pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EPIC: Enhancing Privacy through Iterative Collaboration
Authors: Prakash Chourasia, Heramb Lonkar, Sarwan Ali, Murray Patterson
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Advancements in genomics technology lead to a rising volume of viral (e.g., SARS-CoV-2) sequence data, resulting in increased usage of machine learning (ML) in bioinformatics. Traditional ML techniques require centralized data collection and processing, posing challenges in realistic healthcare scenarios. Additionally, privacy, ownership, and stringent regulation issues exist when pooling medical data into centralized storage to train a powerful deep learning (DL) model. The Federated learning (FL) approach overcomes such issues by setting up a central aggregator server and a shared global model. It also facilitates data privacy by extracting knowledge while keeping the actual data private. This work proposes a cutting-edge Privacy enhancement through Iterative Collaboration (EPIC) architecture. The network is divided and distributed between local and centralized servers. We demonstrate the EPIC approach to resolve a supervised classification problem to estimate SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequence data lineage without explicitly transferring raw sequence data. We aim to create a universal decentralized optimization framework that allows various data holders to work together and converge to a single predictive model. The findings demonstrate that privacy-preserving strategies can be successfully used with aggregation approaches without materially altering the degree of learning convergence. Finally, we highlight a few potential issues and prospects for study in FL-based approaches to healthcare applications.
Exploiting the Structure of Two Graphs with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Victor M. Tenorio, Antonio G. Marques
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution to deal with unstructured data, outperforming traditional deep learning architectures. However, most of the current GNN models are designed to work with a single graph, which limits their applicability in many real-world scenarios where multiple graphs may be involved. To address this limitation, we propose a novel graph-based deep learning architecture to handle tasks where two sets of signals exist, each defined on a different graph. First we consider the setting where the input is represented as a signal on top of one graph (input graph) and the output is a graph signal defined over a different graph (output graph). For this setup, we propose a three-block architecture where we first process the input data using a GNN that operates over the input graph, then apply a transformation function that operates in a latent space and maps the signals from the input to the output graph, and finally implement a second GNN that operates over the output graph. Our goal is not to propose a single specific definition for each of the three blocks, but rather to provide a flexible approach to solve tasks involving data defined on two graphs. The second part of the paper addresses a self-supervised setup, where the focus is not on the output space but on the underlying latent space and, inspired by Canonical Correlation Analysis, we seek informative representations of the data that can be leveraged to solve a downstream task. By leveraging information from multiple graphs, the proposed architecture can capture more intricate relationships between different entities in the data. We test this in several experimental setups using synthetic and real world datasets, and observe that the proposed architecture works better than traditional deep learning architectures, showcasing the importance of leveraging the information of the two graphs.
On the cohesion and separability of average-link for hierarchical agglomerative clustering
Authors: Eduardo Sany Laber, Miguel Bastista
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Average-link is widely recognized as one of the most popular and effective methods for building hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The available theoretical analyses show that this method has a much better approximation than other popular heuristics, as single-linkage and complete-linkage, regarding variants of Dasgupta's cost function [STOC 2016]. However, these analyses do not separate average-link from a random hierarchy and they are not appealing for metric spaces since every hierarchical clustering has a 1/2 approximation with regard to the variant of Dasgupta's function that is employed for dissimilarity measures [Moseley and Yang 2020]. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of average-link in metric spaces, regarding several natural criteria that capture separability and cohesion and are more interpretable than Dasgupta's cost function and its variants. We also present experimental results with real datasets that, together with our theoretical analyses, suggest that average-link is a better choice than other related methods when both cohesion and separability are important goals.
Watermarking Language Models through Language Models
Authors: Agnibh Dasgupta, Abdullah Tanvir, Xin Zhong
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Watermarking the outputs of large language models (LLMs) is critical for provenance tracing, content regulation, and model accountability. Existing approaches often rely on access to model internals or are constrained by static rules and token-level perturbations. Moreover, the idea of steering generative behavior via prompt-based instruction control remains largely underexplored. We introduce a prompt-guided watermarking framework that operates entirely at the input level and requires no access to model parameters or decoding logits. The framework comprises three cooperating components: a Prompting LM that synthesizes watermarking instructions from user prompts, a Marking LM that generates watermarked outputs conditioned on these instructions, and a Detecting LM trained to classify whether a response carries an embedded watermark. This modular design enables dynamic watermarking that adapts to individual prompts while remaining compatible with diverse LLM architectures, including both proprietary and open-weight models. We evaluate the framework over 25 combinations of Prompting and Marking LMs, such as GPT-4o, Mistral, LLaMA3, and DeepSeek. Experimental results show that watermark signals generalize across architectures and remain robust under fine-tuning, model distillation, and prompt-based adversarial attacks, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.
The Fibonacci Network: A Simple Alternative for Positional Encoding
Authors: Yair Bleiberg, Michael Werman
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

Coordinate-based Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are known to have difficulty reconstructing high frequencies of the training data. A common solution to this problem is Positional Encoding (PE), which has become quite popular. However, PE has drawbacks. It has high-frequency artifacts and adds another hyper-hyperparameter, just like batch normalization and dropout do. We believe that under certain circumstances PE is not necessary, and a smarter construction of the network architecture together with a smart training method is sufficient to achieve similar results. In this paper, we show that very simple MLPs can quite easily output a frequency when given input of the half-frequency and quarter-frequency. Using this, we design a network architecture in blocks, where the input to each block is the output of the two previous blocks along with the original input. We call this a {\it Fibonacci Network}. By training each block on the corresponding frequencies of the signal, we show that Fibonacci Networks can reconstruct arbitrarily high frequencies.
Recycled Attention: Efficient inference for long-context language models
Authors: Fangyuan Xu, Tanya Goyal, Eunsol Choi
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Generating long sequences of tokens given a long-context input imposes a heavy computational burden for large language models (LLMs). One of the computational bottleneck comes from computing attention over a long sequence of input at each generation step. In this paper, we propose Recycled Attention, an inference-time method which alternates between full context attention and attention over a subset of input tokens. When performing partial attention, we recycle the attention pattern of a previous token that has performed full attention and attend only to the top K most attended tokens, reducing the cost of data movement and attention computation. Compared to previously proposed inference-time acceleration method which attends only to local context or tokens with high accumulative attention scores, our approach flexibly chooses tokens that are relevant to the current decoding step. We evaluate our methods on RULER, a suite of tasks designed to comprehensively evaluate long-context abilities, and long-context language modeling tasks. Applying our method to off-the-shelf LLMs achieves comparable speedup to baselines which only consider local context while improving the performance by 2x. We further explore two ideas to improve performance-efficiency trade-offs: (1) dynamically decide when to perform recycled or full attention step based on the query similarities and (2) continued pre-training the model with Recycled Attention.
Multi-hop Evidence Pursuit Meets the Web: Team Papelo at FEVER 2024
Authors: Christopher Malon
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

Separating disinformation from fact on the web has long challenged both the search and the reasoning powers of humans. We show that the reasoning power of large language models (LLMs) and the retrieval power of modern search engines can be combined to automate this process and explainably verify claims. We integrate LLMs and search under a multi-hop evidence pursuit strategy. This strategy generates an initial question based on an input claim using a sequence to sequence model, searches and formulates an answer to the question, and iteratively generates follow-up questions to pursue the evidence that is missing using an LLM. We demonstrate our system on the FEVER 2024 (AVeriTeC) shared task. Compared to a strategy of generating all the questions at once, our method obtains .045 higher label accuracy and .155 higher AVeriTeC score (evaluating the adequacy of the evidence). Through ablations, we show the importance of various design choices, such as the question generation method, medium-sized context, reasoning with one document at a time, adding metadata, paraphrasing, reducing the problem to two classes, and reconsidering the final verdict. Our submitted system achieves .510 AVeriTeC score on the dev set and .477 AVeriTeC score on the test set.
Unmasking the Limits of Large Language Models: A Systematic Evaluation of Masked Text Processing Ability through MskQA and MskCal
Authors: Fuka Matsuzaki, Haru-Tada Sato
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

This paper sheds light on the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) by rigorously evaluating their ability to process masked text. We introduce two novel tasks: MskQA, measuring reasoning on masked question-answering datasets like RealtimeQA, and MskCal, assessing numerical reasoning on masked arithmetic problems.Testing GPT-4o and 4o-mini reveals that while LLMs exhibit some resilience to masked text, their performance is highly contingent on masking rates and semantic cues. Specifically, "solid masking," where semantic clues are entirely absent, leads to a significant performance drop compared to "partial lifting," where some semantic information is retained, indicating LLMs' reliance on surface-level patterns. Interestingly, GPT-4o consistently outperforms 4o-mini, particularly in MskCal, demonstrating a greater ability to handle numerical reasoning with masked text. This underscores the crucial role of semantic cues in the reasoning process of LLMs. Our study illuminates the interplay between background knowledge and reasoning ability in masked text processing, paving the way for a deeper understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations, and highlighting the need for more robust evaluation methods to accurately assess their true comprehension abilities.
Evaluating Large Language Model Capability in Vietnamese Fact-Checking Data Generation
Authors: Long Truong To, Hung Tuan Le, Dat Van-Thanh Nguyen, Manh Trong Nguyen, Tri Thien Nguyen, Tin Van Huynh, Kiet Van Nguyen
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Reading Comprehension, Vietnamese Fact Checking

Large Language Models (LLMs), with gradually improving reading comprehension and reasoning capabilities, are being applied to a range of complex language tasks, including the automatic generation of language data for various purposes. However, research on applying LLMs for automatic data generation in low-resource languages like Vietnamese is still underdeveloped and lacks comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs for automatic data generation for the Vietnamese fact-checking task, which faces significant data limitations. Specifically, we focus on fact-checking data where claims are synthesized from multiple evidence sentences to assess the information synthesis capabilities of LLMs. We develop an automatic data construction process using simple prompt techniques on LLMs and explore several methods to improve the quality of the generated data. To evaluate the quality of the data generated by LLMs, we conduct both manual quality assessments and performance evaluations using language models. Experimental results and manual evaluations illustrate that while the quality of the generated data has significantly improved through fine-tuning techniques, LLMs still cannot match the data quality produced by humans.
Assessing Open-Source Large Language Models on Argumentation Mining Subtasks
Authors: Mohammad Yeghaneh Abkenar, Weixing Wang, Hendrik Graupner, Manfred Stede
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Relation Classification

We explore the capability of four open-sourcelarge language models (LLMs) in argumentation mining (AM). We conduct experiments on three different corpora; persuasive essays(PE), argumentative microtexts (AMT) Part 1 and Part 2, based on two argumentation mining sub-tasks: (i) argumentative discourse units classifications (ADUC), and (ii) argumentative relation classification (ARC). This work aims to assess the argumentation capability of open-source LLMs, including Mistral 7B, Mixtral8x7B, LlamA2 7B and LlamA3 8B in both, zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Our analysis contributes to further assessing computational argumentation with open-source LLMs in future research efforts.
Impact of Fake News on Social Media Towards Public Users of Different Age Groups
Authors: Kahlil bin Abdul Hakim, Sathishkumar Veerappampalayam Easwaramoorthy
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Swapping

This study examines how fake news affects social media users across a range of age groups and how machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help reduce the spread of false information. The paper evaluates various machine learning models for their efficacy in identifying and categorizing fake news and examines current trends in the spread of fake news, including deepfake technology. The study assesses four models using a Kaggle dataset: Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Neural Networks, and Logistic Regression. The results show that SVM and neural networks perform better than other models, with accuracies of 93.29% and 93.69%, respectively. The study also emphasises how people in the elder age group diminished capacity for critical analysis of news content makes them more susceptible to disinformation. Natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning approaches have the potential to improve the accuracy of false news detection. Biases in AI and ML models and difficulties in identifying information generated by AI continue to be major problems in spite of the developments. The study recommends that datasets be expanded to encompass a wider range of languages and that detection algorithms be continuously improved to keep up with the latest advancements in disinformation tactics. In order to combat fake news and promote an informed and resilient society, this study emphasizes the value of cooperative efforts between AI researchers, social media platforms, and governments.
Evaluating and Adapting Large Language Models to Represent Folktales in Low-Resource Languages
Authors: JA Meaney, Beatrice Alex, William Lamb
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00

Folktales are a rich resource of knowledge about the society and culture of a civilisation. Digital folklore research aims to use automated techniques to better understand these folktales, and it relies on abstract representations of the textual data. Although a number of large language models (LLMs) claim to be able to represent low-resource langauges such as Irish and Gaelic, we present two classification tasks to explore how useful these representations are, and three adaptations to improve the performance of these models. We find that adapting the models to work with longer sequences, and continuing pre-training on the domain of folktales improves classification performance, although these findings are tempered by the impressive performance of a baseline SVM with non-contextual features.
Assessing the Answerability of Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation
Authors: Geonmin Kim, Jaeyeon Kim, Hancheol Park, Wooksu Shin, Tae-Ho Kim
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval, valid

Thanks to unprecedented language understanding and generation capabilities of large language model (LLM), Retrieval-augmented Code Generation (RaCG) has recently been widely utilized among software developers. While this has increased productivity, there are still frequent instances of incorrect codes being provided. In particular, there are cases where plausible yet incorrect codes are generated for queries from users that cannot be answered with the given queries and API descriptions. This study proposes a task for evaluating answerability, which assesses whether valid answers can be generated based on users' queries and retrieved APIs in RaCG. Additionally, we build a benchmark dataset called Retrieval-augmented Code Generability Evaluation (RaCGEval) to evaluate the performance of models performing this task. Experimental results show that this task remains at a very challenging level, with baseline models exhibiting a low performance of 46.7%. Furthermore, this study discusses methods that could significantly improve performance.
How Good is Your Wikipedia? Auditing Data Quality for Low-resource and Multilingual NLP
Authors: Kushal Tatariya, Artur Kulmizev, Wessel Poelman, Esther Ploeger, Marcel Bollmann, Johannes Bjerva, Jiaming Luo, Heather Lent, Miryam de Lhoneux
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Multilingual NLP

Wikipedia's perceived high quality and broad language coverage have established it as a fundamental resource in multilingual NLP. In the context of low-resource languages, however, these quality assumptions are increasingly being scrutinised. This paper critically examines the data quality of Wikipedia in a non-English setting by subjecting it to various quality filtering techniques, revealing widespread issues such as a high percentage of one-line articles and duplicate articles. We evaluate the downstream impact of quality filtering on Wikipedia and find that data quality pruning is an effective means for resource-efficient training without hurting performance, especially for low-resource languages. Moreover, we advocate for a shift in perspective from seeking a general definition of data quality towards a more language- and task-specific one. Ultimately, we aim for this study to serve as a guide to using Wikipedia for pretraining in a multilingual setting.
An Early FIRST Reproduction and Improvements to Single-Token Decoding for Fast Listwise Reranking
Authors: Zijian Chen, Ronak Pradeep, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Learning-To-Rank, Reranking

Recent advances have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) excel as listwise rerankers, but their high computational demands remain a barrier to widespread adoption. Further, the traditional language modeling (LM) objective is not ideally suited for reranking tasks. FIRST is a novel approach that addresses these challenges by integrating a learning-to-rank objective and leveraging the logits of only the first generated token, thereby significantly reducing inference latency compared to traditional LLM rerankers. In this study, we extend the evaluation of FIRST to the TREC Deep Learning datasets (DL19-22), validating its robustness across diverse domains. We investigate the influence of different first-stage retrievers on FIRST rerankers, observing diminishing returns and patterns consistent with traditional LLM rerankers. Through applying the FIRST objective to a broader range of backbone models, we achieve effectiveness surpassing the original implementation. Our experiments confirm that fast reranking with single-token logits does not compromise out-of-domain reranking quality. To better quantify the computational savings in the original study, we measure and compare latency to find a 21%-42% gain across various models and benchmarks. Moreover, while LM training implicitly improves zero-shot single-token reranking, our experiments also raise questions about whether LM pre-training may hinder subsequent fine-tuning with the FIRST objective. These findings pave the way for more efficient and effective listwise reranking in future applications.
LBPE: Long-token-first Tokenization to Improve Large Language Models
Authors: Haoran Lian, Yizhe Xiong, Zijia Lin, Jianwei Niu, Shasha Mo, Hui Chen, Peng Liu, Guiguang Ding
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The prevalent use of Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) in Large Language Models (LLMs) facilitates robust handling of subword units and avoids issues of out-of-vocabulary words. Despite its success, a critical challenge persists: long tokens, rich in semantic information, have fewer occurrences in tokenized datasets compared to short tokens, which can result in imbalanced learning issue across different tokens. To address that, we propose LBPE, which prioritizes long tokens during the encoding process. LBPE generates tokens according to their reverse ranks of token length rather than their ranks in the vocabulary, granting longer tokens higher priority during the encoding process. Consequently, LBPE smooths the frequency differences between short and long tokens, and thus mitigates the learning imbalance. Extensive experiments across diverse language modeling tasks demonstrate that LBPE consistently outperforms the original BPE, well demonstrating its effectiveness.