Xingxuan Li


2024

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Evaluating Psychological Safety of Large Language Models
Xingxuan Li | Yutong Li | Lin Qiu | Shafiq Joty | Lidong Bing
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

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SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia
Xuan-Phi Nguyen | Wenxuan Zhang | Xin Li | Mahani Aljunied | Zhiqiang Hu | Chenhui Shen | Yew Ken Chia | Xingxuan Li | Jianyu Wang | Qingyu Tan | Liying Cheng | Guanzheng Chen | Yue Deng | Sen Yang | Chaoqun Liu | Hang Zhang | Lidong Bing
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon popular English-centric models through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.

2023

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Towards Robust Low-Resource Fine-Tuning with Multi-View Compressed Representations
Linlin Liu | Xingxuan Li | Megh Thakkar | Xin Li | Shafiq Joty | Luo Si | Lidong Bing
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Due to the huge amount of parameters, finetuning of pretrained language models (PLMs) is prone to overfitting in the low resource scenarios. In this work, we present a novel method that operates on the hidden representations of a PLM to reduce overfitting. During fine-tuning, our method inserts random autoencoders between the hidden layers of a PLM, which transform activations from the previous layers into multi-view compressed representations before feeding them into the upper layers. The autoencoders are plugged out after fine-tuning, so our method does not add extra parameters or increase computation cost during inference. Our method demonstrates promising performance improvement across a wide range of sequence- and token-level lowresource NLP tasks.

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Verify-and-Edit: A Knowledge-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Framework
Ruochen Zhao | Xingxuan Li | Shafiq Joty | Chengwei Qin | Lidong Bing
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

As large language models (LLMs) have become the norm in NLP, demonstrating good performance in generation and reasoning tasks, one of its most fatal disadvantages is the lack of factual correctness. Generating unfactual texts not only leads to lower performances but also degrades the trust and validity of their applications. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves trust and model performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating interpretable reasoning chains, but still suffers from factuality concerns in knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we propose the Verify-and-Edit framework for CoT prompting, which seeks to increase prediction factuality by post-editing reasoning chains according to external knowledge. Building on top of GPT-3, our framework lead to accuracy improvements in multiple open-domain question-answering tasks.

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Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey
Ruochen Zhao | Hailin Chen | Weishi Wang | Fangkai Jiao | Xuan Long Do | Chengwei Qin | Bosheng Ding | Xiaobao Guo | Minzhi Li | Xingxuan Li | Shafiq Joty
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become popular, there emerged an important trend of using multimodality to augment the LLMs’ generation ability, which enables LLMs to better interact with the world. However, there lacks a unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. In this survey, we review methods that assist and augment generative models by retrieving multimodal knowledge, whose formats range from images, codes, tables, graphs, to audio. Such methods offer a promising solution to important concerns such as factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness. By providing an in-depth review, this survey is expected to provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods’ applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs.

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Is GPT-4 a Good Data Analyst?
Liying Cheng | Xingxuan Li | Lidong Bing
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their powerful capabilities in plenty of domains and tasks, including context understanding, code generation, language generation, data storytelling, etc., many data analysts may raise concerns if their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). This controversial topic has drawn great attention in public. However, we are still at a stage of divergent opinions without any definitive conclusion. Motivated by this, we raise the research question of “is GPT-4 a good data analyst?” in this work and aim to answer it by conducting head-to-head comparative studies. In detail, we regard GPT-4 as a data analyst to perform end-to-end data analysis with databases from a wide range of domains. We propose a framework to tackle the problems by carefully designing the prompts for GPT-4 to conduct experiments. We also design several task-specific evaluation metrics to systematically compare the performance between several professional human data analysts and GPT-4. Experimental results show that GPT-4 can achieve comparable performance to humans. We also provide in-depth discussions about our results to shed light on further studies before reaching the conclusion that GPT-4 can replace data analysts.

2018

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YEDDA: A Lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation Tool
Jie Yang | Yue Zhang | Linwei Li | Xingxuan Li
Proceedings of ACL 2018, System Demonstrations

In this paper, we introduce Yedda, a lightweight but efficient and comprehensive open-source tool for text span annotation. Yedda provides a systematic solution for text span annotation, ranging from collaborative user annotation to administrator evaluation and analysis. It overcomes the low efficiency of traditional text annotation tools by annotating entities through both command line and shortcut keys, which are configurable with custom labels. Yedda also gives intelligent recommendations by learning the up-to-date annotated text. An administrator client is developed to evaluate annotation quality of multiple annotators and generate detailed comparison report for each annotator pair. Experiments show that the proposed system can reduce the annotation time by half compared with existing annotation tools. And the annotation time can be further compressed by 16.47% through intelligent recommendation.