GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs
Authors: Wentao Ye; Jiaqi Hu; Liyao Li; Haobo Wang; Gang Chen; Junbo Zhao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we propose a holistic method named Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) along with a new to-be-released dataset to detect the contaminated data and diminish the contamination effect. PAC extends the popular MIA (Membership Inference Attack) — from machine learning community — by forming a more global target at detecting training data to Clarify invisible training data. As a pioneering work, PAC is very much plug-and-play that can be integrated with most (if not all) current white- and black-box LLMs. By extensive experiments, PAC outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5%, towards data contamination detection on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. Besides, our application in real-world scenarios highlights the prominent presence of contamination and related issues.
Truth-Aware Context Selection: Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models Being Misled by Untruthful Contexts
Authors: Tian Yu; Shaolei Zhang; Yang Feng
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive text generation capabilities, they are easily misled by untruthful contexts provided by users or knowledge augmentation tools, leading to hallucinations. To alleviate LLMs from being misled by untruthful context and take advantage of knowledge augmentation, we propose Truth-Aware Context Selection (TACS), a lightweight method to adaptively recognize and mask untruthful context from the inputs. TACS begins by performing truth detection on the input context, leveraging the parameterized knowledge within the LLM. Subsequently, it constructs a corresponding attention mask based on the truthfulness of each position, selecting the truthful context and discarding the untruthful context. Additionally, we introduce a new evaluation metric, Disturbance Adaption Rate, to further study the LLMs’ ability to accept truthful information and resist untruthful information.Experimental results indicate that TACS can effectively filter untruthful context and significantly improve the overall quality of LLMs’ responses when presented with misleading information.
Efficiently Exploring Large Language Models for Document-Level Machine Translation with In-context Learning
Authors: Menglong Cui; Jiangcun Du; Shaolin Zhu; Deyi Xiong
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit outstanding performance in machine translation via in-context learning. In contrast to sentence-level translation, document-level translation (DOCMT) by LLMs based on in-context learning faces two major challenges: firstly, document translations generated by LLMs are often incoherent; secondly, the length of demonstration for in-context learning is usually limited. To address these issues, we propose a Context-Aware Prompting method (CAP), which enables LLMs to generate more accurate, cohesive, and coherent translations via in-context learning. CAP takes into account multi-level attention, selects the most relevant sentences to the current one as context, and then generates a summary from these collected sentences. Subsequently, sentences most similar to the summary are retrieved from the datastore as demonstrations, which effectively guide LLMs in generating cohesive and coherent translations. We conduct extensive experiments across various DOCMT tasks, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, particularly in zero pronoun translation (ZPT) and literary translation tasks.
Improving Grammatical Error Correction via Contextual Data Augmentation
Authors: Yixuan Wang; Baoxin Wang; Yijun Liu; Qingfu Zhu; Dayong Wu; Wanxiang Che
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Nowadays, data augmentation through synthetic data has been widely used in the field of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) to alleviate the problem of data scarcity. However, these synthetic data are mainly used in the pre-training phase rather than the data-limited fine tuning phase due to inconsistent error distribution and noisy labels. In this paper, we propose a synthetic data construction method based on contextual augmentation, which can ensure an efficient augmentation of the original data with a more consistent error distribution. Specifically, we combine rule-based substitution with model-based generation, using the generation model to generate a richer context for the extracted error patterns. Besides, we also propose a relabeling-based data cleaning method to mitigate the effects of noisy labels in synthetic data. Experiments on CoNLL14 and BEA19-Test show that our proposed augmentation method consistently and substantially outperforms strong baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art level with only a few synthetic data.
RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning
Authors: Qi Zhang; Yiming Zhang; Haobo Wang; Junbo Zhao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), the process of instruction tuning serves as an essential step. Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning was proposed to reduce the training data size in this process, aiming at selecting high-quality instructional data. Nevertheless, we argue that most current data-efficient instruction-tuning methods are highly dependent on the quality of the original instruction-tuning dataset. When it comes to datasets synthesized by LLMs, a common scenario in this field, dirty samples will even be selected with a higher probability than other samples. To address these challenges, we utilized external knowledge (relevant examples or paragraphs) to evaluate those samples synthesized by LLMs with an in-context-based relative predictive entropy. Based on the new metric, we proposed a framework, dubbed as RECOST, which integrates external-knowledge-base re-ranking and diversity-consistent sampling into a single pipeline. Through extensive experiments on several synthetic datasets (Alpaca and Alpaca-gpt4), we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and achieve even better results with only 1% of the full dataset.
Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment—A Survey
Authors: Katharina Hämmerl; Jindřich Libovický; Alexander Fraser
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Cross-lingual alignment, the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models, has been an active field of research in recent years. We survey the literature of techniques to improve cross-lingual alignment, providing a taxonomy of methods and summarising insights from throughout the field. We present different understandings of cross-lingual alignment and their limitations. We provide a qualitative summary of results from a number of surveyed papers. Finally, we discuss how these insights may be applied not only to encoder models, where this topic has been heavily studied, but also to encoder-decoder or even decoder-only models, and argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key.
Mitigate Negative Transfer with Similarity Heuristic Lifelong Prompt Tuning
Authors: Chenyuan Wu; Gangwei Jiang; Defu Lian
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Lifelong prompt tuning has significantly advanced parameter-efficient lifelong learning with its efficiency and minimal storage demands on various tasks.Our empirical studies, however, highlights certain transferability constraints in the current methodologies: a universal algorithm that guarantees consistent positive transfer across all tasks is currently unattainable, especially when dealing dissimilar tasks that may engender negative transfer.Identifying the misalignment between algorithm selection and task specificity as the primary cause of negative transfer, we present the Similarity Heuristic Lifelong Prompt Tuning (SHLPT) framework. This innovative strategy partitions tasks into two distinct subsets by harnessing a learnable similarity metric, thereby facilitating fruitful transfer from tasks regardless of their similarity or dissimilarity. Additionally, SHLPT incorporates a parameter pool to combat catastrophic forgetting effectively. Our experiments shows that SHLPT outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in lifelong learning benchmarks and demonstrates robustness against negative transfer in diverse task sequences.
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs
Authors: An Liu; Zonghan Yang; Zhenhe Zhang; Qingyuan Hu; Peng Li; Ming Yan; Ji Zhang; Fei Huang; Yang Liu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: While Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various natural language tasks, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models. One potential approach to enhance domain-specific capabilities of LLMs involves fine-tuning them using corresponding datasets. However, this method can be both resource and time-intensive, and not applicable to closed-source commercial LLMs. In this paper, we propose Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-specific Abilities of LLMs (PANDA), a method designed to augment the domain-specific capabilities of LLMs by leveraging insights from the response preference of expert models without requiring fine-tuning. Our experimental results reveal that PANDA significantly enhances the domain-specific ability of LLMs on text classification and interactive decision tasks. Moreover, LLM with PANDA even outperforms the expert model that being learned on 4 tasks of ScienceWorld. This finding highlights the potential of exploring tuning-free approaches to achieve weak-to-strong generalization.
Developing PUGG for Polish: A Modern Approach to KBQA, MRC, and IR Dataset Construction
Authors: Albert Sawczyn; Katsiaryna Viarenich; Konrad Wojtasik; Aleksandra Domogała; Marcin Oleksy; Maciej Piasecki; Tomasz Kajdanowicz
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Advancements in AI and natural language processing have revolutionized machine-human language interactions, with question answering (QA) systems playing a pivotal role. The knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task, utilizing structured knowledge graphs (KG), allows for handling extensive knowledge-intensive questions. However, a significant gap exists in KBQA datasets, especially for low-resource languages. Many existing construction pipelines for these datasets are outdated and inefficient in human labor, and modern assisting tools like Large Language Models (LLM) are not utilized to reduce the workload. To address this, we have designed and implemented a modern, semi-automated approach for creating datasets, encompassing tasks such as KBQA, Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), and Information Retrieval (IR), tailored explicitly for low-resource environments. We executed this pipeline and introduced the PUGG dataset, the first Polish KBQA dataset, and novel datasets for MRC and IR. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive implementation, insightful findings, detailed statistics, and evaluation of baseline models.
Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM
Authors: Zijin Hong; Zheng Yuan; Hao Chen; Qinggang Zhang; Feiran Huang; Xiao Huang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Generating accurate SQL queries for user questions (text-to-SQL) has been a long-standing challenge since it requires a deep understanding of both the user’s question and the corresponding database schema in order to retrieve the desired content accurately. Existing methods rely on the comprehensive capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate the SQL. However, some necessary knowledge is not explicitly included in the database schema and user question or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient questions may be inaccurate, negatively influencing the text-to-SQL models’ performance and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we introduce the detailed implementation of DELLM regarding table reading and the basic fine-tuning process. We further propose a Preference Learning via Database Feedback (PLDBF) strategy, refining the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify that DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-SQL tasks. The corresponding code of DELLM is released for further research.
Centroid-Based Efficient Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding
Authors: Hiroyuki Deguchi; Yusuke Sakai; Hidetaka Kamigaito; Taro Watanabe; Hideki Tanaka; Masao Utiyama
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding achieved state-of-the-art translation performance by using COMET, a neural metric that has a high correlation with human evaluation.However, MBR decoding requires quadratic time since it computes the expected score between a translation hypothesis and all reference translations.We propose centroid-based MBR (CBMBR) decoding to improve the speed of MBR decoding.Our method clusters the reference translations in the feature space, and then calculates the score using the centroids of each cluster.The experimental results show that our CBMBR not only improved the decoding speed of the expected score calculation 5.7 times, but also outperformed vanilla MBR decoding in translation quality by up to 0.5 COMET in the WMT’22 En↔Ja, En↔De, En↔Zh, and WMT’23 En↔Ja translation tasks.
Enhancing Distractor Generation for Multiple-Choice Questions with Retrieval Augmented Pretraining and Knowledge Graph Integration
Authors: Han Cheng Yu; Yu An Shih; Kin Man Law; KaiYu Hsieh; Yu Chen Cheng; Hsin Chih Ho; Zih An Lin; Wen-Chuan Hsu; Yao-Chung Fan
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we tackle the task of distractor generation (DG) for multiple-choice questions. Our study introduces two key designs. First, we propose the concept of retrieval augmented pretraining, which involves refining the language model pretraining to align it more closely with the downstream task of DG. Second, we explore the integration of knowledge graphs and language models to further enhance the performance of DG. Our study unveils promising directions for further development in DG by showcasing the efficacy of knowledge augmentation and task-specific pretraining. These findings demonstrate the potential for leveraging both strategies to enhance the quality and performance of DG systems.
Exploiting Positional Bias for Query-Agnostic Generative Content in Search
Authors: Andrew Parry; Sean MacAvaney; Debasis Ganguly
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In recent years, research shows that neural ranking models (NRMs) substantially outperform their lexical counterparts in text retrieval. In traditional search pipelines, a combination of features leads to well-defined behaviour. However, as neural approaches become increasingly prevalent as the final scoring component of engines or as standalone systems, their robustness to malicious text and, more generally, semantic perturbation needs to be better understood. We posit that the transformer attention mechanism can induce exploitable defects in search models through sensitivity to token position within a sequence, leading to an attack that could generalise beyond a single query or topic. We demonstrate such defects by showing that non-relevant text–such as promotional content–can be easily injected into a document without adversely affecting its position in search results. Unlike previous gradient-based attacks, we demonstrate the existence of these biases in a query-agnostic fashion. In doing so, without the knowledge of topicality, we can still reduce the negative effects of non-relevant content injection by controlling injection position. Our experiments are conducted with simulated on-topic promotional text automatically generated by prompting LLMs with topical context from target documents. We find that contextualisation of a non-relevant text further reduces negative effects whilst likely circumventing existing content filtering mechanisms. In contrast, lexical models are found to be more resilient to such content injection attacks. We then investigate a simple yet effective compensation for the weaknesses of the NRMs in search, validating our hypotheses regarding transformer bias.
ICC : Quantifying Image Caption Concreteness for Multimodal Dataset Curation
Authors: Moran Yanuka; Morris Alper; Hadar Averbuch-Elor; Raja Giryes
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Web-scale training on paired text-image data is becoming increasingly central to multimodal learning, but is challenged by the highly noisy nature of datasets in the wild. Standard data filtering approaches succeed in removing mismatched text-image pairs, but permit semantically related but highly abstract or subjective text. These approaches lack the fine-grained ability to isolate the most concrete samples that provide the strongest signal for learning in a noisy dataset. In this work, we propose a new metric, Image Caption Concreteness (ICC), that evaluates caption text without an image reference to measure its concreteness and relevancy for use in multimodal learning. Our unsupervised approach leverages strong foundation models for measuring visual-semantic information loss in multimodal representations. We demonstrate that this strongly correlates with human evaluation of concreteness in both single-word and caption-level texts. Moreover, we show that curation using ICC complements existing approaches: It succeeds in selecting the highest quality samples from multimodal web-scale datasets to allow for efficient training in resource-constrained settings.
On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey
Authors: Lin Long; Rui Wang; Ruixuan Xiao; Junbo Zhao; Xiao Ding; Gang Chen; Haobo Wang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Within the evolving landscape of deep learning, the dilemma of data quantity and quality has been a long-standing problem. The recent advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a data-centric solution to alleviate the limitations of real-world data with synthetic data generation. However, current investigations into this field lack a unified framework and mostly stay on the surface. Therefore, this paper provides an organization of relevant studies based on a generic workflow of synthetic data generation. By doing so, we highlight the gaps within existing research and outline prospective avenues for future study. This work aims to shepherd the academic and industrial communities towards deeper, more methodical inquiries into the capabilities and applications of LLMs-driven synthetic data generation.
When is a Language Process a Language Model?
Authors: Li Du; Holden Lee; Jason Eisner; Ryan Cotterell
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: A language model may be viewed as a 𝛴-valued stochastic process for some alphabet 𝛴.However, in some pathological situations, such a stochastic process may “leak” probability mass onto the set of infinite strings and hence is not equivalent to the conventional view of a language model as a distribution over ordinary (finite) strings.Such ill-behaved language processes are referred to as *non-tight* in the literature.In this work, we study conditions of tightness through the lens of stochastic processes.In particular, by regarding the symbol as marking a stopping time and using results from martingale theory, we give characterizations of tightness that generalize our previous work [(Du et al. 2023)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10502).
Accelerating Multilingual Language Model for Excessively Tokenized Languages
Authors: Jimin Hong; Gibbeum Lee; Jaewoong Cho
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have remarkably enhanced performances on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. However, tokenizers in LLMs trained primarily on English-centric corpora often overly fragment a text into character or Unicode-level tokens in non-Roman alphabetic languages, leading to inefficient text generation.We introduce a simple yet effective framework to accelerate text generation in such languages. Our approach involves employing a new language model head with a vocabulary set tailored to a specific target language for a pre-trained LLM. This is followed by fine-tuning the new head while incorporating a verification step to ensure the model’s performance is preserved.We show that this targeted fine-tuning, while freezing other model parameters, effectively reduces token fragmentation for the target language. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework increases the generation speed by a factor of 1.7 while maintaining the performance of pre-trained multilingual models on target monolingual tasks.
Definition Generation for Automatically Induced Semantic Frame
Authors: Yi Han; Ryohei Sasano; Koichi Takeda
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In a semantic frame resource such as FrameNet, the definition sentence of a frame is essential for humans to understand the meaning of the frame intuitively. Recently, several attempts have been made to induce semantic frames from large corpora, but the cost of creating the definition sentences for such frames is significant. In this paper, we address a new task of generating frame definitions from a set of frame-evoking words. Specifically, given a cluster of frame-evoking words and associated exemplars induced as the same semantic frame, we utilize a large language model to generate frame definitions. We demonstrate that incorporating frame element reasoning as chain-of-thought can enhance the inclusion of correct frame elements in the generated definitions.