GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models
Authors: Yifan Jiang; Filip Ilievski; Kaixin Ma; Zhivar Sourati
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The success of language models has inspired the NLP community to attend to tasks that require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. While such vertical thinking tasks have been relatively popular, lateral thinking puzzles have received little attention. To bridge this gap, we devise BrainTeaser: a multiple-choice Question Answering task designed to test the model’s ability to exhibit lateral thinking and defy default commonsense associations. We design a three-step procedure for creating the first lateral thinking benchmark, consisting of data collection, distractor generation, and generation of adversarial examples, leading to 1,100 puzzles with high-quality annotations. To assess the consistency of lateral reasoning by models, we enrich BrainTeaser based on a semantic and contextual reconstruction of its questions. Our experiments with state-of-the-art instruction- and commonsense language models reveal a significant gap between human and model performance, which is further widened when consistency across adversarial formats is considered. We make all of our code and data available to stimulate work on developing and evaluating lateral thinking models.
When are Lemons Purple? The Concept Association Bias of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yingtian Tang; Yutaro Yamada; Yoyo Zhang; Ilker Yildirim
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large-scale vision-language models such as CLIP have shown impressive performance on zero-shot image classification and image-to-text retrieval. However, such performance does not realize in tasks that require a finer-grained correspondence between vision and language, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). We investigate why this is the case, and report an interesting phenomenon of vision-language models, which we call the Concept Association Bias (CAB), as a potential cause of the difficulty of applying these models to VQA and similar tasks. We find that models with CAB tend to treat input as a bag of concepts and attempt to fill in the other missing concept crossmodally, leading to an unexpected zero-shot prediction. We demonstrate CAB by showing that CLIP’s zero-shot classification performance greatly suffers when there is a strong concept association between an object (e.g. eggplant) and an attribute (e.g. color purple). We also show that the strength of CAB predicts the performance on VQA. We observe that CAB is prevalent in vision-language models trained with contrastive losses, even when autoregressive losses are jointly employed. However, a model that solely relies on autoregressive loss seems to exhibit minimal or no signs of CAB.
What Comes Next? Evaluating Uncertainty in Neural Text Generators Against Human Production Variability
Authors: Mario Giulianelli; Joris Baan; Wilker Aziz; Raquel Fernández; Barbara Plank
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, for any input, multiple communicative goals are plausible, and any goal can be put into words, or produced, in multiple ways. We characterise the extent to which human production varies lexically, syntactically, and semantically across four NLG tasks, connecting human production variability to aleatoric or data uncertainty. We then inspect the space of output strings shaped by a generation system’s predicted probability distribution and decoding algorithm to probe its uncertainty. For each test input, we measure the generator’s calibration to human production variability. Following this instance-level approach, we analyse NLG models and decoding strategies, demonstrating that probing a generator with multiple samples and, when possible, multiple references, provides the level of detail necessary to gain understanding of a model’s representation of uncertainty.
Text Representation Distillation via Information Bottleneck Principle
Authors: Yanzhao Zhang; Dingkun Long; Zehan Li; Pengjun Xie
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have recently shown great success in text representation field. However, the high computational cost and high-dimensional representation of PLMs pose significant challenges for practical applications. To make models more accessible, an effective method is to distill large models into smaller representation models. In order to relieve the issue of performance degradation after distillation, we propose a novel Knowledge Distillation method called IBKD. This approach is motivated by the Information Bottleneck principle and aims to maximize the mutual information between the final representation of the teacher and student model, while simultaneously reducing the mutual information between the student model’s representation and the input data. This enables the student model to preserve important learned information while avoiding unnecessary information, thus reducing the risk of over-fitting. Empirical studies on two main downstream applications of text representation (Semantic Textual Similarity and Dense Retrieval tasks) demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Let GPT be a Math Tutor: Teaching Math Word Problem Solvers with Customized Exercise Generation
Authors: Zhenwen Liang; Wenhao Yu; Tanmay Rajpurohit; Peter Clark; Xiangliang Zhang; Ashwin Kalyan
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model’s weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating targeted exercises aligned with educational science principles, such as knowledge tracing and personalized learning. Concretely, we let GPT-3 be a math tutor and run two steps iteratively: 1) assessing the student model’s current learning status on a GPT-generated exercise book, and 2) improving the student model by training it with tailored exercise samples generated by GPT-3. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms LLMs (e.g., GPT-3 and PaLM) in accuracy across three distinct benchmarks while employing significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the various components within our methodology to substantiate their efficacy.
FANToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind in Interactions
Authors: Hyunwoo Kim; Melanie Sclar; Xuhui Zhou; Ronan Bras; Gunhee Kim; Yejin Choi; Maarten Sap
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM) evaluations currently focus on testing models using passive narratives that inherently lack interactivity. We introduce FANToM, a new benchmark designed to stress-test ToM within information-asymmetric conversational contexts via question answering. Our benchmark draws upon important theoretical requisites from psychology and necessary empirical considerations when evaluating large language models (LLMs). In particular, we formulate multiple types of questions that demand the same underlying reasoning to identify illusory or false sense of ToM capabilities in LLMs. We show that FANToM is challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs, which perform significantly worse than humans even with chain-of-thought reasoning or fine-tuning.
Exploring the Boundaries of GPT-4 in Radiology
Authors: Qianchu Liu; Stephanie Hyland; Shruthi Bannur; Kenza Bouzid; Daniel Castro; Maria Wetscherek; Robert Tinn; Harshita Sharma; Fernando Pérez-García; Anton Schwaighofer; Pranav Rajpurkar; Sameer Khanna; Hoifung Poon; Naoto Usuyama; Anja Thieme; Aditya Nori; Matthew Lungren; Ozan Oktay; Javier Alvarez-Valle
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The recent success of general-domain large language models (LLMs) has significantly changed the natural language processing paradigm towards a unified foundation model across domains and applications. In this paper, we focus on assessing the performance of GPT-4, the most capable LLM so far, on the text-based applications for radiology reports, comparing against state-of-the-art (SOTA) radiology-specific models. Exploring various prompting strategies, we evaluated GPT-4 on a diverse range of common radiology tasks and we found GPT-4 either outperforms or is on par with current SOTA radiology models. With zero-shot prompting, GPT-4 already obtains substantial gains (≈ 10% absolute improvement) over radiology models in temporal sentence similarity classification (accuracy) and natural language inference (F1). For tasks that require learning dataset-specific style or schema (e.g. findings summarisation), GPT-4 improves with example-based prompting and matches supervised SOTA. Our extensive error analysis with a board-certified radiologist shows GPT-4 has a sufficient level of radiology knowledge with only occasional errors in complex context that require nuanced domain knowledge. For findings summarisation, GPT-4 outputs are found to be overall comparable with existing manually-written impressions.
A Frustratingly Easy Post-Training Quantization Scheme for LLMs
Authors: Yongkweon Jeon; Chungman Lee; Kyungphil Park; Ho-young Kim
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Efficient inference has become crucial for hyper-scale AI models, including large language models, as their parameter count continues to increase for enhanced performance. This necessity holds true regardless of the computing environment, whether it be mobile devices or cloud servers. Quantization emerges as a solution to alleviate the computational burden during inference. By representing models with a reduced bit-width, quantization minimizes the frequency of DRAM access while fully exploiting the parallelism of operations through a dense matrix format. Consequently, quantized models achieve low end-to-end latency and optimize resource utilization by addressing both memory and computing bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a straightforward post-training quantization scheme, called Z-Fold, that fully utilizes the feature of the Transformer structure widely employed in large language models.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Biomedical Entity Linking Models
Authors: David Kartchner; Jennifer Deng; Shubham Lohiya; Tejasri Kopparthi; Prasanth Bathala; Daniel Domingo-Fernández; Cassie Mitchell
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Biomedical entity linking (BioEL) is the process of connecting entities referenced in documents to entries in biomedical databases such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) or Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The study objective was to comprehensively evaluate nine recent state-of-the-art biomedical entity linking models under a unified framework. We compare these models along axes of (1) accuracy, (2) speed, (3) ease of use, (4) generalization, and (5) adaptability to new ontologies and datasets. We additionally quantify the impact of various preprocessing choices such as abbreviation detection. Systematic evaluation reveals several notable gaps in current methods. In particular, current methods struggle to correctly link genes and proteins and often have difficulty effectively incorporating context into linking decisions. To expedite future development and baseline testing, we release our unified evaluation framework and all included models on GitHub at https://github.com/davidkartchner/biomedical-entity-linking
Exploring Jiu-Jitsu Argumentation for Writing Peer Review Rebuttals
Authors: Sukannya Purkayastha; Anne Lauscher; Iryna Gurevych
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In many domains of argumentation, people’s arguments are driven by so-called attitude roots, i.e., underlying beliefs and world views, and their corresponding attitude themes. Given the strength of these latent drivers of arguments, recent work in psychology suggests that instead of directly countering surface-level reasoning (e.g., falsifying the premises), one should follow an argumentation style inspired by the Jiu-Jitsu “soft” combat system: first, identify an arguer’s attitude roots and themes, and then choose a prototypical rebuttal that is aligned with those drivers instead of trying to invalidate those. In this work, we are the first to explore Jiu-Jitsu argumentation for peer reviews by proposing the novel task of attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation. To this end, we enrich an existing dataset for discourse structure in peer reviews with attitude roots, attitude themes, and canonical rebuttals. To facilitate this process, we recast established annotation concepts from the domain of peer reviews (e.g., aspects a review sentence is relating to) and train domain-specific models. We then propose strong rebuttal generation strategies, which we benchmark on our novel dataset for the task of end-to-end attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation and two subtasks.
LIMIT: Language Identification, Misidentification, and Translation using Hierarchical Models in 350+ Languages
Authors: Milind Agarwal; Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam; Antonios Anastasopoulos
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Knowing the language of an input text/audio is a necessary first step for using almost every NLP tool such as taggers, parsers, or translation systems. Language identification is a well-studied problem, sometimes even considered solved; in reality, due to lack of data and computational challenges, current systems cannot accurately identify most of the world’s 7000 languages. To tackle this bottleneck, we first compile a corpus, MCS-350, of 50K multilingual and parallel children’s stories in 350+ languages. MCS-350 can serve as a benchmark for language identification of short texts and for 1400+ new translation directions in low-resource Indian and African languages. Second, we propose a novel misprediction-resolution hierarchical model, LIMIT, for language identification that reduces error by 55% (from 0.71 to 0.32) on our compiled children’s stories dataset and by 40% (from 0.23 to 0.14) on the FLORES-200 benchmark. Our method can expand language identification coverage into low-resource languages by relying solely on systemic misprediction patterns, bypassing the need to retrain large models from scratch.
FreeAL: Towards Human-Free Active Learning in the Era of Large Language Models
Authors: Ruixuan Xiao; Yiwen Dong; Junbo Zhao; Runze Wu; Minmin Lin; Gang Chen; Haobo Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Collecting high-quality labeled data for model training is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive for various NLP tasks. While copious solutions, such as active learning for small language models (SLMs) and prevalent in-context learning in the era of large language models (LLMs), have been proposed and alleviate the labeling burden to some extent, their performances are still subject to human intervention. It is still underexplored how to reduce the annotation cost in the LLMs era. To bridge this, we revolutionize traditional active learning and propose an innovative collaborative learning framework FreeAL to interactively distill and filter the task-specific knowledge from LLMs. During collaborative training, an LLM serves as an active annotator inculcating its coarse-grained knowledge, while a downstream SLM is incurred as a student to filter out high-quality in-context samples to feedback LLM for the subsequent label refinery. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that FreeAL largely enhances the zero-shot performances for both SLM and LLM without any human supervision.
API-Assisted Code Generation for Question Answering on Varied Table Structures
Authors: Yihan Cao; Shuyi Chen; Ryan Liu; Zhiruo Wang; Daniel Fried
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: A persistent challenge to table question answering (TableQA) by generating executable programs has been adapting to varied table structures, typically requiring domain-specific logical forms. In response, this paper introduces a unified TableQA framework that: (1) provides a unified representation for structured tables as multi-index Pandas data frames, (2) uses Python as a powerful querying language, and (3) uses few-shot prompting to translate NL questions into Python programs, which are executable on Pandas data frames. Furthermore, to answer complex relational questions with extended program functionality and external knowledge, our framework allows customized APIs that Python programs can call. We experiment with four TableQA datasets that involve tables of different structures — relational, multi-table, and hierarchical matrix shapes — and achieve prominent improvements over past state-of-the-art systems. In ablation studies, we (1) show benefits from our multi-index representation and APIs over baselines that use only an LLM, and (2) demonstrate that our approach is modular and can incorporate additional APIs.
Data Factors for Better Compositional Generalization
Authors: Xiang Zhou; Yichen Jiang; Mohit Bansal
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization, such as SCAN (Lake and Baroni, 2018) and COGS (Kim and Linzen, 2020), expose severe problems in models trained from scratch on these datasets. However, in contrast to this poor performance, state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability. In this work, to reconcile this inconsistency, we conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors, including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. First, we show that increased dataset complexity can lead to better generalization behavior on multiple different generalization challenges. To further understand this improvement, we show two axes of the benefit from more complex datasets: they provide more diverse examples so compositional understanding becomes more effective, and they also prevent ungeneralizable memorization of the examples due to reduced example repetition frequency. Finally, we explore how training examples of different difficulty levels influence generalization differently. On synthetic datasets, simple examples invoke stronger compositionality than hard examples do. On larger-scale real language datasets, while hard examples become more important potentially to ensure decent data coverage, a balanced mixture of simple and hard examples manages to induce the strongest generalizability.
ChatEdit: Towards Multi-turn Interactive Facial Image Editing via Dialogue
Authors: Xing Cui; Zekun Li; Pei Li; Yibo Hu; Hailin Shi; Chunshui Cao; Zhaofeng He
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper explores interactive facial image editing through dialogue and presents the ChatEdit benchmark dataset for evaluating image editing and conversation abilities in this context. ChatEdit is constructed from the CelebA-HQ dataset, incorporating annotated multi-turn dialogues corresponding to user editing requests on the images. The dataset is challenging, as it requires the system to dynamically track and edit images based on user requests, while generating appropriate natural language responses. To address these challenges, we propose a framework comprising a dialogue module for tracking user requests as well as generating responses, and an image editing module for editing images accordingly. Unlike previous approaches, our framework directly tracks the user request of the current turn from the entire dialogue history and edits the initial image instead of manipulating the output from the previous turn, mitigating error accumulation and attribute forgetting issues. Extensive experiments on the ChatEdit dataset demonstrate the superiority of our framework over previous methods and also improvement rooms, encouraging future research. We will release the code and data publicly to facilitate advancements in complex interactive facial image editing.
Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations
Authors: James Y. Huang; Wenlin Yao; Kaiqiang Song; Hongming Zhang; Muhao Chen; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Traditional sentence embedding models encode sentences into vector representations to capture useful properties such as the semantic similarity between sentences. However, in addition to similarity, sentence semantics can also be interpreted via compositional operations such as sentence fusion or difference. It is unclear whether the compositional semantics of sentences can be directly reflected as compositional operations in the embedding space. To more effectively bridge the continuous embedding and discrete text spaces, we explore the plausibility of incorporating various compositional properties into the sentence embedding space that allows us to interpret embedding transformations as compositional sentence operations. We propose InterSent, an end-to-end framework for learning interpretable sentence embeddings that supports compositional sentence operations in the embedding space. Our method optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks over existing approaches while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks.
Outlier Dimensions Encode Task Specific Knowledge
Authors: William Rudman; Catherine Chen; Carsten Eickhoff
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Representations from large language models (LLMs) are known to be dominated by a small subset of dimensions with exceedingly high variance. Previous works have argued that although ablating these outlier dimensions in LLM representations hurts downstream performance, outlier dimensions are detrimental to the representational quality of embeddings. In this study, we investigate how fine-tuning impacts outlier dimensions and show that 1) outlier dimensions that occur in pre-training persist in fine-tuned models and 2) a single outlier dimension can complete downstream tasks with a minimal error rate. Our results suggest that outlier dimensions can encode crucial task-specific knowledge and that the value of a representation in a single outlier dimension drives downstream model decisions.