mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Ask LLMs Directly, “What shapes your bias?”: Measuring Social Bias in Large Language Models
Authors: Jisu Shin, Hoyun Song, Huije Lee, Soyeong Jeong, Jong Park
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Social bias is shaped by the accumulation of social perceptions towards targets across various demographic identities. To fully understand such social bias in large language models (LLMs), it is essential to consider the composite of social perceptions from diverse perspectives among identities. Previous studies have either evaluated biases in LLMs by indirectly assessing the presence of sentiments towards demographic identities in the generated text or measuring the degree of alignment with given stereotypes. These methods have limitations in directly quantifying social biases at the level of distinct perspectives among identities. In this paper, we aim to investigate how social perceptions from various viewpoints contribute to the development of social bias in LLMs. To this end, we propose a novel strategy to intuitively quantify these social perceptions and suggest metrics that can evaluate the social biases within LLMs by aggregating diverse social perceptions. The experimental results show the quantitative demonstration of the social attitude in LLMs by examining social perception. The analysis we conducted shows that our proposed metrics capture the multi-dimensional aspects of social bias, enabling a fine-grained and comprehensive investigation of bias in LLMs.
Chain-of-History Reasoning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting
Authors: Yuwei Xia, Ding Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang, Shu Wu, Xiao-Yu Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) forecasting aims to predict future facts based on given histories. Most recent graph-based models excel at capturing structural information within TKGs but lack semantic comprehension abilities. Nowadays, with the surge of LLMs, the LLM-based TKG prediction model has emerged. However, the existing LLM-based model exhibits three shortcomings: (1) It only focuses on the first-order history for prediction while ignoring high-order historical information, resulting in the provided information for LLMs being extremely limited. (2) LLMs struggle with optimal reasoning performance under heavy historical information loads. (3) For TKG prediction, the temporal reasoning capability of LLM alone is limited. To address the first two challenges, we propose Chain-of-History (CoH) reasoning which explores high-order histories step-by-step, achieving effective utilization of high-order historical information for LLMs on TKG prediction. To address the third issue, we design CoH as a plug-and-play module to enhance the performance of graph-based models for TKG prediction. Extensive experiments on three datasets and backbones demonstrate the effectiveness of CoH.
Can LLMs Speak For Diverse People? Tuning LLMs via Debate to Generate Controllable Controversial Statements
Authors: Ming Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Tianyi Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Making LLMs speak for different, especially minority groups of people, and generate statements supporting their diverse or even controversial perspectives is critical to creating an inclusive environment. However, existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to the stance of their generated content, which often contains inconsistent, neutral, or biased statements. In this paper, we improve the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. We find that multi-round debates between two LLMs with opposite stances generate higher-quality and more salient statements for each, which are important training data to improve the controllability of LLMs. Motivated by this, we develop a novel debate & tuning (“DEBATUNE”) pipeline finetuning LLMs to generate the statements obtained via debate. To examine DEBATUNE, we curate the largest dataset of debate topics so far, which covers 710 controversial topics and corresponding arguments for each topic. Evaluations by the GPT-4 judge with a novel controversy controllability metric show that LLMs' capability of generating diverse perspectives is significantly improved by DEBATUNE. Moreover, such controllability can be generalized to unseen topics, generating high-quality statements supporting controversial arguments.
Label-aware Hard Negative Sampling Strategies with Momentum Contrastive Learning for Implicit Hate Speech Detection
Authors: Jaehoon Kim, Seungwan Jin, Sohyun Park, Someen Park, Kyungsik Han
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Detecting implicit hate speech that is not directly hateful remains a challenge. Recent research has attempted to detect implicit hate speech by applying contrastive learning to pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa, but the proposed models still do not have a significant advantage over cross-entropy loss-based learning. We found that contrastive learning based on randomly sampled batch data does not encourage the model to learn hard negative samples. In this work, we propose Label-aware Hard Negative sampling strategies (LAHN) that encourage the model to learn detailed features from hard negative samples, instead of naive negative samples in random batch, using momentum-integrated contrastive learning. LAHN outperforms the existing models for implicit hate speech detection both in- and cross-datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Hanyang-HCC-Lab/LAHN
Selective Reflection-Tuning: Student-Selected Data Recycling for LLM Instruction-Tuning
Authors: Ming Li, Lichang Chen, Jiuhai Chen, Shwai He, Jiuxiang Gu, Tianyi Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Instruction tuning is critical to large language models (LLMs) for achieving better instruction following and task adaptation capabilities but its success heavily relies on the training data quality. Many recent methods focus on improving the data quality but often overlook the compatibility of the data with the student model being finetuned. This paper introduces Selective Reflection-Tuning, a novel paradigm that synergizes a teacher LLM`s reflection and introspection for improving existing data quality with the data selection capability of the student LLM, to automatically refine existing instruction-tuning data. This teacher-student collaboration produces high-quality and student-compatible instruction-response pairs, resulting in sample-efficient instruction tuning and LLMs of superior performance. Selective Reflection-Tuning is a data augmentation and synthesis that generally improves LLM finetuning and self-improvement without collecting brand-new data. We apply our method to Alpaca and WizardLM data and achieve much stronger and top-tier 7B and 13B LLMs.
Selective Prompting Tuning for Personalized Conversations with LLMs
Authors: Qiushi Huang, Xubo Liu, Tom Ko, Bo Wu, Wenwu Wang, Yu Zhang, Lilian Tang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In conversational AI, personalizing dialogues with persona profiles and contextual understanding is essential. Despite large language models' (LLMs) improved response coherence, effective persona integration remains a challenge. In this work, we first study two common approaches for personalizing LLMs: textual prompting and direct fine-tuning. We observed that textual prompting often struggles to yield responses that are similar to the ground truths in datasets, while direct fine-tuning tends to produce repetitive or overly generic replies. To alleviate those issues, we propose **S**elective **P**rompt **T**uning (SPT), which softly prompts LLMs for personalized conversations in a selective way. Concretely, SPT initializes a set of soft prompts and uses a trainable dense retriever to adaptively select suitable soft prompts for LLMs according to different input contexts, where the prompt retriever is dynamically updated through feedback from the LLMs. Additionally, we propose context-prompt contrastive learning and prompt fusion learning to encourage the SPT to enhance the diversity of personalized conversations. Experiments on the CONVAI2 dataset demonstrate that SPT significantly enhances response diversity by up to 90%, along with improvements in other critical performance indicators. Those results highlight the efficacy of SPT in fostering engaging and personalized dialogue generation. The SPT model code is [publicly available](https://github.com/hqsiswiliam/SPT) for further exploration.
Sowing the Wind, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Impact of Editing Language Models
Authors: Rima Hazra, Sayan Layek, Somnath Banerjee, Soujanya Poria
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of \textquoteleftRed-Teaming' or \textquoteleftJailbreaking' large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and enhancing the safety and robustness of these models. This paper investigates the intricate consequences of such modifications through model editing, uncovering a complex relationship between enhancing model accuracy and preserving its ethical integrity. Our in-depth analysis reveals a striking paradox: while injecting accurate information is crucial for model reliability, it can paradoxically destabilize the model`s foundational framework, resulting in unpredictable and potentially unsafe behaviors. Additionally, we propose a benchmark dataset $NicheHazardQA$ to investigate this unsafe behavior both within the same and cross topical domain. This aspect of our research sheds light on how the edits, impact the model`s safety metrics and guardrails. Our findings show that model editing serves as a cost-effective tool for topical red-teaming by methodically applying targeted edits and evaluating the resultant model behavior.
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions
Authors: Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) aims to identify an image within a set of minimally contrastive candidates based on linguistically complex text. Despite the success of VLMs, they still significantly lag behind human performance in IRCD. The main challenges lie in aligning key contextual cues in two modalities, where these subtle cues are concealed in tiny areas of multiple contrastive images and within the complex linguistics of textual descriptions. This motivates us to propose ContextBLIP, a simple yet effective method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. Specifically, 1) our model comprises a multi-scale adapter, a matching loss, and a text-guided masking loss. The adapter learns to capture fine-grained visual cues. The two losses enable iterative supervision for the adapter, gradually highlighting the focal patches of a single image to the key textual cues. We term such a way as intra-contextual alignment. 2) Then, ContextBLIP further employs an inter-context encoder to learn dependencies among candidates, facilitating alignment between the text to multiple images. We term this step as inter-contextual alignment. Consequently, the nuanced cues concealed in each modality can be effectively aligned. Experiments on two benchmarks show the superiority of our method. We observe that ContextBLIP can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite involving about 7,500 times fewer parameters.
PuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Abstract Visual Patterns
Authors: Yew Ken Chia, Vernon Toh, Deepanway Ghosal, Lidong Bing, Soujanya Poria
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large multimodal models extend the impressive capabilities of large language models by integrating multimodal understanding abilities. However, it is not clear how they can emulate the general intelligence and reasoning ability of humans. As recognizing patterns and abstracting concepts are key to general intelligence, we introduce PuzzleVQA, a collection of 2000 puzzle instances based on abstract patterns. With this dataset, we evaluate large multimodal models with abstract patterns based on fundamental concepts, including colors, numbers, sizes, and shapes. Through our experiments on state-of-the-art large multimodal models, we find that they are not able to generalize well to simple abstract patterns. Notably, GPT-4V achieves a score of 46.4% on single-concept puzzles, which shows that state-of-the-art models struggle on our dataset. To diagnose the reasoning challenges in large multimodal models, we progressively guide the models with our ground truth reasoning explanations for visual perception, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Our systematic analysis finds that the main bottlenecks of GPT-4V are weaker visual perception and inductive reasoning abilities. Through this work, we hope to shed light on the limitations of large multimodal models and how they can better emulate human cognitive processes in the future.
How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models
Authors: Jaehong Kim, Chaeyoon Jeong, Seongchan Park, Meeyoung Cha, Wonjae Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Understanding the interplay between emotions in language and user behaviors is critical. We study how moral emotions shape the political participation of users based on cross-cultural online petition data. To quantify moral emotions, we employ a context-aware NLP model that is designed to capture the subtle nuances of emotions across cultures. For model training, we construct and share a moral emotion dataset comprising nearly 50,000 petition sentences in Korean and English each, along with emotion labels annotated by a fine-tuned LLM. We examine two distinct types of user participation: general support (i.e., registered signatures of petitions) and active support (i.e., sharing petitions on social media). We discover that moral emotions like other-suffering increase both forms of participation and help petitions go viral, while self-conscious have the opposite effect. The most prominent moral emotion, other-condemning, led to polarizing responses among the audience. In contrast, other-praising was perceived differently by culture; it led to a rise in active support in Korea but a decline in the UK. Our findings suggest that both moral emotions embedded in language and cultural perceptions are critical to shaping the public`s political discourse.
VillagerAgent: A Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Coordinating Complex Task Dependencies in Minecraft
Authors: Yubo Dong, Xukun Zhu, Zhengzhe Pan, Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to evaluate multi-agent systems against complex dependencies, including spatial, causal, and temporal constraints. First, we construct a new benchmark, named VillagerBench, within the Minecraft environment. VillagerBench comprises diverse tasks crafted to test various aspects of multi-agent collaboration, from workload distribution to dynamic adaptation and synchronized task execution. Second, we introduce a Directed Acyclic Graph Multi-Agent Framework (VillagerAgent) to resolve complex inter-agent dependencies and enhance collaborative efficiency. This solution incorporates a task decomposer that creates a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for structured task management, an agent controller for task distribution, and a state manager for tracking environmental and agent data.Our empirical evaluation on VillagerBench demonstrates that VillagerAgentoutperforms the existing AgentVerse model, reducing hallucinations and improving task decomposition efficacy. The results underscore VillagerAgent`s potential in advancing multi-agent collaboration, offering a scalable and generalizable solution in dynamic environments. Source code is open-source on GitHub.
CF-TCIR: A Compositor-Free Framework for Hierarchical Text-Conditioned Image Retrieval
Authors: Yuchen Yang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In text-conditioned image retrieval (TCIR), the combination of a reference image and modification text forms a query tuple, aiming to locate the most congruent target image within a dataset. The advantages of rich image semantic information and text flexibility are combined in this manner for more accurate retrieval. While traditional techniques often employ attention-driven compositors to craft a unified image-text representation, our paper introduces a compositor-free framework, CF-TCIR, which eschews the standard compositor. Compositor-based methods are designed to learn a joint representation of images and text, but they struggle to directly capture the correlations between attributes across the image and text modalities. Instead, we reformulate the retrieval process as a cross-modal interaction between a synthesized image feature and its corresponding text descriptor. This novel methodology offers advantages in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, and superior performance. To optimize the retrieval performance, we advocate a tiered retrieval mechanism, blending both coarse-grain and fine-grain paradigms. Moreover, to enrich the contextual relationship within the query tuple, we integrate a generative cross-modal alignment technique, ensuring synchronization of sequential attributes between image and text data.
DMIN: A Discourse-specific Multi-granularity Integration Network for Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis
Authors: Peijie Huang, Xisheng Xiao, Yuhong Xu, Jiawei Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment quadruples from dialogues. Previous research has primarily concentrated on enhancing token-level interactions, still lacking in sufficient modeling of the discourse structure information in dialogue. Firstly, it does not incorporate interactions among different utterances in the encoding stage, resulting in a limited token-level context understanding for subsequent modules. Secondly, it ignores the critical fact that discourse information is naturally organized at the utterance level and learning it solely at the token level is incomplete. In this work, we strengthen the token-level encoder by utilizing a discourse structure called “thread” and graph convolutional networks to enhance the token interaction among different utterances. Moreover, we propose an utterance-level encoder to learn the structured speaker and reply information, providing a macro understanding of dialogue discourse. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Multi-granularities Integrator to integrate token-level and utterance-level representations, resulting in a comprehensive and cohesive dialogue contextual understanding. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGSDSscau/DMIN.
Are Decoder-Only Language Models Better than Encoder-Only Language Models in Understanding Word Meaning?
Authors: Muhammad Qorib, Geonsik Moon, Hwee Tou Ng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The natural language processing field has been evolving around language models for the past few years, from the usage of n-gram language models for re-ranking, to transfer learning with encoder-only (BERT-like) language models, and finally to large language models (LLMs) as general solvers. LLMs are dominated by the decoder-only type, and they are popular for their efficacy in numerous tasks. LLMs are regarded as having strong comprehension abilities and strong capabilities to solve new unseen tasks. As such, people may quickly assume that decoder-only LLMs always perform better than the encoder-only ones, especially for understanding word meaning. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoder-only LLMs perform worse on word meaning comprehension than an encoder-only language model that has vastly fewer parameters.
FragRel: Exploiting Fragment-level Relations in the External Memory of Large Language Models
Authors: Xihang Yue, Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: To process contexts with unlimited length using Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies explore hierarchically managing the long text. Only several text fragments are taken from the external memory and passed into the temporary working memory, i.e., LLM`s context window. However, existing approaches isolatedly handle the text fragments without considering their structural connections, thereby suffering limited capability on texts with intensive inter-relations, e.g., coherent stories and code repositories. This work attempts to resolve this by exploiting the fragment-level relations in external memory. First, we formulate the fragment-level relations and present several instantiations for different text types. Next, we introduce a relation-aware fragment assessment criteria upon previous independent fragment assessment. Finally, we present the fragment-connected Hierarchical Memory based LLM. We validate the benefits of involving these relations on long story understanding, repository-level code generation, and long-term chatting.
On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations
Authors: Shiao Meng, Xuming Hu, Aiwei Liu, Fukun Ma, Yawen Yang, Shuang Li, Lijie Wen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Driven by the demand for cross-sentence and large-scale relation extraction, document-level relation extraction (DocRE) has attracted increasing research interest. Despite the continuous improvement in performance, we find that existing DocRE models which initially perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. To this end, we systematically investigate the robustness of DocRE models to entity name variations in this work. We first propose a principled pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. By applying the pipeline to DocRED and Re-DocRED datasets, we construct two novel benchmarks named Env-DocRED and Env-Re-DocRED for robustness evaluation. Experimental results show that both three representative DocRE models and two in-context learned large language models consistently lack sufficient robustness to entity name variations, particularly on cross-sentence relation instances and documents with more entities. Finally, we propose an entity variation robust training method which not only improves the robustness of DocRE models but also enhances their understanding and reasoning capabilities. We further verify that the basic idea of this method can be effectively transferred to in-context learning for DocRE as well.
RESEMO: A Benchmark Chinese Dataset for Studying Responsive Emotion from Social Media Content
Authors: Bo Hu, Meng Zhang, Chenfei Xie, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song, Zhendong Mao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: On social media platforms, users' emotions are triggered when they encounter particular content from other users,where such emotions are different from those that spontaneously emerged, owing to the “responsive” nature. Analyzing the aforementioned responsive emotions from user interactions is a task of significant importance for understanding human cognition, the mechanisms of emotion generation, and behavior on the Internet, etc. Performing the task with artificial intelligence generally requires human-annotated data to help train a well-performing system, while existing data resources do not cover this specific area, with none of them focusing on responsive emotion analysis. In this paper, we propose a Chinese dataset named ResEmo for responsive emotion analysis, including 3813 posts with 68,781 comments collected from Weibo, the largest social media platform in China. ResEmo contains three types of human annotations with respect to responsive emotions, namely, responsive relationship, responsive emotion cause, and responsive emotion category. Moreover, to test this dataset, we build large language model (LLM) baseline methods for responsive relation extraction, responsive emotion cause extraction, and responsive emotion detection, which show the potential of the proposed ResEmo being a benchmark for future studies on responsive emotions.
EHR-SeqSQL : A Sequential Text-to-SQL Dataset For Interactively Exploring Electronic Health Records
Authors: Jaehee Ryu, Seonhee Cho, Gyubok Lee, Edward Choi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce EHR-SeqSQL, a novel sequential text-to-SQL dataset for Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases. EHR-SeqSQL is designed to address critical yet underexplored aspects in text-to-SQL parsing: interactivity, compositionality, and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, EHR-SeqSQL is not only the largest but also the first medical text-to-SQL dataset benchmark to include sequential and contextual questions. We provide a data split and the new test set designed to assess compositional generalization ability. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of a multi-turn approach over a single-turn approach in learning compositionality. Additionally, our dataset integrates specially crafted tokens into SQL queries to improve execution efficiency. With EHR-SeqSQL, we aim to bridge the gap between practical needs and academic research in the text-to-SQL domain.
KEEP CHATTING! An Attractive Dataset for Continuous Conversation Agents
Authors: Yihe Wang, Jin Liu, Yao Wan, Yitong Li, Zifeng Liu, Weipeng Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Ongoing chatting is an important step for conversational agents to build long-term connections with people. However, people tend to quickly lose interest in chatting if the conversational agent`s words are not engaging enough. In this paper, we present a novel task of increasing users' willingness to continue talking to the agent.We collect a dataset named ContinuousChat by: (i) collecting personas and revising them, and then expanding the personas to detailed-personas through experiences, daily life, future plans, or interesting stories; (ii) expanding detailed-personas into the dialogues, and inject emotions and feelings into them; (iii) rewriting the dialogues in specific styles through few-shot prompt, conditioning on handwritten style-specific examples.We benchmark LLMs on ContinuousChat Dataset using both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. Experiments over publicly available models demonstrate that although there is substantial room for improvement in generating style-specific dialogues, our ContinuousChat dataset is valuable in guiding conversational agents to generate more attractive dialogues and increase users' willingness to continue the conversations.
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback
Authors: Yuze Zhao, Zhenya Huang, Yixiao Ma, Rui Li, Kai Zhang, Hao Jiang, Qi Liu, Linbo Zhu, Yu Su
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The gap between the trepidation of program reliability and the expense of repairs underscore the indispensability for Automated Program Repair (APR). APR is instrumental in transforming vulnerable programs into more robust ones, bolstering program reliability while simultaneously diminishing the financial burden of manual repairs. Commercial-scale language models (LM) have taken APR to unprecedented levels. However, due to the limitations of model capabilities by parameters, a one-step substantial modification may not achieve the desired effect for models with parameters less than 100B. Moreover, humans interact with the LLM through explicit prompts, which hinders the LLM from receiving feedback from compiler and test cases to automatically optimize its repair policies. Explicit prompts from humans not only increase additional manpower costs, but also pose potential misunderstandings between human`s intent and LMs.Based on the above considerations, we are exploring how to ensure small-scale LM still outperform through process supervision and feedback. We start by constructing a dataset named CodeNet4Repair, replete with multiple repair records, which supervises the fine-tuning of a foundational mode. Building upon the encouraging outcomes of reinforcement learning, we develop a reward model that serves as a critic, providing feedback for the fine-tuned LM`s action, progressively optimizing its policy. During inference, we require the LM to generate solutions iteratively until the repair effect no longer improves or hits the maximum step limit. The experimental results show that this process-based feedback not only outperforms larger outcome-based generation methods, but also nearly matches the performance of closed-source commercial large-scale LMs.
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models
Authors: Yang Xu, Yunlong Feng, Honglin Mu, Yutai Hou, Yitong Li, Xinghao Wang, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyang Li, Dandan Tu, Qingfu Zhu, Min Zhang, Wanxiang Che
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process.Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths.To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio.Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.
MedDec: A Dataset for Extracting Medical Decisions from Discharge Summaries
Authors: Mohamed Elgaar, Jiali Cheng, Nidhi Vakil, Hadi Amiri, Leo Anthony Celi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Medical decisions directly impact individuals' health and well-being. Extracting decision spans from clinical notes plays a crucial role in understanding medical decision-making processes. In this paper, we develop a new dataset called “MedDec,” which contains clinical notes of eleven different phenotypes (diseases) annotated by ten types of medical decisions. We introduce the task of medical decision extraction, aiming to jointly extract and classify different types of medical decisions within clinical notes. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the dataset, develop a span detection model as a baseline for this task, evaluate recent span detection approaches, and employ a few metrics to measure the complexity of data samples. Our findings shed light on the complexities inherent in clinical decision extraction and enable future work in this area of research. The dataset and code are available through https://github.com/CLU-UML/MedDec.
Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Memory-Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models
Authors: Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Zhihao Jia
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Finetuning large language models (LLMs) has been empirically effective on a variety of downstream tasks. Existing approaches to finetuning an LLM either focus on parameter-efficient finetuning, which only updates a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetuning. Typically, the memory footprint during finetuning stems from three contributors: model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations. However, existing works still require considerable memory, and none can simultaneously mitigate the memory footprint of all three sources. In this paper, we present quantized side tuing (QST), which enables memory-efficient and fast finetuning of LLMs by operating through a dual-stage process. First, QST quantizes an LLM`s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the LLM`s original weights. Second, QST introduces a side network separated from the LLM, which utilizes the hidden states of the LLM to make task-specific predictions. Using a separate side network avoids performing back-propagation through the LLM, thus reducing the memory requirement of the intermediate activations. Finally, QST leverages several low-rank adaptors and gradient-free downsample modules to significantly reduce the trainable parameters, so as to save the memory footprint of the optimizer states. Experiments show that QST can reduce the total memory footprint by up to 2.3× and speed up the finetuning process by up to 3$\times$ while achieving competent performance compared with the state-of-the-art. When it comes to full finetuning, QST can reduce the total memory footprint up to 7$\times$.
Unsupervised Multimodal Clustering for Semantics Discovery in Multimodal Utterances
Authors: Hanlei Zhang, Hua Xu, Fei Long, Xin Wang, Kai Gao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Discovering the semantics of multimodal utterances is essential for understanding human language and enhancing human-machine interactions. Existing methods manifest limitations in leveraging nonverbal information for discerning complex semantics in unsupervised scenarios. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised multimodal clustering method (UMC), making a pioneering contribution to this field. UMC introduces a unique approach to constructing augmentation views for multimodal data, which are then used to perform pre-training to establish well-initialized representations for subsequent clustering. An innovative strategy is proposed to dynamically select high-quality samples as guidance for representation learning, gauged by the density of each sample`s nearest neighbors. Besides, it is equipped to automatically determine the optimal value for the top-$K$ parameter in each cluster to refine sample selection. Finally, both high- and low-quality samples are used to learn representations conducive to effective clustering. We build baselines on benchmark multimodal intent and dialogue act datasets. UMC shows remarkable improvements of 2-6% scores in clustering metrics over state-of-the-art methods, marking the first successful endeavor in this domain. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/thuiar/UMC.
MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild
Authors: Yafu Li, Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Zhilin Wang, Longyue Wang, Linyi Yang, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level text generation, emphasizing the need for effective deepfake text detection to mitigate risks like the spread of fake news and plagiarism. Existing research has been constrained by evaluating detection methods o specific domains or particular language models. In practical scenarios, however, the detector faces texts from various domains or LLMs without knowing their sources. To this end, we build a comprehensive testbed by gathering texts from diverse human writings and deepfake texts generated by different LLMs. Empirical results on mainstream detection methods demonstrate the difficulties associated with detecting deepfake text in a wide-ranging testbed, particularly in out-of-distribution scenarios. Such difficulties align with the diminishing linguistic differences between the two text sources. Despite challenges, the top-performing detector can identify 84.12% out-of-domain texts generated by a new LLM, indicating the feasibility for application scenarios.
PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models
Authors: Haoran Li, Dadi Guo, Donghao Li, Wei Fan, Qi Hu, Xin Liu, Chunkit Chan, Duanyi Yao, Yuan Yao, Yangqiu Song
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The rapid development of language models (LMs) brings unprecedented accessibility and usage for both models and users. On the one hand, powerful LMs achieve state-of-the-art performance over numerous downstream NLP tasks. On the other hand, more and more attention is paid to unrestricted model accesses that may bring malicious privacy risks of data leakage. To address these issues, many recent works propose privacy-preserving language models (PPLMs) with differential privacy (DP). Unfortunately, different DP implementations make it challenging for a fair comparison among existing PPLMs. In this paper, we present PrivLM-Bench, a multi-perspective privacy evaluation benchmark to empirically and intuitively quantify the privacy leakage of LMs. Instead of only reporting DP parameters, PrivLM-Bench sheds light on the neglected inference data privacy during actual usage. PrivLM-Bench first clearly defines multi-faceted privacy objectives. Then, PrivLM-Bench constructs a unified pipeline to perform private fine-tuning. Lastly, PrivLM-Bench performs existing privacy attacks on LMs with pre-defined privacy objectives as the empirical evaluation results. The empirical attack results are used to fairly and intuitively evaluate the privacy leakage of various PPLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on three datasets of GLUE for mainstream LMs.
GenTranslate: Large Language Models are Generative Multilingual Speech and Machine Translators
Authors: Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ruizhe Li, Dong Zhang, Zhehuai Chen, Eng Siong Chng
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have stepped forward the development of multilingual speech and machine translation by its reduced representation errors and incorporated external knowledge. However, both translation tasks typically utilize beam search decoding and top-1 hypothesis selection for inference. These techniques struggle to fully exploit the rich information in the diverse N-best hypotheses, making them less optimal for translation tasks that require a single, high-quality output sequence. In this paper, we propose a new generative paradigm for translation tasks, namely GenTranslate, which builds upon LLMs to generate better results from the diverse translation versions in N-best list. Leveraging the rich linguistic knowledge and strong reasoning abilities of LLMs, our new paradigm can integrate the diverse N-best candidates to generate a higher-quality translation result. Furthermore, to support LLM finetuning, we build and release a HypoTranslate dataset that contains over 592K hypotheses-translation pairs in 11 languages. Experiments on various speech and machine translation benchmarks (e.g., FLEURS, CoVoST-2, WMT) demonstrate that our GenTranslate significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art model.
Exploring Chain-of-Thought for Multi-modal Metaphor Detection
Authors: Yanzhi Xu, Yueying Hua, Shichen Li, Zhongqing Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Metaphors are commonly found in advertising and internet memes. However, the free form of internet memes often leads to a lack of high-quality textual data. Metaphor detection demands a deep interpretation of both textual and visual elements, requiring extensive common-sense knowledge, which poses a challenge to language models. To address these challenges, we propose a compact framework called C4MMD, which utilizes a \textbfChain-of-Thought(CoT) method \textbffor \textbfMulti-modal \textbfMetaphor \textbfDetection. Specifically, our approach designs a three-step process inspired by CoT that extracts and integrates knowledge from Multi-modal Large Language Models(MLLMs) into smaller ones. We also developed a modality fusion architecture to transform knowledge from large models into metaphor features, supplemented by auxiliary tasks to improve model performance. Experimental results on the MET-MEME dataset demonstrate that our method not only effectively enhances the metaphor detection capabilities of small models but also outperforms existing models. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study leveraging MLLMs in metaphor detection tasks. The code for our method is publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/xyz189411yt/C4MMD.
BitDistiller: Unleashing the Potential of Sub-4-Bit LLMs via Self-Distillation
Authors: DaYou Du, Yijia Zhang, Shijie Cao, Jiaqi Guo, Ting Cao, Xiaowen Chu, Ningyi Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The upscaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has yielded impressive advances in natural language processing, yet it also poses significant deployment challenges. Weight quantization has emerged as a widely embraced solution to reduce memory and computational demands. This paper introduces BitDistiller, a framework that synergizes Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) with Knowledge Distillation (KD) to boost the performance of LLMs at ultra-low precisions (sub-4-bit). Specifically, BitDistiller first incorporates a tailored asymmetric quantization and clipping technique to maximally preserve the fidelity of quantized weights, and then proposes a novel Confidence-Aware Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CAKLD) objective, which is employed in a self-distillation manner to enable faster convergence and superior model performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that BitDistiller significantly surpasses existing methods in both 3-bit and 2-bit configurations on general language understanding and complex reasoning benchmarks. Notably, BitDistiller is shown to be more cost-effective, demanding fewer data and training resources. The code is available at https://github.com/DD-DuDa/BitDistiller.
A Unified Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Model Towards Interpolation and Extrapolation
Authors: Kai Chen, Ye Wang, Yitong Li, Aiping Li, Han Yu, Xin Song
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has two settings: interpolation reasoning and extrapolation reasoning. Both of them draw plenty of research interest and have great significance. Methods of the former de-emphasize the temporal correlations among facts sequences, while methods of the latter require strict chronological order of knowledge and ignore inferring clues provided by missing facts of the past. These limit the practicability of TKG applications as almost all of the existing TKG reasoning methods are designed specifically to address either one setting. To this end, this paper proposes an original Temporal PAth-based Reasoning (TPAR) model for both the interpolation and extrapolation reasoning settings. TPAR performs a neural-driven symbolic reasoning fashion that is robust to ambiguous and noisy temporal data, and with fine interpretability as well. Comprehensive experiments show that TPAR outperforms SOTA methods on the link prediction task for both the interpolation and the extrapolation settings. A novel pipeline experimental setting is designed to evaluate the performances of SOTA combinations and the proposed TPAR towards interpolation and extrapolation reasoning. And more diverse experiments are conducted to show the robustness and interpretability of TPAR.
Unsupervised Information Refinement Training of Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Shicheng Xu, Liang Pang, Mo Yu, Fandong Meng, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, Jie Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating additional information from retrieval. However, studies have shown that LLMs still face challenges in effectively using the retrieved information, even ignore it or be misled by it. The key reason is that the training of LLMs does not clearly make LLMs learn how to utilize input retrieved texts with varied quality. In this paper, we propose a novel perspective that considers the role of LLMs in RAG as “Information Refiner”, which means that regardless of correctness, completeness, or usefulness of retrieved texts, LLMs can consistently integrate knowledge within the retrieved texts and model parameters to generate the texts that are more concise, accurate, and complete than the retrieved texts. To this end, we propose an information refinement training method named INFO-RAG that optimizes LLMs for RAG in an unsupervised manner. INFO-RAG is low-cost and general across various tasks. Extensive experiments on zero-shot prediction of 11 datasets in diverse tasks including Question Answering, Slot-Filling, Language Modeling, Dialogue, and Code Generation show that INFO-RAG improves the performance of LLaMA2 by an average of 9.39% relative points. INFO-RAG also shows advantages in in-context learning and robustness of RAG.