pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding and Mitigating the Threat of Vec2Text to Dense Retrieval Systems
Authors: Shengyao Zhuang, Bevan Koopman, Xiaoran Chu, Guido Zuccon
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Retrieval

The emergence of Vec2Text -- a method for text embedding inversion -- has raised serious privacy concerns for dense retrieval systems which use text embeddings, such as those offered by OpenAI and Cohere. This threat comes from the ability for a malicious attacker with access to embeddings to reconstruct the original text. In this paper, we investigate various factors related to embedding models that may impact text recoverability via Vec2Text. We explore factors such as distance metrics, pooling functions, bottleneck pre-training, training with noise addition, embedding quantization, and embedding dimensions, which were not considered in the original Vec2Text paper. Through a comprehensive analysis of these factors, our objective is to gain a deeper understanding of the key elements that affect the trade-offs between the text recoverability and retrieval effectiveness of dense retrieval systems, offering insights for practitioners designing privacy-aware dense retrieval systems. We also propose a simple embedding transformation fix that guarantees equal ranking effectiveness while mitigating the recoverability risk. Overall, this study reveals that Vec2Text could pose a threat to current dense retrieval systems, but there are some effective methods to patch such systems.
Acknowledgment of Emotional States: Generating Validating Responses for Empathetic Dialogue
Authors: Zi Haur Pang, Yahui Fu, Divesh Lala, Keiko Ochi, Koji Inoue, Tatsuya Kawahara
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

In the realm of human-AI dialogue, the facilitation of empathetic responses is important. Validation is one of the key communication techniques in psychology, which entails recognizing, understanding, and acknowledging others' emotional states, thoughts, and actions. This study introduces the first framework designed to engender empathetic dialogue with validating responses. Our approach incorporates a tripartite module system: 1) validation timing detection, 2) users' emotional state identification, and 3) validating response generation. Utilizing Japanese EmpatheticDialogues dataset - a textual-based dialogue dataset consisting of 8 emotional categories from Plutchik's wheel of emotions - the Task Adaptive Pre-Training (TAPT) BERT-based model outperforms both random baseline and the ChatGPT performance, in term of F1-score, in all modules. Further validation of our model's efficacy is confirmed in its application to the TUT Emotional Storytelling Corpus (TESC), a speech-based dialogue dataset, by surpassing both random baseline and the ChatGPT. This consistent performance across both textual and speech-based dialogues underscores the effectiveness of our framework in fostering empathetic human-AI communication.
Are LLMs Rational Investors? A Study on Detecting and Reducing the Financial Bias in LLMs
Authors: YuHang Zhou, Yuchen Ni, Yunhui Gan, Zhangyue Yin, Xiang Liu, Jian Zhang, Sen Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Financial Analysis, Navigate

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted in financial analysis for interpreting complex market data and trends. However, their use is challenged by intrinsic biases (e.g., risk-preference bias) and a superficial understanding of market intricacies, necessitating a thorough assessment of their financial insight. To address these issues, we introduce Financial Bias Indicators (FBI), a framework with components like Bias Unveiler, Bias Detective, Bias Tracker, and Bias Antidote to identify, detect, analyze, and eliminate irrational biases in LLMs. By combining behavioral finance principles with bias examination, we evaluate 23 leading LLMs and propose a de-biasing method based on financial causal knowledge. Results show varying degrees of financial irrationality among models, influenced by their design and training. Models trained specifically on financial datasets may exhibit more irrationality, and even larger financial language models (FinLLMs) can show more bias than smaller, general models. We utilize four prompt-based methods incorporating causal debiasing, effectively reducing financial biases in these models. This work enhances the understanding of LLMs' bias in financial applications, laying the foundation for developing more reliable and rational financial analysis tools.
FormulaReasoning: A Dataset for Formula-Based Numerical Reasoning
Authors: Xiao Li, Bolin Zhu, Kaiwen Shi, Sichen Liu, Yin Zhu, Yiwei Liu, Gong Cheng
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, High School Physics, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The application of formulas (e.g., physics formulas) is a fundamental ability of humans when solving numerical reasoning problems. Existing numerical reasoning datasets seldom explicitly indicate the formulas employed in reasoning, as their questions rely on implicit commonsense mathematical knowledge. In contrast, in this paper, we introduce FormulaReasoning, a new dataset specifically designed for formula-based numerical reasoning. Each of the 4,751 questions in our dataset requires numerical calculation with external physics formulas, making it a more challenging benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs). We offer normalized fine-grained annotations for the questions, available in English and Chinese, including formula structures, parameter names, symbols, numerical values, and units, derived from extensive manual effort with LLM assistance for guaranteed quality. We also provide a consolidated formula database to serve as an external knowledge base accompanying the dataset. We employ FormulaReasoning to evaluate LLMs with 7B to over 100B parameters, and explore retrieval-augmented generation with the formula database. Our evaluation also covers supervised methods that break down the reasoning process into formula generation, parameter extraction, and numerical calculation, as well as direct preference optimization methods based on derived preference data.
Tree-Planted Transformers: Unidirectional Transformer Language Models with Implicit Syntactic Supervision
Authors: Ryo Yoshida, Taiga Someya, Yohei Oseki
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Syntactic Language Models (SLMs) can be trained efficiently to reach relatively high performance; however, they have trouble with inference efficiency due to the explicit generation of syntactic structures. In this paper, we propose a new method dubbed tree-planting: instead of explicitly generating syntactic structures, we "plant" trees into attention weights of unidirectional Transformer LMs to implicitly reflect syntactic structures of natural language. Specifically, unidirectional Transformer LMs trained with tree-planting will be called Tree-Planted Transformers (TPT), which inherit the training efficiency from SLMs without changing the inference efficiency of their underlying Transformer LMs. Targeted syntactic evaluations on the SyntaxGym benchmark demonstrated that TPTs, despite the lack of explicit generation of syntactic structures, significantly outperformed not only vanilla Transformer LMs but also various SLMs that generate hundreds of syntactic structures in parallel. This result suggests that TPTs can learn human-like syntactic knowledge as data-efficiently as SLMs while maintaining the modeling space of Transformer LMs unchanged.
Simpson's Paradox and the Accuracy-Fluency Tradeoff in Translation
Authors: Zheng Wei Lim, Ekaterina Vylomova, Trevor Cohn, Charles Kemp
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

A good translation should be faithful to the source and should respect the norms of the target language. We address a theoretical puzzle about the relationship between these objectives. On one hand, intuition and some prior work suggest that accuracy and fluency should trade off against each other, and that capturing every detail of the source can only be achieved at the cost of fluency. On the other hand, quality assessment researchers often suggest that accuracy and fluency are highly correlated and difficult for human raters to distinguish (Callison-Burch et al., 2007). We show that the tension between these views is an instance of Simpson's paradox, and that accuracy and fluency are positively correlated at the level of the corpus but trade off at the level of individual source segments. We further suggest that the relationship between accuracy and fluency is best evaluated at the segment (or sentence) level, and that the trade off between these dimensions has implications both for assessing translation quality and developing improved MT systems.
OWSM-CTC: An Open Encoder-Only Speech Foundation Model for Speech Recognition, Translation, and Language Identification
Authors: Yifan Peng, Yui Sudo, Muhammad Shakeel, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Hallucination, Language Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Text Generation

There has been an increasing interest in large speech models that can perform multiple tasks in a single model. Such models usually adopt an encoder-decoder or decoder-only architecture due to their popularity and good performance in many domains. However, autoregressive models can be slower during inference compared to non-autoregressive models and also have potential risks of hallucination. Though prior studies observed promising results of non-autoregressive models for certain tasks at small scales, it remains unclear if they can be scaled to speech-to-text generation in diverse languages and tasks. Inspired by the Open Whisper-style Speech Model (OWSM) project, we propose OWSM-CTC, a novel encoder-only speech foundation model based on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). It is trained on 180k hours of public audio data for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translation (ST), and language identification (LID). Compared to encoder-decoder OWSM, our OWSM-CTC achieves competitive results on ASR and up to 24% relative improvement on ST, while it is more robust and 3 to 4 times faster for inference. OWSM-CTC also improves the long-form ASR result with 20x speed-up. We will publicly release our code, pre-trained model, and training logs to promote open science in speech foundation models.
Bias in Language Models: Beyond Trick Tests and Toward RUTEd Evaluation
Authors: Kristian Lum, Jacy Reese Anthis, Kevin Robinson, Chirag Nagpal, Alexander D'Amour
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Text Generation

Standard benchmarks of bias and fairness in large language models (LLMs) measure the association between the user attributes stated or implied by a prompt and the LLM's short text response, but human-AI interaction increasingly requires long-form and context-specific system output to solve real-world tasks. In the commonly studied domain of gender-occupation bias, we test whether these benchmarks are robust to lengthening the LLM responses as a measure of Realistic Use and Tangible Effects (i.e., RUTEd evaluations). From the current literature, we adapt three standard bias metrics (neutrality, skew, and stereotype) and develop analogous RUTEd evaluations from three contexts of real-world use: children's bedtime stories, user personas, and English language learning exercises. We find that standard bias metrics have no significant correlation with the more realistic bias metrics. For example, selecting the least biased model based on the standard "trick tests" coincides with selecting the least biased model as measured in more realistic use no more than random chance. We suggest that there is not yet evidence to justify standard benchmarks as reliable proxies of real-world AI biases, and we encourage further development of evaluations grounded in particular contexts.
StyleDubber: Towards Multi-Scale Style Learning for Movie Dubbing
Authors: Gaoxiang Cong, Yuankai Qi, Liang Li, Amin Beheshti, Zhedong Zhang, Anton Van Den Hengel, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Chenggang Yan, Qingming Huang
Date: 2024-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Cloning

Given a script, the challenge in Movie Dubbing (Visual Voice Cloning, V2C) is to generate speech that aligns well with the video in both time and emotion, based on the tone of a reference audio track. Existing state-of-the-art V2C models break the phonemes in the script according to the divisions between video frames, which solves the temporal alignment problem but leads to incomplete phoneme pronunciation and poor identity stability. To address this problem, we propose StyleDubber, which switches dubbing learning from the frame level to phoneme level. It contains three main components: (1) A multimodal style adaptor operating at the phoneme level to learn pronunciation style from the reference audio, and generate intermediate representations informed by the facial emotion presented in the video; (2) An utterance-level style learning module, which guides both the mel-spectrogram decoding and the refining processes from the intermediate embeddings to improve the overall style expression; And (3) a phoneme-guided lip aligner to maintain lip sync. Extensive experiments on two of the primary benchmarks, V2C and Grid, demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to the current stateof-the-art. The code will be made available at https://github.com/GalaxyCong/StyleDubber.
What is a word?
Authors: Elliot Murphy
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

In order to design strong paradigms for isolating lexical access and semantics, we need to know what a word is. Surprisingly few linguists and philosophers have a clear model of what a word is, even though words impact basically every aspect of human life. Researchers that regularly publish academic papers about language often rely on outdated, or inaccurate, assumptions about wordhood. This short pedagogical document outlines what the lexicon is most certainly not (though is often mistakenly taken to be), what it might be (based on current good theories), and what some implications for experimental design are.
Standardize: Aligning Language Models with Expert-Defined Standards for Content Generation
Authors: Joseph Marvin Imperial, Gail Forey, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Retrieval, Text Generation

Domain experts across engineering, healthcare, and education follow strict standards for producing quality content such as technical manuals, medication instructions, and children's reading materials. However, current works in controllable text generation have yet to explore using these standards as references for control. Towards this end, we introduce Standardize, a retrieval-style in-context learning-based framework to guide large language models to align with expert-defined standards. Focusing on English language standards in the education domain as a use case, we consider the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and Common Core Standards (CCS) for the task of open-ended content generation. Our findings show that models can gain a 45% to 100% increase in precise accuracy across open and commercial LLMs evaluated, demonstrating that the use of knowledge artifacts extracted from standards and integrating them in the generation process can effectively guide models to produce better standard-aligned content.
Evolving AI Collectives to Enhance Human Diversity and Enable Self-Regulation
Authors: Shiyang Lai, Yujin Potter, Junsol Kim, Richard Zhuang, Dawn Song, James Evans
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language model behavior is shaped by the language of those with whom they interact. This capacity and their increasing prevalence online portend that they will intentionally or unintentionally "program" one another and form emergent AI subjectivities, relationships, and collectives. Here, we call upon the research community to investigate these "societies" of interacting artificial intelligences to increase their rewards and reduce their risks for human society and the health of online environments. We use a small "community" of models and their evolving outputs to illustrate how such emergent, decentralized AI collectives can spontaneously expand the bounds of human diversity and reduce the risk of toxic, anti-social behavior online. Finally, we discuss opportunities for AI cross-moderation and address ethical issues and design challenges associated with creating and maintaining free-formed AI collectives.
Creating a Fine Grained Entity Type Taxonomy Using LLMs
Authors: Michael Gunn, Dohyun Park, Nidhish Kamath
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Argument Extraction, Relation Extraction

In this study, we investigate the potential of GPT-4 and its advanced iteration, GPT-4 Turbo, in autonomously developing a detailed entity type taxonomy. Our objective is to construct a comprehensive taxonomy, starting from a broad classification of entity types - including objects, time, locations, organizations, events, actions, and subjects - similar to existing manually curated taxonomies. This classification is then progressively refined through iterative prompting techniques, leveraging GPT-4's internal knowledge base. The result is an extensive taxonomy comprising over 5000 nuanced entity types, which demonstrates remarkable quality upon subjective evaluation. We employed a straightforward yet effective prompting strategy, enabling the taxonomy to be dynamically expanded. The practical applications of this detailed taxonomy are diverse and significant. It facilitates the creation of new, more intricate branches through pattern-based combinations and notably enhances information extraction tasks, such as relation extraction and event argument extraction. Our methodology not only introduces an innovative approach to taxonomy creation but also opens new avenues for applying such taxonomies in various computational linguistics and AI-related fields.
IMBUE: Improving Interpersonal Effectiveness through Simulation and Just-in-time Feedback with Human-Language Model Interaction
Authors: Inna Wanyin Lin, ASHISH SHARMA, Christopher Michael Rytting, Adam S. Miner, Jina Suh, Tim Althoff
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Skill Mastery

Navigating certain communication situations can be challenging due to individuals' lack of skills and the interference of strong emotions. However, effective learning opportunities are rarely accessible. In this work, we conduct a human-centered study that uses language models to simulate bespoke communication training and provide just-in-time feedback to support the practice and learning of interpersonal effectiveness skills. We apply the interpersonal effectiveness framework from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), DEAR MAN, which focuses on both conversational and emotional skills. We present IMBUE, an interactive training system that provides feedback 25% more similar to experts' feedback, compared to that generated by GPT-4. IMBUE is the first to focus on communication skills and emotion management simultaneously, incorporate experts' domain knowledge in providing feedback, and be grounded in psychology theory. Through a randomized trial of 86 participants, we find that IMBUE's simulation-only variant significantly improves participants' self-efficacy (up to 17%) and reduces negative emotions (up to 25%). With IMBUE's additional just-in-time feedback, participants demonstrate 17% improvement in skill mastery, along with greater enhancements in self-efficacy (27% more) and reduction of negative emotions (16% more) compared to simulation-only. The improvement in skill mastery is the only measure that is transferred to new and more difficult situations; situation specific training is necessary for improving self-efficacy and emotion reduction.
Archer: A Human-Labeled Text-to-SQL Dataset with Arithmetic, Commonsense and Hypothetical Reasoning
Authors: Danna Zheng, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

We present Archer, a challenging bilingual text-to-SQL dataset specific to complex reasoning, including arithmetic, commonsense and hypothetical reasoning. It contains 1,042 English questions and 1,042 Chinese questions, along with 521 unique SQL queries, covering 20 English databases across 20 domains. Notably, this dataset demonstrates a significantly higher level of complexity compared to existing publicly available datasets. Our evaluation shows that Archer challenges the capabilities of current state-of-the-art models, with a high-ranked model on the Spider leaderboard achieving only 6.73% execution accuracy on Archer test set. Thus, Archer presents a significant challenge for future research in this field.
TrustScore: Reference-Free Evaluation of LLM Response Trustworthiness
Authors: Danna Zheng, Danyang Liu, Mirella Lapata, Jeff Z. Pan
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various domains, prompting a surge in their practical applications. However, concerns have arisen regarding the trustworthiness of LLMs outputs, particularly in closed-book question-answering tasks, where non-experts may struggle to identify inaccuracies due to the absence of contextual or ground truth information. This paper introduces TrustScore, a framework based on the concept of Behavioral Consistency, which evaluates whether an LLMs response aligns with its intrinsic knowledge. Additionally, TrustScore can seamlessly integrate with fact-checking methods, which assesses alignment with external knowledge sources. The experimental results show that TrustScore achieves strong correlations with human judgments, surpassing existing reference-free metrics, and achieving results on par with reference-based metrics.
Your Vision-Language Model Itself Is a Strong Filter: Towards High-Quality Instruction Tuning with Data Selection
Authors: Ruibo Chen, Yihan Wu, Lichang Chen, Guodong Liu, Qi He, Tianyi Xiong, Chenxi Liu, Junfeng Guo, Heng Huang
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Data selection in instruction tuning emerges as a pivotal process for acquiring high-quality data and training instruction-following large language models (LLMs), but it is still a new and unexplored research area for vision-language models (VLMs). Existing data selection approaches on LLMs either rely on single unreliable scores, or use downstream tasks for selection, which is time-consuming and can lead to potential over-fitting on the chosen evaluation datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel dataset selection method, Self-Filter, that utilizes the VLM itself as a filter. This approach is inspired by the observation that VLMs benefit from training with the most challenging instructions. Self-Filter operates in two stages. In the first stage, we devise a scoring network to evaluate the difficulty of training instructions, which is co-trained with the VLM. In the second stage, we use the trained score net to measure the difficulty of each instruction, select the most challenging samples, and penalize similar samples to encourage diversity. Comprehensive experiments on LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 show that Self-Filter can reach better results compared to full data settings with merely about 15% samples, and can achieve superior performance against competitive baselines.