mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Semantic Consistency of Large Language Models through Model Editing: An Interpretability-Oriented Approach
Authors: Dapeng Chen, Yajing Sun, Rongjun Li, Zhiyong Feng, Wei Peng Jingyuan Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: A Large Language Model (LLM) tends to generate inconsistent and sometimes contradictory outputs when presented with a prompt that has equivalent semantics but is expressed differently from the original prompt. To achieve semantic consistency of an LLM, one of the key approaches is to finetune the model with prompt-output pairs with semantically equivalent meanings. Despite its effectiveness, a data-driven finetuning method incurs substantial computation costs in data preparation and model optimization. In this regime, an LLM is treated as a “black box”, restricting our ability to gain deeper insights into its internal mechanism. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance the semantic consistency of LLMs through a more interpretable method (i.e., model editing) to this end. We first identify the model components (i.e., attention heads) that have a key impact on the semantic consistency of an LLM. We subsequently inject biases into the output of these model components along the semantic-consistency activation direction. It is noteworthy that these modifications are cost-effective, without reliance on mass manipulations of the original model parameters. Through comprehensive experiments on the constructed NLU and open-source NLG datasets, our method demonstrates significant improvements in the semantic consistency and task performance of LLMs. Additionally, our method exhibits promising generalization capabilities by performing well on tasks beyond the primary tasks.
Semantic Skill Grounding for Embodied Instruction-Following in Cross-Domain Environments
Authors: SeungHyun Kim, Youngsoo Jang, Moontae Lee, Honguk Woo Sangwoo Shin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In embodied instruction-following (EIF), the integration of pretrained language models (LMs) as task planners emerges as a significant branch, where tasks are planned at the skill level by prompting LMs with pretrained skills and user instructions. However, grounding these pretrained skills in different domains remains challenging due to their intricate entanglement with the domain-specific knowledge. To address this challenge, we present a semantic skill grounding (SemGro) framework that leverages the hierarchical nature of semantic skills. SemGro recognizes the broad spectrum of these skills, ranging from short-horizon low-semantic skills that are universally applicable across domains to long-horizon rich-semantic skills that are highly specialized and tailored for particular domains. The framework employs an iterative skill decomposition approach, starting from the higher levels of semantic skill hierarchy and then moving downwards, so as to ground each planned skill to an executable level within the target domain. To do so, we use the reasoning capabilities of LMs for composing and decomposing semantic skills, as well as their multi-modal extension for assessing the skill feasibility in the target domain. Our experiments in the VirtualHome benchmark show the efficacy of SemGro in 300 cross-domain EIF scenarios.
LIRE: listwise reward enhancement for preference alignment
Authors: Yi Liu, Lei Zhang, Junbo Guo, Zhendong Mao Mingye Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, tremendous strides have been made to align the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values to mitigate toxic or unhelpful content. Leveraging Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective and is widely adopted by researchers. However, implementing RLHF is complex, and its sensitivity to hyperparameters renders achieving stable performance and scalability challenging. Furthermore, prevailing approaches to preference alignment primarily concentrate on pairwise comparisons, with limited exploration into multi-response scenarios, thereby overlooking the potential richness within the candidate pool. For the above reasons, we propose a new approach: Listwise Reward Enhancement for Preference Alignment (LIRE), a gradient-based reward optimization approach that incorporates the offline rewards of multiple responses into a streamlined listwise framework, thus eliminating the need for online sampling during training. LIRE is straightforward to implement, requiring minimal parameter tuning, and seamlessly aligns with the pairwise paradigm while naturally extending to multi-response scenarios. Moreover, we introduce a self-enhancement algorithm aimed at iteratively refining the reward during training. Our experiments demonstrate that LIRE consistently outperforms existing methods across several benchmarks on dialogue and summarization tasks, with good transferability to out-of-distribution data, assessed using proxy reward models and human annotators.
See It All: Contextualized Late Aggregation for 3D Dense Captioning
Authors: Hyung Lim, Seung Hwan Kim, Soonyoung Lee, Bumsoo Kim, Gunhee Kim Minjung Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: 3D dense captioning is a task to localize objects in a 3D scene and generate descriptive sentences for each object. Recent approaches in 3D dense captioning have adopted transformer encoder-decoder frameworks from object detection to build an end-to-end pipeline without hand-crafted components. However, these approaches struggle with contradicting objectives where a single query attention has to simultaneously view both the tightly localized object regions and contextual environment. To overcome this challenge, we introduce SIA (See-It-All), a transformer pipeline that engages in 3D dense captioning with a novel paradigm called late aggregation. SIA simultaneously decodes two sets of queries---context query and instance query. The instance query focuses on localization and object attribute descriptions, while the context query versatilely captures the region-of-interest of relationships between multiple objects or with the global scene, then aggregated afterwards (i.e., late aggregation) via simple distance-based measures. To further enhance the quality of contextualized caption generation, we design a novel aggregator to generate a fully informed caption based on the surrounding context, the global environment, and object instances. Extensive experiments on two of the most widely-used 3D dense captioning datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant improvement over prior methods.
$\textttDARA$: Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Autonomous Language Agent for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Xiaodan Zhu, Iryna Gurevych Haishuo Fang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Answering Questions over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) is key to well-functioning autonomous language agents in various real-life applications. To improve the neural-symbolic reasoning capabilities of language agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in KGQA, we propose the Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Agent (DARA) framework. DARA effectively parses questions into formal queries through a dual mechanism: high-level iterative task decomposition and low-level task grounding. Importantly, DARA can be efficiently trained with a small number of high-quality reasoning trajectories. Our experimental results demonstrate that DARA fine-tuned on LLMs (e.g. Llama-2-7B, Mistral) outperforms both in-context learning-based agents with GPT-4 and alternative fine-tuned agents, across different benchmarks, making such models more accessible for real-life applications. We also show that DARA attains performance comparable to state-of-the-art enumerating-and-ranking-based methods for KGQA.
GKT: A Novel Guidance-Based Knowledge Transfer Framework For Efficient Cloud-edge Collaboration LLM Deployment
Authors: Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao Yao Yao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The burgeoning size of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to enhanced capabilities in generating responses, albeit at the expense of increased inference times and elevated resource demands. Existing methods of acceleration, predominantly hinged on knowledge distillation, generally necessitate fine-tuning of considerably large models, such as Llama-7B, posing a challenge for average users. Furthermore, present techniques for expediting inference and reducing costs operate independently. To address these issues, we introduce a novel and intuitive Guidance-based Knowledge Transfer (GKT) framework. This approach leverages a larger LLM as a ”teacher” to create guidance prompts, paired with a smaller ”student” model to finalize responses. Remarkably, GKT requires no fine-tuning and doesn`t necessitate the teacher and student models to have the same vocabulary, allowing for extensive batch generation to accelerate the process while ensuring user customization. GKT can be seamlessly integrated into cloud-edge collaboration architectures, and is versatile enough for plug-and-play application across various models. It excels in both efficiency and affordability, epitomizing a ”cheap and cheerful” solution. GKT achieves a maximum accuracy improvement of 14.18%, along with a 10.72 times speed-up on GSM8K and an accuracy improvement of 14.00 % along with a 7.73 times speed-up in CSQA. When utilizing ChatGPT as teacher model and Llama2-70B as the student model, we can achieve 95.00% of ChatGPT`s performance at 52% of the cost. The results highlight substantial enhancements in accuracy and processing speed on the GSM8K and CSQA datasets, surpassing the performance of using either the student or teacher models in isolation.
Compositional Generalization with Grounded Language Models
Authors: Étienne Simon, Lucas Charpentier, Egor Kostylev, Erik Velldal, Lilja Øvrelid Sondre Wold
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Grounded language models use external sources of information, such as knowledge graphs, to meet some of the general challenges associated with pre-training. By extending previous work on compositional generalization in semantic parsing, we allow for a controlled evaluation of the degree to which these models learn and generalize from patterns in knowledge graphs. We develop a procedure for generating natural language questions paired with knowledge graphs that targets different aspects of compositionality and further avoids grounding the language models in information already encoded implicitly in their weights. We evaluate existing methods for combining language models with knowledge graphs and find them to struggle with generalization to sequences of unseen lengths and to novel combinations of seen base components. While our experimental results provide some insight into the expressive power of these models, we hope our work and released datasets motivate future research on how to better combine language models with structured knowledge representations.
Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Juntao Li, Pinzheng Wang, Zecheng Tang, Yan Bowen, Min Zhang Yuyang Ding
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for generalizing in unseen tasks. In the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, recent advancements have seen the remarkable improvement of LLMs in a broad range of entity domains via instruction tuning, by adopting entity-centric schema. In this work, we explore the potential enhancement of the existing methods by incorporating negative instances into training. Our experiments reveal that negative instances contribute to remarkable improvements by (1) introducing contextual information, and (2) clearly delineating label boundaries. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient longest common subsequence (LCS) matching algorithm, which is tailored to transform unstructured predictions into structured entities. By integrating these components, we present GNER, a Generative NER system that shows improved zero-shot performance across unseen entity domains. Our comprehensive evaluation illustrates our system`s superiority, surpassing state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods by 9 $F_1$ score in zero-shot evaluation.
WilKE: Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor for Lifelong Knowledge Editing
Authors: Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao Chenhui Hu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge editing aims to rectify inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs) without costly retraining for outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, current knowledge editing methods primarily focus on single editing, failing to meet the requirements for lifelong editing. This study reveals a performance degradation encountered by knowledge editing in lifelong editing, characterized by toxicity buildup and toxicity flash, with the primary cause identified as pattern unmatch. We introduce a knowledge editing approach named Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor (WilKE), which selects editing layer based on the pattern matching degree of editing knowledge across different layers in language models. Experimental results demonstrate that, in lifelong editing, WilKE exhibits an average improvement of 46.2% and 67.8% on editing GPT2-XL and GPT-J relative to state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods.
DINER: Debiasing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Multi-variable Causal Inference
Authors: Linhai Zhang, Deyu Zhou, Guoqiang Xu Jialong Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Though notable progress has been made, neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) models are prone to learn spurious correlations from annotation biases, resulting in poor robustness on adversarial data transformations. Among the debiasing solutions, causal inference-based methods have attracted much research attention, which can be mainly categorized into causal intervention methods and counterfactual reasoning methods. However, most of the present debiasing methods focus on single-variable causal inference, which is not suitable for ABSA with two input variables (the target aspect and the review). In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on multi-variable causal inference for debiasing ABSA. In this framework, different types of biases are tackled based on different causal intervention methods. For the review branch, the bias is modeled as indirect confounding from context, where backdoor adjustment intervention is employed for debiasing. For the aspect branch, the bias is described as a direct correlation with labels, where counterfactual reasoning is adopted for debiasing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to various baselines on the two widely used real-world aspect robustness test set datasets.
STAR: Constraint LoRA with Dynamic Active Learning for Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Authors: Jialong Wu, Deyu Zhou, Guoqiang Xu Linhai Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the powerful capabilities of few-shot learning through prompting methods, supervised training is still necessary for complex reasoning tasks. Because of their extensive parameters and memory consumption, both Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods and Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods have been proposed for LLMs. Nevertheless, the issue of large annotated data consumption, the aim of Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning, remains unexplored. One obvious way is to combine the PEFT method with active learning. However, the experimental results show that such a combination is not trivial and yields inferior results. Through probe experiments, such observation might be explained by two main reasons: uncertainty gap and poor model calibration. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to effectively integrate uncertainty-based active learning and LoRA. Specifically, for the uncertainty gap, we introduce a dynamic uncertainty measurement that combines the uncertainty of the base model and the uncertainty of the full model during the iteration of active learning. For poor model calibration, we incorporate the regularization method during LoRA training to keep the model from being over-confident, and the Monte-Carlo dropout mechanism is employed to enhance the uncertainty estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing baseline models on three complex reasoning tasks.
How Much Does Nonverbal Communication Conform to Entropy Rate Constancy?: A Case Study on Listener Gaze in Interaction
Authors: Yang Xu, Gabriel Skantze, Hendrik Buschmeier Yu Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: According to the Entropy Rate Constancy (ERC) principle, the information density of a text is approximately constant over its length. Whether this principle also applies to nonverbal communication signals is still under investigation. We perform empirical analyses of video-recorded dialogue data and investigate whether listener gaze, as an important nonverbal communication signal, adheres to the ERC principle. Results show (1) that the ERC principle holds for listener gaze; and (2) that the two linguistic factors syntactic complexity and turn transition potential are weakly correlated with local entropy of listener gaze.
Lost in the Source Language: How Large Language Models Evaluate the Quality of Machine Translation
Authors: Zhirui Zhang, Xiang Geng, Yichao Du, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang Xu Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage source and reference data in machine translation evaluation task, aiming to better understand the mechanisms behind their remarkable performance in this task.We design the controlled experiments across various input modes and model types, and employ both coarse-grained and fine-grained prompts to discern the utility of source versus reference information.We find that reference information significantly enhances the evaluation accuracy, while surprisingly, source information sometimes is counterproductive, indicating LLMs' inability to fully leverage the cross-lingual capability when evaluating translations.Further analysis of the fine-grained evaluation and fine-tuning experiments show similar results.These findings also suggest a potential research direction for LLMs that fully exploits the cross-lingual capability of LLMs to achieve better performance in machine translation evaluation tasks.
Chain-of-Verification Reduces Hallucination in Large Language Models
Authors: Mojtaba Komeili, Jing Xu, Roberta Raileanu, Xian Li, Asli Celikyilmaz, Jason Weston Shehzaad Dhuliawala
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Generation of plausible yet incorrect factual information, termed hallucination, is an unsolved issue in large language models. We study the ability of language models to deliberate on the responses they give in order to correct their mistakes. We develop the Chain-of-Verification (CoVe) method whereby the model first (i) drafts an initial response; then (ii) plans verification questions to fact-check its draft; (iii) answers those questions independently so the answers are not biased by other responses; and (iv) generates its final verified response. In experiments, we show CoVe decreases hallucinations across a variety of tasks, from list-based questions from Wikidata, closed book MultiSpanQA and longform text generation.
Measuring Bargaining Abilities of LLMs: A Benchmark and A Buyer-Enhancement Method
Authors: Zhiwei He, Tong Ren, Yibo Miao, Zhuosheng Zhang, Yang Yang, Rui Wang Tian Xia
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Bargaining is an important and unique part of negotiation between humans. As LLM-driven agents learn to negotiate and act like real humans, how to evaluate agents' bargaining abilities remains an open problem.For the first time, we formally described the Bargaining task as an asymmetric incomplete information game, defining the gains of the Buyer and Seller in multiple bargaining processes. It allows us to quantitatively assess an agent`s performance in the Bargain task.We collected a real product price dataset, AmazonHistoryPrice, and conducted evaluations of various LLM agents' bargaining abilities. We find that playing a Buyer is much harder than a Seller, and increasing model size can not effectively improve the Buyer`s performance.To address the challenge, we propose a novel approach called OG-Narrator that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator to control the price range of Buyer`s offers, and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers.Experimental results show that OG-Narrator improves the buyer`s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned.
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories
Authors: Ge Li, Yunfei Zhao, Yongmin Li, Huanyu Liu, Hao Zhu, Lecheng Wang, Kaibo Liu, Zheng Fang, Lanshen Wang, Jiazheng Ding, Xuanming Zhang, Yuqi Zhu, Yihong Dong, Zhi Jin, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Gu, Mengfei Yang Jia Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: How to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open question. We find that existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of LLMs.To address the knowledge gap, we propose a new benchmark named DevEval, which has three advances. (1) DevEval aligns with real-world repositories in multiple dimensions, e.g., code and dependency distributions. (2) DevEval is annotated by 13 developers and contains comprehensive annotations (e.g., requirements, original repositories, reference code, and reference dependencies). (3) DevEval comprises 1,825 testing samples from 115 repositories, covering 10 popular domains (e.g., Internet, Database). Based on DevEval, we propose repository-level code generation and evaluate 8 popular LLMs on DevEval (e.g., gpt-4, gpt-3.5, StarCoder 2, DeepSeek Coder, CodeLLaMa). Our experiments reveal these LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories. For example, the highest Pass@1 of gpt-4 only is 53.04% in our experiments. We also analyze LLMs' failed cases and summarize their shortcomings. We hope DevEval can facilitate the development of LLMs in real code repositories. DevEval, prompts, and LLMs' predictions have been released.
LPNL: Scalable Link Prediction with Large Language Models
Authors: Shenghua Liu, Yiwei Wang, Lingrui Mei, Xueqi Cheng Baolong Bi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) to graph learning is an emerging endeavor. However, the vast amount of information inherent in large graphs poses significant challenges to graph learning with LLMs. This work focuses on the link prediction task and introduces **LPNL** (Link Prediction via Natural Language), a framework based on large language models designed for scalable link prediction on large-scale heterogeneous graphs. We design novel prompts for link prediction that articulate graph details in natural language. We propose a two-stage sampling pipeline to extract crucial information from the graphs, and a divide-and-conquer strategy to control the input tokens within predefined limits, addressing the challenge of overwhelming information. We fine-tune a T5 model based on our self-supervised learning designed for link prediction. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LPNL outperforms multiple advanced baselines in link prediction tasks on large-scale graphs.
Aligning Speech Segments Beyond Pure Semantics
Authors: Artyom Kozhevnikov, Loic Barrault, Alexandre Mourachko, Holger Schwenk Kevin Heffernan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multilingual parallel data for speech-to-speech translation is scarce and expensive to create from scratch. This is all the more true for expressive speech translation, which aims at preserving not only the semantics, but also the overall prosody (e.g. style, emotion, rate-of-speech). Existing corpora contain speech utterances with the same meaning, yet the overall prosody is typically different, as human annotators are not tasked with reproducing these aspects, or crowed-sourced efforts do not specifically target this kind of alignment in priority. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment algorithm, which automatically forms pairs of speech segments aligned not only in meaning, but also in expressivity. In order to validate our approach, we train an expressive multilingual speech-to-speech translation system on the automatically aligned data. Our experiments show that in comparison to semantic-only approaches, expressively aligned data yields large improvements in source expressivity preservation (e.g. 43% uplift in speech rate preservation on average), while still maintaining content translation quality. In some scenarios, results also indicate that this alignment algorithm can outperform standard, semantic-focused approaches even on content translation quality.
Video-Language Understanding: A Survey from Model Architecture, Model Training, and Data Perspectives
Authors: Yi Bin, Junbin Xiao, Leigang Qu, Yicong Li, Jay Zhangjie Wu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Anh Tuan Luu Thong Nguyen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Humans use multiple senses to comprehend the environment. Vision and language are two of the most vital senses since they allow us to easily communicate our thoughts and perceive the world around us. There has been a lot of interest in creating video-language understanding systems with human-like senses since a video-language pair can mimic both our linguistic medium and visual environment with temporal dynamics. In this survey, we review the key tasks of these systems and highlight the associated challenges. Based on the challenges, we summarize their methods from model architecture, model training, and data perspectives. We also conduct performance comparison among the methods, and discuss promising directions for future research.
Generative Input: Towards Next-Generation Input Methods Paradigm
Authors: Yongcan Wang, Zihang Xu, Zhenzhen Jia, Enhong Chen Keyu Ding
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Since the release of ChatGPT, generative models have achieved tremendous success and become the de facto approach for various NLP tasks. However, its application in the field of input methods remains under-explored. Many neural network approaches have been applied to the construction of Chinese input method engines (IMEs). Previous research often assumed that the input pinyin was correct and focused on Pinyin-to-character (P2C) task, which significantly falls short of meeting users' demands. Moreover, previous research could not leverage user feedback to optimize the model and provide personalized results. In this study, we propose a novel Generative Input paradigm named GeneInput. It uses prompts to handle all input scenarios and other intelligent auxiliary input functions, optimizing the model with user feedback. The results demonstrate that we have achieved state-of-the-art performance for the first time in the Full-mode Key-sequence to Characters task. GeneInput also includes RLHF-IME, a novel RLHF application framework for input method, that eliminates the need for manual ranking annotations and the performance surpasses GPT-4. Relevant resources have been open-sourced.
A + B: A General Generator-Reader Framework for Optimizing LLMs to Unleash Synergy Potential
Authors: Yixin Cao, Jiahao Ying, Bo Wang, Yuyue Zhao, Yong Liao, Peng Zhou Wei Tang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to supplement necessary knowledge to large language models (LLMs). Targeting its bottleneck of retriever performance, “generate-then-read” pipeline is proposed to replace the retrieval stage with generation from the LLM itself. Although promising, this research direction is underexplored and still cannot work in the scenario when source knowledge is given. In this paper, we formalize a general “A + B” framework with varying combinations of foundation models and types for systematic investigation. We explore the efficacy of the base and chat versions of LLMs and found their different functionalities suitable for generator A and reader B, respectively. Their combinations consistently outperform single models, especially in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we extend the application of the “A + B” framework to scenarios involving source documents through continuous learning, enabling the direct integration of external knowledge into LLMs. This approach not only facilitates effective acquisition of new knowledge but also addresses the challenges of safety and helpfulness post-adaptation. The paper underscores the versatility of the “A + B” framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance the practical application of LLMs across various domains.
Functional Overlap Reranking for Neural Code Generation
Authors: Minh Huynh Nguyen, Nghi D. Q. Bui Hung Quoc To
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Code Large Language Models (CodeLLMs) have ushered in a new era in code generation advancements. However, selecting the best code solutions from all possible CodeLLM outputs remains a challenge. Previous methods often overlooked the intricate functional similarities and interactions between solution clusters. We introduce SRank, a novel reranking strategy for selecting the best solutions from code generation, focusing on modeling the relationships between clusters of solutions. By quantifying the functional overlap between solution clusters, our approach provides a better ranking strategy for code solutions. Empirical results show that our method achieves remarkable results on the pass@1 score. For instance, on the Human-Eval benchmark, we achieve 69.66% in pass@1 with Codex002, 75.31% with WizardCoder, 53.99% with StarCoder, and 60.55% with CodeGen, surpassing state-of-the-art code generation reranking methods such as CodeT and Coder-Reviewer on the same CodeLLM by a significant margin approx 6.1% improvement on average. Even in scenarios with a limited number of sampled solutions and test cases, our approach demonstrates robustness and superiority, marking a new benchmark in code generation reranking. Our implementation can be found at https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/SRank-CodeRanker.
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game
Authors: Yifan Yang, Jian Li, Yong Dai, Tianhao Hu, Peixin Cao, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li Pengyu Cheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Human preference alignment is essential to improve the interaction quality of large language models (LLMs). Existing alignment methods depend on manually annotated preference data to guide the LLM optimization directions. However, continuously updating LLMs for alignment raises a distribution gap between model-generated samples and human-annotated responses, hindering training effectiveness. To mitigate this issue, previous methods require additional preference annotation on newly generated samples to adapt to the shifted distribution, which consumes a large amount of annotation resources. Targeting more efficient human preference optimization, we propose an Adversarial Preference Optimization (APO) framework, in which the LLM and the reward model update alternatively via a min-max game. Through adversarial training, the reward model can adapt to the shifted generation distribution of the LLM without any additional annotation. With comprehensive experiments, we find the proposed adversarial training framework further enhances existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. The code is at https://github.com/Linear95/APO.
Pinpointing Diffusion Grid Noise to Enhance Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Authors: Xiangfan Chen, Xiaolei Guo, Chenwei Zhang, Zhechao Zhu, Zehai Zhou, Xiangjie Kong Linan Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) has garnered significant attention in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). Current ASQP research primarily relies on pre-trained generative language models to produce templated sequences, often complemented by grid-based auxiliary methods. Despite these efforts, the persistent challenge of generation instability remains unresolved and the effectiveness of grid methods remains underexplored in current studies. To this end, we introduce \textbfGrid Noise \textbfDiffusion \textbfPinpoint Network (\textbfGDP), a T5-based generative model aiming to tackle the issue of generation instability. The model consists of three novel modules, including Diffusion Vague Learning (DVL) to facilitate effective model learning and enhance overall robustness; Consistency Likelihood Learning (CLL) to discern the characteristics and commonalities of sentiment elements and thus reduce the impact of distributed noise; and GDP-FOR, a novel generation template, to enable models to generate outputs in a more natural way. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the remarkable effectiveness of our approach in addressing ASQP tasks.
Continual Contrastive Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Enrico Fini, Muqiao Yang, Daniele Falavigna, Alessio Brutti, Bhiksha Raj Umberto Cappellazzo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, neural networks have shown impressive progress across diverse fields, with speech processing being no exception. However, recent breakthroughs in this area require extensive offline training using large datasets and tremendous computing resources. Unfortunately, these models struggle to retain their previously acquired knowledge when learning new tasks continually. In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning sequence-to-sequence models for spoken language understanding in a class-incremental learning (CIL) setting and we propose COCONUT, a CIL method that relies on the combination of experience replay and contrastive learning. Through a modified version of the standard supervised contrastive loss, COCONUT preserves the learned representations by pulling closer samples from the same class and pushing away the others. Moreover, we leverage a multimodal contrastive loss that helps the model learn more discriminative representations of the new data by aligning audio and text features. We also investigate different contrastive designs to combine the strengths of the contrastive loss with teacher-student architectures used for distillation. Experiments on two established SLU datasets reveal the effectiveness of our proposed approach and significant improvements over the baselines. We also show that COCONUT can be combined with methods that operate on the decoder side of the model, resulting in further metrics improvements.
LLM as Prompter: Low-resource Inductive Reasoning on Arbitrary Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Yuwei Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Siqiang Luo Kai Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge Graph (KG) inductive reasoning, which aims to infer missing facts from new KGs that are not seen during training, has been widely adopted in various applications. One critical challenge of KG inductive reasoning is handling low-resource scenarios with scarcity in both textual and structural aspects. In this paper, we attempt to address this challenge with Large Language Models (LLMs). Particularly, we utilize the state-of-the-art LLMs to generate a graph-structural prompt to enhance the pre-trained Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which brings us new methodological insights into the KG inductive reasoning methods, as well as high generalizability in practice. On the methodological side, we introduce a novel pretraining and prompting framework ProLINK, designed for low-resource inductive reasoning across arbitrary KGs without requiring additional training. On the practical side, we experimentally evaluate our approach on 36 low-resource KG datasets and find that ProLINK outperforms previous methods in three-shot, one-shot, and zero-shot reasoning tasks, exhibiting average performance improvements by 20%, 45%, and 147%, respectively. Furthermore, ProLINK demonstrates strong robustness for various LLM promptings as well as full-shot scenarios.
Unsupervised Parsing by Searching for Frequent Word Sequences among Sentences with Equivalent Predicate-Argument Structures
Authors: Xiangheng He, Danushka Bollegala, Yusuke Miyao Junjie Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Unsupervised constituency parsing focuses on identifying word sequences that form a syntactic unit (i.e., constituents) in target sentences. Linguists identify the constituent by evaluating a set of Predicate-Argument Structure (PAS) equivalent sentences where we find the constituent appears more frequently than non-constituents (i.e., the constituent corresponds to a frequent word sequence within the sentence set). However, such frequency information is unavailable in previous parsing methods that identify the constituent by observing sentences with diverse PAS. In this study, we empirically show that constituents correspond to frequent word sequences in the PAS-equivalent sentence set. We propose a frequency-based parser, span-overlap, that (1) computes the span-overlap score as the word sequence`s frequency in the PAS-equivalent sentence set and (2) identifies the constituent structure by finding a constituent tree with the maximum span-overlap score. The parser achieves state-of-the-art level parsing accuracy, outperforming existing unsupervised parsers in eight out of ten languages. Additionally, we discover a multilingual phenomenon: participant-denoting constituents tend to have higher span-overlap scores than equal-length event-denoting constituents, meaning that the former tend to appear more frequently in the PAS-equivalent sentence set than the latter. The phenomenon indicates a statistical difference between the two constituent types, laying the foundation for future labeled unsupervised parsing research.
Data-Centric Explainable Debiasing for Improving Fairness in Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Mengnan Du, Rui Song, Xin Wang, Ying Wang Yingji Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Human-like social bias of pre-trained language models (PLMs) on downstream tasks have attracted increasing attention. The potential flaws in the training data are the main factor that causes unfairness in PLMs. Existing data-centric debiasing strategies mainly leverage explicit bias words (defined as sensitive attribute words specific to demographic groups) for counterfactual data augmentation to balance the training data. However, they lack consideration of implicit bias words potentially associated with explicit bias words in complex distribution data, which indirectly harms the fairness of PLMs. To this end, we propose a **Data**-Centric **Debias**ing method (named Data-Debias), which uses an explainability method to search for implicit bias words to assist in debiasing PLMs. Specifically, we compute the feature attributions of all tokens using the Integrated Gradients method, and then treat the tokens that have a large impact on the model`s decision as implicit bias words. To make the search results more precise, we iteratively train a biased model to amplify the bias with each iteration. Finally, we use the implicit bias words searched in the last iteration to assist in debiasing PLMs. Extensive experimental results on multiple PLMs debiasing on three different classification tasks demonstrate that Data-Debias achieves state-of-the-art debiasing performance and strong generalization while maintaining predictive abilities.
Knowledge-Driven Cross-Document Relation Extraction
Authors: Raghava Mutharaju, Kuldeep Singh, Ramakanth Kavuluru Monika Jain
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) is a well-known NLP application often treated as a sentence or document-level task. However, a handful of recent efforts explore it across documents or in the cross-document setting (CrossDocRE). This is distinct from the single document case because different documents often focus on disparate themes, while text within a document tends to have a single goal.Current CrossDocRE efforts do not consider domain knowledge, which are often assumed to be known to the reader when documents are authored. Here, we propose a novel approach, KXDocRE, that embed domain knowledge of entities with input text for cross-document RE. Our proposed framework has three main benefits over baselines: 1) it incorporates domain knowledge of entities along with documents' text; 2) it offers interpretability by producing explanatory text for predicted relations between entities 3) it improves performance over the prior methods. Code and models are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/kracr/cross-doc-relation-extraction.
Injecting Salesperson`s Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Yun-Nung Chen Wen Chang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent research in dialogue systems focuses on two main categories: task-oriented (TOD) and open-domain (chit-chat) dialogues. TOD systems help users complete specific tasks, while open-domain systems aim to create engaging conversations. However, user intents often emerge during interactions. A recent study introduced SalesBot, simulating dialogues that transition from chit-chat to task-oriented scenarios to train sales agents. Unfortunately, the initial data lacked smooth transitions and coherent long dialogues, resulting in unnatural interactions. This paper presents SalesBot 2.0, an improved dataset leveraging commonsense knowledge from large language models (LLMs) through strategic prompting. Additionally, we introduce SalesAgent, a novel model trained on salesperson interactions using chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This model excels in transitioning topics, understanding user intents, and selecting appropriate strategies.Experiments with diverse user simulations validate our method`s effectiveness in controlling dialogue strategies in LLMs. SalesBot 2.0 enhances coherence and reduces aggression, improving model learning for sales-customer interactions.
KG-Adapter: Enabling Knowledge Graph Integration in Large Language Models through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Yangyang Luo, Tianze Xu, Caixia Yuan, Huixing Jiang, Chen Wei, Xiaojie Wang Shiyu Tian
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities and generalizability across various tasks, they are criticized for lack of expertise. One promising solution is to combine knowledge graphs (KGs) with LLMs, and recent studies focus on integrating KGs into LLMs through prompt-based methods. However, these approaches fail to use the structural information of the KGs, suffer from the problem of knowledge conflict, and over-reliance on super LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose KG-Adapter, a parameter-level KG integration method based on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Specifically, we introduce a novel adapter structure designed for decoder-only LLMs, which can encode KGs from both node-centered and relation-centered perspectives, and then perform joint reasoning with LLMs to generate responses end-to-end. Experiments with diverse models on four datasets for two different tasks all demonstrate significant improvements. With only 28M parameters trained, we make the 7B-parameter LLM outperform the previous full-parameter fine-tuned state-of-the-art method and comparable to the prompt-based ChatGPT methods.
Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios
Authors: Jiayi Fu, Pengli Liu, Qingyang Li, Yan Gong, Junchen Wan, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai Lei Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Although chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks, the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting usually causes the repetitiveness and local optimality. To address this shortcoming, ensemble-optimization tries to obtain multiple reasoning paths to get the final answer assembly. However, current ensemble-optimization methods either simply employ rule-based post-processing such as self-consistency, or train an additional model based on several task-related human annotations to select the best one among multiple reasoning paths, yet fail to generalize to realistic settings where the type of input questions is unknown or the answer format of reasoning paths is unknown. To avoid their limitations, we propose Self-Agreement, a generalizable ensemble-optimization method applying in almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and the answer format of reasoning paths may be known or unknown. Self-agreement firstly samples from language model`s decoder to generate a diverse set of reasoning paths, and subsequently prompts the language model one more time to determine the optimal answer by selecting the most agreed answer among the sampled reasoning paths. Self-agreement simultaneously achieves remarkable performance on six public reasoning benchmarks and superior generalization capabilities.