pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Randomized Schur Complement Views for Graph Contrastive Learning
Authors: Vignesh Kothapalli
Date: 2023-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Classification, Node Classification

We introduce a randomized topological augmentor based on Schur complements for Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). Given a graph laplacian matrix, the technique generates unbiased approximations of its Schur complements and treats the corresponding graphs as augmented views. We discuss the benefits of our approach, provide theoretical justifications and present connections with graph diffusion. Unlike previous efforts, we study the empirical effectiveness of the augmentor in a controlled fashion by varying the design choices for subsequent GCL phases, such as encoding and contrasting. Extensive experiments on node and graph classification benchmarks demonstrate that our technique consistently outperforms pre-defined and adaptive augmentation approaches to achieve state-of-the-art results.
ModuleFormer: Modularity Emerges from Mixture-of-Experts
Authors: Yikang Shen, Zheyu Zhang, Tianyou Cao, Shawn Tan, Zhenfang Chen, Chuang Gan
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Lightweight Deployment, Mixture-of-Experts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable results. However, existing models are expensive to train and deploy, and it is also difficult to expand their knowledge beyond pre-training data without forgetting previous knowledge. This paper proposes a new neural network architecture, ModuleFormer, that leverages modularity to improve the efficiency and flexibility of large language models. ModuleFormer is based on the Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE). Unlike the previous SMoE-based modular language model, which requires domain-labeled data to learn domain-specific experts, ModuleFormer can induce modularity from uncurated data with its new load balancing and concentration losses. ModuleFormer is a modular architecture that includes two different types of modules: new stick-breaking attention heads and feedforward experts. Different modules are sparsely activated conditions on the input token during training and inference. In our experiment, we found that the modular architecture enables three important abilities for large pre-trained language models: 1) Efficiency, since ModuleFormer only activates a subset of its modules for each input token, thus it could achieve the same performance as dense LLMs with more than two times throughput; 2) Extendability, ModuleFormer is more immune to catastrophic forgetting than dense LLMs and can be easily extended with new modules to learn new knowledge that is not included in the training data; 3) Specialisation, finetuning ModuleFormer could specialize a subset of modules to the finetuning task and the task-unrelated modules could be easily pruned for a lightweight deployment.
On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Models
Authors: John Kirchenbauer, Jonas Geiping, Yuxin Wen, Manli Shu, Khalid Saifullah, Kezhi Kong, Kasun Fernando, Aniruddha Saha, Micah Goldblum, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00

As LLMs become commonplace, machine-generated text has the potential to flood the internet with spam, social media bots, and valueless content. Watermarking is a simple and effective strategy for mitigating such harms by enabling the detection and documentation of LLM-generated text. Yet a crucial question remains: How reliable is watermarking in realistic settings in the wild? There, watermarked text may be modified to suit a user's needs, or entirely rewritten to avoid detection. We study the robustness of watermarked text after it is re-written by humans, paraphrased by a non-watermarked LLM, or mixed into a longer hand-written document. We find that watermarks remain detectable even after human and machine paraphrasing. While these attacks dilute the strength of the watermark, paraphrases are statistically likely to leak n-grams or even longer fragments of the original text, resulting in high-confidence detections when enough tokens are observed. For example, after strong human paraphrasing the watermark is detectable after observing 800 tokens on average, when setting a 1e-5 false positive rate. We also consider a range of new detection schemes that are sensitive to short spans of watermarked text embedded inside a large document, and we compare the robustness of watermarking to other kinds of detectors.
The Two Word Test: A Semantic Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Nicholas Riccardi, Rutvik H. Desai
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities recently, including passing advanced professional exams and demanding benchmark tests. This performance has led many to suggest that they are close to achieving humanlike or 'true' understanding of language, and even Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Here, we provide a new open-source benchmark that can assess semantic abilities of LLMs using two-word phrases using a task that can be performed relatively easily by humans without advanced training. Combining multiple words into a single concept is a fundamental aspect of human language and intelligence. The test requires meaningfulness judgments of 1768 noun-noun combinations that have been rated as meaningful (e.g., baby boy) or not meaningful (e.g., goat sky). by 150 human raters. We provide versions of the task that probe meaningfulness ratings on a 0-4 scale as well as binary judgments. We conducted a series of experiments using the TWT on GPT-4, GPT-3.5, and Bard, with both versions. Results demonstrated that, compared to humans, all models perform poorly at rating meaningfulness of these phrases. GPT-3.5 and Bard are also unable to make binary discriminations between sensible and nonsense phrases as making sense. GPT-4 makes a substantial improvement in binary discrimination of combinatorial phrases but is still significantly worse than human performance. The TWT can be used to understand the limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs, and potentially improve them. The test also reminds us that caution is warranted in attributing 'true understanding' or AGI to LLMs. TWT is available at: https://github.com/NickRiccardi/two-word-test
Language Models Get a Gender Makeover: Mitigating Gender Bias with Few-Shot Data Interventions
Authors: Himanshu Thakur, Atishay Jain, Praneetha Vaddamanu, Paul Pu Liang, Louis-Philippe Morency
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Societal biases present in pre-trained large language models are a critical issue as these models have been shown to propagate biases in countless downstream applications, rendering them unfair towards specific groups of people. Since large-scale retraining of these models from scratch is both time and compute-expensive, a variety of approaches have been previously proposed that de-bias a pre-trained model. While the majority of current state-of-the-art debiasing methods focus on changes to the training regime, in this paper, we propose data intervention strategies as a powerful yet simple technique to reduce gender bias in pre-trained models. Specifically, we empirically show that by fine-tuning a pre-trained model on only 10 de-biased (intervened) training examples, the tendency to favor any gender is significantly reduced. Since our proposed method only needs a few training examples, our few-shot debiasing approach is highly feasible and practical. Through extensive experimentation, we show that our debiasing technique performs better than competitive state-of-the-art baselines with minimal loss in language modeling ability.
Gender, names and other mysteries: Towards the ambiguous for gender-inclusive translation
Authors: Danielle Saunders, Katrina Olsen
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

The vast majority of work on gender in MT focuses on 'unambiguous' inputs, where gender markers in the source language are expected to be resolved in the output. Conversely, this paper explores the widespread case where the source sentence lacks explicit gender markers, but the target sentence contains them due to richer grammatical gender. We particularly focus on inputs containing person names. Investigating such sentence pairs casts a new light on research into MT gender bias and its mitigation. We find that many name-gender co-occurrences in MT data are not resolvable with 'unambiguous gender' in the source language, and that gender-ambiguous examples can make up a large proportion of training examples. From this, we discuss potential steps toward gender-inclusive translation which accepts the ambiguity in both gender and translation.
ChatGPT is fun, but it is not funny! Humor is still challenging Large Language Models
Authors: Sophie Jentzsch, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Humor is a central aspect of human communication that has not been solved for artificial agents so far. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly able to capture implicit and contextual information. Especially, OpenAI's ChatGPT recently gained immense public attention. The GPT3-based model almost seems to communicate on a human level and can even tell jokes. Humor is an essential component of human communication. But is ChatGPT really funny? We put ChatGPT's sense of humor to the test. In a series of exploratory experiments around jokes, i.e., generation, explanation, and detection, we seek to understand ChatGPT's capability to grasp and reproduce human humor. Since the model itself is not accessible, we applied prompt-based experiments. Our empirical evidence indicates that jokes are not hard-coded but mostly also not newly generated by the model. Over 90% of 1008 generated jokes were the same 25 Jokes. The system accurately explains valid jokes but also comes up with fictional explanations for invalid jokes. Joke-typical characteristics can mislead ChatGPT in the classification of jokes. ChatGPT has not solved computational humor yet but it can be a big leap toward "funny" machines.
Multi-Task Training with In-Domain Language Models for Diagnostic Reasoning
Authors: Brihat Sharma, Yanjun Gao, Timothy Miller, Matthew M. Churpek, Majid Afshar, Dmitriy Dligach
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a promising direction for augmenting clinical diagnostic decision support and reducing diagnostic errors, a leading contributor to medical errors. To further the development of clinical AI systems, the Diagnostic Reasoning Benchmark (DR.BENCH) was introduced as a comprehensive generative AI framework, comprised of six tasks representing key components in clinical reasoning. We present a comparative analysis of in-domain versus out-of-domain language models as well as multi-task versus single task training with a focus on the problem summarization task in DR.BENCH (Gao et al., 2023). We demonstrate that a multi-task, clinically trained language model outperforms its general domain counterpart by a large margin, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance, with a ROUGE-L score of 28.55. This research underscores the value of domain-specific training for optimizing clinical diagnostic reasoning tasks.
Contrastive Bootstrapping for Label Refinement
Authors: Shudi Hou, Yu Xia, Muhao Chen, Sujian Li
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, text-classification, Text Classification

Traditional text classification typically categorizes texts into pre-defined coarse-grained classes, from which the produced models cannot handle the real-world scenario where finer categories emerge periodically for accurate services. In this work, we investigate the setting where fine-grained classification is done only using the annotation of coarse-grained categories and the coarse-to-fine mapping. We propose a lightweight contrastive clustering-based bootstrapping method to iteratively refine the labels of passages. During clustering, it pulls away negative passage-prototype pairs under the guidance of the mapping from both global and local perspectives. Experiments on NYT and 20News show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Multimodal Learning Without Labeled Multimodal Data: Guarantees and Applications
Authors: Paul Pu Liang, Chun Kai Ling, Yun Cheng, Alex Obolenskiy, Yudong Liu, Rohan Pandey, Alex Wilf, Louis-Philippe Morency, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

In many machine learning systems that jointly learn from multiple modalities, a core research question is to understand the nature of multimodal interactions: how modalities combine to provide new task-relevant information that was not present in either alone. We study this challenge of interaction quantification in a semi-supervised setting with only labeled unimodal data and naturally co-occurring multimodal data (e.g., unlabeled images and captions, video and corresponding audio) but when labeling them is time-consuming. Using a precise information-theoretic definition of interactions, our key contribution is the derivation of lower and upper bounds to quantify the amount of multimodal interactions in this semi-supervised setting. We propose two lower bounds: one based on the shared information between modalities and the other based on disagreement between separately trained unimodal classifiers, and derive an upper bound through connections to approximate algorithms for min-entropy couplings. We validate these estimated bounds and show how they accurately track true interactions. Finally, we show how these theoretical results can be used to estimate multimodal model performance, guide data collection, and select appropriate multimodal models for various tasks.
Long-form analogies generated by chatGPT lack human-like psycholinguistic properties
Authors: S. M. Seals, Valerie L. Shalin
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Psycholinguistic analyses provide a means of evaluating large language model (LLM) output and making systematic comparisons to human-generated text. These methods can be used to characterize the psycholinguistic properties of LLM output and illustrate areas where LLMs fall short in comparison to human-generated text. In this work, we apply psycholinguistic methods to evaluate individual sentences from long-form analogies about biochemical concepts. We compare analogies generated by human subjects enrolled in introductory biochemistry courses to analogies generated by chatGPT. We perform a supervised classification analysis using 78 features extracted from Coh-metrix that analyze text cohesion, language, and readability (Graesser et. al., 2004). Results illustrate high performance for classifying student-generated and chatGPT-generated analogies. To evaluate which features contribute most to model performance, we use a hierarchical clustering approach. Results from this analysis illustrate several linguistic differences between the two sources.
PromptAttack: Probing Dialogue State Trackers with Adversarial Prompts
Authors: Xiangjue Dong, Yun He, Ziwei Zhu, James Caverlee
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00

A key component of modern conversational systems is the Dialogue State Tracker (or DST), which models a user's goals and needs. Toward building more robust and reliable DSTs, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. Two key characteristics of this approach are: (i) it only needs the output of the DST with no need for model parameters, and (ii) it can learn to generate natural language utterances that can target any DST. Through experiments over state-of-the-art DSTs, the proposed framework leads to the greatest reduction in accuracy and the best attack success rate while maintaining good fluency and a low perturbation ratio. We also show how much the generated adversarial examples can bolster a DST through adversarial training. These results indicate the strength of prompt-based attacks on DSTs and leave open avenues for continued refinement.
Lenient Evaluation of Japanese Speech Recognition: Modeling Naturally Occurring Spelling Inconsistency
Authors: Shigeki Karita, Richard Sproat, Haruko Ishikawa
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, valid

Word error rate (WER) and character error rate (CER) are standard metrics in Speech Recognition (ASR), but one problem has always been alternative spellings: If one's system transcribes adviser whereas the ground truth has advisor, this will count as an error even though the two spellings really represent the same word. Japanese is notorious for ``lacking orthography'': most words can be spelled in multiple ways, presenting a problem for accurate ASR evaluation. In this paper we propose a new lenient evaluation metric as a more defensible CER measure for Japanese ASR. We create a lattice of plausible respellings of the reference transcription, using a combination of lexical resources, a Japanese text-processing system, and a neural machine translation model for reconstructing kanji from hiragana or katakana. In a manual evaluation, raters rated 95.4% of the proposed spelling variants as plausible. ASR results show that our method, which does not penalize the system for choosing a valid alternate spelling of a word, affords a 2.4%-3.1% absolute reduction in CER depending on the task.
Can current NLI systems handle German word order? Investigating language model performance on a new German challenge set of minimal pairs
Authors: Ines Reinig, Katja Markert
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference

Compared to English, German word order is freer and therefore poses additional challenges for natural language inference (NLI). We create WOGLI (Word Order in German Language Inference), the first adversarial NLI dataset for German word order that has the following properties: (i) each premise has an entailed and a non-entailed hypothesis; (ii) premise and hypotheses differ only in word order and necessary morphological changes to mark case and number. In particular, each premise andits two hypotheses contain exactly the same lemmata. Our adversarial examples require the model to use morphological markers in order to recognise or reject entailment. We show that current German autoencoding models fine-tuned on translated NLI data can struggle on this challenge set, reflecting the fact that translated NLI datasets will not mirror all necessary language phenomena in the target language. We also examine performance after data augmentation as well as on related word order phenomena derived from WOGLI. Our datasets are publically available at https://github.com/ireinig/wogli.
Enhancing In-Context Learning with Answer Feedback for Multi-Span Question Answering
Authors: Zixian Huang, Jiaying Zhou, Gengyang Xiao, Gong Cheng
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Keyphrase Extraction, Question Answering

Whereas the recent emergence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has exhibited impressive general performance, it still has a large gap with fully-supervised models on specific tasks such as multi-span question answering. Previous researches found that in-context learning is an effective approach to exploiting LLM, by using a few task-related labeled data as demonstration examples to construct a few-shot prompt for answering new questions. A popular implementation is to concatenate a few questions and their correct answers through simple templates, informing LLM of the desired output. In this paper, we propose a novel way of employing labeled data such that it also informs LLM of some undesired output, by extending demonstration examples with feedback about answers predicted by an off-the-shelf model, e.g., correct, incorrect, or incomplete. Experiments on three multi-span question answering datasets as well as a keyphrase extraction dataset show that our new prompting strategy consistently improves LLM's in-context learning performance.
Evaluation of ChatGPT on Biomedical Tasks: A Zero-Shot Comparison with Fine-Tuned Generative Transformers
Authors: Israt Jahan, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Chun Peng, Jimmy Huang
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Relation Extraction

ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. Despite its impressive performance across various tasks, no prior work has investigated its capability in the biomedical domain yet. To this end, this paper aims to evaluate the performance of ChatGPT on various benchmark biomedical tasks, such as relation extraction, document classification, question answering, and summarization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that conducts an extensive evaluation of ChatGPT in the biomedical domain. Interestingly, we find based on our evaluation that in biomedical datasets that have smaller training sets, zero-shot ChatGPT even outperforms the state-of-the-art fine-tuned generative transformer models, such as BioGPT and BioBART. This suggests that ChatGPT's pre-training on large text corpora makes it quite specialized even in the biomedical domain. Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT has the potential to be a valuable tool for various tasks in the biomedical domain that lack large annotated data.
STEPS: A Benchmark for Order Reasoning in Sequential Tasks
Authors: Weizhi Wang, Hong Wang, Xifeng Yan
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Various human activities can be abstracted into a sequence of actions in natural text, i.e. cooking, repairing, manufacturing, etc. Such action sequences heavily depend on the executing order, while disorder in action sequences leads to failure of further task execution by robots or AI agents. Therefore, to verify the order reasoning capability of current neural models in sequential tasks, we propose a challenging benchmark , named STEPS. STEPS involves two subtask settings, focusing on determining the rationality of given next step in recipes and selecting the reasonable step from the multi-choice question, respectively. We describe the data construction and task formulations, and benchmark most of significant Large Language Models (LLMs). The experimental results demonstrate 1) The commonsense reasoning of action orders in sequential tasks are challenging to resolve via zero-shot prompting or few-shot in-context learning for LLMs; 2) Prompting method still significantly lags behind tuning-based method on STEPS.
Zambezi Voice: A Multilingual Speech Corpus for Zambian Languages
Authors: Claytone Sikasote, Kalinda Siaminwe, Stanly Mwape, Bangiwe Zulu, Mofya Phiri, Martin Phiri, David Zulu, Mayumbo Nyirenda, Antonios Anastasopoulos
Date: 2023-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

This work introduces Zambezi Voice, an open-source multilingual speech resource for Zambian languages. It contains two collections of datasets: unlabelled audio recordings of radio news and talk shows programs (160 hours) and labelled data (over 80 hours) consisting of read speech recorded from text sourced from publicly available literature books. The dataset is created for speech recognition but can be extended to multilingual speech processing research for both supervised and unsupervised learning approaches. To our knowledge, this is the first multilingual speech dataset created for Zambian languages. We exploit pretraining and cross-lingual transfer learning by finetuning the Wav2Vec2.0 large-scale multilingual pre-trained model to build end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition models for our baseline models. The dataset is released publicly under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license and can be accessed via https://github.com/unza-speech-lab/zambezi-voice .