0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Expedited Training of Visual Conditioned Language Generation via Redundancy Reduction - ACL Anthology

We introduce EVL Gen , a streamlined framework designed for the pre-training of visually conditioned language generation models with high computational demands, utilizing frozen pre-trained large language models (LLMs). The conventional approach in vision-language pre-training (VLP) typically involves a two-stage optimization process: an initial resource-intensive phase dedicated to general-purpose vision-language representation learning, focused on extracting and consolidating relevant visual features. This is followed by a subsequent phase that emphasizes end-to-end alignment between visual and linguistic modalities. Our novel one-stage, single-loss framework bypasses the computationally demanding first training stage by gradually merging similar visual tokens during training, while avoiding model collapse caused by single-stage training of BLIP-2 type models. The gradual merging process effectively condenses visual information while preserving semantic richness, resulting in rapid convergence without compromising performance. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our approach accelerates the training of vision-language models by a factor of 5 without a noticeable impact on overall performance. Furthermore, we illustrate that our models significantly narrow the performance gap to current vision-language models using only 1/10 of the data. Finally, we showcase how our image-text models can seamlessly adapt to video-conditioned language generation tasks through novel soft attentive temporal token contextualizing modules. Code: https://github.com/yiren-jian/EVLGen
Confidence Under the Hood: An Investigation into the Confidence-Probability Alignment in Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

As the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) becomes more widespread, understanding their self-evaluation of confidence in generated responses becomes increasingly important as it is integral to the reliability of the output of these models. We introduce the concept of Confidence-Probability Alignment, that connects an LLM’s internal confidence, quantified by token probabilities, to the confidence conveyed in the model’s response when explicitly asked about its certainty. Using various datasets and prompting techniques that encourage model introspection, we probe the alignment between models’ internal and expressed confidence. These techniques encompass using structured evaluation scales to rate confidence, including answer options when prompting, and eliciting the model’s confidence level for outputs it does not recognize as its own. Notably, among the models analyzed, OpenAI’s GPT-4 showed the strongest confidence-probability alignment, with an average Spearman’s ̂𝜌 of 0.42, across a wide range of tasks. Our work contributes to the ongoing efforts to facilitate risk assessment in the application of LLMs and to further our understanding of model trustworthiness.
Retrieval-Augmented Multilingual Knowledge Editing - ACL Anthology

Knowledge represented in Large Language Models (LLMs) is quite often incorrect and can also become obsolete over time. Updating knowledge via fine-tuning is computationally resource-hungry and not reliable, and so knowledge editing (KE) has developed as an effective and economical alternative to inject new knowledge or to fix factual errors in LLMs. Although there has been considerable interest in this area, current KE research exclusively focuses on monolingual settings, typically in English. However, what happens if the new knowledge is supplied in one language, but we would like to query an LLM in a different language? To address the problem of multilingual knowledge editing, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Multilingual Knowledge Editor (ReMaKE) to update knowledge in LLMs. ReMaKE can be used to perform model-agnostic knowledge editing in a multilingual setting. ReMaKE concatenates the new knowledge retrieved from a multilingual knowledge base with users’ prompts before querying an LLM. Our experimental results show that ReMaKE outperforms baseline knowledge editing methods by a significant margin and is scalable to real-word application scenarios. Our multilingual knowledge editing dataset (MzsRE) in 12 languages, the code, and additional project information are available at https://github.com/weixuan-wang123/ReMaKE.
Picturing Ambiguity: A Visual Twist on the Winograd Schema Challenge - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in tasks like the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), showcasing advanced textual common-sense reasoning. However, applying this reasoning to multimodal domains, where understanding text and images together is essential, remains a substantial challenge. To address this, we introduce WinoVis, a novel dataset specifically designed to probe text-to-image models on pronoun disambiguation within multimodal contexts. Utilizing GPT-4 for prompt generation and Diffusion Attentive Attribution Maps (DAAM) for heatmap analysis, we propose a novel evaluation framework that isolates the models’ ability in pronoun disambiguation from other visual processing challenges. Evaluation of successive model versions reveals that, despite incremental advancements, Stable Diffusion 2.0 achieves a precision of 56.7% on WinoVis, only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further error analysis identifies important areas for future research aimed at advancing text-to-image models in their ability to interpret and interact with the complex visual world.
Subtle Biases Need Subtler Measures: Dual Metrics for Evaluating Representative and Affinity Bias in Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has often neglected subtle biases that, although less apparent, can significantly influence the models’ outputs toward particular social narratives. This study addresses two such biases within LLMs: representative bias, which denotes a tendency of LLMs to generate outputs that mirror the experiences of certain identity groups, and affinity bias, reflecting the models’ evaluative preferences for specific narratives or viewpoints. We introduce two novel metrics to measure these biases: the Representative Bias Score (RBS) and the Affinity Bias Score (ABS), and present the Creativity-Oriented Generation Suite (CoGS), a collection of open-ended tasks such as short story writing and poetry composition, designed with customized rubrics to detect these subtle biases. Our analysis uncovers marked representative biases in prominent LLMs, with a preference for identities associated with being white, straight, and men. Furthermore, our investigation of affinity bias reveals distinctive evaluative patterns within each model, akin to ‘bias fingerprints’. This trend is also seen in human evaluators, highlighting a complex interplay between human and machine bias perceptions.
Framing in the Presence of Supporting Data: A Case Study in U.S. Economic News - ACL Anthology

The mainstream media has much leeway in what it chooses to cover and how it covers it. These choices have real-world consequences on what people know and their subsequent behaviors. However, the lack of objective measures to evaluate editorial choices makes research in this area particularly difficult. In this paper, we argue that there are newsworthy topics where objective measures exist in the form of supporting data and propose a computational framework to analyze editorial choices in this setup. We focus on the economy because the reporting of economic indicators presents us with a relatively easy way to determine both the selection and framing of various publications. Their values provide a ground truth of how the economy is doing relative to how the publications choose to cover it. To do this, we define frame prediction as a set of interdependent tasks. At the article level, we learn to identify the reported stance towards the general state of the economy. Then, for every numerical quantity reported in the article, we learn to identify whether it corresponds to an economic indicator and whether it is being reported in a positive or negative way. To perform our analysis, we track six American publishers and each article that appeared in the top 10 slots of their landing page between 2015 and 2023.
Mementos: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Model Reasoning over Image Sequences - ACL Anthology

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in handling a variety of visual-language tasks. However, current MLLM benchmarks are predominantly designed to evaluate reasoning based on static information about a single image, and the ability of modern MLLMs to extrapolate from image sequences, which is essential for understanding our ever-changing world, has been less investigated. To address this challenge, this paper introduces Mementos, a new benchmark designed to assess MLLMs’ sequential image reasoning abilities. Mementos features 4,761 diverse image sequences with varying lengths. We also employ a GPT-4 assisted method to evaluate MLLM reasoning performance. Through a careful evaluation of nine recent MLLMs on Mementos, including GPT-4V and Gemini, we find that they struggle to accurately describe dynamic information about given image sequences, often leading to hallucinations/misrepresentations of objects and their corresponding behaviors. Our quantitative analysis and case studies identify three key factors impacting MLLMs’ sequential image reasoning: the correlation between object and behavioral hallucinations, the influence of co-occurring behaviors, and the compounding impact of behavioral hallucinations.
TTM-RE: Memory-Augmented Document-Level Relation Extraction - ACL Anthology

Document-level relation extraction aims to categorize the association between any two entities within a document.We find that previous methods for document-level relation extraction are ineffective in exploiting the full potential of large amounts of training data with varied noise levels. For example, in the ReDocRED benchmark dataset, state-of-the-art methods trained on the large-scale, lower-quality, distantly supervised training data generally do not perform better than those trained solely on the smaller, high-quality, human-annotated training data. To unlock the full potential of large-scale noisy training data for document-level relation extraction, we propose TTM-RE, a novel approach that integrates a trainable memory module, known as the Token Turing Machine, with a noisy-robust loss function that accounts for the positive-unlabeled setting. The trainable memory module enhances knowledge extraction from the large-scale noisy training dataset through an explicit learning of the memory tokens and a soft integration of the learned memory tokens into the input representation, thereby improving the model’s effectiveness for the final relation classification. Extensive experiments on ReDocRED, a benchmark dataset for document-level relation extraction, reveal that TTM-RE achieves state-of-the-art performance (with an absolute F1 score improvement of over 3%). Ablation studies further illustrate the superiority of TTM-RE in other domains (the ChemDisGene dataset in the biomedical domain) and under highly unlabeled settings.
Answer is All You Need: Instruction-following Text Embedding via Answering the Question - ACL Anthology

This work aims to build a text embedder that can capture characteristics of texts specified by user instructions clarifying the similarity criterion. While previous methods improve general task awareness by injecting the instruction information into encoding, they fail to be sensitive to clearer criteria like “evaluate similarity based on emotion”. We instead propose a different viewpoint, which treats the instruction as a “question” about the input text and encodes the expected answers to obtain the representation accordingly. Intuitively, texts with the same (implicit) semantics would share similar answers following the instruction, thus leading to more similar representations. Specifically, we propose InBedder that instantiates this learning-to-answer idea by only fine-tuning language models via abstractive question answering tasks. Despite its simplicity, InBedder demonstrates significantly improved instruction-following capabilities according to our proposed instruction awareness tests and instruction robustness tests, when applied to language models with large language models (LLMs) (e.g., llama-2-7b) and smaller encoder-based LMs (e.g., roberta-large). Additionally, our qualitative analysis of clustering outcomes, achieved by applying diverse instructions to the same unlabeled corpus, demonstrates a high degree of interpretability in the clusters formed.
Explore Spurious Correlations at the Concept Level in Language Models for Text Classification - ACL Anthology

Language models (LMs) have achieved notable success in numerous NLP tasks, employing both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) methods. While language models demonstrate exceptional performance, they face robustness challenges due to spurious correlations arising from imbalanced label distributions in training data or ICL exemplars. Previous research has primarily concentrated on word, phrase, and syntax features, neglecting the concept level, often due to the absence of concept labels and difficulty in identifying conceptual content in input texts. This paper introduces two main contributions. First, we employ ChatGPT to assign concept labels to texts, assessing concept bias in models during fine-tuning or ICL on test data. We find that LMs, when encountering spurious correlations between a concept and a label in training or prompts, resort to shortcuts for predictions. Second, we introduce a data rebalancing technique that incorporates ChatGPT-generated counterfactual data, thereby balancing label distribution and mitigating spurious correlations. Our method’s efficacy, surpassing traditional token removal approaches, is validated through extensive testing.
Every Answer Matters: Evaluating Commonsense with Probabilistic Measures - ACL Anthology

Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on commonsense tasks; however, these tasks are often posed as multiple-choice questions, allowing models to exploit systematic biases. Commonsense is also inherently probabilistic with multiple correct answers. The purpose of “boiling water” could be making tea, cooking but also could be killing germs. Existing tasks do not capture the probabilistic nature of common sense. To this end, we present commonsense frame completion (CFC), a new generative task that evaluates common sense via multiple open-ended generations. We also propose a method of probabilistic evaluation that strongly correlates with human judgments. Humans drastically outperform strong language model baselines on our dataset, indicating this approach is both a challenging and useful evaluation of machine common sense.
GradSafe: Detecting Jailbreak Prompts for LLMs via Safety-Critical Gradient Analysis - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) face threats from jailbreak prompts. Existing methods for detecting jailbreak prompts are primarily online moderation APIs or finetuned LLMs. These strategies, however, often require extensive and resource-intensive data collection and training processes. In this study, we propose GradSafe, which effectively detects jailbreak prompts by scrutinizing the gradients of safety-critical parameters in LLMs. Our method is grounded in a pivotal observation: the gradients of an LLM’s loss for jailbreak prompts paired with compliance response exhibit similar patterns on certain safety-critical parameters. In contrast, safe prompts lead to different gradient patterns. Building on this observation, GradSafe analyzes the gradients from prompts (paired with compliance responses) to accurately detect jailbreak prompts. We show that GradSafe, applied to Llama-2 without further training, outperforms Llama Guard—despite its extensive finetuning with a large dataset—in detecting jailbreak prompts. This superior performance is consistent across both zero-shot and adaptation scenarios, as evidenced by our evaluations on ToxicChat and XSTest. The source code is available at https://github.com/xyq7/GradSafe.
Pouring Your Heart Out: Investigating the Role of Figurative Language in Online Expressions of Empathy - ACL Anthology

Empathy is a social mechanism used to support and strengthen emotional connection with others, including in online communities. However, little is currently known about the nature of these online expressions, nor the particular factors that may lead to their improved detection. In this work, we study the role of a specific and complex subcategory of linguistic phenomena, figurative language, in online expressions of empathy. Our extensive experiments reveal that incorporating features regarding the use of metaphor, idiom, and hyperbole into empathy detection models improves their performance, resulting in impressive maximum F1 scores of 0.942 and 0.809 for identifying posts without and with empathy, respectively.
An Information-Theoretic Approach to Analyze NLP Classification Tasks - ACL Anthology

Understanding the contribution of the inputs on the output is useful across many tasks. This work provides an information-theoretic framework to analyse the influence of inputs for text classification tasks. Natural language processing (NLP) tasks take either a single or multiple text elements to predict an output variable. Each text element has two components: the semantic meaning and a linguistic realization. Multiple-choice reading comprehension (MCRC) and sentiment classification (SC) are selected to showcase the framework. For MCRC, it is found that the relative context influence on the output reduces on more challenging datasets. In particular, more challenging contexts allows greater variation in the question complexity. Hence, test creators need to carefully consider the choice of the context when designing multiple-choice questions for assessment. For SC, it is found the semantic meaning of the input dominates compared to its linguistic realization when determining the sentiment. The framework is made available at: https://github.com/WangLuran/nlp-element-influence.
Can Your Model Tell a Negation from an Implicature? Unravelling Challenges With Intent Encoders - ACL Anthology

Conversational systems often rely on embedding models for intent classification and intent clustering tasks. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs), which enable instructional embeddings allowing one to adjust semantics over the embedding space using prompts, are being viewed as a panacea for these downstream conversational tasks. However, traditional evaluation benchmarks rely solely on task metrics that don’t particularly measure gaps related to semantic understanding. Thus, we propose an intent semantic toolkit that gives a more holistic view of intent embedding models by considering three tasks– (1) intent classification, (2) intent clustering, and (3) a novel triplet task. The triplet task gauges the model’s understanding of two semantic concepts paramount in real-world conversational systems– negation and implicature. We observe that current embedding models fare poorly in semantic understanding of these concepts. To address this, we propose a pre-training approach to improve the embedding model by leveraging augmentation with data generated by an auto-regressive model and a contrastive loss term. Our approach improves the semantic understanding of the intent embedding model on the aforementioned linguistic dimensions while slightly effecting their performance on downstream task metrics.
Wav2Gloss: Generating Interlinear Glossed Text from Speech - ACL Anthology

Thousands of the world’s languages are in danger of extinction—a tremendous threat to cultural identities and human language diversity. Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a form of linguistic annotation that can support documentation and resource creation for these languages’ communities. IGT typically consists of (1) transcriptions, (2) morphological segmentation, (3) glosses, and (4) free translations to a majority language. We propose Wav2Gloss: a task in which these four annotation components are extracted automatically from speech, and introduce the first dataset to this end, Fieldwork: a corpus of speech with all these annotations, derived from the work of field linguists, covering 37 languages, with standard formatting, and train/dev/test splits. We provide various baselines to lay the groundwork for future research on IGT generation from speech, such as end-to-end versus cascaded, monolingual versus multilingual, and single-task versus multi-task approaches.
Leveraging Codebook Knowledge with NLI and ChatGPT for Zero-Shot Political Relation Classification - ACL Anthology

Is it possible accurately classify political relations within evolving event ontologies without extensive annotations? This study investigates zero-shot learning methods that use expert knowledge from existing annotation codebook, and evaluates the performance of advanced ChatGPT (GPT-3.5/4) and a natural language inference (NLI)-based model called ZSP. ChatGPT uses codebook’s labeled summaries as prompts, whereas ZSP breaks down the classification task into context, event mode, and class disambiguation to refine task-specific hypotheses. This decomposition enhances interpretability, efficiency, and adaptability to schema changes. The experiments reveal ChatGPT’s strengths and limitations, and crucially show ZSP’s outperformance of dictionary-based methods and its competitive edge over some supervised models. These findings affirm the value of ZSP for validating event records and advancing ontology development. Our study underscores the efficacy of leveraging transfer learning and existing domain expertise to enhance research efficiency and scalability.
SPOR: A Comprehensive and Practical Evaluation Method for Compositional Generalization in Data-to-Text Generation - ACL Anthology

Compositional generalization is an important ability of language models and has many different manifestations. For data-to-text generation, previous research on this ability is limited to a single manifestation called Systematicity and lacks consideration of large language models (LLMs), which cannot fully cover practical application scenarios. In this work, we propose SPOR, a comprehensive and practical evaluation method for compositional generalization in data-to-text generation. SPOR includes four aspects of manifestations (Systematicity, Productivity, Order invariance, and Rule learnability) and allows high-quality evaluation without additional manual annotations based on existing datasets. We demonstrate SPOR on two different datasets and evaluate some existing language models including LLMs. We find that the models are deficient in various aspects of the evaluation and need further improvement. Our work shows the necessity for comprehensive research on different manifestations of compositional generalization in data-to-text generation and provides a framework for evaluation.