Yusuke Iwasawa


2023

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Unnatural Error Correction: GPT-4 Can Almost Perfectly Handle Unnatural Scrambled Text
Qi Cao | Takeshi Kojima | Yutaka Matsuo | Yusuke Iwasawa
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in many tasks, much about their inner workings remains unclear. In this study, we present novel experimental insights into the resilience of LLMs, particularly GPT-4, when subjected to extensive character-level permutations. To investigate this, we first propose the Scrambled Bench, a suite designed to measure the capacity of LLMs to handle scrambled input, in terms of both recovering scrambled sentences and answering questions given scrambled context. The experimental results indicate that multiple advanced LLMs demonstrate the capability akin to typoglycemia, a phenomenon where humans can understand the meaning of words even when the letters within those words are scrambled, as long as the first and last letters remain in place. More surprisingly, we found that only GPT-4 nearly flawlessly processes inputs with unnatural errors, a task that poses significant challenges for other LLMs and often even for humans. Specifically, GPT-4 can almost perfectly reconstruct the original sentences from scrambled ones, decreasing the edit distance by 95%, even when all letters within each word are entirely scrambled. It is counter-intuitive that LLMs can exhibit such resilience despite severe disruption to input tokenization caused by scrambled text.

2021

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Making Use of Latent Space in Language GANs for Generating Diverse Text without Pre-training
Takeshi Kojima | Yusuke Iwasawa | Yutaka Matsuo
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Generating diverse texts is an important factor for unsupervised text generation. One approach is to produce the diversity of texts conditioned by the sampled latent code. Although several generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been proposed thus far, these models still suffer from mode-collapsing if the models are not pre-trained. In this paper, we propose a GAN model that aims to improve the approach to generating diverse texts conditioned by the latent space. The generator of our model uses Gumbel-Softmax distribution for the word sampling process. To ensure that the text is generated conditioned upon the sampled latent code, reconstruction loss is introduced in our objective function. The discriminator of our model iteratively inspects incomplete partial texts and learns to distinguish whether they are real or fake by using the standard GAN objective function. Experimental results using the COCO Image Captions dataset show that, although our model is not pre-trained, the performance of our model is quite competitive with the existing baseline models, which requires pre-training.