mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking
Authors: Zijun Yao, Jing Zhang, Kaifeng Yun, Jifan Yu, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang Xiaokang Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper proposes PiNose, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PiNose reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification. Additionally, it examines various aspects of internal states prior to response decoding, contributing to more effective detection of factual inaccuracies. Experiment results on both factuality detection and question answering benchmarks show that PiNose achieves surpassing results than existing factuality detection methods.
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis.
Authors: Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell Jiaoda Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering the theories underpinning ICL. One popular hypothesis explains ICL by task selection. LLMs identify the task based on the demonstration and generalize it to the prompt. Another popular hypothesis is that ICL is a form of meta-learning, i.e., the models learn a learning algorithm at pre-training time and apply it to the demonstration. Finally, a third hypothesis argues that LLMs use the demonstration to select a composition of tasks learned during pre-training to perform ICL. In this paper, we empirically explore these three hypotheses that explain LLMs' ability to learn in context with a suite of experiments derived from common text classification tasks. We invalidate the first two hypotheses with counterexamples and provide evidence in support of the last hypothesis. Our results suggest an LLM could learn a novel task in context via composing tasks learned during pre-training.
Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents
Authors: Faeze Brahman, Abhilasha Ravichander, Khyathi Chandu, Kai-Wei Chang, Yejin Choi, Bill Yuchen Lin Da Yin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Closed-source agents suffer from several issues such as a lack of affordability, transparency, and reproducibility, particularly on complex interactive tasks. This motivates the development of open-source alternatives. We introduce Lumos, one of the first frameworks for training open-source LLM-based agents. Lumos features a learnable, unified and modular architecture with a planning module that learns high-level subgoal generation, and a grounding module trained to translate these into the actions using various tools in the execution module. The design allows for modular upgrades and wider applicability to diverse interactive tasks. To foster generalizable agent learning, we collect large-scale, unified, and high-quality training annotations derived from diverse ground-truth reasoning rationales across various complex interactive tasks. On 9 datasets, Lumos exhibits several key advantages: (1) Lumos excels multiple larger open-source agents on the held-out datasets (unused for training) for each task type. Lumos even surpasses GPT agents on QA and web tasks; (2) Lumos outperforms open-source agents produced by chain-of-thoughts and unmodularized integrated training; and (3) Lumos effectively generalizes to unseen tasks, outperforming 33B-scale agents and domain-specific agents. Code and data will be released.
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Muhammad ElNokrashy, Mai Alkhamissi, Mona Diab Badr AlKhamissi
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions---firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.
More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero`s Diplomacy Play
Authors: Feng Gu, Yanze Wang, Ulf Hermjakob, Jonathan May, Brandon M. Stewart, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Denis Peskoff, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber Wichayaporn Wongkamjan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI`s difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.
VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild
Authors: Po-Yao Huang, Shang-Wen Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath Puyuan Peng
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce VoiceCraft, a token infilling neural codec language model, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both speech editing and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) on audiobooks, internet videos, and podcasts. VoiceCraft employs a Transformer decoder architecture and introduces a token rearrangement procedure that combines causal masking and delayed stacking to enable generation within an existing sequence. On speech editing tasks, VoiceCraft produces edited speech that is nearly indistinguishable from unedited recordings in terms of naturalness, as evaluated by humans; for zero-shot TTS, our model outperforms prior SotA models including VALL-E and the popular commercial model XTTS v2. Crucially, the models are evaluated on challenging and realistic datasets, that consist of diverse accents, speaking styles, recording conditions, and background noise and music, and our model performs consistently well compared to other models and real recordings. In particular, for speech editing evaluation, we introduce a high quality, challenging, and realistic dataset named . We encourage readers to listen to the demos at https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceCraft_web. Data, code, and model weights are available at https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft
RAID: A Shared Benchmark for Robust Evaluation of Machine-Generated Text Detectors
Authors: Alyssa Hwang, Filip Trhlík, Andrew Zhu, Josh Magnus Ludan, Hainiu Xu, Daphne Ippolito, Chris Callison-Burch Liam Dugan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Many commercial and open-source models claim to detect machine-generated text with extremely high accuracy (99% or more). However, very few of these detectors are evaluated on shared benchmark datasets and even when they are, the datasets used for evaluation are insufficiently challenging---lacking variations in sampling strategy, adversarial attacks, and open-source generative models. In this work we present RAID: the largest and most challenging benchmark dataset for machine-generated text detection. RAID includes over 6 million generations spanning 11 models, 8 domains, 11 adversarial attacks and 4 decoding strategies. Using RAID, we evaluate the out-of-domain and adversarial robustness of 8 open- and 4 closed-source detectors and find that current detectors are easily fooled by adversarial attacks, variations in sampling strategies, repetition penalties, and unseen generative models. We release our data along with a leaderboard to encourage future research.
Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles
Authors: Michela Marchini, Rijul Magu, Caleb Ziems, David Muchlinski, Diyi Yang Julia Kruk
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability. In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.
On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Anej Svete, Alexandra Butoi, Ryan Cotterell Franz Nowak
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this improvement is that CoT reasoning extends an LM`s computational power, as RNNs and transformers with additional scratch space are known to be Turing complete. Comparing LMs to Turing machines, however, introduces a category error---Turing machines decide language membership, whereas LMs define distributions over strings. To bridge this gap, we formalize CoT reasoning in a probabilistic setting. We present several results on the representational capacity of recurrent and transformer LMs with CoT reasoning, showing that they can represent the same family of distributions over strings as probabilistic Turing machines.
Analyzing LLM Behavior in Dialogue Summarization: Unveiling Circumstantial Hallucination Trends
Authors: Elisa Ferracane, Zachary Lipton Sanjana Ramprasad
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the capabilities of summarization systems.However, they continue to face a persistent challenge: hallucination. While prior work has extensively examined LLMs in news domains, evaluation of dialogue summarization has primarily focused on BART-based models, resulting in a notable gap in understanding LLM effectiveness.Our work seeks to address this gap by benchmarking LLMs for dialogue summarization faithfulness using human annotations,focusing on identifying and categorizing span-level inconsistencies.Specifically, we evaluate two prominent LLMs: GPT-4 and Alpaca-13B.Our evaluation reveals that LLMs often generate plausible, but not fully supported inferences based on conversation contextual cues, a trait absent in older models. As a result, we propose a refined taxonomy of errors, introducing a novel category termed “Contextual Inference” to address this aspect of LLM behavior. Using our taxonomy, we compare the behavioral differences between LLMs and older fine-tuned models. Additionally, we systematically assess the efficacy of automatic error detection methods on LLM summaries and find that they struggle to detect these nuanced errors effectively. To address this, we introduce two prompt-based approaches for fine-grained error detection. Our methods outperform existing metrics, particularly in identifying the novel “Contextual Inference” error type.
LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory
Authors: Seyed Iman Mirzadeh, Dmitry Belenko, S. Khatamifard, Minsik Cho, Carlo C Del Mundo, Mohammad Rastegari, Mehrdad Farajtabar Keivan Alizadeh
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are central to modern natural language processing, delivering exceptional performance in various tasks. However, their substantial computational and memory requirements present challenges, especially for devices with limited DRAM capacity. This paper tackles the challenge of efficiently running LLMs that exceed the available DRAM capacity by storing the model parameters in flash memory, but bringing them on demand to DRAM. Our method involves constructing an inference cost model that takes into account the characteristics of flash memory, guiding us to optimize in two critical areas: reducing the volume of data transferred from flash and reading data in larger, more contiguous chunks. Within this hardware-informed framework, we introduce two principal techniques. First, “windowing” strategically reduces data transfer by reusing previously activated neurons, and second, “row-column bundling”, tailored to the sequential data access strengths of flash memory, increases the size of data chunks read from flash memory. These methods collectively enable running models up to twice the size of the available DRAM, with a 4-5x and 20-25x increase in inference speed compared to naive loading approaches in CPU and GPU, respectively. Our integration of sparsity awareness, context-adaptive loading, and a hardware-oriented design paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory.
Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models
Authors: Hanoona Rasheed, Salman Khan, Fahad Khan Muhammad Maaz
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Conversation agents fueled by Large Language Models (LLMs) are providing a new way to interact with visual data. While there have been initial attempts for image-based conversation models, this work addresses the under-explored field of \textitvideo-based conversation by introducing Video-ChatGPT. It is a multimodal model that merges a video-adapted visual encoder with an LLM. The resulting model is capable of understanding and generating detailed conversations about videos. We introduce a new dataset of 100,000 video-instruction pairs used to train Video-ChatGPT acquired via manual and semi-automated pipeline that is easily scalable and robust to label noise. We also develop a quantitative evaluation framework for video-based dialogue models to objectively analyze the strengths and weaknesses of video-based dialogue models. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Video-ChatGPT.
To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Karima Kadaoui, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Abdul Waheed
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Arabic is known to present unique challengesfor Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Onone hand, its rich linguistic diversity andwide range of dialects complicate the de-velopment of robust, inclusive models. Onthe other, current multilingual ASR modelsare compute-intensive and lack proper com-prehensive evaluations. In light of thesechallenges, we distill knowledge from largeteacher models into smaller student variantsthat more efficient. We also introduce a novelhuman-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. Wefurther evaluate both our models and existingSoTA multilingual models on both standardavailable benchmarks and our new dialectaldata. Our best-distilled model`s overall perfor-mance (45.0% WER) surpasses that of a SoTAmodel twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2,WER=47.0%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=55.1%), and its average perfor-mance on our new dialectal data (56.9% WER)outperforms all other models. To gain more in-sight into the poor performance of these modelson dialectal data, we conduct an error analysisand report the main types of errors the differentmodels tend to make. The GitHub repositoryfor the project is available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar.
LayerSkip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decoding
Authors: Akshat Shrivastava, Diana Liskovich, Basil Hosmer, Bram Wasti, Liangzhen Lai, Anas Mahmoud, Bilge Acun, Saurabh Agarwal, Ahmed Roman, Ahmed Aly, Beidi Chen, Carole-Jean Wu Mostafa Elhoushi
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We present LayerSkip, an end-to-end solution to speed-up inference of large language models (LLMs). First, during training we apply layer dropout, with low dropout rates for earlier layers and higher dropout rates for later layers, and an early exit loss where all transformer layers share the same exit. Second, during inference, we show that this training recipe increases the accuracy of early exit at earlier layers, without adding any auxiliary layers or modules to the model. Third, we present a novel self-speculative decoding solution where we exit at early layers and verify and correct with remaining layers of the model. Our proposed self-speculative decoding approach has less memory footprint than other speculative decoding approaches and benefits from shared compute and activations of the draft and verification stages. We run experiments on different Llama model sizes on different types of training: pretraining from scratch, continual pretraining, finetuning on specific data domain, and finetuning on specific task. We implement our inference solution and show speedups of up to 2.16x on summarization for CNN/DM documents, 1.82x on coding, and 2.0x on TOPv2 semantic parsing task. We open source our code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LayerSkip.
Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP
Authors: Giuseppe Attanasio, Zeerak Talat, Dirk Hovy Amanda Cercas Curry
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The field of sociolinguistics has studied factors affecting language use for the last century. Labov (1964) and Bernstein (1960) showed that socioeconomic class strongly influences our accents, syntax and lexicon. However, despite growing concerns surrounding fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP), there is a dearth of studies delving into the effects it may have on NLP systems. We show empirically that NLP systems' performance is affected by speakers' SES, potentially disadvantaging less-privileged socioeconomic groups. We annotate a corpus of 95K utterances from movies with social class, ethnicity and geographical language variety and measure the performance of NLP systems on three tasks: language modelling, automatic speech recognition, and grammar error correction. We find significant performance disparities that can be attributed to socioeconomic status as well as ethnicity and geographical differences. With NLP technologies becoming ever more ubiquitous and quotidian, they must accommodate all language varieties to avoid disadvantaging already marginalised groups. We argue for the inclusion of socioeconomic class in future language technologies.
ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages
Authors: Yufeng Du, Siru Ouyang, Ming Zhong, Tingfeng Luo, Qirong Ho, Hao Peng, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han Xianrui Zhong
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Extraction of experimental procedures from human language in scientific literature and patents into actionable sequences in robotics language holds immense significance in scientific domains. Such an action extraction task is particularly challenging given the intricate details and context-dependent nature of the instructions, especially in fields like chemistry where reproducibility is paramount. In this paper, we introduce ActionIE, a method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this divide by converting actions written in natural language into executable Python code. This enables us to capture the entities of interest, and the relationship between each action, given the features of Programming Languages. Utilizing linguistic cues identified by frequent patterns, ActionIE provides an improved mechanism to discern entities of interest. While our method is broadly applicable, we exemplify its power in the domain of chemical literature, wherein we focus on extracting experimental procedures for chemical synthesis. The code generated by our method can be easily transformed into robotics language which is in high demand in scientific fields. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, we propose a graph-based metric to more accurately reflect the precision of extraction. We also develop a dataset to address the scarcity of scientific literature occurred in existing datasets.
A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech
Authors: Rynaa Grover, Jiawei Zhou, Binny Mathew, Jordan Kraemer, Munmun Choudhury, Srijan Kumar Gaurav Verma
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Violence-provoking speech -- speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous works have characterized and built tools for detecting other forms of harmful speech, like fear speech and hate speech, our work takes a community-centric approach to studying anti-Asian violence-provoking speech. Using data from ~420k Twitter posts spanning a 3-year duration (January 1, 2020 to February 1, 2023), we develop a codebook to characterize anti-Asian violence-provoking speech and collect a community-crowdsourced dataset to facilitate its large-scale detection using state-of-the-art classifiers. We contrast the capabilities of natural language processing classifiers, ranging from BERT-based to LLM-based classifiers, in detecting violence-provoking speech with their capabilities to detect anti-Asian hateful speech. In contrast to prior work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of such classifiers in detecting hateful speech ($F_1$ = 0.89), our work shows that accurate and reliable detection of violence-provoking speech is a challenging task ($F_1$ = 0.69). We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly the need for proactive interventions to support Asian communities during public health crises.
Retaining Key Information under High Compression Ratios: Query-Guided Compressor for LLMs
Authors: Qian Cao, Yu Lu, Ningxin Peng, Luyang Huang, Shanbo Cheng, Jinsong Su Zhiwei Cao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The growing popularity of Large Language Models has sparked interest in context compression for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the performance of previous methods degrades dramatically as compression ratios increase, sometimes even falling to the closed-book level. This decline can be attributed to the loss of key information during the compression process. Our preliminary study supports this hypothesis, emphasizing the significance of retaining key information to maintain model performance under high compression ratios. As a result, we introduce Query-Guided Compressor (QGC), which leverages queries to guide the context compression process, effectively preserving key information within the compressed context. Additionally, we employ a dynamic compression strategy. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed QGC on the Question Answering task, including NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA, and HotpotQA datasets. Experimental results show that QGC can consistently perform well even at high compression ratios, which also offers significant benefits in terms of inference cost and throughput.
COSMIC: Mutual Information for Task-Agnostic Summarization Evaluation
Authors: Philippe Formont, Jackie Cheung, Pablo Piantanida Maxime Darrin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Assessing the quality of summarizers poses significant challenges---gold summaries are hard to obtain and their suitability depends on the use context of the summarization system. Who is the user of the system, and what do they intend to do with the summary? In response, we propose a novel task-oriented evaluation approach that assesses summarizers based on their capacity to produce summaries while preserving task outcomes. We theoretically establish both a lower and upper bound on the expected error rate of these tasks, which depends on the mutual information between source texts and generated summaries. We introduce COSMIC, a practical implementation of this metric, and demonstrate its strong correlation with human judgment-based metrics, as well as its effectiveness in predicting downstream task performance. Comparative analyses against established metrics like BERTScore and ROUGE highlight the competitive performance of COSMIC.
EUROPA: A Legal Multilingual Keyphrase Generation Dataset
Authors: Frédéric Piedboeuf, Guillaume Le Berre, David Alfonso-Hermelo, Philippe Langlais Olivier Salaün
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Keyphrase generation has primarily been explored within the context of academic research articles, with a particular focus on scientific domains and the English language. In this work, we present EUROPA, a novel dataset for multilingual keyphrase generation in the legal domain. It is derived from legal judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), and contains instances in all 24 EU official languages. We run multilingual models on our corpus and analyze the results, showing room for improvement on a domain-specific multilingual corpus such as the one we present.
GLIMPSE: Pragmatically Informative Multi-Document Summarization for Scholarly Reviews
Authors: Ines Arous, Pablo Piantanida, Jackie Cheung Maxime Darrin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Scientific peer review is essential for the quality of academic publications. However, the increasing number of paper submissions to conferences has strained the reviewing process. This surge poses a burden on area chairs who have to carefully read an ever-growing volume of reviews and discern each reviewer`s main arguments as part of their decision process. In this paper, we introduce , a summarization method designed to offer a concise yet comprehensive overview of scholarly reviews. Unlike traditional consensus-based methods, extracts both common and unique opinions from the reviews. We introduce novel uniqueness scores based on the Rational Speech Act framework to identify relevant sentences in the reviews. Our method aims to provide a pragmatic glimpse into all reviews, offering a balanced perspective on their opinions. Our experimental results with both automatic metrics and human evaluation show that generates more discriminative summaries than baseline methods in terms of human evaluation while achieving comparable performance with these methods in terms of automatic metrics.
Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarks
Authors: El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, Gagan Bhatia, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Fakhraddin Alwajih
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have proven effective in a wide range of tasks that require complex reasoning and linguistic comprehension. However, due to a lack of high-quality multimodal resources in languages other than English, the success of MLLMs remains relatively limited to English-based settings. This poses significant challenges in developing comparable models for other languages, even those with large speaker populations, such as Arabic. To alleviate this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive family of Arabic MLLMs, dubbed *Peacock*, with strong vision and language capabilities. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate the solid performance of our models on various visual reasoning tasks and further show their emerging dialectal potential. Additionally, we introduce *Henna*, a new benchmark specifically designed for assessing MLLMs on aspects related to Arabic culture, setting the first stone for culturally-aware Arabic MLLMs. The GitHub repository for the *Peacock* project is available at [https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock](https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock).
Generating Coherent Sequences of Visual Illustrations for Real-World Manual Tasks
Authors: Vasco Ramos, Rodrigo Valério, Diogo Glória-Silva, Yonatan Bitton, Michal Yarom, Idan Szpektor, Joao Magalhaes João Bordalo
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Multistep instructions, such as recipes and how-to guides, greatly benefit from visual aids, such as a series of images that accompany the instruction steps. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become adept at generating coherent textual steps, Large Vision/Language Models (LVLMs) are less capable of generating accompanying image sequences. The most challenging aspect is that each generated image needs to adhere to the relevant textual step instruction, as well as be visually consistent with earlier images in the sequence. To address this problem, we propose an approach for generating consistent image sequences, which integrates a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with an LLM to transform the sequence into a caption to maintain the semantic coherence of the sequence. In addition, to maintain the visual coherence of the image sequence, we introduce a copy mechanism to initialise reverse diffusion processes with a latent vector iteration from a previously generated image from a relevant step. Both strategies will condition the reverse diffusion process on the sequence of instruction steps and tie the contents of the current image to previous instruction steps and corresponding images. Experiments show that the proposed approach is preferred by humans in 46.6% of the cases against 26.6% for the second best method. In addition, automatic metrics showed that the proposed method maintains semantic coherence and visual consistency across steps in both domains.
Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages
Authors: AbdelRahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed Ife Adebara
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African languages. Cheetah supports 517 African languages and language varieties, allowing us to address the scarcity of NLG resources and provide a solution to foster linguistic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheetah through comprehensive evaluations across six generation downstream tasks. In five of the six tasks, Cheetah significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance for generating coherent and contextually appropriate text in a wide range of African languages. We additionally conduct a detailed human evaluation to delve deeper into the linguistic capabilities of Cheetah. The findings of this study contribute to advancing NLP research in low-resource settings, enabling greater accessibility and inclusion for African languages in a rapidly expanding digital landscape. We will publicly release our models for research.
TaPERA: Enhancing Faithfulness and Interpretability in Long-Form Table QA by Content Planning and Execution-based Reasoning
Authors: Lyuhao Chen, Arman Cohan, Chen Zhao Yilun Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Long-form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) requires systems to generate paragraph long and complex answers to questions over tabular data. While Large language models based systems have made significant progress, it often hallucinates, especially when the task involves complex reasoning over tables. To tackle this issue, we propose a new LLM-based framework, TaPERA, for LFTQA tasks. Our framework uses a modular approach that decomposes the whole process into three sub-modules: 1) QA-based Content Planner that iteratively decomposes the input question into sub-questions; 2) Execution-based Table Reasoner that produces executable Python program for each sub-question; and 3) Answer Generator that generates long-form answer grounded on the program output. Human evaluation results on the FeTaQA and QTSumm datasets indicate that our framework significantly improves strong baselines on both accuracy and truthfulness, as our modular framework is better at table reasoning, and the long-form answer is always consistent with the program output. Our modular design further provides transparency as users are able to interact with our framework by manually changing the content plans.
FinanceMATH: Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning in Finance Domains
Authors: Hongjun Liu, Yitao Long, Rui Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan Yilun Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce FinanceMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in solving knowledge-intensive math reasoning problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, FinanceMath includes 1,200 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content. These problems require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. We also construct a finance-domain knowledge bank and investigate various knowledge integration strategies. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 44 LLMs with both Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods. Our experimental results reveal that the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) achieves only 60.9% accuracy using CoT prompting, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, while augmenting LLMs with external knowledge can improve model performance (e.g., from 47.5% to 54.5% for Gemini-1.5-Pro), their accuracy remains significantly lower than the estimated human expert performance of 92%. We believe that FinanceMath can advance future research in the area of domain-specific knowledge retrieval and integration, particularly within the context of solving reasoning-intensive tasks.
API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMs
Authors: Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Subhajit Chaudhury, Soham Dan, Maxwell Crouse, Asim Munawar, Vernon Austel, Sadhana Kumaravel, Vinod Muthusamy, Pavan Kapanipathi, Luis Lastras Kinjal Basu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.
LoRA-Flow: Dynamic LoRA Fusion for Large Language Models in Generative Tasks
Authors: Bowen Ping, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Yun Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun Hanqing Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: LoRA employs lightweight modules to customize large language models (LLMs) for each downstream task or domain, where different learned additional modules represent diverse skills. Combining existing LoRAs to address new tasks can enhance the reusability of learned LoRAs, particularly beneficial for tasks with limited annotated data. Most prior works on LoRA combination primarily rely on task-level weights for each involved LoRA, making different examples and tokens share the same LoRA weights. However, in generative tasks, different tokens may necessitate diverse skills to manage. Taking the Chinese math task as an example, understanding the problem description may depend more on the Chinese LoRA, while the calculation part may rely more on the math LoRA. To this end, we propose LoRA-Flow, which utilizes dynamic weights to adjust the impact of different LoRAs. The weights at each step are determined by a fusion gate with extremely few parameters, which can be learned with only 200 training examples. Experiments across six generative tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines with task-level fusion weights. This underscores the necessity of introducing dynamic fusion weights for LoRA combination.
Harder Task Needs More Experts: Dynamic Routing in MoE Models
Authors: Zhenwei An, Nan Zhuang, Mingxu Tao, Chen Zhang, Yang Jin, Kun Xu, Kun Xu, Liwei Chen, Songfang Huang, Yansong Feng Quzhe Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic expert selection framework for Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, aiming to enhance computational efficiency and model performance by adjusting the number of activated experts based on input difficulty. Unlike existing MoE approaches that rely on fixed TopK Routing, which activates a predetermined number of experts regardless of the input`s complexity, our method dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. This allows for more efficient utilization of computational resources, activating more experts for complex tasks requiring advanced reasoning and fewer for simpler tasks. Through extensive evaluations, our dynamic routing method demonstrates substantial improvements over Top2 Routing across various benchmarks, achieving an average improvement of 0.7% with less than 90% activated parameters. Further analysis shows our model dispatches more experts to tasks requiring complex reasoning skills, like BBH, confirming its ability to dynamically allocate computational resources in alignment with the input`s complexity.Our findings also highlight a variation in the number of experts needed across different layers of the transformer model, offering insights into the potential for designing heterogeneous MoE frameworks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhenweiAn/Dynamic_MoE.
XLAVS-R: Cross-Lingual Audio-Visual Speech Representation Learning for Noise-Robust Speech Perception
Authors: Mohamed Anwar, Juan Pino, Wei-Ning Hsu, Marine Carpuat, Bowen Shi, Changhan Wang HyoJung Han
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Speech recognition and translation systems perform poorly on noisy inputs, which are frequent in realistic environments. Augmenting these systems with visual signals has the potential to improve robustness to noise. However, audio-visual (AV) data is only available in limited amounts and for fewer languages than audio-only resources.To address this gap, we present XLAVS-R, a cross-lingual audio-visual speech representation model for noise-robust speech recognition and translation in over 100 languages. It is designed to maximize the benefits of limited multilingual AV pre-training data, by building on top of audio-only multilingual pre-training and simplifying existing pre-training schemes. Extensive evaluation on the MuAViC benchmark shows the strength of XLAVS-R on downstream audio-visual speech recognition and translation tasks, where it outperforms the previous state of the art by up to 18.5% WER and 4.7 BLEU given noisy AV inputs, and enables strong zero-shot audio-visual ability with audio-only fine-tuning.
SOTOPIA-\ensuremathπ: Interactive Learning of Socially Intelligent Language Agents
Authors: Haofei Yu, Wenxin Zhang, Zhengyang Qi, Maarten Sap, Yonatan Bisk, Graham Neubig, Hao Zhu Ruiyi Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Humans learn social skills through both imitation and social interaction. This social learning process is largely understudied by existing research on building language agents. Motivated by this gap, we propose an interactive learning method, SOTOPIA-\ensuremathπ, that improves the social intelligence of language agents. This method leverages behavior cloning and self-reinforcement based training on filtered social interaction data according to large language model (LLM) rating. We show that our training method allows a 7B LLM to reach the social goal completion ability of an expert model (GPT-4-based agent) without the loss of more generic abilities, such as the ability to answer knowledge-based questions. We also demonstrate that this training paradigm uncovers some weaknesses in standard evaluation and safety training paradigms that (1) LLM-based evaluation of social intelligence overestimates the abilities of the language agents trained specifically for social interaction, and that (2) despite not training for better safety or question answering (QA) ability, our methods improve the safety of language agents and maintain general QA ability on the MMLU benchmark.
XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Jiawei Liu, Yuxiang Wei, Lingming Zhang Yifeng Ding
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13% on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2% to 13% on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ise-uiuc/xft.