GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers
Authors: Valentin Barriere; Sebastian Cifuentes
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23% change in hate speech detection and up to a 60% change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names.
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF
Authors: Yong Lin; Hangyu Lin; Wei Xiong; Shizhe Diao; Jianmeng Liu; Jipeng Zhang; Rui Pan; Haoxiang Wang; Wenbin Hu; Hanning Zhang; Hanze Dong; Renjie Pi; Han Zhao; Nan Jiang; Heng Ji; Yuan Yao; Tong Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: LLMs acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. To investigate alignment tax, we conducted experiments with existing RLHF algorithms using OpenLLaMA-3B, which revealed a pronounced alignment tax in NLP tasks. Whereas, despite various techniques to mitigate forgetting, they are often at odds with the RLHF performance, leading to a trade-off between alignment performance and forgetting mitigation, leading to an alignment-forgetting trade-off. In this paper we show that model averaging, which simply interpolates between pre and post RLHF model weights, surprisingly achieves the most strongest alignment-forgetting Pareto front among a wide range of competing methods. To understand its effectiveness, we offer theoretical insights into model averaging, revealing that it enhances performance Pareto front by increasing feature diversity on the layers where tasks share overlapped feature spaces. Empirical evidence corroborates our analysis by showing the benefits of averaging low-level transformer layers. Building on the analysis and the observation that averaging different layers of the transformer leads to significantly different alignment-forgetting trade-offs, we propose Heterogeneous Model Averaging (HMA) to Heterogeneously find various combination ratios of model layers. HMA seeks to maximize the alignment performance while incurring minimal alignment tax. Moreover, we validate HMA’s performance across a range of RLHF algorithms over OpenLLaMA-3B and further extend our findings to Mistral-7B which is evaluated by open-sourced preference model and GPT4. Code available here.
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations
Authors: Meng Li; Haoran Jin; Ruixuan Huang; Zhihao Xu; Defu Lian; Zijia Lin; Di Zhang; Xiting Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With the growing popularity of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), comes a need for more global explanations of model behaviors. Concept-based explanations arise as a promising avenue for explaining high-level patterns learned by LLMs. Yet their evaluation poses unique challenges, especially due to their non-local nature and high dimensional representation in a model’s hidden space. Current methods approach concepts from different perspectives, lacking a unified formalization. This makes evaluating the core measures of concepts, namely faithfulness or readability, challenging. To bridge the gap, we introduce a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations’ settings. Based on this, we quantify the faithfulness of a concept explanation via perturbation. We ensure adequate perturbation in the high-dimensional space for different concepts via an optimization problem. Readability is approximated via an automatic and deterministic measure, quantifying the coherence of patterns that maximally activate a concept while aligning with human understanding. Finally, based on measurement theory, we apply a meta-evaluation method for evaluating these measures, generalizable to other types of explanations or tasks as well. Extensive experimental analysis has been conducted to inform the selection of explanation evaluation measures.
Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Authors: Zhengyuan Liu; Stella Xin Yin; Geyu Lin; Nancy F. Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can provide personalized and self-paced learning experience. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enables better human-machine interaction, and facilitates the development of conversational ITSs in various disciplines such as math and language learning. In dialogic teaching, recognizing and adapting to individual characteristics can significantly enhance student engagement and learning efficiency. However, characterizing and simulating student’s persona remain challenging in training and evaluating conversational ITSs. In this work, we propose a framework to construct profiles of different student groups by refining and integrating both cognitive and noncognitive aspects, and leverage LLMs for personality-aware student simulation in a language learning scenario. We further enhance the framework with multi-aspect validation, and conduct extensive analysis from both teacher and student perspectives. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can produce diverse student responses according to the given language ability and personality traits, and trigger teacher’s adaptive scaffolding strategies.
MSI-Agent: Incorporating Multi-Scale Insight into Embodied Agents for Superior Planning and Decision-Making
Authors: Dayuan Fu; Biqing Qi; Yihuai Gao; Che Jiang; Guanting Dong; Bowen Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Insight gradually becomes a crucial form of long-term memory for an agent. However, the emergence of irrelevant insight and the lack of general insight can greatly undermine the effectiveness of insight. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce **M**ulti-**S**cale **I**nsight Agent (MSI-Agent), an embodied agent designed to improve LLMs’ planning and decision-making ability by summarizing and utilizing insight effectively across different scales. MSI achieves this through the experience selector, insight generator, and insight selector. Leveraging a three-part pipeline, MSI can generate task-specific and high-level insight, store it in a database, and then use relevant insight from it to aid in decision-making. Our experiments show that MSI outperforms another insight strategy when planning by GPT3.5. Moreover, We delve into the strategies for selecting seed experience and insight, aiming to provide LLM with more useful and relevant insight for better decision-making. Our observations also indicate that MSI exhibits better robustness when facing domain-shifting scenarios.
CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds
Authors: Min-Hsuan Yeh; Ruyuan Wan; Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers’ interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.
Tokenization Is More Than Compression
Authors: Craig W Schmidt; Varshini Reddy; Haoran Zhang; Alec Alameddine; Omri Uzan; Yuval Pinter; Chris Tanner
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document’s text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.
FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming
Authors: Ninareh Mehrabi; Palash Goyal; Christophe Dupuy; Qian Hu; Shalini Ghosh; Richard Zemel; Kai-Wei Chang; Aram Galstyan; Rahul Gupta
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive.As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. In this work, we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. In particular, taking text-to-image models as target models, we explore different feedback mechanisms to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that even with enhanced safety features, Stable Diffusion (SD) models are vulnerable to our adversarial prompts, raising concerns on their robustness in practical uses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models.
Successfully Guiding Humans with Imperfect Instructions by Highlighting Potential Errors and Suggesting Corrections
Authors: Lingjun Zhao; Nguyen X. Khanh; Hal Daumé III
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Language models will inevitably err in situations with which they are unfamiliar. However, by effectively communicating uncertainties, they can still guide humans toward making sound decisions in those contexts. We demonstrate this idea by developing HEAR, a system that can successfully guide humans in simulated residential environments despite generating potentially inaccurate instructions. Diverging from systems that provide users with only the instructions they generate, HEAR warns users of potential errors in its instructions and suggests corrections. This rich uncertainty information effectively prevents misguidance and reduces the search space for users. Evaluation with 80 users shows that HEAR achieves a 13% increase in success rate and a 29% reduction in final location error distance compared to only presenting instructions to users. Interestingly, we find that offering users possibilities to explore, HEAR motivates them to make more attempts at the task, ultimately leading to a higher success rate. To our best knowledge, this work is the first to show the practical benefits of uncertainty communication in a long-horizon sequential decision-making problem.
Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks
Authors: Haoyuan Wu; Haisheng Zheng; Zhuolun He; Bei Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across general tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce parameter-efficient sparsity crafting (PESC), which crafts dense models into sparse models using the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal parameter increase when guaranteeing the quality of approximation in function space compared to original sparse upcycling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our best sparse model outperforms other sparse and dense models and exhibits superior general capabilities compared to GPT-3.5.Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/Parameter-Efficient-MoE.
GeoGPT4V: Towards Geometric Multi-modal Large Language Models with Geometric Image Generation
Authors: Shihao Cai; Keqin Bao; Hangyu Guo; Jizhi Zhang; Jun Song; Bo Zheng
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models have seen widespread adoption in math problem-solving, yet for geometry problems, which often necessitate visual aids even for humans, the most advanced multi-modal models still struggle to effectively utilize image information. High-quality data is crucial for enhancing the geometric capabilities of multi-modal models, yet existing open-source datasets and related efforts are either too challenging for direct model learning or suffer from misalignment between text and images. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and GPT-4V to generate relatively basic geometry problems with aligned text and images, facilitating model learning. We have produced a dataset of 4.9K geometry problems and combined it with 19K open-source data to form our GeoGPT4V dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the GeoGPT4V dataset significantly improves the geometry performance of various models on the MathVista and MathVision benchmarks. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GeoGPT4V-08B2.
DyVo: Dynamic Vocabularies for Learned Sparse Retrieval with Entities
Authors: Thong Nguyen; Shubham Chatterjee; Sean MacAvaney; Iain Mackie; Jeff Dalton; Andrew Yates
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. Splitting entities diminishes retrieval accuracy and limits the model’s ability to incorporate up-to-date world knowledge not included in the training data. In this work, we enhance the LSR vocabulary with Wikipedia concepts and entities, enabling the model to resolve ambiguities more effectively and stay current with evolving knowledge. Central to our approach is a Dynamic Vocabulary (DyVo) head, which leverages existing entity embeddings and an entity retrieval component that identifies entities relevant to a query or document. We use the DyVo head to generate entity weights, which are then merged with word piece weights to create joint representations for efficient indexing and retrieval using an inverted index. In experiments across three entity-rich document ranking datasets, the resulting DyVo model substantially outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
Let the Expert Stick to His Last: Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning for Sparse Architectural Large Language Models
Authors: Zihan Wang; Deli Chen; Damai Dai; Runxin Xu; Zhuoshu Li; Yu Wu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is crucial for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) with constrained resource. Although there have been various PEFT methods for dense-architecture LLMs, PEFT for sparse-architecture LLMs is still underexplored. In this work, we study the PEFT method for LLMs with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and the contents of this work are mainly threefold: (1) We investigate the dispersion degree of the activated experts in customized tasks, and found that the routing distribution for specific task tend to be highly concentrated, while the distribution of activated experts varies significantly across different tasks. (2) We propose the expert-specialized fine-tuning method, which tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts; experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves the tuning efficiency, but also matches or even surpasses the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning. (3) We further analyze the impact of the MoE architecture on expert-specialized fine-tuning. We find that MoE models with finer-grained experts are more advantageous in selecting the combination of experts that are most relevant to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing the both the training efficiency and effectiveness.
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval
Authors: Dawei Zhu; Liang Wang; Nan Yang; Yifan Song; Wenhao Wu; Furu Wei; Sujian Li
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Embedding models play a pivotal role in modern NLP applications such as document retrieval. However, existing embedding models are limited to encoding short documents of typically 512 tokens, restrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing their input length to a maximum of 32,768. We begin by evaluating the performance of existing embedding models using our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark, which includes two synthetic and four real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying lengths and dispersed target information. The benchmarking results highlight huge opportunities for enhancement in current models. Via comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that training-free context window extension strategies can effectively increase the input length of these models by several folds. Moreover, comparison of models using Absolute Position Encoding (APE) and Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) reveals the superiority of RoPE-based embedding models in context window extension, offering empirical guidance for future models. Our benchmark, code and trained models will be released to advance the research in long context embedding models.
Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Orchestrated Streaming Experiences
Authors: Xiangyang Liu; Junliang He; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps using chain-of-thought prompting under zero-shot or few-shot settings. However, zero-shot prompting always encounters low performance, and the superior performance of few-shot prompting hinges on the manual-crafting of task-specific demonstrations one by one. In this paper, we present **RoSE** (**R**easoning with **O**rchestrated **S**treaming **E**xperiences), a general framework for solving reasoning tasks that can self-improve as it answers various reasoning questions. To enable RoSE, we describe an architecture that extends an LLM to store all answered reasoning questions and their reasoning steps in a streaming experience pool and orchestrate helpful questions from the pool to assist itself in answering new questions. To set up a question-aware orchestration mechanism, RoSE first calculates the similarity of each question in the pool with the question to be answered. Since the solution to each question in the experience pool is not always correct, RoSE will sort the questions according to their similarity with the question to be answered, and then uniformly divide them into multiple buckets. It finally extracts one question from each bucket to make the extracted questions more diverse. To make the extracted questions help RoSE answer new questions as much as possible, we introduce two other attributes of uncertainty and complexity for each question. RoSE will preferentially select the questions with low uncertainty and high complexity from each bucket. We evaluate the versatility of RoSE in various complex reasoning tasks and LLMs, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning, and find that it can achieve excellent performance without any labeled data and pre-set unlabeled data.