GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
DC-Instruct: An Effective Framework for Generative Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Bowen Xing; Lizi Liao; Minlie Huang; Ivor Tsang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the realm of multi-intent spoken language understanding, recent advancements have leveraged the potential of prompt learning frameworks. However, critical gaps exist in these frameworks: the lack of explicit modeling of dual-task dependencies and the oversight of task-specific semantic differences among utterances. To address these shortcomings, we propose DC-Instruct, a novel generative framework based on Dual-task Inter-dependent Instructions (DII) and Supervised Contrastive Instructions (SCI). Specifically, DII guides large language models (LLMs) to generate labels for one task based on the other task’s labels, thereby explicitly capturing dual-task inter-dependencies. Moreover, SCI leverages utterance semantics differences by guiding LLMs to determine whether a pair of utterances share the same or similar labels. This can improve LLMs on extracting and discriminating task-specific semantics, thus enhancing their SLU reasoning abilities. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets show that DC-Instruct markedly outperforms current generative models and state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing dialogue language understanding and reasoning.
KnowTuning: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Large Language Models
Authors: Yougang Lyu; Lingyong Yan; Shuaiqiang Wang; Haibo Shi; Dawei Yin; Pengjie Ren; Zhumin Chen; Maarten de Rijke; Zhaochun Ren
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite their success at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, large language models still struggle to effectively leverage knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks, manifesting limitations such as generating incomplete, non-factual, or illogical answers. These limitations stem from inadequate knowledge awareness of LLMs during vanilla fine-tuning. To address these problems, we propose a knowledge-aware fine-tuning (KnowTuning) method to improve fine-grained and coarse-grained knowledge awareness of LLMs. We devise a fine-grained knowledge augmentation stage to train LLMs to identify difficult fine-grained knowledge in answers. We also propose a coarse-grained knowledge comparison stage to train LLMs to distinguish between reliable and unreliable knowledge, in three aspects: completeness, factuality, and logicality. Extensive experiments on both generic and medical question answering (QA) datasets confirm the effectiveness of KnowTuning, through automatic and human evaluations, across various sizes of LLMs. We further verify that KnowTuning generates more facts with less factual error rate under fine-grained facts evaluation.
SecCoder: Towards Generalizable and Robust Secure Code Generation
Authors: Boyu Zhang; Tianyu Du; Junkai Tong; Xuhong Zhang; Kingsum Chow; Sheng Cheng; Xun Wang; Jianwei Yin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: After large models (LMs) have gained widespread acceptance in code-related tasks, their superior generative capacity has greatly promoted the application of the code LM. Nevertheless, the security of the generated code has raised attention to its potential damage. Existing secure code generation methods have limited generalizability to unseen test cases and poor robustness against the attacked model, leading to safety failures in code generation. In this paper, we propose a generalizable and robust secure code generation method SecCoder by using in-context learning (ICL) and the safe demonstration. The dense retriever is also used to select the most helpful demonstration to maximize the improvement of the generated code’s security. Experimental results show the superior generalizability of the proposed model SecCoder compared to the current secure code generation method, achieving a significant security improvement of an average of 7.20% on unseen test cases. The results also show the better robustness of SecCoder compared to the current attacked code LM, achieving a significant security improvement of an average of 7.74%. Our analysis indicates that SecCoder enhances the security of LMs in generating code, and it is more generalizable and robust.
Nash CoT: Multi-Path Inference with Preference Equilibrium
Authors: Ziqi Zhang; Cunxiang Wang; Xiao Xiong; Yue Zhang; Donglin Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Chain of thought (CoT) is a reasoning framework that can enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex inference tasks. In particular, among various studies related to CoT, multi-path inference stands out as a simple yet effective improvement. However, there is no optimal setting for the number of inference paths. Therefore, we have to increase the number of inference paths to obtain better results, which in turn increases the inference cost. To address this limitation, we can utilize question-related role templates to guide LLMs into relevant roles, thereby increasing the possibility of correct inferences for each path and further reducing dependence on the number of inference paths while improving reasoning accuracy. However, placing LLMs into specific roles may reduce their reasoning diversity and performance on a few tasks where role dependence is low. To alleviate the excessive immersion of the LLM into a specific role, we propose Nash CoT by constructing a competitive system on each path that balances the generation from role-specific LLMs’ and the general LLMs’ generation, thereby ensuring both effective role adoption and diversity in LLM generation further maintaining the performance of multi-path inference while reducing the requirement of the number of inference paths. We evaluate Nash CoT across various inference tasks, including Arabic Reasoning, Commonsense Question Answering, and Symbolic Inference, achieving results that are comparable to or better than those of multi-path CoT with the equal number of inference paths.
Scalable Efficient Training of Large Language Models with Low-dimensional Projected Attention
Authors: Xingtai Lv; Ning Ding; Kaiyan Zhang; Ermo Hua; Ganqu Cui; Bowen Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of large language models (LLMs) simultaneously is a critical yet challenging research goal. In this paper, we find that low-rank pre-training, normally considered as efficient methods that will compromise performance, can be scalably effective when reduced parameters are precisely targeted. Specifically, by applying low-dimensional module only to the attention layer — resolves this issue and enhances both effectiveness and efficiency. We refer to this structure as *Low-dimensional Projected Attention (LPA)* and provide an explanatory analysis. Through extensive experimentation at parameter scales of 130M, 370M, and scaling up to 3B, we have validated the effectiveness and scalability of LPA. Our results show that LPA model can save up to 12.4% in time while achieving an approximate 5% improvement in test perplexity (ppl) and on downstream tasks compared with vanilla Transformer.
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector
Authors: Xiaoxue Cheng; Junyi Li; Wayne Xin Zhao; Hongzhi Zhang; Fuzheng Zhang; Di Zhang; Kun Gai; Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Hallucination detection is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), and existing studies heavily rely on powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. In this paper, we propose an autonomous LLM-based agent framework, called HaluAgent, which enables relatively smaller LLMs (e.g. Baichuan2-Chat 7B) to actively select suitable tools for detecting multiple hallucination types such as text, code, and mathematical expression. In HaluAgent, we integrate the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and design a fine-grained three-stage detection framework along with memory mechanism. To facilitate the effectiveness of HaluAgent, we leverage existing Chinese and English datasets to synthesize detection trajectories for fine-tuning, which endows HaluAgent with the capability for bilingual hallucination detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that only using 2K samples for tuning LLMs, HaluAgent can perform hallucination detection on various types of tasks and datasets, achieving performance comparable to or even higher than GPT-4 without tool enhancements on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets.
Interpretable Composition Attribution Enhancement for Visio-linguistic Compositional Understanding
Authors: Wei Li; Zhen Huang; Xinmei Tian; Le Lu; Houqiang Li; Xu Shen; Jieping Ye
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Contrastively trained vision-language models such as CLIP have achieved remarkable progress in vision and language representation learning. Despite the promising progress, their proficiency in compositional reasoning over attributes and relations (e.g., distinguishing between “the car is underneath the person” and “the person is underneath the car”) remains notably inadequate. We investigate the cause for this deficient behavior is the composition attribution issue, where the attribution scores (e.g., attention scores or GradCAM scores) for relations (e.g., underneath) or attributes (e.g., red) in the text are substantially lower than those for object terms. In this work, we show such issue is mitigated via a novel framework called CAE (Composition Attribution Enhancement). This generic framework incorporates various interpretable attribution methods to encourage the model to pay greater attention to composition words denoting relationships and attributes within the text. Detailed analysis shows that our approach enables the models to adjust and rectify the attribution of the texts. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks reveal that our framework significantly enhances the ability to discern intricate details and construct more sophisticated interpretations of combined visual and linguistic elements.
LLM Task Interference: An Initial Study on the Impact of Task-Switch in Conversational History
Authors: Akash Gupta; Ivaxi Sheth; Vyas Raina; Mark Gales; Mario Fritz
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a _task-switch_. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.
Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Models
Authors: Marta Marchiori Manerba; Karolina Stanczak; Riccardo Guidotti; Isabelle Augenstein
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While the impact of social biases in language models has been recognized, prior methods for bias evaluation have been limited to binary association tests on small datasets, limiting our understanding of bias complexities. This paper proposes a novel framework for probing language models for social biases by assessing disparate treatment, which involves treating individuals differently according to their affiliation with a sensitive demographic group. We curate SoFa, a large-scale benchmark designed to address the limitations of existing fairness collections. SoFa expands the analysis beyond the binary comparison of stereotypical versus anti-stereotypical identities to include a diverse range of identities and stereotypes. Comparing our methodology with existing benchmarks, we reveal that biases within language models are more nuanced than acknowledged, indicating a broader scope of encoded biases than previously recognized. Benchmarking LMs on SoFa, we expose how identities expressing different religions lead to the most pronounced disparate treatments across all models. Finally, our findings indicate that real-life adversities faced by various groups such as women and people with disabilities are mirrored in the behavior of these models.
Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models
Authors: Wenhao Yu; Hongming Zhang; Xiaoman Pan; Peixin Cao; Kaixin Ma; Jian Li; Hongwei Wang; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented language model (RALM) represents a significant advancement in mitigating factual hallucination by leveraging external knowledge sources. However, the reliability of the retrieved information is not always guaranteed, and the retrieval of irrelevant data can mislead the response generation. Moreover, standard RALMs frequently neglect their intrinsic knowledge due to the interference from retrieved information. In instances where the retrieved information is irrelevant, RALMs should ideally utilize their intrinsic knowledge or, in the absence of both intrinsic and retrieved knowledge, opt to respond with “unknown” to avoid hallucination. In this paper, we introduces Chain-of-Note (CoN), a novel approach to improve robustness of RALMs in facing noisy, irrelevant documents and in handling unknown scenarios. The core idea of CoN is to generate sequential reading notes for each retrieved document, enabling a thorough evaluation of their relevance to the given question and integrating this information to formulate the final answer. Our experimental results show that GPT-4, when equipped with CoN, outperforms the Chain-of-Thought approach. Besides, we utilized GPT-4 to create 10K CoN data, subsequently trained on smaller models like OPT and LLaMa-2. Our experiments across four open-domain QA benchmarks show that fine-tuned RALMs equipped with CoN significantly outperform standard fine-tuned RALMs.
DynaThink: Fast or Slow? A Dynamic Decision-Making Framework for Large Language Models
Authors: Jiabao Pan; Yan Zhang; Chen Zhang; Zuozhu Liu; Hongwei Wang; Haizhou Li
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities across diverse reasoning tasks via popular Chains-of-Thought (COT) prompting. However, such a simple and fast COT approach often encounters limitations in dealing with complicated problems, while a thorough method, which considers multiple reasoning pathways and verifies each step carefully, results in slower inference. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling LLMs to autonomously select between fast and slow inference methods, thereby optimizing both efficiency and effectiveness. We introduce a dynamic decision-making framework that categorizes tasks into two distinct pathways: ‘Fast,’ designated for tasks where the LLM quickly identifies a high-confidence solution, and ‘Slow,’ allocated for tasks that the LLM perceives as complex and for which it has low confidence in immediate solutions as well as requiring more reasoning paths to verify. Experiments on five popular reasoning benchmarks demonstrated the superiority of the DynaThink over baselines. For example, when we compared it to strong COT with self-consistency baseline on the complicated MATH dataset, DynaThink achieved more than 3% increase in accuracy with lower cost. The code will be made available upon publication.
Revisiting Automated Evaluation for Long-form Table Question Answering
Authors: Yuqi Wang; Lyuhao Chen; Songcheng Cai; Zhijian Xu; Yilun Zhao
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the era of data-driven decision-making, Long-Form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) is essential for integrating structured data with complex reasoning. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) for LFTQA, evaluating their effectiveness remains a significant challenge. We introduce LFTQA-Eval, a meta-evaluation dataset comprising 2,988 human-annotated examples, to rigorously assess the efficacy of current automated metrics in assessing LLM-based LFTQA systems, with a focus on faithfulness and comprehensiveness. Our findings reveal that existing automatic metrics poorly correlate with human judgments and fail to consistently differentiate between factually accurate responses and those that are coherent but factually incorrect. Additionally, our in-depth examination of the limitations associated with automated evaluation methods provides essential insights for the improvement of LFTQA automated evaluation.
Weak Reward Model Transforms Generative Models into Robust Causal Event Extraction Systems
Authors: Italo Luis Da Silva; Hanqi Yan; Lin Gui; Yulan He
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries poses a challenge in evaluating causal event extraction tasks. Traditional metrics like Exact Match and BertScore poorly reflect model performance, so we trained evaluation models to approximate human evaluation, achieving high agreement. We used them to perform Reinforcement Learning with extraction models to align them with human preference, prioritising semantic understanding. We successfully explored our approach through multiple datasets, including transferring an evaluator trained on one dataset to another as a way to decrease the reliance on human-annotated data. In that vein, we also propose a weak-to-strong supervision method that uses a fraction of the annotated data to train an evaluation model while still achieving high performance in training an RL model.
Learn Beyond The Answer: Training Language Models with Reflection for Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Zhihan Zhang; Tao Ge; Zhenwen Liang; Wenhao Yu; Dian Yu; Mengzhao Jia; Dong Yu; Meng Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning enhances the problem-solving abilities of language models across various mathematical reasoning tasks. To maximize such benefits, existing research focuses on *broadening* the training set with various data augmentation techniques, which is effective for standard single-round question-answering settings. Our work introduces a novel technique aimed at cultivating a *deeper* understanding of the training problems at hand, enhancing performance not only in standard settings but also in more complex scenarios that require reflective thinking. Specifically, we propose **reflective augmentation**, a method that embeds problem reflection into each training instance. It trains the model to consider alternative perspectives and engage with abstractions and analogies, thereby fostering a thorough comprehension through reflective reasoning. Extensive experiments validate the achievement of our aim, underscoring the unique advantages of our method and its complementary nature relative to existing augmentation techniques.
FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents
Authors: Yilun Zhao; Yitao Long; Tintin Jiang; Chengye Wang; Weiyuan Chen; Hongjun Liu; Xiangru Tang; Yiming Zhang; Chen Zhao; Arman Cohan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We introduce FinDVer, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing long, hybrid-content financial documents. FinDVer contains 4,000 expert-annotated examples across four subsets, each focusing on a type of scenario that frequently arises in real-world financial domains. We assess a broad spectrum of 25 LLMs under long-context and RAG settings. Our results show that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) significantly lags behind human experts. Our detailed findings and insights highlight the strengths and limitations of existing LLMs in this new task. We believe FinDVer can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLM capabilities in claim verification over complex, expert-domain documents.
Extracting Prompts by Inverting LLM Outputs
Authors: Collin Zhang; John Xavier Morris; Vitaly Shmatikov
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We consider the problem of language model inversion: given outputs of a language model, we seek to extract the prompt that generated these outputs. We develop a new black-box method, output2prompt, that extracts prompts without access to the model’s logits and without adversarial or jailbreaking queries. Unlike previous methods, output2prompt only needs outputs of normal user queries. To improve memory efficiency, output2prompt employs a new sparse encoding techique. We measure the efficacy of output2prompt on a variety of user and system prompts and demonstrate zero-shot transferability across different LLMs.
BiasAlert: A Plug-and-play Tool for Social Bias Detection in LLMs
Authors: Zhiting Fan; Ruizhe Chen; Ruiling Xu; Zuozhu Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Evaluating the bias of LLMs becomes more crucial with their rapid development. However, existing evaluation approaches rely on fixed-form outputs and cannot adapt to the flexible open-text generation scenarios of LLMs (e.g., sentence completion and question answering). To address this, we introduce BiasAlert, a plug-and-play tool designed to detect social bias in open-text generations of LLMs. BiasAlert integrates external human knowledge with its inherent reasoning capabilities to detect bias reliably. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiasAlert significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods like GPT-4-as-Judge in detecting bias. Furthermore, through application studies, we showcase the utility of BiasAlert in reliable LLM fairness evaluation and bias mitigation across various scenarios. Model and code will be publicly released.