GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Do Large Language Models Know How Much They Know?
Authors: Gabriele Prato; Jerry Huang; Prasanna Parthasarathi; Shagun Sodhani; Sarath Chandar
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as highly capable systems and are increasingly being integrated into various uses. Nevertheless, the rapid advancement in their deployment trails a comprehensive understanding of their internal mechanisms, as well as a delineation of their capabilities and limitations. A desired characteristic of an intelligent system is its ability to recognize the scope of its own knowledge. To investigate whether LLMs embody this attribute, we develop a benchmark that challenges these models to enumerate all information they possess on specific topics. This benchmark assesses whether the models recall excessive, insufficient, or the precise amount of required information, thereby indicating their awareness of how much they know about the given topic. Our findings reveal that the emergence of this property varies across different architectures and manifests at diverse rates. However, with sufficient scaling, all tested models are ultimately capable of performing this task. The insights gained from this research advance our understanding of LLMs, shedding light on their operational capabilities and contributing to the ongoing exploration of their intricate dynamics.
Investigating Mysteries of CoT-Augmented Distillation
Authors: Somin Wadhwa; Silvio Amir; Byron C Wallace
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Eliciting chain of thought (CoT) rationales - sequences of token that convey a “reasoning” process has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such rationales can also be used for model distillation: Including CoT sequences (elicited from a large “teacher” model) in addition to target labels when fine-tuning a small student model yields (often substantial) improvements. In this work we ask: Why and how does this additional training signal help in model distillation? We perform ablations to interrogate this, and report some potentially surprising results. Specifically: (1) Placing CoT sequences after labels (rather than before) realizes consistently better downstream performance – this means that no student “reasoning” is necessary at test time to realize gains. (2) When rationales are appended in this way, they need not be coherent reasoning sequences to yield improvements; performance increases are robust to permutations of CoT tokens, for example. In fact, (3) a small number of key tokens are sufficient to achieve improvements equivalent to those observed when full rationales are used in model distillation.
SciPrompt: Knowledge-augmented Prompting for Fine-grained Categorization of Scientific Topics
Authors: Zhiwen You; Kanyao Han; Haotian Zhu; Bertram Ludaescher; Jana Diesner
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.
Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP
Authors: Samyadeep Basu; Shell Xu Hu; Maziar Sanjabi; Daniela Massiceti; Soheil Feizi
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP’s compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.
Learning from Natural Language Explanations for Generalizable Entity Matching
Authors: Somin Wadhwa; Adit Krishnan; Runhui Wang; Byron C Wallace; Luyang Kong
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Entity matching is the task of linking records from different sources that refer to the same real-world entity. Past work has primarily treated entity linking as a standard supervised learning problem. However, supervised entity matching models often do not generalize well to new data, and collecting exhaustive labeled training data is often cost prohibitive. Further, recent efforts have adopted LLMs for this task in few/zero-shot settings, exploiting their general knowledge. But LLMs are prohibitively expensive for performing inference at scale for real-world entity matching tasks.As an efficient alternative, we re-cast entity matching as a conditional generation task as opposed to binary classification. This enables us to “distill” LLM reasoning into smaller entity matching models via natural language explanations. This approach achieves strong performance, especially on out-of-domain generalization tests (10.85% F-1) where standalone generative methods struggle. We perform ablations that highlight the importance of explanations, both for performance and model robustness.
Do You Know What You Are Talking About? Characterizing Query-Knowledge Relevance For Reliable Retrieval Augmented Generation
Authors: Zhuohang Li; Jiaxin Zhang; Chao Yan; Kamalika Das; Sricharan Kumar; Murat Kantarcioglu; Bradley A. Malin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) are known to suffer from hallucinations and misinformation. Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) that retrieves verifiable information from an external knowledge corpus to complement the parametric knowledge in LMs provides a tangible solution to these problems. However, the generation quality of RAG is highly dependent on the relevance between a user’s query and the retrieved documents. Inaccurate responses may be generated when the query is outside of the scope of knowledge represented in the external knowledge corpus or if the information in the corpus is out-of-date. In this work, we establish a statistical framework that assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. We introduce an online testing procedure that employs goodness-of-fit (GoF) tests to inspect the relevance of each user query to detect out-of-knowledge queries with low knowledge relevance. Additionally, we develop an offline testing framework that examines a collection of user queries, aiming to detect significant shifts in the query distribution which indicates the knowledge corpus is no longer sufficiently capable of supporting the interests of the users. We demonstrate the capabilities of these strategies through a systematic evaluation on eight question-answering (QA) datasets, the results of which indicate that the new testing framework is an efficient solution to enhance the reliability of existing RAG systems.
On the Reliability of Psychological Scales on Large Language Models
Authors: Jen-tse Huang; Wenxiang Jiao; Man Ho Lam; Eric John Li; Wenxuan Wang; Michael Lyu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent research has focused on examining Large Language Models’ (LLMs) characteristics from a psychological standpoint, acknowledging the necessity of understanding their behavioral characteristics. The administration of personality tests to LLMs has emerged as a noteworthy area in this context. However, the suitability of employing psychological scales, initially devised for humans, on LLMs is a matter of ongoing debate. Our study aims to determine the reliability of applying personality assessments to LLMs, explicitly investigating whether LLMs demonstrate consistent personality traits. Analysis of 2,500 settings per model, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini-Pro, and LLaMA-3.1, reveals that various LLMs show consistency in responses to the Big Five Inventory, indicating a satisfactory level of reliability. Furthermore, our research explores the potential of GPT-3.5 to emulate diverse personalities and represent various groups—a capability increasingly sought after in social sciences for substituting human participants with LLMs to reduce costs. Our findings reveal that LLMs have the potential to represent different personalities with specific prompt instructions.
Contrastive Entity Coreference and Disambiguation for Historical Texts
Authors: Abhishek Arora; Emily Silcock; Melissa Dell; Leander Heldring
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Massive-scale historical document collections are crucial for social science research. Despite increasing digitization, these documents typically lack unique cross-document identifiers for individuals mentioned within the texts, as well as individual identifiers from external knowledge bases like Wikipedia/Wikidata. Existing entity disambiguation methods often fall short in accuracy for historical documents, which are replete with individuals not remembered in contemporary knowledge bases. This study makes three key contributions to improve cross-document coreference resolution and disambiguation in historical texts: a massive-scale training dataset replete with hard negatives - that sources over 190 million entity pairs from Wikipedia contexts and disambiguation pages - high-quality evaluation data from hand-labeled historical newswire articles, and trained models evaluated on this historical benchmark. We contrastively train bi-encoder models for coreferencing and disambiguating individuals in historical texts, achieving accurate, scalable performance that identifies out-of-knowledge base individuals. Our approach significantly surpasses other entity disambiguation models on our historical newswire benchmark. Our models also demonstrate competitive performance on modern entity disambiguation benchmarks, particularly on certain news disambiguation datasets.
Finer: Investigating and Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Concept Recognition in Large Vision Language Models
Authors: Jeonghwan Kim; Heng Ji
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs such as LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate descriptive visual attributes based on a concept that appears within an input image despite their prominent zero-shot image captioning ability. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs suffer from modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept. In an effort to further the community’s endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric benchmark and training mixture, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs’ fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.
Evaluating LLMs for Targeted Concept Simplification for Domain-Specific Texts
Authors: Sumit Asthana; Hannah Rashkin; Elizabeth Clark; Fantine Huot; Mirella Lapata
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: One useful application of NLP models is to support people in reading complex text from unfamiliar domains (e.g., scientific articles). Simplifying the entire text makes it understandable but sometimes removes important details. On the contrary, helping adult readers understand difficult concepts in context can enhance their vocabulary and knowledge. In a preliminary human study, we first identify that lack of context and unfamiliarity with difficult concepts is a major reason for adult readers’ difficulty with domain-specific text. We then introduce targeted concept simplification, a simplification task for rewriting text to help readers comprehend text containing unfamiliar concepts. We also introduce WikiDomains, a new dataset of 22k definitions from 13 academic domains paired with a difficult concept within each definition. We benchmark the performance of open-source and commercial LLMs and a simple dictionary baseline on this task across human judgments of ease of understanding and meaning preservation. Interestingly, our human judges preferred explanations about the difficult concept more than simplifications of the concept phrase. Further, no single model achieved superior performance across all quality dimensions, and automated metrics also show low correlations with human evaluations of concept simplification (~0.2), opening up rich avenues for research on personalized human reading comprehension support.
VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment
Authors: Lei Li; Zhihui Xie; Mukai Li; Shunian Chen; Peiyi Wang; Liang Chen; Yazheng Yang; Benyou Wang; Lingpeng Kong; Qi Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial. However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs. We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations. To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback. Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9% and 9.5% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at https://vlf-silkie.github.io.
Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners
Authors: Peiwen Yuan; Shaoxiong Feng; Yiwei Li; Xinglin Wang; Yueqi Zhang; Chuyi Tan; Boyuan Pan; Heda Wang; Yao Hu; Kan Li
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of ICL does not necessarily scale well in many-shot (demonstration) settings. We hypothesize that the reason lies in more demonstrations dispersing the model attention from the query, hindering its understanding of key content, which we validate both theoretically and experimentally. Inspired by how humans learn from examples, we propose a training-free method FocusICL, which conducts triviality filtering to avoid attention being diverted by unimportant contents at token-level and operates hierarchical attention to further ensure sufficient attention towards current query at demonstration-level. We also design an efficient hyperparameter searching strategy for FocusICL based on model perplexity of demonstrations. Comprehensive experiments validate that FocusICL achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations.
Reconsidering Sentence-Level Sign Language Translation
Authors: Garrett Tanzer; Maximus Shengelia; Ken Harrenstien; David Uthus
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Historically, sign language machine translation has been posed as a sentence-level task: datasets consisting of continuous narratives are chopped up and presented to the model as isolated clips. In this work, we explore the limitations of this task framing. First, we survey a number of linguistic phenomena in sign languages that depend on discourse-level context. Then as a case study, we perform the first human baseline for sign language translation that actually substitutes a human into the machine learning task framing, rather than provide the human with the entire document as context. This human baseline—for ASL to English translation on the How2Sign dataset—shows that for 33% of sentences in our sample, our fluent Deaf signer annotators were only able to understand key parts of the clip in light of additional discourse-level context. These results underscore the importance of understanding and sanity checking examples when adapting machine learning to new domains.
GAMA: A Large Audio-Language Model with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities
Authors: Sreyan Ghosh; Sonal Kumar; Ashish Seth; Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru; Utkarsh Tyagi; S Sakshi; Oriol Nieto; Ramani Duraiswami; Dinesh Manocha
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Perceiving and understanding non-speech sounds and non-verbal speech is essential to making decisions that help us interact with our surroundings. In this paper, we propose GAMA, a novel General-purpose Large Audio-Language Model (LALM) with Advanced Audio Understanding and Complex Reasoning Abilities. We build GAMA by integrating an LLM with multiple types of audio representations, including features from a custom Audio Q-Former, a multi-layer aggregator that aggregates features from multiple layers of an audio encoder. We fine-tune GAMA on a large-scale audio-language dataset, which augments it with audio understanding capabilities. Next, we propose CompA-R (Instruction-Tuning for Complex Audio Reasoning), a synthetically generated instruction-tuning (IT) dataset with instructions that require the model to perform complex reasoning on the input audio. We instruction-tune GAMA with CompA-R to endow it with complex reasoning abilities, where we further add a soft prompt as input with high-level semantic evidence by leveraging event tags of the input audio. Finally, we also propose CompA-R-test, a human-labeled evaluation dataset for evaluating the capabilities of LALMs on open-ended audio question-answering that requires complex reasoning. Through automated and expert human evaluations, we show that GAMA outperforms all other LALMs in literature on diverse audio understanding tasks by margins of 1%-84% and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on deductive reasoning and hallucination evaluation benchmarks. Further, GAMA IT-ed on CompA-R proves to be superior in its complex reasoning capabilities.
Verba volant, scripta volant? Don’t worry! There are computational solutions for protoword reconstruction
Authors: Liviu P Dinu; Ana Sabina Uban; Alina Maria Cristea; Ioan-Bogdan Iordache; Teodor-George Marchitan; Simona Georgescu; Laurentiu Zoicas
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We introduce a new database of cognate words and etymons for the five main Romance languages, the most comprehensive one to date. We propose a strong benchmark for the automatic reconstruction of protowords for Romance languages, by applying a set of machine learning models and features on these data. The best results reach 90% accuracy in predicting the protoword of a given cognate set, surpassing existing state-of-the-art results for this task and showing that computational methods can be very useful in assisting linguists with protoword reconstruction.
ChatGPT Doesn’t Trust Chargers Fans: Guardrail Sensitivity in Context
Authors: Victoria R Li; Yida Chen; Naomi Saphra
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While the biases of language models in production are extensively documented, the biases of their guardrails have been neglected. This paper studies how contextual information about the user influences the likelihood of an LLM to refuse to execute a request. By generating user biographies that offer ideological and demographic information, we find a number of biases in guardrail sensitivity on GPT-3.5. Younger, female, and Asian-American personas are more likely to trigger a refusal guardrail when requesting censored or illegal information. Guardrails are also sycophantic, refusing to comply with requests for a political position the user is likely to disagree with. We find that certain identity groups and seemingly innocuous information, e.g., sports fandom, can elicit changes in guardrail sensitivity similar to direct statements of political ideology. For each demographic category and even for American football team fandom, we find that ChatGPT appears to infer a likely political ideology and modify guardrail behavior accordingly.