GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
OpenSep: Leveraging Large Language Models with Textual Inversion for Open World Audio Separation
Authors: Tanvir Mahmud; Diana Marculescu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Audio separation in real-world scenarios, where mixtures contain a variable number of sources, presents significant challenges due to limitations of existing models, such as over-separation, under-separation, and dependence on predefined training sources. We propose OpenSep, a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for automated audio separation, eliminating the need for manual intervention and overcoming source limitations. OpenSep uses textual inversion to generate captions from audio mixtures with off-the-shelf audio captioning models, effectively parsing the sound sources present. It then employs few-shot LLM prompting to extract detailed audio properties of each parsed source, facilitating separation in unseen mixtures. Additionally, we introduce a multi-level extension of the mix-and-separate training framework to enhance modality alignment by separating single source sounds and mixtures simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate OpenSep’s superiority in precisely separating new, unseen, and variable sources in challenging mixtures, outperforming SOTA baseline methods. Code is released at https://github.com/tanvir-utexas/OpenSep.git.
Language Concept Erasure for Language-invariant Dense Retrieval
Authors: Zhiqi Huang; Puxuan Yu; Shauli Ravfogel; James Allan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multilingual models aim for language-invariant representations but still prominently encode language identity. This, along with the scarcity of high-quality parallel retrieval data, limits their performance in retrieval. We introduce LANCER, a multi-task learning framework that improves language-invariant dense retrieval by reducing language-specific signals in the embedding space. Leveraging the notion of linear concept erasure, we design a loss function that penalizes cross-correlation between representations and their language labels. LANCER leverages only English retrieval data and general multilingual corpora, training models to focus on language-invariant retrieval by semantic similarity without necessitating a vast parallel corpus. Experimental results on various datasets show our method consistently improves over baselines, with extensive analyses demonstrating greater language agnosticism.
Learning Personalized Alignment for Evaluating Open-ended Text Generation
Authors: Danqing Wang; Kevin Yang; Hanlin Zhu; Xiaomeng Yang; Andrew Cohen; Lei Li; Yuandong Tian
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent research has increasingly focused on evaluating large language models’ (LLMs) alignment with diverse human values and preferences, particularly for open-ended tasks like story generation. Traditional evaluation metrics rely heavily on lexical similarity with human-written references, often showing poor correlation with human judgments and failing to account for alignment with the diversity of human preferences. To address these challenges, we introduce PerSE, an interpretable evaluation framework designed to assess alignment with specific human preferences. It is tuned to infer specific preferences from an in-context personal profile and evaluate the alignment between the generated content and personal preferences. PerSE enhances interpretability by providing detailed comments and fine-grained scoring, facilitating more personalized content generation. Our 13B LLaMA-2-based PerSE shows a 15.8% increase in Kendall correlation and a 13.7% rise in accuracy with zero-shot reviewers compared to GPT-4. It also outperforms GPT-4 by 46.01% in Kendall correlation on new domains, indicating its transferability
Large Language Models Are Involuntary Truth-Tellers: Exploiting Fallacy Failure for Jailbreak Attacks
Authors: Yue Zhou; Henry Peng Zou; Barbara Di Eugenio; Yang Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We find that language models have difficulties generating fallacious and deceptive reasoning. When asked to generate deceptive outputs, language models tend to leak honest counterparts but believe them to be false. Exploiting this deficiency, we propose a jailbreak attack method that elicits an aligned language model for malicious output. Specifically, we query the model to generate a fallacious yet deceptively real procedure for the harmful behavior. Since a fallacious procedure is generally considered fake and thus harmless by LLMs, it helps bypass the safeguard mechanism. Yet the output is factually harmful since the LLM cannot fabricate fallacious solutions but proposes truthful ones. We evaluate our approach over five safety-aligned large language models, comparing four previous jailbreak methods, and show that our approach achieves competitive performance with more harmful outputs. We believe the findings could be extended beyond model safety, such as self-verification and hallucination.
Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE
Authors: Zhiyuan Zeng; Qipeng Guo; Zhaoye Fei; Zhangyue Yin; Yunhua Zhou; Linyang Li; Tianxiang Sun; Hang Yan; Dahua Lin; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-k routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exceeding tokens are dropped. While some experts are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. To address the dropped tokens and padding, we propose the Rectify-Router, comprising the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification. The Intra-GPU Rectification handles dropped tokens, efficiently routing them to experts within the GPU where they are located to avoid inter-GPU communication. The Fill-in Rectification addresses padding by replacing padding tokens with the tokens that have high routing scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification effectively handle dropped tokens and padding, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of them achieves superior performance, surpassing the accuracy of the vanilla top-1 router by 4.7%.
Null-Shot Prompting: Rethinking Prompting Large Language Models With Hallucination
Authors: Pittawat Taveekitworachai; Febri Abdullah; Ruck Thawonmas
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper presents a series of investigations into an interesting phenomenon where we observe performance increases in large language models (LLMs) when providing a prompt that causes and exploits hallucination. We propose null-shot prompting, a counter-intuitive approach where we intentionally instruct LLMs to look at and utilize information from a null section. We investigate null-shot prompting on a wide range of tasks, including arithmetic reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and reading comprehension. We observe a substantial increase in performance in arithmetic reasoning tasks for various models, with up to a 44.62% increase compared to a baseline in one model. Therefore, we investigate deeper into this task by utilizing a more challenging mathematics problem-solving benchmark. We observe that LLMs benefit from hallucination in null-shot prompting in this task and discuss the mathematical topics that benefit the most from introducing hallucination in the prompt. We continue our investigation by evaluating hallucination detection abilities of the LLMs when using null-shot prompting. We find surprising results where hallucination in prompts can improve hallucination detection abilities of many LLMs. We also examine the effects of introducing both reasoning, which is known to mitigate hallucination, and hallucination simultaneously in the prompt and observe another surprising turn for the mathematics problem-solving benchmark with many performance improvements. We hope this paper will spark more interest, investigations, and discussions on how hallucination in prompts LLMs and even bolsters them in certain cases.
CommVQA: Situating Visual Question Answering in Communicative Contexts
Authors: Nandita Shankar Naik; Christopher Potts; Elisa Kreiss
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Current visual question answering (VQA) models tend to be trained and evaluated on image-question pairs in isolation. However, the questions people ask are dependent on their informational needs and prior knowledge about the image content. To evaluate how situating images within naturalistic contexts shapes visual questions, we introduce CommVQA, a VQA dataset consisting of images, image descriptions, real-world communicative scenarios where the image might appear (e.g., a travel website), and follow-up questions and answers conditioned on the scenario and description. CommVQA, which contains 1000 images and 8,949 question-answer pairs, poses a challenge for current models. Error analyses and a human-subjects study suggest that generated answers still contain high rates of hallucinations, fail to fittingly address unanswerable questions, and don’t suitably reflect contextual information.
Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding
Authors: Weilin Zhao; Yuxiang Huang; Xu Han; Wang Xu; Chaojun Xiao; Xinrong Zhang; Yewei Fang; Kaihuo Zhang; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then employing the target LLM to verify the draft in a low-cost parallel manner. Under such a drafting-verification framework, drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative decoding. Therefore, generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better decoding speedup. To achieve this, we introduce Ouroboros, which can generate draft phrases to parallelize the drafting process and meanwhile lengthen drafts in a training-free manner. The experimental results on various typical text generation tasks show that Ouroboros can achieve speedups of up to 2.4× over speculative decoding and 3.9× over vanilla decoding, without fine-tuning draft and target models. Code available at https://github.com/thunlp/Ouroboros.
1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators?
Authors: Yue Huang; Chenrui Fan; Yuan Li; Siyuan Wu; Tianyi Zhou; Xiangliang Zhang; Lichao Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable ability to process information across various languages. Despite their capabilities, they exhibit inconsistencies in handling identical queries in different languages, presenting challenges for further advancement. This paper introduces a method to enhance the multilingual performance of LLMs by aggregating knowledge from diverse languages. This approach incorporates a low-resource knowledge detector specific to a language, a strategic language selection process, and mechanisms for answer replacement and integration. Our extensive experiments demonstrate notable performance improvements, particularly in reducing the performance disparity across languages. An ablation study confirms that each component of our method significantly contributes to these enhancements. This research highlights the inherent potential of LLMs to harmonize multilingual capabilities and offers valuable insights for further exploration.
How to Leverage Demonstration Data in Alignment for Large Language Model? A Self-Imitation Learning Perspective
Authors: Teng Xiao; Mingxiao Li; Yige Yuan; Huaisheng Zhu; Chao Cui; Vasant G Honavar
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel generalized self-imitation learning GSIL framework, which effectively and efficiently aligns large language models with offline demonstration data. We develop GSIL by deriving a surrogate objective of imitation learning with density ratio estimates, facilitating the use of self-generated data and optimizing the imitation learning objective with simple classification losses. GSIL eliminates the need for complex adversarial training in standard imitation learning, achieving lightweight and efficient fine-tuning for large language models. In addition, GSIL encompasses a family of offline losses parameterized by a general class of convex functions for density ratio estimation and enables a unified view for alignment with demonstration data. Extensive experiments show that GSIL consistently and significantly outperforms baselines in many challenging benchmarks, such as coding (HuamnEval), mathematical reasoning (GSM8K) and instruction-following benchmark (MT-Bench). Code is public available at https://github.com/tengxiao1/GSIL.
Style-Specific Neurons for Steering LLMs in Text Style Transfer
Authors: Wen Lai; Viktor Hangya; Alexander Fraser
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Text style transfer (TST) aims to modify the style of a text without altering its original meaning. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance across multiple tasks, including TST. However, in zero-shot setups, they tend to directly copy a significant portion of the input text to the output without effectively changing its style. To enhance the stylistic variety and fluency of the text, we present sNeuron-TST, a novel approach for steering LLMs using style-specific neurons in TST. Specifically, we identify neurons associated with the source and target styles and deactivate source-style-only neurons to give target-style words a higher probability, aiming to enhance the stylistic diversity of the generated text. However, we find that this deactivation negatively impacts the fluency of the generated text, which we address by proposing an improved contrastive decoding method that accounts for rapid token probability shifts across layers caused by deactivated source-style neurons. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six benchmarks, encompassing formality, toxicity, politics, politeness, authorship, and sentiment.
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers
Authors: Tianhua Zhang; Kun Li; Hongyin Luo; Xixin Wu; James R. Glass; Helen M. Meng
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever’s preference during the training of rewriting models. However, these approaches typically rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting the models’ generalization and adaptation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AdaQR (Adaptive Query Rewriting), a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. Our approach begins by fine-tuning compact large language models using only 10% of rewrite annotations from the seed dataset training split. The models are then utilized to self-sample rewrite candidates for each query instance, further eliminating the expense for human labeling or larger language model prompting often adopted in curating preference data. A novel approach is then proposed to assess retriever’s preference for these candidates with the probability of answers conditioned on the conversational query by marginalizing the Top-K passages. This serves as the reward for optimizing the rewriter further using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a process free of rewrite and retrieval annotations. Experimental results on four open-domain CQA datasets demonstrate that AdaQR not only enhances the in-domain capabilities of the rewriter with limited annotation requirement, but also adapts effectively to out-of-domain datasets.
Grasping the Essentials: Tailoring Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Sizhe Zhou; Yu Meng; Bowen Jin; Jiawei Han
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) aims to identify semantic relationships between entities within text. Despite considerable advancements, existing models predominantly require extensive annotated training data, which is both costly and labor-intensive to collect. Moreover, these models often struggle to adapt to new or unseen relations. Few-shot learning, aiming to lessen annotation demands, typically provides incomplete and biased supervision for target relations, leading to degraded and unstable performance. To accurately and explicitly describe relation semantics while minimizing annotation demands, we explore the definition only zero-shot RE setting where only relation definitions expressed in natural language are used to train a RE model. We introduce REPaL, comprising three stages: (1) We leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate initial seed instances from relation definitions and an unlabeled corpus. (2) We fine-tune a bidirectional Small Language Model (SLM) with initial seeds to learn relations for the target domain. (3) We expand pattern coverage and mitigate bias from initial seeds by integrating feedback from the SLM’s predictions on the unlabeled corpus and the synthesis history. To accomplish this, we leverage the multi-turn conversation ability of LLMs to generate new instances in follow-up dialogues, informed by both the feedback and synthesis history. Studies reveal that definition-oriented seed synthesis enhances pattern coverage whereas indiscriminately increasing seed quantity leads to performance saturation. Experiments on two datasets show REPaL significantly improved cost-effective zero-shot performance by large margins.
DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Yiming Huang; Jianwen Luo; Yan Yu; Yitong Zhang; Fangyu Lei; Yifan Wei; Shizhu He; Lifu Huang; Xiao Liu; Jun Zhao; Kang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding advanced coding skills in grounding and planning. Second, examples in DA-Code are all based on real and diverse data, covering a wide range of complex data wrangling and analytics tasks. Third, to solve the tasks, the models must utilize complex data science programming languages, including Python and SQL, to perform intricate data processing and derive the answers. We set up the benchmark in a controllable and executable environment that aligns with real-world data analysis scenarios and is scalable. The annotators meticulously designed the evaluation suite to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the evaluation. We developed the DA-Agent baseline. Experiments show that although the baseline performs better than other existing frameworks, using the current best LLMs achieves only 30.5% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at [link](https://github.com/yiyihum/dabench)
Leveraging Context-Aware Prompting for Commit Message Generation
Authors: Zhihua Jiang; Jianwei Chen; Dongning Rao; Guanghui Ye
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Writing comprehensive commit messages is tedious yet important, because these messages describe changes of code, such as fixing bugs or adding new features. However, most existing methods focus on either only the changed lines or nearest context lines, without considering the effectiveness of selecting useful contexts. On the other hand, it is possible that introducing excessive contexts can lead to noise. To this end, we propose a code model COMMIT (Context-aware prOMpting based comMIt-message generaTion) in conjunction with a code dataset CODEC (COntext and metaData Enhanced Code dataset). Leveraging program slicing, CODEC consolidates code changes along with related contexts via property graph analysis. Further, utilizing CodeT5+ as the backbone model, we train COMMIT via context-aware prompt on CODEC. Experiments show that COMMIT can surpass all compared models including pre-trained language models for code (code-PLMs) such as CommitBART and large language models for code (code-LLMs) such as Code-LlaMa. Besides, we investigate several research questions (RQs), further verifying the effectiveness of our approach. We release the data and code at: https://github.com/Jnunlplab/COMMIT.git.
Linguistic Bias in ChatGPT: Language Models Reinforce Dialect Discrimination
Authors: Eve Fleisig; Genevieve Smith; Madeline Bossi; Ishita Rustagi; Xavier Yin; Dan Klein
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present a large-scale study of linguistic bias exhibited by ChatGPT covering ten dialects of English (Standard American English, Standard British English, and eight widely spoken non-”standard” varieties from around the world). We prompted GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 with text by native speakers of each variety and analyzed the responses via detailed linguistic feature annotation and native speaker evaluation. We find that the models default to “standard” varieties of English; based on evaluation by native speakers, we also find that model responses to non-”standard” varieties consistently exhibit a range of issues: stereotyping (19% worse than for “standard” varieties), demeaning content (25% worse), lack of comprehension (9% worse), and condescending responses (15% worse). Moreover, if these models are asked to imitate the writing style of prompts in non-”standard” varieties, they produce text that exhibits lower comprehension of the input and is especially prone to stereotyping. GPT-4 improves on GPT-3.5 in terms of comprehension, warmth, and friendliness, but also exhibits a marked increase in stereotyping (+18%). The results indicate that GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 can perpetuate linguistic discrimination toward speakers of non-”standard” varieties.