GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Beyond Fine-tuning: Unleashing the Potential of Continuous Pretraining for Clinical LLMs.
Authors: Clement Christophe; Tathagata Raha; Svetlana Maslenkova; Muhammad Umar Salman; Praveenkumar Kanithi; Marco AF Pimentel; Shadab Khan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in revolutionizing clinical applications. In this study, we investigate the efficacy of four techniques in adapting LLMs for clinical use-cases: continuous pretraining, instruct fine-tuning, NEFTune, and prompt engineering. We employ these methods on Mistral 7B and Mixtral 8x7B models, leveraging a large-scale clinical pretraining dataset of 50 billion tokens and an instruct fine-tuning dataset of 500 million tokens. Our evaluation across various clinical tasks reveals nuanced insights. While continuous pretraining beyond 250 billion tokens yields marginal improvements, instruct fine-tuning emerges as a more influential factor. Notably, NEFTune, designed primarily to enhance generation quality, surprisingly demonstrates additional gains on our benchmark. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring fine-tuning strategies and exploring innovative techniques to optimize LLM performance in the clinical domain.
MedCare: Advancing Medical LLMs through Decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation
Authors: Yusheng Liao; Shuyang Jiang; Zhe Chen; Yu Wang; Yanfeng Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown substantial progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable especially in the medical field. Despite advancements, challenges persist due to the complexity and diversity inherent in medical tasks, which can be categorized as knowledge-intensive tasks and alignment-required tasks. Previous approaches either ignore the latter task or focus on a minority of tasks and hence lose generalization. To address these drawbacks, we propose a progressive fine-tuning pipeline. This pipeline employs a and a to encode diverse knowledge in the first stage and filter out detrimental information. In the second stage, we drop the to avoid the interference of suboptimal representation and leverage an additional alignment module optimized towards an orthogonal direction to the knowledge space to mitigate knowledge forgetting. Based on this two-stage paradigm, we proposed a Medical LLM through decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation (), which is designed to achieve promising performance on over 20 medical tasks, as well as results on specific medical alignment tasks. Various model sizes of (1.8B, 7B, 14B) all demonstrate significant improvements over existing models with similar model sizes. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/BlueZeros/MedCare.
Interpretable Preferences via Multi-Objective Reward Modeling and Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Haoxiang Wang; Wei Xiong; Tengyang Xie; Han Zhao; Tong Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the primary method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. The RLHF process typically starts by training a reward model (RM) using human preference data. Conventional RMs are trained on pairwise responses to the same user request, with relative ratings indicating which response humans prefer. The trained RM serves as a proxy for human preferences. However, due to the black-box nature of RMs, their outputs lack interpretability, as humans cannot intuitively understand why an RM thinks a response is good or not. As RMs act as human preference proxies, it is desirable for them to be human-interpretable to ensure that their internal decision processes are consistent with human preferences and to prevent reward hacking in LLM alignment. To build RMs with interpretable preferences, we propose a two-stage approach: i) train an Absolute-Rating Multi-Objective Reward Model (ArmoRM) with multi-dimensional absolute-rating data, each dimension corresponding to a human-interpretable objective (e.g., honesty, verbosity, safety); ii) employ a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) strategy with a gating network that automatically selects the most suitable reward objectives based on the context. We efficiently trained an ArmoRM with Llama-3 8B and a gating network consisting of a shallow MLP on top of the ArmoRM. Our trained model, ArmoRM-Llama3-8B, obtains state-of-the-art performance on RewardBench, a benchmark evaluating RMs for language modeling. Notably, the performance of our model surpasses the LLM-as-a-judge method with GPT-4 judges by a margin, and approaches the performance of the much larger Nemotron-4 340B reward model.
Code Membership Inference for Detecting Unauthorized Data Use in Code Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Sheng Zhang; Hui Li; Rongrong Ji
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Code pre-trained language models (CPLMs) have received great attention since they can benefit various tasks that facilitate software development and maintenance. However, CPLMs are trained on massive open-source code, raising concerns about potential data infringement. This paper launches the study of detecting unauthorized code use in CPLMs, i.e., Code Membership Inference (CMI) task. We design a framework Buzzer for different settings of CMI. Buzzer deploys several inference techniques, including signal extraction from pre-training tasks, hard-to-learn sample calibration and weighted inference, to identify code membership status accurately. Extensive experiments show that CMI can be achieved with high accuracy using Buzzer. Hence, Buzzer can serve as a CMI tool and help protect intellectual property rights. The implementation of Buzzer is available at: https://github.com/KDEGroup/Buzzer
Learning When to Retrieve, What to Rewrite, and How to Respond in Conversational QA
Authors: Nirmal Roy; Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro; Rexhina Blloshmi; Kevin Small
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with information retrieval capabilities (i.e., Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)) has proven beneficial for knowledge-intensive tasks. However, understanding users’ contextual search intent when generating responses is an understudied topic for conversational question answering (QA). This conversational extension leads to additional concerns when compared to single-turn QA as it is more challenging for systems to comprehend conversational context and manage retrieved passages over multiple turns. In this work, we propose a method for enabling LLMs to decide when to retrieve in RAG settings given a conversational context. When retrieval is deemed necessary, the LLM then rewrites the conversation for passage retrieval and judges the relevance of returned passages before response generation. Operationally, we build on the single-turn SELF-RAG framework (Asai et al., 2023) and propose SELF-multi-RAG for conversational settings. SELF-multi-RAG demonstrates improved capabilities over single-turn variants with respect to retrieving relevant passages (by using summarized conversational context) and assessing the quality of generated responses. Experiments on three conversational QA datasets validate the enhanced response generation capabilities of SELF-multi-RAG with improvements of ~13% measured by human annotation.
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication
Authors: Weize Chen; Chenfei Yuan; Jiarui Yuan; Yusheng Su; Chen Qian; Cheng Yang; Ruobing Xie; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, and by extension, has been similarly pivotal in the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, besides NL, LLMs have seen various non-NL formats during pre-training, such as code and logical expression. NL’s status as the optimal format for LLMs, particularly in single-LLM reasoning and multi-agent communication, has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we challenge the default use of NL by exploring the utility of non-NL formats in these contexts. We show that allowing LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating leads to a 3.3 to 5.7% improvement in reasoning efficiency for different LLMs, and up to a 72.7% reduction in token usage in multi-agent communication, all while maintaining communicative effectiveness. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that LLMs can devise a format from limited task instructions and that the devised format is effectively transferable across different LLMs. Intriguingly, the structured communication format decided by LLMs exhibits notable parallels with established agent communication languages, suggesting a natural evolution towards efficient, structured communication in agent communication. Our code will be released to facilitate further exploration.
Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents
Authors: Zhengliang Shi; Shen Gao; Xiuyi Chen; Yue Feng; Lingyong Yan; Haibo Shi; Dawei Yin; Pengjie Ren; Suzan Verberne; Zhaochun Ren
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution results into the next action prediction. Despite their progress, these methods suffer from performance degradation when addressing practical tasks due to: (1) the pre-defined pipeline with restricted flexibility to calibrate incorrect actions, and (2) the struggle to adapt a general LLM-based agent to perform a variety of specialized actions. To mitigate these problems, we propose ConAgents, a Cooperative and interactive Agents framework, which coordinates three specialized agents for tool selection, tool execution, and action calibration separately. ConAgents introduces two communication protocols to enable the flexible cooperation of agents. To effectively generalize the ConAgents into open-source models, we also propose specialized action distillation, enhancing their ability to perform specialized actions in our framework. Our extensive experiments on three datasets show that the LLMs, when equipped with the ConAgents, outperform baselines with substantial improvement (i.e., up to 14% higher success rate).
STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset Derived from Real-life Queries by Non-professionals
Authors: Weihang Su; Yiran Hu; Anzhe Xie; Qingyao Ai; Quezi Bing; Ning Zheng; Yun Liu; Weixing Shen; Yiqun Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Statute retrieval aims to find relevant statutory articles for specific queries. This process is the basis of a wide range of legal applications such as legal advice, automated judicial decisions, legal document drafting, etc. Existing statute retrieval benchmarks emphasize formal and professional queries from sources like bar exams and legal case documents, thereby neglecting non-professional queries from the general public, which often lack precise legal terminology and references. To address this gap, we introduce the STAtute Retrieval Dataset (STARD), a Chinese dataset comprising 1,543 query cases collected from real-world legal consultations and 55,348 candidate statutory articles. Unlike existing statute retrieval datasets, which primarily focus on professional legal queries, STARD captures the complexity and diversity of real queries from the general public. Through a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval baselines, we reveal that existing retrieval approaches all fall short of these real queries issued by non-professional users. The best method only achieves a Recall@100 of 0.907, suggesting the necessity for further exploration and additional research in this area.
What if...?: Thinking Counterfactual Keywords Helps to Mitigate Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models
Authors: Junho Kim; Kim Yeonju; Yong Man Ro
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: This paper presents a way of enhancing the reliability of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) in addressing hallucination, where the models generate cross-modal inconsistent responses. Without additional training, we propose Counterfactual Inception, a novel method that implants counterfactual thinking into LMMs using self-generated counterfactual keywords. Our method is grounded in the concept of counterfactual thinking, a cognitive process where human considers alternative realities, enabling more extensive context exploration. Bridging the human cognition mechanism into LMMs, we aim for the models to engage with and generate responses that span a wider contextual scene understanding, mitigating hallucinatory outputs. We further introduce Plausibility Verification Process (PVP), a simple yet robust keyword constraint that effectively filters out sub-optimal keywords to enable the consistent triggering of counterfactual thinking in the model responses. Comprehensive analyses across various LMMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, corroborate that counterfactual thinking significantly reduces hallucination and helps to broaden contextual understanding based on true visual clues.
MELT: Materials-aware Continued Pre-training for Language Model Adaptation to Materials Science
Authors: Junho Kim; Yeachan Kim; Jun-Hyung Park; Yerim Oh; Suho Kim; SangKeun Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: We introduce a novel continued pre-training method, MELT (MatEriaLs-aware continued pre-Training), specifically designed to efficiently adapt the pre-trained language models (PLMs) for materials science. Unlike previous adaptation strategies that solely focus on constructing domain-specific corpus, MELT comprehensively considers both the corpus and the training strategy, given that materials science corpus has distinct characteristics from other domains. To this end, we first construct a comprehensive materials knowledge base from the scientific corpus by building semantic graphs. Leveraging this extracted knowledge, we integrate a curriculum into the adaptation process that begins with familiar and generalized concepts and progressively moves toward more specialized terms. We conduct extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks to verify the effectiveness and generality of MELT. A comprehensive evaluation convincingly supports the strength of MELT, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing continued pre-training methods. In-depth analysis also shows that MELT enables PLMs to effectively represent materials entities compared to the existing adaptation methods, thereby highlighting its broad applicability across a wide spectrum of materials science.
PDF-to-Tree: Parsing PDF Text Blocks into a Tree
Authors: Yue Zhang; Zhihao Zhang; Wenbin Lai; Chong Zhang; Tao Gui; Qi Zhang; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: In many PDF documents, the reading order of text blocks is missing, which can hinder machine understanding of the document’s content.Existing works try to extract one universal reading order for a PDF file.However, applications, like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), require breaking long articles into sections and subsections for better indexing.For this reason, this paper introduces a new task and dataset, PDF-to-Tree, which organizes the text blocks of a PDF into a tree structure.Since a PDF may contain thousands of text blocks, far exceeding the number of words in a sentence, this paper proposes a transition-based parser that uses a greedy strategy to build the tree structure.Compared to parser for plain text, we also use multi-modal features to encode the parser state.Experiments show that our approach achieves an accuracy of 93.93%, surpassing the performance of baseline methods by an improvement of 6.72%.
Seeing Through VisualBERT: A Causal Adventure on Memetic Landscapes
Authors: Dibyanayan Bandyopadhyay; Mohammed Hasanuzzaman; Asif Ekbal
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Detecting offensive memes is crucial, yet standard deep neural network systems often remain opaque. Various input attribution-based methods attempt to interpret their behavior, but they face challenges with implicitly offensive memes and non-causal attributions. To address these issues, we propose a framework based on a Structural Causal Model (SCM). In this framework, VisualBERT is trained to predict the class of an input meme based on both meme input and causal concepts, allowing for transparent interpretation. Our qualitative evaluation demonstrates the framework’s effectiveness in understanding model behavior, particularly in determining whether the model was right due to the right reason, and in identifying reasons behind misclassification. Additionally, quantitative analysis assesses the significance of proposed modelling choices, such as de-confounding, adversarial learning, and dynamic routing, and compares them with input attribution methods. Surprisingly, we find that input attribution methods do not guarantee causality within our framework, raising questions about their reliability in safety-critical applications. The project page is at: https://newcodevelop.github.io/causality_adventure/
Cross-Lingual Unlearning of Selective Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models
Authors: Minseok Choi; Kyunghyun Min; Jaegul Choo
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Pretrained language models memorize vast amounts of information, including private and copyrighted data, raising significant safety concerns. Retraining these models after excluding sensitive data is prohibitively expensive, making machine unlearning a viable, cost-effective alternative. Previous research has focused on machine unlearning for monolingual models, but we find that unlearning in one language does not necessarily transfer to others. This vulnerability makes models susceptible to low-resource language attacks, where sensitive information remains accessible in less dominant languages. This paper presents a pioneering approach to machine unlearning for multilingual language models, selectively erasing information across different languages while maintaining overall performance. Specifically, our method employs an adaptive unlearning scheme that assigns language-dependent weights to address different language performances of multilingual language models. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared to existing unlearning baselines, setting a new standard for secure and adaptable multilingual language models.
LLaMAX: Scaling Linguistic Horizons of LLM by Enhancing Translation Capabilities Beyond 100 Languages
Authors: Yinquan Lu; Wenhao Zhu; Lei Li; Yu Qiao; Fei Yuan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable translation capabilities in high-resource language tasks, yet their performance in low-resource languages is hindered by insufficient multilingual data during pre-training. To address this, we conduct extensive multilingual continual pre-training on the LLaMA series models, enabling translation support across more than 100 languages. Through a comprehensive analysis of training strategies, such as vocabulary expansion and data augmentation, we develop LLaMAX. Remarkably, without sacrificing its generalization ability, LLaMAX achieves significantly higher translation performance compared to existing open-source LLMs (by more than 10 spBLEU points) and performs on-par with specialized translation model (M2M-100-12B) on the Flores-101 benchmark. Extensive experiments indicate that LLaMAX can serve as a robust multilingual foundation model. The code and the models are publicly available.
Enhancing Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations via Center Event Detection and Reasoning
Authors: Botao Wang; Keke Tang; Peican Zhu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (ECPEC) aims to identify emotion utterances and their corresponding cause utterances in unannotated conversations, this task that has garnered increasing attention recently. Previous methods often apply Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) task models, treating the entire conversation as a whole for contextual interaction. However, statistical analysis shows that the number of emotion-cause pairs in ECPEC conversation data far exceeds that in ECPE datasets, leading to interference among multiple events within a conversation and causing noise to propagate between different events. To address this issue, we propose a novel CEnter eveNT-guided framEwoRk (CENTER). This model introduces a Center Event Detection task to construct a center event-aware graph that captures the unique representations of different event regions. Additionally, mimicking human reasoning processes, we build a center event reasoning graph and use graph neural network to facilitate the flow of information between utterance pairs, thereby uncovering the relationships between emotions and their causes. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across three benchmark datasets.
Light-weight Fine-tuning Method for Defending Adversarial Noise in Pre-trained Medical Vision-Language Models
Authors: Xu Han; Linghao Jin; Xuezhe Ma; Xiaofeng Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has shown remarkable capabilities in medical image and textual depiction synergy. Nevertheless, many pre-training datasets are restricted by patient privacy concerns, potentially containing noise that can adversely affect downstream performance. Moreover, the growing reliance on multi-modal generation exacerbates this issue because of its susceptibility to adversarial attacks. To investigate how VLMs trained on adversarial noisy data perform on downstream medical tasks, we first craft noisy upstream datasets using multi-modal adversarial attacks. Through our comprehensive analysis, we unveil that moderate noise enhances model robustness and transferability, but increasing noise levels negatively impact downstream task performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose rectify adversarial noise (RAN) framework, a recipe designed to effectively defend adversarial attacks and rectify the influence of upstream noise during fine-tuning.