0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PlatoLM: Teaching LLMs in Multi-Round Dialogue via a User Simulator - ACL Anthology

The unparalleled performance of closed-sourced ChatGPT has sparked efforts towards its democratization, with notable strides made by leveraging real user and ChatGPT dialogues, as evidenced by Vicuna. However, due to challenges in gathering dialogues involving human participation, current endeavors like Baize and UltraChat rely on ChatGPT conducting roleplay to simulate humans based on instructions, resulting in overdependence on seeds, diminished human-likeness, limited topic diversity, and an absence of genuine multi-round conversational dynamics. To address the above issues, we propose a paradigm to simulate human behavior better and explore the benefits of incorporating more human-like questions in multi-turn conversations. Specifically, we directly target human questions extracted from genuine human-machine conversations as a learning goal and provide a novel user simulator called ‘Socratic‘. The experimental results show our response model, ‘PlatoLM‘, achieves SoTA performance among LLaMA-based 7B models in MT-Bench. Our findings further demonstrate that our method introduces highly human-like questioning patterns and rich topic structures, which can teach the response model better than previous works in multi-round conversations.
Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs - ACL Anthology

The capability gap between open-source and closed-source large language models (LLMs) remains a challenge in text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we introduce a synthetic data approach that combines data produced by larger, more powerful models (strong models) with error information data generated by smaller, not well-aligned models (weak models). The method not only enhances the domain generalization of text-to-SQL models but also explores the potential of error data supervision through preference learning. Furthermore, we employ the synthetic data approach for instruction tuning on open-source LLMs, resulting SENSE, a specialized text-to-SQL model. The effectiveness of SENSE is demonstrated through state-of-the-art results on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks, bridging the performance gap between open-source models and methods prompted by closed-source models.
STRUCTSUM Generation for Faster Text Comprehension - ACL Anthology

We consider the task of generating structured representations of text using large language models (LLMs). We focus on tables and mind maps as representative modalities. Tables are more organized way of representing data, while mind maps provide a visually dynamic and flexible approach, particularly suitable for sparse content. Despite the effectiveness of LLMs on different tasks, we show that current models struggle with generating structured outputs. In response, we present effective prompting strategies for both of these tasks. We introduce a taxonomy of problems around factuality, global and local structure, common to both modalities and propose a set of critiques to tackle these issues resulting in an absolute improvement in accuracy of +37 pp (79%) for mind maps and +15 pp (78%) for tables. To evaluate semantic coverage of generated structured representations we propose Auto-QA, and we verify the adequacy of Auto-QA using SQuAD dataset. We further evaluate the usefulness of structured representations via a text comprehension user study. The results show a significant reduction in comprehension time compared to text when using table (42.9%) and mind map (31.9%), without loss in accuracy.
Analysing The Impact of Sequence Composition on Language Model Pre-Training - ACL Anthology

Most language model pre-training frameworks concatenate multiple documents into fixed-length sequences and use causal masking to compute the likelihood of each token given its context; this strategy is widely adopted due to its simplicity and efficiency. However, to this day, the influence of the pre-training sequence composition strategy on the generalisation properties of the model remains under-explored.In this work, we find that applying causal masking can lead to the inclusion of distracting information from previous documents during pre-training, which negatively impacts the performance of the models on language modelling and downstream tasks. In intra-document causal masking , the likelihood of each token is only conditioned on the previous tokens in the same document, eliminating potential distracting information from previous documents and significantly improving performance. Furthermore, we find that concatenating related documents can reduce some potential distractions during pre-training, and our proposed efficient retrieval-based sequence construction method, Bm25Chunk, can improve in-context learning (+11.6%), knowledge memorisation (+9.8%), and context utilisation (+7.2%) abilities of language models without sacrificing efficiency.
NACL: A General and Effective KV Cache Eviction Framework for LLM at Inference Time - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ignited an innovative surge of AI applications, marking a new era of exciting possibilities equipped with extended context windows. However, hosting these models is cost-prohibitive mainly due to the extensive memory consumption of KV Cache involving long-context modeling. Despite several works proposing to evict unnecessary tokens from the KV Cache, most of them rely on the biased local statistics of accumulated attention scores and report performance using unconvincing metric like perplexity on inadequate short-text evaluation. In this paper, we propose NACL, a general framework for long-context KV cache eviction that achieves more optimal and efficient eviction in a single operation during the encoding phase. Due to NACL’s efficiency, we combine more accurate attention score statistics in Proxy-Tokens Eviction with the diversified random eviction strategy of Random Eviction, aiming to alleviate the issue of attention bias and enhance the robustness in maintaining pivotal tokens for long-context modeling tasks. Notably, our method significantly improves the performance on short- and long-text tasks by 80% and 76% respectively, reducing KV Cache by up to 5× with over 95% performance maintenance. Code available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/Research/tree/master/NLP/ACL2024-NACL.
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network - ACL Anthology

Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency in vision, natural language, and speech understanding tasks, indicating their capacity to “see”, “listen”, and “read”. In this paper, we design SpikeVoice, which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN, to explore the potential of SNN to “speak”. A major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. The serial nature of spiking neurons, however, leads to the invisibility of information at future spiking time steps, limiting SNN models to capture sequence dependencies solely within the same time step. We term this phenomenon “partial-time dependency”. To address this issue, we introduce Spiking Temporal-Sequential Attention (STSA) in the SpikeVoice. To the best of our knowledge, SpikeVoice is the first TTS work in the SNN field. We perform experiments using four well-established datasets that cover both Chinese and English languages, encompassing scenarios with both single-speaker and multi-speaker configurations. The results demonstrate that SpikeVoice can achieve results comparable to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. Both our demo and code are available as supplementary material.
Context-aware Difference Distilling for Multi-change Captioning - ACL Anthology

Multi-change captioning aims to describe complex and coupled changes within an image pair in natural language. Compared with single-change captioning, this task requires the model to have higher-level cognition ability to reason an arbitrary number of changes. In this paper, we propose a novel context-aware difference distilling (CARD) network to capture all genuine changes for yielding sentences. Given an image pair, CARD first decouples context features that aggregate all similar/dissimilar semantics, termed common/difference context features. Then, the consistency and independence constraints are designed to guarantee the alignment/discrepancy of common/difference context features. Further, the common context features guide the model to mine locally unchanged features, which are subtracted from the pair to distill locally difference features. Next, the difference context features augment the locally difference features to ensure that all changes are distilled. In this way, we obtain an omni-representation of all changes, which is translated into linguistic sentences by a transformer decoder. Extensive experiments on three public datasets show CARD performs favourably against state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/tuyunbin/CARD.
Dataflow-Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Repository-Level Code Completion - ACL Anthology

Recent years have witnessed the deployment of code language models (LMs) in various code intelligence tasks such as code completion. Yet, it is challenging for pre-trained LMs to generate correct completions in private repositories. Previous studies retrieve cross-file context based on import relations or text similarity, which is insufficiently relevant to completion targets. In this paper, we propose a dataflow-guided retrieval augmentation approach, called DraCo, for repository-level code completion. DraCo parses a private repository into code entities and establishes their relations through an extended dataflow analysis, forming a repo-specific context graph. Whenever triggering code completion, DraCo precisely retrieves relevant background knowledge from the repo-specific context graph and generates well-formed prompts to query code LMs. Furthermore, we construct a large Python dataset, ReccEval, with more diverse completion targets. Our experiments demonstrate the superior accuracy and applicable efficiency of DraCo, improving code exact match by 3.43% and identifier F1-score by 3.27% on average compared to the state-of-the-art approach.
Chain-of-Exemplar: Enhancing Distractor Generation for Multimodal Educational Question Generation - ACL Anthology

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are important in enhancing concept learning and student engagement for educational purposes. Despite the multimodal nature of educational content, current methods focus mainly on text-based inputs and often neglect the integration of visual information. In this work, we study the problem of multimodal educational question generation, which aims at generating subject-specific educational questions with plausible yet incorrect distractors based on multimodal educational content. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel framework, named Chain-of-Exemplar (CoE), which utilizes multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with Chain-of-Thought reasoning to improve the generation of challenging distractors. Furthermore, CoE leverages three-stage contextualized exemplar retrieval to retrieve exemplary questions as guides for generating more subject-specific educational questions. Experimental results on the ScienceQA benchmark demonstrate the superiority of CoE in both question generation and distractor generation over existing methods across various subjects and educational levels.
LLMEmbed: Rethinking Lightweight LLM’s Genuine Function in Text Classification - ACL Anthology

With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt-learning has become a promising method mainly researched in various research areas. Recently, many attempts based on prompt-learning have been made to improve the performance of text classification. However, most of these methods are based on heuristic Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and tend to be more complex but less efficient. In this paper, we rethink the LLM-based text classification methodology, propose a simple and effective transfer learning strategy, namely LLMEmbed, to address this classical but challenging task. To illustrate, we first study how to properly extract and fuse the text embeddings via various lightweight LLMs at different network depths to improve their robustness and discrimination, then adapt such embeddings to train the classifier. We perform extensive experiments on publicly available datasets, and the results show that LLMEmbed achieves strong performance while enjoys low training overhead using lightweight LLM backbones compared to recent methods based on larger LLMs, *i.e.* GPT-3, and sophisticated prompt-based strategies. Our LLMEmbed achieves adequate accuracy on publicly available benchmarks without any fine-tuning while merely use 4% model parameters, 1.8% electricity consumption and 1.5% runtime compared to its counterparts. Code is available at: https://github.com/ChunLiu-cs/LLMEmbed-ACL2024.
LEMON: Reviving Stronger and Smaller LMs from Larger LMs with Linear Parameter Fusion - ACL Anthology

In the new era of language models, small models (with billions of parameter sizes) are receiving increasing attention due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness in deployment. However, limited by the model size, the performance of small models trained from scratch may often be unsatisfactory. Learning a stronger and smaller model with the help of larger models is an intuitive idea. Inspired by the observing modular structures in preliminary analysis, we propose LEMON to learn competent initial points for smaller models by fusing parameters from larger models, thereby laying a solid foundation for subsequent training. Specifically, the parameter fusion process involves two operators for layer and dimension, respectively, and we also introduce controllable receptive fields to model the prior parameter characteristics. In this way, the larger model could be transformed into any specific smaller scale and architecture. Starting from LLaMA 2-7B, we revive two stronger and smaller models with 1.3B and 2.7B. Experimental results demonstrate that the fusion-based method exhibits flexibility and outperforms a series of competitive baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.
Speech Sense Disambiguation: Tackling Homophone Ambiguity in End-to-End Speech Translation - ACL Anthology

End-to-end speech translation (ST) presents notable disambiguation challenges as it necessitates simultaneous cross-modal and cross-lingual transformations. While word sense disambiguation is an extensively investigated topic in textual machine translation, the exploration of disambiguation strategies for ST models remains limited. Addressing this gap, this paper introduces the concept of speech sense disambiguation (SSD), specifically emphasizing homophones - words pronounced identically but with different meanings. To facilitate this, we first create a comprehensive homophone dictionary and an annotated dataset rich with homophone information established based on speech-text alignment. Building on this unique dictionary, we introduce AmbigST, an innovative homophone-aware contrastive learning approach that integrates a homophone-aware masking strategy. Our experiments on different MuST-C and CoVoST ST benchmarks demonstrate that AmbigST sets new performance standards. Specifically, it achieves SOTA results on BLEU scores for English to German, Spanish, and French ST tasks, underlining its effectiveness in reducing speech sense ambiguity. Data, code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/ytf-philp/AmbigST.
To be Continuous, or to be Discrete, Those are Bits of Questions - ACL Anthology

Recently, binary representation has been proposed as a novel representation that lies between continuous and discrete representations. It exhibits considerable information-preserving capability when being used to replace continuous input vectors. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of further introducing it to the output side, aiming to allow models to output binary labels instead. To preserve the structural information on the output side along with label information, we extend the previous contrastive hashing method as structured contrastive hashing. More specifically, we upgrade CKY from label-level to bit-level, define a new similarity function with span marginal probabilities, and introduce a novel contrastive loss function with a carefully designed instance selection strategy. Our model achieves competitive performance on various structured prediction tasks, and demonstrates that binary representation can be considered a novel representation that further bridges the gap between the continuous nature of deep learning and the discrete intrinsic property of natural languages.
Moûsai: Efficient Text-to-Music Diffusion Models - ACL Anthology

Recent years have seen the rapid development of large generative models for text; however, much less research has explored the connection between text and another “language” of communication – music. Music, much like text, can convey emotions, stories, and ideas, and has its own unique structure and syntax. In our work, we bridge text and music via a text-to-music generation model that is highly efficient, expressive, and can handle long-term structure. Specifically, we develop Moûsai, a cascading two-stage latent diffusion model that can generate multiple minutes of high-quality stereo music at 48kHz from textual descriptions. Moreover, our model features high efficiency, which enables real-time inference on a single consumer GPU with a reasonable speed. Through experiments and property analyses, we show our model’s competence over a variety of criteria compared with existing music generation models. Lastly, to promote the open-source culture, we provide a collection of open-source libraries with the hope of facilitating future work in the field. We open-source the following: Codes: https://github.com/archinetai/audio-diffusion-pytorch. Music samples for this paper: http://bit.ly/44ozWDH. Music samples for all models: https://bit.ly/audio-diffusion.
PokeMQA: Programmable knowledge editing for Multi-hop Question Answering - ACL Anthology

Multi-hop question answering (MQA) is one of the challenging tasks to evaluate machine’s comprehension and reasoning abilities, where large language models (LLMs) have widely achieved the human-comparable performance. Due to the dynamics of knowledge facts in real world, knowledge editing has been explored to update model with the up-to-date facts while avoiding expensive re-training or fine-tuning. Starting from the edited fact, the updated model needs to provide cascading changes in the chain of MQA. The previous art simply adopts a mix-up prompt to instruct LLMs conducting multiple reasoning tasks sequentially, including question decomposition, answer generation, and conflict checking via comparing with edited facts. However, the coupling of these functionally-diverse reasoning tasks inhibits LLMs’ advantages in comprehending and answering questions while disturbing them with the unskilled task of conflict checking. We thus propose a framework, Programmable knowledge editing for Multi-hop Question Answering (PokeMQA), to decouple the jobs. Specifically, we prompt LLMs to decompose knowledge-augmented multi-hop question, while interacting with a detached trainable scope detector to modulate LLMs behavior depending on external conflict signal. The experiments on three LLM backbones and two benchmark datasets validate our superiority in knowledge editing of MQA, outperforming all competitors by a large margin in almost all settings and consistently producing reliable reasoning process.
MemeGuard: An LLM and VLM-based Framework for Advancing Content Moderation via Meme Intervention - ACL Anthology

In the digital world, memes present a unique challenge for content moderation due to their potential to spread harmful content. Although detection methods have improved, proactive solutions such as intervention are still limited, with current research focusing mostly on text-based content, neglecting the widespread influence of multimodal content like memes. Addressing this gap, we present MemeGuard , a comprehensive framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) for meme intervention. MemeGuard harnesses a specially fine-tuned VLM, VLMeme , for meme interpretation, and a multimodal knowledge selection and ranking mechanism ( MKS ) for distilling relevant knowledge. This knowledge is then employed by a general-purpose LLM to generate contextually appropriate interventions. Another key contribution of this work is the I ntervening C yberbullying in M ultimodal M emes (ICMM) dataset, a high-quality, labeled dataset featuring toxic memes and their corresponding human-annotated interventions. We leverage ICMM to test MemeGuard , demonstrating its proficiency in generating relevant and effective responses to toxic memes. red Disclaimer : This paper contains harmful content that may be disturbing to some readers.
Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History - ACL Anthology

Many users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) – which jointly learns a vision and language model – is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters’ visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, it opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
Acquiring Clean Language Models from Backdoor Poisoned Datasets by Downscaling Frequency Space - ACL Anthology

Despite the notable success of language models (LMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the reliability of LMs is susceptible to backdoor attacks. Prior research attempts to mitigate backdoor learning while training the LMs on the poisoned dataset, yet struggles against complex backdoor attacks in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the learning mechanisms of backdoor LMs in the frequency space by Fourier analysis. Our findings indicate that the backdoor mapping presented on the poisoned datasets exhibits a more discernible inclination towards lower frequency compared to clean mapping, resulting in the faster convergence of backdoor mapping. To alleviate this dilemma, we propose Mu lti- Sc a le Lo w- R ank A daptation (MuScleLoRA), which deploys multiple radial scalings in the frequency space with low-rank adaptation to the target model and further aligns the gradients when updating parameters. Through downscaling in the frequency space, MuScleLoRA encourages the model to prioritize the learning of relatively high-frequency clean mapping, consequently mitigating backdoor learning. Experimental results demonstrate that MuScleLoRA outperforms baselines significantly. Notably, MuScleLoRA reduces the average success rate of diverse backdoor attacks to below 15% across multiple datasets and generalizes to various backbone LMs, including BERT, RoBERTa, and Llama2. The codes are publicly available at Anonymous.