GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Hansel: Output Length Controlling Framework for Large Language Models
Authors: Seoha Song; Junhyun Lee; Hyeonmok Ko
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Despite the great success of large language models (LLMs), efficiently controlling the length of the output sequence still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Hansel, an efficient framework for length control in LLMs without affecting its generation ability. Hansel utilizes periodically outputted hidden special tokens to keep track of the remaining target length of the output sequence. Together with techniques to avoid abrupt termination of the output, this seemingly simple method proved to be efficient and versatile, while not harming the coherency and fluency of the generated text. The framework can be applied to any pre-trained LLMs during the finetuning stage of the model, regardless of its original positional encoding method. We demonstrate this by finetuning four different LLMs with Hansel and show that the mean absolute error of the output sequence decreases significantly in every model and dataset compared to the prompt-based length control finetuning. Moreover, the framework showed a substantially improved ability to extrapolate to target lengths unseen during finetuning, such as long dialog responses or extremely short summaries. This indicates that the model learns the general means of length control, rather than learning to match output lengths to those seen during training.
Interweaving Memories of a Siamese Large Language Model
Authors: Xin Song; Zhikai Xue; Guoxiu He; Jiawei Liu; Wei Lu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods optimize large language models (LLMs) by modifying or introducing a small number of parameters to enhance alignment with downstream tasks. However, they can result in catastrophic forgetting, where LLMs prioritize new knowledge at the expense of comprehensive world knowledge. A promising approach to mitigate this issue is to recall prior memories based on the original knowledge. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic PEFT framework, IMSM, which Interweaves Memories of a Siamese Large Language Model. Specifically, our siamese LLM is equipped with an existing PEFT method. Given an incoming query, it generates two distinct memories based on the pre-trained and fine-tuned parameters. IMSM then incorporates an interweaving mechanism that regulates the contributions of both original and enhanced memories when generating the next token. This framework is theoretically applicable to all open-source LLMs and existing PEFT methods. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, evaluating the performance of popular open-source LLMs using the proposed IMSM, in comparison to both classical and leading PEFT methods. Our findings indicate that IMSM maintains comparable time and space efficiency to backbone PEFT methods while significantly improving performance and effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
Is Your Image a Good Storyteller?
Authors: Xiujie Song; Xiaoyi Pang; Haifeng Tang; Mengyue Wu; Kenny Q. Zhu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
ELLA-V: Stable Neural Codec Language Modeling with Alignment-Guided Sequence Reordering
Authors: Yakun Song; Zhuo Chen; Xiaofei Wang; Ziyang Ma; Xie Chen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: The language model (LM) approach based on acoustic and linguistic prompts, such as VALL-E, has achieved remarkable progress in the field of zero-shot audio generation. However, existing methods still have some limitations: 1) repetitions, transpositions, and omissions in the output synthesized speech due to limited alignment constraints between audio and phoneme tokens; 2) challenges of fine-grained control over the synthesized speech with autoregressive (AR) language model; 3) infinite silence generation due to the nature of AR-based decoding, especially under the greedy strategy. To alleviate these issues, we propose ELLA-V, a simple but efficient LM-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) framework, which enables fine-grained control over synthesized audio at the phoneme level. The key to ELLA-V is interleaving sequences of acoustic and phoneme tokens, where phoneme tokens appear ahead of the corresponding acoustic tokens. The experimental findings reveal that our model outperforms baselines in terms of accuracy and delivers more stable results using both greedy and sampling-based decoding strategies.
Tradutor: Building a Variety Specific Translation Model
Authors: Hugo Sousa; Satya Almasian; Ricardo Campos; Alipio Jorge
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Language models have become foundational to many widely used systems. However, these seemingly advantageous models are double-edged swords. While they excel in tasks related to resource-rich languages like English, they often lose the fine nuances of language forms, dialects, and varieties that are inherent to languages spoken in multiple regions of the world. Languages like European Portuguese are neglected in favor of their more popular counterpart, Brazilian Portuguese, leading to suboptimal performance in various linguistic tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the first open-source translation model specifically tailored for European Portuguese, along with a novel dataset specifically designed for this task. Results from automatic evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our best model surpasses existing open-source translation systems for Portuguese and approaches the performance of industry-leading closed-source systems for European Portuguese. By making our dataset, models, and code publicly available, we aim to support and encourage further research, fostering advancements in the representation of underrepresented language varieties.
Enhancing Portuguese Variety Identification with Cross-Domain Approaches
Authors: Hugo Sousa; Rúben Almeida; Purificação Silvano; Inês Cantante; Ricardo Campos; Alipio Jorge
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Recent advances in natural language processing have raised expectations for generative models to produce coherent text across diverse language varieties. In the particular case of the Portuguese language, the predominance of Brazilian Portuguese corpora online introduces linguistic biases in these models, limiting their applicability outside of Brazil. To address this gap and promote the creation of European Portuguese resources, we developed a cross-domain language variety identifier (LVI) to discriminate between European and Brazilian Portuguese. Motivated by the findings of our literature review, we compiled the PtBrVarId corpus, a cross-domain LVI dataset, and study the effectiveness of transformer-based LVI classifiers for cross-domain scenarios. Although this research focuses on two Portuguese varieties, our contribution can be extended to other varieties and languages. We open source the code, corpus, and models to foster further research in this task.
Structured Packing in LLM Training Improves Long Context Utilization
Authors: Konrad Staniszewski; Szymon Tworkowski; Sebastian Jaszczur; Yu Zhao; Henryk Michalewski; Łukasz Kuciński; Piotr Miłoś
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Recent advancements in long-context language modeling have attracted significant attention, yet their practical applications often suffer from suboptimal context utilization. To efficiently address this issue, we introduce the Structured Packing for Long Context, SPLiCe, a method that uses retrieval to collate mutually relevant documents into long training samples. 
    We demonstrate that SPLiCe improves performance on long-context tasks, particularly by achieving perfect accuracy on the synthetic Needle in the Haystack benchmark, and effectively mitigating the ‘lost-in-the-middle’ phenomenon often observed in large language models. Notably, these long-context capabilities also extend to realistic downstream tasks, such as Qasper, across multiple model sizes—3B, 7B, and 13B—and are achieved with only brief fine-tuning on 2-6 billion tokens.
    We supplement these results with a detailed analysis of SPLiCe, examining the impact of hyperparameter choices, the different mixtures and proportions of SPLiCe-generated training data, and the choice of the retriever. We also study the transfer of long-context utilization skills between the modalities.
    An intriguing finding from our analysis is that training on a corpus of code can enhance performance on natural language tasks.
VERO: Verification and Zero-Shot Feedback Acquisition for Few-Shot Multimodal Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification
Authors: Kai Sun; Hao Wu; Bin Shi; Samuel Mensah; Peng Liu; Bo Dong
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Deep learning approaches for multimodal aspect-level sentiment classification (MALSC) often require extensive data, which is costly and time-consuming to obtain. To mitigate this, current methods typically fine-tune small-scale pretrained models like BERT and BART with few-shot examples. While these models have shown success, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) offer significant advantages due to their greater capacity and ability to understand nuanced language in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. However, there is limited work on fine-tuning LVLMs for MALSC. A major challenge lies in selecting few-shot examples that effectively capture the underlying patterns in data for these LVLMs. To bridge this research gap, we propose an acquisition function designed to select challenging samples for the few-shot learning of LVLMs for MALSC. We compare our approach, Verification and ZERO-shot feedback acquisition (VERO), with diverse acquisition functions for few-shot learning in MALSC. Our experiments show that VERO outperforms prior methods, achieving an F1 score improvement of up to 6.07% on MALSC benchmark datasets.
Transformer Layers as Painters
Authors: Qi Sun; Marc Pickett; Aakash Kumar Nain; Llion Jones
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood.  We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a pretrained transformer.  Such an understanding could both yield better usage of existing models as well as to make architectural improvements to produce new variants.  We present a series of empirical studies on frozen models that show that the lower and final layers of pretrained transformers differ from middle layers, but that middle layers have a surprising amount of uniformity.  We further show that some classes of problems have robustness to skipping layers, running the layers in an order different from how they were trained, or running the layers in parallel.  Our observations suggest that even frozen pretrained models may gracefully trade accuracy for latency by skipping layers or running layers in parallel.
ExDDI: Explaining Drug-Drug Interaction Predictions with Natural Language
Authors: Zhaoyue Sun; Jiazheng Li; Gabriele Pergola; Yulan He
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Predicting unknown drug-drug interactions (DDIs) is crucial for improving medication safety. Previous efforts in DDI prediction have typically focused on binary classification or predicting DDI categories, with the absence of explanatory insights that could enhance trust in these predictions. In this work, we propose to generate natural language explanations for DDI predictions, enabling the model to reveal the underlying pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics mechanisms simultaneously as making the prediction. To do this, we have collected DDI explanations from DDInter and DrugBank and developed various models for extensive experiments and analysis. Our models can provide accurate explanations for unknown DDIs between known drugs. This paper contributes new tools to the field of DDI prediction and lays a solid foundation for further research on generating explanations for DDI predictions.
Tuning-Free Accountable Intervention for LLM Deployment – a Metacognitive Approach
Authors: Zhen Tan; Jie Peng; Song Wang; Lijie Hu; Tianlong Chen; Huan Liu
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have brought significant advances across various NLP tasks through few-shot or zero-shot prompting, bypassing the need for parameter tuning. However, the "black-box" nature behind their massive parameter sizes increases the "hallucination" concerns, especially in high-stakes applications (e.g., healthcare), where decision mistakes can lead to severe consequences. In contrast, human decision-making relies on complex cognitive processes, such as the ability to sense and adaptively correct mistakes through conceptual understanding. Drawing inspiration from human cognition, we propose an innovative metacognitive approach CLEAR, to equip LLMs with capabilities for self-aware error identification and correction. Our framework constructs concept-specific sparse subnetworks that indicate decision processes. This provides a novel interface for model {intervention} after deployment. The benefits include: (i) at inference time, our metacognitive LLMs can self-consciously identify potential mispredictions with minimum human involvement, (ii) the model can self-correct its errors efficiently without additional tuning, and (iii) the correction procedure is not only self-explanatory but also user-friendly, enhancing model interpretability and accessibility. With these metacognitive features, our approach pioneers a new path toward the trustworthiness of LLMs.
Multi-Grained Query-Guided Set Prediction Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Jielong Tang; Zhenxing Wang; ZiYang Gong; Jianxing Yu; Xiangwei Zhu; Jian Yin
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is an emerging information extraction (IE) task, aiming to simultaneously extract entity spans, types, and corresponding visual regions of entities from given sentence-image pairs data. Recent unified methods employing machine reading comprehension or sequence generation-based frameworks show limitations in this difficult task. The former, utilizing human-designed type queries, struggles to differentiate ambiguous entities, such as Jordan (Person) and off-White x Jordan (Shoes). The latter, following the one-by-one decoding order, suffers from exposure bias issues. We maintain that these works misunderstand the relationships of multimodal entities. To tackle these, we propose a novel unified framework named Multi-grained Query-guided Set Prediction Network (MQSPN) to learn appropriate relationships at intra-entity and inter-entity levels. Specifically, MQSPN explicitly aligns textual entities with visual regions by employing a set of learnable queries to strengthen intra-entity connections. Based on distinct intra-entity modeling, MQSPN reformulates GMNER as a set prediction, guiding models to establish appropriate inter-entity relationships from a optimal global matching perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a query-guided Fusion Net (QFNet) as a glue network to boost better alignment of two-level relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in widely used benchmarks.
Adaptive Few-shot Prompting for Machine Translation with Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Lei Tang; Jinghui Qin; Wenxuan Ye; Hao Tan; Zhijing Yang
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) with in-context learning have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling neural machine translation. However, existing evidence shows that LLMs are prompt-sensitive and it is sub-optimal to apply the fixed prompt to any input for downstream machine translation tasks. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive few-shot prompting (AFSP) framework to automatically select suitable translation demonstrations for various source input sentences to further elicit the translation capability of an LLM for better machine translation. First, we build a translation demonstration retrieval module based on LLM's embedding to retrieve top-k semantic-similar translation demonstrations from aligned parallel translation corpus. Rather than using other embedding models for semantic demonstration retrieval, we build a hybrid demonstration retrieval module based on the embedding layer of the deployed LLM to build better input representation for retrieving more semantic-related translation demonstrations. Then, to ensure better semantic consistency between source inputs and target outputs, we force the deployed LLM itself to generate multiple output candidates in the target language with the help of translation demonstrations and rerank these candidates. Besides, to better evaluate the effectiveness of our AFSP framework on the latest language and extend the research boundary of neural machine translation, we construct a high-quality diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset that consists of 5,528 parallel Chinese-English sentences. Finally, extensive experiments on the proposed diplomatic Chinese-English parallel dataset and the United Nations Parallel Corpus (Chinese-English part) show the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed AFSP.
Unleashing the Potential of Large Language Models as Prompt Optimizers: Analogical Analysis with Gradient-based Model Optimizers
Authors: Xinyu Tang; Xiaolei Wang; Wayne Xin Zhao; Siyuan Lu; Yaliang Li; Ji-Rong Wen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization is an important approach to improving the performance of large language models (LLMs). Recent research demonstrates the potential of using LLMs as prompt optimizers, which can generate improved task prompts via iterative refinement. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective to investigate the design of LLM-based prompt optimizers, by drawing an analogy with gradient-based model optimizers. To connect these two approaches, we identify two pivotal factors in model parameter learning: update direction and update method. By systematically analyzing a rich set of improvement strategies on the two aspects, we further develop a capable Gradient-inspired LLM-based Prompt Optimizer called GPO. At each step, it first retrieves relevant prompts from the optimization trajectory as the update direction. Then, it utilizes the generation-based refinement strategy to perform the update, while controlling the edit distance through a cosine-based decay strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GPO. In particular, GPO brings an additional improvement of up to 56.8% on Big-Bench Hard and 62.6% on MMLU compared to baseline methods.
A Comprehensive Evaluation on Event Reasoning of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhengwei Tao; Zhi Jin; Yifan Zhang; Xiancai Chen; Haiyan Zhao; Jia Li; Bin Liang; Chongyang Tao; Qun Liu; Kam-Fai Wong
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Event reasoning is a fundamental ability that underlies many applications. It requires event schema knowledge to perform global reasoning and needs to deal with the diversity of the inter-event relations and the reasoning paradigms. The extent to which LLMs excel in event reasoning across various relations and reasoning paradigms has not been thoroughly investigated. Additionally, it is still unclear whether LLMs utilize event knowledge in the same way humans do. To mitigate this disparity, we comprehensively evaluate the abilities of event reasoning of LLMs on different relations, paradigms, and levels of abstraction. We introduce a novel benchmark EV2 for EValuation of EVent reasoning. EV2 consists of two levels of evaluation on schema and instance and is comprehensive in relations and reasoning paradigms. We conduct extensive experiments on EV2. We find that 1) LLMs have abilities to accomplish event reasoning but their performances are far from satisfactory. 2) There are imbalances of event reasoning abilities on different relations and paradigms. 3) LLMs have event schema knowledge, however, they're not aligned with humans on how to utilize the knowledge. Based on these findings, we guide the LLMs in utilizing the event schema knowledge as memory leading to improvements in event reasoning.
Few-Shot, No Problem: Descriptive Continual Relation Extraction
Authors: Nguyen Xuan Thanh; Anh Duc Le; Quyen Tran; Thanh-Thien Le; Linh Ngo Van; Thien Huu Nguyen
Venue: AAAI 2025 (main)

Abstract: Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction is a crucial challenge for enabling AI systems to identify and adapt to evolving relationships in dynamic real-world domains. Traditional memory-based approaches often overfit to limited samples, failing to reinforce old knowledge, with the scarcity of data in few-shot scenarios further exacerbating these issues by hindering effective data augmentation in the latent space. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval-based solution, starting with a large language model to generate descriptions for each relation. From these descriptions, we introduce a bi-encoder retrieval training paradigm to enrich both sample and class representation learning. Leveraging these enhanced representations, we design a retrieval-based prediction method where each sample "retrieves" the best fitting relation via a reciprocal rank fusion score that integrates both relation description vectors and class prototypes. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state-of-the-art by maintaining robust performance across sequential tasks, effectively addressing catastrophic forgetting.