GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Bayesian Prompt Ensembles: Model Uncertainty Estimation for Black-Box Large Language Models
Authors: Francesco Tonolini; Nikolaos Aletras; Jordan Massiah; Gabriella Kazai
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: An important requirement for the reliable deployment of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) is the well-calibrated quantification of the uncertainty in their outputs. While the likelihood of predicting the next token is a practical surrogate of the data uncertainty learned during training, model uncertainty is challenging to estimate, i.e., due to lack of knowledge acquired during training. Prior efforts to quantify uncertainty of neural networks require specific architectures or (re-)training strategies, which are impractical to apply to LLMs with several billion parameters, or for black-box models where the architecture and parameters are not available. In this paper, we propose Bayesian Prompts Ensembles (BayesPE), a novel approach to effectively obtain well-calibrated uncertainty for the output of pre-trained LLMs. BayesPE computes output probabilities through a weighted ensemble of different, but semantically equivalent, task instruction prompts. The relative weights of the different prompts in the ensemble are estimated through approximate Bayesian variational inference over a small labeled validation set. We demonstrate that BayesPE approximates a Bayesian input layer for the LLM, providing a lower bound on the expected model error. In our extensive experiments, we show that BayesPE achieves significantly superior uncertainty calibration compared to several baselines over a range of natural language classification tasks, both in zero- and few-shot settings.
X-ACE: Explainable and Multi-factor Audio Captioning Evaluation
Authors: Qian Wang; Jia-Chen Gu; Zhen-Hua Ling
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims to generate descriptions based on audio input, attracting exploration of emerging audio language models (ALMs). However, current evaluation metrics only provide a single score to assess the overall quality of captions without characterizing the nuanced difference by systematically going through an evaluation checklist. To this end, we propose the explainable and multi-factor audio captioning evaluation (X-ACE) paradigm. X-ACE identifies four main factors that constitute the majority of audio features, specifically sound event, source, attribute and relation. To assess a given caption from an ALM, it is firstly transformed into an audio graph, where each node denotes an entity in the caption and corresponds to a factor. On the one hand, graph matching is conducted from part to whole for a holistic assessment. On the other hand, the nodes contained within each factor are aggregated to measure the factor-level performance. The pros and cons of an ALM can be explicitly and clearly demonstrated through X-ACE, pointing out the direction for further improvements. Experiments show that X-ACE exhibits better correlation with human perception and can detect mismatches sensitively.
Reasons to Reject? Aligning Language Models with Judgments
Authors: Weiwen Xu; Deng Cai; Zhisong Zhang; Wai Lam; Shuming Shi
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: As humans, we consistently interact with our peers and receive feedback in the form of natural language. This language feedback allows us to maintain appropriate behavior, and rectify potential errors. The question arises naturally: can we use language feedback to align large language models (LLMs)? In contrast to previous research that aligns LLMs with scalar rewards, we present the first systematic exploration of alignment through the lens of language feedback (i.e., judgment). We start with an in-depth investigation of potential methods that can be adapted for aligning LLMs with judgments, revealing that these methods cannot fully capitalize on judgments. To facilitate more effective utilization of judgments, we propose a novel framework, Contrastive Unlikelihood Training (CUT), that allows for fine-grained inappropriate content detection and correction based on judgments. Our results show that, with merely 1317 off-the-shelf judgment data, CUT can beat the 175B DaVinci003 and surpass the best baseline by 50.84 points on AlpacaEval using LLaMA2-13b. CUT can also align LLMs in an iterative fashion using up-to-date model-specific judgments, improving performance from 81.09 to 91.68 points on AlpacaEval using LLaMA2-chat-13b. Further analysis suggests that judgments hold greater potential in LLM alignment than rewards.
Decomposing Argumentative Essay Generation via Dialectical Planning of Complex Reasoning
Authors: Yuhang He; Jianzhu Bao; Yang Sun; Bin Liang; Min Yang; Bing Qin; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Argumentative Essay Generation (AEG) is a challenging task in computational argumentation, where detailed logical reasoning and effective rhetorical skills are essential.Previous methods on argument generation typically involve planning prior to generation.However, the planning strategies in these methods overlook the exploration of the logical reasoning process.Inspired by argument structure-related theories, we propose an argumentative planning strategy for prompting large language models (LLMs) to generate high-quality essays.This strategy comprises two stages: (1) Sketch planning, which creates a rough outline of the essay, and (2) Dialectical planning, which refines the outline through critical self-reflection.Such a planning strategy enables LLMs to write argumentative essays that are more logical, diverse, and persuasive.Furthermore, due to the scarcity of existing AEG datasets, we construct three new datasets.These datasets are from two domains: exam essays and news editorials, covering both Chinese and English.Automatic and manual evaluation on four datasets show that our method can generate more dialectical and persuasive essays with higher diversity compared to several strong baselines.
Large Language Models are Few-Shot Training Example Generators: A Case Study in Fallacy Recognition
Authors: Tariq Alhindi; Smaranda Muresan; Preslav Nakov
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recognizing fallacies is crucial for ensuring the quality and validity of arguments across various domains. However, computational fallacy recognition faces challenges due to the diverse genres, domains, and types of fallacies found in datasets. This leads to a highly multi-class, and even multi-label, setup with substantial class imbalance. In this study, we aim to enhance existing models for fallacy recognition by incorporating additional context and by leveraging large language models to generate synthetic data, thus increasing the representation of the infrequent classes. We experiment with GPT3.5 to generate synthetic examples and we examine the impact of prompt settings for this. Moreover, we explore zero-shot and few-shot scenarios to evaluate the effectiveness of using the generated examples for training smaller models within a unified fallacy recognition framework. Furthermore, we analyze the overlap between the synthetic data and existing fallacy datasets. Finally, we investigate the usefulness of providing supplementary context for detecting fallacy types that need such context, e.g., diversion fallacies. Our evaluation results demonstrate consistent improvements across fallacy types, datasets, and generators. The code and the synthetic datasets are all publicly available.
Concept-aware Data Construction Improves In-context Learning of Language Models
Authors: Michal Štefánik; Marek Kadlčík; Petr Sojka
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs’ ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges from a vast over-parametrization or the scale of multi-task training. However, recent theoretical work attributes the ICL ability to concept-dependent training data and creates functional in-context learners even in small-scale, synthetic settings.In this work, we practically explore this newly identified axis of ICL quality. We propose Concept-aware Training (CoAT), a framework for constructing training scenarios that make it beneficial for the LM to learn to utilize the analogical reasoning concepts from demonstrations. We find that by using CoAT, pre-trained transformers can learn to better utilise new latent concepts from demonstrations and that such ability makes ICL more robust to the functional deficiencies of the previous models. Finally, we show that concept-aware in-context learners are much more effective in in-context learning a majority of unseen tasks compared to traditional instruction tuning, and fare comparably also to previous in-context learners trained in large-scale multitask learning requiring magnitudes of more training data.
Beyond Text: Leveraging Multi-Task Learning and Cognitive Appraisal Theory for Post-Purchase Intention Analysis
Authors: Gerard Yeo; Shaz Furniturewala; Kokil Jaidka
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Supervised machine-learning models for predicting user behavior offer a challenging classification problem with lower average prediction performance scores than other text classification tasks. This study evaluates multi-task learning frameworks grounded in Cognitive Appraisal Theory to predict user behavior as a function of users’ self-expression and psychological attributes. Our experiments show that users’ language and traits improve predictions above and beyond models predicting only from text. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating psychological constructs into NLP to enhance the understanding and prediction of user actions. We close with a discussion of the implications for future applications of large language models for computational psychology.
Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation as Constrained HMM
Authors: Haoran Li; Zhanming Jie; Wei Lu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In non-autoregressive translation (NAT), directed acyclic Transformers (DAT) have demonstrated their ability to achieve comparable performance to the autoregressive Transformers.In this paper, we first show that DAT is essentially a fully connected left-to-right Hidden Markov Model (HMM), with the source and target sequences being observations and the token positions being latent states.Even though generative models like HMM do not suffer from label bias in traditional task settings (e.g., sequence labeling), we argue here that the left-to-right HMM in NAT may still encounter this issue due to the missing observations at the inference stage.To combat label bias, we propose two constrained HMMs: 1) Adaptive Window HMM, which explicitly balances the number of outgoing transitions at different states; 2) Bi-directional HMM, i.e., a combination of left-to-right and right-to-left HMMs, whose uni-directional components can implicitly regularize each other’s biases via shared parameters.Experimental results on WMT’14 EnDe and WMT’17 ZhEn demonstrate that our methods can achieve better or comparable performance to the original DAT using various decoding methods.We also demonstrate that our methods effectively reduce the impact of label bias.
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model
Authors: Bin Liang; Ang Li; Jingqian Zhao; Lin Gui; Min Yang; Yue Yu; Kam-Fai Wong; Ruifeng Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Stance detection is a challenging task that aims to identify public opinion from social media platforms with respect to specific targets. Previous work on stance detection largely focused on pure texts. In this paper, we study multi-modal stance detection for tweets consisting of texts and images, which are prevalent in today’s fast-growing social media platforms where people often post multi-modal messages. To this end, we create five new multi-modal stance detection datasets of different domains based on Twitter, in which each example consists of a text and an image. In addition, we propose a simple yet effective Targeted Multi-modal Prompt Tuning framework (TMPT), where target information is leveraged to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. Experimental results on our five benchmark datasets show that the proposed TMPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-modal stance detection.
Enhanced Language Model Truthfulness with Learnable Intervention and Uncertainty Expression
Authors: Farima Fatahi Bayat; Xin Liu; H. Jagadish; Lu Wang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate long-form and coherent text, yet they often hallucinate facts, which undermines their reliability. To mitigate this issue, inference-time methods steer LLM representations toward the “truthful directions” previously learned for truth elicitation. However, applying these truthful directions with the same intensity fails to generalize across different query contexts. We propose LITO, a Learnable Intervention method for Truthfulness Optimization that automatically identifies the optimal intervention intensity tailored to each specific context. LITO explores a sequence of model generations based on increasing levels of intervention intensities. It selects the most accurate response or refuses to answer when the predictions are highly uncertain. Experiments on multiple LLMs and question-answering datasets demonstrate that LITO improves truthfulness while preserving task accuracy. The adaptive nature of LITO counters the limitations of one-size-fits-all intervention methods, maximizing truthfulness by reflecting the model’s internal knowledge only when it is confident. Our code is available at https://github.com/launchnlp/LITO.
MM-LLMs: Recent Advances in MultiModal Large Language Models
Authors: Duzhen Zhang; Yahan Yu; Jiahua Dong; Chenxing Li; Dan Su; Chenhui Chu; Dong Yu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In the past year, MultiModal Large Language Models (MM-LLMs) have undergone substantial advancements, augmenting off-the-shelf LLMs to support MM inputs or outputs via cost-effective training strategies. The resulting models not only preserve the inherent reasoning and decision-making capabilities of LLMs but also empower a diverse range of MM tasks. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey aimed at facilitating further research of MM-LLMs. Initially, we outline general design formulations for model architecture and training pipeline. Subsequently, we introduce a taxonomy encompassing 126 MM-LLMs, each characterized by its specific formulations. Furthermore, we review the performance of selected MM-LLMs on mainstream benchmarks and summarize key training recipes to enhance the potency of MM-LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for MM-LLMs while concurrently maintaining a [real-time tracking website](https://mm-llms.github.io/) for the latest developments in the field. We hope that this survey contributes to the ongoing advancement of the MM-LLMs domain.
CIF-Bench: A Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark for Evaluating the Generalizability of Large Language Models
Authors: Yizhi Li; Ge Zhang; Xingwei Qu; Jiali Li; Zhaoqun Li; Noah Wang; Hao Li; Ruibin Yuan; Yinghao Ma; Kai Zhang; Wangchunshu Zhou; Yiming Liang; Lei Zhang; Lei Ma; Jiajun Zhang; Zuowen Li; Wenhao Huang; Chenghua Lin; Jie Fu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enhanced the ability to generalize across a wide range of unseen natural language processing (NLP) tasks through instruction-following.Yet, their effectiveness often diminishes in low-resource languages like Chinese, exacerbated by biased evaluations from data leakage, casting doubt on their true generalizability to new linguistic territories. In response, we introduce the Chinese Instruction-Following Benchmark (**CIF-Bench**), designed to evaluate the zero-shot generalizability of LLMs to the Chinese language. CIF-Bench comprises 150 tasks and 15,000 input-output pairs, developed by native speakers to test complex reasoning and Chinese cultural nuances across 20 categories. To mitigate data contamination, we release only half of the dataset publicly, with the remainder kept private, and introduce diversified instructions to minimize score variance, totaling 45,000 data instances.Our evaluation of 28 selected LLMs reveals a noticeable performance gap, with the best model scoring only 52.9%, highlighting the limitations of LLMs in less familiar language and task contexts.This work not only uncovers the current limitations of LLMs in handling Chinese language tasks but also sets a new standard for future LLM generalizability research, pushing towards the development of more adaptable, culturally informed, and linguistically diverse models.
Countering Reward Over-Optimization in LLM with Demonstration-Guided Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mathieu Rita; Florian Strub; Rahma Chaabouni; Paul Michel; Emmanuel Dupoux; Olivier Pietquin
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: While reinforcement learning (RL) has been proven essential for tuning large language models (LLMs), it can lead to reward over-optimization (ROO). Existing approaches address ROO by adding KL regularization, requiring computationally expensive hyperparameter tuning. Additionally, KL regularization focuses solely on regularizing the language policy, neglecting a potential source of regularization: the reward function itself. Inspired by demonstration-guided RL, we here introduce the Reward Calibration from Demonstration (RCfD), which leverages human demonstrations and a reward model to recalibrate the reward objective. Formally, given a prompt, the RCfD objective minimizes the distance between the demonstrations’ and LLM’s rewards rather than directly maximizing the reward function. This objective shift avoids incentivizing the LLM to exploit the reward model and promotes more natural and diverse language generation.We show the effectiveness of RCfD in three RL language tasks, where it achieves comparable performance to carefully tuned baselines while mitigating ROO.
Enhancing Idiomatic Representation in Multiple Languages via an Adaptive Contrastive Triplet Loss
Authors: Wei He; Marco Idiart; Carolina Scarton; Aline Villavicencio
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Accurately modeling idiomatic or non-compositional language has been a longstanding challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is partly because these expressions do not derive their meanings solely from their constituent words, but also due to the scarcity of relevant data resources, and their impact on the performance of downstream tasks such as machine translation and simplification. In this paper we propose an approach to model idiomaticity effectively using a triplet loss that incorporates the asymmetric contribution of components words to an idiomatic meaning for training language models by using adaptive contrastive learning and resampling miners to build an idiomatic-aware learning objective. Our proposed method is evaluated on a SemEval challenge and outperforms previous alternatives significantly in many metrics.
AdaLomo: Low-memory Optimization with Adaptive Learning Rate
Authors: Kai Lv; Hang Yan; Qipeng Guo; Haijun Lv; Xipeng Qiu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models have achieved remarkable success, but their extensive parameter size necessitates substantial memory for training, thereby setting a high threshold. While the recently proposed low-memory optimization (LOMO) reduces memory footprint, its optimization technique, akin to stochastic gradient descent, is sensitive to hyper-parameters and exhibits suboptimal convergence, failing to match the performance of the prevailing optimizer for large language models, AdamW. Through analysis of the Adam optimizer, we found that, compared to momentum, the adaptive learning rate is more critical for bridging the gap. Building on this insight, we introduce the low-memory optimization with adaptive learning rate (AdaLomo), which offers an adaptive learning rate for each parameter and exhibits superior convergence performance compared to LOMO theoretically. To maintain memory efficiency, we employ non-negative matrix factorization for the second-order moment estimation. Additionally, we suggest the use of a grouped update normalization to stabilize convergence. Our experiments with instruction-tuning and further pre-training demonstrate that AdaLomo achieves results on par with AdamW, while significantly reducing memory requirements, thereby lowering the hardware barrier to training large language models. The code is accessible at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LOMO.
Propagation and Pitfalls: Reasoning-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing through Counterfactual Tasks
Authors: Wenyue Hua; Jiang Guo; Mingwen Dong; Henghui Zhu; Patrick Ng; Zhiguo Wang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Current knowledge editing approaches struggle to effectively propagate updates to interconnected facts.In this work, we delve into the barriers that hinder the appropriate propagation of updated knowledge within these models for accurate reasoning. To support our analysis, we introduce a novel reasoning-based benchmark, ReCoE (Reasoning-based Counterfactual Editing dataset), which covers six common reasoning schemes in the real world. We conduct an extensive analysis of existing knowledge editing techniques, including input-augmentation, finetuning, and locate-and-edit methods. We found that all model editing methods exhibit notably low performance on this dataset, especially within certain reasoning schemes. Our analysis of the chain-of-thought responses from edited models indicate that, while the models effectively update individual facts, they struggle to recall these facts in reasoning tasks. Moreover, locate-and-edit methods severely deteriorate the models’ language modeling capabilities, leading to poor perplexity and logical coherence in their outputs.