GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Here’s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge
Authors: Ansh Arora; Xuanli He; Maximilian Mozes; Srinibas Swain; Mark Dras; Qiongkai Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks, where hidden malicious behaviors are triggered by specific inputs, compromising natural language processing (NLP) system integrity and reliability. This paper suggests that merging a backdoored model with other homogeneous models can significantly remediate backdoor vulnerabilities even if such models are not entirely secure. In our experiments, we verify our hypothesis on various models (BERT-Base, RoBERTa-Large, Llama2-7B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (SST-2, OLID, AG News, and QNLI). Compared to multiple advanced defensive approaches, our method offers an effective and efficient inference-stage defense against backdoor attacks on classification and instruction-tuned tasks without additional resources or specific knowledge. Our approach consistently outperforms recent advanced baselines, leading to an average of about 75% reduction in the attack success rate. Since model merging has been an established approach for improving model performance, the extra advantage it provides regarding defense can be seen as a cost-free bonus.
Enhancing Sentence Simplification in Portuguese: Leveraging Paraphrases, Context, and Linguistic Features
Authors: Arthur Scalercio; Maria Finatto; Aline Paes
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.
How Far can 100 Samples Go? Unlocking Zero-Shot Translation with Tiny Multi-Parallel Data
Authors: Di Wu; Shaomu Tan; Yan Meng; David Stap; Christof Monz
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Zero-shot translation aims to translate between language pairs not seen during training in Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) and is widely considered an open problem. A common, albeit resource-consuming, solution is to add as many related translation directions as possible to the training corpus. In this paper, we show that for an English-centric model, surprisingly large zero-shot improvements can be achieved by simply fine-tuning with a very small amount of multi-parallel data. For example, on the EC30 dataset, we obtain up to +21.7 ChrF++ non-English overall improvements (870 directions) by using only 100 multi-parallel samples while preserving English-centric translation quality. This performance exceeds M2M100 by an average of 5.9 ChrF++ in the involved non-English directions. When investigating the size effect of fine-tuning data on translation quality, we found that already a small, randomly sampled set of fine-tuning directions is sufficient to achieve comparable improvements. The resulting non-English performance is close to the complete translation upper bound. Even in a minimal setting—fine-tuning with only one single sample—the well-known off-target issue is almost completely resolved, explaining parts—but not all—of the observed improvements in translation quality.
Toward Reliable Ad-hoc Scientific Information Extraction: A Case Study on Two Materials Dataset
Authors: Satanu Ghosh; Neal Brodnik; Carolina Frey; Collin Holgate; Tresa Pollock; Samantha Daly; Samuel Carton
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: We explore the ability of GPT-4 to perform ad-hoc schema-based information extraction from scientific literature. We assess specifically whether it can, with a basic one-shot prompting approach over the full text of the included manusciprts, replicate two existing material science datasets, one pertaining to multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), and one to silicate diffusion. We collaborate with materials scientists to perform a detailed manual error analysis to assess where and why the model struggles to faithfully extract the desired information, and draw on their insights to suggest research directions to address this broadly important task.
Structural Optimization Ambiguity and Simplicity Bias in Unsupervised Neural Grammar Induction
Authors: Jinwook Park; Kangil Kim
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Neural parameterization has significantly advanced unsupervised grammar induction. However, training these models with a traditional likelihood loss for all possible parses exacerbates two issues: 1) *structural optimization ambiguity* that arbitrarily selects one among structurally ambiguous optimal grammars despite the specific preference of gold parses, and 2) *structural simplicity bias* that leads a model to underutilize rules to compose parse trees. These challenges subject unsupervised neural grammar induction (UNGI) to inevitable prediction errors, high variance, and the necessity for extensive grammars to achieve accurate predictions. This paper tackles these issues, offering a comprehensive analysis of their origins. As a solution, we introduce *sentence-wise parse-focusing* to reduce the parse pool per sentence for loss evaluation, using the structural bias from pre-trained parsers on the same dataset.In unsupervised parsing benchmark tests, our method significantly improves performance while effectively reducing variance and bias toward overly simplistic parses. Our research promotes learning more compact, accurate, and consistent explicit grammars, facilitating better interpretability.
LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction and Localization
Authors: Vincent Perot; Kai Kang; Florian Luisier; Guolong Su; Xiaoyu Sun; Ramya Sree Boppana; Zilong Wang; Zifeng Wang; Jiaqi Mu; Hao Zhang; Chen-Yu Lee; Nan Hua
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), improving state-of-the-art and exhibiting emergent capabilities across various tasks. However, their application in extracting information from visually rich documents, which is at the core of many document processing workflows and involving the extraction of key entities from semi-structured documents, has not yet been successful. The main obstacles to adopting LLMs for this task include the absence of layout encoding within LLMs, which is critical for high quality extraction, and the lack of a grounding mechanism to localize the predicted entities within the document. In this paper, we introduce Language Model-based Document Information EXtraction and Localization (LMDX), a methodology to reframe the document information extraction task for a LLM. LMDX enables extraction of singular, repeated, and hierarchical entities, both with and without training data, while providing grounding guarantees and localizing the entities within the document. Finally, we apply LMDX to the PaLM 2-S and Gemini Pro LLMs and evaluate it on VRDU and CORD benchmarks, setting a new state-of-the-art and showing how LMDX enables the creation of high quality, data-efficient parsers.
DBQR-QA: A Question Answering Dataset on a Hybrid of Database Querying and Reasoning
Authors: Rungsiman Nararatwong; Chung-Chi Chen; Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn; Hiroya Takamura; Ryutaro Ichise
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: This paper introduces the Database Querying and Reasoning Dataset for Question Answering (DBQR-QA), aimed at addressing the gap in current question-answering (QA) research by emphasizing the essential processes of database querying and reasoning to answer questions. Specifically designed to accommodate sequential questions and multi-hop queries, DBQR-QA more accurately mirrors the dynamics of real-world information retrieval and analysis, with a particular focus on the financial reports of US companies. The dataset’s construction, the challenges encountered during its development, the performance of large language models on this dataset, and a human evaluation are thoroughly discussed to illustrate the dataset’s complexity and highlight future research directions in querying and reasoning tasks.
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes
Authors: Junda Wang; Zonghai Yao; Zhichao Yang; Huixue Zhou; Rumeng Li; Xun Wang; Yucheng Xu; Hong Yu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: We introduce NoteChat, a novel cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate patient-physician dialogues. NoteChat embodies the principle that an ensemble of role-specific LLMs, through structured role-play and strategic prompting, can perform their assigned roles more effectively. The synergy among these role-playing LLMs results in a cohesive and efficient dialogue generation. Evaluation on MTS-dialogue, a benchmark dataset for patient-physician dialogues-note pairs, shows that models trained with the augmented synthetic patient-physician dialogues by NoteChat outperforms other state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation demonstrates that NoteChat substantially surpasses state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 up to 22.78% by domain experts in generating superior synthetic patient-physician dialogues based on clinical notes. NoteChat has the potential to engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout.
Model Editing at Scale leads to Gradual and Catastrophic Forgetting
Authors: Akshat Gupta; Anurag Rao; Gopala Anumanchipalli
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Editing knowledge in large language models is an attractive capability that allows us to correct incorrectly learned facts during pre-training, as well as update the model with an ever-growing list of new facts. While existing model editing techniques have shown promise, they are usually evaluated using metrics for reliability, specificity and generalization over one or few edits. We argue that for model editing to have practical utility, we must be able to make multiple edits to the same model. With this in mind, we evaluate current model editing methods at scale, focusing on two state of the art methods - ROME and MEMIT. With the lens of scalability, we evaluate model editing methods for three crucial properties - editing proficiency, fact forgetting and downstream performance. We find that as a model is edited sequentially with multiple facts, it continually becomes less editable, forgets previously edited facts and loses the ability to perform downstream tasks. For ROME and MEMIT, this “forgetting” happens in two phases - an initial gradual but progressive forgetting phase followed by an abrupt or catastrophic forgetting. Both gradual and catastrophic forgetting limit the usefulness of model editing methods at scale - the former makes model editing less effective as multiple edits are made to the model while the latter caps the scalability of such model editing methods. Our analysis also highlights other key limitations of ROME and MEMIT at scale. With our work, we push for better evaluation of model editing and development of model editing methods keeping scalability in mind.
3MVRD: Multimodal Multi-task Multi-teacher Visually-Rich Form Document Understanding
Authors: Yihao Ding; Lorenzo Vaiani; Caren Han; Jean Lee; Paolo Garza; Josiah Poon; Luca Cagliero
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: This paper presents a groundbreaking multimodal, multi-task, multi-teacher joint-grained knowledge distillation model for visually-rich form document understanding. The model is designed to leverage insights from both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels by facilitating a nuanced correlation between token and entity representations, addressing the complexities inherent in form documents. Additionally, we introduce new inter-grained and cross-grained loss functions to further refine diverse multi-teacher knowledge distillation transfer process, presenting distribution gaps and a harmonised understanding of form documents. Through a comprehensive evaluation across publicly available form document understanding datasets, our proposed model consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its efficacy in handling the intricate structures and content of visually complex form documents.
Faithful Persona-based Conversational Dataset Generation with Large Language Models
Authors: Pegah Jandaghi; Xianghai Sheng; Xinyi Bai; Jay Pujara; Hakim Sidahmed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI (NLP4ConvAI 2024))

Abstract: High-quality conversational datasets are essential for developing AI models that can communicate with users. One way to foster deeper interactions between a chatbot and its user is through personas, aspects of the user’s character that provide insights into their personality, motivations, and behaviors. Training Natural Language Processing (NLP) models on a diverse and comprehensive persona-based dataset can lead to conversational models that create a deeper connection with the user, and maintain their engagement. In this paper, we leverage the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a large, high-quality conversational dataset from a seed dataset. We propose a Generator-Critic architecture framework to expand the initial dataset, while improving the quality of its conversations. The Generator is an LLM prompted to output conversations. The Critic consists of a mixture of expert LLMs that control the quality of the generated conversations. These experts select the best generated conversations, which we then use to improve the Generator. We release Synthetic-Persona-Chat, consisting of 20k conversations seeded from Persona-Chat. We evaluate the quality of Synthetic-Persona-Chat and our generation framework on different dimensions through extensive experiments, and observe that the losing rate of Synthetic-Persona-Chat against Persona-Chat during an AI detection test decreases from 17.2% to 8.8% over three iterations.
Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Zhiyang Xu; Chao Feng; Rulin Shao; Trevor Ashby; Ying Shen; Di Jin; Yu Cheng; Qifan Wang; Lifu Huang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Despite vision-language models’ (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability, hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs’ capabilities but rather modulates the model’s responses to human-preferred formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.
TAXI: Evaluating Categorical Knowledge Editing for Language Models
Authors: Derek Powell; Walter Gerych; Thomas Hartvigsen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Humans rarely learn one fact in isolation. Instead, learning a new fact induces knowledge of other facts about the world. For example, in learning a korat is a type of cat, you also infer it is a mammal and has claws, ensuring your model of the world is consistent. Knowledge editing aims to inject new facts into language models to improve their factuality, but current benchmarks fail to evaluate consistency, which is critical to ensure efficient, accurate, and generalizable edits. We manually create TAXI, a new benchmark dataset specifically created to evaluate consistency in categorical knowledge edits. TAXI contains 11,120 multiple-choice queries for 976 edits spanning 41 categories (e.g., Dogs), 164 subjects (e.g., Labrador), and 183 properties (e.g., is a mammal). We then use TAXI to evaluate popular editors’ categorical consistency, measuring how often editing a subject’s category appropriately edits its properties. We find that 1) the editors achieve marginal, yet non-random consistency, 2) their consistency far underperforms human baselines, and 3) consistency is more achievable when editing atypical subjects.
Automatic Bug Detection in LLM-Powered Text-Based Games Using LLMs
Authors: Claire Jin; Sudha Rao; Xiangyu Peng; Portia Botchway; Jessica Quaye; Chris Brockett; Bill Dolan
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Advancements in large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing interactive game design, enabling dynamic plotlines and interactions between players and non-player characters (NPCs). However, LLMs may exhibit flaws such as hallucinations, forgetfulness, or misinterpretations of prompts, causing logical inconsistencies and unexpected deviations from intended designs. Automated techniques for detecting such game bugs are still lacking. To address this, we propose a systematic LLM-based method for automatically identifying such bugs from player game logs, eliminating the need for collecting additional data such as post-play surveys. Applied to a text-based game DejaBoom!, our approach effectively identifies bugs inherent in LLM-powered interactive games, surpassing unstructured LLM-powered bug-catching methods and filling the gap in automated detection of logical and design flaws.
Embodied Language Learning: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions
Authors: Nadine Amin; Julia Rayz
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: While large language and vision-language models showcase impressive capabilities, they face a notable limitation: the inability to connect language with the physical world. To bridge this gap, research has focused on embodied language learning, where the language learner is situated in the world, perceives it, and interacts with it. This article explores the current standing of research in embodied language learning, highlighting opportunities and discussing common challenges. Lastly, it identifies existing gaps from the perspective of language understanding research within the embodied world and suggests potential future directions.
Challenges to Evaluating the Generalization of Coreference Resolution Models: A Measurement Modeling Perspective
Authors: Ian Porada; Alexandra Olteanu; Kaheer Suleman; Adam Trischler; Jackie Cheung
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: It is increasingly common to evaluate the same coreference resolution (CR) model on multiple datasets. Do these multi-dataset evaluations allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about model generalization? Or, do they rather reflect the idiosyncrasies of a particular experimental setup (e.g., the specific datasets used)? To study this, we view evaluation through the lens of measurement modeling, a framework commonly used in the social sciences for analyzing the validity of measurements. By taking this perspective, we show how multi-dataset evaluations risk conflating different factors concerning what, precisely, is being measured. This in turn makes it difficult to draw more generalizable conclusions from these evaluations. For instance, we show that across seven datasets, measurements intended to reflect CR model generalization are often correlated with differences in both how coreference is defined and how it is operationalized; this limits our ability to draw conclusions regarding the ability of CR models to generalize across any singular dimension. We believe the measurement modeling framework provides the needed vocabulary for discussing challenges surrounding what is actually being measured by CR evaluations.
SAGA: A Participant-specific Examination of Story Alternatives and Goal Applicability for a Deeper Understanding of Complex Events
Authors: Sai Vallurupalli; Katrin Erk; Francis Ferraro
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Interpreting and assessing goal driven actions is vital to understanding and reasoning over complex events. It is important to be able to acquire the knowledge needed for this understanding, though doing so is challenging. We argue that such knowledge can be elicited through a participant achievement lens. We analyze a complex event in a narrative according to the intended achievements of the participants in that narrative, the likely future actions of the participants, and the likelihood of goal success. We collect 6.3K high quality goal and action annotations reflecting our proposed participant achievement lens, with an average weighted Fleiss-Kappa IAA of 80%. Our collection contains annotated alternate versions of each narrative. These alternate versions vary minimally from the “original” story, but can license drastically different inferences. Our findings suggest that while modern large language models can reflect some of the goal-based knowledge we study, they find it challenging to fully capture the design and intent behind concerted actions, even when the model pretraining included the data from which we extracted the goal knowledge. We show that smaller models fine-tuned on our dataset can achieve performance surpassing larger models.