GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?
Authors: Michael Hahn; Mark Rofin
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Empirical studies have identified a range of learnability biases and limitations of transformers, such as a persistent difficulty in learning to compute simple formal languages such as PARITY, and a bias towards low-degree functions. However, theoretical understanding remains limited, with existing expressiveness theory either overpredicting or underpredicting realistic learning abilities. We prove that, under the transformer architecture, the loss landscape is constrained by the input-space sensitivity: Transformers whose output is sensitive to many parts of the input string inhabit isolated points in parameter space, leading to a low-sensitivity bias in generalization. We show theoretically and empirically that this theory unifies a broad array of empirical observations about the learning abilities and biases of transformers, such as their generalization bias towards low sensitivity and low degree, and difficulty in length generalization for PARITY. This shows that understanding transformers’ inductive biases requires studying not just their in-principle expressivity, but also their loss landscape.
Talk With Human-like Agents: Empathetic Dialogue Through Perceptible Acoustic Reception and Reaction
Authors: Haoqiu Yan; Yongxin Zhu; Kai Zheng; Bing Liu; Haoyu Cao; Deqiang Jiang; Linli Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced agents become increasingly prevalent in Human-AI communication, offering vast potential from entertainment to professional domains. However, current multi-modal dialogue systems overlook the acoustic information present in speech, which is crucial for understanding human communication nuances. This oversight can lead to misinterpretations of speakers’ intentions, resulting in inconsistent or even contradictory responses within dialogues. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose PerceptiveAgent, an empathetic multi-modal dialogue system designed to discern deeper or more subtle meanings beyond the literal interpretations of words through the integration of speech modality perception. Employing LLMs as a cognitive core, PerceptiveAgent perceives acoustic information from input speech and generates empathetic responses based on speaking styles described in natural language. Experimental results indicate that PerceptiveAgent excels in contextual understanding by accurately discerning the speakers’ true intentions in scenarios where the linguistic meaning is either contrary to or inconsistent with the speaker’s true feelings, producing more nuanced and expressive spoken dialogues. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haoqiu-Yan/PerceptiveAgent.
IRCoder: Intermediate Representations Make Language Models Robust Multilingual Code Generators
Authors: Indraneil Paul; Goran Glavaš; Iryna Gurevych
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Code generation has fast become one of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs, such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside the exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR)—shared across programming languages—to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with their respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across various code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.
The Echoes of Multilinguality: Tracing Cultural Value Shifts during Language Model Fine-tuning
Authors: Rochelle Choenni; Anne Lauscher; Ekaterina Shutova
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Texts written in different languages reflect different culturally-dependent beliefs of their writers. Thus, we expect multilingual LMs (MLMs), that are jointly trained on a concatenation of text in multiple languages, to encode different cultural values for each language. Yet, as the ‘multilinguality’ of these LMs is driven by cross-lingual sharing, we also have reason to belief that cultural values bleed over from one language into another. This limits the use of MLMs in practice, as apart from being proficient in generating text in multiple languages, creating language technology that can serve a community also requires the output of LMs to be sensitive to their biases (Naous et al. 2023). Yet, little is known about how cultural values emerge and evolve in MLMs (Hershcovich et al. 2022). We are the first to study how languages can exert influence on the cultural values encoded for different test languages, by studying how such values are revised during fine-tuning. Focusing on the fine-tuning stage allows us to study the interplay between value shifts when exposed to new linguistic experience from different data sources and languages. Lastly, we use a training data attribution method to find patterns in the fine-tuning examples, and the languages that they come from, that tend to instigate value shifts.
MYTE: Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better and Fairer Multilingual Language Modeling
Authors: Tomasz Limisiewicz; Terra Blevins; Hila Gonen; Orevaoghene Ahia; Luke Zettlemoyer
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts.Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world’s writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.
MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus
Authors: Joel Niklaus; Veton Matoshi; Matthias Stürmer; Ilias Chalkidis; Daniel Ho
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Large, high-quality datasets are crucial for training Large Language Models (LLMs). However, so far, few datasets are available for specialized critical domains such as law and the available ones are often small and only in English. To fill this gap, we curate and release MultiLegalPile, a 689GB corpus in 24 languages from 17 jurisdictions. MultiLegalPile includes diverse legal data sources and allows for pretraining NLP models under fair use, with most of the dataset licensed very permissively. We pretrain two RoBERTa models and one Longformer multilingually, and 24 monolingual models on each of the language-specific subsets and evaluate them on LEXTREME. Additionally, we evaluate the English and multilingual models on LexGLUE. Our multilingual models set a new SotA on LEXTREME and our English models on LexGLUE. We release the dataset, trained models, and all code under the most open licenses possible.
WebCiteS: Attributed Query-Focused Summarization on Chinese Web Search Results with Citations
Authors: Haolin Deng; Chang Wang; Xin Li; Dezhang Yuan; Junlang Zhan; Tianhua Zhou; Jin Ma; Jun Gao; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.
What Languages are Easy to Language-Model? A Perspective from Learning Probabilistic Regular Languages
Authors: Nadav Borenstein; Anej Svete; Robin Chan; Josef Valvoda; Franz Nowak; Isabelle Augenstein; Eleanor Chodroff; Ryan Cotterell
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributionsover strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of distributions over strings. While prior work in this direction focused on assessing the theoretical limits, in contrast, we seek to understand the empirical learnability. Unlike prior empirical work, we evaluate neural LMs on their home turf—learning probabilistic languages—rather than as classifiers of formal languages. In particular, we investigate the learnability of regular LMs (RLMs) by RNN and Transformer LMs. We empirically test the learnability of RLMs as a function of various complexity parameters of the RLM and the hidden state size of the neural LM. We find that the RLM rank, which corresponds to the size of linear space spanned by the logits of its conditional distributions, and the expected length of sampled strings are strong and significant predictors of learnability for both RNNs and Transformers. Several other predictors also reach significance, but with differing patterns between RNNs and Transformers.
Tree-Averaging Algorithms for Ensemble-Based Unsupervised Discontinuous Constituency Parsing
Authors: Behzad Shayegh; Yuqiao Wen; Lili Mou
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: We address unsupervised discontinuous constituency parsing, where we observe a high variance in the performance of the only previous model in the literature. We propose to build an ensemble of different runs of the existing discontinuous parser by averaging the predicted trees, to stabilize and boost performance. To begin with, we provide comprehensive computational complexity analysis (in terms of P and NP-complete) for tree averaging under different setups of binarity and continuity. We then develop an efficient exact algorithm to tackle the task, which runs in a reasonable time for all samples in our experiments. Results on three datasets show our method outperforms all baselines in all metrics; we also provide in-depth analyses of our approach.
ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs
Authors: Fengqing Jiang; Zhangchen Xu; Luyao Niu; Zhen Xiang; Bhaskar Ramasubramanian; Bo Li; Radha Poovendran
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Safety is critical to the usage of large language models (LLMs). Multiple techniques such as data filtering and supervised fine-tuning have been developed to strengthen LLM safety. However, currently known techniques presume that corpora used for safety alignment of LLMs are solely interpreted by semantics. This assumption, however, does not hold in real-world applications, which leads to severe vulnerabilities in LLMs. For example, users of forums often use ASCII art, a form of text-based art, to convey image information. In this paper, we propose a novel ASCII art-based jailbreak attack and introduce a comprehensive benchmark Vision-in-Text Challenge (ViTC) to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in recognizing prompts that cannot be solely interpreted by semantics. We show that five SOTA LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2) struggle to recognize prompts provided in the form of ASCII art. Based on this observation, we develop the jailbreak attack ArtPrompt, which leverages the poor performance of LLMs in recognizing ASCII art to bypass safety measures and elicit undesired behaviors from LLMs. ArtPrompt only requires black-box access to the victim LLMs, making it a practical attack. We evaluate ArtPrompt on five SOTA LLMs, and show that ArtPrompt can effectively and efficiently induce undesired behaviors from all five LLMs.
ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development
Authors: Chen Qian; Wei Liu; Hongzhang Liu; Nuo Chen; Yufan Dang; Jiahao Li; Cheng Yang; Weize Chen; Yusheng Su; Xin Cong; Juyuan Xu; Dahai Li; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Software development is a complex task that necessitates cooperation among multiple members with diverse skills. Numerous studies used deep learning to improve specific phases in a waterfall model, such as design, coding, and testing. However, the deep learning model in each phase requires unique designs, leading to technical inconsistencies across various phases, which results in a fragmented and ineffective development process. In this paper, we introduce ChatDev, a chat-powered software development framework in which specialized agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are guided in what to communicate (via chat chain) and how to communicate (via communicative dehallucination). These agents actively contribute to the design, coding, and testing phases through unified language-based communication, with solutions derived from their multi-turn dialogues. We found their utilization of natural language is advantageous for system design, and communicating in programming language proves helpful in debugging. This paradigm demonstrates how linguistic communication facilitates multi-agent collaboration, establishing language as a unifying bridge for autonomous task-solving among LLM agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.
Disentangled Learning with Synthetic Parallel Data for Text Style Transfer
Authors: Jingxuan Han; Quan Wang; Zikang Guo; Benfeng Xu; Licheng Zhang; Zhendong Mao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Text style transfer (TST) is an important task in natural language generation, which aims to transfer the text style (e.g., sentiment) while keeping its semantic information. Due to the absence of parallel datasets for supervision, most existing studies have been conducted in an unsupervised manner, where the generated sentences often suffer from high semantic divergence and thus low semantic preservation. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement-based framework for TST named DisenTrans, where disentanglement means that we separate the attribute and content components in the natural language corpus and consider this task from these two perspectives. Concretely, we first create a disentangled Chain-of-Thought prompting procedure to synthesize parallel data and corresponding attribute components for supervision. Then we develop a disentanglement learning method with synthetic data, where two losses are designed to enhance the focus on attribute properties and constrain the semantic space, thereby benefiting style control and semantic preservation respectively. Instructed by the disentanglement concept, our framework creates valuable supervised information and utilizes it effectively in TST tasks. Extensive experiments on mainstream datasets present that our framework achieves significant performance with great sample efficiency.
PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety
Authors: Zaibin Zhang; Yongting Zhang; Lijun Li; Hongzhi Gao; Lijun Wang; Huchuan Lu; Feng Zhao; Yu Qiao; Jing Shao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date, comprehensive research on the safety issues associated with multi-agent systems remains limited. In this paper, we explore these concerns through the innovative lens of agent psychology, revealing that the dark psychological states of agents constitute a significant threat to safety.To tackle these concerns, we propose a comprehensive framework (PsySafe) grounded in agent psychology, focusing on three key areas: firstly, identifying how dark personality traits in agents can lead to risky behaviors; secondly, evaluating the safety of multi-agent systems from the psychological and behavioral perspectives, and thirdly, devising effective strategies to mitigate these risks.Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents’ self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents’ psychological assessments and dangerous behaviors. We anticipate that our framework and observations will provide valuable insights for further research into the safety of multi-agent systems. We make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI4Good24/PsySafe.
Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation
Authors: Dongjin Kang; Sunghwan Kim; Taeyoon Kwon; Seungjun Moon; Hyunsouk Cho; Youngjae Yu; Dongha Lee; Jinyoung Yeo
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals’ emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, despite the remarkable conversational ability of large language models (LLMs), previous studies have suggested that they often struggle with providing useful emotional support. Hence, this work initially analyzes the results of LLMs on ESConv, revealing challenges in selecting the correct strategy and a notable preference for a specific strategy. Motivated by these, we explore the impact of the inherent preference in LLMs on providing emotional support, and consequently, we observe that exhibiting high preference for specific strategies hinders effective emotional support, aggravating its robustness in predicting the appropriate strategy. Moreover, we conduct a methodological study to offer insights into the necessary approaches for LLMs to serve as proficient emotional supporters. Our findings emphasize that (1) low preference for specific strategies hinders the progress of emotional support, (2) external assistance helps reduce preference bias, and (3) existing LLMs alone cannot become good emotional supporters. These insights suggest promising avenues for future research to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs.
∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokens
Authors: Xinrong Zhang; Yingfa Chen; Shengding Hu; Zihang Xu; Junhao Chen; Moo Hao; Xu Han; Zhen Thai; Shuo Wang; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers))

Abstract: Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose , the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains in English and Chinese. The tasks in are designed to require an understanding of long dependencies in contexts and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. Based on , we evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The experimental results indicate that existing long-context LLMs still require significant advancements to process 100K+ contexts effectively. Furthermore, we present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context. Our code and data is released.