Zhi Li


2024

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I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization
Xianquan Wang | Likang Wu | Shukang Yin | Zhi Li | Yanjiang Chen | Hufeng Hufeng | Yu Su | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The emergence of personalized generation has made it possible to create texts or images that meet the unique needs of users. Recent advances mainly focus on style or scene transfer based on given keywords. However, in e-commerce and recommender systems, it is almost an untouched area to explore user historical interactions, automatically mine user interests with semantic associations, and create item representations that closely align with user individual interests.In this paper, we propose a brand new framework called **I**nterest-**A**ugmented **M**ultimodal **G**enerator (**I-AM-G**). The framework first extracts tags from the multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with, and the most frequently occurred ones are extracted to rewrite the text description of the item. Then, the framework uses a decoupled text-to-text and image-to-image retriever to search for the top-K similar item text and image embeddings from the item pool. Finally, the Attention module for user interests fuses the retrieved information in a cross-modal manner and further guides the personalized generation process in collaboration with the rewritten text.We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that our framework can effectively generate results aligned with user preferences, which potentially provides a new paradigm of **Rewrite and Retrieve** for personalized generation.

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Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search
Li Chenglin | Qianglong Chen | Zhi Li | FengTao FengTao | Yicheng Li | Hao Chen | Fei Yu | Yin Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Instruction tuning is a crucial technique for aligning language models with humans’ actual goals in the real world. Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. However, creating high-quality data manually is labor-intensive and time-consuming, which leads researchers to explore using LLMs to synthesize data. Recent studies have focused on using a stronger LLM to iteratively enhance existing instruction data, showing promising results. Nevertheless, previous work often lacks control over the evolution direction, resulting in high uncertainty in the data synthesis process and low-quality instructions. In this paper, we introduce a general and scalable framework, IDEA-MCTS (Instruction Data Enhancement using Monte Carlo Tree Search), a scalable framework for efficiently synthesizing instructions. With tree search and evaluation models, it can efficiently guide each instruction to evolve into a high-quality form, aiding in instruction fine-tuning. Experimental results show that IDEA-MCTS significantly enhances the seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores of quality, diversity, and complexity from 2.19 to 3.81. Furthermore, in open-domain benchmarks, experimental results show that IDEA-MCTS improves the accuracy of real-world instruction-following skills in LLMs by an average of 5% in low-resource settings.

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Improving Faithfulness of Large Language Models in Summarization via Sliding Generation and Self-Consistency
Taiji Li | Zhi Li | Yin Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Despite large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks, they are still suffering from the factual inconsistency problem called hallucinations. For instance, LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from source article, and prefer to extract information that appears at the beginning and end of the context, especially in long document summarization. Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of LLMs in summarization by impelling them to process the entire article more fairly and faithfully. We present a novel summary generation strategy, namely SliSum, which exploits the ideas of sliding windows and self-consistency. Specifically, SliSum divides the source article into overlapping windows, and utilizes LLM to generate local summaries for the content in the windows. Finally, SliSum aggregates all local summaries using clustering and majority voting algorithm to produce more faithful summary of entire article. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SliSum significantly improves the faithfulness of diverse LLMs including LLaMA-2, Claude-2 and GPT-3.5 in both short and long text summarization, while maintaining their fluency and informativeness and without additional fine-tuning and resources. We further conduct qualitative and quantitative studies to investigate why SliSum works and impacts of hyperparameters in SliSum on performance.

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Towards Autonomous Tool Utilization in Language Models: A Unified, Efficient and Scalable Framework
Zhi Li | Yicheng Li | Hequan Ye | Yin Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

In recent research, significant advancements have been achieved in tool learning for large language models. Looking towards future advanced studies, the issue of fully autonomous tool utilization is particularly intriguing: given only a query, language models can autonomously decide whether to employ a tool, which specific tool to select, and how to utilize these tools, all without needing any tool-specific prompts within the context. To achieve this, we introduce a unified, efficient, and scalable framework for fine-tuning language models. Based on the degree of tool dependency, we initially categorize queries into three distinct types. By transforming the entire process into a sequential decision-making problem through conditional probability decomposition, our approach unifies the three types and autoregressively generates decision processes. Concurrently, we’ve introduced an “instruct, execute, and reformat” strategy specifically designed for efficient data annotation. Through end-to-end training on the annotated dataset comprising 26 diverse APIs, the model demonstrates a level of self-awareness, automatically seeking tool assistance when necessary. It significantly surpasses original instruction-tuned open-source language models and GPT-3.5/4 on multiple evaluation metrics. To address real-world scalability needs, we’ve enhanced our framework with a dynamic rehearsal strategy for continual learning, proven to require minimal new annotations to exhibit remarkable performance.

2023

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Cultural Concept Adaptation on Multimodal Reasoning
Zhi Li | Yin Zhang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Developing cultural adaptation methods is important, which can improve the model performance on the low-resource ones and provide more equitable opportunities for everyone to benefit from advanced technology. Past methods primarily focused on multilingual and multimodal capabilities, and the improvement of multicultural competence is still an unexplored problem. This is largely due to the difficulty of data scarcity and expensive annotation. In this paper, we navigate this uncharted territory by leveraging high-resource cultures to facilitate comprehension of low-resource ones. We first introduce an annotation-free method for cultural-concept adaptation and construct a concept mapping set. To facilitate the model’s comprehension of cultural-concept mappings, we propose a new multimodal data augmentation called CultureMixup. This approach employs a three-tier code-switching strategy on textual sentences. Additionally, it uses a cultural concept-based mixup method for the images. This combination effectively generates new data instances across culture, phrase, word, and image levels. For visually grounded reasoning across languages and cultures, experimental results on five languages show that our method consistently improves performance for four existing multilingual and multimodal models on both zero-shot and few-shot settings.

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CCL23-Eval 任务6系统报告:面向电信网络诈骗案件分类的优化策略(CCL23-Eval Task 6 System Report: Research on Optimization Strategies for Telecom Internet fraud Case Classification)
Junhui Yu (余俊晖) | Zhi Li (李智)
Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: Evaluations)

“电信网络诈骗案件的激增给社会带来了巨大的安全威胁,因此准确、高效地分类和检测电信网络诈骗成为了当务之急。本研究旨在针对电信网络诈骗案件分类问题,探索了一系列优化策略,并在“电信网络诈骗案件分类评测”技术评测比赛中最终成绩排名第一。本研究基于文本分类模型,并采用了BERT的继续预训练、FreeLB的对抗训练和模型融合等trick。通过BERT的继续预训练,使模型具备更好的语义理解能力和特征提取能力。而通过FreeLB的对抗训练,增强了模型的鲁棒性,使其能够更好地应对噪声和干扰。此外,本文采用模型融合的方法将多个模型的预测结果进行融合,进一步提高了分类的准确性。实验结果表明,本文的优化策略在比赛中取得了显著的成绩,证明了其在电信网络诈骗案件分类中的有效性和优越性。本研究的成果对于提高电信网络诈骗案件的分类性能具有重要意义,为相关领域的研究和实践提供了有益的参考。”

2021

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KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game
Yadong Xi | Xiaoxi Mao | Le Li | Lei Lin | Yanjiang Chen | Shuhan Yang | Xuhan Chen | Kailun Tao | Zhi Li | Gongzheng Li | Lin Jiang | Siyan Liu | Zeng Zhao | Minlie Huang | Changjie Fan | Zhipeng Hu
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

There is a long history of research related to automated story generation, dating back as far as the 1970s. Recently, the rapid development of pre-trained language models has spurred great progresses in this field. Equipped with GPT-2 and the latest GPT-3, AI Dungeon has been seen as a famous example of the powerful text generation capabilities of large-scale pre-trained language models, and a possibility for future games. However, as a game, AI Dungeon lacks incentives to players and relies entirely on players to explore on their own. This makes players’ enthusiasm decline rapidly. In this paper, we present an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named as KuiLeiXi. In KuiLeiXi, players need to interact with the AI until the pre-determined plot goals are reached. By introducing the plot goals, players have a stronger incentive to explore ways to reach plot goals, while the AI’s abilities are not abused to generate harmful contents. This limited freedom allows this game to be integrated as a part of a romance simulation mobile game, Yu Jian Love. Since KuiLeiXi was launched, it has received a lot of positive feedbacks from more than 100,000 players. A demo video is available at https://youtu.be/DyYZhxMRrkk.

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AutoChart: A Dataset for Chart-to-Text Generation Task
Jiawen Zhu | Jinye Ran | Roy Ka-Wei Lee | Zhi Li | Kenny Choo
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

The analytical description of charts is an exciting and important research area with many applications in academia and industry. Yet, this challenging task has received limited attention from the computational linguistics research community. This paper proposes AutoChart, a large dataset for the analytical description of charts, which aims to encourage more research into this important area. Specifically, we offer a novel framework that generates the charts and their analytical description automatically. We conducted extensive human and machine evaluation on the generated charts and descriptions and demonstrate that the generated texts are informative, coherent, and relevant to the corresponding charts.

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UnClE: Explicitly Leveraging Semantic Similarity to Reduce the Parameters of Word Embeddings
Zhi Li | Yuchen Zhai | Chengyu Wang | Minghui Qiu | Kailiang Li | Yin Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Natural language processing (NLP) models often require a massive number of parameters for word embeddings, which limits their application on mobile devices. Researchers have employed many approaches, e.g. adaptive inputs, to reduce the parameters of word embeddings. However, existing methods rarely pay attention to semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Unique and Class Embeddings (UnClE), which explicitly leverages semantic similarity with weight sharing to reduce the dimensionality of word embeddings. Inspired by the fact that words with similar semantic can share a part of weights, we divide the embeddings of words into two parts: unique embedding and class embedding. The former is one-to-one mapping like traditional embedding, while the latter is many-to-one mapping and learn the representation of class information. Our method is suitable for both word-level and sub-word level models and can be used to reduce both input and output embeddings. Experimental results on the standard WMT 2014 English-German dataset show that our method is able to reduce the parameters of word embeddings by more than 11x, with about 93% performance retaining in BLEU metrics. For language modeling task, our model can reduce word embeddings by 6x or 11x on PTB/WT2 dataset at the cost of a certain degree of performance degradation.

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BSTC: A Large-Scale Chinese-English Speech Translation Dataset
Ruiqing Zhang | Xiyang Wang | Chuanqiang Zhang | Zhongjun He | Hua Wu | Zhi Li | Haifeng Wang | Ying Chen | Qinfei Li
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Automatic Simultaneous Translation

This paper presents BSTC (Baidu Speech Translation Corpus), a large-scale Chinese-English speech translation dataset. This dataset is constructed based on a collection of licensed videos of talks or lectures, including about 68 hours of Mandarin data, their manual transcripts and translations into English, as well as automated transcripts by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. We have further asked three experienced interpreters to simultaneously interpret the testing talks in a mock conference setting. This corpus is expected to promote the research of automatic simultaneous translation as well as the development of practical systems. We have organized simultaneous translation tasks and used this corpus to evaluate automatic simultaneous translation systems.