GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning
Authors: Qizhou Chen; Taolin Zhang; Xiaofeng He; Dongyang Li; Chengyu Wang; Longtao Huang; Hui Xue’
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.
A Learning Rate Path Switching Training Paradigm for Version Updates of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhihao Wang; Shiyu Liu; Jianheng Huang; Wang Zheng; YiXuan Liao; Xiaoxin Chen; Junfeng Yao; Jinsong Su
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Due to the continuous emergence of new data, version updates have become an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs). The training paradigms for version updates of LLMs include pre-training from scratch (PTFS) and continual pre-training (CPT). Preliminary experiments demonstrate that PTFS achieves better pre-training performance, while CPT has lower training cost. Moreover, their performance and training cost gaps widen progressively with version updates. To investigate the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, we analyze the effect of learning rate adjustments during the two stages of CPT: preparing an initialization checkpoint and continual pre-training based on this checkpoint. We find that a large learning rate in the first stage and a complete learning rate decay process in the second stage are crucial for version updates of LLMs. Hence, we propose a learning rate path switching training paradigm. Our paradigm comprises one main path, where we pre-train a LLM with the maximal learning rate, and multiple branching paths, each of which corresponds to an update of the LLM with newly-added training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our paradigm. Particularly, when training four versions of LLMs, our paradigm reduces the total training cost to 58% compared to PTFS, while maintaining comparable pre-training performance.
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NER Using Phonemic Representations for Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Jimin Sohn; Haeji Jung; Alex Cheng; Jooeon Kang; Yilin Du; David R Mortensen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Existing zero-shot cross-lingual NER approaches require substantial prior knowledge of the target language, which is impractical for low-resource languages.In this paper, we propose a novel approach to NER using phonemic representation based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to bridge the gap between representations of different languages.Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms baseline models in extremely low-resource languages, with the highest average F1 score (46.38%) and lowest standard deviation (12.67), particularly demonstrating its robustness with non-Latin scripts. Ourcodes are available at https://github.com/Gabriel819/zeroshot_ner.git
Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora
Authors: Chaeeun Kim; Soyoung Yoon; Hyunji Lee; Joel Jang; Sohee Yang; Minjoon Seo
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Benchmarking the performance of information retrieval (IR) is mostly conducted with a fixed set of documents (static corpora). However, in realistic scenarios, this is rarely the case and the documents to be retrieved are constantly updated and added. In this paper, we focus on Generative Retrievals (GR), which apply autoregressive language models to IR problems, and explore their adaptability and robustness in dynamic scenarios. We also conduct an extensive evaluation of computational and memory efficiency, crucial factors for real-world deployment of IR systems handling vast and ever-changing document collections. Our results on the StreamingQA benchmark demonstrate that GR is more adaptable to evolving knowledge (4–11%), robust in learning knowledge with temporal information, and efficient in terms of inference FLOPs (x2), indexing time (x6), and storage footprint (x4) compared to Dual Encoders (DE), which are commonly used in retrieval systems. Our paper highlights the potential of GR for future use in practical IR systems within dynamic environments.
OneNet: A Fine-Tuning Free Framework for Few-Shot Entity Linking via Large Language Model Prompting
Authors: Xukai Liu; Ye Liu; Kai Zhang; Kehang Wang; Qi Liu; Enhong Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Entity Linking (EL) is the process of associating ambiguous textual mentions to specific entities in a knowledge base.Traditional EL methods heavily rely on large datasets to enhance their performance, a dependency that becomes problematic in the context of few-shot entity linking, where only a limited number of examples are available for training. To address this challenge, we present OneNet, an innovative framework that utilizes the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, this marks a pioneering approach to applying LLMs to few-shot entity linking tasks. OneNet is structured around three key components prompted by LLMs: (1) an entity reduction processor that simplifies inputs by summarizing and filtering out irrelevant entities, (2) a dual-perspective entity linker that combines contextual cues and prior knowledge for precise entity linking, and (3) an entity consensus judger that employs a unique consistency algorithm to alleviate the hallucination in the entity linking reasoning.Comprehensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets reveal that OneNet outperforms current state-of-the-art entity linking methods.
Don’t Just Say “I don’t know”! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations
Authors: Yang Deng; Yong Zhao; Moxin Li; See-Kiong Ng; Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scalable self-alignment method to utilize the LLM itself to enhance its response-ability to different types of unknown questions, being capable of not just refusing to answer but further proactively providing explanations to the unanswerability of unknown questions. Specifically, the Self-Align method first employ a two-stage class-aware self-augmentation approach to generate a large amount of unknown question-response data. Then we conduct disparity-driven self-curation to select qualified data for fine-tuning the LLM itself for aligning the responses to unknown questions as desired. Experimental results on two datasets across four types of unknown questions validate the superiority of the Self-Aligned method over existing baselines in terms of three types of task formulation.
Fewer is More: Boosting Math Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning
Authors: Xijie Huang; Li Lyna Zhang; Kwang-Ting Cheng; Fan Yang; Mao Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, yet they still struggle with math reasoning. In this work, we propose CoT-Influx, a novel approach that pushes the boundary of few-shot Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) learning to improve LLM mathematical reasoning. Motivated by the observation that adding more concise CoT examples in the prompt can improve LLM reasoning performance, CoT-Influx employs a coarse-to-fine pruner to maximize the input of effective and concise CoT examples. The pruner first selects as many crucial CoT examples as possible and then prunes unimportant tokens to fit the context window. As a result, by enabling more CoT examples with double the context window size in tokens, CoT-Influx significantly outperforms various prompting baselines across various LLMs (LLaMA2-7B, 13B, 70B) and 5 math datasets, achieving up to 4.55% absolute improvements. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, LLaMA2-70B with CoT-Influx surpasses GPT-3.5 and a wide range of larger LLMs (PaLM, Minerva 540B, etc.) on the GSM8K. CoT-Influx is a plug-and-play module for LLMs, adaptable in various scenarios. It’s compatible with advanced reasoning prompting techniques, such as self-consistency, and supports different long-context LLMs, including Mistral-7B-v0.3-32K and Yi-6B-200K.
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark
Authors: Fenglin Liu; Zheng Li; Hongjian Zhou; Qingyu Yin; Jingfeng Yang; Xianfeng Tang; Chen Luo; Ming Zeng; Haoming Jiang; Yifan Gao; Priyanka Nigam; Sreyashi Nag; Bing Yin; Yining Hua; Xuan Zhou; Omid Rohanian; Anshul Thakur; Lei Clifton; David A. Clifton
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs
Holistic Automated Red Teaming for Large Language Models through Top-Down Test Case Generation and Multi-turn Interaction
Authors: Jinchuan Zhang; Yan Zhou; Yaxin Liu; Ziming Li; Songlin Hu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Automated red teaming is an effective method for identifying misaligned behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches, however, often focus primarily on improving attack success rates while overlooking the need for comprehensive test case coverage. Additionally, most of these methods are limited to single-turn red teaming, failing to capture the multi-turn dynamics of real-world human-machine interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose **HARM** (**H**olistic **A**utomated **R**ed tea**M**ing), which scales up the diversity of test cases using a top-down approach based on an extensible, fine-grained risk taxonomy. Our method also leverages a novel fine-tuning strategy and reinforcement learning techniques to facilitate multi-turn adversarial probing in a human-like manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables a more systematic understanding of model vulnerabilities and offers more targeted guidance for the alignment process.
Householder Pseudo-Rotation: A Novel Approach to Activation Editing in LLMs with Direction-Magnitude Perspective
Authors: Van-Cuong Pham; Thien Huu Nguyen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Activation Editing, which involves directly editting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to alter their behavior and achieve desired properties, has emerged as a promising area of research. Existing works primarily treat LLMs’ activations as points in space and modify them by adding steering vectors. We show that doing so would break the magnitude consistency of the activation vectors in LLMs. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel editing method that views activations in terms of their directions and magnitudes. Our method, which we name Householder Pseudo-Rotation (HPR), mimics the rotation transformation, thus preserving activation norm and resulting in an improved performance on various safety benchmarks.
DynamicER: Resolving Emerging Mentions to Dynamic Entities for RAG
Authors: Jinyoung Kim; Dayoon Ko; Gunhee Kim
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of language, resolving new linguistic expressions in continuously updating knowledge bases remains a formidable challenge. This challenge becomes critical in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with knowledge bases, as emerging expressions hinder the retrieval of relevant documents, leading to generator hallucinations. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task aimed at resolving emerging mentions to dynamic entities and present DynamicER benchmark. Our benchmark includes dynamic entity mention resolution and entity-centric knowledge-intensive QA task, evaluating entity linking and RAG model’s adaptability to new expressions, respectively. We discovered that current entity linking models struggle to link these new expressions to entities. Therefore, we propose a temporal segmented clustering method with continual adaptation, effectively managing the temporal dynamics of evolving entities and emerging mentions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, enhancing RAG model performance on QA task with resolved mentions.
Preserving Generalization of Language models in Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction
Authors: Quyen Tran; Nguyen Xuan Thanh; Nguyen Hoang Anh; Nam Le Hai; Trung Le; Linh Van Ngo; Thien Huu Nguyen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.
A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations
Authors: Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar; Sawsan Alqahtani; M Saiful Bari; Mizanur Rahman; Mohammad Abdullah Matin Khan; Haidar Khan; Israt Jahan; Amran Bhuiyan; Chee Wei Tan; Md Rizwan Parvez; Enamul Hoque; Shafiq Joty; Jimmy Xiangji Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their remarkable capabilities in performing diverse tasks across various domains. However, a thorough evaluation of these models is crucial before deploying them in real-world applications to ensure they produce reliable performance. Despite the well-established importance of evaluating LLMs in the community, the complexity of the evaluation process has led to varied evaluation setups, causing inconsistencies in findings and interpretations. To address this, we systematically review the primary challenges and limitations causing these inconsistencies and unreliable evaluations in various steps of LLM evaluation. Based on our critical review, we present our perspectives and recommendations to ensure LLM evaluations are reproducible, reliable, and robust.
Consecutive Batch Model Editing with HooK Layers
Authors: Shuaiyi Li; Yang Deng; Deng Cai; Hongyuan Lu; Liang Chen; Wai Lam
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: As the typical retraining paradigm is unacceptably time- and resource-consuming, researchers are turning to model editing to find an effective way that supports both consecutive and batch scenarios to edit the model behavior directly. Despite all these practical expectations, existing model editing methods fail to realize all of them. Furthermore, the memory demands for such sequential model editing approaches tend to be prohibitive, frequently necessitating an external memory that grows incrementally over time. To cope with these challenges, we propose CoachHooK, a model editing method that simultaneously supports sequential and batch editing. CoachHooK is memory-friendly as it only needs a small amount of it to store several hook layers whose size remains unchanged over time. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other batch-supportive model editing methods under both single-round and consecutive batch editing scenarios. Extensive analyses of CoachHooK have been conducted to verify the stability of our method over a number of consecutive steps.
Topic-Oriented Open Relation Extraction with A Priori Seed Generation
Authors: Linyi Ding; Jinfeng Xiao; Sizhe Zhou; Chaoqi Yang; Jiawei Han
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The field of open relation extraction (ORE) has recently observed significant advancement thanks to the growing capability of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, challenges persist when ORE is performed on specific topics. Existing methods give sub-optimal results in five dimensions: factualness, topic relevance, informativeness, coverage, and uniformity. To improve topic-oriented ORE, we propose a zero-shot approach called PriORE: Open Relation Extraction with a Priori seed generation. PriORE leverages the built-in knowledge of LLMs to maintain a dynamic seed relation dictionary for the topic. The dictionary is initialized by seed relations generated from topic-relevant entity types and expanded during contextualized ORE. PriORE then reduces the randomness in generative ORE by converting it to a more robust relation classification task. Experiments show the approach empowers better topic-oriented control over the generated relations and thus improves ORE performance along the five dimensions, especially on specialized and narrow topics.
Related Work and Citation Text Generation: A Survey
Authors: Xiangci Li; Jessica Ouyang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: To convince readers of the novelty of their research paper, authors must perform a literature review and compose a coherent story that connects and relates prior works to the current work. This challenging nature of literature review writing makes automatic related work generation (RWG) academically and computationally interesting, and also makes it an excellent test bed for examining the capability of SOTA natural language processing (NLP) models. Since the initial proposal of the RWG task, its popularity has waxed and waned, following the capabilities of mainstream NLP approaches. In this work, we survey the zoo of RWG historical works, summarizing the key approaches and task definitions and discussing the ongoing challenges of RWG.
Curriculum Consistency Learning for Conditional Sentence Generation
Authors: Liangxin Liu; Xuebo Liu; Lian Lian; Shengjun Cheng; Jun Rao; Tengfei Yu; Hexuan Deng; Min Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Consistency learning (CL) has proven to be a valuable technique for improving the robustness of models in conditional sentence generation (CSG) tasks by ensuring stable predictions across various input data forms. However, models augmented with CL often face challenges in optimizing consistency features, which can detract from their efficiency and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce Curriculum Consistency Learning (CCL), a novel strategy that guides models to learn consistency in alignment with their current capacity to differentiate between features. CCL is designed around the inherent aspects of CL-related losses, promoting task independence and simplifying implementation. Implemented across four representative CSG tasks, including instruction tuning (IT) for large language models and machine translation (MT) in three modalities (text, speech, and vision), CCL demonstrates marked improvements. Specifically, it delivers +2.0 average accuracy point improvement compared with vanilla IT and an average increase of +0.7 in COMET scores over traditional CL methods in MT tasks. Our comprehensive analysis further indicates that models utilizing CCL are particularly adept at managing complex instances, showcasing the effectiveness and efficiency of CCL in improving CSG models. Code and scripts are available at https://github.com/xinxinxing/Curriculum-Consistency-Learning.