mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Compositional Deficiency of Large Language Models in Mathematical Reasoning Through Trap Problems
Authors: Jingqi Tong, Yurong Mou, Ming Zhang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang Jun Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset MathTrap by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8K. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent “unseen” cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not \textbfspontaneously combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. We find that LLMs' performance can be improved through the above external intervention. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.
Scaling Laws for Linear Complexity Language Models
Authors: Dong Li, Ruitao Leng, Zhen Qin, Weigao Sun, Yiran Zhong Xuyang Shen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The interest in linear complexity models for large language models is on the rise, although their scaling capacity remains uncertain. In this study, we present the scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability. Specifically, we examine the scaling behaviors of three efficient linear architectures. These include TNL, a linear attention model with data-independent decay; HGRN2, a linear RNN with data-dependent decay; and cosFormer2, a linear attention model without decay. We also include LLaMA as a baseline architecture for comparison with softmax attention. These models were trained with six variants, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters on a 300B-token corpus, and evaluated with a total of 1,376 intermediate checkpoints on various downstream tasks. These tasks include validation loss, commonsense reasoning, and information retrieval and generation. The study reveals that existing linear complexity language models exhibit similar scaling capabilities as conventional transformer-based models while also demonstrating superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention.
Autoregressive Multi-trait Essay Scoring via Reinforcement Learning with Scoring-aware Multiple Rewards
Authors: Sangwon Ryu, Gary Lee Heejin Do
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in automated essay scoring (AES) have shifted towards evaluating multiple traits to provide enriched feedback. Like typical AES systems, multi-trait AES employs the quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) to measure agreement with human raters, aligning closely with the rating schema; however, its non-differentiable nature prevents its direct use in neural network training. In this paper, we propose Scoring-aware Multi-reward Reinforcement Learning (SaMRL), which integrates actual evaluation schemes into the training process by designing QWK-based rewards with a mean-squared error penalty for multi-trait AES. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) applications in AES are limited to classification models despite associated performance degradation, as RL requires probability distributions; instead, we adopt an autoregressive score generation framework to leverage token generation probabilities for robust multi-trait score predictions. Empirical analyses demonstrate that SaMRL facilitates model training, notably enhancing scoring of previously inferior prompts.
Intrinsic Self-correction for Enhanced Morality: An Analysis of Internal Mechanisms and the Superficial Hypothesis
Authors: Haitao Mao, Jiliang Tang, Kristen Johnson Guangliang Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of producing content that perpetuates stereotypes, discrimination, and toxicity.The recently proposed \textitmoral self-correction is a computationally efficient method for reducing harmful content in the responses of LLMs. However, the process of how injecting self-correction instructions can modify the behavior of LLMs remains under-explored. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of moral self-correction by answering three research questions: (1) In what scenarios does moral self-correction work? (2) What are the internal mechanisms of LLMs, e.g., hidden states, that are influenced by moral self-correction instructions? (3) Is intrinsic moral self-correction actually superficial in terms of reduced immorality in hidden states? We argue that self-correction can help LLMs find a shortcut to more morally correct output, rather than truly reducing the immorality stored in hidden states.Through empirical investigation with tasks of language generation and multi-choice question answering, we conclude: (i) LLMs exhibit good performance across both tasks, and self-correction instructions are particularly beneficial when the correct answer is already top-ranked; (ii) The morality levels in intermediate hidden states are strong indicators as to whether one instruction would be more effective than another; (iii) Based on our analysis of intermediate hidden states and task case studies of self-correction behaviors, we are first to propose the hypothesis that intrinsic moral self-correction is in fact superficial.
ATAP: Automatic Template-Augmented Commonsense Knowledge Graph Completion via Pre-Trained Language Models
Authors: Yifan Ding, Jingwei Cheng Fu Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The mission of commonsense knowledge graph completion (CKGC) is to infer missing facts from known commonsense knowledge. CKGC methods can be roughly divided into two categories: triple-based methods and text-based methods. Due to the imbalanced distribution of entities and limited structural information, triple-based methods struggle with long-tail entities. Text-based methods alleviate this issue, but require extensive training and fine-tuning of language models, which reduces efficiency. To alleviate these problems, we propose ATAP, the first CKGC framework that utilizes automatically generated continuous prompt templates combined with pre-trained language models (PLMs). Moreover, ATAP uses a carefully designed new prompt template training strategy, guiding PLMs to generate optimal prompt templates for CKGC tasks. Combining the rich knowledge of PLMs with the template automatic augmentation strategy, ATAP effectively mitigates the long-tail problem and enhances CKGC performance. Results on benchmark datasets show that ATAP achieves state-of-the-art performance overall.
LM2: A Simple Society of Language Models Solves Complex Reasoning
Authors: Subhabrata Dutta, Tanmoy Chakraborty Gurusha Juneja
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite demonstrating emergent reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMS) often lose track of complex, multi-step reasoning. Existing studies show that providing guidance via decomposing the original question into multiple subproblems elicits more robustness in LLM reasoning -- a decomposer generates the subproblems, and a solver solves each of these subproblems. However, these techniques fail to accommodate coordination between the decomposer and the solver modules (either in a single model or different specialized ones) -- the decomposer does not keep track of the ability of the solver to follow the decomposed reasoning. In this paper, we propose LM2 to address these challenges. LM2 modularizes the decomposition, solution, and verification into three different language models. The decomposer module identifies the key concepts necessary to solve the problem and generates step-by-step subquestions according to the reasoning requirement. The solver model generates the solution to the subproblems that are then checked by the verifier module; depending upon the feedback from the verifier, the reasoning context is constructed using the subproblems and the solutions. These models are trained to coordinate using policy learning. Exhaustive experimentation suggests the superiority of LM2 over existing methods on in- and out-domain reasoning problems, outperforming the best baselines by 8.1% on MATH, 7.71% on JEEBench, and 9.7% on MedQA problems (code available at https://github.com/ LCS2-IIITD/Language_Model_Multiplex).
Towards a Similarity-adjusted Surprisal Theory
Authors: Mario Giulianelli, Tiago Pimentel Clara Meister
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Surprisal theory posits that the cognitive effort required to comprehend a word is determined by its contextual predictability, quantified assurprisal. Traditionally, surprisal theory treats words as distinct entities, overlooking any potential similarity between them. Giulianelli et al. (2023) address this limitation by introducing information value, a measure of predictability designed to account for similarities between communicative units. Our work leverages Ricotta and Szeidl`s (2006) diversity index to extend surprisal into a metric that we term similarity-adjusted surprisal, exposing a mathematical relationship between surprisal and information value. Similarity-adjusted surprisal aligns with information value when considering graded similarities and reduces to standard surprisal when words are treated as distinct. Experimental results with reading time data indicate that similarity-adjusted surprisal adds predictive power beyond standard surprisal for certain datasets, suggesting it serves as a complementary measure of comprehension effort.
Multi-Level Information Retrieval Augmented Generation for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Authors: Olivier Ferret, Sahar Ghannay, Hervé Le Borgne Omar Adjali
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The Knowledge-Aware Visual Question Answering about Entity task aims to disambiguate entities using textual and visual information, as well as knowledge. It usually relies on two independent steps, information retrieval then reading comprehension, that do not benefit each other. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a solution by using generated answers as feedback for retrieval training. RAG usually relies solely on pseudo-relevant passages retrieved from external knowledge bases which can lead to ineffective answer generation. In this work, we propose a multi-level information RAG approach that enhances answer generation through entity retrieval and query expansion. We formulate a joint-training RAG loss such that answer generation is conditioned on both entity and passage retrievals. We show through experiments new state-of-the-art performance on the VIQuAE KB-VQA benchmark and demonstrate that our approach can help retrieve more actual relevant knowledge to generate accurate answers.
Can We Trust the Performance Evaluation of Uncertainty Estimation Methods in Text Summarization?
Authors: Runing Yang, Linlin Yu, Changbin Li, Ruoxi Jia, Feng Chen, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu Jianfeng He
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Text summarization, a key natural language generation (NLG) task, is vital in various domains. However, the high cost of inaccurate summaries in risk-critical applications, particularly those involving human-in-the-loop decision-making, raises concerns about the reliability of uncertainty estimation on text summarization (UE-TS) evaluation methods. This concern stems from the dependency of uncertainty model metrics on diverse and potentially conflicting NLG metrics. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive UE-TS benchmark incorporating 31 NLG metrics across four dimensions. The benchmark evaluates the uncertainty estimation capabilities of two large language models and one pre-trained language model on three datasets, with human-annotation analysis incorporated where applicable. We also assess the performance of 14 common uncertainty estimation methods within this benchmark. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering multiple uncorrelated NLG metrics and diverse uncertainty estimation methods to ensure reliable and efficient evaluation of UE-TS techniques. Our code and data are available: https://github.com/he159ok/Benchmark-of-Uncertainty-Estimation-Methods-in-Text-Summarization.
Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP
Authors: Alon Jacovi, Aviv Slobodkin, Aviya Maimon, Ido Dagan, Reut Tsarfaty Omer Goldman
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of “long-context”, defined simply by the total length of the model`s input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.
BPE Gets Picky: Efficient Vocabulary Refinement During Tokenizer Training
Authors: Catherine Arnett, Elizaveta Korotkova, Ivan P. Yamshchikov Pavel Chizhov
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models can greatly benefit from efficient tokenization. However, they still mostly utilize the classical Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) algorithm, a simple and reliable method. BPE has been shown to cause such issues as under-trained tokens and sub-optimal compression that may affect the downstream performance. We introduce PickyBPE, a modified BPE algorithm that carries out vocabulary refinement during tokenizer training by removing merges that leave intermediate “junk” tokens. Our method improves vocabulary efficiency, eliminates under-trained tokens, and does not compromise text compression. Our experiments show that this method either improves downstream performance or does not harm it.
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models
Authors: Shuang Li, Kerun Yu, Jinglei Chen, Zujie Liang, Xinhui Wu, Yuxi Qian, Feng Wei, Bo Zheng, Jiaqing Liang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao Wei Shi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: There is a growing interest in expanding the input capacity of language models (LMs) across various domains. However, simply increasing the context window does not guarantee robust performance across diverse long-input processing tasks, such as understanding extensive documents and extracting detailed information from lengthy and noisy data. In response, we introduce Segment+, a general framework that enables LMs to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently. Segment+ utilizes structured notes and a filtering module to manage information flow, resulting in a system that is both controllable and interpretable. Our extensive experiments across various model sizes, focusing on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, demonstrate the effectiveness of Segment+ in improving performance.
Closing the Loop: Learning to Generate Writing Feedback via Language Model Simulated Student Revisions
Authors: Jiaye Tan, Xiaotian Su, Anne Gere, Xu Wang, Lu Wang Inderjeet Jayakumar Nair
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Providing feedback is widely recognized as crucial for refining students' writing skills. Recent advances in language models (LMs) have made it possible to automatically generate feedback that is actionable and well-aligned with human-specified attributes. However, it remains unclear whether the feedback generated by these models is truly effective in enhancing the quality of student revisions. Moreover, prompting LMs with a precise set of instructions to generate feedback is nontrivial due to the lack of consensus regarding the specific attributes that can lead to improved revising performance. To address these challenges, we propose PROF that PROduces Feedback via learning from LM simulated student revisions. PROF aims to iteratively optimize the feedback generator by directly maximizing the effectiveness of students' overall revising performance as simulated by LMs. Focusing on an economic essay assignment, we empirically test the efficacy of PROF and observe that our approach not only surpasses a variety of baseline methods in effectiveness of improving students' writing but also demonstrates enhanced pedagogical values, even though it was not explicitly trained for this aspect.
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent
Authors: Chenliang Li, Hongzhan Chen, Ming Yan, Xiaojun Quan, Hehong Chen, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang Weizhou Shen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents significantly extend the capabilities of standalone LLMs, empowering them to interact with external tools (e.g., APIs, functions) and complete various tasks in a self-directed fashion. The challenge of tool use demands that LLMs not only understand user queries and generate answers accurately but also excel in task planning, tool invocation, and result summarization. While traditional works focus on training a single LLM with all these capabilities, performance limitations become apparent, particularly with smaller models. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer. Each component is implemented by a single LLM that focuses on a specific capability and collaborates with others to accomplish the task. This modular framework facilitates individual updates and the potential use of smaller LLMs for building each capability. To effectively train this framework, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm. First, we fine-tune a backbone LLM on the entire dataset without discriminating sub-tasks, providing the model with a comprehensive understanding of the task. Second, the fine-tuned LLM is used to instantiate the planner, caller, and summarizer respectively, which are continually fine-tuned on respective sub-tasks. Evaluation across various tool-use benchmarks illustrates that our proposed multi-LLM framework surpasses the traditional single-LLM approach, highlighting its efficacy and advantages in tool learning.
Interpreting Context Look-ups in Transformers: Investigating Attention-MLP Interactions
Authors: Shay B Cohen, Fazl Barez Clement Neo
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied independently, their interactions remain largely unexplored. This study investigates how attention heads and next-token neurons interact in LLMs to predict new words. We propose a methodology to identify next-token neurons, find prompts that highly activate them, and determine the upstream attention heads responsible. We then generate and evaluate explanations for the activity of these attention heads in an automated manner. Our findings reveal that some attention heads recognize specific contexts relevant to predicting a token and activate a downstream token-predicting neuron accordingly. This mechanism provides a deeper understanding of how attention heads work with MLP neurons to perform next-token prediction. Our approach offers a foundation for further research into the intricate workings of LLMs and their impact on text generation and understanding.
Still Not Quite There! Evaluating Large Language Models for Comorbid Mental Health Diagnosis
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Shantanu Deepak Patankar, Madhumitha Chandrasekaran, Sneha D′silva, Jemima S. Jacob, Rashmi Gupta Amey Hengle
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this study, we introduce ANGST, a novel, first of its kind benchmark for depression-anxiety comorbidity classification from social media posts. Unlike contemporary datasets that often oversimplify the intricate interplay between different mental health disorders by treating them as isolated conditions, ANGST enables multi-label classification, allowing each post to be simultaneously identified as indicating depression and/or anxiety. Comprising 2876 meticulously annotated posts by expert psychologists and an additional 7667 silver-labeled posts, ANGST posits a more representative sample of online mental health discourse. Moreover, we benchmark ANGST using various state-of-the-art language models, ranging from Mental-BERT to GPT-4. Our results provide significant insights into the capabilities and limitations of these models in complex diagnostic scenarios. While GPT-4 generally outperforms other models, none achieve an F1 score exceeding 72% in multi-class comorbid classification, underscoring the ongoing challenges in applying language models to mental health diagnostics.
The Odyssey of Commonsense Causality: From Foundational Benchmarks to Cutting-Edge Reasoning
Authors: Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, Boi Faltings Shaobo Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding commonsense causality is a unique mark of intelligence for humans. It helps people understand the principles of the real world better and benefits the decision-making process related to causation. For instance, commonsense causality is crucial in judging whether a defendant`s action causes the plaintiff`s loss in determining legal liability. Despite its significance, a systematic exploration of this topic is notably lacking. Our comprehensive survey bridges this gap by focusing on taxonomies, benchmarks, acquisition methods, qualitative reasoning, and quantitative measurements in commonsense causality, synthesizing insights from over 200 representative articles. Our work aims to provide a systematic overview, update scholars on recent advancements, provide a practical guide for beginners, and highlight promising future research directions in this vital field. A summary of the related literature is available at https://github.com/cui-shaobo/causality-papers .
Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups
Authors: David-Gabriel Ion, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Florin Pop, Mihaela-Claudia Cercel Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an essential step in the lexical simplification task and has recently become a task on its own. Some variations of this binary classification task have emerged, such as lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complexity evaluation of multi-word expressions (MWE). Large language models (LLMs) recently became popular in the Natural Language Processing community because of their versatility and capability to solve unseen tasks in zero/few-shot settings. Our work investigates LLM usage, specifically open-source models such as Llama 2, Llama 3, and Vicuna v1.5, and closed-source, such as ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o, in the CWI, LCP, and MWE settings. We evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings and show that LLMs struggle in certain conditions or achieve comparable results against existing methods. In addition, we provide some views on meta-learning combined with prompt learning. In the end, we conclude that the current state of LLMs cannot or barely outperform existing methods, which are usually much smaller.
Model Editing Harms General Abilities of Large Language Models: Regularization to the Rescue
Authors: Hao-Xiang Xu, Jun-Yu Ma, Pan Lu, Zhen-Hua Ling, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng Jia-Chen Gu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Model editing is a technique that edits the large language models (LLMs) with updated knowledge to alleviate hallucinations without resource-intensive retraining. While current model editing methods can effectively modify a model`s behavior within a specific area of interest, they often overlook the potential unintended side effects on the general abilities of LLMs such as reasoning, natural language inference, and question answering. In this paper, we raise concerns that model editing`s improvements on factuality may come at the cost of a significant degradation of the model`s general abilities. We systematically analyze the side effects by evaluating four popular editing methods on three LLMs across eight representative tasks. Our extensive empirical experiments show that it is challenging for current editing methods to simultaneously improve factuality of LLMs and maintain their general abilities. Our analysis reveals that the side effects are caused by model editing altering the original model weights excessively, leading to overfitting to the edited facts. To mitigate this, a method named RECT is proposed to regularize the edit update weights by imposing constraints on their complexity based on the RElative Change in weighT. Evaluation results show that RECT can significantly mitigate the side effects of editing while still maintaining over 94% editing performance.
MediTOD: An English Dialogue Dataset for Medical History Taking with Comprehensive Annotations
Authors: Goonjan Saha, Rocktim Jyoti Das, Dinesh Raghu, Mausam . Vishal Vivek Saley
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Medical task-oriented dialogue systems can assist doctors by collecting patient medical history, aiding in diagnosis, or guiding treatment selection, thereby reducing doctor burnout and expanding access to medical services. However, doctor-patient dialogue datasets are not readily available, primarily due to privacy regulations. Moreover, existing datasets lack comprehensive annotations involving medical slots and their different attributes, such as symptoms and their onset, progression, and severity. These comprehensive annotations are crucial for accurate diagnosis. Finally, most existing datasets are non-English, limiting their utility for the larger research community.In response, we introduce MediTOD, a new dataset of doctor-patient dialogues in English for the medical history-taking task. Collaborating with doctors, we devise a questionnaire-based labeling scheme tailored to the medical domain. Then, medical professionals create the dataset with high-quality comprehensive annotations, capturing medical slots and their attributes. We establish benchmarks in supervised and few-shot settings on MediTOD for natural language understanding, policy learning, and natural language generation subtasks, evaluating models from both TOD and biomedical domains. We make MediTOD publicly available for future research.
***YesBut***: A High-Quality Annotated Multimodal Dataset for evaluating Satire Comprehension capability of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yash Agarwal, Ashish Patwa, Millon Madhur Das, Aman Bansal, Ankit Raj, Pawan Goyal, Niloy Ganguly Abhilash Nandy
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding satire and humor is a challenging task for even current Vision-Language models. In this paper, we propose the challenging tasks of Satirical Image Detection (detecting whether an image is satirical), Understanding (generating the reason behind the image being satirical), and Completion (given one half of the image, selecting the other half from 2 given options, such that the complete image is satirical) and release a high-quality dataset ***YesBut***, consisting of 2547 images, 1084 satirical and 1463 non-satirical, containing different artistic styles, to evaluate those tasks. Each satirical image in the dataset depicts a normal scenario, along with a conflicting scenario which is funny or ironic. Despite the success of current Vision-Language Models on multimodal tasks such as Visual QA and Image Captioning, our benchmarking experiments show that such models perform poorly on the proposed tasks on the ***YesBut*** Dataset in Zero-Shot Settings w.r.t both automated as well as human evaluation. Additionally, we release a dataset of 119 real, satirical photographs for further research.
Working Memory Identifies Reasoning Limits in Language Models
Authors: Yiren Jian, Zhongyu Ouyang, Soroush Vosoughi Chunhui Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This study explores the inherent limitations of large language models (LLMs) from a scaling perspective, focusing on the upper bounds of their cognitive capabilities. We integrate insights from cognitive science to quantitatively examine how LLMs perform on n-back tasks---a benchmark used to assess working memory, which involves temporarily holding and manipulating information. Our findings reveal that despite the increased model size, LLMs still face significant challenges in holding and processing information effectively, especially under complex task conditions. We also assess various prompting strategies, revealing their diverse impacts on LLM performance. The results highlight the struggle of current LLMs to autonomously discover optimal problem-solving patterns without heavily relying on manually corrected prompts. To move beyond these constraints, fundamental improvements in the planning and search of LLMs are essential for them to reason autonomously. Improving these capabilities will reduce the reliance on external corrections and enable LLMs to become more autonomous in their problem-solving processes.
RAFT: Realistic Attacks to Fool Text Detectors
Authors: Ran Li, Junfeng Yang, Chengzhi Mao James Liyuan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable fluency across various tasks. However, their unethical applications, such as disseminating disinformation, have become a growing concern. Although recent works have proposed a number of LLM detection methods, their robustness and reliability remain unclear. In this paper, we present RAFT: a grammar error-free black-box attack against existing LLM detectors. In contrast to previous attacks for language models, our method exploits the transferability of LLM embeddings at the word-level while preserving the original text quality. We leverage an auxiliary embedding to greedily select candidate words to perturb against the target detector. Experiments reveal that our attack effectively compromises all detectors in the study across various domains by up to 99%, and are transferable across source models. Manual human evaluation studies show our attacks are realistic and indistinguishable from original human-written text. We also show that examples generated by RAFT can be used to train adversarially robust detectors. Our work shows that current LLM detectors are not adversarially robust, underscoring the urgent need for more resilient detection mechanisms.
LLM-Evolve: Evaluation for LLM`s Evolving Capability on Benchmarks
Authors: Mingjie Liu, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro Jiaxuan You
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has extended their use to dynamic and interactive real-world applications, where models engage continuously with their environment and potentially enhance their performance over time. Most existing LLM benchmarks evaluate LLMs on i.i.d. tasks, overlooking their ability to learn iteratively from past experiences. Our paper bridges this evaluation gap by proposing a novel framework, LLM-Evolve, which extends established benchmarks to sequential problem-solving settings. LLM-Evolve evaluates LLMs over multiple rounds, providing feedback after each round to build a demonstration memory that the models can query in future tasks. We applied LLM-Evolve to the MMLU, GSM8K, and AgentBench benchmarks, testing 8 state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source models. Results show that LLMs can achieve performance improvements of up to 17% by learning from past interactions, with the quality of retrieval algorithms and feedback significantly influencing this capability. These insights advocate for more understanding and benchmarks for LLMs' performance in evolving interactive scenarios.
FFN-SkipLLM: A Hidden Gem for Autoregressive Decoding with Adaptive Feed Forward Skipping
Authors: Bodun Hu, Lu Yin, Yeonju Ro, Tianlong Chen, Shiwei Liu, Aditya Akella Ajay Kumar Jaiswal
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Autoregressive Large Language Models (e.g., LLaMa, GPTs) are omnipresent achieving remarkable success in language understanding and generation. However, such impressive capability typically comes with a substantial model size, which presents significant challenges for autoregressive token-by-token generation. To mitigate computation overload incurred during generation, several early-exit and layer-dropping strategies have been proposed. Despite some promising success due to the redundancy across LLMs layers on metrics like Rough-L/BLUE, our careful knowledge-intensive evaluation unveils issues such as generation collapse, hallucination, and noticeable performance drop even at the trivial exit ratio of ~10-15% of layers. We attribute these errors primarily to ineffective handling of the KV cache through state copying during early exit. In this work, we observe the saturation of computationally expensive feed-forward blocks of LLM layers and propose FFN-SkipLLM, which is a novel fine-grained skip strategy for autoregressive LLMs. FFN-SkipLLM leverages an input-adaptive feed-forward skipping approach that can skip ~25-30% of FFN blocks of LLMs with marginal change in performance on knowledge-intensive generation tasks without any requirement to handle the KV cache. Our extensive experiments and ablation studies across benchmarks like MT-Bench, Factoid-QA, and variable-length text summarization illustrate how our simple and easy-to-use method can facilitate faster autoregressive decoding.
LLM-based Code-Switched Text Generation for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Zheng Yuan Tom Potter
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: With the rise of globalisation, code-switching (CSW) has become a ubiquitous part of multilingual conversation, posing new challenges for natural language processing (NLP), especially in Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). This work explores the complexities of applying GEC systems to CSW texts. Our objectives include evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art GEC systems on an authentic CSW dataset from English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, exploring synthetic data generation as a solution to data scarcity, and developing a model capable of correcting grammatical errors in monolingual and CSW texts. We generated synthetic CSW GEC data, resulting in one of the first substantial datasets for this task, and showed that a model trained on this data is capable of significant improvements over existing systems. This work targets ESL learners, aiming to provide educational technologies that aid in the development of their English grammatical correctness without constraining their natural multilingualism.
Deciphering the Interplay of Parametric and Non-parametric Memory in Retrieval-augmented Language Models
Authors: Richard Johansson Mehrdad Farahani
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Generative language models often struggle with specialized or less-discussed knowledge. A potential solution is found in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models which act like retrieving information before generating responses. In this study, we explore how the Atlas approach, a RAG model, decides between what it already knows (parametric) and what it retrieves (non-parametric). We use causal mediation analysis and controlled experiments to examine how internal representations influence information processing. Our findings disentangle the effects of parametric knowledge and the retrieved context. They indicate that in cases where the model can choose between both types of information (parametric and non-parametric), it relies more on the context than the parametric knowledge. Furthermore, the analysis investigates the computations involved in \textithow the model uses the information from the context. We find that multiple mechanisms are active within the model and can be detected with mediation analysis: first, the decision of \textitwhether the context is relevant, and second, how the encoder computes output representations to support copying when relevant.
On Efficient Language and Vision Assistants for Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding: What Matters in Reading and Reasoning
Authors: Minjoon Seo Geewook Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in language and vision assistants have showcased impressive capabilities but suffer from a lack of transparency, limiting broader research and reproducibility. While open-source models handle general image tasks effectively, they face challenges with the high computational demands of complex visually-situated text understanding. Such tasks often require increased token inputs and large vision modules to harness high-resolution information. Striking a balance between model size and data importance remains an open question. This study aims to redefine the design of vision-language models by identifying key components and creating efficient models with constrained inference costs. By strategically formulating datasets, optimizing vision modules, and enhancing supervision techniques, we achieve significant improvements in inference throughput while maintaining high performance. Extensive experiments across models ranging from 160M to 13B parameters offer insights into model optimization.We will fully open-source our codebase, models, and datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/elva.
Community-Cross-Instruct: Unsupervised Instruction Generation for Aligning Large Language Models to Online Communities
Authors: Minh Duc Chu, Rebecca Dorn, Siyi Guo, Kristina Lerman Zihao He
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Social scientists use surveys to probe the opinions and beliefs of populations, but these methods are slow, costly, and prone to biases. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable the creating of computational representations or “digital twins” of populations that generate human-like responses mimicking the population`s language, styles, and attitudes. We introduce Community-Cross-Instruct, an unsupervised framework for aligning LLMs to online communities to elicit their beliefs. Given a corpus of a community`s online discussions, Community-Cross-Instruct automatically generates instruction-output pairs by an advanced LLM to (1) finetune a foundational LLM to faithfully represent that community, and (2) evaluate the alignment of the finetuned model to the community. We demonstrate the method`s utility in accurately representing political and diet communities on Reddit. Unlike prior methods requiring human-authored instructions, Community-Cross-Instruct generates instructions in a fully unsupervised manner, enhancing scalability and generalization across domains. This work enables cost-effective and automated surveying of diverse online communities.
Mathador-LM: A Dynamic Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning on Large Language Models
Authors: Amir Moeini, Dan Alistarh Eldar Kurtic
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce Mathador-LM, a new benchmark for evaluating the mathematical reasoning on large language models (LLMs), combining ruleset interpretation, planning, and problem-solving. This benchmark is inspired by the Mathador game, where the objective is to reach a target number using basic arithmetic operations on a given set of base numbers, following a simple set of rules. We show that, across leading LLMs, we obtain stable average performance while generating benchmark instances dynamically, following a target difficulty level. Thus, our benchmark alleviates concerns about test-set leakage into training data, an issue that often undermines popular benchmarks. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both open and closed-source state-of-the-art LLMs on Mathador-LM. Our findings reveal that contemporary models struggle with Mathador-LM, scoring significantly lower than average 3rd graders. This stands in stark contrast to their strong performance on popular mathematical reasoning benchmarks. The implementation of Mathador-LM benchmark is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/Mathador-LM.
Reasoning Paths with Reference Objects Elicit Quantitative Spatial Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Rafid Mahmood, Sanja Fidler, David Acuna Yuan-Hong Liao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite recent advances demonstrating vision- language models' (VLMs) abilities to describe complex relationships among objects in images using natural language, their capability to quantitatively reason about object sizes and distances remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce a manually annotated benchmark of 241 questions across five categories specifically designed for quantitative spatial reasoning, and systematically investigate the performance of SoTA VLMs on this task. Our analysis reveals that questions involving reasoning about distances between objects are particularly challenging for SoTA VLMs; however, some VLMs perform significantly better at this task than others, with an almost 40 points gap between the two best performing models. We also make the surprising observation that the success rate of the top-performing VLM increases by 19 points when a reasoning path using a reference object emerges naturally in the response. Inspired by this observation, we develop a zero-shot prompting technique, SpatialPrompt, that encourages VLMs to answer quantitative spatial questions using references objects as visual cues. Specifically, we demonstrate that instruct- ing VLMs to use reference objects in their reasoning paths significantly improves their quantitative spatial reasoning performance, bypassing the need for external data, architectural modifications, or fine-tuning. Remarkably, by solely using SpatialPrompt, Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4V, and GPT-4o improve by 56.2, 28.5, and 6.7 points on average in Q-Spatial Bench without the need for more data, model architectural modifications, or fine-tuning.
One Thousand and One Pairs: A “novel” challenge for long-context language models
Authors: Katherine Thai, Kyle Lo, Tanya Goyal, Mohit Iyyer Marzena Karpinska
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Synthetic long-context LLM benchmarks (e.g., “needle-in-the-haystack”) test only surface-level retrieval capabilities; but how well can long-context LLMs retrieve, synthesize, and reason over information across book-length inputs? We address this question by creating NoCha, a dataset of 1,001 minimally different pairs of true and false claims about 67 recently-published English fictional books, written by human readers of those books. In contrast to existing long-context benchmarks, our annotators confirm that the largest share of pairs in NoCha require global reasoning over the entire book to verify. Our experiments show that while human readers easily perform this task, it is enormously challenging for all ten long-context LLMs that we evaluate: no open-weight model performs above random chance (despite their strong performance on synthetic benchmarks), while GPT-4o achieves the highest pair accuracy at 55.8%. Further analysis reveals that (1) on average, models perform much better on pairs that require only sentence-level retrieval vs. global reasoning; (2) model-generated explanations for their decisions are often inaccurate even for correctly-labeled claims; and (3) models perform substantially worse on speculative fiction books that contain extensive world-building. The methodology proposed in NoCha allows for the evolution of the benchmark dataset and the easy analysis of future models.