0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Global Controller in Latent Space for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning - ACL Anthology

While large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable prowess in various natural language processing tasks, their training costs are exorbitant. Consequently, a plethora of parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods have emerged to tailor large models for downstream tasks, including low-rank training. Recent approaches either amalgamate existing fine-tuning methods or dynamically adjust rank allocation. Nonetheless, these methods continue to grapple with issues like local optimization, inability to train with full rank and lack of focus on specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce an innovative parameter-efficient method for exploring optimal solutions within latent space. More specifically, we introduce a set of latent units designed to iteratively extract input representations from LLMs, continuously refining informative features that enhance downstream task performance. Due to the small and independent nature of the latent units in relation to input size, this significantly reduces training memory requirements. Additionally, we employ an asymmetric attention mechanism to facilitate bidirectional interaction between latent units and freezed LLM representations, thereby mitigating issues associated with non-full-rank training. Furthermore, we apply distillation over hidden states during the interaction, which guarantees a trimmed number of trainable parameters.Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a range of natural language understanding, generation and reasoning tasks.
CaMML: Context-Aware Multimodal Learner for Large Models - ACL Anthology

In this work, we introduce Context-Aware MultiModal Learner (CaMML), for tuning large multimodal models (LMMs). CaMML, a lightweight module, is crafted to seamlessly integrate multimodal contextual samples into large models, thereby empowering the model to derive knowledge from analogous, domain-specific, up-to-date information and make grounded inferences. Importantly, CaMML is highly scalable and can efficiently handle lengthy multimodal context examples owing to its hierarchical design. Based on CaMML, we have developed two multimodal models, CaMML-7B and CaMML-13B, that have shown exceptional performance across an array of benchmark datasets for multimodal tasks. Remarkably, CaMML-13B achieves the state-of-the-art performance on over ten widely recognized multimodal benchmark datasets, surpassing LLaVA-1.5 (13B) with a noticeable margin, without integration of any external resources. Moreover, we have conducted extensive ablative studies to inspect the inner workings of CaMML and performed qualitative analyses to showcase its effectiveness in handling real-world challenging cases. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/amazon-science/camml.
MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation - ACL Anthology

Understanding events in texts is a core objective of natural language understanding, which requires detecting event occurrences, extracting event arguments, and analyzing inter-event relationships. However, due to the annotation challenges brought by task complexity, a large-scale dataset covering the full process of event understanding has long been absent. In this paper, we introduce MAVEN-Arg, which augments MAVEN datasets with event argument annotations, making the first all-in-one dataset supporting event detection, event argument extraction (EAE), and event relation extraction. As an EAE benchmark, MAVEN-Arg offers three main advantages: (1) a comprehensive schema covering 162 event types and 612 argument roles, all with expert-written definitions and examples; (2) a large data scale, containing 98,591 events and 290,613 arguments obtained with laborious human annotation; (3) the exhaustive annotation supporting all task variants of EAE, which annotates both entity and non-entity event arguments in document level. Experiments indicate that MAVEN-Arg is quite challenging for both fine-tuned EAE models and proprietary large language models (LLMs). Furthermore, to demonstrate the benefits of an all-in-one dataset, we preliminarily explore a potential application, future event prediction, with LLMs. MAVEN-Arg and codes can be obtained from https://github.com/THU-KEG/MAVEN-Argument.
NPHardEval: Dynamic Benchmark on Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models via Complexity Classes - ACL Anthology

Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of Large Language Models (LLMs). Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, they are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation and prone to the risk of overfitting, as these publicly accessible and static benchmarks allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, we introduce a new benchmark NPHardEval. It contains a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions belonging up to the NP-Hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs utilizing computational complexity. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at https://github.com/casmlab/NPHardEval.
Can Watermarks Survive Translation? On the Cross-lingual Consistency of Text Watermark for Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

Text watermarking technology aims to tag and identify content produced by large language models (LLMs) to prevent misuse. In this study, we introduce the concept of cross-lingual consistency in text watermarking, which assesses the ability of text watermarks to maintain their effectiveness after being translated into other languages. Preliminary empirical results from two LLMs and three watermarking methods reveal that current text watermarking technologies lack consistency when texts are translated into various languages. Based on this observation, we propose a Cross-lingual Watermark Removal Attack (CWRA) to bypass watermarking by first obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language, which is then translated into the target language. CWRA can effectively remove watermarks, decreasing the AUCs to a random-guessing level without performance loss. Furthermore, we analyze two key factors that contribute to the cross-lingual consistency in text watermarking and propose X-SIR as a defense method against CWRA.
Multi-Level Feedback Generation with Large Language Models for Empowering Novice Peer Counselors - ACL Anthology

Realistic practice and tailored feedback are key processes for training peer counselors with clinical skills. However, existing mechanisms of providing feedback largely rely on human supervision. Peer counselors often lack mechanisms to receive detailed feedback from experienced mentors, making it difficult for them to support the large number of people with mental health issues who use peer counseling. Our work aims to leverage large language models to provide contextualized and multi-level feedback to empower peer counselors, especially novices, at scale. To achieve this, we co-design with a group of senior psychotherapy supervisors to develop a multi-level feedback taxonomy, and then construct a publicly available dataset with comprehensive feedback annotations of 400 emotional support conversations. We further design a self-improvement method on top of large language models to enhance the automatic generation of feedback. Via qualitative and quantitative evaluation with domain experts, we demonstrate that our method minimizes the risk of potentially harmful and low-quality feedback generation which is desirable in such high-stakes scenarios.
In-context Mixing (ICM): Code-mixed Prompts for Multilingual LLMs - ACL Anthology

We introduce a simple and effective prompting technique called in-context mixing (ICM) for effective in-context learning (ICL) with multilingual large language models (MLLMs). With ICM, we modify the few-shot examples within ICL prompts to be intra-sententially code-mixed by randomly swapping content words in the target languages with their English translations. We observe that ICM prompts yield superior performance in NLP tasks such as disfluency correction, grammar error correction and text simplification that demand a close correspondence between the input and output sequences. Significant improvements are observed mainly for low-resource languages that are under-represented during the pretraining and finetuning of MLLMs. We present an extensive set of experiments to analyze when ICM is effective and what design choices contribute towards its effectiveness. ICM works consistently and significantly better than other prompting techniques across models of varying capacity such as mT0-XXL, BloomZ and GPT-4.
Respond in my Language: Mitigating Language Inconsistency in Response Generation based on Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong instruction understanding ability across multiple languages. However, they are easily biased towards English in instruction tuning, and generate English responses even given non-English instructions. In this paper, we investigate the language inconsistent generation problem in monolingual instruction tuning. We find that instruction tuning in English increases the models’ preference for English responses. It attaches higher probabilities to English responses than to responses in the same language as the instruction. Based on the findings, we alleviate the language inconsistent generation problem by counteracting the model preference for English responses in both the training and inference stages. Specifically, we propose Pseudo-Inconsistent Penalization (PIP) which prevents the model from generating English responses when given non-English language prompts during training, and Prior Enhanced Decoding (PED) which improves the language-consistent prior by leveraging the untuned base language model. Experimental results show that our two methods significantly improve the language consistency of the model without requiring any multilingual data. Our code, data, and models will be released.
Transferable Embedding Inversion Attack: Uncovering Privacy Risks in Text Embeddings without Model Queries - ACL Anthology

This study investigates the privacy risks associated with text embeddings, focusing on the scenario where attackers cannot access the original embedding model. Contrary to previous research requiring direct model access, we explore a more realistic threat model by developing a transfer attack method. This approach uses a surrogate model to mimic the victim model’s behavior, allowing the attacker to infer sensitive information from text embeddings without direct access. Our experiments across various embedding models and a clinical dataset demonstrate that our transfer attack significantly outperforms traditional methods, revealing the potential privacy vulnerabilities in embedding technologies and emphasizing the need for enhanced security measures.
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Label-Sensitive Reward for Natural Language Understanding - ACL Anthology

Recent strides in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance, leveraging reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to significantly enhance generation and alignment capabilities. However, RLHF encounters numerous challenges, including the objective mismatch issue, leading to suboptimal performance in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks.To address this limitation, we propose a novel Reinforcement Learning framework enhanced with Label-sensitive Reward (RLLR) to amplify the performance of LLMs in NLU tasks. By incorporating label-sensitive pairs into reinforcement learning, our method aims to adeptly capture nuanced label-sensitive semantic features during RL, thereby enhancing natural language understanding.Experiments conducted on five diverse foundation models across eight tasks showcase promising results. In comparison to Supervised Fine-tuning models (SFT), RLLR demonstrates an average performance improvement of 1.54%. Compared with RLHF models, the improvement averages at 0.69%. These results reveal the effectiveness of our method for LLMs in NLU tasks.
Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs’ Behavior Style to Conflicting Prompts - ACL Anthology

This study investigates the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) when faced with conflicting prompts versus their internal memory. This will not only help to understand LLMs’ decision mechanism but also benefit real-world applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).Drawing on cognitive theory, we target the first scenario of decision-making styles where there is no superiority in the conflict and categorize LLMs’ preference into dependent, intuitive, and rational/irrational styles.Another scenario of factual robustness considers the correctness of prompt and memory in knowledge-intensive tasks, which can also distinguish if LLMs behave rationally or irrationally in the first scenario.To quantify them, we establish a complete benchmarking framework including a dataset, a robustness evaluation pipeline, and corresponding metrics. Extensive experiments with seven LLMs reveal their varying behaviors. And, with role play intervention, we can change the styles, but different models present distinct adaptivity and upper-bound. One of our key takeaways is to optimize models or the prompts according to the identified style. For instance, RAG models with high role play adaptability may dynamically adjust the interventions according to the quality of retrieval results — being dependent to better leverage informative context; and, being intuitive when external prompt is noisy.
CoCA: Fusing Position Embedding with Collinear Constrained Attention in Transformers for Long Context Window Extending - ACL Anthology

Self-attention and position embedding are two crucial modules in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the potential relationship between them is far from well studied, especially for long context window extending. In fact, anomalous behaviors that hinder long context extrapolation exist between Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) and vanilla self-attention.Incorrect initial angles between Q and K can cause misestimation in modeling rotary position embedding of the closest tokens.To address this issue, we propose Co llinear C onstrained A ttention mechanism, namely CoCA. Specifically, we enforce a collinear constraint between Q and K to seamlessly integrate RoPE and self-attention.While only adding minimal computational and spatial complexity, this integration significantly enhances long context window extrapolation ability. We provide an optimized implementation, making it a drop-in replacement for any existing transformer-based models.Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoCA excels in extending context windows. A CoCA-based GPT model, trained with a context length of 512, can extend the context window up to 32K (60 × ) without any fine-tuning.Additionally, incorporating CoCA into LLaMA-7B achieves extrapolation up to 32K within a training length of only 2K.Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/codefuse-ai/Collinear-Constrained-Attention
InfoLossQA: Characterizing and Recovering Information Loss in Text Simplification - ACL Anthology

Text simplification aims to make technical texts more accessible to laypeople but often results in deletion of information and vagueness. This work proposes InfoLossQA, a framework to characterize and recover simplification-induced information loss in form of question-and-answer (QA) pairs. Building on the theory of Questions Under Discussion, the QA pairs are designed to help readers deepen their knowledge of a text. First, we collect a dataset of 1,000 linguist-curated QA pairs derived from 104 LLM simplifications of English medical study abstracts. Our analyses of this data reveal that information loss occurs frequently, and that the QA pairs give a high-level overview of what information was lost. Second, we devise two methods for this task: end-to-end prompting of open-source and commercial language models, and a natural language inference pipeline. With a novel evaluation framework considering the correctness of QA pairs and their linguistic suitability, our expert evaluation reveals that models struggle to reliably identify information loss and applying similar standards as humans at what constitutes information loss.
CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following - ACL Anthology

With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues.
DAPR: A Benchmark on Document-Aware Passage Retrieval - ACL Anthology

The work of neural retrieval so far focuses on ranking short texts and is challenged with long documents. There are many cases where the users want to find a relevant passage within a long document from a huge corpus, e.g. Wikipedia articles, research papers, etc. We propose and name this task Document-Aware Passage Retrieval (DAPR). While analyzing the errors of the State-of-The-Art (SoTA) passage retrievers, we find the major errors (53.5%) are due to missing document context. This drives us to build a benchmark for this task including multiple datasets from heterogeneous domains. In the experiments, we extend the SoTA passage retrievers with document context via (1) hybrid retrieval with BM25 and (2) contextualized passage representations, which inform the passage representation with document context. We find despite that hybrid retrieval performs the strongest on the mixture of the easy and the hard queries, it completely fails on the hard queries that require document-context understanding. On the other hand, contextualized passage representations (e.g. prepending document titles) achieve good improvement on these hard queries, but overall they also perform rather poorly. Our created benchmark enables future research on developing and comparing retrieval systems for the new task. The code and the data are available.
Strengthened Symbol Binding Makes Large Language Models Reliable Multiple-Choice Selectors - ACL Anthology

Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) constitute a critical area of research in the study of Large Language Models (LLMs). Previous works have investigated the selection bias problem in MCQs within few-shot scenarios, in which the LLM’s performance may be influenced by the presentation of answer choices, leaving the selection bias during Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) unexplored. In this paper, we reveal that selection bias persists in the SFT phase , primarily due to the LLM’s inadequate Multiple Choice Symbol Binding (MCSB) ability. This limitation implies that the model struggles to associate the answer options with their corresponding symbols (e.g., A/B/C/D) effectively. To enhance the model’s MCSB capability, we first incorporate option contents into the loss function and subsequently adjust the weights of the option symbols and contents, guiding the model to understand the option content of the current symbol. Based on this, we introduce an efficient SFT algorithm for MCQs, termed Point-wise Intelligent Feedback (PIF). PIF constructs negative instances by randomly combin- ing the incorrect option contents with all candidate symbols, and proposes a point-wise loss to provide feedback on these negative samples into LLMs. Our experimental results demonstrate that PIF significantly reduces the model’s selection bias by improving its MCSB capability. Remarkably, PIF exhibits a substantial enhancement in the accuracy for MCQs.
SAC-KG: Exploiting Large Language Models as Skilled Automatic Constructors for Domain Knowledge Graph - ACL Anthology

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in knowledge-intensive tasks across specialized domains, where the acquisition of precise and dependable knowledge is crucial. However, existing KG construction methods heavily rely on human intervention to attain qualified KGs, which severely hinders the practical applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a general KG construction framework, named **SAC-KG**, to exploit large language models (LLMs) as **S**killed **A**utomatic **C**onstructors for domain **K**nowledge **G**raph. SAC-KG effectively involves LLMs as domain experts to generate specialized and precise multi-level KGs. Specifically, SAC-KG consists of three components: Generator, Verifier, and Pruner. For a given entity, Generator produces its relations and tails from raw domain corpora, to construct a specialized single-level KG. Verifier and Pruner then work together to ensure precision by correcting generation errors and determining whether newly produced tails require further iteration for the next-level KG. Experiments demonstrate that SAC-KG automatically constructs a domain KG at the scale of over one million nodes and achieves a precision of 89.32%, leading to a superior performance with over 20% increase in precision rate compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for the KG construction task.
Uncertainty-Guided Modal Rebalance for Hateful Memes Detection - ACL Anthology

Hateful memes detection is a challenging multimodal understanding task that requires comprehensive learning of vision, language, and cross-modal interactions. Previous research has focused on developing effective fusion strategies for integrating hate information from different modalities. However, these methods excessively rely on cross-modal fusion features, ignoring the modality uncertainty caused by the contribution degree of each modality to hate sentiment and the modality imbalance caused by the dominant modality suppressing the optimization of another modality. To this end, this paper proposes an Uncertainty-guided Modal Rebalance (UMR) framework for hateful memes detection. The uncertainty of each meme is explicitly formulated by designing stochastic representation drawn from a Gaussian distribution for aggregating cross-modal features with unimodal features adaptively. The modality imbalance is alleviated by improving cosine loss from the perspectives of inter-modal feature and weight vectors constraints. In this way, the suppressed unimodal representation ability in multimodal models would be unleashed, while the learning of modality contribution would be further promoted. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed UMR produces the state-of-the-art performance on four widely-used datasets.