GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Position Debiasing for Large Language Models
Authors: Zhongkun Liu; Zheng Chen; Mengqi Zhang; Zhaochun Ren; Pengjie Ren; Zhumin Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Fine-tuning has been demonstrated to be an effective method to improve the domain performance of large language models (LLMs). However, LLMs might fit the dataset bias and shortcuts for prediction, leading to poor generation performance. Previous works have proven that LLMs are prone to exhibit position bias, i.e., leveraging information positioned at the beginning or end, or specific positional cues within the input. Existing debiasing methods for LLMs require external bias knowledge or annotated non-biased samples, which is lacking for position debiasing and impractical in reality. In this work, we propose a self-supervised position debiasing (SOD) framework to mitigate position bias for LLMs. SOD leverages unsupervised responses from pre-trained LLMs for debiasing without relying on any external knowledge. To improve the quality of unsupervised responses, we propose an objective alignment (OAM) module to prune these responses. Experiments on eight datasets and five tasks show that SOD consistently outperforms existing methods in mitigating three types of position biases. Besides, SOD achieves this by sacrificing only a small performance on biased samples, which is general and effective. To facilitate the reproducibility of the results, we share the code of all methods and datasets on https://github.com/LZKSKY/SOD.
Encoding Hierarchical Schema via Concept Flow for Multifaceted Ideology Detection
Authors: Songtao Liu; Bang Wang; Wei Xiang; Han Xu; Minghua Xu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Multifaceted ideology detection (MID) aims to detect the ideological leanings of texts towards multiple facets. Previous studies on ideology detection mainly focus on one generic facet and ignore label semantics and explanatory descriptions of ideologies, which are a kind of instructive information and reveal the specific concepts of ideologies. In this paper, we develop a novel concept semantics-enhanced framework for the MID task. Specifically, we propose a bidirectional iterative concept flow (BICo) method to encode multifaceted ideologies. BICo enables the concepts to flow across levels of the schema tree and enriches concept representations with multi-granularity semantics. Furthermore, we explore concept attentive matching and concept-guided contrastive learning strategies to guide the model to capture ideology features with the learned concept semantics. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in MID, including in the cross-topic scenario.
Character-Level Chinese Dependency Parsing via Modeling Latent Intra-Word Structure
Authors: Yang Hou; Zhenghua Li
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Revealing the syntactic structure of sentences in Chinese poses significant challenges for word-level parsers due to the absence of clear word boundaries. To facilitate a transition from word-level to character-level Chinese dependency parsing, this paper proposes modeling latent internal structures within words. In this way, each word-level dependency tree is interpreted as a forest of character-level trees. A constrained Eisner algorithm is implemented to ensure the compatibility of character-level trees, guaranteeing a single root for intra-word structures and establishing inter-word dependencies between these roots. Experiments on Chinese treebanks demonstrate the superiority of our method over both the pipeline framework and previous joint models. A detailed analysis reveals that a coarse-to-fine parsing strategy empowers the model to predict more linguistically plausible intra-word structures.
AlignRE: An Encoding and Semantic Alignment Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Zehan Li; Fu Zhang; Jingwei Cheng
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Zero-shot Relation Extraction (ZSRE) aims to predict unseen relations between entity pairs from input sentences. Existing prototype-based ZSRE methods encode relation descriptions into prototype embeddings and predict by measuring the similarity between sentence embeddings and prototype embeddings. However, these methods often overlook abundant side information of relations and suffer from a significant encoding gap between prototypes and sentences, limiting performance. To this end, we propose a framework named AlignRE, based on two Alignment methods for ZSRE. Specifically, we present a novel perspective centered on encoding schema alignment to enhance prototype-based ZSRE methods. We utilize well-designed prompt-tuning to bridge the encoding gap. To improve prototype quality, we explore and leverage multiple side information and propose a prototype aggregation method based on semantic alignment to create comprehensive relation prototype representations. We conduct experiments on FewRel and Wiki-ZSL datasets and consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our method exhibits substantially faster performance and reduces the need for extensive manual labor in prototype construction. Code is available at https://github.com/lizehan1999/AlignRE.
Disperse-Then-Merge: Pushing the Limits of Instruction Tuning via Alignment Tax Reduction
Authors: Tingchen Fu; Deng Cai; Lemao Liu; Shuming Shi; Rui Yan
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on instruction-following corpus is a crucial approach toward the alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, the performance of LLMs on standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks tends to suffer from deterioration at the latter stage of the SFT process, echoing the phenomenon of alignment tax. Through our pilot study, we put a hypothesis that the data biases are probably one cause behind the phenomenon. To address the issue, we introduce a simple disperse-then-merge framework. To be concrete, we disperse the instruction-following data into portions and then train multiple sub-models using different data portions. Lastly, we merge multiple models into a single one via model merging techniques. Despite its simplicity, our framework outperforms various sophisticated methods such as data curation and training regularization on a series of standard knowledge and reasoning benchmarks.
Efficient Knowledge Infusion via KG-LLM Alignment
Authors: Zhouyu Jiang; Ling Zhong; Mengshu Sun; Jun Xu; Rui Sun; Hui Cai; Shuhan Luo; Zhiqiang Zhang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: To tackle the problem of domain-specific knowledge scarcity within large language models (LLMs), knowledge graph-retrievalaugmented method has been proven to be an effective and efficient technique for knowledge infusion. However, existing approaches face two primary challenges: knowledge mismatch between public available knowledge graphs and the specific domain of the task at hand, and poor information compliance of LLMs with knowledge graphs. In this paper, we leverage a small set of labeled samples and a large-scale corpus to efficiently construct domain-specific knowledge graphs by an LLM, addressing the issue of knowledge mismatch. Additionally, we propose a three-stage KG-LLM alignment strategy to enhance the LLM’s capability to utilize information from knowledge graphs. We conduct experiments with a limited-sample setting on two biomedical question-answering datasets, and the results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines.
Towards Precise Localization of Critical Errors in Machine Translation
Authors: Dahyun Jung; Sugyeong Eo; Heuiseok Lim
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The advent of large language models has experienced a remarkable improvement in the field of machine translation. However, machine translation is still vulnerable to critical meaning deviations, which may incur catastrophic issues in social or ethical contexts. In particular, existing critical error detection primarily focuses on identifying sentence-level errors, leaving the precise localization of such errors within the sentence unaddressed. In this paper, we introduce a new task, word-level critical error detection (WCED), to detect critical errors at a fine-grained level in machine translation sentences. The task aims to identify the parts of a machine translation that contain catastrophic meaning distortions. We hypothesize that the ability to determine errors at the sentence level will positively influence the detection of more granular errors. We propose a sentence-level error detection module to predict which words in a sentence have critical errors. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing methodologies and LLM in En-De, Zh-En, En-Ru, and En-Ko. Our method is helpful for determining the fine-grained location of errors. We hope that such studies will improve the capacity to address critical errors adeptly.
LoRAPrune: Structured Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Mingyang Zhang; Hao Chen; Chunhua Shen; Zhen Yang; Linlin Ou; Xinyi Yu; Bohan Zhuang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs), such as LLaMA and T5, have shown exceptional performance across various tasks through fine-tuning. Although low-rank adaption (LoRA) has emerged to cheaply fine-tune these LLMs on downstream tasks, their deployment is still hindered by the vast model scale and computational costs. Post-training model pruning offers a way to compress LLMs. However, the current pruning methods designed for LLMs are not compatible with LoRA. This is due to their utilization of unstructured pruning on LLMs, impeding the merging of LoRA weights, or their dependence on the gradients of pre-trained weights to guide pruning, which can impose significant memory overhead.To this end, we propose LoRAPrune, a new framework that delivers an accurate structured pruned model in a highly memory-efficient manner. Specifically, we first design a LoRA-guided pruning criterion, which uses the weights and gradients of LoRA, rather than the gradients of pre-trained weights for importance estimation. We subsequently integrate this criterion into an iterative pruning process, effectively removing redundant channels and heads. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our LoRAPrune over existing approaches on the LLaMA series models.At a 50% compression rate, LoRAPrune demonstrates superior performance over LLM-Pruner, achieving a reduction in perplexity by 4.81 on WikiText2 and 3.46 on PTB, while also decreasing memory usage by 52.6%.Besides, LoRAPrune also matches semi-structural pruning across multiple LLMs, proving its wide applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/LoRAPrune.
Speculative Decoding via Early-exiting for Faster LLM Inference with Thompson Sampling Control Mechanism
Authors: Jiahao Liu; Qifan Wang; Jingang Wang; Xunliang Cai
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been extraordinary, yet the escalating inference costs associated with them present challenges in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called Early-exiting Speculative Decoding (EESD) with lossless acceleration. Specifically, EESD utilizes a segment of the LLM to generate draft tokens, incorporating Early-exiting structures after the first N layers. To enhance the quality of draft tokens, a self-distillation method is integrated. This early-exiting design not only reduces deployment and training costs but also significantly accelerates the token generation speed. Moreover, we introduce a novel sampling mechanism that leverages Thompson Sampling to regulate the generation processes, automatically determining the quantity of draft tokens in each round. The original LLM is then employed to validate these draft tokens through a single forward pass, and thus guarantees that the final output text maintains a distribution consistent with vanilla auto-regressive decoding. The experimental results on both 13B and 70B models demonstrate that our approach decodes tokens at a markedly accelerated rate compared to prior methods, showing the effectiveness of our approach.
Towards Better Utilization of Multi-Reference Training Data for Chinese Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Yumeng Liu; Zhenghua Li; HaoChen Jiang; Bo Zhang; Chen Li; Ji Zhang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: For the grammatical error correction (GEC) task, there usually exist multiple correction ways for an erroneous input sentence, leading to multiple references. Observing the high proportion of multi-reference instances in Chinese GEC training data, we target a systematic study on how to better utilize multi-reference training data. We propose two new approaches and a simple two-stage training strategy. We compare them against previously proposed approaches, on two Chinese training datasets, i.e., Lang-8 for second language learner texts and FCGEC-Train for native speaker texts, and three test datasets. The experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches and reveal interesting insights. Our code is available at https://github.com/ymliucs/MrGEC.
AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs
Authors: Aohan Zeng; Mingdao Liu; Rui Lu; Bowen Wang; Xiao Liu; Yuxiao Dong; Jie Tang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Open large language models (LLMs) with great performance in various tasks have significantly advanced the development of LLMs. However, they are far inferior to commercial models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 when acting as agents to tackle complex tasks in the real world. These agent tasks employ LLMs as the central controller responsible for planning, memorization, and tool utilization, necessitating both fine-grained prompting methods and robust LLMs to achieve satisfactory performance. Though many prompting methods have been proposed to complete particular agent tasks, there is lack of research focusing on improving the agent capabilities of LLMs themselves without compromising their general abilities. In this work, we present AgentTuning, a simple and general method to enhance the agent abilities of LLMs while maintaining their general LLM capabilities. We construct AgentInstruct, a lightweight instruction-tuning dataset containing high-quality interaction trajectories. We employ a hybrid instruction-tuning strategy by combining AgentInstruct with open-source instructions from general domains. AgentTuning is used to instruction-tune the Llama 2 series, resulting in AgentLM. Our evaluations show that AgentTuning enables LLMs’ agent capabilities without compromising general abilities. The AgentLM-70B is comparable to GPT-3.5-turbo on unseen agent tasks, demonstrating generalized agent capabilities. We open source the AgentInstruct and AgentLM-7B, 13B, and 70B models at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AgentTuning, serving open and powerful alternatives to commercial LLMs for agent tasks.
Transition-based Opinion Generation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Tianlai Ma; Zhongqing Wang; Guodong Zhou
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recently, the use of pre-trained generation models for extracting sentiment elements has resulted in significant advancements in aspect-based sentiment analysis benchmarks. However, these approaches often overlook the importance of explicitly modeling structure among sentiment elements. To address this limitation, we present a study that aims to integrate general pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language models with a structure-aware transition-based approach. Therefore, we propose a transition system for opinion tree generation, designed to better exploit pre-trained language models for structured fine-tuning. Our proposed transition system ensures the structural integrity of the generated opinion tree. By leveraging pre-trained generation models and simplifying the transition set, we are able to maximize the accuracy of opinion tree generation. Extensive experiments show that our model significantly advances the state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets. In addition, the empirical studies also indicate that the proposed opinion tree generation with transition system is more effective in capturing the sentiment structure than other generation models.
Modeling Dynamic Topics in Chain-Free Fashion by Evolution-Tracking Contrastive Learning and Unassociated Word Exclusion
Authors: Xiaobao Wu; Xinshuai Dong; Liangming Pan; Thong Nguyen; Anh Tuan Luu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Dynamic topic models track the evolution of topics in sequential documents, which have derived various applications like trend analysis. However, existing models suffer from repetitive topic and unassociated topic issues, failing to reveal the evolution and hindering further applications. To address these issues, we break the tradition of simply chaining topics in existing work and propose a novel neural Chain-Free Dynamic Topic Model. We introduce a new evolution-tracking contrastive learning method that builds the similarity relations among dynamic topics. This not only tracks topic evolution but also maintains topic diversity, mitigating the repetitive topic issue. To avoid unassociated topics, we further present an unassociated word exclusion method that consistently excludes unassociated words from discovered topics. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, tracking topic evolution with high-quality topics, showing better performance on downstream tasks, and remaining robust to the hyperparameter for evolution intensities.
A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating the Safeguards in Large Language Models
Authors: Yuxia Wang; Zenan Zhai; Haonan Li; Xudong Han; Shom Lin; Zhenxuan Zhang; Angela Zhao; Preslav Nakov; Timothy Baldwin
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of LLM risks, as well as corresponding prompts that can be used to examine LLM safety. However, the focus has been almost exclusively on English. We aim to broaden LLM safety research by introducing a dataset for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs, and extending it to better identify false negative and false positive examples in terms of risky prompt rejections. We further present a set of fine-grained safety assessment criteria for each risk type, facilitating both manual annotation and automatic evaluation in terms of LLM response harmfulness. Our experiments over five LLMs show that region-specific risks are the prevalent risk type. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased. Our data is available at https://github.com/Libr-AI/do-not-answer.
LLMFactor: Extracting Profitable Factors through Prompts for Explainable Stock Movement Prediction
Authors: Meiyun Wang; Kiyoshi Izumi; Hiroki Sakaji
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their exceptional performance across a broad range of tasks, particularly in text analysis. However, the finance sector presents a distinct challenge due to its dependence on time-series data for complex forecasting tasks. In this study, we introduce a novel framework called LLMFactor, which employs Sequential Knowledge-Guided Prompting (SKGP) to identify factors that influence stock movements using LLMs. Unlike previous methods that relied on keyphrases or sentiment analysis, this approach focuses on extracting factors more directly related to stock market dynamics, providing clear explanations for complex temporal changes. Our framework directs the LLMs to create background knowledge through a fill-in-the-blank strategy and then discerns potential factors affecting stock prices from related news. Guided by background knowledge and identified factors, we leverage historical stock prices in textual format to predict stock movement. An extensive evaluation of the LLMFactor framework across four benchmark datasets from both the U.S. and Chinese stock markets demonstrates its superiority over existing state-of-the-art methods and its effectiveness in financial time-series forecasting.
You Only Look at Screens: Multimodal Chain-of-Action Agents
Authors: Zhuosheng Zhang; Aston Zhang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Autonomous graphical user interface (GUI) agents aim to facilitate task automation by interacting with the user interface without manual intervention. Recent studies have investigated eliciting the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for effective engagement in diverse environments. To align with the input-output requirement of LLMs, most existing approaches are developed under a sandbox setting where they rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to parse the environment into textual elements and interpret the predicted actions. Consequently, those approaches often grapple with inference inefficiency and error propagation risks. To mitigate the challenges, we introduce Auto-GUI, a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the interface, bypassing the need for environment parsing or reliance on application-dependent APIs. Moreover, we propose a chain-of-action technique—leveraging a series of intermediate previous action histories and future action plans—to help the agent decide what action to execute. We evaluate our approach on a new device-control benchmark AITW with 30K unique instructions, spanning multi-step tasks such as application operation, web searching, and web shopping. Experimental results show that Auto-GUI achieves state-of-the-art performance with an action type prediction accuracy of 90% and an overall action success rate of 74%. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cooelf/Auto-GUI.