GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
GNNavi: Navigating the Information Flow in Large Language Models by Graph Neural Network
Authors: Shuzhou Yuan; Ercong Nie; Michael Färber; Helmut Schmid; Hinrich Schuetze
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong In-Context Learning (ICL) capabilities when prompts with demonstrations are used. However, fine-tuning still remains crucial to further enhance their adaptability. Prompt-based fine-tuning proves to be an effective fine-tuning method in low-data scenarios, but high demands on computing resources limit its practicality. We address this issue by introducing a prompt-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach. GNNavi leverages insights into ICL’s information flow dynamics, which indicates that label words act in prompts as anchors for information propagation. GNNavi employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN) layer to precisely guide the aggregation and distribution of information flow during the processing of prompts by hardwiring the desired information flow into the GNN. Our experiments on text classification tasks with GPT-2 and Llama2 show GNNavi surpasses standard prompt-based fine-tuning methods in few-shot settings by updating just 0.2% to 0.5% of parameters. We compare GNNavi with prevalent PEFT approaches, such as prefix tuning, LoRA and Adapter in terms of performance and efficiency. Our analysis reveals that GNNavi enhances information flow and ensures a clear aggregation process.
M-QALM: A Benchmark to Assess Clinical Reading Comprehension and Knowledge Recall in Large Language Models via Question Answering
Authors: Anand Subramanian; Viktor Schlegel; Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap; Thanh-Tung Nguyen; Vijay Prakash Dwivedi; Stefan Winkler
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: There is vivid research on adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks in high-stakes domains such as healthcare. Despite their popularity, there is a lack of understanding of the extent and contributing factors that allow LLMs to recall relevant knowledge and combine it with presented information in the clinical and biomedical domain: a fundamental pre-requisite for success on down-stream tasks.Addressing this gap, we use Multiple Choice and Abstractive Question Answering to conduct a large-scale empirical study on 22 datasets in three generalist and three specialist biomedical sub-domains. Our multifaceted analysis of the performance of 15 LLMs, further broken down by sub-domain, source of knowledge and model architecture, uncovers success factors such as instruction tuning that lead to improved recall and comprehension. We further show that while recently proposed domain-adapted models may lack adequate knowledge, directly fine-tuning on our collected medical knowledge datasets shows encouraging results, even generalising to unseen specialist sub-domains. We complement the quantitative results with a skill-oriented manual error analysis, which reveals a significant gap between the models’ capabilities to simply recall necessary knowledge and to integrate it with the presented context.To foster research and collaboration in this field we share M-QALM, our resources, standardised methodology, and evaluation results, with the research community to facilitate further advancements in clinical knowledge representation learning within language models.
MovieSum: An Abstractive Summarization Dataset for Movie Screenplays
Authors: Rohit Saxena; Frank Keller
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Movie screenplay summarization is challenging, as it requires an understanding of long input contexts and various elements unique to movies. Large language models have shown significant advancements in document summarization, but they often struggle with processing long input contexts. Furthermore, while television transcripts have received attention in recent studies, movie screenplay summarization remains underexplored. To stimulate research in this area, we present a new dataset, MovieSum, for abstractive summarization of movie screenplays. This dataset comprises 2200 movie screenplays accompanied by their Wikipedia plot summaries. We manually formatted the movie screenplays to represent their structural elements. Compared to existing datasets, MovieSum possesses several distinctive features: 1) It includes movie screenplays which are longer than scripts of TV episodes. 2) It is twice the size of previous movie screenplay datasets. 3) It provides metadata with IMDb IDs to facilitate access to additional external knowledge. We also show the results of recently released large language models applied to summarization on our dataset to provide a detailed baseline.
Autonomous Workflow for Multimodal Fine-Grained Training Assistants Towards Mixed Reality
Authors: Jiahuan Pei; Irene Viola; Haochen Huang; Junxiao Wang; Moonisa Ahsan; Fanghua Ye; Jiang Yiming; Yao Sai; Di Wang; Zhumin Chen; Pengjie Ren; Pablo Cesar
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents have emerged as promising protocols for automatically understanding the language-based environment, particularly with the exponential development of large language models (LLMs). However, a fine-grained, comprehensive understanding of multimodal environments remains under-explored. This work designs an autonomous workflow tailored for integrating AI agents seamlessly into extended reality (XR) applications for fine-grained training. We present a demonstration of a multimodal fine-grained training assistant for LEGO brick assembly in a pilot XR environment. Specifically, we design a cerebral language agent that integrates LLM with memory, planning, and interaction with XR tools and a vision-language agent, enabling agents to decide their actions based on past experiences. Furthermore, we introduce LEGO-MRTA, a multimodal fine-grained assembly dialogue dataset synthesized automatically in the workflow served by a commercial LLM. This dataset comprises multimodal instruction manuals, conversations, XR responses, and vision question answering. Last, we present several prevailing open-resource LLMs as benchmarks, assessing their performance with and without fine-tuning on the proposed dataset. We anticipate that the broader impact of this workflow will advance the development of smarter assistants for seamless user interaction in XR environments, fostering research in both AI and HCI communities.
Perceptions of Language Technology Failures from South Asian English Speakers
Authors: Faye Holt; William Held; Diyi Yang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: English NLP systems have empirically worse performance for dialects other than Standard American English (SAmE). However, how these discrepancies impact use of language technology by speakers of non-SAmE global Englishes is not well understood. We focus on reducing this gap for South Asian Englishes (SAsE), a macro-group of regional varieties with cumulatively more speakers than SAmE, by surveying SAsE speakers about their interactions with language technology and compare their responses to a control survey of SAmE speakers. SAsE speakers are more likely to recall failures with language technology and more likely to reference specific issues with written language technology than their SAmE counterparts. Furthermore, SAsE speakers indicate that they modify both their lexicon and syntax to make technology work better, but that lexical issues are perceived as the most salient challenge. We then assess whether these issues are pervasive in more recently developed Large Language Models (LLMs), introducing two benchmarks for broader SAsE Lexical and Indian English Syntactic understanding and evaluating 11 families of LLMs on them.
A Mechanistic Analysis of a Transformer Trained on a Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Task
Authors: Jannik Brinkmann; Abhay Sheshadri; Victor Levoso; Paul Swoboda; Christian Bartelt
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for behavioral studies. However, these studies do not provide insights into the internal mechanisms driving the observed capabilities. To improve our understanding of the internal mechanisms of transformers, we present a comprehensive mechanistic analysis of a transformer trained on a synthetic reasoning task. We identify a set of interpretable mechanisms the model uses to solve the task, and validate our findings using correlational and causal evidence. Our results suggest that it implements a depth-bounded recurrent mechanisms that operates in parallel and stores intermediate results in selected token positions. We anticipate that the motifs we identified in our synthetic setting can provide valuable insights into the broader operating principles of transformers and thus provide a basis for understanding more complex models.
Optimal Transport Guided Correlation Assignment for Multimodal Entity Linking
Authors: Zefeng Zhang; Jiawei Sheng; Chuang Zhang; Yunzhi Liang; Wenyuan Zhang; Siqi Wang; Tingwen Liu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Multimodal entity linking (MEL) aims to link ambiguous mentions in multimodal contexts to entities in a multimodal knowledge graph. A pivotal challenge is to fully leverage multi-element correlations between mentions and entities to bridge modality gap and enable fine-grained semantic matching. Existing methods attempt several local correlative mechanisms, relying heavily on the automatically learned attention weights, which may over-concentrate on partial correlations. To mitigate this issue, we formulate the correlation assignment problem as an optimal transport (OT) problem, and propose a novel MEL framework, namely OT-MEL, with OT-guided correlation assignment. Thereby, we exploit the correlation between multimodal features to enhance multimodal fusion, and the correlation between mentions and entities to enhance fine-grained matching. To accelerate model prediction, we further leverage knowledge distillation to transfer OT assignment knowledge to attention mechanism. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines and confirm the effectiveness of the OT-guided correlation assignment.
On Efficiently Representing Regular Languages as RNNs
Authors: Anej Svete; Robin Chan; Ryan Cotterell
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recent work by Hewitt et al. (2020) provides an interpretation of the empirical success of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as language models (LMs). It shows that RNNs can efficiently represent bounded hierarchical structures that are prevalent in human language.This suggests that RNNs’ success might be linked to their ability to model hierarchy. However, a closer inspection of hewitt-etal-2020-rnns construction shows that it is not inherently limited to hierarchical structures. This poses a natural question: What other classes of LMs RNNs can efficiently represent? To this end, we generalize Hewitt et al.’s (2020) construction and show that RNNs can efficiently represent a larger class of LMs than previously claimed—specifically, those that can be represented by a pushdown automaton with a bounded stack and a specific stack update function. Altogether, the efficiency of representing this diverse class of LMs with RNN LMs suggests novel interpretations of their inductive bias.
A Survey on Modelling Morality for Text Analysis
Authors: Ines Reinig; Maria Becker; Ines Rehbein; Simone Ponzetto
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In this survey, we provide a systematic review of recent work on modelling morality in text, an area of research that has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Our survey is motivated by the importance of modelling decisions on the created resources, the models trained on these resources and the analyses that result from the models’ predictions. We review work at the interface of NLP, Computational Social Science and Psychology and give an overview of the different goals and research questions addressed in the papers, their underlying theoretical backgrounds and the methods that have been applied to pursue these goals. We then identify and discuss challenges and research gaps, such as the lack of a theoretical framework underlying the operationalisation of morality in text, the low IAA reported for manyhuman-annotated resulting resources and the lack of validation of newly proposed resources and analyses.
Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection
Authors: Ruibo Chen; Yihan Wu; Lichang Chen; Guodong Liu; Qi He; Tianyi Xiong; Chenxi Liu; Junfeng Guo; Heng Huang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing data selection approaches on LLMs either rely on single unreliable scores, or use downstream tasks for selection, which is time-consuming and can lead to potential over-fitting on the chosen evaluation datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel dataset selection method, Self-Filter, that utilizes the VLM itself as a filter. This approach is inspired by the observation that VLMs benefit from training with the most challenging instructions. Self-Filter operates in two stages. In the first stage, we devise a scoring network to evaluate the difficulty of training instructions, which is co-trained with the VLM. In the second stage, we use the trained score net to measure the difficulty of each instruction, select the most challenging samples, and penalize similar samples to encourage diversity. Comprehensive experiments on LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 show that Self-Filter can reach better results compared to full data settings with merely about 15% samples, and can achieve superior performance against competitive baselines.
DebugBench: Evaluating Debugging Capability of Large Language Models
Authors: Runchu Tian; Yining Ye; Yujia Qin; Xin Cong; Yankai Lin; Yinxu Pan; Yesai Wu; Hui Haotian; Liu Weichuan; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capability. However, as another critical component of programming proficiency, the debugging capability of LLMs remains relatively unexplored. Previous evaluations of LLMs’ debugging ability are significantly limited by the risk of data leakage, the scale of the dataset, and the variety of tested bugs. To overcome these deficiencies, we introduce ‘DebugBench’, an LLM debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 instances. It covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. To construct DebugBench, we collect code snippets from the LeetCode community, implant bugs into source data with GPT-4, and assure rigorous quality checks. We evaluate two commercial and four open-source models in a zero-shot scenario. We find that (1) while closed-source models exhibit inferior debugging performance compared to humans, open-source models relatively lower pass rate scores; (2) the complexity of debugging notably fluctuates depending on the bug category; (3) incorporating runtime feedback has a clear impact on debugging performance which is not always helpful. As an extension, we also compare LLM debugging and code generation, revealing a strong correlation between them for closed-source models. These findings will benefit the development of LLMs in debugging.
POP-CEE: Position-oriented Prompt-tuning Model for Causal Emotion Entailment
Authors: Zhihan Zhou; Xue Gu; Yujie Zhao; Hao Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The objective of the Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) task is to identify the causes of the target emotional utterances in a given conversation. Most existing studies have focused on a fine-tuning paradigm based on a pretrained model, e.g., the BERT model. However, there are gaps between the pretrained task and the CEE task. Although a pretrained model enhances contextual comprehension to some extent, it cannot acquire specific knowledge that is relevant to the CEE task. In addition, in a typical CEE task, there are peculiarities in the distribution of the positions with different emotion types of emotion utterances and cause utterances in conversations. Existing methods employ a fixed-size window to capture the relationship between neighboring conversations; however, these methods ignore the specific semantic associations between emotions and cause utterances. To address these issues, we propose the Position-oriented Prompt-tuning (POP-CEE) model to solve the CEE task in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we can model the CEE task by designing prompts with multiple unified goals and by exploring the positional relationship between emotion and cause utterances using a position constraint module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed POP-CEE model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark dataset. Ourcode and data can be found at: https://github.com/Zh0uzh/POP-CEE.
Selectively Answering Visual Questions
Authors: Julian Eisenschlos; Hernán Maina; Guido Ivetta; Luciana Benotti
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recently, large multi-modal models (LMMs) have emerged with the capacity to perform vision tasks such as captioning and visual question answering (VQA) with unprecedented accuracy. Applications such as helping the blind or visually impaired have a critical need for precise answers. It is specially important for models to be well calibrated and be able to quantify their uncertainty in order to selectively decide when to answer and when to abstain or ask for clarifications. We perform the first in-depth analysis of calibration methods and metrics for VQA with in-context learning LMMs. Studying VQA on two answerability benchmarks, we show that the likelihood score of visually grounded models is better calibrated than in their text-only counterparts for in-context learning, where sampling based methods are generally superior, but no clear winner arises. We propose Avg BLEU, a calibration score combining the benefits of both sampling and likelihood methods across modalities.
Wav2SQL: Direct Generalizable Speech-To-SQL Parsing
Authors: Huadai Liu; Rongjie Huang; Jinzheng He; Gang Sun; Ran Shen; Xize Cheng; Zhou Zhao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: We release a multi-accent dataset and propose speech-programming and gradient reversal classifier to improve the generalization.Abstract: Speech-to-SQL (S2SQL) aims to convert spoken questions into SQL queries given relational databases, which has been traditionally implemented in a cascaded manner while facing the following challenges: 1) model training is faced with the major issue of data scarcity, where limited parallel data is available; and 2) the systems should be robust enough to handle diverse out-of-domain speech samples that differ from the source data. In this work, we propose the direct generalizable speech-to-SQL parsing model Wav2SQL which avoids error compounding across cascaded systems. Specifically, 1) to accelerate speech-driven SQL parsing research in the community, we release a large-scale and multi-accent dataset MASpider; 2) leveraging the recent progress in the large-scale pre-training, we show that it alleviates the data scarcity issue and allow for direct speech-to-SQL parsing; and 3) we include the speech re-programming and gradient reversal classifier techniques to reduce acoustic variance and learned style-agnostic representation, improving generalization to unseen out-of-domain custom data. Experimental results demonstrate that Wav2SQL avoids error compounding and achieves state-of-the-art results by up to 4.7% accuracy improvement over the baseline.
E2-LLM: Efficient and Extreme Length Extension of Large Language Models
Authors: Jiaheng Liu; Zhiqi Bai; Yuanxing Zhang; Chenchen Zhang; Yu Zhang; Ge Zhang; Jiakai Wang; Haoran Que; Yukang Chen; Wenbo Su; Tiezheng Ge; Jie Fu; Wenhu Chen; Bo Zheng
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to process extensive context lengths incurs prohibitive computational costs. Prevailing techniques for extending context capabilities in LLMs typically require not only additional training procedures but also access to datasets with long context (e.g., sequences of 32K tokens), presupposing substantial GPU expenditures. To address the aforementioned issues, we introduce a novel solution named Efficient and Extreme length extension for Large Language Models (E2-LLM). E2-LLM entails a singular training process over considerably short sequences (e.g., 4K tokens), which greatly mitigates the cost of continual-pretraining or fine-tuning. Within the training phase, we incorporate a dual augmentation strategy with Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) that adjusts the scale and position indices across distinct training samples. E 2 -LLM is meticulously designed to enhance the model’s robustness to diverse relative positions. The experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of E 2 -LLM on demanding tasks of processing long contexts.
Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality
Authors: Da Ju; Karen Ullrich; Adina Williams
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: People tend to use language to mention surprising properties of events: for example, when a banana is blue, we are more likely to mention color than when it is yellow. This fact is taken to suggest that yellowness is somehow a typical feature of bananas, and blueness is exceptional. Similar to how a yellow color is typical of bananas, there may also be genders that are typical of occupations. In this work, we explore this question using information theoretic techniques coupled with corpus statistic analysis. In two distinct large corpora, we do not find strong evidence that occupations and gender display the same patterns of mentioning as do bananas and color. Instead, we find that gender mentioning is correlated with femaleness of occupation in particular, suggesting perhaps that woman-dominated occupations are seen as somehow “more gendered” than male-dominated ones, and thereby they encourage more gender mentioning overall.