pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Common Sense Reward
Authors: Neta Glazer, Aviv Navon, Aviv Shamsian, Ethan Fetaya
Date: 2024-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result in unwanted outcomes. This may lead to issues like "reward hacking" where the agent maximizes rewards by unintended behavior. In this work, we propose to disentangle the reward into two distinct parts. A simple task-specific reward, outlining the particulars of the task at hand, and an unknown common-sense reward, indicating the expected behavior of the agent within the environment. We then explore how this common-sense reward can be learned from expert demonstrations. We first show that inverse reinforcement learning, even when it succeeds in training an agent, does not learn a useful reward function. That is, training a new agent with the learned reward does not impair the desired behaviors. We then demonstrate that this problem can be solved by training simultaneously on multiple tasks. That is, multi-task inverse reinforcement learning can be applied to learn a useful reward function.
Data-Driven Stochastic AC-OPF using Gaussian Processes
Authors: Mile Mitrovic
Date: 2024-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, GPR

The thesis focuses on developing a data-driven algorithm, based on machine learning, to solve the stochastic alternating current (AC) chance-constrained (CC) Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem. Although the AC CC-OPF problem has been successful in academic circles, it is highly nonlinear and computationally demanding, which limits its practical impact. The proposed approach aims to address this limitation and demonstrate its empirical efficiency through applications to multiple IEEE test cases. To solve the non-convex and computationally challenging CC AC-OPF problem, the proposed approach relies on a machine learning Gaussian process regression (GPR) model. The full Gaussian process (GP) approach is capable of learning a simple yet non-convex data-driven approximation to the AC power flow equations that can incorporate uncertain inputs. The proposed approach uses various approximations for GP-uncertainty propagation. The full GP CC-OPF approach exhibits highly competitive and promising results, outperforming the state-of-the-art sample-based chance constraint approaches. To further improve the robustness and complexity/accuracy trade-off of the full GP CC-OPF, a fast data-driven setup is proposed. This setup relies on the sparse and hybrid Gaussian processes (GP) framework to model the power flow equations with input uncertainty.
Training Bayesian Neural Networks with Sparse Subspace Variational Inference
Authors: Junbo Li, Zichen Miao, Qiang Qiu, Ruqi Zhang
Date: 2024-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification, Variational Inference

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) offer uncertainty quantification but come with the downside of substantially increased training and inference costs. Sparse BNNs have been investigated for efficient inference, typically by either slowly introducing sparsity throughout the training or by post-training compression of dense BNNs. The dilemma of how to cut down massive training costs remains, particularly given the requirement to learn about the uncertainty. To solve this challenge, we introduce Sparse Subspace Variational Inference (SSVI), the first fully sparse BNN framework that maintains a consistently highly sparse Bayesian model throughout the training and inference phases. Starting from a randomly initialized low-dimensional sparse subspace, our approach alternately optimizes the sparse subspace basis selection and its associated parameters. While basis selection is characterized as a non-differentiable problem, we approximate the optimal solution with a removal-and-addition strategy, guided by novel criteria based on weight distribution statistics. Our extensive experiments show that SSVI sets new benchmarks in crafting sparse BNNs, achieving, for instance, a 10-20x compression in model size with under 3\% performance drop, and up to 20x FLOPs reduction during training compared with dense VI training. Remarkably, SSVI also demonstrates enhanced robustness to hyperparameters, reducing the need for intricate tuning in VI and occasionally even surpassing VI-trained dense BNNs on both accuracy and uncertainty metrics.
Automated Detection and Analysis of Data Practices Using A Real-World Corpus
Authors: Mukund Srinath, Pranav Venkit, Maria Badillo, Florian Schaub, C. Lee Giles, Shomir Wilson
Date: 2024-02-16 00:00:00

Privacy policies are crucial for informing users about data practices, yet their length and complexity often deter users from reading them. In this paper, we propose an automated approach to identify and visualize data practices within privacy policies at different levels of detail. Leveraging crowd-sourced annotations from the ToS;DR platform, we experiment with various methods to match policy excerpts with predefined data practice descriptions. We further conduct a case study to evaluate our approach on a real-world policy, demonstrating its effectiveness in simplifying complex policies. Experiments show that our approach accurately matches data practice descriptions with policy excerpts, facilitating the presentation of simplified privacy information to users.
The Evolution of Statistical Induction Heads: In-Context Learning Markov Chains
Authors: Benjamin L. Edelman, Ezra Edelman, Surbhi Goel, Eran Malach, Nikolaos Tsilivis
Date: 2024-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large language models have the ability to generate text that mimics patterns in their inputs. We introduce a simple Markov Chain sequence modeling task in order to study how this in-context learning (ICL) capability emerges. In our setting, each example is sampled from a Markov chain drawn from a prior distribution over Markov chains. Transformers trained on this task form \emph{statistical induction heads} which compute accurate next-token probabilities given the bigram statistics of the context. During the course of training, models pass through multiple phases: after an initial stage in which predictions are uniform, they learn to sub-optimally predict using in-context single-token statistics (unigrams); then, there is a rapid phase transition to the correct in-context bigram solution. We conduct an empirical and theoretical investigation of this multi-phase process, showing how successful learning results from the interaction between the transformer's layers, and uncovering evidence that the presence of the simpler unigram solution may delay formation of the final bigram solution. We examine how learning is affected by varying the prior distribution over Markov chains, and consider the generalization of our in-context learning of Markov chains (ICL-MC) task to $n$-grams for $n > 2$.
Sequoia: Scalable, Robust, and Hardware-aware Speculative Decoding
Authors: Zhuoming Chen, Avner May, Ruslan Svirschevski, Yuhsun Huang, Max Ryabinin, Zhihao Jia, Beidi Chen
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference, existing methods are limited in their ability to scale to larger speculation budgets, and adapt to different hyperparameters and hardware. This paper introduces Sequoia, a scalable, robust, and hardware-aware algorithm for speculative decoding. To attain better scalability, Sequoia introduces a dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal tree structure for the speculated tokens. To achieve robust speculative performance, Sequoia uses a novel sampling and verification method that outperforms prior work across different decoding temperatures. Finally, Sequoia introduces a hardware-aware tree optimizer that maximizes speculative performance by automatically selecting the token tree size and depth for a given hardware platform. Evaluation shows that Sequoia improves the decoding speed of Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B, and Vicuna-33B on an A100 by up to $4.04\times$, $3.73\times$, and $2.27\times$. For offloading setting on L40, Sequoia achieves as low as 0.56 s/token for exact Llama2-70B inference latency, which is $9.96\times$ on our optimized offloading system (5.6 s/token), $9.7\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference, $19.5\times$ than Huggingface Accelerate.
HunFlair2 in a cross-corpus evaluation of biomedical named entity recognition and normalization tools
Authors: Mario Sänger, Samuele Garda, Xing David Wang, Leon Weber-Genzel, Pia Droop, Benedikt Fuchs, Alan Akbik, Ulf Leser
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-corpus, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

With the exponential growth of the life science literature, biomedical text mining (BTM) has become an essential technology for accelerating the extraction of insights from publications. Identifying named entities (e.g., diseases, drugs, or genes) in texts and their linkage to reference knowledge bases are crucial steps in BTM pipelines to enable information aggregation from different documents. However, tools for these two steps are rarely applied in the same context in which they were developed. Instead, they are applied in the wild, i.e., on application-dependent text collections different from those used for the tools' training, varying, e.g., in focus, genre, style, and text type. This raises the question of whether the reported performance of BTM tools can be trusted for downstream applications. Here, we report on the results of a carefully designed cross-corpus benchmark for named entity extraction, where tools were applied systematically to corpora not used during their training. Based on a survey of 28 published systems, we selected five for an in-depth analysis on three publicly available corpora encompassing four different entity types. Comparison between tools results in a mixed picture and shows that, in a cross-corpus setting, the performance is significantly lower than the one reported in an in-corpus setting. HunFlair2 showed the best performance on average, being closely followed by PubTator. Our results indicate that users of BTM tools should expect diminishing performances when applying them in the wild compared to original publications and show that further research is necessary to make BTM tools more robust.
A synthetic data approach for domain generalization of NLI models
Authors: Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Andrey Petrov, Alex Fabrikant, Annie Louis
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Natural Language Inference, Transfer Learning

Natural Language Inference (NLI) remains an important benchmark task for LLMs. NLI datasets are a springboard for transfer learning to other semantic tasks, and NLI models are standard tools for identifying the faithfulness of model-generated text. There are several large scale NLI datasets today, and models have improved greatly by hill-climbing on these collections. Yet their realistic performance on out-of-distribution/domain data is less well-understood. We explore the opportunity for synthetic high-quality datasets to adapt NLI models for zero-shot use in downstream applications across new and unseen text domains. We demonstrate a new approach for generating NLI data in diverse domains and lengths, so far not covered by existing training sets. The resulting examples have meaningful premises, the hypotheses are formed in creative ways rather than simple edits to a few premise tokens, and the labels have high accuracy. We show that models trained on this data ($685$K synthetic examples) have the best generalization to completely new downstream test settings. On the TRUE benchmark, a T5-small model trained with our data improves around $7\%$ on average compared to training on the best alternative dataset. The improvements are more pronounced for smaller models, while still meaningful on a T5 XXL model. We also demonstrate gains on test sets when in-domain training data is augmented with our domain-general synthetic data.
Emergent Word Order Universals from Cognitively-Motivated Language Models
Authors: Tatsuki Kuribayashi, Ryo Ueda, Ryo Yoshida, Yohei Oseki, Ted Briscoe, Timothy Baldwin
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We study word-order universals through a computational simulation with language models (LMs). Our experiments show that typologically-typical word orders tend to have lower perplexity estimated by LMs with cognitively plausible biases: syntactic biases, specific parsing strategies, and memory limitations. This suggests that the interplay of cognitive biases and predictability (perplexity) can explain many aspects of word-order universals. It also showcases the advantage of cognitively-motivated LMs, typically employed in cognitive modeling, in the simulation of language universals.
Graph-Based Retriever Captures the Long Tail of Biomedical Knowledge
Authors: Julien Delile, Srayanta Mukherjee, Anton Van Pamel, Leonid Zhukov
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming the way information is retrieved with vast amounts of knowledge being summarized and presented via natural language conversations. Yet, LLMs are prone to highlight the most frequently seen pieces of information from the training set and to neglect the rare ones. In the field of biomedical research, latest discoveries are key to academic and industrial actors and are obscured by the abundance of an ever-increasing literature corpus (the information overload problem). Surfacing new associations between biomedical entities, e.g., drugs, genes, diseases, with LLMs becomes a challenge of capturing the long-tail knowledge of the biomedical scientific production. To overcome this challenge, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to alleviate some of the shortcomings of LLMs by augmenting the prompts with context retrieved from external datasets. RAG methods typically select the context via maximum similarity search over text embeddings. In this study, we show that RAG methods leave out a significant proportion of relevant information due to clusters of over-represented concepts in the biomedical literature. We introduce a novel information-retrieval method that leverages a knowledge graph to downsample these clusters and mitigate the information overload problem. Its retrieval performance is about twice better than embedding similarity alternatives on both precision and recall. Finally, we demonstrate that both embedding similarity and knowledge graph retrieval methods can be advantageously combined into a hybrid model that outperforms both, enabling potential improvements to biomedical question-answering models.
Emulated Disalignment: Safety Alignment for Large Language Models May Backfire!
Authors: Zhanhui Zhou, Jie Liu, Zhichen Dong, Jiaheng Liu, Chao Yang, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Safety Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) undergo safety alignment to ensure safe conversations with humans. However, this paper introduces a training-free attack method capable of reversing safety alignment, converting the outcomes of stronger alignment into greater potential for harm by accessing only LLM output token distributions. Specifically, our method achieves this reversal by contrasting the output token distribution of a safety-aligned language model (e.g., Llama-2-chat) against its pre-trained version (e.g., Llama-2), so that the token predictions are shifted towards the opposite direction of safety alignment. We name this method emulated disalignment (ED) because sampling from this contrastive distribution provably emulates the result of fine-tuning to minimize a safety reward. Our experiments with ED across three evaluation datasets and four model families (Llama-1, Llama-2, Mistral, and Alpaca) show that ED doubles the harmfulness of pre-trained models and outperforms strong baselines, achieving the highest harmful rates in 43 out of 48 evaluation subsets by a large margin. Eventually, given ED's reliance on language model output token distributions, which particularly compromises open-source models, our findings highlight the need to reassess the open accessibility of language models, even if they have been safety-aligned. Code is available at https://github.com/ZHZisZZ/emulated-disalignment.
Triple-Encoders: Representations That Fire Together, Wire Together
Authors: Justus-Jonas Erker, Florian Mai, Nils Reimers, Gerasimos Spanakis, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

Search-based dialog models typically re-encode the dialog history at every turn, incurring high cost. Curved Contrastive Learning, a representation learning method that encodes relative distances between utterances into the embedding space via a bi-encoder, has recently shown promising results for dialog modeling at far superior efficiency. While high efficiency is achieved through independently encoding utterances, this ignores the importance of contextualization. To overcome this issue, this study introduces triple-encoders, which efficiently compute distributed utterance mixtures from these independently encoded utterances through a novel hebbian inspired co-occurrence learning objective in a self-organizing manner, without using any weights, i.e., merely through local interactions. Empirically, we find that triple-encoders lead to a substantial improvement over bi-encoders, and even to better zero-shot generalization than single-vector representation models without requiring re-encoding. Our code (https://github.com/UKPLab/acl2024-triple-encoders) and model (https://huggingface.co/UKPLab/triple-encoders-dailydialog) are publicly available.
TILP: Differentiable Learning of Temporal Logical Rules on Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Siheng Xiong, Yuan Yang, Faramarz Fekri, James Clayton Kerce
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Compared with static knowledge graphs, temporal knowledge graphs (tKG), which can capture the evolution and change of information over time, are more realistic and general. However, due to the complexity that the notion of time introduces to the learning of the rules, an accurate graph reasoning, e.g., predicting new links between entities, is still a difficult problem. In this paper, we propose TILP, a differentiable framework for temporal logical rules learning. By designing a constrained random walk mechanism and the introduction of temporal operators, we ensure the efficiency of our model. We present temporal features modeling in tKG, e.g., recurrence, temporal order, interval between pair of relations, and duration, and incorporate it into our learning process. We compare TILP with state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We show that our proposed framework can improve upon the performance of baseline methods while providing interpretable results. In particular, we consider various scenarios in which training samples are limited, data is biased, and the time range between training and inference are different. In all these cases, TILP works much better than the state-of-the-art methods.
KARL: Knowledge-Aware Retrieval and Representations aid Retention and Learning in Students
Authors: Matthew Shu, Nishant Balepur, Shi Feng, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Tracing, Retrieval, Scheduling

Flashcard schedulers rely on 1) student models to predict the flashcards a student knows; and 2) teaching policies to pick which cards to show next via these predictions. Prior student models, however, just use study data like the student's past responses, ignoring the text on cards. We propose content-aware scheduling, the first schedulers exploiting flashcard content. To give the first evidence that such schedulers enhance student learning, we build KARL, a simple but effective content-aware student model employing deep knowledge tracing (DKT), retrieval, and BERT to predict student recall. We train KARL by collecting a new dataset of 123,143 study logs on diverse trivia questions. KARL bests existing student models in AUC and calibration error. To ensure our improved predictions lead to better student learning, we create a novel delta-based teaching policy to deploy KARL online. Based on 32 study paths from 27 users, KARL improves learning efficiency over SOTA, showing KARL's strength and encouraging researchers to look beyond historical study data to fully capture student abilities.
Ontology Enhanced Claim Detection
Authors: Zehra Melce Hüsünbeyi, Tatjana Scheffler
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Word Embeddings

We propose an ontology enhanced model for sentence based claim detection. We fused ontology embeddings from a knowledge base with BERT sentence embeddings to perform claim detection for the ClaimBuster and the NewsClaims datasets. Our ontology enhanced approach showed the best results with these small-sized unbalanced datasets, compared to other statistical and neural machine learning models. The experiments demonstrate that adding domain specific features (either trained word embeddings or knowledge graph metadata) can improve traditional ML methods. In addition, adding domain knowledge in the form of ontology embeddings helps avoid the bias encountered in neural network based models, for example the pure BERT model bias towards larger classes in our small corpus.
High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models
Authors: Michela Lorandi, Anya Belz
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

The performance of NLP methods for severely under-resourced languages cannot currently hope to match the state of the art in NLP methods for well resourced languages. We explore the extent to which pretrained large language models (LLMs) can bridge this gap, via the example of data-to-text generation for Irish, Welsh, Breton and Maltese. We test LLMs on these under-resourced languages and English, in a range of scenarios. We find that LLMs easily set the state of the art for the under-resourced languages by substantial margins, as measured by both automatic and human evaluations. For all our languages, human evaluation shows on-a-par performance with humans for our best systems, but BLEU scores collapse compared to English, casting doubt on the metric's suitability for evaluating non-task-specific systems. Overall, our results demonstrate the great potential of LLMs to bridge the performance gap for under-resourced languages.