GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
mOthello: When Do Cross-Lingual Representation Alignment and Cross-Lingual Transfer Emerge in Multilingual Models?
Authors: Tianze Hua; Tian Yun; Ellie Pavlick
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Many pretrained multilingual models exhibit cross-lingual transfer ability, which is often attributed to a learned language-neutral representation during pretraining. However, it remains unclear what factors contribute to the learning of a language-neutral representation, and whether the learned language-neutral representation suffices to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. We propose a synthetic task, Multilingual Othello (mOthello), as a testbed to delve into these two questions. We find that: (1) models trained with naive multilingual pretraining fail to learn a language-neutral representation across all input languages; (2) the introduction of “anchor tokens” (i.e., lexical items that are identical across languages) helps cross-lingual representation alignment; and (3) the learning of a language-neutral representation alone is not sufficient to facilitate cross-lingual transfer. Based on our findings, we propose a novel approach – multilingual pretraining with unified output space – that both induces the learning of language-neutral representation and facilitates cross-lingual transfer.
Discovering and Mitigating Indirect Bias in Attention-Based Model Explanations
Authors: Farsheed Haque; Depeng Xu; Shuhan Yuan
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: As the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) increasingly adopts transformer-based models, the issue of bias becomes more pronounced. Such bias, manifesting through stereotypes and discriminatory practices, can disadvantage certain groups. Our study focuses on direct and indirect bias in the model explanations, where the model makes predictions relying heavily on identity tokens or associated contexts. We present a novel analysis of bias in model explanation, especially the subtle indirect bias, underlining the limitations of traditional fairness metrics. We first define direct and indirect bias in model explanations, which is complementary to fairness in predictions. We then develop an indirect bias discovery algorithm for quantitatively evaluating indirect bias in transformer models using their in-built self-attention matrix. We also propose an indirect bias mitigation algorithm to ensure fairness in transformer models by leveraging attention explanations. Our evaluation shows the significance of indirect bias and the effectiveness of our indirect bias discovery and mitigation.
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data
Authors: Ziyi Yang; Mahmoud Khademi; Yichong Xu; Reid Pryzant; Yuwei Fang; Chenguang Zhu; Dongdong Chen; Yao Qian; Xuemei Gao; Yi-Ling Chen; Robert Gmyr; Naoyuki Kanda; Noel Codella; Bin Xiao; Yu Shi; Lu Yuan; Takuya Yoshioka; Michael Zeng; Xuedong Huang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: The convergence of text, visual, and audio data is crucial towards human-like artificial intelligence, however the current Vision-Language-Speech landscape is dominated by encoder-only models that lack generative abilities. We propose closing this gap with i-Code V2, one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. i-Code V2 leverages state-of-the-art single-modality encoders, combining their outputs with a new modality-fusing encoder to project combinations of modalities into a shared representational space. Language tokens are generated from these representations via an autoregressive decoder. i-Code V2 is pretrained end-to-end on a large collection of dual- and single-modality datasets with a novel text completion objective that can be generalized across arbitrary combinations of modalities. i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks, demonstrating the power of generative multimodal pretraining across a diversity of tasks and signals.
Think While You Write: Hypothesis Verification Promotes Faithful Knowledge-to-Text Generation
Authors: Yifu Qiu; Varun Embar; Shay B. Cohen; Benjamin Han
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Knowledge-to-text generators often struggle to faithfully generate descriptions for the input facts: they may produce hallucinations that contradict the input, or describe facts not present in the input. To reduce hallucinations, we propose a decoding-only method, TWEAK (Think While Effectively Articulating Knowledge), which can be integrated with any generator without retraining. TWEAK treats the generated sequences at each decoding step and its future sequences as hypotheses, and ranks each generation candidate based on the extent to which their hypotheses are supported by the input facts using a Hypothesis Verification Model (HVM). We first demonstrate the effectiveness of TWEAK by using a Natural Language Inference (NLI) model as the HVM and report improved faithfulness with a minimal impact on the quality. We then replace the NLI model with a task-specific HVM trained with a first-of-a-kind dataset, FATE (Fact-Aligned Textual Entailment), which pairs input facts with their original and perturbed descriptions. We test TWEAK with two generators, and the best TWEAK variants improve on average for the two models by 2.24/7.17 points in faithfulness (FactKB) in in/out-of-distribution evaluations, respectively, and with only a 0.14/0.32-point decline in quality (BERTScore).
It’s All Relative! – A Synthetic Query Generation Approach for Improving Zero-Shot Relevance Prediction
Authors: Aditi Chaudhary; Karthik Raman; Michael Bendersky
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising ability to generate synthetic query-document pairs by prompting with as few as 8 demonstrations. This has enabled building better IR models, especially for tasks with no training data. Typically, such synthetic query generation (QGen) approaches condition on an input context (e.g. a text document) and generate a query relevant to that context, or condition the QGen additionally on the relevance label (e.g. relevant vs irrelevant) to generate queries across relevance buckets. However, we find that such QGen approaches are sub-optimal as they require the model to reason about the desired label and the input from a handful of examples. In this work, we propose to reduce this burden of LLMs by generating queries simultaneously for different labels. We hypothesize that instead of asking the model to generate, say, an irrelevant query given an input context, asking the model to generate an irrelevant query relative to a relevant query is a much simpler task. Extensive experimentation across nine IR datasets shows that synthetic queries generated in such a fashion translates to better downstream performance.
RS-DPO: A Hybrid Rejection Sampling and Direct Preference Optimization Method for Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Saeed Khaki; JinJin Li; Lan Ma; Liu Yang; Prathap Ramachandra
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been extensively employed to align large language models with user intent. However, proximal policy optimization (PPO) based RLHF is occasionally unstable requiring significant hyperparameter finetuning, and computationally expensive to maximize the estimated reward during alignment. Recently, direct preference optimization (DPO) is proposed to address those challenges. However, DPO often relies on contrastive responses generated from human annotator and alternative LLM, instead of the policy model, limiting the effectiveness of the RLHF. In this paper, we addresses both challenges by systematically combining rejection sampling (RS) and DPO. Our proposed method, RS-DPO, initiates with the development of a supervised fine-tuned policy model (SFT). A varied set of k responses per prompt are sampled directly from the SFT model. RS-DPO identifies pairs of contrastive samples based on their reward distribution. Finally, we apply DPO with the contrastive samples to align the model to human preference. Our experiments indicate that our proposed method effectively fine-tunes LLMs with limited resource environments, leading to improved alignment with user intent. Furthermore, it outperforms existing methods, including RS, PPO, and DPO.
Hypernetwork-Assisted Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Meta-Knowledge Distillation for Domain Knowledge Disentanglement
Authors: Changqun Li; Linlin Wang; Xin Lin; Shizhou Huang; Liang He
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Domain adaptation from labeled source domains to the target domain is important in practical summarization scenarios. However, the key challenge is domain knowledge disentanglement. In this work, we explore how to disentangle domain-invariant knowledge from source domains while learning specific knowledge of the target domain. Specifically, we propose a hypernetwork-assisted encoder-decoder architecture with parameter-efficient fine-tuning. It leverages a hypernetwork instruction learning module to generate domain-specific parameters from the encoded inputs accompanied by task-related instruction. Further, to better disentangle and transfer knowledge from source domains to the target domain, we introduce a meta-knowledge distillation strategy to build a meta-teacher model that captures domain-invariant knowledge across multiple domains and use it to transfer knowledge to students. Experiments on three dialogue summarization datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed model. Human evaluations also show the superiority of our model with regard to the summary generation quality.
MICo: Preventative Detoxification of Large Language Models through Inhibition Control
Authors: Roy Siegelmann; Ninareh Mehrabi; Palash Goyal; Prasoon Goyal; Lisa Bauer; Jwala Dhamala; Aram Galstyan; Rahul Gupta; Reza Ghanadan
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools which have been both dominant and commonplace in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Yet, LLMs have a tendency to devolve into toxic degeneration, wherein otherwise safe and unproblematic models begin generating toxic content. For the sake of social responsibility and inspired by the biological mechanisms of inhibition control, we introduce the paradigm of Education for Societal Norms (ESN). By collecting and labeling examples as acceptable and unacceptable (in this case toxic and non-toxic), and including a corresponding acceptable rewrite with every unacceptable example, we introduce a new mechanism for LLM detoxification. We annotate a dataset of 2,850 entries and use it to fine-tune a model, which we call a Model with Inhibition Control (MICo). Evaluating this model on toxicity detection capability, rewrite detoxification, meaning preservation, and overall toxicity reduction, we discover significant improvements over the baseline model. In our experiments we show that overall toxicity of this model is more than 60% reduced, with over 75% reduction in severe toxicity.
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation
Authors: Wendi Li; Wei Wei; Kaihe Xu; Wenfeng Xie; Dangyang Chen; Yu Cheng
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: To meet the requirements of real-world applications, it is essential to control generations of large language models (LLMs). Prior research has tried to introduce reinforcement learning (RL) into controllable text generation while most existing methods suffer from overfitting issues (finetuning-based methods) or semantic collapse (post-processing methods). However, current RL methods are generally guided by coarse-grained (sentence/paragraph-level) feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. To tackle that, we propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm named TOLE which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation, and employs a “first-quantize-then-noise” paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. Furthermore, TOLE can be flexibly extended to multiple constraints with little computational expense. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve superior performance on both single-attribute and multi-attribute control tasks. We have released our codes at https://github.com/WindyLee0822/CTG.
CoMM: Collaborative Multi-Agent, Multi-Reasoning-Path Prompting for Complex Problem Solving
Authors: Pei Chen; Shuai Zhang; Boran Han
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great ability in solving traditional natural language tasks and elementary reasoning tasks with appropriate prompting techniques. However, their ability is still limited in solving complicated science problems. In this work, we aim to push the upper bound of the reasoning capability of LLMs by proposing a collaborative multi-agent, multi-reasoning-path (CoMM) prompting framework. Specifically, we prompt LLMs to play different roles in a problem-solving team, and encourage different role-play agents to collaboratively solve the target task. In particular, we discover that applying different reasoning paths for different roles is an effective strategy to implement few-shot prompting approaches in the multi-agent scenarios. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods on two college-level science problems over competitive baselines. Our further analysis shows the necessity of prompting LLMs to play different roles or experts independently.
Tokenization Matters: Navigating Data-Scarce Tokenization for Gender Inclusive Language Technologies
Authors: Anaelia Ovalle; Ninareh Mehrabi; Palash Goyal; Jwala Dhamala; Kai-Wei Chang; Richard Zemel; Aram Galstyan; Yuval Pinter; Rahul Gupta
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Gender-inclusive NLP research has documented the harmful limitations of gender binary-centric large language models (LLM), such as the inability to correctly use gender-diverse English neopronouns (e.g., xe, zir, fae). While data scarcity is a known culprit, the precise mechanisms through which scarcity affects this behavior remain underexplored. We discover LLM misgendering is significantly influenced by Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization, the tokenizer powering many popular LLMs. Unlike binary pronouns, BPE overfragments neopronouns, a direct consequence of data scarcity during tokenizer training. This disparate tokenization mirrors tokenizer limitations observed in multilingual and low-resource NLP, unlocking new misgendering mitigation strategies. We propose two techniques: (1) pronoun tokenization parity, a method to enforce consistent tokenization across gendered pronouns, and (2) utilizing pre-existing LLM pronoun knowledge to improve neopronoun proficiency. Our proposed methods outperform finetuning with standard BPE, improving neopronoun accuracy from 14.1% to 58.4%. Our paper is the first to link LLM misgendering to tokenization and deficient neopronoun grammar, indicating that LLMs unable to correctly treat neopronouns as pronouns are more prone to misgender.
AdaPT: A Set of Guidelines for Hyperbolic Multimodal Multilingual NLP
Authors: Ramit Sawhney; Shrey Pandit; Vishwa Shah; Megh Thakkar; Shafiq Joty
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: The Euclidean space is the familiar space for training neural models and performing arithmetic operations.However, many data types inherently possess complex geometries, and model training methods involve operating over their latent representations, which cannot be effectively captured in the Euclidean space.The hyperbolic space provides a more generalized representative geometry to model the hierarchical complexities of the tree-like structure of natural language.We propose AdaPT a set of guidelines for initialization, parametrization, and training of neural networks, which adapts to the dataset and can be used with different manifolds. AdaPT can be generalized over any existing neural network training methodology and leads to more stable training without a substantial increase in training time.We apply AdaPT guidelines over two state-of-the-art deep learning approaches and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on three tasks over 12 languages across speech and text.Through extensive qualitative analysis, we put forward the applicability of AdaPT as a set of guidelines optimally utilizing the manifold geometry, which can be extended to various downstream tasks across languages and modalities.
More Samples or More Prompts? Exploring Effective Few-Shot In-Context Learning for LLMs with In-Context Sampling
Authors: Bingsheng Yao; Guiming Chen; Ruishi Zou; Yuxuan Lu; Jiachen Li; Shao Zhang; Yisi Sang; Sijia Liu; James Hendler; Dakuo Wang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: While most existing works on LLM prompting techniques focus only on how to select a better set of data samples inside one single prompt input (In-Context Learning or ICL), why can not we design and leverage multiple prompts together to further improve the LLM’s performance? In this work, we propose In-Context Sampling (ICS), a low-resource LLM prompting technique to produce confident predictions by optimizing the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs. Extensive experiments with three open-source LLMs (FlanT5-XL, Mistral-7B, and Mixtral-8x7B) on four NLI datasets (e-SNLI, Multi-NLI, ANLI, and Contract-NLI) and one QA dataset (CommonsenseQA) illustrate that ICS can consistently enhance LLMs’ performance. An in-depth evaluation with three data similarity-based ICS strategies suggests that these strategies can further elevate LLM’s performance, which sheds light on a new yet promising future research direction.
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform
Authors: Song He; Xin Peng; Yihan Cai; Xin Li; Zhiqing Yuan; WenLi Du; Weimin Yang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Automated synthesis of zeolite, one of the most important catalysts in chemical industries, holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. Structural synthesis data extracted through NLP technologies from zeolite experimental procedures can significantly expedite automated synthesis owing to its machine readability. However, the utilization of NLP technologies in information extraction of zeolite synthesis remains restricted due to the lack of annotated datasets. In this paper, we formulate an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. Furthermore, we introduce ZSEE, a novel dataset containing fine-grained event annotations of zeolite synthesis actions. Our dataset features 16 event types and 13 argument roles which cover all the experimental operational steps of zeolite synthesis. We explore current state-of-the-art event extraction methods on ZSEE, perform error analysis based on the experimental results, and summarize the challenges and corresponding research directions to further facilitate the automated synthesis of zeolites. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hi-0317/ZSEE.
Mitigating Hallucination in Abstractive Summarization with Domain-Conditional Mutual Information
Authors: Kyubyung Chae; Jaepill Choi; Yohan Jo; Taesup Kim
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: A primary challenge in abstractive summarization is hallucination—the phenomenon where a model generates plausible text that is absent in the source text. We hypothesize that the domain (or topic) of the source text triggers the model to generate text that is highly probable in the domain, neglecting the details of the source text. To alleviate this model bias, we introduce a decoding strategy based on domain-conditional pointwise mutual information. This strategy adjusts the generation probability of each token by comparing it with the token’s marginal probability within the domain of the source text. According to evaluation on the XSUM dataset, our method demonstrates improvement in terms of faithfulness and source relevance.
Adversarial DPO: Harnessing Harmful Data for Reducing Toxicity with Minimal Impact on Coherence and Evasiveness in Dialogue Agents
Authors: San Kim; Gary Lee
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Recent advancements in open-domain dialogue systems have been propelled by the emergence of high-quality large language models (LLMs) and various effective training methodologies. Nevertheless, the presence of toxicity within these models presents a significant challenge that can potentially diminish the user experience. In this study, we introduce an innovative training algorithm, an improvement upon direct preference optimization (DPO), called adversarial DPO (ADPO). The ADPO algorithm is designed to train models to assign higher probability distributions to preferred responses and lower distributions to unsafe responses, which are self-generated using the toxic control token. We demonstrate that ADPO enhances the model’s resilience against harmful conversations while minimizing performance degradation. Furthermore, we illustrate that ADPO offers a more stable training procedure compared to the traditional DPO. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first adaptation of the DPO algorithm that directly incorporates harmful data into the generative model, thereby reducing the need to artificially create safe dialogue data.
Prompt Space Optimizing Few-shot Reasoning Success with Large Language Models
Authors: Fobo Shi; Peijun Qing; Dong Yang; Nan Wang; Youbo Lei; Haonan Lu; Xiaodong Lin; Duantengchuan Li
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. It enables LLMs to excel in various tasks, such as arithmetic reasoning, question answering, summarization, relation extraction, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. Researchers have been actively exploring different prompt engineering strategies, such as Chain of Thought (CoT), Zero-CoT, and In-context learning. However, an unresolved problem arises from the fact that current approaches lack a solid mathematical solution for determining optimal prompts. To address this issue in prompt engineering, we propose a new and effective approach called Prompt Space. Our methodology utilizes text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition, and then constructs a space for representing all prompts. Prompt Space significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. Notably, without the help of the CoT method and the prompt “Let’s think step by step”, Prompt Space shows superior performance over the few-shot method. Overall, our approach provides a robust and effective mathematical framework for selecting simple and effective prompts. This advancement marks a significant step towards improving prompt engineering for a wide variety of applications in LLMs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YouBLEI/Prompt-Space