pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedDW: Distilling Weights through Consistency Optimization in Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Authors: Jiayu Liu, Yong Wang, Nianbin Wang, Jing Yang, Xiaohui Tao
Date: 2024-12-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation

Federated Learning (FL) is an innovative distributed machine learning paradigm that enables neural network training across devices without centralizing data. While this addresses issues of information sharing and data privacy, challenges arise from data heterogeneity across clients and increasing network scale, leading to impacts on model performance and training efficiency. Previous research shows that in IID environments, the parameter structure of the model is expected to adhere to certain specific consistency principles. Thus, identifying and regularizing these consistencies can mitigate issues from heterogeneous data. We found that both soft labels derived from knowledge distillation and the classifier head parameter matrix, when multiplied by their own transpose, capture the intrinsic relationships between data classes. These shared relationships suggest inherent consistency. Therefore, the work in this paper identifies the consistency between the two and leverages it to regulate training, underpinning our proposed FedDW framework. Experimental results show FedDW outperforms 10 state-of-the-art FL methods, improving accuracy by an average of 3% in highly heterogeneous settings. Additionally, we provide a theoretical proof that FedDW offers higher efficiency, with the additional computational load from backpropagation being negligible. The code is available at https://github.com/liuvvvvv1/FedDW.
Prompting Large Language Models for Clinical Temporal Relation Extraction
Authors: Jianping He, Laila Rasmy, Haifang Li, Jianfu Li, Zenan Sun, Evan Yu, Degui Zhi, Cui Tao
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Quantization, Relation, Relation Extraction, Temporal Relation Extraction

Objective: This paper aims to prompt large language models (LLMs) for clinical temporal relation extraction (CTRE) in both few-shot and fully supervised settings. Materials and Methods: This study utilizes four LLMs: Encoder-based GatorTron-Base (345M)/Large (8.9B); Decoder-based LLaMA3-8B/MeLLaMA-13B. We developed full (FFT) and parameter-efficient (PEFT) fine-tuning strategies and evaluated these strategies on the 2012 i2b2 CTRE task. We explored four fine-tuning strategies for GatorTron-Base: (1) Standard Fine-Tuning, (2) Hard-Prompting with Unfrozen LLMs, (3) Soft-Prompting with Frozen LLMs, and (4) Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with Frozen LLMs. For GatorTron-Large, we assessed two PEFT strategies-Soft-Prompting and LoRA with Frozen LLMs-leveraging Quantization techniques. Additionally, LLaMA3-8B and MeLLaMA-13B employed two PEFT strategies: LoRA strategy with Quantization (QLoRA) applied to Frozen LLMs using instruction tuning and standard fine-tuning. Results: Under fully supervised settings, Hard-Prompting with Unfrozen GatorTron-Base achieved the highest F1 score (89.54%), surpassing the SOTA model (85.70%) by 3.74%. Additionally, two variants of QLoRA adapted to GatorTron-Large and Standard Fine-Tuning of GatorTron-Base exceeded the SOTA model by 2.36%, 1.88%, and 0.25%, respectively. Decoder-based models with frozen parameters outperformed their Encoder-based counterparts in this setting; however, the trend reversed in few-shot scenarios. Discussions and Conclusions: This study presented new methods that significantly improved CTRE performance, benefiting downstream tasks reliant on CTRE systems. The findings underscore the importance of selecting appropriate models and fine-tuning strategies based on task requirements and data availability. Future work will explore larger models and broader CTRE applications.
LIAR: Leveraging Alignment (Best-of-N) to Jailbreak LLMs in Seconds
Authors: James Beetham, Souradip Chakraborty, Mengdi Wang, Furong Huang, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Many existing jailbreak techniques rely on solving discrete combinatorial optimization, while more recent approaches involve training LLMs to generate multiple adversarial prompts. However, both approaches require significant computational resources to produce even a single adversarial prompt. We hypothesize that the inefficiency of current approaches stems from an inadequate characterization of the jailbreak problem. To address this gap, we formulate the jailbreak problem in terms of alignment. By starting from an available safety-aligned model, we leverage an unsafe reward to guide the safe model towards generating unsafe outputs using alignment techniques (e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback), effectively performing jailbreaking via alignment. We propose a novel jailbreak method called LIAR (LeveragIng Alignment to jailbReak). To demonstrate the simplicity and effectiveness of our approach, we employ a best-of-N method to solve the alignment problem. LIAR offers significant advantages: lower computational requirements without additional training, fully black-box operation, competitive attack success rates, and more human-readable prompts. We provide theoretical insights into the possibility of jailbreaking a safety-aligned model, revealing inherent vulnerabilities in current alignment strategies for LLMs. We also provide sub-optimality guarantees for the proposed \algo. Experimentally, we achieve ASR comparable to the SoTA with a 10x improvement to perplexity and a Time-to-Attack measured in seconds rather than tens of hours.
100% Elimination of Hallucinations on RAGTruth for GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo
Authors: Michael C. Wood, Adam A. Forbes
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The issue of hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) remains a critical barrier to the adoption of AI in enterprise and other high-stakes applications. Despite advancements in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, current state-of-the-art methods fail to achieve more than 80% accuracy in generating faithful and factually correct outputs, even when provided with relevant and accurate context. In this work, we introduce Acurai, a novel systematic approach that achieves 100% hallucination-free responses in LLMs by reformatting queries and context data prior to input. Leveraging a deep understanding of LLM internal representations, the importance of noun-phrase dominance, and the role of discrete functional units (DFUs), Acurai ensures alignment between input context and generated output. We validate this method using the RAGTruth corpus, demonstrating its ability to eliminate 100% hallucinations for both GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo. Acurai sets a new standard for achieving consistent, accurate, and faithful AI responses, marking a significant step forward in the development of trustworthy AI systems.
Evaluating and Aligning CodeLLMs on Human Preference
Authors: Jian Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Ke Jin, Yibo Miao, Lei Zhang, Liqun Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yichang Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation

Code large language models (codeLLMs) have made significant strides in code generation. Most previous code-related benchmarks, which consist of various programming exercises along with the corresponding test cases, are used as a common measure to evaluate the performance and capabilities of code LLMs. However, the current code LLMs focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences, where the query should be sampled from the practical application scenarios and the model-generated responses should satisfy the human preference. To bridge the gap between the model-generated response and human preference, we present a rigorous human-curated benchmark CodeArena to emulate the complexity and diversity of real-world coding tasks, where 397 high-quality samples spanning 40 categories and 44 programming languages, carefully curated from user queries. Further, we propose a diverse synthetic instruction corpus SynCode-Instruct (nearly 20B tokens) by scaling instructions from the website to verify the effectiveness of the large-scale synthetic instruction fine-tuning, where Qwen2.5-SynCoder totally trained on synthetic instruction data can achieve top-tier performance of open-source code LLMs. The results find performance differences between execution-based benchmarks and CodeArena. Our systematic experiments of CodeArena on 40+ LLMs reveal a notable performance gap between open SOTA code LLMs (e.g. Qwen2.5-Coder) and proprietary LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1), underscoring the importance of the human preference alignment.\footnote{\url{https://codearenaeval.github.io/ }}
Multimodal Fact-Checking with Vision Language Models: A Probing Classifier based Solution with Embedding Strategies
Authors: Recep Firat Cekinel, Pinar Karagoz, Cagri Coltekin
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Misinformation, Veracity Classification

This study evaluates the effectiveness of Vision Language Models (VLMs) in representing and utilizing multimodal content for fact-checking. To be more specific, we investigate whether incorporating multimodal content improves performance compared to text-only models and how well VLMs utilize text and image information to enhance misinformation detection. Furthermore we propose a probing classifier based solution using VLMs. Our approach extracts embeddings from the last hidden layer of selected VLMs and inputs them into a neural probing classifier for multi-class veracity classification. Through a series of experiments on two fact-checking datasets, we demonstrate that while multimodality can enhance performance, fusing separate embeddings from text and image encoders yielded superior results compared to using VLM embeddings. Furthermore, the proposed neural classifier significantly outperformed KNN and SVM baselines in leveraging extracted embeddings, highlighting its effectiveness for multimodal fact-checking.
Findings of the Second BabyLM Challenge: Sample-Efficient Pretraining on Developmentally Plausible Corpora
Authors: Michael Y. Hu, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Adina Williams, Tal Linzen, Chengxu Zhuang, Ryan Cotterell, Leshem Choshen, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

The BabyLM Challenge is a community effort to close the data-efficiency gap between human and computational language learners. Participants compete to optimize language model training on a fixed language data budget of 100 million words or less. This year, we released improved text corpora, as well as a vision-and-language corpus to facilitate research into cognitively plausible vision language models. Submissions were compared on evaluation tasks targeting grammatical ability, (visual) question answering, pragmatic abilities, and grounding, among other abilities. Participants could submit to a 10M-word text-only track, a 100M-word text-only track, and/or a 100M-word and image multimodal track. From 31 submissions employing diverse methods, a hybrid causal-masked language model architecture outperformed other approaches. No submissions outperformed the baselines in the multimodal track. In follow-up analyses, we found a strong relationship between training FLOPs and average performance across tasks, and that the best-performing submissions proposed changes to the training data, training objective, and model architecture. This year's BabyLM Challenge shows that there is still significant room for innovation in this setting, in particular for image-text modeling, but community-driven research can yield actionable insights about effective strategies for small-scale language modeling.
Unifying Dual-Space Embedding for Entity Alignment via Contrastive Learning
Authors: Cunda Wang, Weihua Wang, Qiuyu Liang, Feilong Bao, Guanglai Gao
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Entity Alignment, Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Graphs

Entity alignment aims to match identical entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs). Graph neural network-based entity alignment methods have achieved promising results in Euclidean space. However, KGs often contain complex structures, including both local and hierarchical ones, which make it challenging to efficiently represent them within a single space. In this paper, we proposed a novel method UniEA, which unifies dual-space embedding to preserve the intrinsic structure of KGs. Specifically, we learn graph structure embedding in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces simultaneously to maximize the consistency between the embedding in both spaces. Moreover, we employ contrastive learning to mitigate the misalignment issues caused by similar entities, where embedding of similar neighboring entities within the KG become too close in distance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in structure-based EA. Our code is available at https://github.com/wonderCS1213/UniEA.
Steps are all you need: Rethinking STEM Education with Prompt Engineering
Authors: Krishnasai Addala, Kabir Dev Paul Baghel, Chhavi Kirtani, Avinash Anand, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Hallucination, Mixture-of-Experts, Prompt Engineering, Question Answering

Few shot and Chain-of-Thought prompting have shown promise when applied to Physics Question Answering Tasks, but are limited by the lack of mathematical ability inherent to LLMs, and are prone to hallucination. By utilizing a Mixture of Experts (MoE) Model, along with analogical prompting, we are able to show improved model performance when compared to the baseline on standard LLMs. We also survey the limits of these prompting techniques and the effects they have on model performance. Additionally, we propose Analogical CoT prompting, a prompting technique designed to allow smaller, open source models to leverage Analogical prompting, something they have struggled with, possibly due to a lack of specialist training data.
PETapter: Leveraging PET-style classification heads for modular few-shot parameter-efficient fine-tuning
Authors: Jonas Rieger, Mattes Ruckdeschel, Gregor Wiedemann
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Few-shot learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) are crucial to overcome the challenges of data scarcity and ever growing language model sizes. This applies in particular to specialized scientific domains, where researchers might lack expertise and resources to fine-tune high-performing language models to nuanced tasks. We propose PETapter, a novel method that effectively combines PEFT methods with PET-style classification heads to boost few-shot learning capabilities without the significant computational overhead typically associated with full model training. We validate our approach on three established NLP benchmark datasets and one real-world dataset from communication research. We show that PETapter not only achieves comparable performance to full few-shot fine-tuning using pattern-exploiting training (PET), but also provides greater reliability and higher parameter efficiency while enabling higher modularity and easy sharing of the trained modules, which enables more researchers to utilize high-performing NLP-methods in their research.
C$^2$LEVA: Toward Comprehensive and Contamination-Free Language Model Evaluation
Authors: Yanyang Li, Tin Long Wong, Cheung To Hung, Jianqiao Zhao, Duo Zheng, Ka Wai Liu, Michael R. Lyu, LiWei Wang
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Model Evaluation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise, yet their evaluation raises concerns, particularly regarding data contamination due to the lack of access to proprietary training data. To address this issue, we present C$^2$LEVA, a comprehensive bilingual benchmark featuring systematic contamination prevention. C$^2$LEVA firstly offers a holistic evaluation encompassing 22 tasks, each targeting a specific application or ability of LLMs, and secondly a trustworthy assessment due to our contamination-free tasks, ensured by a systematic contamination prevention strategy that fully automates test data renewal and enforces data protection during benchmark data release. Our large-scale evaluation of 15 open-source and proprietary models demonstrates the effectiveness of C$^2$LEVA.
Large Language Models for Ingredient Substitution in Food Recipes using Supervised Fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: Thevin Senath, Kumuthu Athukorala, Ransika Costa, Surangika Ranathunga, Rishemjit Kaur
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

In this paper, we address the challenge of recipe personalization through ingredient substitution. We make use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to build an ingredient substitution system designed to predict plausible substitute ingredients within a given recipe context. Given that the use of LLMs for this task has been barely done, we carry out an extensive set of experiments to determine the best LLM, prompt, and the fine-tuning setups. We further experiment with methods such as multi-task learning, two-stage fine-tuning, and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). The experiments are conducted using the publicly available Recipe1MSub corpus. The best results are produced by the Mistral7-Base LLM after fine-tuning and DPO. This result outperforms the strong baseline available for the same corpus with a Hit@1 score of 22.04. Thus we believe that this research represents a significant step towards enabling personalized and creative culinary experiences by utilizing LLM-based ingredient substitution.
Building a Family of Data Augmentation Models for Low-cost LLM Fine-tuning on the Cloud
Authors: Yuanhao Yue, Chengyu Wang, Jun Huang, Peng Wang
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.
EXAONE 3.5: Series of Large Language Models for Real-world Use Cases
Authors: LG AI Research, Soyoung An, Kyunghoon Bae, Eunbi Choi, Kibong Choi, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Seokhee Hong, Junwon Hwang, Hyojin Jeon, Gerrard Jeongwon Jo, Hyunjik Jo, Jiyeon Jung, Yountae Jung, Hyosang Kim, Joonkee Kim, SeongHwan Kim, Soyeon Kim, Sunkyoung Kim, Yireun Kim, Yongil Kim, Youchul Kim, Edward Hwayoung Lee, Haeju Lee, Honglak Lee, Jinsik Lee, Kyungmin Lee, Woohyung Lim, Sangha Park, Sooyoun Park, Yongmin Park, Sihoon Yang, Heuiyeen Yeen, Hyeongu Yun
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

This technical report introduces the EXAONE 3.5 instruction-tuned language models, developed and released by LG AI Research. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are offered in three configurations: 32B, 7.8B, and 2.4B. These models feature several standout capabilities: 1) exceptional instruction following capabilities in real-world scenarios, achieving the highest scores across seven benchmarks, 2) outstanding long-context comprehension, attaining the top performance in four benchmarks, and 3) competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open models of similar sizes across nine general benchmarks. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are open to anyone for research purposes and can be downloaded from https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE. For commercial use, please reach out to the official contact point of LG AI Research: contact_us@lgresearch.ai.
Breaking Event Rumor Detection via Stance-Separated Multi-Agent Debate
Authors: Mingqing Zhang, Haisong Gong, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00

The rapid spread of rumors on social media platforms during breaking events severely hinders the dissemination of the truth. Previous studies reveal that the lack of annotated resources hinders the direct detection of unforeseen breaking events not covered in yesterday's news. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for rumor detection holds significant promise. However, it is challenging for LLMs to provide comprehensive responses to complex or controversial issues due to limited diversity. In this work, we propose the Stance Separated Multi-Agent Debate (S2MAD) to address this issue. Specifically, we firstly introduce Stance Separation, categorizing comments as either supporting or opposing the original claim. Subsequently, claims are classified as subjective or objective, enabling agents to generate reasonable initial viewpoints with different prompt strategies for each type of claim. Debaters then follow specific instructions through multiple rounds of debate to reach a consensus. If a consensus is not reached, a judge agent evaluates the opinions and delivers a final verdict on the claim's veracity. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance and effectively improves the performance of LLMs in breaking event rumor detection.
Adaptive Dropout for Pruning Conformers
Authors: Yotaro Kubo, Xingyu Cai, Michiel Bacchiani
Date: 2024-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper proposes a method to effectively perform joint training-and-pruning based on adaptive dropout layers with unit-wise retention probabilities. The proposed method is based on the estimation of a unit-wise retention probability in a dropout layer. A unit that is estimated to have a small retention probability can be considered to be prunable. The retention probability of the unit is estimated using back-propagation and the Gumbel-Softmax technique. This pruning method is applied at several application points in Conformers such that the effective number of parameters can be significantly reduced. Specifically, adaptive dropout layers are introduced in three locations in each Conformer block: (a) the hidden layer of the feed-forward-net component, (b) the query vectors and the value vectors of the self-attention component, and (c) the input vectors of the LConv component. The proposed method is evaluated by conducting a speech recognition experiment on the LibriSpeech task. It was shown that this approach could simultaneously achieve a parameter reduction and accuracy improvement. The word error rates improved by approx 1% while reducing the number of parameters by 54%.