mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs
Authors: Zae Myung Kim, Kwang Lee, Preston Zhu, Vipul Raheja, Dongyeop Kang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in texts that were written by humans, particularly uncovering the underlying discourse structures of texts beyond their surface structures. Introducing a novel methodology, we leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to unveil distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. Empirical findings demonstrate that, although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. Notably, incorporating hierarchical discourse features enhances binary classifiers' overall performance in distinguishing between human-written and machine-generated texts, even on out-of-distribution and paraphrased samples. This underscores the significance of incorporating hierarchical discourse features in the analysis of text patterns. The code and dataset will be available at [TBA].
Jailbreak Open-Sourced Large Language Models via Enforced Decoding
Authors: Hangfan Zhang, Zhimeng Guo, Huaisheng Zhu, Bochuan Cao, Lu Lin, Jinyuan Jia, Jinghui Chen, Dinghao Wu
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 unprecedented performance in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. However, many existing studies have shown that they could be misused to generate undesired content. In response, before releasing LLMs for public access, model developers usually align those language models through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Consequently, those aligned large language models refuse to generate undesired content when facing potentially harmful/unethical requests. A natural question is “could alignment really prevent those open-sourced large language models from being misused to generate undesired content?”. In this work, we provide a negative answer to this question. In particular, we show those open-sourced, aligned large language models could be easily misguided to generate undesired content without heavy computations or careful prompt designs. Our key idea is to directly manipulate the generation process of open-sourced LLMs to misguide it to generate undesired content including harmful or biased information and even private data. We evaluate our method on 4 open-sourced LLMs accessible publicly and our finding highlights the need for more advanced mitigation strategies for open-sourced LLMs.
NICE: To Optimize In-Context Examples or Not?
Authors: Pragya Srivastava, Satvik Golechha, Amit Deshpande, Amit Sharma
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent work shows that in-context learning and optimization of in-context examples (ICE) can significantly improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks, leading to an apparent consensus that ICE optimization is crucial for better performance. However, most of these studies assume a fixed or no instruction provided in the prompt. We challenge this consensus by investigating the necessity of optimizing ICE when task-specific instructions are provided and find that there are many tasks for which it yields diminishing returns. In particular, using a diverse set of tasks and a systematically created instruction set with gradually added details, we find that as the prompt instruction becomes more detailed, the returns on ICE optimization diminish. To characterize this behavior, we introduce a task-specific metric called Normalized Invariability to Choice of Examples (NICE) that quantifies the learnability of tasks from a given instruction, and provides a heuristic to help decide whether to optimize instructions or ICE for a new task. Given a task, the proposed metric can reliably predict the utility of optimizing ICE compared to using random ICE. Our code is available at [https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl](https://github.com/microsoft/nice-icl).
CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation
Authors: Weixiang Yan, Haitian Liu, Yunkun Wang, Yunzhe Li, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Tingyu Lin, Weishan Zhao, Li Zhu, Hari Sundaram, Shuiguang Deng
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 demonstrated remarkable performance on assisting humans in programming and facilitating programming automation. However, existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of LLMs suffer from severe limitations. First, most benchmarks are insufficient as they focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks, whereas real-world software development scenarios show a critical need to implement systems with multilingual and multitask programming environments to satisfy diverse requirements. Second, most benchmarks fail to consider the actual executability and the consistency of execution results of the generated code. To bridge these gaps between existing benchmarks and expectations from practical applications, we introduce **CodeScope**, an execution-based, multilingual, multitask, multidimensional evaluation benchmark for comprehensively measuring LLM capabilities on coding tasks. CodeScope covers **43 programming languages** and **eight coding tasks**. It evaluates the coding performance of LLMs from three dimensions (perspectives): **length**, **difficulty**, and **efficiency**. To facilitate execution-based evaluations of code generation, we develop **MultiCodeEngine**, an automated code execution engine that supports 14 programming languages. Finally, we systematically evaluate and analyze eight mainstream LLMs and demonstrate the superior breadth and challenges of CodeScope for evaluating LLMs on code understanding and generation tasks compared to other benchmarks. The CodeScope benchmark and code are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeScope.
Digital Socrates: Evaluating LLMs through Explanation Critiques
Authors: Yuling Gu, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Clark
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: While LLMs can provide reasoned explanations along with their answers, the nature and quality of those explanations are still poorly understood. In response, our goal is to define a detailed way of characterizing the explanation capabilities of modern models and to create a nuanced, interpretable explanation evaluation tool that can generate such characterizations automatically, without relying on expensive API calls or human annotations. Our approach is to (a) define the new task of explanation critiquing - identifying and categorizing any main flaw in an explanation and providing suggestions to address the flaw, (b) create a sizeable, human-verified dataset for this task, and (c) train an open-source, automatic critique model (called Digital Socrates) using this data. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate how Digital Socrates is useful for revealing insights about student models by examining their reasoning chains, and how it can provide high-quality, nuanced, automatic evaluation of those model explanations for the first time. Digital Socrates thus fills an important gap in evaluation tools for understanding and improving the explanation behavior of models.
SafeDecoding: Defending against Jailbreak Attacks via Safety-Aware Decoding
Authors: Zhangchen Xu, Fengqing Jiang, Luyao Niu, Jinyuan Jia, Bill Yuchen Lin, Radha Poovendran
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into real-world applications such as code generation and chatbot assistance, extensive efforts have been made to align LLM behavior with human values, including safety. Jailbreak attacks, which aim to provoke unintended and unsafe behaviors from LLMs, remain a significant LLM safety threat. We analyze tokens, which are the smallest unit of text that can be processed by LLMs and make the following observations: (1) probabilities of tokens representing harmful responses are higher than those of harmless responses, and (2) responses containing safety disclaimers appear among the top tokens when token probabilities are sorted in descending order. In this paper, we leverage (1) and (2) to develop SafeDecoding, a safety-aware decoding strategy for LLMs, to defend against jailbreak attacks. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate SafeDecoding against six SOTA jailbreak attacks (GCG, AutoDAN, PAIR, DeepInception, SAP30, and template based attack) on five LLMs (Vicuna, Llama2, Guanaco, falcon, and Dolphin) using four benchmark datasets (AdvBench, HEx-PHI, MT-Bench, and Just-Eval). Our results show that SafeDecoding significantly reduces attack success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks without compromising the helpfulness of responses to benign user queries while outperforming six defense methods (Perpelexity, Paraphrase, Retokenization, Self-Reminder, ICD, and Self-Examination).
Multi-Task Inference: Can Large Language Models Follow Multiple Instructions at Once?
Authors: Guijin Son, SangWon Baek, Sangdae Nam, Ilgyun Jeong, Seungone Kim
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) are typically prompted to follow a single instruction per inference call. In this work, we analyze whether LLMs also hold the capability to handle \textitmultiple instructions simultaneously, denoted as Multi-Task Inference. For this purpose, we introduce the MTI Bench (Multi-Task Inference Benchmark), a comprehensive evaluation benchmark encompassing 5,000 instances across 25 tasks. Each task in the MTI Bench involves 2 to 3 sub-tasks. As expected, we first demonstrate that Multi-Task Inference reduces the total inference time by $\times 1.46$ times in average since it does not require multiple inference calls. Interestingly, contrary to the expectation that LLMs would perform better when tasks are divided, we find that state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Llama-2-Chat-70B and GPT-4, show up to 7.3% and 12.4% improved performance with Multi-Task Inference compared to Single-Task Inference on the MTI Bench. We release the MTI Bench dataset and our code at this [link](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MTI-Bench-6F01).
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents
Authors: Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where LLM agents demonstrate efficient collaboration, task division, and assurance of software quality, markedly reducing the need for manual involvement. However, these agents frequently perform a variety of tasks independently, without benefiting from past experiences, which leads to repeated mistakes and inefficient attempts in multi-step task execution. To this end, we introduce Experiential Co-Learning, a novel LLM-agent learning framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for future task execution. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. We anticipate that our insights will guide LLM agents towards enhanced autonomy and contribute to their evolutionary growth in cooperative learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.
Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery
Authors: Kai Tang, Junbo Zhao, Xiao Ding, Runze Wu, Lei Feng, Gang Chen, Haobo Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: New intent discovery (NID) is an important problem for deploying practical dialogue systems, which trains intent classifiers on a semi-supervised corpus where unlabeled user utterances contain both known and novel intents. Most existing NID algorithms place hope on the sample similarity to cluster unlabeled corpus to known or new samples. Lacking supervision on new intents, we experimentally find the intent classifier fails to fully distinguish new intents since they tend to assemble into intertwined centers.To address this problem, we propose a novel GeoID framework that learns geometry-aware representations to maximally separate all intents. Specifically, we are motivated by the recent findings on Neural Collapse (NC) in classification tasks to derive optimal intent center structure. Meanwhile, we devise a dual pseudo-labeling strategy based on optimal transport assignments and semi-supervised clustering, ensuring proper utterances-to-center arrangement.Extensive results show that our GeoID method establishes a new state-of-the-art performance, achieving a +3.49% average accuracy improvement on three standardized benchmarking datasets. We also verify its usefulness in assisting large language models for improved in-context performance.
Speaker Verification in Agent-generated Conversations
Authors: Yizhe Yang, Palakorn Achananuparp, Heyan Huang, Jing Jiang, Ee-Peng Lim
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has attracted widespread interest to develop role-playing conversational agents personalized to the characteristics and styles of different speakers to enhance their abilities to perform both general and special purpose dialogue tasks. However, the ability to personalize the generated utterances to speakers, whether conducted by human or LLM, has not been well studied. To bridge this gap, our study introduces a novel evaluation challenge: speaker verification in agent-generated conversations, which aimed to verify whether two sets of utterances originate from the same speaker. To this end, we assemble a large dataset collection encompassing thousands of speakers and their utterances. We also develop and evaluate speaker verification models under experiment setups. We further utilize the speaker verification models to evaluate the personalization abilities of LLM-based role-playing models. Comprehensive experiments suggest that the current role-playing models fail in accurately mimicking speakers, primarily due to their inherent linguistic characteristics.
Benchmarking Data Science Agents
Authors: Yuge Zhang, Qiyang Jiang, XingyuHan XingyuHan, Nan Chen, Yuqing Yang, Kan Ren
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In the era of data-driven decision-making, the complexity of data analysis necessitates advanced expertise and tools of data science, presenting significant challenges even for specialists. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising aids as data science agents, assisting humans in data analysis and processing. Yet their practical efficacy remains constrained by the varied demands of real-world applications and complicated analytical process. In this paper, we introduce DSEval -- a novel evaluation paradigm, as well as a series of innovative benchmarks tailored for assessing the performance of these agents throughout the entire data science lifecycle. Incorporating a novel bootstrapped annotation method, we streamline dataset preparation, improve the evaluation coverage, and expand benchmarking comprehensiveness. Our findings uncover prevalent obstacles and provide critical insights to inform future advancements in the field.
Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models
Authors: Tianyi Tang, Wenyang Luo, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiaolei Wang, Xin Zhao, Furu Wei, Ji-Rong Wen
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) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities without being pre-trained on specially curated multilingual parallel corpora.It remains a challenging problem to explain the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs process multilingual texts.In this paper, we delve into the composition of Transformer architectures in LLMs to pinpoint language-specific regions.Specially, we propose a novel detection method, language activation probability entropy (LAPE), to identify language-specific neurons within LLMs.Based on LAPE, we conduct comprehensive experiments on several representative LLMs, such as LLaMA-2, BLOOM, and Mistral. Our findings indicate that LLMs' proficiency in processing a particular language is predominantly due to a small subset of neurons, primarily situated in the models' top and bottom layers.Furthermore, we showcase the feasibility to “steer” the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. Our research provides important evidence to the understanding and exploration of the multilingual capabilities of LLMs.
Forgetting before Learning: Utilizing Parametric Arithmetic for Knowledge Updating in Large Language Models
Authors: Shiwen Ni, Dingwei Chen, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their remarkable capabilities in text understanding and generation. However, even stronger LLMs are susceptible to acquiring erroneous or obsolete information from the training corpus. Direct secondary fine-tuning with data containing new knowledge may be ineffective in updating knowledge due to the conflict between old and new knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for fine-tuning called F-Learning (Forgetting before Learning), which employs parametric arithmetic to facilitate the forgetting of old knowledge and learning of new knowledge. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our proposed F-Learning can obviously improve the knowledge updating performance of both full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning, simultaneously outperforming the existing baselines in most cases. Moreover, we have also discovered that forgetting old knowledge by subtracting the parameters of LoRA can yield a similar effect to subtracting the parameters of full fine-tuning, and occasionally even surpass it significantly.
A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques
Authors: Megh Thakkar, Quentin Fournier, Matthew Riemer, Pin-Yu Chen, Amal Zouaq, Payel Das, Sarath Chandar
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 are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has become affordable thanks to parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA and QLoRA. Alignment is known to be sensitive to the many factors involved, including the quantity and quality of data, the alignment method, and the adapter rank. However, there has not yet been an extensive study of their effect on downstream performance. To address this gap, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the impact of popular choices for three crucial axes: (i) the alignment dataset (HH-RLHF and BeaverTails), (ii) the alignment technique (SFT and DPO), and (iii) the model (LLaMA-1, Vicuna-v1.3, Mistral-7b, and Mistral-7b-Instruct). Our extensive setup spanning over 300 experiments reveals consistent trends and unexpected findings. We observe how more informative data helps with preference alignment, cases where supervised fine-tuning outperforms preference optimization, and how aligning to a distinct preference boosts performance on downstream tasks. Through our in-depth analyses, we put forward key guidelines to help researchers perform more effective parameter-efficient LLM alignment.
Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking via Dual Low-Rank Adaptation
Authors: Xiang Luo, Zhiwen Tang, Jin Wang, Xuejie Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) seeks to enable dialogue systems to transition to unfamiliar domains without manual annotation or extensive retraining. Prior research has approached this objective by embedding prompts into language models (LMs). Common methodologies include integrating prompts at the input layer or introducing learnable variables at each transformer layer. Nonetheless, each strategy exhibits inherent limitations. Prompts integrated at the input layer risk underutilization, with their impact potentially diminishing across successive transformer layers. Conversely, the addition of learnable variables to each layer can complicate the training process and increase inference latency. To tackle the issues mentioned above, this paper proposes Dual Low-Rank Adaptation (DualLoRA), a plug-and-play architecture designed for zero-shot DST. DualLoRA incorporates two distinct Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) components, targeting both dialogue context processing and prompt optimization, to ensure the comprehensive influence of prompts throughout the transformer model layers. This is achieved without incurring additional inference latency, showcasing an efficient integration into existing architectures. Through rigorous evaluation on the MultiWOZ and SGD datasets, DualLoRA demonstrates notable improvements across multiple domains, outperforming traditional baseline methods in zero-shot settings.
PRP-Graph: Pairwise Ranking Prompting to LLMs with Graph Aggregation for Effective Text Re-ranking
Authors: Jian Luo, Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Le Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) demonstrates impressive effectiveness in zero-shot document re-ranking tasks with large language models (LLMs). However, in the existing methods, PRP only outputs the same label for the comparison results of different confidence intervals without considering the uncertainty of pairwise comparison, which implies an underutilization of the generation probability information of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose PRP-Graph, a novel pairwise re-ranking approach, based on a refined scoring PRP unit that exploits the output probabilities of target labels to capture the degree of certainty of the comparison results. Specifically, the PRP-Graph consists of two stages, namely ranking graph construction and ranking graph aggregation. Extensive experiments conducted on the BEIR benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing PRP-based methods. Comprehensive analysis reveals that the PRP-Graph displays strong robustness towards the initial ranking order and delivers exceptional re-ranking results with acceptable efficiency. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Memelank/PRP-Graph.
RepCodec: A Speech Representation Codec for Speech Tokenization
Authors: Zhichao Huang, Chutong Meng, Tom Ko
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: With recent rapid growth of large language models (LLMs), discrete speech tokenization has played an important role for injecting speech into LLMs. However, this discretization gives rise to a loss of information, consequently impairing overall performance. To improve the performance of these discrete speech tokens, we present RepCodec, a novel speech representation codec for semantic speech tokenization. In contrast to audio codecs which reconstruct the raw audio, RepCodec learns a vector quantization codebook through reconstructing speech representations from speech encoders like HuBERT or data2vec. Together, the speech encoder, the codec encoder and the vector quantization codebook form a pipeline for converting speech waveforms into semantic tokens. The extensive experiments illustrate that RepCodec, by virtue of its enhanced information retention capacity, significantly outperforms the widely used k-means clustering approach in both speech understanding and generation. Furthermore, this superiority extends across various speech encoders and languages, affirming the robustness of RepCodec.We believe our method can facilitate large language modeling research on speech processing.
GumbelSoft: Diversified Language Model Watermarking via the GumbelMax-trick
Authors: Jiayi Fu, Xuandong Zhao, Ruihan Yang, Yuansen Zhang, Jiangjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao
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) excellently generate human-like text, but also raise concerns about misuse in fake news and academic dishonesty. Decoding-based watermark, particularly the watermark based on the GumbelMax trick (GM watermark), is a standout solution for safeguarding machine-generated texts due to its notable detectability. However, GM watermark encounters a major challenge with generation diversity, always yielding identical outputs for the same prompt, negatively impacting generation diversity and user experience. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new type of GM watermark, the Logits-Addition watermark, as well as three variants that aim to enhance diversity, particularly the GumbelSoft watermark (i.e., the softmax variant of the Logits-Addition watermark). When assessed for detectability in high diversity settings, our Gumbelsoft demonstrates superior performance, with its AUROC score exceeding those of the two alternative variants by a margin of 0.1 to 0.3 and outperforming other decoding-based watermarking methods by a minimum of 0.1.
Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection
Authors: Zihan Ma, Minnan Luo, Hao Guo, Zhi Zeng, Yiran Hao, Xiang Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The swift detection of multimedia fake news has emerged as a crucial task in combating malicious propaganda and safeguarding the security of the online environment. While existing methods have achieved commendable results in modeling entity-level inconsistency, addressing event-level inconsistency following the inherent subject-predicate logic of news and robustly learning news representations from poor-quality news samples remain two challenges. In this paper, we propose an Event-diven fake news detection framework (Event-Radar) based on multi-view learning, which integrates visual manipulation, textual emotion and multimodal inconsistency at event-level for fake news detection. Specifically, leveraging the capability of graph structures to capture interactions between events and parameters, Event-Radar captures event-level multimodal inconsistency by constructing an event graph that includes multimodal entity subject-predicate logic. Additionally, to mitigate the interference of poor-quality news, Event-Radar introduces a multi-view fusion mechanism, learning comprehensive and robust representations by computing the credibility of each view as a clue, thereby detecting fake news. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Event-Radar achieves outstanding performance on three large-scale fake news detection benchmarks. Our studies also confirm that Event-Radar exhibits strong robustness, providing a paradigm for detecting fake news from noisy news samples.
Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions
Authors: Liyan Xu, Jiangnan Li, Mo Yu, 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: This work introduces an original and practical paradigm for narrative comprehension, stemming from the characteristics that individual passages within narratives tend to be more cohesively related than isolated.Complementary to the common end-to-end paradigm, we propose a fine-grained modeling of narrative context, by formulating a graph dubbed NarCo, which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by various downstream tasks. In particular, edges in NarCo encompass free-form retrospective questions between context snippets, inspired by human cognitive perception that constantly reinstates relevant events from prior context. Importantly, our graph formalism is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations, through our designed two-stage prompting scheme.To examine the graph properties and its utility, we conduct three studies in narratives, each from a unique angle: edge relation efficacy, local context enrichment, and broader application in QA. All tasks could benefit from the explicit coherence captured by NarCo.
Stealthy Attack on Large Language Model based Recommendation
Authors: Jinghao Zhang, Yuting Liu, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Guibing Guo, Liang Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, the powerful large language models (LLMs) have been instrumental in propelling the progress of recommender systems (RS). However, while these systems have flourished, their susceptibility to security threats has been largely overlooked. In this work, we reveal that the introduction of LLMs into recommendation models presents new security vulnerabilities due to their emphasis on the textual content of items. We demonstrate that attackers can significantly boost an item`s exposure by merely altering its textual content during the testing phase, without requiring direct interference with the model`s training process. Additionally, the attack is notably stealthy, as it does not affect the overall recommendation performance and the modifications to the text are subtle, making it difficult for users and platforms to detect. Our comprehensive experiments across four mainstream LLM-based recommendation models demonstrate the superior efficacy and stealthiness of our approach. Our work unveils a significant security gap in LLM-based recommendation systems and paves the way for future research on protecting these systems.
Multi-Dimensional Optimization for Text Summarization via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Sangwon Ryu, Heejin Do, Yunsu Kim, Gary Lee, Jungseul Ok
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The evaluation of summary quality encompasses diverse dimensions such as consistency, coherence, relevance, and fluency. However, existing summarization methods often target a specific dimension, facing challenges in generating well-balanced summaries across multiple dimensions. In this paper, we propose multi-objective reinforcement learning tailored to generate balanced summaries across all four dimensions. We introduce two multi-dimensional optimization (MDO) strategies for adaptive learning: 1) MDO_min, rewarding the current lowest dimension score, and 2) MDO_pro, optimizing multiple dimensions similar to multi-task learning, resolves conflicting gradients across dimensions through gradient projection. Unlike prior ROUGE-based rewards relying on reference summaries, we use a QA-based reward model that aligns with human preferences. Further, we discover the capability to regulate the length of summaries by adjusting the discount factor, seeking the generation of concise yet informative summaries that encapsulate crucial points. Our approach achieved substantial performance gains compared to baseline models on representative summarization datasets, particularly in the overlooked dimensions.
Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models
Authors: Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models insuch domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise supervisory signals from human labeling, larger models, or self-sampling, although at a high cost. Conversely, we develop a method that avoids external resources, relying instead on introducing perturbations to the input. Our training approach randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought, a techniquewe found to be particularly effective for reasoning tasks. When applied to fine-tuning with GSM8K on Llama-2-7B, this method achieveda 5% improvement in GSM8K accuracy and a 10% improvement in GSM-IC accuracy over standard supervised fine-tuning with a few codes modified. Furthermore, it is complementary to existing methods. When integrated with related explicit data augmentation methods, it leads to improvements across five datasets of various augmentation methods, as well as two different base models. We further investigate the mechanisms behind this improvement through case studies and quantitative analysis, suggesting that our approach may provide superior support for the model in capturing long-distance dependencies, especially those related to questions. This enhancement could deepen understanding of the premises in questions and prior steps.
SEER: Facilitating Structured Reasoning and Explanation via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Guoxin Chen, Kexin Tang, Chao Yang, Fuying Ye, Yu Qiao, Yiming Qian
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Elucidating the reasoning process with structured explanations from question to answer is crucial, as it significantly enhances the interpretability, traceability, and trustworthiness of question-answering (QA) systems. However, structured explanations demand models to perform intricately structured reasoning, which poses great challenges. Most existing methods focus on single-step reasoning through supervised learning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning (RL) based methods overlook the structured relationships, underutilizing the potential of RL in structured reasoning. In this paper, we propose SEER, a novel method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. Our proposed structure-based return precisely describes the hierarchical and branching structure inherent in structured reasoning, effectively capturing the intricate relationships between different reasoning steps. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained reward function to meticulously delineate diverse reasoning steps. Extensive experiments show that SEER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement of 6.9% over RL-based methods on EntailmentBank, a 4.4% average improvement on STREET benchmark, and exhibiting outstanding efficiency and cross-dataset generalization performance.
Towards Robust and Generalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Noisy Label Learning
Authors: Yeachan Kim, Junho Kim, SangKeun Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has enabled the efficient optimization of cumbersome language models in real-world settings. However, as datasets in such environments often contain noisy labels that adversely affect performance, PEFT methods are inevitably exposed to noisy labels. Despite this challenge, the adaptability of PEFT to noisy environments remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we investigate various PEFT methods under noisy labels. Interestingly, our findings reveal that PEFT has difficulty in memorizing noisy labels due to its inherently limited capacity, resulting in robustness. However, we also find that such limited capacity simultaneously makes PEFT more vulnerable to interference of noisy labels, impeding the learning of clean samples. To address this issue, we propose Clean Routing (CleaR), a novel routing-based PEFT approach that adaptively activates PEFT modules. In CleaR, PEFT modules are preferentially exposed to clean data while bypassing the noisy ones, thereby minimizing the noisy influence. To verify the efficacy of CleaR, we perform extensive experiments on diverse configurations of noisy labels. The results convincingly demonstrate that CleaR leads to substantially improved performance in noisy environments
SparseFlow: Accelerating Transformers by Sparsifying Information Flows
Authors: Yeachan Kim, SangKeun Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Transformers have become the de-facto standard for natural language processing. However, dense information flows within transformers pose significant challenges for real-time and resource-constrained devices, as computational complexity grows quadratically with sequence length. To counteract such dense information flows, we propose SparseFlow, a novel efficient method designed to sparsify the dense pathways of token representations across all transformer blocks. To this end, SparseFlow parameterizes the information flows linking token representations to transformer blocks. These parameterized information flows are optimized to be sparse, allowing only the salient information to pass through into the blocks. To validate the efficacy of SparseFlow, we conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse benchmarks (understanding and generation), scales (ranging from millions to billions), architectures (including encoders, decoders, and seq-to-seq models), and modalities (such as language-only and vision-language). The results convincingly demonstrate that sparsifying the dense information flows leads to substantial speedup gains without compromising task accuracy. For instance, SparseFlow reduces computational costs by half on average, without a significant loss in accuracy.
ProtT3: Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding
Authors: Zhiyuan Liu, An Zhang, Hao Fei, Enzhi Zhang, Xiang Wang, Kenji Kawaguchi, Tat-Seng Chua
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Language Models (LMs) excel in understanding textual descriptions of proteins, as evident in biomedical question-answering tasks. However, their capability falters with raw protein data, such as amino acid sequences, due to a deficit in pretraining on such data. Conversely, Protein Language Models (PLMs) can understand and convert protein data into high-quality representations, but struggle to process texts. To address their limitations, we introduce ProtT3, a framework for Protein-to-Text Generation for Text-based Protein Understanding. ProtT3 empowers an LM to understand protein sequences of amino acids by incorporating a PLM as its protein understanding module, enabling effective protein-to-text generation. This collaboration between PLM and LM is facilitated by a cross-modal projector (i.e., Q-Former) that bridges the modality gap between the PLM`s representation space and the LM`s input space. Unlike previous studies focusing on protein property prediction and protein-text retrieval, we delve into the largely unexplored field of protein-to-text generation. To facilitate comprehensive benchmarks and promote future research, we establish quantitative evaluations for protein-text modeling tasks, including protein captioning, protein question-answering, and protein-text retrieval. Our experiments show that ProtT3 substantially surpasses current baselines, with ablation studies further highlighting the efficacy of its core components. Our code is available at https://github.com/acharkq/ProtT3.
KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models
Authors: Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Automatic evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are hindered by data contamination, leading to inflated assessments of their effectiveness. Existing strategies, which aim to detect contaminated texts, focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. In this paper, we introduce KIEval, a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework, which incorporates an LLM-powered “interactor” role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. Starting with a question in a conventional LLM benchmark involving domain-specific knowledge, KIEval utilizes dynamically generated, multi-round, and knowledge-focused dialogues to determine whether a model`s response is merely a recall of benchmark answers or demonstrates a deep comprehension to apply knowledge in more complex conversations. Extensive experiments on seven leading LLMs across five datasets validate KIEval`s effectiveness and generalization. We also reveal that data contamination brings no contribution or even negative effect to models' real-world applicability and understanding, and existing contamination detection methods for LLMs can only identify contamination in pre-training but not during supervised fine-tuning.
EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models
Authors: Sahand Sabour, Siyang Liu, Zheyuan Zhang, June Liu, Jinfeng Zhou, Alvionna Sunaryo, Tatia Lee, Rada Mihalcea, Minlie Huang
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 highlighted the need for robust, comprehensive, and challenging benchmarks. Yet, research on evaluating their Emotional Intelligence (EI) is considerably limited. Existing benchmarks have two major shortcomings: first, they mainly focus on emotion recognition, neglecting essential EI capabilities such as emotion management and thought facilitation through emotion understanding; second, they are primarily constructed from existing datasets, which include frequent patterns, explicit information, and annotation errors, leading to unreliable evaluation. We propose EmoBench, a benchmark that draws upon established psychological theories and proposes a comprehensive definition for machine EI, including Emotional Understanding and Emotional Application. EmoBench includes a set of 400 hand-crafted questions in English and Chinese, which are meticulously designed to require thorough reasoning and understanding. Our findings reveal a considerable gap between the EI of existing LLMs and the average human, highlighting a promising direction for future research. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/Sahandfer/EmoBench.
Are AI-Generated Text Detectors Robust to Adversarial Perturbations?
Authors: Guanhua Huang, Yuchen Zhang, Zhe Li, Yongjian You, Mingze Wang, Zhouwang Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The widespread use of large language models (LLMs) has sparked concerns about the potential misuse of AI-generated text, as these models can produce content that closely resembles human-generated text. Current detectors for AI-generated text (AIGT) lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. This paper investigates the robustness of existing AIGT detection methods and introduces a novel detector, the Siamese Calibrated Reconstruction Network (SCRN). The SCRN employs a reconstruction network to add and remove noise from text, extracting a semantic representation that is robust to local perturbations. We also propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model`s robustness against adversarial perturbations. Experiments on four publicly available datasets show that the SCRN outperforms all baseline methods, achieving 6.5%-18.25% absolute accuracy improvement over the best baseline method under adversarial attacks. Moreover, it exhibits superior generalizability in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. The code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/CarlanLark/Robust-AIGC-Detector.