pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NEO-BENCH: Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models with Neologisms
Authors: Jonathan Zheng, Alan Ritter, Wei Xu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding, Sentence

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) degrades from the temporal drift between data used for model training and newer text seen during inference. One understudied avenue of language change causing data drift is the emergence of neologisms -- new word forms -- over time. We create a diverse resource of recent English neologisms by using several popular collection methods. We analyze temporal drift using neologisms by comparing sentences containing new words with near-identical sentences that replace neologisms with existing substitute words. Model performance is nearly halved in machine translation when a single neologism is introduced in a sentence. Motivated by these results, we construct a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to generalize to neologisms with various natural language understanding tasks and model perplexity. Models with later knowledge cutoff dates yield lower perplexities and perform better in downstream tasks. LLMs are also affected differently based on the linguistic origins of words, indicating that neologisms are complex for static LLMs to address. We will release our benchmark and code for reproducing our experiments.
Shallow Synthesis of Knowledge in GPT-Generated Texts: A Case Study in Automatic Related Work Composition
Authors: Anna Martin-Boyle, Aahan Tyagi, Marti A. Hearst, Dongyeop Kang
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

Numerous AI-assisted scholarly applications have been developed to aid different stages of the research process. We present an analysis of AI-assisted scholarly writing generated with ScholaCite, a tool we built that is designed for organizing literature and composing Related Work sections for academic papers. Our evaluation method focuses on the analysis of citation graphs to assess the structural complexity and inter-connectedness of citations in texts and involves a three-way comparison between (1) original human-written texts, (2) purely GPT-generated texts, and (3) human-AI collaborative texts. We find that GPT-4 can generate reasonable coarse-grained citation groupings to support human users in brainstorming, but fails to perform detailed synthesis of related works without human intervention. We suggest that future writing assistant tools should not be used to draft text independently of the human author.
Analysis of Levenshtein Transformer's Decoder and Its Variants
Authors: Ruiyang Zhou
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Translation

Levenshtein transformer (LevT) is a non-autoregressive machine translation model with high decoding efficiency and comparable translation quality in terms of bleu score, due to its parallel decoding and iterative refinement procedure. Are there any deficiencies of its translations and what improvements could be made? In this report, we focus on LevT's decoder and analyse the decoding results length, subword generation, and deletion module's capability. We hope to identify weaknesses of the decoder for future improvements. We also compare translations of the original LevT, knowledge-distilled LevT, LevT with translation memory, and the KD-LevT with translation memory to see how KD and translation memory can help.
Understanding the Effects of Noise in Text-to-SQL: An Examination of the BIRD-Bench Benchmark
Authors: Niklas Wretblad, Fredrik Gordh Riseby, Rahul Biswas, Amin Ahmadi, Oskar Holmström
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise. All datasets, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/niklaswretblad/the-effects-of-noise-in-text-to-SQL.
Task-Oriented Dialogue with In-Context Learning
Authors: Tom Bocklisch, Thomas Werkmeister, Daksh Varshneya, Alan Nichol
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Navigate, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

We describe a system for building task-oriented dialogue systems combining the in-context learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with the deterministic execution of business logic. LLMs are used to translate between the surface form of the conversation and a domain-specific language (DSL) which is used to progress the business logic. We compare our approach to the intent-based NLU approach predominantly used in industry today. Our experiments show that developing chatbots with our system requires significantly less effort than established approaches, that these chatbots can successfully navigate complex dialogues which are extremely challenging for NLU-based systems, and that our system has desirable properties for scaling task-oriented dialogue systems to a large number of tasks. We make our implementation available for use and further study.
Empirical Study on Updating Key-Value Memories in Transformer Feed-forward Layers
Authors: Zihan Qiu, Zeyu Huang, Youcheng Huang, Jie Fu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: knowledge editing

The feed-forward networks (FFNs) in transformers are recognized as a group of key-value neural memories to restore abstract high-level knowledge. In this work, we conduct an empirical ablation study on updating keys (the 1st layer in the FFNs layer) or values (the 2nd layer in the FFNs layer). We compare those two methods in various knowledge editing and fine-tuning tasks of large language models to draw insights to understand FFNs further. Code is available at $\href{https://github.com/qiuzh20/Tuning-keys-v.s.-values}{this\,repo}$.
Polarization of Autonomous Generative AI Agents Under Echo Chambers
Authors: Masaya Ohagi
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

Online social networks often create echo chambers where people only hear opinions reinforcing their beliefs. An echo chamber often generates polarization, leading to conflicts caused by people with radical opinions, such as the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The echo chamber has been viewed as a human-specific problem, but this implicit assumption is becoming less reasonable as large language models, such as ChatGPT, acquire social abilities. In response to this situation, we investigated the potential for polarization to occur among a group of autonomous AI agents based on generative language models in an echo chamber environment. We had AI agents discuss specific topics and analyzed how the group's opinions changed as the discussion progressed. As a result, we found that the group of agents based on ChatGPT tended to become polarized in echo chamber environments. The analysis of opinion transitions shows that this result is caused by ChatGPT's high prompt understanding ability to update its opinion by considering its own and surrounding agents' opinions. We conducted additional experiments to investigate under what specific conditions AI agents tended to polarize. As a result, we identified factors that strongly influence polarization, such as the agent's persona. These factors should be monitored to prevent the polarization of AI agents.
Enhancing Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models through Self-Distillation from Resource-Rich Languages
Authors: Yuanchi Zhang, Yile Wang, Zijun Liu, Shuo Wang, Xiaolong Wang, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

While large language models (LLMs) have been pre-trained on multilingual corpora, their performance still lags behind in most languages compared to a few resource-rich languages. One common approach to mitigate this issue is to translate training data from resource-rich languages into other languages and then continue training. However, using the data obtained solely relying on translation while ignoring the original capabilities of LLMs across languages is not always effective, which we show will limit the performance of cross-lingual knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose SDRRL, a method based on Self-Distillation from Resource-Rich Languages that effectively improve multilingual performance by leveraging the internal capabilities of LLMs on resource-rich languages. We evaluate on different LLMs (LLaMA-2 and SeaLLM) and source languages across various comprehension and generation tasks, experimental results demonstrate that SDRRL can significantly enhance multilingual capabilities while minimizing the impact on original performance in resource-rich languages.
Browse and Concentrate: Comprehending Multimodal Content via prior-LLM Context Fusion
Authors: Ziyue Wang, Chi Chen, Yiqi Zhu, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

With the bloom of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that incorporate LLMs with pre-trained vision models have recently demonstrated impressive performance across diverse vision-language tasks. However, they fall short to comprehend context involving multiple images. A primary reason for this shortcoming is that the visual features for each images are encoded individually by frozen encoders before feeding into the LLM backbone, lacking awareness of other images and the multimodal instructions. We term this issue as prior-LLM modality isolation and propose a two phase paradigm, browse-and-concentrate, to enable in-depth multimodal context fusion prior to feeding the features into LLMs. This paradigm initially "browses" through the inputs for essential insights, and then revisits the inputs to "concentrate" on crucial details, guided by these insights, to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the multimodal inputs. Additionally, we develop training strategies specifically to enhance the understanding of multi-image inputs. Our method markedly boosts the performance on 7 multi-image scenarios, contributing to increments on average accuracy by 2.13% and 7.60% against strong MLLMs baselines with 3B and 11B LLMs, respectively.
A Chinese Dataset for Evaluating the Safeguards in Large Language Models
Authors: Yuxia Wang, Zenan Zhai, Haonan Li, Xudong Han, Lizhi Lin, Zhenxuan Zhang, Jingru Zhao, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs, as well as corresponding prompts that can be used to examine the safety mechanisms of LLMs. However, the focus has been almost exclusively on English, and little has been explored for other languages. Here we aim to bridge this gap. We first introduce a dataset for the safety evaluation of Chinese LLMs, and then extend it to two other scenarios that can be used to better identify false negative and false positive examples in terms of risky prompt rejections. We further present a set of fine-grained safety assessment criteria for each risk type, facilitating both manual annotation and automatic evaluation in terms of LLM response harmfulness. Our experiments on five LLMs show that region-specific risks are the prevalent type of risk, presenting the major issue with all Chinese LLMs we experimented with. Our data is available at https://github.com/Libr-AI/do-not-answer. Warning: this paper contains example data that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.
BIDER: Bridging Knowledge Inconsistency for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented LLMs via Key Supporting Evidence
Authors: Jiajie Jin, Yutao Zhu, Yujia Zhou, Zhicheng Dou
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain QA, addressing inherent challenges in knowledge update and factual inadequacy. However, inconsistencies between retrieval knowledge and the necessary knowledge for LLMs, leading to a decline in LLM's answer quality. This paper introduces BIDER, an approach that refines retrieval documents into Key Supporting Evidence (KSE) through knowledge synthesis, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and preference alignment. We train BIDER by learning from crafting KSE, while maximizing its output to align with LLM's information acquisition preferences through reinforcement learning. Evaluations across five datasets show BIDER boosts LLMs' answer quality by 7% while reducing input content length in retrieval documents by 80%, outperforming existing methods. The proposed KSE simulation effectively equips LLMs with essential information for accurate question answering.
Can LLMs Compute with Reasons?
Authors: Harshit Sandilya, Peehu Raj, Jainit Sushil Bafna, Srija Mukhopadhyay, Shivansh Sharma, Ellwil Sharma, Arastu Sharma, Neeta Trivedi, Manish Shrivastava, Rajesh Kumar
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex mathematical tasks, prone to "hallucinating" incorrect answers due to their reliance on statistical patterns. This limitation is further amplified in average Small LangSLMs with limited context and training data. To address this challenge, we propose an "Inductive Learning" approach utilizing a distributed network of SLMs. This network leverages error-based learning and hint incorporation to refine the reasoning capabilities of SLMs. Our goal is to provide a framework that empowers SLMs to approach the level of logic-based applications achieved by high-parameter models, potentially benefiting any language model. Ultimately, this novel concept paves the way for bridging the logical gap between humans and LLMs across various fields.
Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria?
Authors: Xinyu Hu, Mingqi Gao, Sen Hu, Yang Zhang, Yicheng Chen, Teng Xu, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: nlg evaluation

Some prior work has shown that LLMs perform well in NLG evaluation for different tasks. However, we discover that LLMs seem to confuse different evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability. For further verification, we first consider avoiding issues of inconsistent conceptualization and vague expression in existing NLG quality criteria themselves. So we summarize a clear hierarchical classification system for 11 common aspects with corresponding different criteria from previous studies involved. Inspired by behavioral testing, we elaborately design 18 types of aspect-targeted perturbation attacks for fine-grained analysis of the evaluation behaviors of different LLMs. We also conduct human annotations beyond the guidance of the classification system to validate the impact of the perturbations. Our experimental results reveal confusion issues inherent in LLMs, as well as other noteworthy phenomena, and necessitate further research and improvements for LLM-based evaluation.
Small Models, Big Insights: Leveraging Slim Proxy Models To Decide When and What to Retrieve for LLMs
Authors: Jiejun Tan, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu, Peidong Guo, Kun Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

The integration of large language models (LLMs) and search engines represents a significant evolution in knowledge acquisition methodologies. However, determining the knowledge that an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine remains an unresolved issue. Most existing methods solve this problem through the results of preliminary answers or reasoning done by the LLM itself, but this incurs excessively high computational costs. This paper introduces a novel collaborative approach, namely SlimPLM, that detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a slim proxy model, to enhance the LLM's knowledge acquisition process. We employ a proxy model which has far fewer parameters, and take its answers as heuristic answers. Heuristic answers are then utilized to predict the knowledge required to answer the user question, as well as the known and unknown knowledge within the LLM. We only conduct retrieval for the missing knowledge in questions that the LLM does not know. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with two LLMs demonstrate a notable improvement in the end-to-end performance of LLMs in question-answering tasks, achieving or surpassing current state-of-the-art models with lower LLM inference costs.
Model Tailor: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Multi-modal Large Language Models
Authors: Didi Zhu, Zhongyi Sun, Zexi Li, Tao Shen, Ke Yan, Shouhong Ding, Kun Kuang, Chao Wu
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Catastrophic forgetting emerges as a critical challenge when fine-tuning multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), where improving performance on unseen tasks often leads to a significant performance drop on the original tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of catastrophic forgetting in MLLMs and introduces a post-training adjustment method called Model Tailor. Our method primarily preserves the pre-trained parameters while replacing a small number ($\leq$ 10\%) of fine-tuned parameters, maintaining $\sim$ 99\% effectiveness on original tasks versus pre-training, and achieving $\sim$ 97\% on new tasks compared to standard fine-tuning. Specifically, we derive a sparse mask to identify the "model patch", based on a fusion strategy that integrates salience and sensitivity analysis. Subsequently, a compensation mechanism is introduced to "decorate the patch", enhancing the model's performance on both target and original tasks. Additionally, our method is adaptable to multi-task scenarios. Through extensive experiments on InstructBLIP and LLaVA-1.5 in both image captioning and visual question answering tasks, our approach demonstrates significant task adaptability while preserving inherent pre-trained capabilities.
Citation Amnesia: On The Recency Bias of NLP and Other Academic Fields
Authors: Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Mohamed Abdalla, Bela Gipp, Saif M. Mohammad
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00

This study examines the tendency to cite older work across 20 fields of study over 43 years (1980--2023). We put NLP's propensity to cite older work in the context of these 20 other fields to analyze whether NLP shows similar temporal citation patterns to these other fields over time or whether differences can be observed. Our analysis, based on a dataset of approximately 240 million papers, reveals a broader scientific trend: many fields have markedly declined in citing older works (e.g., psychology, computer science). We term this decline a 'citation age recession', analogous to how economists define periods of reduced economic activity. The trend is strongest in NLP and ML research (-12.8% and -5.5% in citation age from previous peaks). Our results suggest that citing more recent works is not directly driven by the growth in publication rates (-3.4% across fields; -5.2% in humanities; -5.5% in formal sciences) -- even when controlling for an increase in the volume of papers. Our findings raise questions about the scientific community's engagement with past literature, particularly for NLP, and the potential consequences of neglecting older but relevant research. The data and a demo showcasing our results are publicly available.
Language Model Adaptation to Specialized Domains through Selective Masking based on Genre and Topical Characteristics
Authors: Anas Belfathi, Ygor Gallina, Nicolas Hernandez, Richard Dufour, Laura Monceaux
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent advances in pre-trained language modeling have facilitated significant progress across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Word masking during model training constitutes a pivotal component of language modeling in architectures like BERT. However, the prevalent method of word masking relies on random selection, potentially disregarding domain-specific linguistic attributes. In this article, we introduce an innovative masking approach leveraging genre and topicality information to tailor language models to specialized domains. Our method incorporates a ranking process that prioritizes words based on their significance, subsequently guiding the masking procedure. Experiments conducted using continual pre-training within the legal domain have underscored the efficacy of our approach on the LegalGLUE benchmark in the English language. Pre-trained language models and code are freely available for use.
Towards Cross-Tokenizer Distillation: the Universal Logit Distillation Loss for LLMs
Authors: Nicolas Boizard, Kevin El Haddad, Céline Hudelot, Pierre Colombo
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Deploying large language models (LLMs) of several billion parameters can be impractical in most industrial use cases due to constraints such as cost, latency limitations, and hardware accessibility. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a solution by compressing knowledge from resource-intensive large models to smaller ones. Various strategies exist, some relying on the text generated by the teacher model and optionally utilizing his logits to enhance learning. However, these methods based on logits often require both teacher and student models to share the same tokenizer, limiting their applicability across different LLM families. In this paper, we introduce Universal Logit Distillation (ULD) loss, grounded in optimal transport, to address this limitation. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of ULD loss in enabling distillation across models with different architectures and tokenizers, paving the way to a more widespread use of distillation techniques.
Speech Translation with Speech Foundation Models and Large Language Models: What is There and What is Missing?
Authors: Marco Gaido, Sara Papi, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli
Date: 2024-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently witnessed a transformative shift with the emergence of foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) that have revolutionized text-based NLP. This paradigm has extended to other modalities, including speech, where researchers are actively exploring the combination of Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) and LLMs into single, unified models capable of addressing multimodal tasks. Among such tasks, this paper focuses on speech-to-text translation (ST). By examining the published papers on the topic, we propose a unified view of the architectural solutions and training strategies presented so far, highlighting similarities and differences among them. Based on this examination, we not only organize the lessons learned but also show how diverse settings and evaluation approaches hinder the identification of the best-performing solution for each architectural building block and training choice. Lastly, we outline recommendations for future works on the topic aimed at better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the SFM+LLM solutions for ST.