pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Online Learning Approach for Survival Analysis
Authors: Camila Fernandez, Pierre Gaillard, Joseph de Vilmarest, Olivier Wintenberger
Date: 2024-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

We introduce an online mathematical framework for survival analysis, allowing real time adaptation to dynamic environments and censored data. This framework enables the estimation of event time distributions through an optimal second order online convex optimization algorithm-Online Newton Step (ONS). This approach, previously unexplored, presents substantial advantages, including explicit algorithms with non-asymptotic convergence guarantees. Moreover, we analyze the selection of ONS hyperparameters, which depends on the exp-concavity property and has a significant influence on the regret bound. We propose a stochastic approach that guarantees logarithmic stochastic regret for ONS. Additionally, we introduce an adaptive aggregation method that ensures robustness in hyperparameter selection while maintaining fast regret bounds. The findings of this paper can extend beyond the survival analysis field, and are relevant for any case characterized by poor exp-concavity and unstable ONS. Finally, these assertions are illustrated by simulation experiments.
Tensor Completion via Integer Optimization
Authors: Xin Chen, Sukanya Kudva, Yongzheng Dai, Anil Aswani, Chen Chen
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00

The main challenge with the tensor completion problem is a fundamental tension between computation power and the information-theoretic sample complexity rate. Past approaches either achieve the information-theoretic rate but lack practical algorithms to compute the corresponding solution, or have polynomial-time algorithms that require an exponentially-larger number of samples for low estimation error. This paper develops a novel tensor completion algorithm that resolves this tension by achieving both provable convergence (in numerical tolerance) in a linear number of oracle steps and the information-theoretic rate. Our approach formulates tensor completion as a convex optimization problem constrained using a gauge-based tensor norm, which is defined in a way that allows the use of integer linear optimization to solve linear separation problems over the unit-ball in this new norm. Adaptations based on this insight are incorporated into a Frank-Wolfe variant to build our algorithm. We show our algorithm scales-well using numerical experiments on tensors with up to ten million entries.
FACT-GPT: Fact-Checking Augmentation via Claim Matching with LLMs
Authors: Eun Cheol Choi, Emilio Ferrara
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Misinformation

Our society is facing rampant misinformation harming public health and trust. To address the societal challenge, we introduce FACT-GPT, a system leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the claim matching stage of fact-checking. FACT-GPT, trained on a synthetic dataset, identifies social media content that aligns with, contradicts, or is irrelevant to previously debunked claims. Our evaluation shows that our specialized LLMs can match the accuracy of larger models in identifying related claims, closely mirroring human judgment. This research provides an automated solution for efficient claim matching, demonstrates the potential of LLMs in supporting fact-checkers, and offers valuable resources for further research in the field.
On the Robustness of Editing Large Language Models
Authors: Xinbei Ma, Tianjie Ju, Jiyang Qiu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Lifeng Liu, Yulong Wang
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Editing, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in building communicative AI, yet they encounter the challenge of efficient updates. Model editing enables the manipulation of specific knowledge memories and the behavior of language generation without retraining. However, the robustness of model editing remains an open question. This work seeks to understand the strengths and limitations of editing methods, facilitating practical applications of communicative AI. We focus on three key research questions. RQ1: Can edited LLMs behave consistently resembling communicative AI in realistic situations? RQ2: To what extent does the rephrasing of prompts lead LLMs to deviate from the edited knowledge memory? RQ3: Which knowledge features are correlated with the performance and robustness of editing? Our empirical studies uncover a substantial disparity between existing editing methods and the practical application of LLMs. On rephrased prompts that are flexible but common in realistic applications, the performance of editing experiences a significant decline. Further analysis shows that more popular knowledge is memorized better, easier to recall, and more challenging to edit effectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/xbmxb/edit_analysis .
FAQ-Gen: An automated system to generate domain-specific FAQs to aid content comprehension
Authors: Sahil Kale, Gautam Khaire, Jay Patankar
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) refer to the most common inquiries about specific content. They serve as content comprehension aids by simplifying topics and enhancing understanding through succinct presentation of information. In this paper, we address FAQ generation as a well-defined Natural Language Processing task through the development of an end-to-end system leveraging text-to-text transformation models. We present a literature review covering traditional question-answering systems, highlighting their limitations when applied directly to the FAQ generation task. We propose a system capable of building FAQs from textual content tailored to specific domains, enhancing their accuracy and relevance. We utilise self-curated algorithms to obtain an optimal representation of information to be provided as input and also to rank the question-answer pairs to maximise human comprehension. Qualitative human evaluation showcases the generated FAQs as well-constructed and readable while also utilising domain-specific constructs to highlight domain-based nuances and jargon in the original content.
Text-to-Code Generation with Modality-relative Pre-training
Authors: Fenia Christopoulou, Guchun Zhang, Gerasimos Lampouras
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text-to-Code Generation, Transfer Learning

Large pre-trained language models have recently been expanded and applied to programming language tasks with great success, often through further pre-training of a strictly-natural language model--where training sequences typically contain both natural and (linearised) programming language. Such approaches effectively map both modalities of the sequence into the same embedding space. However, programming language keywords (e.g. "while") often have very strictly defined semantics. As such, transfer learning from their natural language usage may not necessarily be beneficial to their code application and vise versa. Assuming an already pre-trained language model, in this work we investigate how sequence tokens can be adapted and represented differently, depending on which modality they belong to, and to the ultimate benefit of the downstream task. We experiment with separating embedding spaces between modalities during further model pre-training with modality-relative training objectives. We focus on text-to-code generation and observe consistent improvements across two backbone models and two test sets, measuring pass@$k$ and a novel incremental variation.
Spirit LM: Interleaved Spoken and Written Language Model
Authors: Tu Anh Nguyen, Benjamin Muller, Bokai Yu, Marta R. Costa-Jussa, Maha Elbayad, Sravya Popuri, Christophe Ropers, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Robin Algayres, Ruslan Mavlyutov, Itai Gat, Mary Williamson, Gabriel Synnaeve, Juan Pino, Benoit Sagot, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

We introduce Spirit LM, a foundation multimodal language model that freely mixes text and speech. Our model is based on a 7B pretrained text language model that we extend to the speech modality by continuously training it on text and speech units. Speech and text sequences are concatenated as a single stream of tokens, and trained with a word-level interleaving method using a small automatically-curated speech-text parallel corpus. Spirit LM comes in two versions: a Base version that uses speech phonetic units (HuBERT) and an Expressive version that models expressivity using pitch and style units in addition to the phonetic units. For both versions, the text is encoded with subword BPE tokens. The resulting model displays both the semantic abilities of text models and the expressive abilities of speech models. Additionally, we demonstrate that Spirit LM can learn new tasks in a few-shot fashion across modalities (i.e. ASR, TTS, Speech Classification). We make available model weights and inference code.
TimeArena: Shaping Efficient Multitasking Language Agents in a Time-Aware Simulation
Authors: Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Caiyu Hu, Kyle Richardson, Yanghua Xiao, Jiangjie Chen
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

Despite remarkable advancements in emulating human-like behavior through Large Language Models (LLMs), current textual simulations do not adequately address the notion of time. To this end, we introduce TimeArena, a novel textual simulated environment that incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. In TimeArena, agents are asked to complete multiple tasks as soon as possible, allowing for parallel processing to save time. We implement the dependency between actions, the time duration for each action, and the occupancy of the agent and the objects in the environment. TimeArena grounds to 30 real-world tasks in cooking, household activities, and laboratory work. We conduct extensive experiments with various state-of-the-art LLMs using TimeArena. Our findings reveal that even the most powerful models, e.g., GPT-4, still lag behind humans in effective multitasking, underscoring the need for enhanced temporal awareness in the development of language agents.
Paralinguistics-Aware Speech-Empowered Large Language Models for Natural Conversation
Authors: Heeseung Kim, Soonshin Seo, Kyeongseok Jeong, Ohsung Kwon, Soyoon Kim, Jungwhan Kim, Jaehong Lee, Eunwoo Song, Myungwoo Oh, Jung-Woo Ha, Sungroh Yoon, Kang Min Yoo
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Recent work shows promising results in expanding the capabilities of large language models (LLM) to directly understand and synthesize speech. However, an LLM-based strategy for modeling spoken dialogs remains elusive, calling for further investigation. This paper introduces an extensive speech-text LLM framework, the Unified Spoken Dialog Model (USDM), designed to generate coherent spoken responses with naturally occurring prosodic features relevant to the given input speech without relying on explicit automatic speech recognition (ASR) or text-to-speech (TTS) systems. We have verified the inclusion of prosody in speech tokens that predominantly contain semantic information and have used this foundation to construct a prosody-infused speech-text model. Additionally, we propose a generalized speech-text pretraining scheme that enhances the capture of cross-modal semantics. To construct USDM, we fine-tune our speech-text model on spoken dialog data using a multi-step spoken dialog template that stimulates the chain-of-reasoning capabilities exhibited by the underlying LLM. Automatic and human evaluations on the DailyTalk dataset demonstrate that our approach effectively generates natural-sounding spoken responses, surpassing previous and cascaded baselines. Our code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/usdm.
Multilingual E5 Text Embeddings: A Technical Report
Authors: Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xiaolong Huang, Linjun Yang, Rangan Majumder, Furu Wei
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

This technical report presents the training methodology and evaluation results of the open-source multilingual E5 text embedding models, released in mid-2023. Three embedding models of different sizes (small / base / large) are provided, offering a balance between the inference efficiency and embedding quality. The training procedure adheres to the English E5 model recipe, involving contrastive pre-training on 1 billion multilingual text pairs, followed by fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets. Additionally, we introduce a new instruction-tuned embedding model, whose performance is on par with state-of-the-art, English-only models of similar sizes. Information regarding the model release can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/unilm/tree/master/e5 .
Merging Facts, Crafting Fallacies: Evaluating the Contradictory Nature of Aggregated Factual Claims in Long-Form Generations
Authors: Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

Long-form generations from large language models (LLMs) contain a mix of factual and non-factual claims, making evaluating factuality difficult. Prior works evaluate the factuality of a long paragraph by decomposing it into multiple facts, verifying those facts independently, and aggregating the results. Such methods assume that combining factual claims forms a factual paragraph. The above assumption can be violated: we show that strong open-source models like Llama-chat can generate paragraphs that contain verifiable facts, but the facts are combined into a non-factual paragraph due to entity ambiguity. We further reveal that existing factuality metrics, including FActScore and citation recall, cannot properly evaluate these non-factual paragraphs and overestimate their factuality. To address this, we introduce an enhanced metric, D-FActScore, specifically designed for content with ambiguous entities. We evaluate the D-FActScores of people biographies generated by retrieval-augmented LLMs. We show that D-FActScore can better assess the factuality of paragraphs with entity ambiguity than FActScore. We also find that four widely used open-source LLMs tend to mix information of distinct entities to form non-factual paragraphs, making their D-FActScore much lower than FActScore by over 10%.
Deep Learning-based Computational Job Market Analysis: A Survey on Skill Extraction and Classification from Job Postings
Authors: Elena Senger, Mike Zhang, Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Recent years have brought significant advances to Natural Language Processing (NLP), which enabled fast progress in the field of computational job market analysis. Core tasks in this application domain are skill extraction and classification from job postings. Because of its quick growth and its interdisciplinary nature, there is no exhaustive assessment of this emerging field. This survey aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of deep learning methodologies, datasets, and terminologies specific to NLP-driven skill extraction and classification. Our comprehensive cataloging of publicly available datasets addresses the lack of consolidated information on dataset creation and characteristics. Finally, the focus on terminology addresses the current lack of consistent definitions for important concepts, such as hard and soft skills, and terms relating to skill extraction and classification.
Establishing degrees of closeness between audio recordings along different dimensions using large-scale cross-lingual models
Authors: Maxime Fily, Guillaume Wisniewski, Severine Guillaume, Gilles Adda, Alexis Michaud
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

In the highly constrained context of low-resource language studies, we explore vector representations of speech from a pretrained model to determine their level of abstraction with regard to the audio signal. We propose a new unsupervised method using ABX tests on audio recordings with carefully curated metadata to shed light on the type of information present in the representations. ABX tests determine whether the representations computed by a multilingual speech model encode a given characteristic. Three experiments are devised: one on room acoustics aspects, one on linguistic genre, and one on phonetic aspects. The results confirm that the representations extracted from recordings with different linguistic/extra-linguistic characteristics differ along the same lines. Embedding more audio signal in one vector better discriminates extra-linguistic characteristics, whereas shorter snippets are better to distinguish segmental information. The method is fully unsupervised, potentially opening new research avenues for comparative work on under-documented languages.
Named Entity Recognition for Address Extraction in Speech-to-Text Transcriptions Using Synthetic Data
Authors: Bibiána Lajčinová, Patrik Valábek, Michal Spišiak
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Speech-to-Text

This paper introduces an approach for building a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model built upon a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) architecture, specifically utilizing the SlovakBERT model. This NER model extracts address parts from data acquired from speech-to-text transcriptions. Due to scarcity of real data, a synthetic dataset using GPT API was generated. The importance of mimicking spoken language variability in this artificial data is emphasized. The performance of our NER model, trained solely on synthetic data, is evaluated using small real test dataset.
Large Language Models for Psycholinguistic Plausibility Pretesting
Authors: Samuel Joseph Amouyal, Aya Meltzer-Asscher, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by extraneous factors. To achieve this, psycholinguists typically pretest linguistic materials, where a common pretest is to solicit plausibility judgments from human evaluators on specific sentences. In this work, we investigate whether Language Models (LMs) can be used to generate these plausibility judgements. We investigate a wide range of LMs across multiple linguistic structures and evaluate whether their plausibility judgements correlate with human judgements. We find that GPT-4 plausibility judgements highly correlate with human judgements across the structures we examine, whereas other LMs correlate well with humans on commonly used syntactic structures. We then test whether this correlation implies that LMs can be used instead of humans for pretesting. We find that when coarse-grained plausibility judgements are needed, this works well, but when fine-grained judgements are necessary, even GPT-4 does not provide satisfactory discriminative power.
Improving Agent Interactions in Virtual Environments with Language Models
Authors: Jack Zhang
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Minecraft

Enhancing AI systems with efficient communication skills for effective human assistance necessitates proactive initiatives from the system side to discern specific circumstances and interact aptly. This research focuses on a collective building assignment in the Minecraft dataset, employing language modeling to enhance task understanding through state-of-the-art methods. These models focus on grounding multi-modal understanding and task-oriented dialogue comprehension tasks, providing insights into their interpretative and responsive capabilities. Our experimental results showcase a substantial improvement over existing methods, indicating a promising direction for future research in this domain.
Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Guided by Evolutionary Algorithms in Large Language Models
Authors: Feihu Jin, Yifan Liu, Ying Tan
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Sentence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks and exhibited impressive reasoning abilities by applying zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, due to the evolving nature of sentence prefixes during the pre-training phase, existing zero-shot CoT prompting methods that employ identical CoT prompting across all task instances may not be optimal. In this paper, we introduce a novel zero-shot prompting method that leverages evolutionary algorithms to generate diverse promptings for LLMs dynamically. Our approach involves initializing two CoT promptings, performing evolutionary operations based on LLMs to create a varied set, and utilizing the LLMs to select a suitable CoT prompting for a given problem. Additionally, a rewriting operation, guided by the selected CoT prompting, enhances the understanding of the LLMs about the problem. Extensive experiments conducted across ten reasoning datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared to current zero-shot CoT prompting methods on GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4. Moreover, in-depth analytical experiments underscore the adaptability and effectiveness of our method in various reasoning tasks.
TreeForm: End-to-end Annotation and Evaluation for Form Document Parsing
Authors: Ran Zmigrod, Zhiqiang Ma, Armineh Nourbakhsh, Sameena Shah
Date: 2024-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

Visually Rich Form Understanding (VRFU) poses a complex research problem due to the documents' highly structured nature and yet highly variable style and content. Current annotation schemes decompose form understanding and omit key hierarchical structure, making development and evaluation of end-to-end models difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel F1 metric to evaluate form parsers and describe a new content-agnostic, tree-based annotation scheme for VRFU: TreeForm. We provide methods to convert previous annotation schemes into TreeForm structures and evaluate TreeForm predictions using a modified version of the normalized tree-edit distance. We present initial baselines for our end-to-end performance metric and the TreeForm edit distance, averaged over the FUNSD and XFUND datasets, of 61.5 and 26.4 respectively. We hope that TreeForm encourages deeper research in annotating, modeling, and evaluating the complexities of form-like documents.
Determining the significance and relative importance of parameters of a simulated quenching algorithm using statistical tools
Authors: Pedro A. Castillo, Maribel García Arenas, Nuria Rico, Antonio Miguel Mora, Pablo García-Sánchez, Juan Luis Jiménez Laredo, Juan Julián Merelo Guervós
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

When search methods are being designed it is very important to know which parameters have the greatest influence on the behaviour and performance of the algorithm. To this end, algorithm parameters are commonly calibrated by means of either theoretic analysis or intensive experimentation. When undertaking a detailed statistical analysis of the influence of each parameter, the designer should pay attention mostly to the parameters that are statistically significant. In this paper the ANOVA (ANalysis Of the VAriance) method is used to carry out an exhaustive analysis of a simulated annealing based method and the different parameters it requires. Following this idea, the significance and relative importance of the parameters regarding the obtained results, as well as suitable values for each of these, were obtained using ANOVA and post-hoc Tukey HSD test, on four well known function optimization problems and the likelihood function that is used to estimate the parameters involved in the lognormal diffusion process. Through this statistical study we have verified the adequacy of parameter values available in the bibliography using parametric hypothesis tests.