, we demonstrate the use of templates as a useful tool for analyzing style memorization of training data in LLMs.

Smaller-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often claim to perform on par with larger models in general-domain visual grounding and question-answering benchmarks while offering advantages in computational efficiency and storage. However, their ability to handle rare objects, which fall into the long tail of data distributions, is less understood. To rigorously evaluate this aspect, we introduce the “Uncontextualized Uncommon Objects” (UOUO) benchmark. This benchmark focuses on systematically testing VLMs with both large and small parameter counts on rare and specialized objects. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that while smaller VLMs maintain competitive performance on common datasets, they significantly underperform on tasks involving uncommon objects. We also propose an advanced, scalable pipeline for data collection and cleaning, ensuring the UOUO benchmark provides high-quality, challenging instances. These findings highlight the need to consider long-tail distributions when assessing the true capabilities of VLMs. Code and project details for UOUO can be found at https://zoezheng126.github.io/UOUO-Website/.

In this work, we optimize speculative sampling for parallel hardware accelerators to improve sampling speed. We notice that substantial portions of the intermediate matrices necessary for speculative sampling can be computed concurrently. This allows us to distribute the workload across multiple GPU threads, enabling simultaneous operations on matrix segments within thread blocks. This results in profiling time improvements ranging from 6% to 13% relative to the baseline implementation, without compromising accuracy. To further accelerate speculative sampling, probability distributions parameterized by softmax are approximated by sigmoid. This approximation approach results in significantly greater relative improvements in profiling time, ranging from 37% to 94%, with a minor decline in accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on both automatic speech recognition and summarization tasks to validate the effectiveness of our optimization methods.

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Personalized Pieces: Efficient Personalized Large Language Models through Collaborative Efforts
Zhaoxuan Tan | Zheyuan Liu | Meng Jiang

Personalized large language models (LLMs) aim to tailor interactions, content, and recommendations to individual user preferences. While parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods excel in performance and generalization, they are costly and limit communal benefits when used individually. To this end, we introduce Personalized Pieces (Per-Pcs), a framework that allows users to safely share and assemble personalized PEFT efficiently with collaborative efforts. Per-Pcs involves selecting sharers, breaking their PEFT into pieces, and training gates for each piece. These pieces are added to a pool, from which target users can select and assemble personalized PEFT using their history data. This approach preserves privacy and enables fine-grained user modeling without excessive storage and computation demands. Experimental results show Per-Pcs outperforms non-personalized and PEFT retrieval baselines, offering performance comparable to OPPU with significantly lower resource use across six tasks. Further analysis highlights Per-Pcs’s robustness concerning sharer count and selection strategy, pieces sharing ratio, and scalability in computation time and storage space. Per-Pcs’s modularity promotes safe sharing, making LLM personalization more efficient, effective, and widely accessible through collaborative efforts.

Personalization in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly important, aiming to align the LLMs’ interactions, content, and recommendations with individual user preferences. Recent advances have highlighted effective prompt design by enriching user queries with non-parametric knowledge through behavior history retrieval and textual profiles. However, these methods faced limitations due to a lack of model ownership, resulting in constrained customization and privacy issues, and often failed to capture complex, dynamic user behavior patterns. To address these shortcomings, we introduce One PEFT Per User (OPPU), employing personalized parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules to store user-specific behavior patterns and preferences. By plugging in personal PEFT parameters, users can own and use their LLMs individually. OPPU integrates parametric user knowledge in the personal PEFT parameters with non-parametric knowledge from retrieval and profiles, adapting LLMs to user behavior shifts. Experimental results demonstrate that OPPU significantly outperforms existing prompt-based methods across seven diverse tasks in the LaMP benchmark. Further studies reveal OPPU’s enhanced capabilities in handling user behavior shifts, modeling users at different activity levels, maintaining robustness across various user history formats, and displaying versatility with different PEFT methods.

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Unifying Multimodal Retrieval via Document Screenshot Embedding
Xueguang Ma | Sheng-Chieh Lin | Minghan Li | Wenhu Chen | Jimmy Lin

In the real world, documents are organized in different formats and varied modalities. Traditional retrieval pipelines require tailored document parsing techniques and content extraction modules to prepare input for indexing. This process is tedious, prone to errors, and has information loss. To this end, we propose Document Screenshot Embedding (DSE), a novel retrieval paradigm that regards document screenshots as a unified input format, which does not require any content extraction preprocess and preserves all the information in a document (e.g., text, image and layout). DSE leverages a large vision-language model to directly encode document screenshots into dense representations for retrieval. To evaluate our method, we first craft the dataset of Wiki-SS, a 1.3M Wikipedia web page screenshots as the corpus to answer the questions from the Natural Questions dataset. In such a text-intensive document retrieval setting, DSE shows competitive effectiveness compared to other text retrieval methods relying on parsing. For example, DSE outperforms BM25 by 17 points in top-1 retrieval accuracy. Additionally, in a mixed-modality task of slide retrieval, DSE significantly outperforms OCR text retrieval methods by over 15 points in nDCG@10. These experiments show that DSE is an effective document retrieval paradigm for diverse types of documents. Model checkpoints, code, and Wiki-SS collection will be released.

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Neuron Specialization: Leveraging Intrinsic Task Modularity for Multilingual Machine Translation
Shaomu Tan | Di Wu | Christof Monz

Training a unified multilingual model promotes knowledge transfer but inevitably introduces negative interference. Language-specific modeling methods show promise in reducing interference. However, they often rely on heuristics to distribute capacity and struggle to foster cross-lingual transfer via isolated modules. In this paper, we explore intrinsic task modularity within multilingual networks and leverage these observations to circumvent interference under multilingual translation. We show that neurons in the feed-forward layers tend to be activated in a language-specific manner. Meanwhile, these specialized neurons exhibit structural overlaps that reflect language proximity, which progress across layers. Based on these findings, we propose Neuron Specialization, an approach that identifies specialized neurons to modularize feed-forward layers and then continuously updates them through sparse networks. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves consistent performance gains over strong baselines with additional analyses demonstrating reduced interference and increased knowledge transfer.

We audit how hallucination in large language models (LLMs) is characterized in peer-reviewed literature, using a critical examination of 103 publications across NLP research. Through the examination of the literature, we identify a lack of agreement with the term ‘hallucination’ in the field of NLP. Additionally, to compliment our audit, we conduct a survey with 171 practitioners from the field of NLP and AI to capture varying perspectives on hallucination. Our analysis calls for the necessity of explicit definitions and frameworks outlining hallucination within NLP, highlighting potential challenges, and our survey inputs provide a thematic understanding of the influence and ramifications of hallucination in society.

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Discovering Knowledge-Critical Subnetworks in Pretrained Language Models
Deniz Bayazit | Negar Foroutan | Zeming Chen | Gail Weiss | Antoine Bosselut

Pretrained language models (LMs) encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters. However, localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained language models contain various *knowledge-critical* subnetworks: particular sparse computational subgraphs that can, if removed, precisely suppress specific knowledge the model has memorized. We propose a multi-objective differentiable masking scheme that can be applied to both weights and neurons to discover such subnetworks and show that we can use them to precisely remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the behavior of the original model. We demonstrate our method on multiple GPT2 variants, uncovering highly sparse subnetworks (98%+ sparsity) that are critical for expressing specific collections of relational knowledge. When these subnetworks are removed, the remaining network maintains most of its initial abilities but struggles to represent the suppressed knowledge.

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Reconstruct Your Previous Conversations! Comprehensively Investigating Privacy Leakage Risks in Conversations with GPT Models
Junjie Chu | Zeyang Sha | Michael Backes | Yang Zhang

Significant advancements have recently been made in large language models, represented by GPT models.Users frequently have multi-round private conversations with cloud-hosted GPT models for task optimization.Yet, this operational paradigm introduces additional attack surfaces, particularly in custom GPTs and hijacked chat sessions.In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet potent Conversation Reconstruction Attack.This attack targets the contents of previous conversations between GPT models and benign users, i.e., the benign users’ input contents during their interaction with GPT models.The adversary could induce GPT models to leak such contents by querying them with designed malicious prompts.Our comprehensive examination of privacy risks during the interactions with GPT models under this attack reveals GPT-4’s considerable resilience.We present two advanced attacks targeting improved reconstruction of past conversations, demonstrating significant privacy leakage across all models under these advanced techniques.Evaluating various defense mechanisms, we find them ineffective against these attacks.Our findings highlight the ease with which privacy can be compromised in interactions with GPT models, urging the community to safeguard against potential abuses of these models’ capabilities.

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Right for Right Reasons: Large Language Models for Verifiable Commonsense Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Armin Toroghi | Willis Guo | Mohammad Mahdi Abdollah Pour | Scott Sanner

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) methods seek to answer Natural Language questions using the relational information stored in Knowledge Graphs (KGs). With the recent advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their remarkable reasoning abilities, there is a growing trend to leverage them for KGQA. However, existing methodologies have only focused on answering factual questions, e.g., *“In which city was Silvio Berlusconi’s first wife born?”*, leaving questions involving commonsense reasoning that real-world users may pose more often, e.g., *“Do I need separate visas to see the Venus of Willendorf and attend the Olympics this summer?”* unaddressed. In this work, we first observe that existing LLM-based methods for KGQA struggle with hallucination on such questions, especially on queries targeting long-tail entities (e.g., non-mainstream and recent entities), thus hindering their applicability in real-world applications especially since their reasoning processes are not easily verifiable. In response, we propose Right for Right Reasons (R³), a commonsense KGQA methodology that allows for a verifiable reasoning procedure by axiomatically surfacing intrinsic commonsense knowledge of LLMs and grounding every factual reasoning step on KG triples. Through experimental evaluations across three different tasks—question answering, claim verification, and preference matching—our findings showcase R³ as a superior approach, outperforming existing methodologies and notably reducing instances of hallucination and reasoning errors.

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Verifiable, Debuggable, and Repairable Commonsense Logical Reasoning via LLM-based Theory Resolution
Armin Toroghi | Willis Guo | Ali Pesaranghader | Scott Sanner

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLM) have led to substantial interest in their application to commonsense reasoning tasks. Despite their potential, LLMs are susceptible to reasoning errors and hallucinations that may be harmful in use cases where accurate reasoning is critical. This challenge underscores the need for verifiable, debuggable, and repairable LLM reasoning. Recent works have made progress toward verifiable reasoning with LLMs by using them as either (i) a reasoner over an axiomatic knowledge base, or (ii) a semantic parser for use in existing logical inference systems. However, both settings are unable to extract commonsense axioms from the LLM that are not already formalized in the knowledge base, and also lack a reliable method to repair missed commonsense inferences. In this work, we present LLM-TRes, a logical reasoning framework based on the notion of “theory resolution” that allows for seamless integration of the commonsense knowledge from LLMs with a verifiable logical reasoning framework that mitigates hallucinations and facilitates debugging of the reasoning procedure as well as repair. We crucially prove that repaired axioms are theoretically guaranteed to be given precedence over flawed ones in our theory resolution inference process. We conclude by evaluating on three diverse language-based reasoning tasks—preference reasoning, deductive reasoning, and causal commonsense reasoning—and demonstrate the superior performance of LLM-TRes vs. state-of-the-art LLM-based reasoning methods in terms of both accuracy and reasoning correctness.

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Understanding and Mitigating Language Confusion in LLMs
Kelly Marchisio | Wei-Yin Ko | Alexandre Berard | Théo Dehaze | Sebastian Ruder

We investigate a surprising limitation of LLMs: their inability to consistently generate text in a user’s desired language. We create the Language Confusion Benchmark (LCB) to evaluate such failures, covering 15 typologically diverse languages with existing and newly-created English and multilingual prompts. We evaluate a range of LLMs on monolingual and cross-lingual generation reflecting practical use cases, finding that Llama Instruct and Mistral models exhibit high degrees of language confusion and even the strongest models fail to consistently respond in the correct language. We observe that base and English-centric instruct models are more prone to language confusion, which is aggravated by complex prompts and high sampling temperatures. We find that language confusion can be partially mitigated via few-shot prompting, multilingual SFT and preference tuning. We release our language confusion benchmark, which serves as a first layer of efficient, scalable multilingual evaluation.

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Can Large Language Models Learn Independent Causal Mechanisms?
Gael Gendron | Bao Trung Nguyen | Alex Yuxuan Peng | Michael Witbrock | Gillian Dobbie

Despite impressive performance on language modelling and complex reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) fall short on the same tasks in uncommon settings or with distribution shifts, exhibiting a lack of generalisation ability. By contrast, systems such as causal models, that learn abstract variables and causal relationships, can demonstrate increased robustness against changes in the distribution. One reason for this success is the existence and use of Independent Causal Mechanisms (ICMs) representing high-level concepts that only sparsely interact. In this work, we apply two concepts from causality to learn ICMs within LLMs. We develop a new LLM architecture composed of multiple sparsely interacting language modelling modules. We show that such causal constraints can improve out-of-distribution performance on abstract and causal reasoning tasks. We also investigate the level of independence and domain specialisation and show that LLMs rely on pre-trained partially domain-invariant mechanisms resilient to fine-tuning.

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MirrorStories: Reflecting Diversity through Personalized Narrative Generation with Large Language Models
Sarfaroz Yunusov | Hamza Sidat | Ali Emami

This study explores the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in creating personalized “mirror stories” that reflect and resonate with individual readers’ identities, addressing the significant lack of diversity in literature. We present MirrorStories, a corpus of 1,500 personalized short stories generated by integrating elements such as name, gender, age, ethnicity, reader interest, and story moral. We demonstrate that LLMs can effectively incorporate diverse identity elements into narratives, with human evaluators identifying personalized elements in the stories with high accuracy. Through a comprehensive evaluation involving 26 diverse human judges, we compare the effectiveness of MirrorStories against generic narratives. We find that personalized LLM-generated stories not only outscore generic human-written and LLM-generated ones across all metrics of engagement (with average ratings of 4.22 versus 3.37 on a 5-point scale), but also achieve higher textual diversity while preserving the intended moral. We also provide analyses that include bias assessments and a study on the potential for integrating images into personalized stories.

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InterIntent: Investigating Social Intelligence of LLMs via Intention Understanding in an Interactive Game Context
Ziyi Liu | Abhishek Anand | Pei Zhou | Jen-tse Huang | Jieyu Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to mimic human social intelligence. However, most studies focus on simplistic and static self-report or performance-based tests, which limits the depth and validity of the analysis. In this paper, we developed a novel framework, InterIntent, to assess LLMs’ social intelligence by mapping their ability to understand and manage intentions in a game setting. We focus on four dimensions of social intelligence: situational awareness, self-regulation, self-awareness, and theory of mind. Each dimension is linked to a specific game task: intention selection, intention following, intention summarization, and intention guessing. Our findings indicate that while LLMs exhibit high proficiency in selecting intentions, achieving an accuracy of 88%, their ability to infer the intentions of others is significantly weaker, trailing human performance by 20%. Additionally, game performance correlates with intention understanding, highlighting the importance of the four components towards success in this game. These findings underline the crucial role of intention understanding in evaluating LLMs’ social intelligence and highlight the potential of using social deduction games as a complex testbed to enhance LLM evaluation. InterIntent contributes a structured approach to bridging the evaluation gap in social intelligence within multiplayer LLM-based games.

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Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia
Farhan Samir | Chan Young Park | Anjalie Field | Vered Shwartz | Yulia Tsvetkov

To explain social phenomena and identify systematic biases, much research in computational social science focuses on comparative text analyses. These studies often rely on coarse corpus-level statistics or local word-level analyses, mainly in English. We introduce the InfoGap method—an efficient and reliable approach to locating information gaps and inconsistencies in articles at the fact level, across languages. We evaluate InfoGap by analyzing LGBT people’s portrayals, across 2.7K biography pages on English, Russian, and French Wikipedias. We find large discrepancies in factual coverage across the languages. Moreover, our analysis reveals that biographical facts carrying negative connotations are more likely to be highlighted in Russian Wikipedia. Crucially, InfoGap both facilitates large scale analyses, and pinpoints local document- and fact-level information gaps, laying a new foundation for targeted and nuanced comparative language analysis at scale.

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From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models
Mehar Bhatia | Sahithya Ravi | Aditya Chinchure | EunJeong Hwang | Vered Shwartz

Despite recent advancements in vision-language models, their performance remains suboptimal on images from non-western cultures due to underrepresentation in training datasets. Various benchmarks have been proposed to test models’ cultural inclusivity. Still, they have limited coverage of cultures and do not adequately assess cultural diversity across universal and culture-specific local concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce the GlobalRG benchmark, comprising two challenging tasks: retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding. The former task entails retrieving culturally diverse images for universal concepts from 50 countries, while the latter aims at grounding culture-specific concepts within images from 15 countries. Our evaluation across a wide range of models reveals that the performance varies significantly across cultures – underscoring the necessity for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models.

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Dynamic Multi-Reward Weighting for Multi-Style Controllable Generation
Karin De Langis | Ryan Koo | Dongyeop Kang

Textual style expresses a diverse set of information, including interpersonal dynamics (e.g., formality) and the author’s emotions or attitudes (e.g., disgust). An open question is how language models can be explicitly controlled so that they weave together target styles when generating text: for example, to produce text that is both negative and non-toxic. One approach to such controlled generation is multi-objective reinforcement learning (RL), but how to best combine multiple objectives in a reward function is an open question. In this paper, we investigate various formulations of multi-style reward formulations, including calibrated outputs from discriminators and dynamic weighting by discriminator gradient magnitudes. We find that our proposed dynamic weighting outperforms static weighting approaches with respect style control while maintaining linguistic quality, and we explore its effectiveness in 2- and 3-style control.

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MMNeuron: Discovering Neuron-Level Domain-Specific Interpretation in Multimodal Large Language Model
Jiahao Huo | Yibo Yan | Boren Hu | Yutao Yue | Xuming Hu

Projecting visual features into word embedding space has become a significant fusion strategy adopted by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, its internal mechanisms have yet to be explored. Inspired by multilingual research, we identify domain-specific neurons in multimodal large language models. Specifically, we investigate the distribution of domain-specific neurons and the mechanism of how MLLMs process features from diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage framework for language model modules in MLLMs when handling projected image features, and verify this hypothesis using logit lens. Extensive experiments indicate that while current MLLMs exhibit Visual Question Answering (VQA) capability, they may not fully utilize domain-specific information. Manipulating domain-specific neurons properly will result in a 10% change of accuracy at most, shedding light on the development of cross-domain, all-encompassing MLLMs in the future. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MMNeuron.

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly impacted the field of information extraction, with Language Models (LMs) playing a pivotal role in extracting structured information from unstructured text. Prior works typically represent information extraction as triplet-centric and use classical metrics such as precision and recall for evaluation. We reformulate the task to be entity-centric, enabling the use of diverse metrics that can provide more insights from various perspectives. We contribute to the field by introducing Structured Entity Extraction and proposing the Approximate Entity Set OverlaP (AESOP) metric, designed to appropriately assess model performance. Later, we introduce a new Multistage Structured Entity Extraction (MuSEE) model that harnesses the power of LMs for enhanced effectiveness and efficiency by decomposing the extraction task into multiple stages. Quantitative and human side-by-side evaluations confirm that our model outperforms baselines, offering promising directions for future advancements in structured entity extraction. Our source code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/Structured-Entity-Extraction.

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Efficient LLM Comparative Assessment: A Product of Experts Framework for Pairwise Comparisons
Adian Liusie | Vatsal Raina | Yassir Fathullah | Mark Gales

LLM-as-a-judge approaches are a practical and effective way of assessing a range of text tasks. However, when using pairwise comparisons to rank a set of candidates, the computational cost scales quadratically with the number of candidates, which has practical limitations. This paper introduces a Product of Expert (PoE) framework for efficient LLM Comparative Assessment. Here individual comparisons are considered experts that provide information on a pair’s score difference. The PoE framework combines the information from these experts to yield an expression that can be maximized with respect to the underlying set of candidates, and is highly flexible where any form of expert can be assumed. When Gaussian experts are used one can derive simple closed-form solutions for the optimal candidate ranking, as well as expressions for selecting which comparisons should be made to maximize the probability of this ranking. Our approach enables efficient comparative assessment, where by using only a small subset of the possible comparisons, one can generate score predictions that correlate well with human judgements. We evaluate the approach on multiple NLG tasks and demonstrate that our framework can yield considerable computational savings when performing pairwise comparative assessment. With many candidate texts, using as few as 2% of comparisons the PoE solution can achieve similar performance to when all comparisons are used.

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A Survey of AMR Applications
Shira Wein | Juri Opitz

In the ten years since the development of the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) formalism, substantial progress has been made on AMR-related tasks such as parsing and alignment. Still, the engineering applications of AMR are not fully understood. In this survey, we categorize and characterize more than 100 papers which use AMR for downstream tasks— the first survey of this kind for AMR. Specifically, we highlight (1) the range of applications for which AMR has been harnessed, and (2) the techniques for incorporating AMR into those applications. We also detect broader AMR engineering patterns and outline areas of future work that seem ripe for AMR incorporation. We hope that this survey will be useful to those interested in using AMR and that it sparks discussion on the role of symbolic representations in the age of neural-focused NLP research.

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Beyond Embeddings: The Promise of Visual Table in Visual Reasoning
Yiwu Zhong | Zi-Yuan Hu | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang

Visual representation learning has been a cornerstone in computer vision, involving typical forms such as visual embeddings, structural symbols, and text-based representations. Despite the success of CLIP-type visual embeddings, they often lack access to world knowledge critical for visual reasoning. In this work, we propose Visual Table, a novel form of visual representation tailored for visual reasoning. Visual tables are constructed as hierarchical descriptions of visual scenes, featuring a scene description and multiple object-centric descriptions covering categories, attributes, and knowledge. Thanks to the structural and textual formats, visual tables offer unique properties over mere visual embeddings, such as explainability and controllable editing. Furthermore, they deliver instance-level world knowledge and detailed attributes that are essential for visual reasoning. To create visual tables, we develop a generator trained on the dataset with collected, small-scale annotations. Extensive results on 11 visual reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that the generated visual tables significantly outperform previous structural and text-based representations. Moreover, they consistently enhance state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models across diverse benchmarks, showcasing their potential for advancing visual reasoning tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/Visual-Table.

Caregiver strategy classification in pediatric rehabilitation contexts is strongly motivated by real-world clinical constraints but highly under-resourced and seldom studied in natural language processing settings. We introduce a large dataset of 4,037 caregiver strategies in this setting, a five-fold increase over the nearest contemporary dataset. These strategies are manually categorized into clinically established constructs with high agreement (𝜅=0.68-0.89). We also propose two techniques to further address identified data constraints. First, we manually supplement target task data with publicly relevant data from online child health forums. Next, we propose a novel data augmentation technique to generate synthetic caregiver strategies with high downstream task utility. Extensive experiments showcase the quality of our dataset. They also establish evidence that both the publicly available data and the synthetic strategies result in large performance gains, with relative F₁ increases of 22.6% and 50.9%, respectively.

Ensuring the security of released large language models (LLMs) poses a significant dilemma, as existing mechanisms either compromise ownership rights or raise data privacy concerns. To address this dilemma, we introduce TaylorMLP to protect the ownership of released LLMs and prevent their abuse. Specifically, TaylorMLP preserves the ownership of LLMs by transforming the weights of LLMs into parameters of Taylor-series. Instead of releasing the original weights, developers can release the Taylor-series parameters with users, thereby ensuring the security of LLMs. Moreover, TaylorMLP can prevent abuse of LLMs by adjusting the generation speed. It can induce low-speed token generation for the protected LLMs by increasing the terms in the Taylor-series. This intentional delay helps LLM developers prevent potential large-scale unauthorized uses of their models. Empirical experiments across five datasets and three LLM architectures demonstrate that TaylorMLP induces over increase in latency, producing the tokens precisely matched with original LLMs. Subsequent defensive experiments further confirm that TaylorMLP effectively prevents users from reconstructing the weight values based on downstream datasets.

Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs). Previous works employ pre-trained TKG embeddings or graph neural networks to incorporate the knowledge of TKGs. However, these methods fail to fully understand the complex semantic information of time constraints in questions.In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance in knowledge graph reasoning, unifying both semantic understanding and structural reasoning. To further enhance LLMs’ temporal reasoning ability, this paper aims to integrate relevant temporal knowledge from TKGs into LLMs through a Time-aware Retrieve-Rewrite-Retrieve-Rerank framework, which we named TimeR⁴.Specifically, to reduce temporal hallucination in LLMs, we propose a retrieve-rewrite module to rewrite questions using background knowledge stored in the TKGs, thereby acquiring explicit time constraints. Then, we implement a retrieve-rerank module aimed at retrieving semantically and temporally relevant facts from the TKGs and reranking them according to the temporal constraints.To achieve this, we fine-tune a retriever using the contrastive time-aware learning framework.Our approach achieves great improvements, with relative gains of 47.8% and 22.5% on two datasets, underscoring its effectiveness in boosting the temporal reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/qianxinying/TimeR4.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but also a concerning tendency to hallucinate. This paper presents RefChecker, a framework that introduces claim-triplets to represent claims in LLM responses, aiming to detect fine-grained hallucinations. In RefChecker, an extractor generates claim-triplets from a response, which are then evaluated by a checker against a reference. We delineate three task settings: Zero, Noisy and Accurate Context, to reflect various real-world use cases. We curated a benchmark spanning various NLP tasks and annotated 11k claim-triplets from 2.1k responses by seven LLMs. RefChecker supports both proprietary and open-source models as the extractor and checker. Experiments demonstrate that claim-triplets enable superior hallucination detection, compared to other granularities such as response, sentence and sub-sentence level claims. RefChecker outperforms prior methods by 18.2 to 27.2 points on our benchmark and the checking results of RefChecker are strongly aligned with human judgments.

Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous works leveraging multilingualism in LLMs primarily focus on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. Given that multiple languages are a compensation for the losses caused by a single language’s limitations, it’s a natural next step to enrich the model’s learning context through the integration of the original input with its multiple translations. In this paper, we start by revealing that LLMs learn from parallel multilingual input (PMI). Our comprehensive evaluation shows that PMI enhances the model’s comprehension of the input, achieving superior performance than conventional in-context learning (ICL). Furthermore, to explore how multilingual processing affects prediction, we examine the activated neurons in LLMs. Surprisingly, involving more languages in the input activates fewer neurons, leading to more focused and effective neural activation patterns. Also, this neural reaction coincidently mirrors the neuroscience insight about synaptic pruning, highlighting a similarity between artificial and biological ‘brains’.

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Automatic Instruction Evolving for Large Language Models
Weihao Zeng | Can Xu | Yingxiu Zhao | Jian-Guang Lou | Weizhu Chen

Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models with Evol-Instruct has achieved encouraging results across a wide range of tasks. However, designing effective evolving methods for instruction evolution requires substantial human expertise. This paper proposes Auto Evol-Instruct, an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets using large language models without any human effort. The framework automatically analyzes and summarizes suitable evolutionary strategies for the given instruction data and iteratively improves the evolving method based on issues exposed during the instruction evolution process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the best method optimized by Auto Evol-Instruct outperforms human-designed methods on various benchmarks, including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, and HumanEval.

The era of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises new demands for automatic evaluation metrics, which should be adaptable to various application scenarios while maintaining low cost and effectiveness. Traditional metrics for automatic text evaluation are often tailored to specific scenarios, while LLM-based evaluation metrics are costly, requiring fine-tuning or rely heavily on the generation capabilities of LLMs. Besides, previous LLM-based metrics ignore the fact that, within the space of LLM representations, there exist direction vectors that indicate the estimation of text quality. To this end, we introduce RepEval, a metric that leverages the projection of LLM representations for evaluation. Through simple prompt modifications, RepEval can easily transition to various tasks, requiring only minimal sample pairs for direction vector construction. Results on fourteen datasets across two evaluation tasks demonstrate the high effectiveness of our method, which exhibits a higher correlation with human judgments than previous methods, even in complex evaluation scenarios involving pair-wise selection under nuanced aspects. Our work underscores the richness of information regarding text quality embedded within LLM representations, offering insights for the development of new metrics.

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Generative Models for Automatic Medical Decision Rule Extraction from Text
Yuxin He | Buzhou Tang | Xiaoling Wang

Medical decision rules play a key role in many clinical decision support systems (CDSS). However, these rules are conventionally constructed by medical experts, which is expensive and hard to scale up. In this study, we explore the automatic extraction of medical decision rules from text, leading to a solution to construct large-scale medical decision rules. We adopt a formulation of medical decision rules as binary trees consisting of condition/decision nodes. Such trees are referred to as medical decision trees and we introduce several generative models to extract them from text. The proposed models inherit the merit of two categories of successful natural language generation frameworks, i.e., sequence-to-sequence generation and autoregressive generation. To unleash the potential of pretrained language models, we design three styles of linearization (natural language, augmented natural language and JSON code), acting as the target sequence for our models. Our final system achieves 67% tree accuracy on a comprehensive Chinese benchmark, outperforming state-of-the-art baseline by 12%. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of generative models on explicitly modeling structural decision-making roadmaps, and shows great potential to boost the development of CDSS and explainable AI. Our code will be open-source upon acceptance.

Seeking answers effectively for long videos is essential to build video question answering (videoQA) systems. Previous methods adaptively select frames and regions from long videos to save computations. However, this fails to reason over the whole sequence of video, leading to sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, we introduce a state space layer (SSL) into multi-modal Transformer to efficiently integrate global semantics of the video, which mitigates the video information loss caused by frame and region selection modules. Our SSL includes a gating unit to enable controllability over the flow of global semantics into visual representations. To further enhance the controllability, we introduce a cross-modal compositional congruence objective to encourage global semantics aligned with the question. To rigorously evaluate long-form videoQA capacity, we construct two new benchmarks Ego-QA and MAD-QA featuring videos of considerably long length, i.e. 17.5 minutes and 1.9 hours, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework on these new as well as existing datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. Although there are diverse jailbreak attack strategies, there is no unified understanding on why some methods succeed and others fail. This paper explores the behavior of harmful and harmless prompts in the LLM’s representation space to investigate the intrinsic properties of successful jailbreak attacks. We hypothesize that successful attacks share some similar properties: They are effective in moving the representation of the harmful prompt towards the direction to the harmless prompts. We leverage hidden representations into the objective of existing jailbreak attacks to move the attacks along the acceptance direction, and conduct experiments to validate the above hypothesis using the proposed objective. We hope this study provides new insights into understanding how LLMs understand harmfulness information.

Legal case retrieval (LCR) aims to provide similar cases as references for a given fact description. This task is crucial for promoting consistent judgments in similar cases, effectively enhancing judicial fairness and improving work efficiency for judges. However, existing works face two main challenges for real-world applications: existing works mainly focus on case-to-case retrieval using lengthy queries, which does not match real-world scenarios; and the limited data scale, with current datasets containing only hundreds of queries, is insufficient to satisfy the training requirements of existing data-hungry neural models. To address these issues, we introduce an automated method to construct synthetic query-candidate pairs and build the largest LCR dataset to date, LEAD, which is hundreds of times larger than existing datasets. This data construction method can provide ample training signals for LCR models. Experimental results demonstrate that model training with our constructed data can achieve state-of-the-art results on two widely-used LCR benchmarks. Besides, the construction method can also be applied to civil cases and achieve promising results. The data and codes can be found in https://github.com/thunlp/LEAD.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, there are significant differences in the knowledge and abilities required for different tasks. Therefore, it is important to understand whether the same LLM processes different tasks in the same way. Are there specific neurons in a LLM for different tasks? Inspired by neuroscience, this paper pioneers the exploration of whether distinct neurons are activated when a LLM handles different tasks. Compared with current research exploring the neurons of language and knowledge, task-specific neurons present a greater challenge due to their abstractness, diversity, and complexity. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST). CGVST identifies task-specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, thereby eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. Compared to traditional neuron localization methods, our approach can more effectively identify task-specific neurons. We conduct experiments across eight different public tasks. Experiments involving the inhibition and amplification of identified neurons demonstrate that our method can accurately locate task-specific neurons.

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Liar, Liar, Logical Mire: A Benchmark for Suppositional Reasoning in Large Language Models
Philipp Mondorf | Barbara Plank

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Advancing Test-Time Adaptation in Wild Acoustic Test Settings
Hongfu Liu | Hengguan Huang | Ye Wang

Acoustic foundation models, fine-tuned for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), suffer from performance degradation in wild acoustic test settings when deployed in real-world scenarios. Stabilizing online Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) under these conditions remains an open and unexplored question. Existing wild vision TTA methods often fail to handle speech data effectively due to the unique characteristics of high-entropy speech frames, which are unreliably filtered out even when containing crucial semantic content. Furthermore, unlike static vision data, speech signals follow short-term consistency, requiring specialized adaptation strategies. In this work, we propose a novel wild acoustic TTA method tailored for ASR fine-tuned acoustic foundation models. Our method, Confidence-Enhanced Adaptation, performs frame-level adaptation using a confidence-aware weight scheme to avoid filtering out essential information in high-entropy frames. Additionally, we apply consistency regularization during test-time optimization to leverage the inherent short-term consistency of speech signals. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines under various wild acoustic test settings, including Gaussian noise, environmental sounds, accent variations, and sung speech.

We introduce iterative retrieval, a novel framework that empowers retrievers to make iterative decisions through policy optimization. Finding an optimal portfolio of retrieved items is a combinatorial optimization problem, generally considered NP-hard. This approach provides a learned approximation to such a solution, meeting specific task requirements under a given family of large language models (LLMs). We propose a training procedure based on reinforcement learning, incorporating feedback from LLMs. We instantiate an iterative retriever for composing in-context learning (ICL) exemplars and apply it to various semantic parsing tasks that demand synthesized programs as outputs. By adding only 4M additional parameters for state encoding, we convert an off-the-shelf dense retriever into a stateful iterative retriever, outperforming previous methods in selecting ICL exemplars on semantic parsing datasets such as CalFlow, TreeDST, and MTOP. Additionally, the trained iterative retriever generalizes across different inference LLMs beyond the one used during training.

Academic paper search is an essential task for efficient literature discovery and scientific advancement. While dense retrieval has advanced various ad-hoc searches, it often struggles to match the underlying academic concepts between queries and documents, which is critical for paper search. To enable effective academic concept matching for paper search, we propose Taxonomy-guided Semantic Indexing (TaxoIndex) framework. TaxoIndex extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them as a semantic index guided by an academic taxonomy, and then leverages this index as foundational knowledge to identify academic concepts and link queries and documents. As a plug-and-play framework, TaxoIndex can be flexibly employed to enhance existing dense retrievers. Extensive experiments show that TaxoIndex brings significant improvements, even with highly limited training data, and greatly enhances interpretability.

Program of Thoughts (PoT) is an approach characterized by its executable intermediate steps, which ensure the accuracy of the logical calculations in the reasoning process. Currently, PoT primarily uses Python. However, relying solely on a single language may result in suboptimal solutions and overlook the potential benefits of other programming languages. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the programming languages used in PoT and find that no single language consistently delivers optimal performance across all tasks and models. The effectiveness of each language varies depending on the specific scenarios. Inspired by this, we propose a task and model agnostic approach called MultiPoT, which harnesses strength and diversity from various languages. Experimental results reveal that it significantly outperforms Python Self-Consistency. Furthermore, it achieves comparable or superior performance compared to the best monolingual PoT in almost all tasks across all models. In particular, MultiPoT achieves more than 4.6% improvement on average on ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo-0701).

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Advancing Adversarial Suffix Transfer Learning on Aligned Large Language Models
Hongfu Liu | Yuxi Xie | Ye Wang | Michael Shieh

Language Language Models (LLMs) face safety concerns due to potential misuse by malicious users. Recent red-teaming efforts have identified adversarial suffixes capable of jailbreaking LLMs using the gradient-based search algorithm Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG). However, GCG struggles with computational inefficiency, limiting further investigations regarding suffix transferability and scalability across models and data. In this work, we bridge the connection between search efficiency and suffix transferability. We propose a two-stage transfer learning framework, DeGCG, which decouples the search process into behavior-agnostic pre-searching and behavior-relevant post-searching. Specifically, we employ direct first target token optimization in pre-searching to facilitate the search process. We apply our approach to cross-model, cross-data, and self-transfer scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce an interleaved variant of our approach, i-DeGCG, which iteratively leverages self-transferability to accelerate the search process. Experiments on HarmBench demonstrate the efficiency of our approach across various models and domains. Notably, our i-DeGCG outperforms the baseline on Llama2-chat-7b with ASRs of 43.9 (+ 22.2) and 39.0 (+19.5) on valid and test sets, respectively. Further analysis on cross-model transfer indicates the pivotal role of first target token optimization in leveraging suffix transferability for efficient searching.