Large language models (LLMs) have an impressive ability to draw on novel information supplied in their context. Yet the mechanisms underlying this contextual grounding remain unknown, especially in situations where contextual information contradicts factual knowledge stored in the parameters, which LLMs also excel at recalling. Favoring the contextual information is critical for retrieval-augmented generation methods, which enrich the context with up-to-date information, hoping that grounding can rectify outdated or noisy stored knowledge. We present a novel method to study grounding abilities using Fakepedia, a novel dataset of counterfactual texts constructed to clash with a model’s internal parametric knowledge. In this study, we introduce Fakepedia, a counterfactual dataset designed to evaluate grounding abilities when the internal parametric knowledge clashes with the contextual information. We benchmark various LLMs with Fakepedia and conduct a causal mediation analysis of LLM components when answering Fakepedia queries, based on our Masked Grouped Causal Tracing (MGCT) method. Through this analysis, we identify distinct computational patterns between grounded and ungrounded responses. We finally demonstrate that distinguishing grounded from ungrounded responses is achievable through computational analysis alone. Our results, together with existing findings about factual recall mechanisms, provide a coherent narrative of how grounding and factual recall mechanisms interact within LLMs.

One of the prominent issues stifling the current generation of large language models is their limited context length. Recent proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude 2 have introduced longer context lengths, 8k/32k and 100k, respectively; however, despite the efforts in the community, most common models, such as LLama-2, have a context length of 4k or less. Unlimiformer (Bertsch et al., 2023) is a recently popular vector-retrieval augmentation method that offloads cross-attention computations to a kNN index. However, its main limitation is incompatibility with decoder-only transformers out of the box. In this work, we explore practical considerations of adapting Unlimiformer to decoder-only transformers and introduce a series of modifications to overcome this limitation. Moreover, we expand the original experimental setup on summarization to include a new task (i.e., free-form Q&A) and an instruction-tuned model (i.e., a custom 6.7B GPT model). Our results showcase the effectiveness of these modifications on summarization, performing on par with a model with 2x the context length. Moreover, we discuss limitations and future directions for free-form Q&A and instruction-tuned models.

Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then we propose two designs to improve the above metric of Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a relative position embedding to explicitly maximize attention resolution. Moreover, we use blockwise causal attention during inference for better resolution. We evaluate different Transformer variants with language modeling. Experimental results show that our model achieves strong performance in both interpolation and extrapolation settings. The code will be available at https://aka.ms/LeX-Transformer.

In this paper, we elaborate upon recipes for building multilingual representation models that are not only competitive with existing state-of-the-art models but are also more parameter efficient, thereby promoting better adoption in resource-constrained scenarios and practical applications. We show that going beyond English-centric bitexts, coupled with a novel sampling strategy aimed at reducing under-utilization of training data, substantially boosts performance across model sizes for both Electra and MLM pre-training objectives. We introduce XY-LENT: X-Y bitext enhanced Language ENcodings using Transformers which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance over 5 cross-lingual tasks within all model size bands, is also competitive across bands. Our XY-LENT XL variant outperforms XLM-R XXL and exhibits competitive performance with mT5 XXL while being 5x and 6x smaller respectively. We then show that our proposed method helps ameliorate the curse of multilinguality, with the XY-LENT XL achieving 99.3% GLUE performance and 98.5% SQuAD 2.0 performance compared to a SoTA English only model in the same size band. We then analyze our models performance on extremely low resource languages and posit that scaling alone may not be sufficient for improving the performance in this scenario

This tutorial will describe various aspects of scaling up language technologies to many of the world’s languages by describing the latest research in Massively Multilingual Language Models (MMLMs). We will cover topics such as data collection, training and fine-tuning of models, Responsible AI issues such as fairness, bias and toxicity, linguistic diversity and evaluation in the context of MMLMs, specifically focusing on issues in non-English and low-resource languages. Further, we will also talk about some of the real-world challenges in deploying these models in language communities in the field. With the performance of MMLMs improving in the zero-shot setting for many languages, it is now becoming feasible to use them for building language technologies in many languages of the world, and this tutorial will provide the computational linguistics community with unique insights from the latest research in multilingual models.

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of a decoding algorithm remain unclear. Previous works only compare decoding algorithms in narrow scenarios, and their findings do not generalize across tasks. We argue that the misalignment between the model’s likelihood and the task-specific notion of utility is the key factor in understanding the effectiveness of decoding algorithms. To structure the discussion, we introduce a taxonomy of misalignment mitigation strategies (MMSs), providing a unifying view of decoding as a tool for alignment. The MMS taxonomy groups decoding algorithms based on their implicit assumptions about likelihood–utility misalignment, yielding general statements about their applicability across tasks. Specifically, by analyzing the correlation between the likelihood and the utility of predictions across a diverse set of tasks, we provide empirical evidence supporting the proposed taxonomy and a set of principles to structure reasoning when choosing a decoding algorithm. Crucially, our analysis is the first to relate likelihood-based decoding algorithms with algorithms that rely on external information, such as value-guided methods and prompting, and covers the most diverse set of tasks to date. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/understanding-decoding.

When tasked with supporting multiple languages for a given problem, two approaches have arisen: training a model for each language with the annotation budget divided equally among them, and training on a high-resource language followed by zero-shot transfer to the remaining languages. In this work, we show that the strategy of joint learning across multiple languages using a single model performs substantially better than the aforementioned alternatives. We also demonstrate that active learning provides additional, complementary benefits. We show that this simple approach enables the model to be data efficient by allowing it to arbitrate its annotation budget to query languages it is less certain on. We illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on a diverse set of tasks: a classification task with 4 languages, a sequence tagging task with 4 languages and a dependency parsing task with 5 languages. Our proposed method, whilst simple, substantially outperforms the other viable alternatives for building a model in a multilingual setting under constrained budgets.

Modern pretrained language models are critical components of NLP pipelines. Yet, they suffer from spurious correlations, poor out-of-domain generalization, and biases.Inspired by recent progress in causal machine learning, in particular the invariant risk minimization (IRM) paradigm, we propose invariant language modeling, a framework for learning invariant representations that generalize better across multiple environments. In particular, we adapt a game-theoretic implementation of IRM (IRM-games) to language models, where the invariance emerges from a specific training schedule in which all the environments compete to optimize their own environment-specific loss by updating subsets of the model in a round-robin fashion.We focused on controlled experiments to precisely demonstrate the ability of our method to (i) remove structured noise, (ii) ignore specific spurious correlations without affecting global performance, and (iii) achieve better out-of-domain generalization.These benefits come with a negligible computational overhead compared to standard training, do not require changing the local loss, and can be applied to any language model. We believe this framework is promising to help mitigate spurious correlations and biases in language models.

A prominent problem faced by conversational agents working with large documents (Eg: email-based assistants) is the frequent presence of information in the document that is irrelevant to the assistant. This in turn makes it harder for the agent to accurately detect intents, extract entities relevant to those intents and perform the desired action. To address this issue we present a neural model for scoping relevant information for the agent from a large document. We show that when used as the first step in a popularly used email-based assistant for helping users schedule meetings, our proposed model helps improve the performance of the intent detection and entity extraction tasks required by the agent for correctly scheduling meetings: across a suite of 6 downstream tasks, by using our proposed method, we observe an average gain of 35% in precision without any drop in recall. Additionally, we demonstrate that the same approach can be used for component level analysis in large documents, such as signature block identification.

State of the art research for date-time entity extraction from text is task agnostic. Consequently, while the methods proposed in literature perform well for generic date-time extraction from texts, they don’t fare as well on task specific date-time entity extraction where only a subset of the date-time entities present in the text are pertinent to solving the task. Furthermore, some tasks require identifying negation constraints associated with the date-time entities to correctly reason over time. We showcase a novel model for extracting task-specific date-time entities along with their negation constraints. We show the efficacy of our method on the task of date-time understanding in the context of scheduling meetings for an email-based digital AI scheduling assistant. Our method achieves an absolute gain of 19% f-score points compared to baseline methods in detecting the date-time entities relevant to scheduling meetings and a 4% improvement over baseline methods for detecting negation constraints over date-time entities.

Recent work on bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) has frequently depended either on aligned bilingual lexicons or on distribution matching, often with an assumption about the isometry of the two spaces. We propose a technique to quantitatively estimate this assumption of the isometry between two embedding spaces and empirically show that this assumption weakens as the languages in question become increasingly etymologically distant. We then propose Bilingual Lexicon Induction with Semi-Supervision (BLISS) — a semi-supervised approach that relaxes the isometric assumption while leveraging both limited aligned bilingual lexicons and a larger set of unaligned word embeddings, as well as a novel hubness filtering technique. Our proposed method obtains state of the art results on 15 of 18 language pairs on the MUSE dataset, and does particularly well when the embedding spaces don’t appear to be isometric. In addition, we also show that adding supervision stabilizes the learning procedure, and is effective even with minimal supervision.

The task of entity recognition has traditionally been modelled as a sequence labelling task. However, this usually requires a large amount of fine-grained data annotated at the token level, which in turn can be expensive and cumbersome to obtain. In this work, we aim to circumvent this requirement of word-level annotated data. To achieve this, we propose a novel architecture for entity recognition from a corpus containing weak binary presence/absence labels, which are relatively easier to obtain. We show that our proposed weakly supervised model, trained solely on a multi-label classification task, performs reasonably well on the task of entity recognition, despite not having access to any token-level ground truth data.