GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
DocHieNet: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Document Hierarchy Parsing
Authors: Hangdi Xing; Changxu Cheng; Feiyu Gao; Zirui Shao; Zhi Yu; Jiajun Bu; Qi Zheng; Cong Yao
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Parsing documents from pixels, such as pictures and scanned PDFs, into hierarchical structures is extensively demanded in the daily routines of data storage, retrieval and understanding. However, previously the research on this topic has been largely hindered since most existing datasets are small-scale, or contain documents of only a single type, which are characterized by a lack of document diversity. Moreover, there is a significant discrepancy in the annotation standards across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a large and diverse document hierarchy parsing (DHP) dataset to compensate for the data scarcity and inconsistency problem. We aim to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark. Meanwhile, we present a new DHP framework designed to grasp both fine-grained text content and coarse-grained pattern at layout element level, enhancing the capacity of pre-trained text-layout models in handling the multi-page and multi-level challenges in DHP. Through exhaustive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset and method.
AMR-Evol: Adaptive Modular Response Evolution Elicits Better Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models in Code Generation
Authors: Ziyang Luo; Xin Li; Hongzhan Lin; Jing Ma; Lidong Bing
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The impressive performance of proprietary LLMs like GPT4 in code generation has led to a trend to replicate these capabilities in open-source models through knowledge distillation (e.g. Code Evol-Instruct). However, these efforts often neglect the crucial aspect of response quality, relying heavily on teacher models for direct response distillation. This paradigm, especially for complex instructions, can degrade the quality of synthesized data, compromising the knowledge distillation process. To this end, our study introduces the Adaptive Modular Response Evolution (AMR-Evol) framework, which employs a two-stage process to refine response distillation. The first stage, modular decomposition, breaks down the direct response into more manageable sub-modules. The second stage, adaptive response evolution, automatically evolves the response with the related function modules. Our experiments with three popular code benchmarks—HumanEval, MBPP, and EvalPlus—attests to the superiority of the AMR-Evol framework over baseline response distillation methods. By comparing with the open-source Code LLMs trained on a similar scale of data, we observed performance enhancements: more than +3.0 points on HumanEval-Plus and +1.0 points on MBPP-Plus, which underscores the effectiveness of our framework. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ChiYeungLaw/AMR-Evol.
EFUF: Efficient Fine-Grained Unlearning Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Shangyu Xing; Fei Zhao; Zhen Wu; Tuo An; Weihao Chen; Chunhui Li; Jianbing Zhang; Xinyu Dai
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing attention in the past few years, but they may still generate descriptions that include objects not present in the corresponding images, a phenomenon known as object hallucination. To eliminate hallucinations, existing methods manually annotate paired responses with and without hallucinations, and then employ various alignment algorithms to improve the alignment capability between images and text. However, they not only demand considerable computation resources during the finetuning stage but also require expensive human annotation to construct paired data needed by the alignment algorithms. To address these issues, we propose an efficient fine-grained unlearning framework (EFUF), which performs gradient ascent utilizing three tailored losses to eliminate hallucinations without paired data. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently reduces hallucinations while preserving the generation quality with modest computational overhead. Our code and datasets will be publicly available.
Rethinking Pruning Large Language Models: Benefits and Pitfalls of Reconstruction Error Minimization
Authors: Sungbin Shin; Wonpyo Park; Jaeho Lee; Namhoon Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This work suggests fundamentally rethinking the current practice of pruning large language models (LLMs). The way it is done is by divide and conquer: split the model into submodels, sequentially prune them, and reconstruct predictions of the dense counterparts on small calibration data one at a time; the final model is obtained simply by putting the resulting sparse submodels together. While this approach enables pruning under memory constraints, it generates high reconstruction errors. In this work, we first present an array of reconstruction techniques that can significantly reduce this error by more than 90%. Unwittingly, however, we discover that minimizing reconstruction error is not always ideal and can overfit the given calibration data, resulting in rather increased language perplexity and poor performance at downstream tasks. We find out that a strategy of self-generating calibration data can mitigate this trade-off between reconstruction and generalization, suggesting new directions in the presence of both benefits and pitfalls of reconstruction for pruning LLMs.
LLMs Are Zero-Shot Context-Aware Simultaneous Translators
Authors: Roman Koshkin; Katsuhito Sudoh; Satoshi Nakamura
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The advent of transformers has fueled progress in machine translation. More recently large language models (LLMs) have come to the spotlight thanks to their generality and strong performance in a wide range of language tasks, including translation. Here we show that open-source LLMs perform on par with or better than some state-of-the-art baselines in simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) tasks, zero-shot. We also demonstrate that injection of minimal background information, which is easy with an LLM, brings further performance gains, especially on challenging technical subject-matter. This highlights LLMs’ potential for building next generation of massively multilingual, context-aware and terminologically accurate SiMT systems that require no resource-intensive training or fine-tuning.
AgentReview: Exploring Peer Review Dynamics with LLM Agents
Authors: Yiqiao Jin; Qinlin Zhao; Yiyang Wang; Hao Chen; Kaijie Zhu; Yijia Xiao; Jindong Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Peer review is fundamental to the integrity and advancement of scientific publication. Traditional methods of peer review analyses often rely on exploration and statistics of existing peer review data, which do not adequately address the multivariate nature of the process, account for the latent variables, and are further constrained by privacy concerns due to the sensitive nature of the data. We introduce AgentReview, the first large language model (LLM) based peer review simulation framework, which effectively disentangles the impacts of multiple latent factors and addresses the privacy issue. Our study reveals significant insights, including a notable 37.1% variation in paper decisions due to reviewers’ biases, supported by sociological theories such as the social influence theory, altruism fatigue, and authority bias. We believe that this study could offer valuable insights to improve the design of peer review mechanisms.
ChatRetriever: Adapting Large Language Models for Generalized and Robust Conversational Dense Retrieval
Authors: Kelong Mao; Chenlong Deng; Haonan Chen; Fengran Mo; Zheng Liu; Tetsuya Sakai; Zhicheng Dou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Conversational search requires accurate interpretation of user intent from complex multi-turn contexts. This paper presents ChatRetriever, which inherits the strong generalization capability of large language models to robustly represent complex conversational sessions for dense retrieval. To achieve this, we propose a simple and effective dual-learning approach that adapts LLM for retrieval via contrastive learning while enhancing the complex session understanding through masked instruction tuning on high-quality conversational instruction tuning data. Extensive experiments on five conversational search benchmarks demonstrate that ChatRetriever significantly outperforms existing conversational dense retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance on par with LLM-based rewriting approaches. Furthermore, ChatRetriever exhibits superior robustness in handling diverse conversational contexts. Our work highlights the potential of adapting LLMs for retrieval with complex inputs like conversational search sessions and proposes an effective approach to advance this research direction.
Fairer Preferences Elicit Improved Human-Aligned Large Language Model Judgments
Authors: Han Zhou; Xingchen Wan; Yinhong Liu; Nigel Collier; Ivan Vulić; Anna Korhonen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM evaluators, which compare two generated texts and determine the preferred one, have been employed in a wide range of applications. However, LLMs exhibit preference biases and worrying sensitivity to prompt designs. In this work, we first reveal that the predictive preference of LLMs can be highly brittle and skewed, even with semantically equivalent instructions. We find that fairer predictive preferences from LLMs consistently lead to judgments that are better aligned with humans. Motivated by this phenomenon, we propose an automatic Zero-shot Evaluation-oriented Prompt Optimization framework, ZEPO, which aims to produce fairer preference decisions and improve the alignment of LLM evaluators with human judgments. To this end, we propose a zero-shot learning objective based on the preference decision fairness. ZEPO demonstrates substantial performance improvements over state-of-the-art LLM evaluators, without requiring labeled data, on representative meta-evaluation benchmarks. Our findings underscore the critical correlation between preference fairness and human alignment, positioning ZEPO as an efficient prompt optimizer for bridging the gap between LLM evaluators and human judgments.
Learning Interpretable Legal Case Retrieval via Knowledge-Guided Case Reformulation
Authors: Chenlong Deng; Kelong Mao; Zhicheng Dou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Legal case retrieval for sourcing similar cases is critical in upholding judicial fairness. Different from general web search, legal case retrieval involves processing lengthy, complex, and highly specialized legal documents. Existing methods in this domain often overlook the incorporation of legal expert knowledge, which is crucial for accurately understanding and modeling legal cases, leading to unsatisfactory retrieval performance. This paper introduces KELLER, a legal knowledge-guided case reformulation approach based on large language models (LLMs) for effective and interpretable legal case retrieval. By incorporating professional legal knowledge about crimes and law articles, we enable large language models to accurately reformulate the original legal case into concise sub-facts of crimes, which contain the essential information of the case. Extensive experiments on two legal case retrieval benchmarks demonstrate superior retrieval performance and robustness on complex legal case queries of KELLER over existing methods.
Effective Demonstration Annotation for In-Context Learning via Language Model-Based Determinantal Point Process
Authors: Peng Wang; Xiaobin Wang; Chao Lou; Shengyu Mao; Pengjun Xie; Yong Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) is a few-shot learning paradigm that involves learning mappings through input-output pairs and appropriately applying them to new instances. Despite the remarkable ICL capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs), existing works are highly dependent on large-scale labeled support sets, not always feasible in practical scenarios. To refine this approach, we focus primarily on an innovative selective annotation mechanism, which precedes the standard demonstration retrieval. We introduce the Language Model-based Determinant Point Process (LM-DPP) that simultaneously considers the uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled instances for optimal selection. Consequently, this yields a subset for annotation that strikes a trade-off between the two factors. We apply LM-DPP to various language models, including GPT-J, LlaMA, and GPT-3. Experimental results on 9 NLU and 2 Generation datasets demonstrate that LM-DPP can effectively select canonical examples. Further analysis reveals that LLMs benefit most significantly from subsets that are both low uncertainty and high diversity.
Pre-trained Language Models Do Not Help Auto-regressive Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Yuhui Zhang; Brandon McKinzie; Zhe Gan; Vaishaal Shankar; Alexander T Toshev
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent advances in image tokenizers, such as VQ-VAE, have enabled text-to-image generation using auto-regressive methods, similar to language modeling. However, these methods have yet to leverage pre-trained language models, despite their adaptability to various downstream tasks. In this work, we explore this gap by adapting a pre-trained language model for auto-regressive text-to-image generation, and find that pre-trained language models offer limited help. We provide a two-fold explanation by analyzing tokens from each modality. First, we demonstrate that image tokens possess significantly different semantics compared to text tokens, rendering pre-trained language models no more effective in modeling them than randomly initialized ones. Second, the text tokens in the image-text datasets are too simple compared to normal language model pre-training data, which causes the catastrophic degradation of language models’ capability.
QUDSELECT: Selective Decoding for Questions Under Discussion Parsing
Authors: Ashima Suvarna; Xiao Liu; Tanmay Parekh; Kai-Wei Chang; Nanyun Peng
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Question Under Discussion (QUD) is a discourse framework that uses implicit questions to reveal discourse relationships between sentences. In QUD parsing, each sentence is viewed as an answer to a question triggered by an anchor sentence in prior context. The resulting QUD structure is required to conform to several theoretical criteria like answer compatibility(how well the question is answered), making QUD parsing a challenging task. Previous works construct QUD parsers in a pipelined manner (i.e. detect the trigger sentence in context and then generate the question). However, these parsers lack a holistic view of the task and can hardly satisfy all the criteria. In this work, we introduce QUDSELECT, a joint-training framework that selectively decodes the QUD dependency structures considering the QUD criteria criteria. Using instruction-tuning, we train models to simultaneously predict the anchor sentence and generate the associated question. To explicitly incorporate the criteria, we adopt a selective decoding strategy of sampling multiple QUD candidates during inference, followed by selecting the best one with criteria scorers. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models by 9% in human evaluation and 4% in automatic evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Code and data are in https://github.com/asuvarna31/qudselect.
Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning
Authors: Zihang Liu; Yuanzhe Hu; Tianyu Pang; Yefan Zhou; Pu Ren; Yaoqing Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent advances in foundation models have emphasized the need to align pre-trained models with specialized domains using small, curated datasets. Studies on these foundation models underscore the importance of low-data training and fine-tuning. This topic, well-known in natural language processing (NLP), has also gained increasing attention in the emerging field of scientific machine learning (SciML). To address the limitations of low-data training and fine-tuning, we draw inspiration from Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HT-SR) theory, analyzing the shape of empirical spectral densities (ESDs) and revealing an imbalance in training quality across different model layers. To mitigate this issue, we adapt a recently proposed layer-wise learning rate scheduler, TempBalance, which effectively balances training quality across layers and enhances low-data training and fine-tuning for both NLP and SciML tasks. Notably, TempBalance demonstrates increasing performance gains as the amount of available tuning data decreases. Comparative analyses further highlight the effectiveness of TempBalance and its adaptability as an “add-on” method for improving model performance.
Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Alignment
Authors: Zhaofeng Wu; Ananth Balashankar; Yoon Kim; Jacob Eisenstein; Ahmad Beirami
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it challenging to extend this framework to diverse languages. In this work, we evaluate a simple approach for zero-shot cross-lingual alignment, where a reward model is trained on preference data in one source language and directly applied to other target languages. On summarization and open-ended dialog generation, we show that this method is consistently successful under comprehensive evaluation settings, including human evaluation: cross-lingually aligned models are preferred by humans over unaligned models on up to >70% of evaluation instances. We moreover find that a different-language reward model sometimes yields better aligned models than a same-language reward model. We also identify best practices when there is no language-specific data for even supervised finetuning, another component in alignment.
Large Language Models as Foundations for Next-Gen Dense Retrieval: A Comprehensive Empirical Assessment
Authors: Kun Luo; Minghao Qin; Zheng Liu; Shitao Xiao; Jun Zhao; Kang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Pre-trained language models like BERT and T5 serve as crucial backbone encoders for dense retrieval. However, these models often exhibit limited generalization capabilities and face challenges in improving in-domain accuracy. Recent research has explored using large language models (LLMs) as retrievers, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. Despite these advancements, the specific benefits of LLMs over traditional retrievers and the impact of different LLM configurations—such as parameter sizes, pre-training duration, and alignment processes—on retrieval tasks remain unclear. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study on a wide range of retrieval tasks, including in-domain accuracy, data efficiency, zero-shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction-based retrieval, and multi-task learning. We evaluate over 15 different backbone LLMs and non-LLMs. Our findings reveal that larger models and extensive pre-training consistently enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency. Additionally, larger models demonstrate significant potential in zero-shot generalization, lengthy retrieval, instruction-based retrieval, and multi-task learning. These results underscore the advantages of LLMs as versatile and effective backbone encoders in dense retrieval, providing valuable insights for future research and development in this field.
A New Pipeline for Knowledge Graph Reasoning Enhanced by Large Language Models Without Fine-Tuning
Authors: Zhongwu Chen; Long Bai; Zixuan Li; Zhen Huang; Xiaolong Jin; Yong Dou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Conventional Knowledge Graph Reasoning (KGR) models learn the embeddings of KG components over the structure of KGs, but their performances are limited when the KGs are severely incomplete. Recent LLM-enhanced KGR models input KG structural information into LLMs. However, they require fine-tuning on open-source LLMs and are not applicable to closed-source LLMs. Therefore, in this paper, to leverage the knowledge in LLMs without fine-tuning to assist and enhance conventional KGR models, we propose a new three-stage pipeline, including knowledge alignment, KG reasoning and entity reranking. Specifically, in the alignment stage, we propose three strategies to align the knowledge in LLMs to the KG schema by explicitly associating unconnected nodes with semantic relations. Based on the enriched KGs, we train structure-aware KGR models to integrate aligned knowledge to original knowledge existing in KGs. In the reranking stage, after obtaining the results of KGR models, we rerank the top-scored entities with LLMs to recall correct answers further. Experiments show our pipeline can enhance the KGR performance in both incomplete and general situations. Code and datasets are available.
Towards Tool Use Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhi-Yuan Chen; Shiqi Shen; Guangyao Shen; Gong Zhi; Xu Chen; Yankai Lin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recently, tool use with LLMs has become one of the primary research topics as it can help LLM generate truthful and helpful responses. Existing studies on tool use with LLMs primarily focus on enhancing the tool-calling ability of LLMs. In practice, like chat assistants, LLMs are also required to align with human values in the context of tool use. Specifically, LLMs should refuse to answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions and insecure tool responses to ensure their reliability and harmlessness. At the same time, LLMs should demonstrate autonomy in tool use to reduce the costs associated with tool calling. To tackle this issue, we first introduce the principle that LLMs should follow in tool use scenarios: H2A. The goal of H2A is to align LLMs with **helpfulness**, **harmlessness**, and **autonomy**. In addition, we propose ToolAlign, a dataset comprising instruction-tuning data and preference data to align LLMs with the H2A principle for tool use. Based on ToolAlign, we develop LLMs by supervised fine-tuning and preference learning, and experimental results demonstrate that the LLMs exhibit remarkable tool-calling capabilities, while also refusing to engage with harmful content, and displaying a high degree of autonomy in tool utilization. The code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/zhiyuanc2001/ToolAlign.