Xuefeng Li


2024

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OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research
Yuxiang Zheng | Shichao Sun | Lin Qiu | Dongyu Ru | Cheng Jiayang | Xuefeng Li | Jifan Lin | Binjie Wang | Yun Luo | Renjie Pan | Yang Xu | Qingkai Min | Zizhao Zhang | Yiwen Wang | Wenjie Li | Pengfei Liu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

The rapid growth of scientific literature imposes significant challenges for researchers endeavoring to stay updated with the latest advancements in their fields and delve into new areas. We introduce OpenResearcher, an innovative platform that leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to accelerate the research process by answering diverse questions from researchers. OpenResearcher is built based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. Moreover, we develop various tools for OpenResearcher to understand researchers’ queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine these answers. OpenResearcher can flexibly use these tools to balance efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, OpenResearcher enables researchers to save time and increase their potential to discover new insights and drive scientific breakthroughs. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/OpenResearcher.

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Reformatted Alignment
Run-Ze Fan | Xuefeng Li | Haoyang Zou | Junlong Li | Shwai He | Ethan Chern | Jiewen Hu | Pengfei Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

The quality of finetuning data is crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. Current methods to improve data quality are either labor-intensive or prone to factual errors caused by LLM hallucinations. This paper explores elevating the quality of existing instruction data to better align with human values, introducing a simple and effective approach named ReAlign, which reformats the responses of instruction data into a format that better aligns with pre-established criteria and the collated evidence. This approach minimizes human annotation, hallucination, and the difficulty in scaling, remaining orthogonal to existing alignment techniques. Experimentally, ReAlign significantly boosts the general alignment ability, math reasoning, factuality, and readability of the LLMs.Encouragingly, without introducing any additional data or advanced training techniques, and merely by reformatting the response, LLaMA-2-13B’s mathematical reasoning ability on GSM8K can be improved **from 46.77% to 56.63%** in accuracy. Additionally, a mere 5% of ReAlign data yields a 67% boost in general alignment ability measured by the Alpaca dataset. This work highlights the need for further research into the science and mechanistic interpretability of LLMs. We have made the associated code and data publicly accessible to support future studies at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ReAlign.

2023

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Generative Zero-Shot Prompt Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Inverse Prompting
Xuefeng Li | Liwen Wang | Guanting Dong | Keqing He | Jinzheng Zhao | Hao Lei | Jiachi Liu | Weiran Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling aims to transfer knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing models either encode slot descriptions and examples or design handcrafted question templates using heuristic rules, suffering from poor generalization capability or robustness. In this paper, we propose a generative zero-shot prompt learning framework for cross-domain slot filling, both improving generalization and robustness than previous work. Besides, we introduce a novel inverse prompting strategy to distinguish different slot types to avoid the multiple prediction problem, and an efficient prompt tuning strategy to boost higher performance only training fewer prompt parameters. Experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, especially huge improvements (+13.44% F1) on the unseen slots.

2022

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PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling
Guanting Dong | Daichi Guo | Liwen Wang | Xuefeng Li | Zechen Wang | Chen Zeng | Keqing He | Jinzheng Zhao | Hao Lei | Xinyue Cui | Yi Huang | Junlan Feng | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Most existing slot filling models tend to memorize inherent patterns of entities and corresponding contexts from training data. However, these models can lead to system failure or undesirable outputs when being exposed to spoken language perturbation or variation in practice. We propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for training perturbation-robust slot filling models. Specifically, we introduce two MLM-based training strategies to respectively learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution from unsupervised language perturbation corpus. Then, we transfer semantic knowledge learned from upstream training procedure into the original samples and filter generated data by consistency processing. These procedures aims to enhance the robustness of slot filling models. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms the previous basic methods and gains strong generalization while preventing the model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts.

2021

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Bridge to Target Domain by Prototypical Contrastive Learning and Label Confusion: Re-explore Zero-Shot Learning for Slot Filling
Liwen Wang | Xuefeng Li | Jiachi Liu | Keqing He | Yuanmeng Yan | Weiran Xu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Zero-shot cross-domain slot filling alleviates the data dependence in the case of data scarcity in the target domain, which has aroused extensive research. However, as most of the existing methods do not achieve effective knowledge transfer to the target domain, they just fit the distribution of the seen slot and show poor performance on unseen slot in the target domain. To solve this, we propose a novel approach based on prototypical contrastive learning with a dynamic label confusion strategy for zero-shot slot filling. The prototypical contrastive learning aims to reconstruct the semantic constraints of labels, and we introduce the label confusion strategy to establish the label dependence between the source domains and the target domain on-the-fly. Experimental results show that our model achieves significant improvement on the unseen slots, while also set new state-of-the-arts on slot filling task.