pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Vaxformer: Antigenicity-controlled Transformer for Vaccine Design Against SARS-CoV-2
Authors: Aryo Pradipta Gema, Michał Kobiela, Achille Fraisse, Ajitha Rajan, Diego A. Oyarzún, Javier Antonio Alfaro
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Protein Language Model

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has emphasised the importance of developing a universal vaccine that can protect against current and future variants of the virus. The present study proposes a novel conditional protein Language Model architecture, called Vaxformer, which is designed to produce natural-looking antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. We evaluate the generated protein sequences of the Vaxformer model using DDGun protein stability measure, netMHCpan antigenicity score, and a structure fidelity score with AlphaFold to gauge its viability for vaccine development. Our results show that Vaxformer outperforms the existing state-of-the-art Conditional Variational Autoencoder model to generate antigenicity-controlled SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. These findings suggest promising opportunities for conditional Transformer models to expand our understanding of vaccine design and their role in mitigating global health challenges. The code used in this study is available at https://github.com/aryopg/vaxformer .
Compress, Then Prompt: Improving Accuracy-Efficiency Trade-off of LLM Inference with Transferable Prompt
Authors: Zhaozhuo Xu, Zirui Liu, Beidi Chen, Yuxin Tang, Jue Wang, Kaixiong Zhou, Xia Hu, Anshumali Shrivastava
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Model Compression, Prompt Learning, Quantization

While the numerous parameters in Large Language Models (LLMs) contribute to their superior performance, this massive scale makes them inefficient and memory-hungry. Thus, they are hard to deploy on commodity hardware, such as one single GPU. Given the memory and power constraints of such devices, model compression methods are widely employed to reduce both the model size and inference latency, which essentially trades off model quality in return for improved efficiency. Thus, optimizing this accuracy-efficiency trade-off is crucial for the LLM deployment on commodity hardware. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to optimize this trade-off by prompting compressed models. Specifically, we first observe that for certain questions, the generation quality of a compressed LLM can be significantly improved by adding carefully designed hard prompts, though this isn't the case for all questions. Based on this observation, we propose a soft prompt learning method where we expose the compressed model to the prompt learning process, aiming to enhance the performance of prompts. Our experimental analysis suggests our soft prompt strategy greatly improves the performance of the 8x compressed LLaMA-7B model (with a joint 4-bit quantization and 50% weight pruning compression), allowing them to match their uncompressed counterparts on popular benchmarks. Also, we demonstrate that these learned prompts can be transferred across various datasets, tasks, and compression levels. Hence with this transferability, we can stitch the soft prompt to a newly compressed model to improve the test-time accuracy in an ``in-situ'' way.
Assessing the predicting power of GPS data for aftershocks forecasting
Authors: Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, Giuseppe Petrillo, Alberto Rosso, Francois P. Landes
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00

We present a machine learning approach for the aftershock forecasting of Japanese earthquake catalogue from 2015 to 2019. Our method takes as sole input the ground surface deformation as measured by Global Positioning System (GPS) stations at the day of the mainshock, and processes it with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), thus capturing the input's spatial correlations. Despite the moderate amount of data the performance of this new approach is very promising. The accuracy of the prediction heavily relies on the density of GPS stations: the predictive power is lost when the mainshocks occur far from measurement stations, as in offshore regions.
North Sámi Dialect Identification with Self-supervised Speech Models
Authors: Sofoklis Kakouros, Katri Hiovain-Asikainen
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialect Identification

The North S\'{a}mi (NS) language encapsulates four primary dialectal variants that are related but that also have differences in their phonology, morphology, and vocabulary. The unique geopolitical location of NS speakers means that in many cases they are bilingual in S\'{a}mi as well as in the dominant state language: Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish. This enables us to study the NS variants both with respect to the spoken state language and their acoustic characteristics. In this paper, we investigate an extensive set of acoustic features, including MFCCs and prosodic features, as well as state-of-the-art self-supervised representations, namely, XLS-R, WavLM, and HuBERT, for the automatic detection of the four NS variants. In addition, we examine how the majority state language is reflected in the dialects. Our results show that NS dialects are influenced by the state language and that the four dialects are separable, reaching high classification accuracy, especially with the XLS-R model.
Reducing Sequence Length by Predicting Edit Operations with Large Language Models
Authors: Masahiro Kaneko, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Formality Style Transfer, Grammatical Error Correction, Style Transfer, Text Simplification

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various tasks and gained significant attention. LLMs are also used for local sequence transduction tasks, including grammatical error correction (GEC) and formality style transfer, where most tokens in a source text are kept unchanged. However, the models that generate all target tokens in such tasks have a tendency to simply copy the input text as is, without making needed changes, because the difference between input and output texts is minimal in the training data. This is also inefficient because the computational cost grows quadratically with the target sequence length with Transformer. This paper proposes predicting edit spans for the source text for local sequence transduction tasks. Representing an edit span with a position of the source text and corrected tokens, we can reduce the length of the target sequence and the computational cost for inference. We apply instruction tuning for LLMs on the supervision data of edit spans. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to the baseline in four tasks, paraphrasing, formality style transfer, GEC, and text simplification, despite reducing the length of the target text by as small as 21%. Furthermore, we report that the task-specific fine-tuning with the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance in the four tasks.
Let's Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs
Authors: Pranjal Aggarwal, Aman Madaan, Yiming Yang, Mausam
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

A popular approach for improving the correctness of output from large language models (LLMs) is Self-Consistency - poll the LLM multiple times and output the most frequent solution. Existing Self-Consistency techniques always generate a constant number of samples per question, where a better approach will be to non-uniformly distribute the available budget based on the amount of agreement in the samples generated so far. In response, we introduce Adaptive-Consistency, a cost-efficient, model-agnostic technique that dynamically adjusts the number of samples per question using a lightweight stopping criterion. Our experiments over 17 reasoning and code generation datasets and three LLMs demonstrate that Adaptive-Consistency reduces sample budget by up to 7.9 times with an average accuracy drop of less than 0.1%. Our code and data are available at https://www.sample-step-by-step.info
Complex Claim Verification with Evidence Retrieved in the Wild
Authors: Jifan Chen, Grace Kim, Aniruddh Sriram, Greg Durrett, Eunsol Choi
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Fact Checking, Retrieval

Evidence retrieval is a core part of automatic fact-checking. Prior work makes simplifying assumptions in retrieval that depart from real-world use cases: either no access to evidence, access to evidence curated by a human fact-checker, or access to evidence available long after the claim has been made. In this work, we present the first fully automated pipeline to check real-world claims by retrieving raw evidence from the web. We restrict our retriever to only search documents available prior to the claim's making, modeling the realistic scenario where an emerging claim needs to be checked. Our pipeline includes five components: claim decomposition, raw document retrieval, fine-grained evidence retrieval, claim-focused summarization, and veracity judgment. We conduct experiments on complex political claims in the ClaimDecomp dataset and show that the aggregated evidence produced by our pipeline improves veracity judgments. Human evaluation finds the evidence summary produced by our system is reliable (it does not hallucinate information) and relevant to answering key questions about a claim, suggesting that it can assist fact-checkers even when it cannot surface a complete evidence set.
How to Prompt LLMs for Text-to-SQL: A Study in Zero-shot, Single-domain, and Cross-domain Settings
Authors: Shuaichen Chang, Eric Fosler-Lussier
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Retrieval, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have demonstrated remarkable capability in the text-to-SQL task. Previous research has prompted LLMs with various demonstration-retrieval strategies and intermediate reasoning steps to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, those works often employ varied strategies when constructing the prompt text for text-to-SQL inputs, such as databases and demonstration examples. This leads to a lack of comparability in both the prompt constructions and their primary contributions. Furthermore, selecting an effective prompt construction has emerged as a persistent problem for future research. To address this limitation, we comprehensively investigate the impact of prompt constructions across various settings and provide insights into prompt constructions for future text-to-SQL studies.
How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages?
Authors: Ronak Pradeep, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam D. Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Q. Tran
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Passage Ranking, Retrieval

Popularized by the Differentiable Search Index, the emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire document corpus within a single Transformer. Although many different approaches have been proposed to improve the effectiveness of generative retrieval, they have only been evaluated on document corpora on the order of 100k in size. We conduct the first empirical study of generative retrieval techniques across various corpus scales, ultimately scaling up to the entire MS MARCO passage ranking task with a corpus of 8.8M passages and evaluating model sizes up to 11B parameters. We uncover several findings about scaling generative retrieval to millions of passages; notably, the central importance of using synthetic queries as document representations during indexing, the ineffectiveness of existing proposed architecture modifications when accounting for compute cost, and the limits of naively scaling model parameters with respect to retrieval performance. While we find that generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, scaling to millions of passages remains an important and unsolved challenge. We believe these findings will be valuable for the community to clarify the current state of generative retrieval, highlight the unique challenges, and inspire new research directions.
SeeGULL: A Stereotype Benchmark with Broad Geo-Cultural Coverage Leveraging Generative Models
Authors: Akshita Jha, Aida Davani, Chandan K. Reddy, Shachi Dave, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Sunipa Dev
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00

Stereotype benchmark datasets are crucial to detect and mitigate social stereotypes about groups of people in NLP models. However, existing datasets are limited in size and coverage, and are largely restricted to stereotypes prevalent in the Western society. This is especially problematic as language technologies gain hold across the globe. To address this gap, we present SeeGULL, a broad-coverage stereotype dataset, built by utilizing generative capabilities of large language models such as PaLM, and GPT-3, and leveraging a globally diverse rater pool to validate the prevalence of those stereotypes in society. SeeGULL is in English, and contains stereotypes about identity groups spanning 178 countries across 8 different geo-political regions across 6 continents, as well as state-level identities within the US and India. We also include fine-grained offensiveness scores for different stereotypes and demonstrate their global disparities. Furthermore, we include comparative annotations about the same groups by annotators living in the region vs. those that are based in North America, and demonstrate that within-region stereotypes about groups differ from those prevalent in North America. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains stereotype examples that may be offensive.
Pseudo-Label Training and Model Inertia in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Benjamin Hsu, Anna Currey, Xing Niu, Maria Nădejde, Georgiana Dinu
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Machine Translation, NMT, Pseudo Label, Translation

Like many other machine learning applications, neural machine translation (NMT) benefits from over-parameterized deep neural models. However, these models have been observed to be brittle: NMT model predictions are sensitive to small input changes and can show significant variation across re-training or incremental model updates. This work studies a frequently used method in NMT, pseudo-label training (PLT), which is common to the related techniques of forward-translation (or self-training) and sequence-level knowledge distillation. While the effect of PLT on quality is well-documented, we highlight a lesser-known effect: PLT can enhance a model's stability to model updates and input perturbations, a set of properties we call model inertia. We study inertia effects under different training settings and we identify distribution simplification as a mechanism behind the observed results.
The Inside Story: Towards Better Understanding of Machine Translation Neural Evaluation Metrics
Authors: Ricardo Rei, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Marcos Treviso, Luisa Coheur, Alon Lavie, André F. T. Martins
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Neural metrics for machine translation evaluation, such as COMET, exhibit significant improvements in their correlation with human judgments, as compared to traditional metrics based on lexical overlap, such as BLEU. Yet, neural metrics are, to a great extent, "black boxes" returning a single sentence-level score without transparency about the decision-making process. In this work, we develop and compare several neural explainability methods and demonstrate their effectiveness for interpreting state-of-the-art fine-tuned neural metrics. Our study reveals that these metrics leverage token-level information that can be directly attributed to translation errors, as assessed through comparison of token-level neural saliency maps with Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) annotations and with synthetically-generated critical translation errors. To ease future research, we release our code at: https://github.com/Unbabel/COMET/tree/explainable-metrics.
Enhancing Few-shot NER with Prompt Ordering based Data Augmentation
Authors: Huiming Wang, Liying Cheng, Wenxuan Zhang, De Wen Soh, Lidong Bing
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, few-shot-ner, Few-shot NER, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Recently, data augmentation (DA) methods have been proven to be effective for pre-trained language models (PLMs) in low-resource settings, including few-shot named entity recognition (NER). However, conventional NER DA methods are mostly aimed at sequence labeling models, i.e., token-level classification, and few are compatible with unified autoregressive generation frameworks, which can handle a wider range of NER tasks, such as nested NER. Furthermore, these generation frameworks have a strong assumption that the entities will appear in the target sequence with the same left-to-right order as the source sequence. In this paper, we claim that there is no need to keep this strict order, and more diversified but reasonable target entity sequences can be provided during the training stage as a novel DA method. Nevertheless, a naive mixture of augmented data can confuse the model since one source sequence will then be paired with different target sequences. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective Prompt Ordering based Data Augmentation (PODA) method to improve the training of unified autoregressive generation frameworks under few-shot NER scenarios. Experimental results on three public NER datasets and further analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions
Authors: Mayank Mishra, Prince Kumar, Riyaz Bhat, Rudra Murthy V, Danish Contractor, Srikanth Tamilselvam
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00

Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models. Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the possible advantages of prompting with less ambiguous prompt styles, such as the use of pseudo-code. In this paper we explore if prompting via pseudo-code instructions helps improve the performance of pre-trained language models. We manually create a dataset of pseudo-code prompts for 132 different tasks spanning classification, QA and generative language tasks, sourced from the Super-NaturalInstructions dataset. Using these prompts along with their counterparts in natural language, we study their performance on two LLM families - BLOOM and CodeGen. Our experiments show that using pseudo-code instructions leads to better results, with an average increase (absolute) of 7-16 points in F1 scores for classification tasks and an improvement (relative) of 12-38% in aggregate ROUGE-L scores across all tasks. We include detailed ablation studies which indicate that code comments, docstrings, and the structural clues encoded in pseudo-code all contribute towards the improvement in performance. To the best of our knowledge our work is the first to demonstrate how pseudo-code prompts can be helpful in improving the performance of pre-trained LMs.
Solving NLP Problems through Human-System Collaboration: A Discussion-based Approach
Authors: Masahiro Kaneko, Graham Neubig, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Humans work together to solve common problems by having discussions, explaining, and agreeing or disagreeing with each other. Similarly, if a system can have discussions with humans when solving tasks, it can improve the system's performance and reliability. In previous research on explainability, it has only been possible for the system to make predictions and for humans to ask questions about them rather than having a mutual exchange of opinions. This research aims to create a dataset and computational framework for systems that discuss and refine their predictions through dialogue. Through experiments, we show that the proposed system can have beneficial discussions with humans improving the accuracy by up to 25 points in the natural language inference task.
ReSeTOX: Re-learning attention weights for toxicity mitigation in machine translation
Authors: Javier García Gilabert, Carlos Escolano, Marta R. Costa-jussà
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Our proposed method, ReSeTOX (REdo SEarch if TOXic), addresses the issue of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) generating translation outputs that contain toxic words not present in the input. The objective is to mitigate the introduction of toxic language without the need for re-training. In the case of identified added toxicity during the inference process, ReSeTOX dynamically adjusts the key-value self-attention weights and re-evaluates the beam search hypotheses. Experimental results demonstrate that ReSeTOX achieves a remarkable 57% reduction in added toxicity while maintaining an average translation quality of 99.5% across 164 languages.
HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Junyi Li, Xiaoxue Cheng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jian-Yun Nie, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Hallucination Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, are prone to generate hallucinations, i.e., content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by the factual knowledge. To understand what types of content and to which extent LLMs are apt to hallucinate, we introduce the Hallucination Evaluation benchmark for Large Language Models (HaluEval), a large collection of generated and human-annotated hallucinated samples for evaluating the performance of LLMs in recognizing hallucination. To generate these samples, we propose a ChatGPT-based two-step framework, i.e., sampling-then-filtering. Besides, we also hire some human labelers to annotate the hallucinations in ChatGPT responses. The empirical results suggest that ChatGPT is likely to generate hallucinated content in specific topics by fabricating unverifiable information (i.e., about $19.5\%$ responses). Moreover, existing LLMs face great challenges in recognizing the hallucinations in texts. However, our experiments also prove that providing external knowledge or adding reasoning steps can help LLMs recognize hallucinations. Our benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/HaluEval.
HalOmi: A Manually Annotated Benchmark for Multilingual Hallucination and Omission Detection in Machine Translation
Authors: David Dale, Elena Voita, Janice Lam, Prangthip Hansanti, Christophe Ropers, Elahe Kalbassi, Cynthia Gao, Loïc Barrault, Marta R. Costa-jussà
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Hallucinations in machine translation are translations that contain information completely unrelated to the input. Omissions are translations that do not include some of the input information. While both cases tend to be catastrophic errors undermining user trust, annotated data with these types of pathologies is extremely scarce and is limited to a few high-resource languages. In this work, we release an annotated dataset for the hallucination and omission phenomena covering 18 translation directions with varying resource levels and scripts. Our annotation covers different levels of partial and full hallucinations as well as omissions both at the sentence and at the word level. Additionally, we revisit previous methods for hallucination and omission detection, show that conclusions made based on a single language pair largely do not hold for a large-scale evaluation, and establish new solid baselines.