mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Iterative Forward Tuning Boosts In-Context Learning in Language Models
Authors: Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bailin Wang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li Jiaxi Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations processing can generalize effectively to a given test sample. However, this perspective overlooks the potential benefits derived from multiple iterations involving demonstrations, a practice aligning more closely with the iterative decision-making process exhibited by humans, who often learn through analogy. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage framework to boost ICL in LLMs. Specifically, our framework delineates the ICL process into two distinct stages: Deep-Thinking and test stages. The Deep-Thinking stage incorporates a unique attention mechanism, i.e., iterative enhanced attention, which enables multiple rounds of information accumulation. This mechanism operates by manipulating the Key-Value matrices without training, fostering enhanced understanding capabilities in LLMs by thinking demonstrations multiple times. We evaluated Deep-Thinking across a range of benchmarks and LLMs, showing its superior performance over vanilla ICL methods and its effectiveness in challenging tasks where demonstration selection is infeasible.
Pride and Prejudice: LLM Amplifies Self-Bias in Self-Refinement
Authors: Guanglei Zhu, Xuandong Zhao, Liangming Pan, Lei Li, William Wang Wenda Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) improve their performance through self-feedback on certain tasks while degrade on others. We discovered that such a contrary is due to LLM`s bias in evaluating their own output. In this paper, we formally define LLM`s self-bias -- the tendency to favor its own generation -- using two statistics. We analyze six LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Gemini, LLaMA2, Mixtral and DeepSeek) on translation, constrained text generation, and mathematical reasoning tasks. We find that self-bias is prevalent in all examined LLMs across multiple languages and tasks. Our analysis reveals that while the self-refine pipeline improves the fluency and understandability of model outputs, it further amplifies self-bias. To mitigate such biases, we discover that larger model size and external feedback with accurate assessment can significantly reduce bias in the self-refine pipeline, leading to actual performance improvement in downstream tasks. The code and data are released at https://github.com/xu1998hz/llm_self_bias.
Language Complexity and Speech Recognition Accuracy: Orthographic Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn`t
Authors: David Chiang Chihiro Taguchi
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We investigate what linguistic factors affect the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. We hypothesize that orthographic and phonological complexities both degrade accuracy. To examine this, we fine-tune the multilingual self-supervised pretrained model Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 on 25 languages with 15 writing systems, and we compare their ASR accuracy, number of graphemes, unigram grapheme entropy, logographicity (how much word/morpheme-level information is encoded in the writing system), and number of phonemes. The results demonstrate that a high logographicity correlates with low ASR accuracy, while phonological complexity has no significant effect.
Steering Llama 2 via Contrastive Activation Addition
Authors: Nick Gabrieli, Julian Schulz, Meg Tong, Evan Hubinger, Alexander Turner Nina Rimsky
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 Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), a method for steering language models by modifying their activations during forward passes. CAA computes “steering vectors” by averaging the difference in residual stream activations between pairs of positive and negative examples of a particular behavior, such as factual versus hallucinatory responses. During inference, these steering vectors are added at all token positions after the user`s prompt with either a positive or negative coefficient, allowing precise control over the degree of the targeted behavior. We evaluate CAA`s effectiveness on Llama 2 Chat using multiple-choice behavioral question datasets and open-ended generation tasks. We demonstrate that CAA significantly alters model behavior, is effective over and on top of traditional methods like finetuning and system prompt design, and minimally reduces capabilities. Moreover, we gain deeper insights into CAA`s mechanisms by employing various activation space interpretation methods. CAA accurately steers model outputs and sheds light on how high-level concepts are represented in Large Language Models (LLMs).
EconAgent: Large Language Model-Empowered Agents for Simulating Macroeconomic Activities
Authors: Chen Gao, Mingyu Li, Yong Li, Qingmin Liao Nian Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The advent of artificial intelligence has led to a growing emphasis on data-driven modeling in macroeconomics, with agent-based modeling (ABM) emerging as a prominent bottom-up simulation paradigm. In ABM, agents (*e.g.*, households, firms) interact within a macroeconomic environment, collectively generating market dynamics. Existing agent modeling typically employs predetermined rules or learning-based neural networks for decision-making. However, customizing each agent presents significant challenges, complicating the modeling of agent heterogeneity. Additionally, the influence of multi-period market dynamics and multifaceted macroeconomic factors are often overlooked in decision-making processes.In this work, we introduce **EconAgent**, a large language model-empowered agent with human-like characteristics for macroeconomic simulation. We first construct a simulation environment that incorporates various market dynamics driven by agents' decisions regarding work and consumption. Through the perception module, we create heterogeneous agents with distinct decision-making mechanisms. Furthermore, we model the impact of macroeconomic trends using a memory module, which allows agents to reflect on past individual experiences and market dynamics.Simulation experiments show that EconAgent can make realistic decisions, leading to more reasonable macroeconomic phenomena compared to existing rule-based or learning-based agents. Our codes are released at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/ACL24-EconAgent.
SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models
Authors: Leqi Lei, Lindong Wu, Rui Sun, Yongkang Huang, Chong Long, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang Zhexin Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: With the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), increasing attention has been paid to their safety concerns. Consequently, evaluating the safety of LLMs has become an essential task for facilitating the broad applications of LLMs. Nevertheless, the absence of comprehensive safety evaluation benchmarks poses a significant impediment to effectively assess and enhance the safety of LLMs. In this work, we present SafetyBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the safety of LLMs, which comprises 11,435 diverse multiple choice questions spanning across 7 distinct categories of safety concerns. Notably, SafetyBench also incorporates both Chinese and English data, facilitating the evaluation in both languages. Our extensive tests over 25 popular Chinese and English LLMs in both zero-shot and few-shot settings reveal a substantial performance advantage for GPT-4 over its counterparts, and there is still significant room for improving the safety of current LLMs. We also demonstrate that the measured safety understanding abilities in SafetyBench are correlated with safety generation abilities. Data and evaluation guidelines are available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SafetyBench. Submission entrance and leaderboard are available at https://llmbench.ai/safety.
Deciphering Oracle Bone Language with Diffusion Models
Authors: Huanxin Yang, Xinyu Wang, Shengwei Han, Yongge Liu, Lianwen Jin, Xiang Bai, Yuliang Liu Haisu Guan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Originating from China`s Shang Dynasty approximately 3,000 years ago, the Oracle Bone Script (OBS) is a cornerstone in the annals of linguistic history, predating many established writing systems. Despite the discovery of thousands of inscriptions, a vast expanse of OBS remains undeciphered, casting a veil of mystery over this ancient language. The emergence of modern AI technologies presents a novel frontier for OBS decipherment, challenging traditional NLP methods that rely heavily on large textual corpora, a luxury not afforded by historical languages. This paper introduces a novel approach by adopting image generation techniques, specifically through the development of Oracle Bone Script Decipher (OBSD). Utilizing a conditional diffusion-based strategy, OBSD generates vital clues for decipherment, charting a new course for AI-assisted analysis of ancient languages. To validate its efficacy, extensive experiments were conducted on an oracle bone script dataset, with quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness of OBSD.
M4LE: A Multi-Ability Multi-Range Multi-Task Multi-Domain Long-Context Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Xingshan Zeng, Yufei Wang, Yusen Sun, Liangyou Li, Yuxin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong Wai-Chung Kwan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Managing long sequences has become an important and necessary feature for large language models (LLMs). However, assessing their ability to handle long contexts remains a challenge. This paper introduces M$^4$LE, a $\textbfM$ulti-ability, $\textbfM$ulti-range, $\textbfM$ulti-task, $\textbfM$ulti-domain benchmark for $\textbfL$ong-context $\textbfE$valuation. It encompasses 36 NLP datasets, covering 11 types of tasks and 12 domains, providing a comprehensive test bed. To address the lack of tasks featuring naturally long sequences, we propose an automatic approach to convert short-sequence tasks into long-sequence scenarios. These scenarios evaluate LLMs' long-context understanding across five key abilities: understanding of single or multiple relevant spans in long contexts based on explicit or semantic hints, and global context understanding. This automatic approach allows us to create instances evenly distributed from 1k to 8k input length. Our evaluation of 11 prominent LLMs reveals that 1) Current LLMs struggle to understand long context, particularly when tasks require multiple-span attention. 2) Semantic retrieval is more difficult for competent LLMs. 3) Models fine-tuned on longer text with position interpolation have comparable performance to those using Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) aware scaling methods without fine-tuning. We make our benchmark publicly available to encourage future research in this challenging area.
RomanSetu: Efficiently unlocking multilingual capabilities of Large Language Models via Romanization
Authors: Raj Dabre, Aswanth M, Jay Gala, Thanmay Jayakumar, Ratish Puduppully, Anoop Kunchukuttan Jaavid J
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to non-English languages, specifically those using non-Roman scripts. We propose an approach that utilizes the romanized form of text as an interface for LLMs, hypothesizing that its frequent informal use and shared tokens with English enhance cross-lingual alignment. Our approach involve the continual pretraining of a English LLM like Llama 2 on romanized text of non-English, non-Roman script languages, followed by instruction tuning on romanized data. The results indicate that romanized text not only reduces token fertility by 2x-4x but also matches if not outperforms native script representation across various NLU, NLG and MT tasks. Moreover, the embeddings computed on romanized text exhibit closer alignment with their English translations than those from the native script. Our approach presents a promising direction for leveraging the power of English LLMs in languages traditionally underrepresented in NLP research.
Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles
Authors: Clara Meister, Thomas Hofmann, Andreas Vlachos, Tiago Pimentel Pietro Lesci
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding memorisation in language models has practical and societal implications, e.g., studying models' training dynamics or preventing copyright infringements.Prior work defines memorisation as the causal effect of training with an instance on the model`s ability to predict that instance. This definition relies on a counterfactual: the ability to observe what would have happened had the model not seen that instance.Existing methods struggle to provide computationally efficient and accurate estimates of this counterfactual. Further, they often estimate memorisation for a model architecture rather than for a specific model instance. This paper fills an important gap in the literature, proposing a new, principled, and efficient method to estimate memorisation based on the difference-in-differences design from econometrics. Using this method, we characterise a model`s memorisation profile--its memorisation trends across training--by only observing its behaviour on a small set of instances throughout training.In experiments with the Pythia model suite, we find that memorisation (i) is stronger and more persistent in larger models, (ii) is determined by data order and learning rate, and (iii) has stable trends across model sizes, thus making memorisation in larger models predictable from smaller ones.
CHECKWHY: Causal Fact Verification via Argument Structure
Authors: Yibo Zhao, Yingjie Zhu, Haiyang Zhu, Wenpeng Lu, Deyu Zhou Jiasheng Si
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: With the growing complexity of fact verification tasks, the concern with “thoughtful” reasoning capabilities is increasing. However, recent fact verification benchmarks mainly focus on checking a narrow scope of semantic factoids within claims and lack an explicit logical reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce CHECKWHY, a challenging dataset tailored to a novel causal fact verification task: checking the truthfulness of the causal relation within claims through rigorous reasoning steps. CHECKWHY consists of over 19K “why” claim-evidence- argument structure triplets with supports, refutes, and not enough info labels. Each argument structure is composed of connected evidence, representing the reasoning process that begins with foundational evidence and progresses toward claim establishment. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we validate the importance of incorporating the argument structure for causal fact verification. Moreover, the automated and human evaluation of argument structure generation reveals the difficulty in producing satisfying argument structure by fine-tuned models or Chain-of-Thought prompted LLMs, leaving considerable room for future improvements.
Quality-Aware Translation Models: Efficient Generation and Quality Estimation in a Single Model
Authors: David Vilar, Markus Freitag, Colin Cherry, Subhajit Naskar, Mara Finkelstein, Xavier Garcia, Daniel Cremers Christian Tomani
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Maximum-a-posteriori (MAP) decoding is the most widely used decoding strategy for neural machine translation (NMT) models. The underlying assumption is that model probability correlates well with human judgment, with better translations getting assigned a higher score by the model. However, research has shown that this assumption does not always hold, and generation quality can be improved by decoding to optimize a utility function backed by a metric or quality-estimation signal, as is done by Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) or Quality-Aware decoding. The main disadvantage of these approaches is that they require an additional model to calculate the utility function during decoding, significantly increasing the computational cost. In this paper, we propose to make the NMT models themselves quality-aware by training them to estimate the quality of their own output. Using this approach for MBR decoding we can drastically reduce the size of the candidate list, resulting in a speed-up of two-orders of magnitude. When applying our method to MAP decoding we obtain quality gains similar or even superior to quality reranking approaches, but with the efficiency of single pass decoding.
On Efficient and Statistical Quality Estimation for Data Annotation
Authors: Juan Haladjian, Marc Kirchner, Rahul Nair Jan-Christoph Klie
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Annotated datasets are an essential ingredient to train, evaluate, compare and productionalize supervised machine learning models. It is therefore imperative that annotations are of high quality. For their creation, good quality management and thereby reliable quality estimates are needed. Then, if quality is insufficient during the annotation process, rectifying measures can be taken to improve it. Quality estimation is often performed by having experts manually label instances as correct or incorrect. But checking all annotated instances tends to be expensive. Therefore, in practice, usually only subsets are inspected; sizes are chosen mostly without justification or regard to statistical power and more often than not, are relatively small. Basing estimates on small sample sizes, however, can lead to imprecise values for the error rate. Using unnecessarily large sample sizes costs money that could be better spent, for instance on more annotations. Therefore, we first describe in detail how to use confidence intervals for finding the minimal sample size needed to estimate the annotation error rate. Then, we propose applying acceptance sampling as an alternative to error rate estimation We show that acceptance sampling can reduce the required sample sizes up to 50% while providing the same statistical guarantees.
EZ-STANCE: A Large Dataset for English Zero-Shot Stance Detection
Authors: Cornelia Caragea Chenye Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) aims to determine whether the author of a text is in favor, against, or neutral toward a target that is unseen during training. In this paper, we present EZ-STANCE, a large English ZSSD dataset with 47,316 annotated text-target pairs. In contrast to VAST, which is the only other large existing ZSSD dataset for English, EZ-STANCE is 2.5 times larger, includes both noun-phrase targets and claim targets that cover a wide range of domains, provides two challenging subtasks for ZSSD: target-based ZSSD and domain-based ZSSD, and contains much harder examples for the neutral class. We evaluate EZ-STANCE using state-of-the-art deep learning models. Furthermore, we propose to transform ZSSD into the NLI task by applying simple yet effective prompts to noun-phrase targets. Our experimental results show that EZ-STANCE is a challenging new benchmark, which provides significant research opportunities on English ZSSD. We publicly release our dataset and code at https://github.com/chenyez/EZ-STANCE.
American Sign Language Handshapes Reflect Pressures for Communicative Efficiency
Authors: Terry Regier, Dan Klein Kayo Yin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Communicative efficiency is a key topic in linguistics and cognitive psychology, with many studies demonstrating how the pressure to communicate with minimal effort guides the form of natural language. However, this phenomenon is rarely explored in signed languages. This paper shows how handshapes in American Sign Language (ASL) reflect these efficiency pressures and provides new evidence of communicative efficiency in the visual-gestural modality.We focus on hand configurations in native ASL signs and signs borrowed from English to compare efficiency pressures from both ASL and English usage. First, we develop new methodologies to quantify the articulatory effort needed to produce handshapes and the perceptual effort required to recognize them. Then, we analyze correlations between communicative effort and usage statistics in ASL or English. Our findings reveal that frequent ASL handshapes are easier to produce and that pressures for communicative efficiency mostly come from ASL usage, rather than from English lexical borrowing.
Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research
Authors: Rodney Kinney, Akshita Bhagia, Dustin Schwenk, David Atkinson, Russell Authur, Ben Bogin, Khyathi Chandu, Jennifer Dumas, Yanai Elazar, Valentin Hofmann, Ananya Jha, Sachin Kumar, Li Lucy, Xinxi Lyu, Nathan Lambert, Ian Magnusson, Jacob Morrison, Niklas Muennighoff, Aakanksha Naik, Crystal Nam, Matthew Peters, Abhilasha Ravichander, Kyle Richardson, Zejiang Shen, Emma Strubell, Nishant Subramani, Oyvind Tafjord, Evan Walsh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Noah Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Iz Beltagy, Dirk Groeneveld, Jesse Dodge, Kyle Lo Luca Soldaini
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Information about pretraining corpora used to train the current best-performing language models is seldom discussed: commercial models rarely detail their data, and even open models are often released without accompanying training data or recipes to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct and advance scientific research on language modeling, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and limitations. To facilitate scientific research on language model pretraining, we curate and release Dolma, a three-trillion-token English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. We extensively document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We present analyses and experimental results on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices. Finally, we open-source our data curation toolkit to enable reproduction of our work as well as support further research in large-scale data curation.
OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models
Authors: Iz Beltagy, Evan Walsh, Akshita Bhagia, Rodney Kinney, Oyvind Tafjord, Ananya Jha, Hamish Ivison, Ian Magnusson, Yizhong Wang, Shane Arora, David Atkinson, Russell Authur, Khyathi Chandu, Arman Cohan, Jennifer Dumas, Yanai Elazar, Yuling Gu, Jack Hessel, Tushar Khot, William Merrill, Jacob Morrison, Niklas Muennighoff, Aakanksha Naik, Crystal Nam, Matthew Peters, Valentina Pyatkin, Abhilasha Ravichander, Dustin Schwenk, Saurabh Shah, William Smith, Emma Strubell, Nishant Subramani, Mitchell Wortsman, Pradeep Dasigi, Nathan Lambert, Kyle Richardson, Luke Zettlemoyer, Jesse Dodge, Kyle Lo, Luca Soldaini, Noah Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi Dirk Groeneveld
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, we have built OLMo, a competitive, truly Open Language Model, to enable the scientific study of language models. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo alongside open training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.
Emulated Disalignment: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models May Backfire!
Authors: Jie Liu, Zhichen Dong, Jiaheng Liu, Chao Yang, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao Zhanhui Zhou
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) undergo safety alignment to ensure safe conversations with humans. However, this paper introduces a training-free attack method capable of reversing safety alignment, converting the outcomes of stronger alignment into greater potential for harm by accessing only LLM output token distributions. Specifically, our method achieves this reversal by contrasting the output token distribution of a safety-aligned language model (e.g., Llama-2-chat) against its pre-trained version (e.g., Llama-2), so that the token predictions are shifted towards the opposite direction of safety alignment.We name this method \textitemulated disalignment (ED) because sampling from this contrastive distribution provably emulates the result of fine-tuning to minimize a safety reward.Our experiments with ED across three evaluation datasets and four model families (Llama-1, Llama-2, Mistral, and Alpaca) show that ED doubles the harmfulness of pre-trained models and outperforms strong baselines, achieving the highest harmful rates in 43 out of 48 evaluation subsets by a large margin.Eventually, given ED`s reliance on language model output token distributions, which particularly compromises open-source models, our findings highlight the need to reassess the open accessibility of language models, even if they have been safety-aligned.Code is available at https://github.com/ZHZisZZ/emulated-disalignment.
IndicLLMSuite: A Blueprint for Creating Pre-training and Fine-Tuning Datasets for Indian Languages
Authors: Priyam Mehta, Ananth Sankar, Umashankar Kumaravelan, Sumanth Doddapaneni, Suriyaprasaad B, Varun G, Sparsh Jain, Anoop Kunchukuttan, Pratyush Kumar, Raj Dabre, Mitesh M. Khapra Mohammed Safi Ur Rahman Khan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages.
Reasoning in Conversation: Solving Subjective Tasks through Dialogue Simulation for Large Language Models
Authors: Yile Wang, Yuanchi Zhang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu Xiaolong Wang
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) have achieved remarkable performance in objective tasks such as open-domain question answering and mathematical reasoning, which can often be solved through recalling learned factual knowledge or chain-of-thought style reasoning. However, we find that the performance of LLMs in subjective tasks is still unsatisfactory, such as metaphor recognition, dark humor detection, etc. Compared to objective tasks, subjective tasks focus more on interpretation or emotional response rather than a universally accepted reasoning pathway. Based on the characteristics of the tasks and the strong dialogue-generation capabilities of LLMs, we propose RiC (Reasoning in Conversation), a method that focuses on solving subjective tasks through dialogue simulation. The motivation of RiC is to mine useful contextual information by simulating dialogues instead of supplying chain-of-thought style rationales, thereby offering potential useful knowledge behind dialogues for giving the final answers. We evaluate both API-based and open-source LLMs including GPT-4, ChatGPT, and OpenChat across twelve tasks. Experimental results show that RiC can yield significant improvement compared with various baselines.
Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language Model
Authors: Viraat Aryabumi, Zheng Yong, Wei-Yin Ko, Daniel D′souza, Gbemileke Onilude, Neel Bhandari, Shivalika Singh, Hui-Lee Ooi, Amr Kayid, Freddie Vargus, Phil Blunsom, Shayne Longpre, Niklas Muennighoff, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer, Sara Hooker Ahmet Üstün
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have centered around a handful of data-rich languages. What does it take to broaden access to breakthroughs beyond first-class citizen languages? Our work introduces Aya, a massively multilingual generative language model that follows instructions in 101 languages of which over 50% are considered as lower-resourced. Aya outperforms mT0 and BLOOMZ on the majority of tasks while covering double the number of languages. We introduce extensive new evaluation suites that broaden the state-of-art for multilingual eval across 99 languages ------ including discriminative and generative tasks, human evaluation, and simulated win rates that cover both held-out tasks and in-distribution performance. Furthermore, we conduct detailed investigations on the optimal finetuning mixture composition, data pruning, as well as the toxicity, bias, and safety of our models.
BatchEval: Towards Human-like Text Evaluation
Authors: Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Boyuan Pan, Heda Wang, Yao Hu, Kan Li Peiwen Yuan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Significant progress has been made in automatic text evaluation with the introduction of large language models (LLMs) as evaluators. However, current sample-wise evaluation paradigm suffers from the following issues: (1) Sensitive to prompt design; (2) Poor resistance to noise; (3) Inferior ensemble performance with static reference. Inspired by the fact that humans treat both criterion definition and inter sample comparison as references for evaluation, we propose BatchEval, a paradigm that conducts batch-wise evaluation iteratively to alleviate the above problems. We explore variants under this paradigm and confirm the optimal settings are two stage procedure with heterogeneous batch composition strategy and decimal scoring format. Comprehensive experiments across 3 LLMs on 4 text evaluation tasks demonstrate that BatchEval outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 10.5% on Pearson correlations with only 64% API cost on average. Further analyses have been conducted to verify the robustness, generalization, and working mechanism of BatchEval.
ToMBench: Benchmarking Theory of Mind in Large Language Models
Authors: Jincenzi Wu, Jinfeng Zhou, Bosi Wen, Guanqun Bi, Gongyao Jiang, Yaru Cao, Mengting Hu, Yunghwei Lai, Zexuan Xiong, Minlie Huang Zhuang Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive capability to perceive and ascribe mental states to oneself and others. Recent research has sparked a debate over whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit a form of ToM. However, existing ToM evaluations are hindered by challenges such as constrained scope, subjective judgment, and unintended contamination, yielding inadequate assessments. To address this gap, we introduce ToMBench with three key characteristics: a systematic evaluation framework encompassing 8 tasks and 31 abilities in social cognition, a multiple-choice question format to support automated and unbiased evaluation, and a build-from-scratch bilingual inventory to strictly avoid data leakage. Based on ToMBench, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the ToM performance of 10 popular LLMs across tasks and abilities. We find that even the most advanced LLMs like GPT-4 lag behind human performance by over 10% points, indicating that LLMs have not achieved a human-level theory of mind yet. Our aim with ToMBench is to enable an efficient and effective evaluation of LLMs' ToM capabilities, thereby facilitating the development of LLMs with inherent social intelligence.
COKE: A Cognitive Knowledge Graph for Machine Theory of Mind
Authors: Zhuang Chen, Jiawen Deng, Sahand Sabour, Helen Meng, Minlie Huang Jincenzi Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM) refers to humans' ability to understand and infer the desires, beliefs, and intentions of others. The acquisition of ToM plays a key role in humans' social cognition and interpersonal relations. Though indispensable for social intelligence, ToM is still lacking for modern AI and NLP systems since they cannot access the human mental state and cognitive process beneath the training corpus. To empower AI systems with the ToM ability and narrow the gap between them and humans, in this paper, we propose COKE: the first cognitive knowledge graph for machine theory of mind. Specifically, COKE formalizes ToM as a collection of 45k+ manually verified cognitive chains that characterize human mental activities and subsequent behavioral/affective responses when facing specific social circumstances. In addition, we further generalize COKE using LLMs and build a powerful generation model COLM tailored for cognitive reasoning. Experimental results in both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the high quality of COKE, the superior ToM ability of COLM, and its potential to significantly enhance social applications.
MultiPICo: Multilingual Perspectivist Irony Corpus
Authors: Simona Frenda, Soda Marem Lo, Erhan Sezerer, Antonio Uva, Valerio Basile, Cristina Bosco, Alessandro Pedrani, Chiara Rubagotti, Viviana Patti, Davide Bernardi Silvia Casola
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, several scholars have contributed to the growth of a new theoretical framework in NLP called perspectivism. This approach aimsto leverage data annotated by different individuals to model diverse perspectives that affect their opinions on subjective phenomena such as irony. In this context, we propose MultiPICo, a multilingual perspectivist corpus of ironic short conversations in different languages andlinguistic varieties extracted from Twitter and Reddit. The corpus includes sociodemographic information about its annotators. Our analysis of the annotated corpus shows how different demographic cohorts may significantly disagree on their annotation of irony and how certain cultural factors influence the perception of the phenomenon and the agreement on the annotation. Moreover, we show how disaggregated annotations and rich annotator metadata can be exploited to benchmark the ability of large language models to recognize irony, their positionality with respect to sociodemographic groups, and the efficacy of perspective-taking prompting for irony detection in multiple languages.
AppWorld: A Controllable World of Apps and People for Benchmarking Interactive Coding Agents
Authors: Tushar Khot, Mareike Hartmann, Ruskin Manku, Vinty Dong, Edward Li, Shashank Gupta, Ashish Sabharwal, Niranjan Balasubramanian Harsh Trivedi
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Autonomous agents that address day-to-day digital tasks (e.g., ordering groceries for a household), must not only operate multiple apps (e.g., notes, messaging, shopping app) via APIs, but also generate rich code with complex control flow in an iterative manner based on their interaction with the environment. However, existing benchmarks for tool use are inadequate, as they only cover tasks that require a simple sequence of API calls. To remedy this gap, we built AppWorld Engine, a high-quality execution environment (60K lines of code) of 9 day-to-day apps operable via 457 APIs and populated with realistic digital activities simulating the lives of ~100 fictitious users. We then created AppWorld Benchmark (40K lines of code), a suite of 750 natural, diverse, and challenging autonomous agent tasks requiring rich and interactive code generation. It supports robust programmatic evaluation with state-based unit tests, allowing for different ways of completing a task while also checking for unexpected changes, i.e., collateral damage. The state-of-the-art LLM, GPT4O, solves only ~49% of our \textquoteleftnormal' tasks and ~30% of \textquoteleftchallenge' tasks, while other models solve at least 16% fewer. This highlights the benchmark`s difficulty and AppWorld`s potential to push the frontiers of interactive coding agents.
MMToM-QA: Multimodal Theory of Mind Question Answering
Authors: Yutong Wu, Jing Cao, Jiannan Xiang, Yen-Ling Kuo, Zhiting Hu, Tomer Ullman, Antonio Torralba, Joshua Tenenbaum, Tianmin Shu Chuanyang Jin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people`s mental states, is an essential ingredient for developing machines with human-level social intelligence. Recent machine learning models, particularly large language models, seem to show some aspects of ToM understanding. However, existing ToM benchmarks use unimodal datasets -- either video or text. Human ToM, on the other hand, is more than video or text understanding. People can flexibly reason about another person`s mind based on conceptual representations (e.g., goals, beliefs, plans) extracted from any available data. To address this, we introduce a multimodal Theory of Mind question answering (MMToM-QA) benchmark. MMToM-QA comprehensively evaluates machine ToM both on multimodal data and on different kinds of unimodal data about a person`s activity in a household environment. To engineer multimodal ToM capacity, we propose a novel method, BIP-ALM (Bayesian Inverse Planning Accelerated by Language Models). BIP-ALM extracts unified representations from multimodal data and utilizes language models for scalable Bayesian inverse planning. We conducted a systematic comparison of human performance, BIP-ALM, and state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4. The experiments demonstrate that large language models and large multimodal models still lack robust ToM capacity. BIP-ALM, on the other hand, shows promising results, by leveraging the power of both model-based mental inference and language models.
DocMath-Eval: Evaluating Math Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Understanding Long and Specialized Documents
Authors: Yitao Long, Hongjun Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Linyong Nan, Lyuhao Chen, Yixin Liu, Xiangru Tang, Rui Zhang, 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: Recent LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving exam-like math word problems. However, the degree to which these numerical reasoning skills are effective in real-world scenarios, particularly in expert domains, is still largely unexplored. This paper introduces DocMath-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the numerical reasoning capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing specialized documents containing both text and tables. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 48 LLMs with Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods, aiming to comprehensively assess the capabilities and limitations of existing LLMs in DocMath-Eval. We found that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) still significantly lags behind human experts in solving complex numerical reasoning problems grounded in long contexts. We believe that DocMath-Eval can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in solving challenging numerical reasoning problems within expert domains.
Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation
Authors: William Held, Diyi Yang Michael J Ryan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.
ICLEF: In-Context Learning with Expert Feedback for Explainable Style Transfer
Authors: Smaranda Muresan Arkadiy Saakyan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: While state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can excel at adapting text from one style to another, current work does not address the explainability of style transfer models. Recent work has explored generating textual explanations from larger teacher models and distilling them into smaller student models. One challenge with such approach is that LLM outputs may contain errors that require expertise to correct, but gathering and incorporating expert feedback is difficult due to cost and availability. To address this challenge, we propose ICLEF, a novel human-AI collaboration approach to model distillation that incorporates scarce expert human feedback by combining in-context learning and model self-critique. We show that our method leads to generation of high-quality synthetic explainable style transfer datasets for formality (E-GYAFC) and subjective bias (E-WNC). Via automatic and human evaluation, we show that specialized student models fine-tuned on our datasets outperform generalist teacher models on the explainable style transfer task in one-shot settings, and perform competitively compared to few-shot teacher models, highlighting the quality of the data and the role of expert feedback. In an extrinsic task of authorship attribution, we show that explanations generated by smaller models fine-tuned on E-GYAFC are more predictive of authorship than explanations generated by few-shot teacher models.
MAP`s not dead yet: Uncovering true language model modes by conditioning away degeneracy
Authors: Kartik Goyal, Kevin Gimpel Davis Yoshida
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: It has been widely observed that exact or approximate MAP (mode-seeking) decoding from natural language generation (NLG) models consistently leads to degenerate outputs (Holtzman et al., 2019; Stahlberg and Byrne, 2019). Prior work has attributed this behavior to either a fundamental and unavoidable inadequacy of modes in probabilistic models or weaknesses in language modeling. Contrastingly, we argue that degenerate modes can even occur in the absence of any modeling error, due to contamination of the training data. Specifically, we argue that mixing even a tiny amount of low-entropy noise with a population text distribution can cause the data distribution`s mode to become degenerate. We therefore propose to apply MAP decoding to the model`s true conditional distribution where the conditioning variable explicitly avoids specific degenerate behavior. Using exact search, we empirically verify that the length-conditional modes of machine translation models and language models are indeed more fluent and topical than their unconditional modes. For the first time, we also share many examples of exact modal sequences from these models, and from several variants of the LLaMA-7B model. Notably, we observethat various kinds of degenerate modes persist, even at the scale of LLaMA-7B. Although we cannot tractably address these degeneracieswith exact search, we perform a classifier-based approximate search on LLaMA-7B, a model which was not trained for instruction following, and find that we are able to elicit reasonable outputs without any finetuning.