pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Task Instruction Tuning of LLaMa for Specific Scenarios: A Preliminary Study on Writing Assistance
Authors: Yue Zhang, Leyang Cui, Deng Cai, Xinting Huang, Tao Fang, Wei Bi
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional capabilities in handling a diverse range of tasks. Recent studies demonstrate that open-sourced smaller foundational models, such as 7B-size LLaMA, can also display remarkable proficiency in tackling diverse tasks when fine-tuned using instruction-driven data. In this work, we investigate a practical problem setting where the primary focus is on one or a few particular tasks rather than general-purpose instruction following, and explore whether LLMs can be beneficial and further improved for such targeted scenarios. We choose the writing-assistant scenario as the testbed, which includes seven writing tasks. We collect training data for these tasks, reframe them in an instruction-following format, and subsequently refine the LLM, specifically LLaMA, via instruction tuning. Experimental results show that fine-tuning LLaMA on writing instruction data significantly improves its ability on writing tasks. We also conduct more experiments and analyses to offer insights for future work on effectively fine-tuning LLaMA for specific scenarios. Finally, we initiate a discussion regarding the necessity of employing LLMs for only one targeted task, taking into account the efforts required for tuning and the resources consumed during deployment.
Atomic Inference for NLI with Generated Facts as Atoms
Authors: Joe Stacey, Pasquale Minervini, Haim Dubossarsky, Oana-Maria Camburu, Marek Rei
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Natural Language Inference, Natural Language Understanding

With recent advances, neural models can achieve human-level performance on various natural language tasks. However, there are no guarantees that any explanations from these models are faithful, i.e. that they reflect the inner workings of the model. Atomic inference overcomes this issue, providing interpretable and faithful model decisions. This approach involves making predictions for different components (or atoms) of an instance, before using interpretable and deterministic rules to derive the overall prediction based on the individual atom-level predictions. We investigate the effectiveness of using LLM-generated facts as atoms, decomposing Natural Language Inference premises into lists of facts. While directly using generated facts in atomic inference systems can result in worse performance, with 1) a multi-stage fact generation process, and 2) a training regime that incorporates the facts, our fact-based method outperforms other approaches.
Improving Isochronous Machine Translation with Target Factors and Auxiliary Counters
Authors: Proyag Pal, Brian Thompson, Yogesh Virkar, Prashant Mathur, Alexandra Chronopoulou, Marcello Federico
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Translation

To translate speech for automatic dubbing, machine translation needs to be isochronous, i.e. translated speech needs to be aligned with the source in terms of speech durations. We introduce target factors in a transformer model to predict durations jointly with target language phoneme sequences. We also introduce auxiliary counters to help the decoder to keep track of the timing information while generating target phonemes. We show that our model improves translation quality and isochrony compared to previous work where the translation model is instead trained to predict interleaved sequences of phonemes and durations.
Knowledge-Retrieval Task-Oriented Dialog Systems with Semi-Supervision
Authors: Yucheng Cai, Hong Liu, Zhijian Ou, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

Most existing task-oriented dialog (TOD) systems track dialog states in terms of slots and values and use them to query a database to get relevant knowledge to generate responses. In real-life applications, user utterances are noisier, and thus it is more difficult to accurately track dialog states and correctly secure relevant knowledge. Recently, a progress in question answering and document-grounded dialog systems is retrieval-augmented methods with a knowledge retriever. Inspired by such progress, we propose a retrieval-based method to enhance knowledge selection in TOD systems, which significantly outperforms the traditional database query method for real-life dialogs. Further, we develop latent variable model based semi-supervised learning, which can work with the knowledge retriever to leverage both labeled and unlabeled dialog data. Joint Stochastic Approximation (JSA) algorithm is employed for semi-supervised model training, and the whole system is referred to as that JSA-KRTOD. Experiments are conducted on a real-life dataset from China Mobile Custom-Service, called MobileCS, and show that JSA-KRTOD achieves superior performances in both labeled-only and semi-supervised settings.
Multilingual Holistic Bias: Extending Descriptors and Patterns to Unveil Demographic Biases in Languages at Scale
Authors: Marta R. Costa-jussà, Pierre Andrews, Eric Smith, Prangthip Hansanti, Christophe Ropers, Elahe Kalbassi, Cynthia Gao, Daniel Licht, Carleigh Wood
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Joint Multilingual Sentence Representations, Sentence

We introduce a multilingual extension of the HOLISTICBIAS dataset, the largest English template-based taxonomy of textual people references: MULTILINGUALHOLISTICBIAS. This extension consists of 20,459 sentences in 50 languages distributed across all 13 demographic axes. Source sentences are built from combinations of 118 demographic descriptors and three patterns, excluding nonsensical combinations. Multilingual translations include alternatives for gendered languages that cover gendered translations when there is ambiguity in English. Our benchmark is intended to uncover demographic imbalances and be the tool to quantify mitigations towards them. Our initial findings show that translation quality for EN-to-XX translations is an average of 8 spBLEU better when evaluating with the masculine human reference compared to feminine. In the opposite direction, XX-to-EN, we compare the robustness of the model when the source input only differs in gender (masculine or feminine) and masculine translations are an average of almost 4 spBLEU better than feminine. When embedding sentences to a joint multilingual sentence representations space, we find that for most languages masculine translations are significantly closer to the English neutral sentences when embedded.
Challenging Decoder helps in Masked Auto-Encoder Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval
Authors: Zehan Li, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Passage Retrieval, Retrieval

Recently, various studies have been directed towards exploring dense passage retrieval techniques employing pre-trained language models, among which the masked auto-encoder (MAE) pre-training architecture has emerged as the most promising. The conventional MAE framework relies on leveraging the passage reconstruction of decoder to bolster the text representation ability of encoder, thereby enhancing the performance of resulting dense retrieval systems. Within the context of building the representation ability of the encoder through passage reconstruction of decoder, it is reasonable to postulate that a ``more demanding'' decoder will necessitate a corresponding increase in the encoder's ability. To this end, we propose a novel token importance aware masking strategy based on pointwise mutual information to intensify the challenge of the decoder. Importantly, our approach can be implemented in an unsupervised manner, without adding additional expenses to the pre-training phase. Our experiments verify that the proposed method is both effective and robust on large-scale supervised passage retrieval datasets and out-of-domain zero-shot retrieval benchmarks.
SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation
Authors: Elizabeth Clark, Shruti Rijhwani, Sebastian Gehrmann, Joshua Maynez, Roee Aharoni, Vitaly Nikolaev, Thibault Sellam, Aditya Siddhant, Dipanjan Das, Ankur P. Parikh
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00

Reliable automatic evaluation of summarization systems is challenging due to the multifaceted and subjective nature of the task. This is especially the case for languages other than English, where human evaluations are scarce. In this work, we introduce SEAHORSE, a dataset for multilingual, multifaceted summarization evaluation. SEAHORSE consists of 96K summaries with human ratings along 6 dimensions of text quality: comprehensibility, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness, covering 6 languages, 9 systems and 4 datasets. As a result of its size and scope, SEAHORSE can serve both as a benchmark to evaluate learnt metrics, as well as a large-scale resource for training such metrics. We show that metrics trained with SEAHORSE achieve strong performance on the out-of-domain meta-evaluation benchmarks TRUE (Honovich et al., 2022) and mFACE (Aharoni et al., 2022). We make the SEAHORSE dataset and metrics publicly available for future research on multilingual and multifaceted summarization evaluation.
SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives
Authors: Jiahao Xu, Wei Shao, Lihui Chen, Lemao Liu
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings

This paper improves contrastive learning for sentence embeddings from two perspectives: handling dropout noise and addressing feature corruption. Specifically, for the first perspective, we identify that the dropout noise from negative pairs affects the model's performance. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to deal with such type of noise. Secondly, we pinpoint the rank bottleneck of current solutions to feature corruption and propose a dimension-wise contrastive learning objective to address this issue. Both proposed methods are generic and can be applied to any contrastive learning based models for sentence embeddings. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that combining both proposed methods leads to a gain of 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE configured with BERT base. Furthermore, applying the proposed method to DiffCSE, another strong contrastive learning based baseline, results in a gain of 1.4 points.
Discovering Universal Geometry in Embeddings with ICA
Authors: Hiroaki Yamagiwa, Momose Oyama, Hidetoshi Shimodaira
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00

This study utilizes Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to unveil a consistent semantic structure within embeddings of words or images. Our approach extracts independent semantic components from the embeddings of a pre-trained model by leveraging anisotropic information that remains after the whitening process in Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We demonstrate that each embedding can be expressed as a composition of a few intrinsic interpretable axes and that these semantic axes remain consistent across different languages, algorithms, and modalities. The discovery of a universal semantic structure in the geometric patterns of embeddings enhances our understanding of the representations in embeddings.
Can ChatGPT Defend its Belief in Truth? Evaluating LLM Reasoning via Debate
Authors: Boshi Wang, Xiang Yue, Huan Sun
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Math, Memorization

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks. However, it is difficult to know whether the models are reasoning based on deep understandings of truth and logic, or leveraging their memorized patterns in a relatively superficial way. In this work, we explore testing LLMs' reasoning by engaging with them in a debate-like conversation, where given a question, the LLM and the user need to discuss to make the correct decision starting from opposing arguments. Upon mitigating the Clever Hans effect, our task requires the LLM to not only achieve the correct answer on its own, but also be able to hold and defend its belief instead of blindly believing or getting misled by the user's (invalid) arguments and critiques, thus testing in greater depth whether the LLM grasps the essence of the reasoning required to solve the problem. Across a range of complex reasoning benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, logic and BIG-Bench tasks, we find that despite their impressive performance as reported in existing work on generating correct step-by-step solutions in the beginning, LLMs like ChatGPT cannot maintain their beliefs in truth for a significant portion of examples when challenged by oftentimes absurdly invalid arguments. Our work points to danger zones of model alignment, and also suggests more careful treatments and interpretations of the recent findings that LLMs can improve their responses based on feedback.
Response Length Perception and Sequence Scheduling: An LLM-Empowered LLM Inference Pipeline
Authors: Zangwei Zheng, Xiaozhe Ren, Fuzhao Xue, Yang Luo, Xin Jiang, Yang You
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Quantization, Scheduling

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of AI, demonstrating unprecedented capacity across various tasks. However, the inference process for LLMs comes with significant computational costs. In this paper, we propose an efficient LLM inference pipeline that harnesses the power of LLMs. Our approach begins by tapping into the potential of LLMs to accurately perceive and predict the response length with minimal overhead. By leveraging this information, we introduce an efficient sequence scheduling technique that groups queries with similar response lengths into micro-batches. We evaluate our approach on real-world instruction datasets using the LLaMA-based model, and our results demonstrate an impressive 86% improvement in inference throughput without compromising effectiveness. Notably, our method is orthogonal to other inference acceleration techniques, making it a valuable addition to many existing toolkits (e.g., FlashAttention, Quantization) for LLM inference.
Better Sampling of Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, Wei Lu
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER

Distantly supervised named entity recognition (DS-NER) has been proposed to exploit the automatically labeled training data instead of human annotations. The distantly annotated datasets are often noisy and contain a considerable number of false negatives. The recent approach uses a weighted sampling approach to select a subset of negative samples for training. However, it requires a good classifier to assign weights to the negative samples. In this paper, we propose a simple and straightforward approach for selecting the top negative samples that have high similarities with all the positive samples for training. Our method achieves consistent performance improvements on four distantly supervised NER datasets. Our analysis also shows that it is critical to differentiate the true negatives from the false negatives.
Extrapolating Multilingual Understanding Models as Multilingual Generators
Authors: Bohong Wu, Fei Yuan, Hai Zhao, Lei LI, Jingjing Xu
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Masked Language Modeling, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Story Generation, XLM-R

Multilingual understanding models (or encoder-based), pre-trained via masked language modeling, have achieved promising results on many language understanding tasks (e.g., mBERT). However, these non-autoregressive (NAR) models still struggle to generate high-quality texts compared with autoregressive (AR) models. Considering that encoder-based models have the advantage of efficient generation and self-correction abilities, this paper explores methods to empower multilingual understanding models the generation abilities to get a unified model. Specifically, we start from a multilingual encoder (XLM-R) and propose a \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{A}lignment-then-Denoising (SGA) approach to adapt an encoder to a multilingual generator with a small number of new parameters. Experiments show that the proposed approach is an effective adaption method, outperforming widely-used initialization-based methods with gains of 9.4 BLEU on machine translation, 8.1 Rouge-L on question generation, and 5.5 METEOR on story generation on XLM-R$_{large}$. On the other hand, we observe that XLM-R is still inferior to mBART in supervised settings despite better results on zero-shot settings, indicating that more exploration is required to make understanding models strong generators.
Ambiguity Meets Uncertainty: Investigating Uncertainty Estimation for Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Zhu Liu, Ying Liu
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Word Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation (WSD), which aims to determine an appropriate sense for a target word given its context, is crucial for natural language understanding. Existing supervised methods treat WSD as a classification task and have achieved remarkable performance. However, they ignore uncertainty estimation (UE) in the real-world setting, where the data is always noisy and out of distribution. This paper extensively studies UE on the benchmark designed for WSD. Specifically, we first compare four uncertainty scores for a state-of-the-art WSD model and verify that the conventional predictive probabilities obtained at the end of the model are inadequate to quantify uncertainty. Then, we examine the capability of capturing data and model uncertainties by the model with the selected UE score on well-designed test scenarios and discover that the model reflects data uncertainty satisfactorily but underestimates model uncertainty. Furthermore, we explore numerous lexical properties that intrinsically affect data uncertainty and provide a detailed analysis of four critical aspects: the syntactic category, morphology, sense granularity, and semantic relations. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanLiut/WSD-UE.
Rethinking the Evaluation for Conversational Recommendation in the Era of Large Language Models
Authors: Xiaolei Wang, Xinyu Tang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Jingyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Explanation Generation, Recommendation Systems

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has shown great potential to develop more powerful conversational recommender systems (CRSs), which rely on natural language conversations to satisfy user needs. In this paper, we embark on an investigation into the utilization of ChatGPT for conversational recommendation, revealing the inadequacy of the existing evaluation protocol. It might over-emphasize the matching with the ground-truth items or utterances generated by human annotators, while neglecting the interactive nature of being a capable CRS. To overcome the limitation, we further propose an interactive Evaluation approach based on LLMs named iEvaLM that harnesses LLM-based user simulators. Our evaluation approach can simulate various interaction scenarios between users and systems. Through the experiments on two publicly available CRS datasets, we demonstrate notable improvements compared to the prevailing evaluation protocol. Furthermore, we emphasize the evaluation of explainability, and ChatGPT showcases persuasive explanation generation for its recommendations. Our study contributes to a deeper comprehension of the untapped potential of LLMs for CRSs and provides a more flexible and easy-to-use evaluation framework for future research endeavors. The codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/iEvaLM-CRS.
Improved Compositional Generalization by Generating Demonstrations for Meta-Learning
Authors: Sam Spilsbury, Pekka Marttinen, Alexander Ilin
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Grounded language learning, Meta-Learning

Meta-learning and few-shot prompting are viable methods to induce certain types of compositional behaviour. However, these methods can be very sensitive to the choice of support examples used. Choosing good supports from the training data for a given test query is already a difficult problem, but in some cases solving this may not even be enough. We consider a grounded language learning problem (gSCAN) where good support examples for certain test splits might not even exist in the training data, or would be infeasible to search for. We design an agent which instead generates possible supports which are relevant to the test query and current state of the world, then uses these supports via meta-learning to solve the test query. We show substantially improved performance on a previously unsolved compositional behaviour split without a loss of performance on other splits. Further experiments show that in this case, searching for relevant demonstrations even with an oracle function is not sufficient to attain good performance when using meta-learning.
Large Language Models are Not Yet Human-Level Evaluators for Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Chenhui Shen, Liying Cheng, Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Yang You, Lidong Bing
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization

With the recent undeniable advancement in reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4, there is a growing trend for using LLMs on various tasks. One area where LLMs can be employed is as an alternative evaluation metric for complex generative tasks, which generally demands expensive human judges to complement the traditional automatic metrics for various evaluation dimensions such as fluency and consistency. In this work, we conduct extensive analysis to investigate the stability and reliability of LLMs as automatic evaluators for abstractive summarization. We found that while ChatGPT and GPT-4 outperform the commonly used automatic metrics, they are not ready as human replacements due to significant limitations. That is, LLM evaluators rate each candidate system inconsistently and are dimension-dependent. They also struggle to compare candidates with close performance and become more unreliable with higher-quality summaries by obtaining a lower correlation with humans. In other words, with better abstractive summarization systems being introduced at a fast pace, LLMs may result in misleading and unreliable evaluations.
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization
Authors: Ruochen Xu, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
Date: 2023-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Query-focused Summarization, Sentence

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to extract or generate a summary of an input document that directly answers or is relevant to a given query. The lack of large-scale datasets in the form of documents, queries, and summaries has hindered model development in this area. In contrast, multiple large-scale high-quality datasets for generic summarization exist. We hypothesize that there is a hidden query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation, and we utilize a large-scale pretrained language model to recover it. In this way, we convert four generic summarization benchmarks into a new QFS benchmark dataset, LMGQS, which consists of over 1 million document-query-summary samples. We thoroughly investigate the properties of our proposed dataset and establish baselines with state-of-the-art summarization models. By fine-tuning a language model on LMGQS, we achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks, demonstrating the high quality and diversity of LMGQS.