GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Efficient Overshadowed Entity Disambiguation by Mitigating Shortcut Learning
Authors: Panuthep Tasawong; Peerat Limkonchotiwat; Potsawee Manakul; Can Udomcharoenchaikit; Ekapol Chuangsuwanich; Sarana Nutanong
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Entity disambiguation (ED) is crucial in natural language processing (NLP) for tasks such as question-answering and information extraction. A major challenge in ED is handling overshadowed entities—uncommon entities sharing mention surfaces with common entities. The current approach to enhance performance on these entities involves reasoning over facts in a knowledge base (KB), increasing computational overhead during inference. We argue that the ED performance on overshadowed entities can be enhanced during training by addressing shortcut learning, which does not add computational overhead at inference. We propose a simple yet effective debiasing technique to prevent models from shortcut learning during training. Experiments on a range of ED datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without compromising inference speed. Our findings suggest a new research direction for improving entity disambiguation via shortcut learning mitigation.
AppBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex User Instruction
Authors: Hongru Wang; Rui Wang; Boyang Xue; Heming Xia; Jingtao Cao; Zeming Liu; Jeff Z. Pan; Kam-Fai Wong
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily either focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex dependency relationship between different APIs. However, it is essential to utilize multiple APIs collaboratively from various sources, especially for complex user instructions. In this paper, we introduce MetaBench, the first benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user’s task. Specifically, we consider two significant challenges in multiple APIs: 1) graph structures: some APIs can be executed independently while others need to be executed one by one, resulting in graph-like execution order; and 2) permission constraints: which source is authorized to execute the API call. We have experimental results on 9 distinct LLMs; e.g., GPT-4o achieves only a 2.0% success rate at the most complex instruction, revealing that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ruleGreen/AppBench.
Not Everything is All You Need: Toward Low-Redundant Optimization for Large Language Model Alignment
Authors: Zhipeng Chen; Kun Zhou; Wayne Xin Zhao; Jingyuan Wang; Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are still struggling in aligning with human preference in complex tasks and scenarios. They are prone to overfit into the unexpected patterns or superficial styles in the training data. We conduct an empirical study that only selects the top-10% most updated parameters in LLMs for alignment training, and see improvements in the convergence process and final performance. It indicates the existence of redundant neurons in LLMs for alignment training. To reduce its influence, we propose a low-redundant alignment method named **ALLO**, focusing on optimizing the most related neurons with the most useful supervised signals. Concretely, we first identify the neurons that are related to the human preference data by a gradient-based strategy, then identify the alignment-related key tokens by reward models for computing loss. Besides, we also decompose the alignment process into the forgetting and learning stages, where we first forget the tokens with unaligned knowledge and then learn aligned knowledge, by updating different ratios of neurons, respectively. Experimental results on 10 datasets have shown the effectiveness of ALLO. Our code and data will be publicly released.
AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data
Authors: Xiaoda Yang; Xize Cheng; Jiaqi Duan; Hongshun Qiu; Minjie Hong; Minghui Fang; Shengpeng Ji; Jialong Zuo; Zhiqing Hong; Zhimeng Zhang; Tao Jin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) aims to predict spoken content by analyzing lip movements in videos. Recently reported state-of-the-art results in VSR often rely on increasingly large amounts of video data, while the publicly available transcribed video datasets are insufficient compared to the audio data. To further enhance the VSR model using the audio data, we employed a generative model for data inflation, integrating the synthetic data with the authentic visual data. Essentially, the generative model incorporates another insight, which enhances the capabilities of the recognition model. For the cross-language issue, previous work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages. We trained a multi-language-family modal fusion model, AudioVSR. Leveraging the concept of modal transfer, we achieved significant results in downstream VSR tasks under conditions of data scarcity. To the best of our knowledge, AudioVSR represents the first work on cross-language-family audio-lip alignment, achieving a new SOTA in the cross-language scenario.
ECCO: Can We Improve Model-Generated Code Efficiency Without Sacrificing Functional Correctness?
Authors: Siddhant Waghjale; Vishruth Veerendranath; Zhiruo Wang; Daniel Fried
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have been largely successful in generating functionally correct programs, conditioning models to produce efficient solutions while ensuring correctness remains a challenge. Further, unreliability in benchmarking code efficiency is a hurdle across varying hardware specifications for popular interpreted languages such as Python. In this paper, we present ECCO, a reproducible benchmark for evaluating program efficiency via two paradigms: natural language (NL) based code generation and history-based code editing. On ECCO, we adapt and thoroughly investigate the three most promising existing LLM-based approaches: in-context learning, iterative refinement with execution or NL feedback, and fine-tuning conditioned on execution and editing history. While most methods degrade functional correctness and moderately increase program efficiency, we find that adding execution information often helps maintain functional correctness, and NL feedback enhances more on efficiency. We release our benchmark to support future work on LLM-based generation of efficient code.
Ladder: A Model-Agnostic Framework Boosting LLM-based Machine Translation to the Next Level
Authors: Zhaopeng Feng; Ruizhe Chen; Yan Zhang; Zijie Meng; Zuozhu Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder’s refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX→En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings.
Re-ReST: Reflection-Reinforced Self-Training for Language Agents
Authors: Zi-Yi Dou; Cheng-Fu Yang; Xueqing Wu; Kai-Wei Chang; Nanyun Peng
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Finetuning language agents with reasoning-action trajectories is effective, but obtaining these trajectories from human annotations or stronger models is costly and sometimes impractical. In this paper, we investigate the use of self-training in language agents, which can generate supervision from the agent itself, offering a promising alternative without relying on human or stronger model demonstrations. Self-training, however, requires high-quality model-generated samples, which are hard to obtain for challenging language agent tasks. To address this, we present Reflection-Reinforced Self-Training (Re-ReST), which uses a reflector to refine low-quality generated samples during self-training. The reflector takes the agent’s output and feedback from an external environment (e.g., unit test results in code generation) to produce improved samples. This technique enhances the quality of inferior samples and efficiently enriches the self-training dataset with higher-quality samples. We conduct extensive experiments on open-source language agents across tasks, including multi-hop question answering, sequential decision-making, code generation, visual question answering, and text-to-image generation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of self-training and Re-ReST in language agent tasks, with self-training improving baselines by 7.6% on HotpotQA and 28.4% on AlfWorld, and Re-ReST further boosting performance by 2.0% and 14.1%, respectively. Our studies also confirm the efficiency of using a reflector to generate high-quality samples for self-training. Moreover, we demonstrate a method to employ reflection during inference without ground-truth feedback, addressing the limitation of previous reflection work.
Effective Synthetic Data and Test-Time Adaptation for OCR Correction
Authors: Shuhao Guan; Cheng Xu; Moule Lin; Derek Greene
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Post-OCR technology is used to correct errors in the text produced by OCR systems. This study introduces a method for constructing post-OCR synthetic data with different noise levels using weak supervision. We define Character Error Rate (CER) thresholds for “effective” and “ineffective” synthetic data, allowing us to create more useful multi-noise level synthetic datasets. Furthermore, we propose Self-Correct-Noise Test-Time Adaptation (SCN-TTA), which combines self-correction and noise generation mechanisms. SCN-TTA allows a model to dynamically adjust to test data without relying on labels, effectively handling proper nouns in long texts and further reducing CER. In our experiments we evaluate a range of models, including multiple PLMs and LLMs. Results indicate that our method yields models that are effective across diverse text types. Notably, the ByT5 model achieves a CER reduction of 68.67% without relying on manually annotated data
SRF: Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with a Novel Secondary Reasoning Framework
Authors: Fu Zhang; Qi Miao; Jingwei Cheng; Hongsen Yu; Yi Yan; Xin Li; Yongxue Wu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entity pairs in a document and poses many challenges as it involves multiple mentions of entities and cross-sentence inference. However, several aspects that are important for DocRE have not been considered and explored. Existing work ignores bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. Also, sophisticated neural networks are typically designed for cross-sentence evidence extraction to further enhance DocRE. More interestingly, we reveal a noteworthy finding: If a model has predicted a relation between an entity and other entities, this relation information may help infer and predict more relations between the entity’s adjacent entities and these other entities. Nonetheless, none of existing methods leverage secondary reasoning to exploit results of relation prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (SRF) for DocRE. In SRF, we initially propose a DocRE model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module (incurring only an additional learnable parameter overhead) for relation prediction. Further, for the first time, we elaborately design and propose a novel secondary reasoning method to discover more relations by exploring the results of the first relation prediction. Extensive experiments show that SRF achieves SOTA performance and our secondary reasoning method is both effective and general when integrated into existing models.
FineCops-Ref: A new Dataset and Task for Fine-Grained Compositional Referring Expression Comprehension
Authors: Junzhuo Liu; Xuzheng Yang; Weiwei Li; Peng Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a crucial cross-modal task that objectively evaluates the capabilities of language understanding, image comprehension, and language-to-image grounding. Consequently, it serves as an ideal testing ground for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In pursuit of this goal, we have established a new REC dataset characterized by two key features: Firstly, it is designed with controllable varying levels of difficulty, necessitating multi-level fine-grained reasoning across object categories, attributes, and multi-hop relationships. Secondly, it includes negative text and images created through fine-grained editing and generation based on existing data, thereby testing the model’s ability to correctly reject scenarios where the target object is not visible in the image—an essential aspect often overlooked in existing datasets and approaches. Utilizing this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art specialist models and MLLMs. Our findings indicate that there remains a significant gap in achieving satisfactory grounding performance. We anticipate that our dataset will inspire new approaches to enhance visual reasoning and develop more advanced cross-modal interaction strategies, ultimately unlocking the full potential of MLLMs.
Exploring the Learning Capabilities of Language Models using LEVERWORLDS
Authors: Eitan Wagner; Amir Feder; Omri Abend
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Learning a model of a stochastic setting often involves learning both general structure rules and specific properties of the instance. This paper investigates the interplay between learning the general and the specific in various learning methods, with emphasis on sample efficiency. We design a framework called LEVERWORLDS, which allows the generation of simple physics-inspired worlds that follow a similar generative process with different distributions, and their instances can be expressed in natural language. These worlds allow for controlled experiments to assess the sample complexity of different learning methods. We experiment with classic learning algorithms as well as Transformer language models, both with fine-tuning and In-Context Learning (ICL). Our general finding is that (1) Transformers generally succeed in the task; but (2) they are considerably less sample efficient than classic methods that make stronger assumptions about the structure, such as Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Logistic Regression. This finding is in tension with the recent tendency to use Transformers as general-purpose estimators. We propose an approach that leverages the ICL capabilities of contemporary language models to apply simple algorithms for this type of data. Our experiments show that models currently struggle with the task but show promising potential.
CONTESTS: a Framework for Consistency Testing of Span Probabilities in Language Models
Authors: Eitan Wagner; Yuli Slavutsky; Omri Abend
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models produce the same value for different ways of assigning joint probabilities to word spans. Our work introduces a novel framework, ConTestS (Consistency Testing over Spans), involving statistical tests to assess score consistency across interchangeable completion and conditioning orders. We conduct experiments on post-release real and synthetic data to eliminate training effects. Our findings reveal that both Masked Language Models (MLMs) and autoregressive models exhibit inconsistent predictions, with autoregressive models showing larger discrepancies. Larger MLMs tend to produce more consistent predictions, while autoregressive models show the opposite trend. Moreover, for both model types, prediction entropies offer insights into the true word span likelihood and therefore can aid in selecting optimal decoding strategies. The inconsistencies revealed by our analysis, as well their connection to prediction entropies and differences between model types, can serve as useful guides for future research on addressing these limitations.
DocEdit-v2: Document Structure Editing Via Multimodal LLM Grounding
Authors: Manan Suri; Puneet Mathur; Franck Dernoncourt; Rajiv Jain; Vlad I Morariu; Ramit Sawhney; Preslav Nakov; Dinesh Manocha
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user’s requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEditAgent, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components – (1) Doc2Command to simultaneously localize edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguate user edit requests into edit commands. (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEditAgent processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEditAgent significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12%) tasks.
DogeRM: Equipping Reward Models with Domain Knowledge through Model Merging
Authors: Tzu-Han Lin; Chen-An Li; Hung-yi Lee; Yun-Nung Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a popular strategy for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviors. Reward modeling is a crucial step in RLHF. However, collecting paired preference data for training reward models is often costly and time-consuming, especially for domain-specific preferences requiring expert annotation. To address this challenge, we propose the **Do**main knowled**ge** merged **R**eward **M**odel (**DogeRM**), a novel framework that integrates domain-specific knowledge into a general reward model by model merging. The experiments demonstrate that DogeRM enhances performance across different benchmarks and provide a detailed analysis showcasing the effects of model merging, showing the great potential of facilitating model alignment.
Understanding Slang with LLMs: Modelling Cross-Cultural Nuances through Paraphrasing
Authors: Ifeoluwa Wuraola; Nina Dethlefs; Daniel Marciniak
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the realm of social media discourse, the integration of slang enriches communication, reflecting the sociocultural identities of users. This study investigates the capability of large language models (LLMs) to paraphrase slang within climate-related tweets from Nigeria and the UK, with a focus on identifying emotional nuances. Using DistilRoBERTa as the base-line model, we observe its limited comprehension of slang. To improve cross-cultural understanding, we gauge the effectiveness of leading LLMs ChatGPT 4, Gemini, and LLaMA3 in slang paraphrasing. While ChatGPT 4 and Gemini demonstrate comparable effectiveness in slang paraphrasing, LLaMA3 shows less coverage, with all LLMs exhibiting limitations in coverage, especially of Nigerian slang. Our findings underscore the necessity for culturally sensitive LLM development in emotion classification, particularly in non-anglocentric regions.
Unlocking Anticipatory Text Generation: A Constrained Approach for Large Language Models Decoding
Authors: Lifu Tu; Semih Yavuz; Jin Qu; Jiacheng Xu; Rui Meng; Caiming Xiong; Yingbo Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).