Zhuoran Lu


2024

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Pearl: Personalizing Large Language Model Writing Assistants with Generation-Calibrated Retrievers
Sheshera Mysore | Zhuoran Lu | Mengting Wan | Longqi Yang | Bahareh Sarrafzadeh | Steve Menezes | Tina Baghaee | Emmanuel Barajas Gonzalez | Jennifer Neville | Tara Safavi
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U)

Powerful large language models have facilitated the development of writing assistants that promise to significantly improve the quality and efficiency of composition and communication. However, a barrier to effective assistance is the lack of personalization in LLM outputs to the author’s communication style, specialized knowledge, and values. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing Pearl, a LLM writing assistant personalized with a retriever that is trained to be generation-calibrated for personalization. Generation calibration ensures that our retriever selects historic user authored documents to augment an LLM prompt such that they are likely to help an LLM generation better adhere to a users’ preferences. We propose two key novelties for training such a retriever: (1) A training data selection method that identifies user requests likely to benefit from personalization and documents that provide that benefit; and (2) A scale-calibrating KL-divergence objective that ensures that our retriever scores remain proportional to the downstream generation quality from using the document for personalized generation. In a series of holistic evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Pearl in generating long-form texts on multiple social media datasets. Finally, we demonstrate how a generation-calibrated retriever can double as a performance predictor – detecting low quality retrieval, and improving potentially under-performing outputs via revision with LLMs.

2023

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Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations
Zhuoyan Li | Hangxiao Zhu | Zhuoran Lu | Ming Yin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The collection and curation of high-quality training data is crucial for developing text classification models with superior performance, but it is often associated with significant costs and time investment. Researchers have recently explored using large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets as an alternative approach. However, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data in supporting model training is inconsistent across different classification tasks. To better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data, in this study, we look into how the performance of models trained on these synthetic data may vary with the subjectivity of classification. Our results indicate that subjectivity, at both the task level and instance level, is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work on the potential and limitations of leveraging LLM for synthetic data generation.