mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF
Authors: Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: LLMs acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. To investigate alignment tax, we conducted experiments with existing RLHF algorithms using OpenLLaMA-3B, which revealed a pronounced alignment tax in NLP tasks. Whereas, despite various techniques to mitigate forgetting, they are often at odds with the RLHF performance, leading to a trade-off between alignment performance and forgetting mitigation, leading to an alignment-forgetting trade-off. In this paper we show that model averaging, which simply interpolates between pre and post RLHF model weights, surprisingly achieves the most strongest alignment-forgetting Pareto front among a wide range of competing methods. To understand its effectiveness, we offer theoretical insights into model averaging, revealing that it enhances performance Pareto front by increasing feature diversity on the layers where tasks share overlapped feature spaces. Empirical evidence corroborates our analysis by showing the benefits of averaging low-level transformer layers. Building on the analysis and the observation that averaging different layers of the transformer leads to significantly different alignment-forgetting trade-offs, we propose Heterogeneous Model Averaging (HMA) to Heterogeneously find various combination ratios of model layers. HMA seeks to maximize the alignment performance while incurring minimal alignment tax. Moreover, we validate HMA`s performance across a range of RLHF algorithms over OpenLLaMA-3B and further extend our findings to Mistral-7B which is evaluated by open-sourced preference model and GPT4. Code available here.
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations
Authors: Meng Li, Haoran Jin, Ruixuan Huang, Zhihao Xu, Defu Lian, Zijia Lin, Di Zhang, Xiting Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: With the growing popularity of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), comes a need for more global explanations of model behaviors. Concept-based explanations arise as a promising avenue for explaining high-level patterns learned by LLMs. Yet their evaluation poses unique challenges, especially due to their non-local nature and high dimensional representation in a model`s hidden space. Current methods approach concepts from different perspectives, lacking a unified formalization. This makes evaluating the core measures of concepts, namely faithfulness or readability, challenging. To bridge the gap, we introduce a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations' settings. Based on this, we quantify the faithfulness of a concept explanation via perturbation. We ensure adequate perturbation in the high-dimensional space for different concepts via an optimization problem. Readability is approximated via an automatic and deterministic measure, quantifying the coherence of patterns that maximally activate a concept while aligning with human understanding. Finally, based on measurement theory, we apply a meta-evaluation method for evaluating these measures, generalizable to other types of explanations or tasks as well. Extensive experimental analysis has been conducted to inform the selection of explanation evaluation measures.
Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Authors: Zhengyuan Liu, Stella Xin Yin, Geyu Lin, Nancy F. Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can provide personalized and self-paced learning experience. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enables better human-machine interaction, and facilitates the development of conversational ITSs in various disciplines such as math and language learning. In dialogic teaching, recognizing and adapting to individual characteristics can significantly enhance student engagement and learning efficiency. However, characterizing and simulating student`s persona remain challenging in training and evaluating conversational ITSs. In this work, we propose a framework to construct profiles of different student groups by refining and integrating both cognitive and noncognitive aspects, and leverage LLMs for personality-aware student simulation in a language learning scenario. We further enhance the framework with multi-aspect validation, and conduct extensive analysis from both teacher and student perspectives. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can produce diverse student responses according to the given language ability and personality traits, and trigger teacher`s adaptive scaffolding strategies.
MSI-Agent: Incorporating Multi-Scale Insight into Embodied Agents for Superior Planning and Decision-Making
Authors: Dayuan Fu, Biqing Qi, Yihuai Gao, Che Jiang, Guanting Dong, Bowen Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Insight gradually becomes a crucial form of long-term memory for an agent. However, the emergence of irrelevant insight and the lack of general insight can greatly undermine the effectiveness of insight. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce **M**ulti-**S**cale **I**nsight Agent (MSI-Agent), an embodied agent designed to improve LLMs' planning and decision-making ability by summarizing and utilizing insight effectively across different scales. MSI achieves this through the experience selector, insight generator, and insight selector. Leveraging a three-part pipeline, MSI can generate task-specific and high-level insight, store it in a database, and then use relevant insight from it to aid in decision-making. Our experiments show that MSI outperforms another insight strategy when planning by GPT3.5. Moreover, We delve into the strategies for selecting seed experience and insight, aiming to provide LLM with more useful and relevant insight for better decision-making. Our observations also indicate that MSI exhibits better robustness when facing domain-shifting scenarios.
CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds
Authors: Min-Hsuan Yeh, Ruyuan Wan, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers' interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.
Tokenization Is More Than Compression
Authors: Craig W Schmidt, Varshini Reddy, Haoran Zhang, Alec Alameddine, Omri Uzan, Yuval Pinter, Chris Tanner
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document`s text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.
FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming
Authors: Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Christophe Dupuy, Qian Hu, Shalini Ghosh, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive.As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. In this work, we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. In particular, taking text-to-image models as target models, we explore different feedback mechanisms to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that even with enhanced safety features, Stable Diffusion (SD) models are vulnerable to our adversarial prompts, raising concerns on their robustness in practical uses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models.
Successfully Guiding Humans with Imperfect Instructions by Highlighting Potential Errors and Suggesting Corrections
Authors: Lingjun Zhao, Nguyen X. Khanh, Hal Daumé III
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models will inevitably err in situations with which they are unfamiliar. However, by effectively communicating uncertainties, they can still guide humans toward making sound decisions in those contexts. We demonstrate this idea by developing HEAR, a system that can successfully guide humans in simulated residential environments despite generating potentially inaccurate instructions. Diverging from systems that provide users with only the instructions they generate, HEAR warns users of potential errors in its instructions and suggests corrections. This rich uncertainty information effectively prevents misguidance and reduces the search space for users. Evaluation with 80 users shows that HEAR achieves a 13% increase in success rate and a 29% reduction in final location error distance compared to only presenting instructions to users. Interestingly, we find that offering users possibilities to explore, HEAR motivates them to make more attempts at the task, ultimately leading to a higher success rate. To our best knowledge, this work is the first to show the practical benefits of uncertainty communication in a long-horizon sequential decision-making problem.
Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks
Authors: Haoyuan Wu, Haisheng Zheng, Zhuolun He, Bei Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across general tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce parameter-efficient sparsity crafting (PESC), which crafts dense models into sparse models using the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal parameter increase when guaranteeing the quality of approximation in function space compared to original sparse upcycling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our best sparse model outperforms other sparse and dense models and exhibits superior general capabilities compared to GPT-3.5.Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/Parameter-Efficient-MoE.
GeoGPT4V: Towards Geometric Multi-modal Large Language Models with Geometric Image Generation
Authors: Shihao Cai, Keqin Bao, Hangyu Guo, Jizhi Zhang, Jun Song, Bo Zheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models have seen widespread adoption in math problem-solving, yet for geometry problems, which often necessitate visual aids even for humans, the most advanced multi-modal models still struggle to effectively utilize image information. High-quality data is crucial for enhancing the geometric capabilities of multi-modal models, yet existing open-source datasets and related efforts are either too challenging for direct model learning or suffer from misalignment between text and images. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and GPT-4V to generate relatively basic geometry problems with aligned text and images, facilitating model learning. We have produced a dataset of 4.9K geometry problems and combined it with 19K open-source data to form our GeoGPT4V dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the GeoGPT4V dataset significantly improves the geometry performance of various models on the MathVista and MathVision benchmarks. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GeoGPT4V-08B2.
DyVo: Dynamic Vocabularies for Learned Sparse Retrieval with Entities
Authors: Thong Nguyen, Shubham Chatterjee, Sean MacAvaney, Iain Mackie, Jeff Dalton, Andrew Yates
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Learned Sparse Retrieval (LSR) models use vocabularies from pre-trained transformers, which often split entities into nonsensical fragments. Splitting entities diminishes retrieval accuracy and limits the model`s ability to incorporate up-to-date world knowledge not included in the training data. In this work, we enhance the LSR vocabulary with Wikipedia concepts and entities, enabling the model to resolve ambiguities more effectively and stay current with evolving knowledge. Central to our approach is a Dynamic Vocabulary (DyVo) head, which leverages existing entity embeddings and an entity retrieval component that identifies entities relevant to a query or document. We use the DyVo head to generate entity weights, which are then merged with word piece weights to create joint representations for efficient indexing and retrieval using an inverted index. In experiments across three entity-rich document ranking datasets, the resulting DyVo model substantially outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
Let the Expert Stick to His Last: Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning for Sparse Architectural Large Language Models
Authors: Zihan Wang, Deli Chen, Damai Dai, Runxin Xu, Zhuoshu Li, Yu Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (\textbfPEFT) is crucial for customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) with constrained resource. Although there have been various PEFT methods for dense-architecture LLMs, PEFT for sparse-architecture LLMs is still underexplored. In this work, we study the PEFT method for LLMs with the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and the contents of this work are mainly threefold: (1) We investigate the dispersion degree of the activated experts in customized tasks, and found that the routing distribution for specific task tend to be highly concentrated, while the distribution of activated experts varies significantly across different tasks. (2) We propose the expert-specialized fine-tuning method, which tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts; experimental results demonstrate that our method not only improves the tuning efficiency, but also matches or even surpasses the performance of full-parameter fine-tuning. (3) We further analyze the impact of the MoE architecture on expert-specialized fine-tuning. We find that MoE models with finer-grained experts are more advantageous in selecting the combination of experts that are most relevant to downstream tasks, thereby enhancing the both the training efficiency and effectiveness.
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval
Authors: Dawei Zhu, Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Yifan Song, Wenhao Wu, Furu Wei, Sujian Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Embedding models play a pivotal role in modern NLP applications such as document retrieval. However, existing embedding models are limited to encoding short documents of typically 512 tokens, restrained from application scenarios requiring long inputs. This paper explores context window extension of existing embedding models, pushing their input length to a maximum of 32,768. We begin by evaluating the performance of existing embedding models using our newly constructed LongEmbed benchmark, which includes two synthetic and four real-world tasks, featuring documents of varying lengths and dispersed target information. The benchmarking results highlight huge opportunities for enhancement in current models. Via comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that training-free context window extension strategies can effectively increase the input length of these models by several folds. Moreover, comparison of models using Absolute Position Encoding (APE) and Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) reveals the superiority of RoPE-based embedding models in context window extension, offering empirical guidance for future models. Our benchmark, code and trained models will be released to advance the research in long context embedding models.
Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Orchestrated Streaming Experiences
Authors: Xiangyang Liu, Junliang He, Xipeng Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps using chain-of-thought prompting under zero-shot or few-shot settings. However, zero-shot prompting always encounters low performance, and the superior performance of few-shot prompting hinges on the manual-crafting of task-specific demonstrations one by one. In this paper, we present **RoSE** (**R**easoning with **O**rchestrated **S**treaming **E**xperiences), a general framework for solving reasoning tasks that can self-improve as it answers various reasoning questions. To enable RoSE, we describe an architecture that extends an LLM to store all answered reasoning questions and their reasoning steps in a streaming experience pool and orchestrate helpful questions from the pool to assist itself in answering new questions. To set up a question-aware orchestration mechanism, RoSE first calculates the similarity of each question in the pool with the question to be answered. Since the solution to each question in the experience pool is not always correct, RoSE will sort the questions according to their similarity with the question to be answered, and then uniformly divide them into multiple buckets. It finally extracts one question from each bucket to make the extracted questions more diverse. To make the extracted questions help RoSE answer new questions as much as possible, we introduce two other attributes of uncertainty and complexity for each question. RoSE will preferentially select the questions with low uncertainty and high complexity from each bucket. We evaluate the versatility of RoSE in various complex reasoning tasks and LLMs, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning, and find that it can achieve excellent performance without any labeled data and pre-set unlabeled data.
Overcome Noise and Bias: Segmentation-Aided Multi-Granularity Denoising and Debiasing for Enhanced Quarduples Extraction in Dialogue
Authors: Xianlong Luo, Meng Yang, Yihao Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Dialogue Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple analysis (DiaASQ) extends ABSA to more complex real-world scenarios (i.e., dialogues), which makes existing generation methods encounter heightened noise and order bias challenges, leading to decreased robustness and accuracy.To address these, we propose the Segmentation-Aided multi-grained Denoising and Debiasing (SADD) method. For noise, we propose the Multi-Granularity Denoising Generation model (MGDG), achieving word-level denoising via sequence labeling and utterance-level denoising via topic-aware dialogue segmentation. Denoised Attention in MGDG integrates multi-grained denoising information to help generate denoised output.For order bias, we first theoretically analyze its direct cause as the gap between ideal and actual training objectives and propose a distribution-based solution. Since this solution introduces a one-to-many learning challenge, our proposed Segmentation-aided Order Bias Mitigation (SOBM) method utilizes dialogue segmentation to supplement order diversity, concurrently mitigating this challenge and order bias.Experiments demonstrate SADD`s effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art results with a 6.52% F1 improvement.
Integrating Plutchik`s Theory with Mixture of Experts for Enhancing Emotion Classification
Authors: Dongjun Lim, Yun-Gyung Cheong
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Emotion significantly influences human behavior and decision-making processes. We propose a labeling methodology grounded in Plutchik`s Wheel of Emotions theory for emotion classification. Furthermore, we employ a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture to evaluate the efficacy of this labeling approach, by identifying the specific emotions that each expert learns to classify. Experimental results reveal that our methodology improves the performance of emotion classification.
In-context Contrastive Learning for Event Causality Identification
Authors: Liang Chao, Wei Xiang, Bang Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Event Causality Identification (ECI) aims at determining the existence of a causal relation between two events. Although recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task, their performance are often subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and the positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. The in-context learning paradigm provides explicit guidance for label prediction in the prompt learning paradigm, alleviating its reliance on complex prompts and derivative tasks. However, it does not distinguish between positive and negative demonstrations for analogy learning. Motivated from such considerations, this paper proposes an **I**n-**C**ontext **C**ontrastive **L**earning (ICCL) model that utilizes contrastive learning to enhance the effectiveness of both positive and negative demonstrations. Additionally, we apply contrastive learning to event pairs to better facilitate event causality identification. Our ICCL is evaluated on the widely used corpora, including the EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank, and results show significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms.
What`s Mine becomes Yours: Defining, Annotating and Detecting Context-Dependent Paraphrases in News Interview Dialogs
Authors: Anna Wegmann, Tijs A. Van Den Broek, Dong Nguyen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Best practices for high conflict conversations like counseling or customer support almost always include recommendations to paraphrase the previous speaker. Although paraphrase classification has received widespread attention in NLP, paraphrases are usually considered independent from context, and common models and datasets are not applicable to dialog settings. In this work, we investigate paraphrases across turns in dialog (e.g., Speaker 1: “That book is mine.” becomes Speaker 2: “That book is yours.”). We provide an operationalization of context-dependent paraphrases, and develop a training for crowd-workers to classify paraphrases in dialog. We introduce ContextDeP, a dataset with utterance pairs from NPR and CNN news interviews annotated for context-dependent paraphrases. To enable analyses on label variation, the dataset contains 5,581 annotations on 600 utterance pairs. We present promising results with in-context learning and with token classification models for automatic paraphrase detection in dialog.
Language Models Learn Rare Phenomena from Less Rare Phenomena: The Case of the Missing AANNs
Authors: Kanishka Misra, Kyle Mahowald
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models learn rare syntactic phenomena, but the extent to which this is attributable to generalization vs. memorization is a major open question. To that end, we iteratively trained transformer language models on systematically manipulated corpora which were human-scale in size, and then evaluated their learning of a rare grammatical phenomenon: the English Article+Adjective+Numeral+Noun (AANN) construction (“a beautiful five days”). We compared how well this construction was learned on the default corpus relative to a counterfactual corpus in which AANN sentences were removed. We found that AANNs were still learned better than systematically perturbed variants of the construction. Using additional counterfactual corpora, we suggest that this learning occurs through generalization from related constructions (e.g., “a few days”). An additional experiment showed that this learning is enhanced when there is more variability in the input. Taken together, our results provide an existence proof that LMs can learn rare grammatical phenomena by generalization from less rare phenomena. Data and code: https://github.com/kanishkamisra/aannalysis.
Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey
Authors: Zhen Tan, Dawei Li, Song Wang, Alimohammad Beigi, Bohan Jiang, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Mansooreh Karami, Jundong Li, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Data annotation and synthesis generally refers to the labeling or generating of raw data with relevant information, which could be used for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and costly. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to automate the complicated process of data annotation and synthesis. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, we uniquely focus on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Annotation Generation, LLM-Generated Annotations Assessment, and LLM-Generated Annotations Utilization. Furthermore, this survey includes an in-depth taxonomy of data types that LLMs can annotate, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion of the primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation and synthesis. Serving as a key guide, this survey aims to assist researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, thereby fostering future advancements in this critical field.
Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models
Authors: Hongyuan Lu, Haoran Yang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Furu Wei
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) even if not being trained explicitly for translation. Yet, they still struggle with translating low-resource languages. As supported by our experiments, a bilingual dictionary between the source and the target language could help. Motivated by the fact that multilingual training effectively improves cross-lingual performance, we show that a chained multilingual dictionary with words expressed in more languages can provide more information to better enhance the LLM translation. To this end, we present a novel framework, CoD, Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting, which augments LLMs with prior knowledge with the chains of multilingual dictionaries for a subset of input words to elicit translation abilities for LLMs. Experiments indicate that ChatGPT and InstructGPT still have room for improvement in translating many language pairs. And CoD elicits large gains by up to 13x chrF++ points for MNMT (3.08 to 42.63 for English to Serbian written in Cyrillic script) on FLORES-200 full devtest set. We demonstrate the importance of chaining the multilingual dictionaries, as well as the superiority of CoD to few-shot in-context learning for low-resource languages. Using CoD helps ChatGPT to obviously surpass the SOTA translator NLLB 3.3B.
AdaZeta: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Tensor-Train Adaption for Memory-Efficient Large Language Models Fine-Tuning
Authors: Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Zheng Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO) methods attempt to fine-tune LLMs using only forward passes, thereby avoiding the need for a backpropagation graph. However, significant performance drops and a high risk of divergence have limited their widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive Zeroth-order Tensor-Train Adaption (AdaZeta) framework, specifically designed to improve the performance and convergence of the ZO methods. To enhance dimension-dependent ZO estimation accuracy, we introduce a fast-forward, low-parameter tensorized adapter. To tackle the frequently observed divergence issue in large-scale ZO fine-tuning tasks, we propose an adaptive query number schedule that guarantees convergence. Detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on Roberta-Large and Llama-2-7B models substantiate the efficacy of our AdaZeta framework in terms of accuracy, memory efficiency, and convergence speed.
RoseLoRA: Row and Column-wise Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Model for Knowledge Editing and Fine-tuning
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Monica Xiao Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Pre-trained language models, trained on large-scale corpora, demonstrate strong generalizability across various NLP tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific tasks typically involves updating all parameters, which is resource-intensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as the popular LoRA family, introduce low-rank matrices to learn only a few parameters efficiently. However, during inference, the product of these matrices updates all pre-trained parameters, complicating tasks like knowledge editing that require selective updates. We propose a novel PEFT method, which conducts \textbfrow and c\textbfolumn-wise spar\textbfse \textbflow-\textbfrank \textbfadaptation (RoseLoRA), to address this challenge. RoseLoRA identifies and updates only the most important parameters for a specific task, maintaining efficiency while preserving other model knowledge. By adding a sparsity constraint on the product of low-rank matrices and converting it to row and column-wise sparsity, we ensure efficient and precise model updates. Our theoretical analysis guarantees the lower bound of the sparsity with respective to the matrix product. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks across twenty datasets demonstrate that RoseLoRA outperforms baselines in both general fine-tuning and knowledge editing tasks.
BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Ruirui Li, Haoming Jiang, Jinjin Tian, Zhengyang Wang, Chen Luo, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Xiao Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) offer substantial benefits in enhancing performance across knowledge-intensive scenarios. However, these methods often struggle with complex inputs and encounter difficulties due to noisy knowledge retrieval, notably hindering model effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce BlendFilter, a novel approach that elevates retrieval-augmented LLMs by integrating query generation blending with knowledge filtering. BlendFilter proposes the blending process through its query generation method, which integrates both external and internal knowledge augmentation with the original query, ensuring comprehensive information gathering. Additionally, our distinctive knowledge filtering module capitalizes on the intrinsic capabilities of the LLM, effectively eliminating extraneous data. We conduct extensive experiments on three open-domain question answering benchmarks, and the findings clearly indicate that our innovative BlendFilter surpasses state-of-the-art baselines significantly.
HEART-felt Narratives: Tracing Empathy and Narrative Style in Personal Stories with LLMs
Authors: Jocelyn Shen, Joel Mire, Hae Won Park, Cynthia Breazeal, Maarten Sap
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Empathy serves as a cornerstone in enabling prosocial behaviors, and can be evoked through sharing of personal experiences in stories. While empathy is influenced by narrative content, intuitively, people respond to the way a story is told as well, through narrative style. Yet the relationship between empathy and narrative style is not fully understood. In this work, we empirically examine and quantify this relationship between style and empathy using LLMs and large-scale crowdsourcing studies. We introduce a novel, theory-based taxonomy, HEART (Human Empathy and Narrative Taxonomy) that delineates elements of narrative style that can lead to empathy with the narrator of a story. We establish the performance of LLMs in extracting narrative elements from HEART, showing that prompting with our taxonomy leads to reasonable, human-level annotations beyond what prior lexicon-based methods can do. To show empirical use of our taxonomy, we collect a dataset of empathy judgments of stories via a large-scale crowdsourcing study with $N=2,624$ participants. We show that narrative elements extracted via LLMs, in particular, vividness of emotions and plot volume, can elucidate the pathways by which narrative style cultivates empathy towards personal stories. Our work suggests that such models can be used for narrative analyses that lead to human-centered social and behavioral insights.
Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence
Authors: Junru Lu, Jiazheng Li, Siyu An, Meng Zhao, Yulan He, Di Yin, Xing Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a prominent algorithm for the direct and robust alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a more straightforward alternative to the complex Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Despite its promising efficacy, DPO faces a notable drawback: “verbosity”, a common over-optimization phenomenon also observed in RLHF. While previous studies mainly attributed verbosity to biased labels within the data, we propose that the issue also stems from an inherent algorithmic length reliance in DPO. Specifically, we suggest that the discrepancy between sequence-level Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergences between chosen and rejected sequences, used in DPO, results in overestimated or underestimated rewards due to varying token lengths. Empirically, we utilize datasets with different label lengths to demonstrate the presence of biased rewards. We then introduce an effective downsampling approach, named SamPO, to eliminate potential length reliance. Our experimental evaluations, conducted across three LLMs of varying scales and a diverse array of conditional and open-ended benchmarks, highlight the efficacy of SamPO in mitigating verbosity, achieving improvements of 5% to 12% over DPO through debaised rewards. Our code can be accessed at: https://github.com/LuJunru/SamPO/.
Bridging Cultures in the Kitchen: A Framework and Benchmark for Cross-Cultural Recipe Retrieval
Authors: Tianyi Hu, Maria Maistro, Daniel Hershcovich
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The cross-cultural adaptation of recipes is an important application of identifying and bridging cultural differences in language. The challenge lies in retaining the essence of the original recipe while also aligning with the writing and dietary habits of the target culture. Information Retrieval (IR) offers a way to address the challenge because it retrieves results from the culinary practices of the target culture while maintaining relevance to the original recipe. We introduce a novel task about cross-cultural recipe retrieval and present a unique Chinese-English cross-cultural recipe retrieval benchmark. Our benchmark is manually annotated under limited resource, utilizing various retrieval models to generate a pool of candidate results for manual annotation. The dataset provides retrieval samples that are culturally adapted but textually diverse, presenting greater challenges. We propose CARROT, a plug-and-play cultural-aware recipe information retrieval framework that incorporates cultural-aware query rewriting and re-ranking methods and evaluate it both on our benchmark and intuitive human judgments. The results show that our framework significantly enhances the preservation of the original recipe and its cultural appropriateness for the target culture. We believe these insights will significantly contribute to future research on cultural adaptation.
RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models
Authors: Peng Xia, Kangyu Zhu, Haoran Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Gang Li, Linjun Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The recent emergence of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs) has enhanced medical diagnosis. However, current Med-LVLMs frequently encounter factual issues, often generating responses that do not align with established medical facts. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which utilizes external knowledge, can improve the factual accuracy of these models but introduces two major challenges. First, limited retrieved contexts might not cover all necessary information, while excessive retrieval can introduce irrelevant and inaccurate references, interfering with the model`s generation. Second, in cases where the model originally responds correctly, applying RAG can lead to an over-reliance on retrieved contexts, resulting in incorrect answers. To address these issues, we propose RULE, which consists of two components. First, we introduce a provably effective strategy for controlling factuality risk through the calibrated selection of the number of retrieved contexts. Second, based on samples where over-reliance on retrieved contexts led to errors, we curate a preference dataset to fine-tune the model, balancing its dependence on inherent knowledge and retrieved contexts for generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RAFE on three medical VQA datasets, achieving an average improvement of 20.8% in factual accuracy.
CryptoTrade: A Reflective LLM-based Agent to Guide Zero-shot Cryptocurrency Trading
Authors: Yuan Li, Bingqiao Luo, Qian Wang, Nuo Chen, Xu Liu, Bingsheng He
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) in financial trading has primarily been concentrated within the stock market, aiding in economic and financial decisions. Yet, the unique opportunities presented by the cryptocurrency market, noted for its on-chain data`s transparency and the critical influence of off-chain signals like news, remain largely untapped by LLMs. This work aims to bridge the gap by developing an LLM-based trading agent, CryptoTrade, which uniquely combines the analysis of on-chain and off-chain data. This approach leverages the transparency and immutability of on-chain data, as well as the timeliness and influence of off-chain signals, providing a comprehensive overview of the cryptocurrency market. CryptoTrade incorporates a reflective mechanism specifically engineered to refine its daily trading decisions by analyzing the outcomes of prior trading decisions. This research makes two significant contributions. Firstly, it broadens the applicability of LLMs to the domain of cryptocurrency trading. Secondly, it establishes a benchmark for cryptocurrency trading strategies. Through extensive experiments, CryptoTrade has demonstrated superior performance in maximizing returns compared to time-series baselines, but not compared to traditional trading signals, across various cryptocurrencies and market conditions. Our code and data are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Xtra-Computing/CryptoTrade
A Survey on In-context Learning
Authors: Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: With the increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a new paradigm for natural language processing (NLP), where LLMs make predictions based on contexts augmented with a few examples. It has been a significant trend to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of LLMs. In this paper, we aim to survey and summarize the progress and challenges of ICL. We first present a formal definition of ICL and clarify its correlation to related studies. Then, we organize and discuss advanced techniques, including training strategies, prompt designing strategies, and related analysis. Additionally, we explore various ICL application scenarios, such as data engineering and knowledge updating. Finally, we address the challenges of ICL and suggest potential directions for further research. We hope that our work can encourage more research on uncovering how ICL works and improving ICL.
DocHieNet: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Document Hierarchy Parsing
Authors: Hangdi Xing, Changxu Cheng, Feiyu Gao, Zirui Shao, Zhi Yu, Jiajun Bu, Qi Zheng, Cong Yao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Parsing documents from pixels, such as pictures and scanned PDFs, into hierarchical structures is extensively demanded in the daily routines of data storage, retrieval and understanding. However, previously the research on this topic has been largely hindered since most existing datasets are small-scale, or contain documents of only a single type, which are characterized by a lack of document diversity. Moreover, there is a significant discrepancy in the annotation standards across datasets. In this paper, we introduce a large and diverse document hierarchy parsing (DHP) dataset to compensate for the data scarcity and inconsistency problem. We aim to set a new standard as a more practical, long-standing benchmark. Meanwhile, we present a new DHP framework designed to grasp both fine-grained text content and coarse-grained pattern at layout element level, enhancing the capacity of pre-trained text-layout models in handling the multi-page and multi-level challenges in DHP. Through exhaustive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed dataset and method.