GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Large Language Models Can Learn Temporal Reasoning
Authors: Siheng Xiong; Ali Payani; Ramana Kompella; Faramarz Fekri
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, they are not without their flaws and inaccuracies. Recent studies have introduced various methods to mitigate these limitations. Temporal reasoning (TR), in particular, presents a significant challenge for LLMs due to its reliance on diverse temporal concepts and intricate temporal logic. In this paper, we propose TG-LLM, a novel framework towards language-based TR. Instead of reasoning over the original context, we adopt a latent representation, temporal graph (TG) that enhances the learning of TR. A synthetic dataset (TGQA), which is fully controllable and requires minimal supervision, is constructed for fine-tuning LLMs on this text-to-TG translation task. We confirmed in experiments that the capability of TG translation learned on our dataset can be transferred to other TR tasks and benchmarks. On top of that, we teach LLM to perform deliberate reasoning over the TGs via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) bootstrapping and graph data augmentation. We observed that those strategies, which maintain a balance between usefulness and diversity, bring more reliable CoTs and final results than the vanilla CoT distillation.
Learning Relational Decomposition of Queries for Question Answering from Tables
Authors: Raphaël Mouravieff; Benjamin Piwowarski; Sylvain Lamprier
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Table Question-Answering involves both understanding the natural language query and grounding it in the context of the input table to extract relevant information. In this context, many methods have highlighted the benefits of intermediate pre-training using SQL queries. However, while most approaches aim at generating final answers directly from inputs, we claim that there is better to do with SQL queries during training.By learning to imitate a restricted subset of SQL-like algebraic operations, we demonstrate that their execution flow provides intermediate supervision steps that allow for increased generalization and structural reasoning compared to classical approaches. Our method, bridges the gap between semantic parsing and direct answering methods, offering valuable insights into which types of operations should be predicted by a generative architecture and which should be executed by an external algorithm. Our code can be found at https://github.com/RaphaelMouravieff/Partial-Exec.
Characterizing Similarities and Divergences in Conversational Tones in Humans and LLMs by Sampling with People
Authors: Dun-Ming Huang; Pol Van Rijn; Ilia Sucholutsky; Raja Marjieh; Nori Jacoby
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Conversational tones — the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate — are essential to effective communication. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly popular, it is necessary to characterize the divergences in their conversational tones relative to humans. Prior research relied on pre-existing taxonomies or text corpora, which suffer from experimenter bias and may not be representative of real-world distributions. Inspired by methods from cognitive science, we propose an iterative method for simultaneously eliciting conversational tones and sentences, where participants alternate between two tasks: (1) one participant identifies the tone of a given sentence and (2) a different participant generates a sentence based on that tone. We run 50 iterations of this process with both human participants and GPT-4 and obtain a dataset of sentences and frequent conversational tones. In an additional experiment, humans and GPT-4 annotated all sentences with all tones. With data from 1,339 participants, 33,370 human judgments, and 29,900 GPT-4 queries, we show how our approach can be used to create an interpretable geometric representation of relations between tones in humans and GPT-4. This work showcases how combining ideas from machine learning and cognitive science can address challenges in human-computer interactions.
Pareto Optimal Learning for Estimating Large Language Model Errors
Authors: Theodore Zhao; Mu Wei; J. Preston; Hoifung Poon
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in many applications. When a concrete and precise answer is desired, it is important to have a quantitative estimation of the potential error rate. However, this can be challenging due to the text-in-text-out nature of the generative models. We present a method based on Pareto optimization that generates a risk score to estimate the probability of error in an LLM response by integrating multiple sources of information. We prove theoretically that the error estimator optimized in our framework aligns with the LLM and the information sources in an Pareto optimal manner. Experimental results show that the risk scores estimated by our method are well correlated with the true LLM error rate, thus facilitating error correction. By dynamically combining with prompting strategies such as self-verification and information retrieval, we demonstrate the proposed method can be utilized to increase the performance of an LLM, surpassing state-of-the-art task specific model.
Simul-LLM: A Framework for Exploring High-Quality Simultaneous Translation with Large Language Models
Authors: Victor Agostinelli; Max Wild; Matthew Raffel; Kazi Fuad; Lizhong Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters and pretrained on massive amounts of data are now capable of near or better than state-of-the-art performance in a variety of downstream natural language processing tasks. Neural machine translation (NMT) is one such task that LLMs have been applied to with great success. However, little research has focused on applying LLMs to the more difficult subset of NMT called simultaneous translation (SimulMT), where translation begins before the entire source context is available to the model. In this paper, we address key challenges facing LLMs fine-tuned for SimulMT, validate classical SimulMT concepts and practices in the context of LLMs, explore adapting LLMs that are fine-tuned for NMT to the task of SimulMT, and introduce Simul-LLM, the first open-source fine-tuning and evaluation pipeline development framework for LLMs focused on SimulMT.
Defending Against Alignment-Breaking Attacks via Robustly Aligned LLM
Authors: Bochuan Cao; Yuanpu Cao; Lu Lin; Jinghui Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements and are now widely used across various domains. Unfortunately, there has been a rising concern that LLMs can be misused to generate harmful or malicious content. Though a line of research has focused on aligning LLMs with human values and preventing them from producing inappropriate content, such alignments are usually vulnerable and can be bypassed by alignment-breaking attacks via adversarially optimized or handcrafted jailbreaking prompts. In this work, we introduce a Robustly Aligned LLM (RA-LLM) to defend against potential alignment-breaking attacks. RA-LLM can be directly constructed upon an existing aligned LLM with a robust alignment checking function, without requiring any expensive retraining or fine-tuning process of the original LLM. Furthermore, we also provide a theoretical analysis for RA-LLM to verify its effectiveness in defending against alignment-breaking attacks. Through real-world experiments on open-source large language models, we demonstrate that RA-LLM can successfully defend against both state-of-the-art adversarial prompts and popular handcrafted jailbreaking prompts by reducing their attack success rates from nearly 100% to around 10% or less.
Interactive-KBQA: Multi-Turn Interactions for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Large Language Models
Authors: Guanming Xiong; Junwei Bao; Wen Zhao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: This study explores the realm of knowledge base question answering (KBQA). KBQA is considered a challenging task, particularly in parsing intricate questions into executable logical forms. Traditional semantic parsing (SP)-based methods require extensive data annotations, which result in significant costs. Recently, the advent of few-shot in-context learning, powered by large language models (LLMs), has showcased promising capabilities. Yet, fully leveraging LLMs to parse questions into logical forms in low-resource scenarios poses a substantial challenge. To tackle these hurdles, we introduce Interactive-KBQA, a framework designed to generate logical forms through direct interaction with knowledge bases (KBs). Within this framework, we have developed three generic APIs for KB interaction. For each category of complex question, we devised exemplars to guide LLMs through the reasoning processes. Our method achieves competitive results on the WebQuestionsSP, ComplexWebQuestions, KQA Pro, and MetaQA datasets with a minimal number of examples (shots). Importantly, our approach supports manual intervention, allowing for the iterative refinement of LLM outputs. By annotating a dataset with step-wise reasoning processes, we showcase our model’s adaptability and highlight its potential for contributing significant enhancements to the field.
LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error
Authors: Boshi Wang; Hao Fang; Jason Eisner; Benjamin Van Durme; Yu Su
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments. Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs primarily focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. However, a critical aspect that has surprisingly been understudied is simply how accurately an LLM uses tools for which it has been trained. We find that existing LLMs, including GPT-4 and open-source LLMs specifically fine-tuned for tool use, only reach a correctness rate in the range of 30% to 60%, far from reliable use in practice. We propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs, simulated trial and error (STE), that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. Specifically, STE leverages an LLM’s ‘imagination’ to simulate plausible scenarios for using a tool, after which the LLM interacts with the tool to learn from its execution feedback. Both short-term and long-term memory are employed to improve the depth and breadth of the exploration, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on ToolBench show that STE substantially improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and enabling it to outperform GPT-4. We also show effective continual learning of tools via a simple experience replay strategy.
HyperMoE: Towards Better Mixture of Experts via Transferring Among Experts
Authors: Hao Zhao; Zihan Qiu; Huijia Wu; Zili Wang; Zhaofeng He; Jie Fu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: The Mixture of Experts (MoE) for language models has been proven effective in augmenting the capacity of models by dynamically routing each input token to a specific subset of experts for processing. Despite the success, most existing methods face a challenge for balance between sparsity and the availability of expert knowledge: enhancing performance through increased use of expert knowledge often results in diminishing sparsity during expert selection. To mitigate this contradiction, we propose HyperMoE, a novel MoE framework built upon Hypernetworks. This framework integrates the computational processes of MoE with the concept of knowledge transferring in multi-task learning. Specific modules generated based on the information of unselected experts serve as supplementary information, which allows the knowledge of experts not selected to be used while maintaining selection sparsity. Our comprehensive empirical evaluations across multiple datasets and backbones establish that HyperMoE significantly outperforms existing MoE methods under identical conditions concerning the number of experts. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Bumble666/Hyper_MoE
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering
Authors: Wenhao Liu; Xiaohua Wang; Muling Wu; Tianlong Li; Changze Lv; Zixuan Ling; Zhu JianHao; Cenyuan Zhang; Xiaoqing Zheng; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for enhancing their utility in terms of helpfulness, truthfulness, safety, harmlessness, and interestingness. Existing methods for achieving this alignment often involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels assessing the relative quality of model responses. Nevertheless, RLHF is susceptible to instability during fine-tuning and presents challenges in implementation. Drawing inspiration from the emerging field of representation engineering (RepE), this study aims to identify relevant representations for high-level human preferences embedded in patterns of activity within an LLM and achieve precise control of model behavior by transforming its representations. This novel approach, denoted as Representation Alignment from Human Feedback (RAHF), proves to be effective, computationally efficient, and easy to implement. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of RAHF in not only capturing but also manipulating representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values, rather than being confined to a singular concept or function (e.g. honesty or bias). RAHF’s versatility in accommodating diverse human preferences shows its potential for advancing LLM performance.
CODIS: Benchmarking Context-dependent Visual Comprehension for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Fuwen Luo; Chi Chen; Zihao Wan; Zhaolu Kang; Qidong Yan; Yingjie Li; Xiaolong Wang; Siyu Wang; Ziyue Wang; Xiaoyue Mi; Peng Li; Ning Ma; Maosong Sun; Yang Liu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising results in a variety of tasks that combine vision and language. As these models become more integral to research and applications, conducting comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities has grown increasingly important. However, most existing benchmarks fail to consider that, in certain situations, images need to be interpreted within a broader context. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark, named as CODIS, designed to assess the ability of models to use context provided in free-form text to enhance visual comprehension. Our findings indicate that MLLMs consistently fall short of human performance on this benchmark. Further analysis confirms that these models struggle to effectively extract and utilize contextual information to improve their understanding of images. This underscores the pressing need to enhance the ability of MLLMs to comprehend visuals in a context-dependent manner.
ARAIDA: Analogical Reasoning-Augmented Interactive Data Annotation
Authors: Chen Huang; Yiping Jin; Ilija Ilievski; Wenqiang Lei; Jiancheng Lv
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Human annotation is a time-consuming task that requires a significant amount of effort. To address this issue, interactive data annotation utilizes an annotation model to provide suggestions for humans to approve or correct. However, annotation models trained with limited labeled data are prone to generating incorrect suggestions, leading to extra human correction effort. To tackle this challenge, we propose Araida, an analogical reasoning-based approach that enhances automatic annotation accuracy in the interactive data annotation setting and reduces the need for human corrections. Araida involves an error-aware integration strategy that dynamically coordinates an annotation model and a k-nearest neighbors (KNN) model, giving more importance to KNN’s predictions when predictions from the annotation model are deemed inaccurate. Empirical studies demonstrate that Araida is adaptable to different annotation tasks and models. On average, it reduces human correction labor by 11.02% compared to vanilla interactive data annotation methods.
PolCLIP: A Unified Image-Text Word Sense Disambiguation Model via Generating Multimodal Complementary Representations
Authors: Qihao Yang; Yong Li; Xuelin Wang; Fu Lee Wang; Tianyong Hao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Word sense disambiguation (WSD) can be viewed as two subtasks: textual word sense disambiguation (Textual-WSD) and visual word sense disambiguation (Visual-WSD). They aim to identify the most semantically relevant senses or images to a given context containing ambiguous target words. However, existing WSD models seldom address these two subtasks jointly due to lack of images in Textual-WSD datasets or lack of senses in Visual-WSD datasets. To bridge this gap, we propose PolCLIP, a unified image-text WSD model. By employing an image-text complementarity strategy, it not only simulates stable diffusion models to generate implicit visual representations for word senses but also simulates image captioning models to provide implicit textual representations for images. Additionally, a disambiguation-oriented image-sense dataset is constructed for the training objective of learning multimodal polysemy representations. To the best of our knowledge, PolCLIP is the first model that can cope with both Textual-WSD and Visual-WSD. Extensive experimental results on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving a 2.53% F1-score increase over the state-of-the-art models on Textual-WSD and a 2.22% HR@1 improvement on Visual-WSD.
Prompted Aspect Key Point Analysis for Quantitative Review Summarization
Authors: An Quang Tang; Xiuzhen Zhang; Minh Ngoc Dinh; Erik Cambria
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Key Point Analysis (KPA) aims for quantitative summarization that provides key points (KPs) as succinct textual summaries and quantities measuring their prevalence. KPA studies for arguments and reviews have been reported in the literature. A majority of KPA studies for reviews adopt supervised learning to extract short sentences as KPs before matching KPs to review comments for quantification of KP prevalence. Recent abstractive approaches still generate KPs based on sentences, often leading to KPs with overlapping and hallucinated opinions, and inaccurate quantification. In this paper, we propose Prompted Aspect Key Point Analysis (PAKPA) for quantitative review summarization. PAKPA employs aspect sentiment analysis and prompted in-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate and quantify KPs grounded in aspects for business entities, which achieves faithful KPs with accurate quantification, and removes the need for large amounts of annotated data for supervised training. Experiments on the popular review dataset Yelp and the aspect-oriented review summarization dataset SPACE show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/PAKPA
Ask Again, Then Fail: Large Language Models’ Vacillations in Judgment
Authors: Qiming Xie; Zengzhi Wang; Yi Feng; Rui Xia
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: We observe that current large language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions, even if the original judgment was correct. This wavering presents a significant challenge for generating reliable responses and building user trust. To comprehensively assess this issue, we introduce a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism along with two metrics to quantify this inconsistency, confirming its widespread presence in current large language models. Furthermore, to mitigate this issue, we explore various prompting strategies for closed-source models, and develop a training-based framework Unwavering-FQ that teaches large language models to maintain their originally correct judgments through synthesized high-quality preference data. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our framework and its ability to enhance the general capabilities of large language models.
CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models
Authors: Tong Zhang; Peixin Qin; Yang Deng; Chen Huang; Wenqiang Lei; Junhong Liu; Dingnan Jin; Hongru Liang; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown, ultimately risking user trust and satisfaction. To this end, we introduce CLAMBER, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs using a well-organized taxonomy. Building upon the taxonomy, we construct 12K high-quality data to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks of various off-the-shelf LLMs.Our findings indicate the limited practical utility of current LLMs in identifying and clarifying ambiguous user queries, even enhanced by chain-of-thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting. These techniques may result in overconfidence in LLMs and yield only marginal enhancements in identifying ambiguity. Furthermore, current LLMs fall short in generating high-quality clarifying questions due to a lack of conflict resolution and inaccurate utilization of inherent knowledge.In this paper, CLAMBER presents a guidance and promotes further research on proactive and trustworthy LLMs.