GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Decoupling Breaks Data Barriers: A Decoupled Pre-training Framework for Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Libo Qin; Qiguang Chen; Jingxuan Zhou; Qinzheng Li; Chunlin Lu; Wanxiang Che
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding (Multi-intent SLU) can extract multiple intents in a single utterance, gaining increasing attention. Nevertheless, current multi-intent SLU approaches still heavily rely on large amounts of annotated multi-intent SLU data, which makes it hard to be satisfied in real-world scenarios without sufficient data. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel decoupled pre-training framework (DPF) to address the data-scarcity problem, achieving to leverage of abundant multi-intent-free SLU data to enhance multi-intent SLU. Specifically, DPF first decouples the multi-intent SLU task into two abilities: (1) task-agnostic ability to locate the task-agnostic slot entity span and (2) task-specific ability to predict the task-specific slot and intent labels simultaneously. The key insight of DPF is that such decomposition allows us to design a two-stage decoupled pre-training procedure to enhance both task-agnostic ability and task-specific ability with abundant multi-intent-free SLU data (i.e., NER and single-intent SLU data), respectively. Experimental results on two standard benchmarks (e.g., MixATIS and MixSNIPS) demonstrate the effectiveness of DPF by achieving superior performance. In addition, extensive analyses reveal that utilizing the multi-intent-free data can effectively enhance multi-intent SLU.
Contextualized Speech Recognition: Rethinking Second-Pass Rescoring with Generative Large Language Models
Authors: Yixuan Tang; Anthony K. H. Tung
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have witnessed notable advancements in recent years. Contextualized ASR tasks require recognizing speech not as isolated utterances but within the broader context in which they occur. Conventional approaches often employ a second-pass paradigm to re-rank initial transcriptions, yet they risk propagating errors across candidate hypotheses, thereby compromising recognition precision. In this study, we introduce a novel framework that diverges from typical second-pass rescoring methods. Given n-best hypotheses, we leverage prompting with a large language model for contextualized second-pass generation. Besides pursuing higher accuracy, we aim to explore the performance boundaries without substantially altering the underlying pre-trained speech and language models. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm through zero-shot prompting and strategic low-rank adaptation tuning. On the multi-accent spoken reading comprehension benchmark SQuAD-SRC, both prompting and fine-tuned models outperform the 1-best ASR hypothesis, achieving notable relative Word Error Rate (WER) improvements of 13.6% and 45.9%, respectively. The results suggest that the proposed approach enhances transcription accuracy and contextual understanding.
Correct and Optimal: The Regular Expression Inference Challenge
Authors: Mojtaba Valizadeh; Philip John Gorinski; Ignacio Iacobacci; Martin Berger
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We propose regular expression inference (REI) as a challenge for code/language modelling, and the wider machine learning community. REI is a supervised machine learning (ML) and program optimisation task, and poses the problem of finding minimal regular expressions from examples: Given two finite sets of strings P and N and a cost function cost(·), the task is to generate an expression r that accepts all strings in P and rejects all strings in N , while no other such expression r′ exists with cost(r′) < cost(r). REI has advantages as a challenge problem: (i) regular expressions are well-known, widely used, and a natural idealisation of code; (ii) REI’s asymptotic worst-case complexity is well understood; (iii) REI has a small number of easy to understand parameters (e.g. P or N cardinality, string lengths of examples, or the cost function); this lets us easily finetune REI-hardness; (iv) REI, with its emphasis on optimisation, is an unsolved problem for deep learning based ML. Recently, an REI solver was implemented on GPUs, using program synthesis techniques. This enabled, for the first time, fast generation of minimal regular expressions for complex REI instances. Building on this advance, we generate and publish the first large-scale datasets for REI, and devise and evaluate several initial heuristic and machine learning baselines. We invite the community to participate and explore ML methods that learn to solve REI problems. We believe that progress in REI directly translates to progress in code/language modelling.
Two-stage Semi-supervised Speaker Recognition with Gated Label Learning
Authors: Xingmei Wang; Jiaxiang Meng; Kong Aik Lee; Boquan Li; Jinghan Liu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Speaker recognition technologies have been successfully applied in diverse domains, benefiting from the advance of deep learning. Nevertheless, current efforts are still subject to the lack of labeled data. Such issues have been attempted in computer vision, through semi-supervised learning (SSL) that assigns pseudo labels for unlabeled data, undertaking the role of labeled ones. Through our empirical evaluations, the state-of-the-art SSL methods show unsatisfactory performance in speaker recognition tasks, due to the imbalance between the quantity and quality of pseudo labels. Therefore, in this work, we propose a two-stage SSL framework, with the aim to address the data scarcity challenge. We first construct an initial contrastive learning network, where the encoder outputs the embedding representation of utterances. Furthermore, we construct an iterative holistic semi-supervised learning network that involves a clustering strategy to assign pseudo labels, and a gated label learning (GLL) strategy to further select reliable pseudo-label data. Systematical evaluations show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance in speaker recognition than the state-of-the-art methods, matching the performance of supervised learning.
NegativePrompt: Leveraging Psychology for Large Language Models Enhancement via Negative Emotional Stimuli
Authors: Xu Wang; Cheng Li; Yi Chang; Jindong Wang; Yuan Wu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from traditional computing tasks to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This widespread adoption has spurred extensive research into LLMs across various disciplines, including the social sciences. Notably, studies have revealed that LLMs possess emotional intelligence, which can be further developed through positive emotional stimuli. This discovery raises an intriguing question: can negative emotions similarly influence LLMs, potentially enhancing their performance? In response to this question, we introduce NegativePrompt, a novel approach underpinned by psychological principles, involving ten specifically designed negative emotional stimuli. We embark on rigorous experimental evaluations of five LLMs including Flan-T5-Large, Vicuna, Llama 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, across a set of 45 tasks. The results are revealing: NegativePrompt markedly enhances the performance of LLMs, evidenced by relative improvements of 12.89% in Instruction Induction tasks and 46.25% in BIG-Bench tasks. Moreover, we conduct attention visualization experiments to decipher the underlying mechanisms of NegativePrompt's influence. Our research contributes significantly to the understanding of LLMs and emotion interaction, demonstrating the practical efficacy of NegativePrompt as an emotion-driven method and offering novel insights for the enhancement of LLMs in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/wangxu0820/NegativePrompt.
Purpose Enhanced Reasoning through Iterative Prompting: Uncover Latent Robustness of ChatGPT on Code Comprehension
Authors: Yi Wang; Qidong Zhao; Dongkuan Xu; Xu Liu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Code comments are crucial for gaining in-depth insights to facilitate code comprehension. The key to obtaining these insights lies in precisely summarizing the main purpose of the code. Recent approaches on code comment generation lie in prompting large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, instead of training/fine-tuning specific models. Although ChatGPT demonstrates an impressive performance in code comprehension, it still suffers from robustness challenges in consistently producing high-quality code comments. This is because ChatGPT prioritizes the semantics of code tokens, which makes it vulnerable to commonly encountered benign perturbations such as variable name replacements. This study proposes a modular prompting paradigm Perthept to effectively mitigate the negative effects caused by such minor perturbations. Perthept iteratively enhances the reasoning depth to reach the main purpose of the code. Perthept demonstrates robustness under the scenario where there is stochasticity or unreliability in ChatGPT's responses. We give a comprehensive evaluation across four public datasets to show the consistent robustness improvement with our proposed methodology over other models.
Beyond What If: Advancing Counterfactual Text Generation with Structural Causal Modeling
Authors: Ziao Wang; Xiaofeng Zhang; Hongwei Du
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Exploring the realms of counterfactuals, this paper introduces a versatile approach in text generation using structural causal models (SCM), broadening the scope beyond traditional singular causal studies to encompass complex, multi-layered relationships. To comprehensively explore these intricate, multi-layered causal relationships in text generation, we introduce a generalized approach based on the structural causal model (SCM), adept at handling complex causal interactions in a spectrum ranging from everyday stories to financial reports.Specifically, our method begins by disentangling each component of the text into pairs of latent variables, representing elements that remain unchanged and those subject to variation. Subsequently, counterfactual interventions are applied to these latent variables, facilitating the generation of outcomes that are influenced by complex causal dynamics. Extensive experiments have been conducted on both a public story generation dataset and a specially constructed dataset in the financial domain. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of automatic and human evaluation criteria, underscoring its effectiveness and versatility in diverse text generation contexts.
Sentence-Level or Token-Level? A Comprehensive Study on Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Jingxuan Wei; Linzhuang Sun; Yichong Leng; Xu Tan; Bihui Yu; Ruifeng Guo
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge distillation, transferring knowledge from a teacher model to a student model, has emerged as a powerful technique in neural machine translation for compressing models or simplifying training targets. Knowledge distillation encompasses two primary methods: sentence-level distillation and token-level distillation. In sentence-level distillation, the student model is trained to align with the output of the teacher model, which can alleviate the training difficulty and give student model a comprehensive understanding of global structure. Differently, token-level distillation requires the student model to learn the output distribution of the teacher model, facilitating a more fine-grained transfer of knowledge. Studies have revealed divergent performances between sentence-level and token-level distillation across different scenarios, leading to the confusion on the empirical selection of knowledge distillation methods. In this study, we argue that token-level distillation, with its more complex objective (i.e., distribution), is better suited for “simple” scenarios, while sentence-level distillation excels in “complex” scenarios. To substantiate our hypothesis, we systematically analyze the performance of distillation methods by varying the model size of student models, the complexity of text, and the difficulty of decoding procedure. While our experimental results validate our hypothesis, defining the complexity level of a given scenario remains a challenging task. So we further introduce a novel hybrid method that combines token-level and sentence-level distillation through a gating mechanism, aiming to leverage the advantages of both individual methods. Experiments demonstrate that the hybrid method surpasses the performance of token-level or sentence-level distillation methods and the previous works by a margin, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid method.
Unified Evidence Enhancement Inference Framework for Fake News Detection
Authors: Lianwei Wu; Linyong Wang; Yongqiang Zhao
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The current approaches for fake news detection are mainly devoted to extracting candidate evidence from comments (or external articles) and establishing interactive reasoning with the news itself to verify the falsehood of the news. However, they still have several drawbacks: 1) The interaction object is coarse-grained, which mainly drives the entire news to participate in interaction, but ignores the learning of potential suspicious segments in news; 2) The reasoning ways are relatively single, making it difficult to explore the various possible correlations between news and candidate evidence. To this end, we propose Unified Evidence Enhancement Inference framework (UEEI) to discover and infer high-quality evidence to reveal the false parts of news for detection. Specifically, UEEI first promotes the interaction fusion between comments and news from the perspectives of semantic and emotion, thereby learning potential suspicious fragments in news. Then, the model constructs entity-level and relationship-level retrievals to screen sufficient candidate evidence from external sources. Finally, we measure coherence between suspicious fragments and candidate evidence by multi-view reasoning, and further infer explainable evidence that discovers the false parts of news. Experiments on three public datasets confirm the effectiveness and interpretability of our UEEI.
HyDiscGAN: A Hybrid Distributed cGAN for Audio-Visual Privacy Preservation in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Zhuojia Wu; Qi Zhang; Duoqian Miao; Kun Yi; Wei Fan; Liang Hu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) aims to identify speakers' sentiment tendencies in multimodal video content, raising serious concerns about privacy risks associated with multimodal data, such as voiceprints and facial images. Recent distributed collaborative learning has been verified as an effective paradigm for privacy preservation in multimodal tasks. However, they often overlook the privacy distinctions among different modalities, struggling to strike a balance between performance and privacy preservation. Consequently, it poses an intriguing question of maximizing multimodal utilization to improve performance while simultaneously protecting necessary modalities. This paper forms the first attempt at modality-specified (i.e., audio and visual) privacy preservation in MSA tasks. We propose a novel Hybrid Distributed cross-modality cGAN framework (HyDiscGAN), which learns multimodality alignment to generate fake audio and visual features conditioned on shareable de-identified textual data. The objective is to leverage the fake features to approximate real audio and visual content to guarantee privacy preservation while effectively enhancing performance. Extensive experiments show that compared with the state-of-the-art MSA model, HyDiscGAN can achieve superior or competitive performance while preserving privacy.
Learning to Solve Geometry Problems via Simulating Human Dual-Reasoning Process
Authors: Tong Xiao; Jiayu Liu; Zhenya Huang; Jinze Wu; Jing Sha; Shijin Wang; Enhong Chen
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Geometry Problem Solving (GPS), which is a classic and challenging math problem, has attracted much attention in recent years. It requires a solver to comprehensively understand both text and diagram, master essential geometry knowledge, and appropriately apply it in reasoning. However, existing works follow a paradigm of neural machine translation and only focus on enhancing the capability of encoders, which neglects the essential characteristics of human geometry reasoning. In this paper, inspired by dual-process theory, we propose a Dual-Reasoning Geometry Solver (DualGeoSolver) to simulate the dual-reasoning process of humans for GPS. Specifically, we construct two systems in DualGeoSolver, namely Knowledge System and Inference System. Knowledge System controls an implicit reasoning process, which is responsible for providing diagram information and geometry knowledge according to a step-wise reasoning goal generated by Inference System. Inference System conducts an explicit reasoning process, which specifies the goal in each reasoning step and applies the knowledge to generate program tokens for resolving it. The two systems carry out the above process iteratively, which behaves more in line with human cognition. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, GeoQA and GeoQA+. The results demonstrate the superiority of DualGeoSolver in both solving accuracy and robustness from explicitly modeling human reasoning process and knowledge application.
Attention Based Document-level Relation Extraction with None Class Ranking Loss
Authors: Xiaolong Xu; Chenbin Li; Haolong Xiang; Lianyong Qi; Xuyun Zhang; Wanchun Dou
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Through document-level relation extraction (RE), the analysis of the global relation between entities in the text is feasible, and more comprehensive and accurate semantic information can be obtained. In document-level RE, the model needs to infer the implicit relations between two entities in different sentences. To obtain more semantic information, existing methods mainly focus on exploring entity representations. However, they ignore the correlations and indivisibility between relations, entities and contexts. Furthermore, current methods only independently estimate the cases of predefined relations, ignoring the case of "no relation'', which results in poor prediction. To address the above issues, we propose a document-level RE method based on attention mechanisms, which considers the case of "no relation''. Specifically, our approach leverages graph attention and multi-head attention networks to capture the correlations and indivisibility among relations, entities, and contexts, respectively. In addition, a novel multi-label loss function that promotes large margins in label confidence scores between each predefined class and the none class is employed to improve the prediction performance. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmarking datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with higher accuracy.
It Ain’t That Bad: Understanding the Mysterious Performance Drop in OOD Generalization for Generative Transformer Models
Authors: Xingcheng Xu; Zihao Pan; Haipeng Zhang; Yanqing Yang
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable proficiency on solving diverse problems. However, their generalization ability is not always satisfying and the generalization problem is common for generative transformer models in general. Researchers take basic mathematical tasks like n-digit addition or multiplication as important perspectives for investigating their generalization behaviors. It is observed that when training models on n-digit operations (e.g., additions) in which both input operands are n-digit in length, models generalize successfully on unseen n-digit inputs (in-distribution (ID) generalization), but fail miserably on longer, unseen cases (out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization). We bring this unexplained performance drop into attention and ask whether there is systematic OOD generalization. Towards understanding LLMs, we train various smaller language models which may share the same underlying mechanism. We discover that the strong ID generalization stems from structured representations, while behind the unsatisfying OOD performance, the models still exhibit clear learned algebraic structures. Specifically, these models map unseen OOD inputs to outputs with learned equivalence relations in the ID domain, which we call the equivalence generalization. These findings deepen our knowledge regarding the generalizability of generative models including LLMs, and provide insights into potential avenues for improvement.
TaD: A Plug-and-Play Task-Aware Decoding Method to Better Adapt LLMs on Downstream Tasks
Authors: Xinhao Xu; Hui Chen; Zijia Lin; Jungong Han; Lixing Gong; Guoxin Wang; Yongjun Bao; Guiguang Ding
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained models on downstream tasks is a common practice in leveraging large language models (LLMs) today. A critical issue is how to adapt pre-trained models to downstream tasks better, thereby enhancing their performance. This paper introduces Task-aware Decoding (TaD), a plug-and-play method that exploits the difference in probability distributions before and after fine-tuning to boost the performance of LLMs on downstream tasks. The proposed TaD argues that the difference between the pre-finetuning probability distribution and the post-finetuning one represents the direction from common knowledge towards specific downstream-task knowledge. Aligning the final output probability distribution to that direction can probably result in superior downstream task performance, compared to the original fine-tuned model. Experiments on various datasets across four different task categories well demonstrate TaD's effectiveness on different LLMs, i.e., GPT, BLOOM, and LLaMA, with different fine-tuning methods. Moreover, further experiments reveal that TaD better enhances model performance in data-scarce scenarios.
Incorporating Schema-Aware Description into Document-Level Event Extraction
Authors: Zijie Xu; Peng Wang; Wenjun Ke; Guozheng Li; Jiajun Liu; Ke Ji; Xiye Chen; Chenxiao Wu
Venue: IJCAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Document-level event extraction (DEE) aims to extract the structured event information from a given document, facing two critical challenges: (1) event arguments always scatter across sentences (arguments-scattering); (2) multiple events can co-occur in one document (multi-event). Most recent studies mainly follow two simplified settings to ease the challenges: one simplifies DEE with the no-trigger-words design (NDEE), and the other focuses on event argument extraction (DEAE), a sub-task of DEE. However, the former excludes trigger extraction and suffers from error propagation in the sub-tasks. The latter relies heavily on the gold triggers as prerequisites and struggles to distinguish multiple arguments playing the same role in different events. To address the limitations above, we propose a novel joint trigger and argument extraction paradigm SEELE to enhance the DEE model via incorporating SchEma-awarE descriptions into Document-Level Event extraction. Specifically, the schema-aware descriptions are leveraged from two aspects: (1) guiding the attention mechanism among event-aware tokens across sentences, which relieves arguments-scattering without error propagation; (2) performing the fine-grained contrastive learning to distinguish different events, which mitigates multi-event without gold triggers. Extensive experiments show the superiority of SEELE, achieving notable improvements (2.1% to 9.7% F1) on three NDEE datasets and competitive performance on two DEAE datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/TheoryRhapsody/SEELE.