mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
End-to-End Emotion Semantic Parsing
Authors: Xiaotong Jiang, Zhongqing Wang, Guodong Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Emotion detection is the task of automatically associating one or more emotions with a text. The emotions are experienced, targeted, and caused by different semantic constituents. Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate these semantic constituents into the process of emotion detection. In this study, we propose a new task called emotion semantic parsing which aims to parse the emotion and semantic constituents into an abstract semantic tree structure. In particular, we design an end-to-end generation model to capture the relations between emotion and all the semantic constituents, and to generate them jointly. Furthermore, we employ a task decomposition strategy to capture the semantic relation among these constituents in a more cognitive and structural way. Experimental results demonstrate the importance of the proposed task, and indicate the proposed model gives superior performance compared to other models.
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Exemplar Selection in Task-oriented Dialogue System
Authors: Chen Chen, Ruizhe Li, Yuchen Hu, Yuanyuan Chen, Chengwei Qin, Qiang Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Intelligent task-oriented dialogue systems (ToDs) are expected to continuously acquire new knowledge, also known as Continual Learning (CL), which is crucial to fit ever-changing user needs. However, catastrophic forgetting dramatically degrades the model performance in face of a long streamed curriculum. In this paper, we aim to overcome the forgetting problem in ToDs and propose a method (HESIT) with hyper-gradient-based exemplar strategy, which samples influential exemplars for periodic retraining. Instead of unilaterally observing data or models, HESIT adopts a profound exemplar selection strategy that considers the general performance of the trained model when selecting exemplars for each task domain. Specifically, HESIT analyzes the training data influence by tracing their hyper-gradient in the optimization process. Furthermore, HESIT avoids estimating Hessian to make it compatible for ToDs with a large pre-trained model. Experimental results show that HESIT effectively alleviates catastrophic forgetting by exemplar selection, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the largest CL benchmark of ToDs in terms of all metrics.
The Counterfeit Conundrum: Can Code Language Models Grasp the Nuances of Their Incorrect Generations?
Authors: Alex Gu, Wen-Ding Li, Naman Jain, Theo Olausson, Celine Lee, Koushik Sen, Armando Solar-Lezama
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: While language models are increasingly more proficient at code generation, they still frequently generate incorrect programs. Many of these programs are obviously wrong, but others are more subtle and pass weaker correctness checks such as being able to compile. In this work, we focus on these counterfeit samples: programs sampled from a language model that 1) have a high enough log-probability to be generated at a moderate temperature and 2) pass weak correctness checks. Overall, we discover that most models have a very shallow understanding of counterfeits through three clear failure modes. First, models mistakenly classify them as correct. Second, models are worse at reasoning about the execution behaviour of counterfeits and often predict their execution results as if they were correct. Third, when asking models to fix counterfeits, the likelihood of a model successfully repairing a counterfeit is often even lower than that of sampling a correct program from scratch. Counterfeits also have very unexpected properties: first, counterfeit programs for problems that are easier for a model to solve are not necessarily easier to detect and only slightly easier to execute and repair. Second, counterfeits from a given model are just as confusing to the model itself as they are to other models. Finally, both strong and weak models are able to generate counterfeit samples that equally challenge all models. In light of our findings, we recommend that care and caution be taken when relying on models to understand their own samples, especially when no external feedback is incorporated.
CHIME: LLM-Assisted Hierarchical Organization of Scientific Studies for Literature Review Support
Authors: Chao-Chun Hsu, Erin Bransom, Jenna Sparks, Bailey Kuehl, Chenhao Tan, David Wadden, Lucy Wang, Aakanksha Naik
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information and is increasingly challenging as the scientific literature expands. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs for producing hierarchical organizations of scientific studies to assist researchers with literature review. We define hierarchical organizations as tree structures where nodes refer to topical categories and every node is linked to the studies assigned to that category. Our naive LLM-based pipeline for hierarchy generation from a set of studies produces promising yet imperfect hierarchies, motivating us to collect CHIME, an expert-curated dataset for this task focused on biomedicine. Given the challenging and time-consuming nature of building hierarchies from scratch, we use a human-in-the-loop process in which experts correct errors (both links between categories and study assignment) in LLM-generated hierarchies. CHIME contains 2,174 LLM-generated hierarchies covering 472 topics, and expert-corrected hierarchies for a subset of 100 topics. Expert corrections allow us to quantify LLM performance, and we find that while they are quite good at generating and organizing categories, their assignment of studies to categories could be improved. We attempt to train a corrector model with human feedback which improves study assignment by 12.6 F1 points. We release our dataset and models to encourage research on developing better assistive tools for literature review.
Which Side Are You On? A Multi-task Dataset for End-to-End Argument Summarisation and Evaluation
Authors: Hao Li, Yuping Wu, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro, Tharindu Madusanka, Iqra Zahid, Jiayan Zeng, Xiaochi Wang, Xinran He, Yizhi Li, Goran Nenadic
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: With the recent advances of large language models (LLMs), it is no longer infeasible to build an automated debate system that helps people to synthesise persuasive arguments. Previous work attempted this task by integrating multiple components. In our work, we introduce an argument mining dataset that captures the end-to-end process of preparing an argumentative essay for a debate, which covers the tasks of claim and evidence identification (Task 1 ED), evidence convincingness ranking (Task 2 ECR), argumentative essay summarisation and human preference ranking (Task 3 ASR) and metric learning for automated evaluation of resulting essays, based on human feedback along argument quality dimensions (Task 4 SQE). Our dataset contains 14k examples of claims that are fully annotated with various properties supporting the aforementioned tasks. We evaluate multiple generative baselines for each of these tasks, including representative LLMs. We find, that while they show promising results on individual tasks in our benchmark, their end-to-end performance on all four tasks in succession deteriorates significantly, both in automated measures as well as in human-centred evaluation. This challenge presented by our proposed dataset motivates future research on end-to-end argument mining and summarisation. The repository of this project is available at https://github.com/HarrywillDr/ArgSum-Datatset.
A Grounded Preference Model for LLM Alignment
Authors: Tahira Naseem, Guangxuan Xu, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Asaf Yehudai, Subhajit Chaudhury, Radu Florian, Ramón Astudillo, Asim Munawar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite LLMs' recent advancements, they still suffer from factual inconsistency and hallucination. An often-opted remedy is retrieval-augmented generation -- however, there is no guarantee that the model will strictly adhere to retrieved grounding. Fundamentally, LLMs need to be aligned to be more faithful to grounding, which will require high-quality preference annotations. This paper investigates whether we can create high-quality grounded preference data for model alignment without using annotations from humans or large proprietary models. We experimented with existing entailment data and proposed approaches to generate synthetic grounded preference data, with which we train a Grounded Preference Model(GPM). We demonstrate through Proximal Policy Optimization(PPO) training of Mistral-7B-Instruct that our GPM model can successfully align powerful LLMs to generate much better grounded responses as judged by GPT4. Moreover, we show that our GPM is also a great faithfulness classifier, achieving SoTA in dialogue sub-tasks of the TRUE faithfulness Benchmark. We will release our GPM under the Apache 2.0 license.
Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs
Authors: Bowen Jin, Chulin Xie, Jiawei Zhang, Kashob Kumar Roy, Yu Zhang, Zheng Li, Ruirui Li, Xianfeng Tang, Suhang Wang, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), while exhibiting exceptional performance, suffer from hallucinations, especially on knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing works propose to augment LLMs with individual text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. However, in many domains, texts are interconnected (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic graph are linked by citations and co-authorships) which form a (text-attributed) graph. The knowledge in such graphs is encoded not only in single texts/nodes but also in their associated connections. To facilitate the research of augmenting LLMs with graphs, we manually construct a Graph Reasoning Benchmark dataset called GRBench, containing 1,740 questions that can be answered with the knowledge from 10 domain graphs. Then, we propose a simple and effective framework called Graph Chain-of-thought (Graph-CoT) to augment LLMs with graphs by encouraging LLMs to reason on the graph iteratively. Each Graph-CoT iteration consists of three sub-steps: LLM reasoning, LLM-graph interaction, and graph execution. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on GRBench, where Graph-CoT outperforms the baselines consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Graph-CoT/.
Text2DB: Integration-Aware Information Extraction with Large Language Model Agents
Authors: Yizhu Jiao, Sha Li, Sizhe Zhou, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The task of information extraction (IE) is to extract structured knowledge from text. However, it is often not straightforward to utilize IE output due to the mismatch between the IE ontology and the downstream application needs. We propose a new formulation of IE, Text2DB, that emphasizes the integration of IE output and the target database (or knowledge base). Given a user instruction, a document set, and a database, our task requires the model to update the database with values from the document set to satisfy the user instruction. This task requires understanding user instructions for \textitwhat to extract and adapting to the given DB/KB schema for \textithow to extract on the fly. To evaluate this new task, we introduce a new benchmark featuring common demands such as data infilling, row population, and column addition. In addition, we propose an LLM agent framework OPAL (Observe-Plan-Analyze LLM) which includes an Observer component that interacts with the database, the Planner component that generates a code-based plan with calls to IE models, and the Analyzer component that provides feedback regarding code quality before execution. Experiments show that OPAL can successfully adapt to diverse database schemas by generating different code plans and calling the required IE models. We also highlight difficult cases such as dealing with large databases with complex dependencies and extraction hallucination, which we believe deserve further investigation.
How Important is a Language Model for Low-resource ASR?
Authors: Zoey Liu, Nitin Venkateswaran, Eric Le Ferrand, Emily Prud′hommeaux
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: N-gram language models (LMs) are the innovation that first made large-vocabulary continuous automatic speech recognition (ASR) viable. With neural end-to-end ASR architectures, however, LMs have become an afterthought. While the effect on accuracy may be negligible for English and Mandarin, jettisoning the LM might not make sense for the world`s remaining 6000+ languages. In this paper, we investigate the role of the LM in low-resource ASR. First we ask: does using an n-gram LM in decoding in neural architectures help ASR performance? While it may seem obvious that it should, its absence in most implementations suggests otherwise. Second, we ask: when an n-gram LM is used in ASR, is there a relationship between the size of the LM and ASR accuracy? We have discovered that gut feelings on this question vary considerably, but there is little empirical work to support any particular claim. We explore these questions “in the wild” using a deliberately diverse set of 9 very small ASR corpora. The results show that: (1) decoding with an n-gram LM, regardless of its size, leads to lower word error rates; and (2) increasing the size of the LM appears to yield improvements only when the audio corpus itself is already relatively large. This suggests that collecting additional LM training text may benefit widely-spoken languages which typically have larger audio corpora. In contrast, for endangered languages where data of any kind will always be limited, efforts may be better spent collecting additional transcribed audio.
MediSwift: Efficient Sparse Pre-trained Biomedical Language Models
Authors: Vithursan Thangarasa, Mahmoud Salem, Shreyas Saxena, Chen-Yu Leong, Joel Hestness, Sean Lie
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on general source data forvarious domains, but a recent surge in domain-specific LLMs has shown theirpotential to outperform general-purpose models in domain-specific tasks (e.g.,biomedicine). Although domain-specific pre-training enhances efficiency andleads to smaller models, the computational costs of training these LLMs remainhigh, posing budgeting challenges. We introduce MediSwift, a suite of biomedicalLMs that leverage sparse pre-training on domain-specific biomedical text data.By inducing up to 75% weight sparsity during the pre-training phase, MediSwiftachieves a 2-2.5x reduction in training FLOPs. Notably, all sparse pre-trainingwas performed on the Cerebras CS-2 system, which is specifically designed torealize the acceleration benefits from unstructured weight sparsity, therebysignificantly enhancing the efficiency of the MediSwift models. Throughsubsequent dense fine-tuning and strategic soft prompting, MediSwift modelsoutperform existing LLMs up to 7B parameters on biomedical tasks, setting newbenchmarks w.r.t efficiency-accuracy on tasks such as PubMedQA. Our results showthat sparse pre-training, along with dense fine-tuning and soft prompting,offers an effective method for creating high-performing, computationallyefficient models in specialized domains.
Lexicon-Level Contrastive Visual-Grounding Improves Language Modeling
Authors: Chengxu Zhuang, Evelina Fedorenko, Jacob Andreas
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Today`s most accurate language models are trained on orders of magnitude more language data than human language learners receive--- but with no supervision from other sensory modalities that play a crucial role in human learning. Can we make LMs' representations and predictions more accurate (and more human-like) with more ecologically plausible supervision? This paper describes LexiContrastive Grounding (LCG), a grounded language learning procedure that leverages visual supervision to improve textual representations. LexiContrastive Grounding combines a next-token prediction strategy with a contrastive visual grounding objective, focusing on early-layerrepresentations that encode lexical information. Across multiple word-learning and sentence-understanding benchmarks, LexiContrastiveGrounding not only outperforms standard language-only models in terms of learning efficiency in small and developmentally plausible data regimes, but also improves upon vision-and-language learning procedures including CLIP, GIT, Flamingo, and Vokenization.Moreover, LexiContrastive Grounding improves perplexity by around 5% on multiple language modeling tasks compared to other models trained on the same amount of text data. This work underscores the potential of incorporating visual grounding into language models, aligning more closely with the multimodal nature of human language acquisition.
P-TA: Using Proximal Policy Optimization to Enhance Tabular Data Augmentation via Large Language Models
Authors: Shuo Yang, Chenchen Yuan, Yao Rong, Felix Steinbauer, Gjergji Kasneci
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: A multitude of industries depend on accurate and reasonable tabular data augmentation for their business processes. Contemporary methodologies in generating tabular data revolve around utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) or fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLM). However, GAN-based approaches are documented to produce samples with common-sense errors attributed to the absence of external knowledge. On the other hand, LLM-based methods exhibit a limited capacity to capture the disparities between synthesized and actual data distribution due to the absence of feedback from a discriminator during training. Furthermore, the decoding of LLM-based generation introduces gradient breakpoints, impeding the backpropagation of loss from a discriminator, thereby complicating the integration of these two approaches. To solve this challenge, we propose using proximal policy optimization (PPO) to apply GANs, guiding LLMs to enhance the probability distribution of tabular features. This approach enables the utilization of LLMs as generators for GANs in synthesizing tabular data. Our experiments demonstrate that PPO leads to an approximately 4% improvement in the accuracy of models trained on synthetically generated data over state-of-the-art across three real-world datasets.
Teaching-Assistant-in-the-Loop: Improving Knowledge Distillation from Imperfect Teacher Models in Low-Budget Scenarios
Authors: Yuhang Zhou, Wei Ai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: There is increasing interest in distilling task-specific knowledge from large language models (LLM) to smaller student models.Nonetheless, LLM distillation presents a dual challenge: 1) there is a high cost associated with querying the teacher LLM, such as GPT-4, for gathering an ample number of demonstrations; 2) the teacher LLM might provide imperfect outputs with a negative impact on the student`s learning process. To enhance sample efficiency within resource-constrained, imperfect teacher scenarios, we propose a three-component framework leveraging three signal types. The first signal is the student`s self-consistency (consistency of student multiple outputs), which is a proxy of the student`s confidence. Specifically, we introduce a ”teaching assistant” (TA) model to assess the uncertainty of both the student`s and the teacher`s outputs via confidence scoring, which serves as another two signals for student training. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training schema to first warm up the student with a small proportion of data to better utilize student`s signal. Experiments have shown the superiority of our proposed framework for four complex reasoning tasks. On average, our proposed two-stage framework brings a relative improvement of up to 20.79% compared to fine-tuning without any signals across datasets.
Small Models are Valuable Plug-ins for Large Language Models
Authors: Canwen Xu, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Yang Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Julian McAuley
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and GPT-4 are powerful but their weights are often publicly unavailable and their immense sizes make the models difficult to be tuned with common hardware. As a result, effectively tuning these models with large-scale supervised data can be challenging. As an alternative, In-Context Learning (ICL) can only use a small number of supervised examples due to context length limits. In this paper, we propose Super In-Context Learning (SuperICL) which allows black-box LLMs to work with locally fine-tuned smaller models, resulting in superior performance on supervised tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that SuperICL can improve performance beyond state-of-the-art fine-tuned models while addressing the instability problem of in-context learning.
Are self-explanations from Large Language Models faithful?
Authors: Andreas Madsen, Sarath Chandar, Siva Reddy
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at many tasks and will even explain their reasoning, so-called self-explanations. However, convincing and wrong self-explanations can lead to unsupported confidence in LLMs, thus increasing risk. Therefore, it`s important to measure if self-explanations truly reflect the model`s behavior. Such a measure is called interpretability-faithfulness and is challenging to perform since the ground truth is inaccessible, and many LLMs only have an inference API. To address this, we propose employing self-consistency checks to measure faithfulness. For example, if an LLM says a set of words is important for making a prediction, then it should not be able to make its prediction without these words. While self-consistency checks are a common approach to faithfulness, they have not previously been successfully applied to LLM self-explanations for counterfactual, feature attribution, and redaction explanations. Our results demonstrate that faithfulness is explanation, model, and task-dependent, showing self-explanations should not be trusted in general. For example, with sentiment classification, counterfactuals are more faithful for Llama2, feature attribution for Mistral, and redaction for Falcon 40B.
ImplicitAVE: An Open-Source Dataset and Multimodal LLMs Benchmark for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction
Authors: Henry Zou, Vinay Samuel, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Zihe Song, Philip Yu, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing datasets for attribute value extraction (AVE) predominantly focus on explicit attribute values while neglecting the implicit ones, lack product images, are often not publicly available, and lack an in-depth human inspection across diverse domains. To address these limitations, we present ImplicitAVE, the first, publicly available multimodal dataset for implicit attribute value extraction. ImplicitAVE, sourced from the MAVE dataset, is carefully curated and expanded to include implicit AVE and multimodality, resulting in a refined dataset of 68k training and 1.6k testing data across five domains. We also explore the application of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to implicit AVE, establishing a comprehensive benchmark for MLLMs on the ImplicitAVE dataset. Six recent MLLMs with eleven variants are evaluated across diverse settings, revealing that implicit value extraction remains a challenging task for MLLMs. The contributions of this work include the development and release of ImplicitAVE, and the exploration and benchmarking of various MLLMs for implicit AVE, providing valuable insights and potential future research directions. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/HenryPengZou/ImplicitAVE.
Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer
Authors: Qinyuan Ye, Mohamed Ahmed, Reid Pryzant, Fereshte Khani
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Prompt engineering is a challenging yet crucial task for optimizing the performance of large language models on customized tasks. It requires complex reasoning to examine the model`s errors, hypothesize what is missing or misleading in the current prompt, and communicate the task with clarity. While recent works indicate that large language models can be meta-prompted to perform automatic prompt engineering, we argue that their potential is limited due to insufficient guidance for complex reasoning in the meta-prompt. We fill this gap by infusing into the meta-prompt three key components: detailed descriptions, context specification, and a step-by-step reasoning template. The resulting method, named PE2, showcases remarkable versatility across diverse language tasks. It finds prompts that outperform “let`s think step by step” by 6.3% on MultiArith and 3.1% on GSM8K, and outperforms competitive baselines on counterfactual tasks by 6.9%. Further, we show that PE2 can make targeted prompt edits, rectify erroneous prompts, and induce multi-step plans for complex tasks.
ASPIRE: Language-Guided Data Augmentation for Improving Robustness Against Spurious Correlations
Authors: Sreyan Ghosh, Chandra Kiran Evuru, Sonal Kumar, Utkarsh Tyagi, S Sakshi, Sanjoy Chowdhury, Dinesh Manocha
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural image classifiers can often learn to make predictions by overly relying on non-predictive features that are spuriously correlated with the class labels in the training data. This leads to poor performance in real-world atypical scenarios where such features are absent. This paper presents ASPIRE (Language-guided Data Augmentation for SPurIous correlation REmoval), a simple yet effective solution for supplementing the training dataset with images without spurious features, for robust learning against spurious correlations via better generalization. ASPIRE, guided by language at various steps, can generate non-spurious images without requiring any group labeling or existing non-spurious images in the training set. Precisely, we employ LLMs to first extract foreground and background features from textual descriptions of an image, followed by advanced language-guided image editing to discover the features that are spuriously correlated with the class label. Finally, we personalize a text-to-image generation model using the edited images to generate diverse in-domain images without spurious features. ASPIRE is complementary to all prior robust training methods in literature, and we demonstrate its effectiveness across 4 datasets and 9 baselines and show that ASPIRE improves the worst-group classification accuracy of prior methods by 1% - 38%. We also contribute a novel test set for the challenging Hard ImageNet dataset.
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs
Authors: Naihao Deng, Zhenjie Sun, Ruiqi He, Aman Sikka, Yulong Chen, Lin Ma, Yue Zhang, Rada Mihalcea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Tables contrast with unstructured text data by its structure to organize the information.In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. We pioneer in the assessment of LLMs' performance on image-based table representation. Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, revealing the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. We hope our study provides researchers insights into optimizing LLMs' application in table-related tasks.
Biasly: An Expert-Annotated Dataset for Subtle Misogyny Detection and Mitigation
Authors: Brooklyn Sheppard, Anna Richter, Allison Cohen, Elizabeth Smith, Tamara Kneese, Carolyne Pelletier, Ioana Baldini, Yue Dong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Using novel approaches to dataset development, the Biasly dataset captures the nuance and subtlety of misogyny in ways that are unique within the literature. Built in collaboration with multi-disciplinary experts and annotators themselves, the dataset contains annotations of movie subtitles, capturing colloquial expressions of misogyny in North American film. The open-source dataset can be used for a range of NLP tasks, including binary and multi-label classification, severity score regression, and text generation for rewrites. In this paper, we discuss the methodology used, analyze the annotations obtained, provide baselines for each task using common NLP algorithms, and furnish error analyses to give insight into model behaviour when fine-tuned on the Biasly dataset.
BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra
Authors: Parker Glenn, Parag Dakle, Liang Wang, Preethi Raghavan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Many existing end-to-end systems for hybrid question answering tasks can often be boiled down to a “prompt-and-pray” paradigm, where the user has limited control and insight into the intermediate reasoning steps used to achieve the final result. Additionally, due to the context size limitation of many transformer-based LLMs, it is often not reasonable to expect that the full structured and unstructured context will fit into a given prompt in a zero-shot setting, let alone a few-shot setting. We introduce BlendSQL, a superset of SQLite to act as a unified dialect for orchestrating reasoning across both unstructured and structured data. For hybrid question answering tasks involving multi-hop reasoning, we encode the full decomposed reasoning roadmap into a single interpretable BlendSQL query. Notably, we show that BlendSQL can scale to massive datasets and improve the performance of end-to-end systems while using 35% fewer tokens. Our code is available and installable as a package at https://github.com/parkervg/blendsql.
LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models
Authors: Zechun Liu, Barlas Oguz, Changsheng Zhao, Ernie Chang, Pierre Stock, Yashar Mehdad, Yangyang Shi, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Several post-training quantization methods have been applied to large language models (LLMs), and have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits. We find that these methods break down at lower bit precision, and investigate quantization-aware training for LLMs (LLM-QAT) to push quantization levels even further. We propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model, which better preserves the original output distribution and allows quantizing any generative model independent of its training data, similar to post-training quantization methods. In addition to quantizing weights and activations, we also quantize the KV cache, which is critical for increasing throughput and supporting long sequence dependencies at current model sizes. We experiment with LLaMA models of sizes 7B, 13B, and 30B, at quantization levels down to 4-bits. We observe large improvements over training-free methods, especially in the low-bit settings.
InfiMM: Advancing Multimodal Understanding with an Open-Sourced Visual Language Model
Authors: Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Yiqi Wang, Xiaotian Han, Bohan Zhai, Yongfei Liu, Wentao Chen, Yiren Jian, Yunzhe Tao, Jianbo Yuan, Ran He, Hongxia Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we present InfiMM, an advanced Multimodal Large Language Model that adapts to intricate vision-language tasks. InfiMM, inspired by the Flamingo architecture, distinguishes itself through the utilization of large-scale training data, comprehensive training strategies, and diverse large language models. This approach ensures the preservation of Flamingo`s foundational strengths while simultaneously introducing augmented capabilities. Empirical evaluations across a variety of benchmarks underscore InfiMM`s remarkable capability in multimodal understanding. The code can be found at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/infimm-zephyr-F60C/.
Towards Verifiable Generation: A Benchmark for Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution
Authors: Xinze Li, Yixin Cao, Liangming Pan, Yubo Ma, Aixin Sun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Although achieving great success, Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from unreliable hallucinations. Although language attribution can be a potential solution, there are no suitable benchmarks and evaluation metrics to attribute LLMs to structured knowledge. In this paper, we define a new task of Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution (KaLMA) that improves upon three core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. First, we extend attribution source from unstructured texts to Knowledge Graph (KG), whose rich structures benefit both the attribution performance and working scenarios. Second, we propose a new “Conscious Incompetence” setting considering the incomplete knowledge repository, where the model identifies the need for supporting knowledge beyond the provided KG. Third, we propose a comprehensive automatic evaluation metric encompassing text quality, citation quality, and text citation alignment. To implement the above innovations, we build a dataset in biography domain BioKaLMA via evolutionary question generation strategy, to control the question complexity and necessary knowledge to the answer. For evaluation, we develop a baseline solution and demonstrate the room for improvement in LLMs' citation generation, emphasizing the importance of incorporating the “Conscious Incompetence” setting, and the critical role of retrieval accuracy.
Benchmarking Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models as Evaluators
Authors: Ryan Koo, Minhwa Lee, Vipul Raheja, Jong Inn Park, Zae Myung Kim, Dongyeop Kang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been shown to be effective as automatic evaluators with simple prompting and in-context learning. In this work, we assemble 16 LLMs encompassing four different size ranges and evaluate their output responses by preference ranking from the other LLMs as evaluators, such as System Star is better than System Square. We then evaluate the quality of ranking outputs introducing the Cognitive Bias Benchmark for LLMs as Evaluators (CoBBLer), a benchmark to measure six different cognitive biases in LLM evaluation outputs, such as the Egocentric bias where a model prefers to rank its own outputs highly in evaluation. We find that LLMs are biased text quality evaluators, exhibiting strong indications on our bias benchmark (40% of comparisons made by all models) within each of their evaluations that question their robustness as evaluators. Furthermore, we examine the correlation between human and machine preferences and calculate the average Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) score to be 44%, indicating that machine preferences are misaligned with humans. According to our findings, LLMs may still be unable to be utilized for automatic annotation aligned with human preferences.
X-Instruction: Aligning Language Model in Low-resource Languages with Self-curated Cross-lingual Instructions
Authors: Chong Li, Wen Yang, Jiajun Zhang, Jinliang Lu, Shaonan Wang, Chengqing Zong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models respond well in high-resource languages like English but struggle in low-resource languages. It may arise from the lack of high-quality instruction following data in these languages. Directly translating English samples into these languages can be a solution but unreliable, leading to responses with translation errors and lacking language-specific or cultural knowledge. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to construct cross-lingual instruction following samples with instruction in English and response in low-resource languages. Specifically, the language model first learns to generate appropriate English instructions according to the natural web texts in other languages as responses. The candidate cross-lingual instruction tuning samples are further refined and diversified. We have employed this method to build a large-scale cross-lingual instruction tuning dataset on 10 languages, namely X-Instruction. The instruction data built using our method incorporate more language-specific knowledge compared with the naive translation method. Experimental results have shown that the response quality of the model tuned on X-Instruction greatly exceeds the model distilled from a powerful teacher model, reaching or even surpassing the ones of ChatGPT. In addition, we find that models tuned on cross-lingual instruction following samples can follow the instruction in the output language without further tuning.
Resonance RoPE: Improving Context Length Generalization of Large Language Models
Authors: Suyuchen Wang, Ivan Kobyzev, Peng Lu, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Bang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of train-short-test-long (TSTL) scenarios in Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), where models pre-trained on shorter sequences face difficulty with out-of-distribution (OOD) token positions in longer sequences. We introduce Resonance RoPE, a novel approach designed to narrow the generalization gap in TSTL scenarios by refining the interpolation of RoPE features for OOD positions, significantly improving the model performance without additional online computational costs. Furthermore, we present PosGen, a new synthetic benchmark specifically designed for fine-grained behavior analysis in TSTL scenarios, aiming to isolate the constantly increasing difficulty of token generation on long contexts from the challenges of recognizing new token positions. Our experiments on synthetic tasks show that after applying Resonance RoPE, Transformers recognize OOD position better and more robustly. Our extensive LLM experiments also show superior performance after applying Resonance RoPE to the current state-of-the-art RoPE scaling method, YaRN, on both upstream language modeling tasks and a variety of downstream long-text applications.
MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning
Authors: Xiangru Tang, Anni Zou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ziming Li, Yilun Zhao, Xingyao Zhang, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these issues, we propose MedAgents, a novel multi-disciplinary collaboration framework for the medical domain. MedAgents leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting that participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work focuses on the zero-shot setting, which is applicable in real-world scenarios. Experimental results on nine datasets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MedAgents framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedAgents.
Meta-Reasoning: Semantics-Symbol Deconstruction for Large Language Models
Authors: Yiming Wang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Rui Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural-symbolic methods have demonstrated efficiency in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods mainly rely on syntactically mapping natural languages to complete formal languages like Python and SQL. Those methods require that reasoning tasks be convertible into programs, which cater to the computer execution mindset and deviate from human reasoning habits. To broaden symbolic methods' applicability and adaptability in the real world, we propose Meta-Reasoning from a linguistic perspective. This method empowers LLMs to deconstruct reasoning-independent semantic information into generic symbolic representations, thereby efficiently capturing more generalized reasoning knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments on more than ten datasets encompassing conventional reasoning tasks like arithmetic, symbolic, and logical reasoning, and the more complex interactive reasoning tasks like theory-of-mind reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Meta-Reasoning significantly enhances in-context reasoning accuracy, learning efficiency, out-of-domain generalization, and output stability compared to the Chain-of-Thought technique.
DPDLLM: A Black-box Framework for Detecting Pre-training Data from Large Language Models
Authors: Baohang Zhou, Zezhong Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Hongru Wang, Ying Zhang, Kehui Song, Xuhui Sui, Kam-Fai Wong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The success of large language models (LLM) benefits from large-scale model parameters and large amounts of pre-training data. However, the textual data for training LLM can not be confirmed to be legal because they are crawled from different web sites. For example, there are copyrighted articles, personal reviews and information in the pre-training data for LLM which are illegal. To address the above issue and develop legal LLM, we propose to detect the pre-training data from LLM in a pure black-box way because the existing LLM services only return the generated text. The previous most related works are the membership inference attack (MIA) on machine learning models to detect the training data from them. But the existing methods are based on analyzing the output probabilities of models which are unrealistic to LLM services. To tackle the problem, we firstly construct the benchmark datasets by collecting textual data from different domains as the seen and unseen pre-training data for LLMs. Then, we investigate a black-box framework named DPDLLM, with the only access to the generated texts from LLM for detecting textual data whether was used to train it. In the proposed framework, we exploit GPT-2 as the reference model to fit the textual data and feed the generated text from LLM into it to acquire sequence probabilities as the significant feature for detection. The experimental results on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that DPDLLM is effective on different popular LLMs and outperforms the existing methods.
PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning
Authors: Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Yixia Li, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Instruction tuning enhances the instruction following ability of large language models by finetuning with supervised instruction data. Previous work proposes in-context instruction tuning (ICIT) where specific positive or negative examples are incorporated into the prompt for better performance. In this work, we propose PACIT, a simple and effective in-context instruction tuning method, inspired by the pedagogical concept of desirable difficulty. The PACIT method unlocks the power of examples by encouraging the model to actively learn to grasp the distinctions between the positive and negative examples instead of merely reading. The model is expected to first verify the correctness of the provided example according to the task description, which is then set as the condition for generating a better response to the task instance. Our extensive experiments prove the effectiveness of PACIT, outperforming ICIT baseline on both in-domain and out-domain tasks up to 9.16 and 3.14 average ROUGE-L scores, respectively. Moreover, PACIT can notably enhance the performance of instruction tuning even when all positive and negative examples are generated with a self-instruct method.
Listen Again and Choose the Right Answer: A New Paradigm for Automatic Speech Recognition with Large Language Models
Authors: Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Chengwei Qin, Qiushi Zhu, EngSiong Chng, Ruizhe Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), which aims to predict the ground-truth transcription from the decoded N-best hypotheses. Thanks to the strong language generation ability of LLMs and rich information in the N-best list, GER shows great effectiveness in enhancing ASR results. However, it still suffers from two limitations: 1) LLMs are unaware of the source speech during GER, which may lead to results that are grammatically correct but violate the source speech content, 2) N-best hypotheses usually only vary in a few tokens, making it redundant to send all of them for GER, which could confuse LLM about which tokens to focus on and thus lead to increased miscorrection. In this paper, we propose ClozeGER, a new paradigm for ASR generative error correction. First, we introduce a multimodal LLM (i.e., SpeechGPT) to receive source speech as extra input to improve the fidelity of correction output. Then, we reformat GER as a cloze test with logits calibration to remove the input information redundancy and simplify GER with clear instructions. Experiments show that ClozeGER achieves a new breakthrough over vanilla GER on 9 popular ASR datasets.