pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AI on AI: Exploring the Utility of GPT as an Expert Annotator of AI Publications
Authors: Autumn Toney-Wails, Christian Schoeberl, James Dunham
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modelling, Prompt Engineering

Identifying scientific publications that are within a dynamic field of research often requires costly annotation by subject-matter experts. Resources like widely-accepted classification criteria or field taxonomies are unavailable for a domain like artificial intelligence (AI), which spans emerging topics and technologies. We address these challenges by inferring a functional definition of AI research from existing expert labels, and then evaluating state-of-the-art chatbot models on the task of expert data annotation. Using the arXiv publication database as ground-truth, we experiment with prompt engineering for GPT chatbot models to identify an alternative, automated expert annotation pipeline that assigns AI labels with 94% accuracy. For comparison, we fine-tune SPECTER, a transformer language model pre-trained on scientific publications, that achieves 96% accuracy (only 2% higher than GPT) on classifying AI publications. Our results indicate that with effective prompt engineering, chatbots can be used as reliable data annotators even where subject-area expertise is required. To evaluate the utility of chatbot-annotated datasets on downstream classification tasks, we train a new classifier on GPT-labeled data and compare its performance to the arXiv-trained model. The classifier trained on GPT-labeled data outperforms the arXiv-trained model by nine percentage points, achieving 82% accuracy.
Information Extraction: An application to the domain of hyper-local financial data on developing countries
Authors: Abuzar Royesh, Olamide Oladeji
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: NER, Relation, Relation Extraction

Despite the need for financial data on company activities in developing countries for development research and economic analysis, such data does not exist. In this project, we develop and evaluate two Natural Language Processing (NLP) based techniques to address this issue. First, we curate a custom dataset specific to the domain of financial text data on developing countries and explore multiple approaches for information extraction. We then explore a text-to-text approach with the transformer-based T5 model with the goal of undertaking simultaneous NER and relation extraction. We find that this model is able to learn the custom text structure output data corresponding to the entities and their relations, resulting in an accuracy of 92.44\%, a precision of 68.25\% and a recall of 54.20\% from our best T5 model on the combined task. Secondly, we explore an approach with sequential NER and relation extration. For the NER, we run pre-trained and fine-tuned models using SpaCy, and we develop a custom relation extraction model using SpaCy's Dependency Parser output and some heuristics to determine entity relationships \cite{spacy}. We obtain an accuracy of 84.72\%, a precision of 6.06\% and a recall of 5.57\% on this sequential task.
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models
Authors: Yongyu Mu, Peinan Feng, Zhiquan Cao, Yuzhang Wu, Bei Li, Chenglong Wang, Tong Xiao, Kai Song, Tongran Liu, Chunliang Zhang, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

In this study, we reveal an in-context learning (ICL) capability of multilingual large language models (LLMs): by translating the input to several languages, we provide Parallel Input in Multiple Languages (PiM) to LLMs, which significantly enhances their comprehension abilities. To test this capability, we design extensive experiments encompassing 8 typical datasets, 7 languages and 8 state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs. Experimental results show that (1) incorporating more languages help PiM surpass the conventional ICL further; (2) even combining with the translations that are inferior to baseline performance can also help. Moreover, by examining the activated neurons in LLMs, we discover a counterintuitive but interesting phenomenon. Contrary to the common thought that PiM would activate more neurons than monolingual input to leverage knowledge learned from diverse languages, PiM actually inhibits neurons and promotes more precise neuron activation especially when more languages are added. This phenomenon aligns with the neuroscience insight about synaptic pruning, which removes less used neural connections, strengthens remainders, and then enhances brain intelligence.
LAMP: A Language Model on the Map
Authors: Pasquale Balsebre, Weiming Huang, Gao Cong
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to play an increasingly important role in our lives, providing assistance across a wide array of tasks. In the geospatial domain, LLMs have demonstrated the ability to answer generic questions, such as identifying a country's capital; nonetheless, their utility is hindered when it comes to answering fine-grained questions about specific places, such as grocery stores or restaurants, which constitute essential aspects of people's everyday lives. This is mainly because the places in our cities haven't been systematically fed into LLMs, so as to understand and memorize them. This study introduces a novel framework for fine-tuning a pre-trained model on city-specific data, to enable it to provide accurate recommendations, while minimizing hallucinations. We share our model, LAMP, and the data used to train it. We conduct experiments to analyze its ability to correctly retrieving spatial objects, and compare it to well-known open- and closed- source language models, such as GPT-4. Finally, we explore its emerging capabilities through a case study on day planning.
RAGGED: Towards Informed Design of Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems
Authors: Jennifer Hsia, Afreen Shaikh, Zhiruo Wang, Graham Neubig
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can significantly improve the performance of language models (LMs) by providing additional context for tasks such as document-based question answering (DBQA). However, the effectiveness of RAG is highly dependent on its configuration. To systematically find the optimal configuration, we introduce RAGGED, a framework for analyzing RAG configurations across various DBQA tasks. Using the framework, we discover distinct LM behaviors in response to varying context quantities, context qualities, and retrievers. For instance, while some models are robust to noisy contexts, monotonically performing better with more contexts, others are more noise-sensitive and can effectively use only a few contexts before declining in performance. This framework also provides a deeper analysis of these differences by evaluating the LMs' sensitivity to signal and noise under specific context quality conditions. Using RAGGED, researchers and practitioners can derive actionable insights about how to optimally configure their RAG systems for their specific question-answering tasks.
ChartInstruct: Instruction Tuning for Chart Comprehension and Reasoning
Authors: Ahmed Masry, Mehrad Shahmohammadi, Md Rizwan Parvez, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Chart Understanding, Instruction Following, Question Answering

Charts provide visual representations of data and are widely used for analyzing information, addressing queries, and conveying insights to others. Various chart-related downstream tasks have emerged recently, such as question-answering and summarization. A common strategy to solve these tasks is to fine-tune various models originally trained on vision tasks language. However, such task-specific models are not capable of solving a wide range of chart-related tasks, constraining their real-world applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce ChartInstruct: a novel chart-specific vision-language Instruction-following dataset comprising 191K instructions generated with 71K charts. We then present two distinct systems for instruction tuning on such datasets: (1) an end-to-end model that connects a vision encoder for chart understanding with a LLM; and (2) a pipeline model that employs a two-step approach to extract chart data tables and input them into the LLM. In experiments on four downstream tasks, we first show the effectiveness of our model--achieving a new set of state-of-the-art results. Further evaluation shows that our instruction-tuning approach supports a wide array of real-world chart comprehension and reasoning scenarios, thereby expanding the scope and applicability of our models to new kinds of tasks.
AraTrust: An Evaluation of Trustworthiness for LLMs in Arabic
Authors: Emad A. Alghamdi, Reem I. Masoud, Deema Alnuhait, Afnan Y. Alomairi, Ahmed Ashraf, Mohamed Zaytoon
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Multiple-choice

The swift progress and widespread acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) systems highlight a pressing requirement to comprehend both the capabilities and potential risks associated with AI. Given the linguistic complexity, cultural richness, and underrepresented status of Arabic in AI research, there is a pressing need to focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) performance and safety for Arabic-related tasks. Despite some progress in their development, there is a lack of comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation benchmarks, which presents a major challenge in accurately assessing and improving the safety of LLMs when prompted in Arabic. In this paper, we introduce AraTrust, the first comprehensive trustworthiness benchmark for LLMs in Arabic. AraTrust comprises 522 human-written multiple-choice questions addressing diverse dimensions related to truthfulness, ethics, safety, physical health, mental health, unfairness, illegal activities, privacy, and offensive language. We evaluated a set of LLMs against our benchmark to assess their trustworthiness. GPT-4 was the most trustworthy LLM, while open-source models, particularly AceGPT 7B and Jais 13B, struggled to achieve a score of 60% in our benchmark.
Ethos: Rectifying Language Models in Orthogonal Parameter Space
Authors: Lei Gao, Yue Niu, Tingting Tang, Salman Avestimehr, Murali Annavaram
Date: 2024-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, Task Arithmetic

Language models (LMs) have greatly propelled the research on natural language processing. However, LMs also raise concerns regarding the generation of biased or toxic content and the potential disclosure of private information from the training dataset. In this work, we present a new efficient approach, Ethos, that rectifies LMs to mitigate toxicity and bias in outputs and avoid privacy leakage. Ethos is built on task arithmetic. However, unlike current task arithmetic algorithms, Ethos distinguishes general beneficial and undesired knowledge when reconstructing task vectors. Specifically, Ethos first obtains a set of principal components from the pre-trained models using singular value decomposition. Then, by projecting the task vector onto principal components, Ethos identifies the principal components that encode general or undesired knowledge. Ethos performs negating using the task vector with undesired knowledge only, thereby minimizing collateral damage on general model utility. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on three different tasks: debiasing, detoxification, and memorization unlearning. Evaluations show Ethos is more effective in removing undesired knowledge and maintaining the overall model performance compared to current task arithmetic methods.
LMStyle Benchmark: Evaluating Text Style Transfer for Chatbots
Authors: Jianlin Chen
Date: 2024-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer

Since the breakthrough of ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention in the research community. With the development of LLMs, the question of text style transfer for conversational models has emerged as a natural extension, where chatbots may possess their own styles or even characters. However, standard evaluation metrics have not yet been established for this new settings. This paper aims to address this issue by proposing the LMStyle Benchmark, a novel evaluation framework applicable to chat-style text style transfer (C-TST), that can measure the quality of style transfer for LLMs in an automated and scalable manner. In addition to conventional style strength metrics, LMStyle Benchmark further considers a novel aspect of metrics called appropriateness, a high-level metrics take account of coherence, fluency and other implicit factors without the aid of reference samples. Our experiments demonstrate that the new evaluation methods introduced by LMStyle Benchmark have a higher correlation with human judgments in terms of appropriateness. Based on LMStyle Benchmark, we present a comprehensive list of evaluation results for popular LLMs, including LLaMA, Alpaca, and Vicuna, reflecting their stylistic properties, such as formality and sentiment strength, along with their appropriateness.
Detecting Hallucination and Coverage Errors in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controversial Topics
Authors: Tyler A. Chang, Katrin Tomanek, Jessica Hoffmann, Nithum Thain, Erin Van Liemt, Kathleen Meier-Hellstern, Lucas Dixon
Date: 2024-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Text Generation

We explore a strategy to handle controversial topics in LLM-based chatbots based on Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View (NPOV) principle: acknowledge the absence of a single true answer and surface multiple perspectives. We frame this as retrieval augmented generation, where perspectives are retrieved from a knowledge base and the LLM is tasked with generating a fluent and faithful response from the given perspectives. As a starting point, we use a deterministic retrieval system and then focus on common LLM failure modes that arise during this approach to text generation, namely hallucination and coverage errors. We propose and evaluate three methods to detect such errors based on (1) word-overlap, (2) salience, and (3) LLM-based classifiers. Our results demonstrate that LLM-based classifiers, even when trained only on synthetic errors, achieve high error detection performance, with ROC AUC scores of 95.3% for hallucination and 90.5% for coverage error detection on unambiguous error cases. We show that when no training data is available, our other methods still yield good results on hallucination (84.0%) and coverage error (85.2%) detection.
From "um" to "yeah": Producing, predicting, and regulating information flow in human conversation
Authors: Claire Augusta Bergey, Simon DeDeo
Date: 2024-03-13 00:00:00

Conversation demands attention. Speakers must call words to mind, listeners must make sense of them, and both together must negotiate this flow of information, all in fractions of a second. We used large language models to study how this works in a large-scale dataset of English-language conversation, the CANDOR corpus. We provide a new estimate of the information density of unstructured conversation, of approximately 13 bits/second, and find significant effects associated with the cognitive load of both retrieving, and presenting, that information. We also reveal a role for backchannels -- the brief yeahs, uh-huhs, and mhmms that listeners provide -- in regulating the production of novelty: the lead-up to a backchannel is associated with declining information rate, while speech downstream rebounds to previous rates. Our results provide new insights into long-standing theories of how we respond to fluctuating demands on cognitive resources, and how we negotiate those demands in partnership with others.
Extremal graphical modeling with latent variables via convex optimization
Authors: Sebastian Engelke, Armeen Taeb
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00

Extremal graphical models encode the conditional independence structure of multivariate extremes and provide a powerful tool for quantifying the risk of rare events. Prior work on learning these graphs from data has focused on the setting where all relevant variables are observed. For the popular class of H\"usler-Reiss models, we propose the \texttt{eglatent} method, a tractable convex program for learning extremal graphical models in the presence of latent variables. Our approach decomposes the H\"usler-Reiss precision matrix into a sparse component encoding the graphical structure among the observed variables after conditioning on the latent variables, and a low-rank component encoding the effect of a few latent variables on the observed variables. We provide finite-sample guarantees of \texttt{eglatent} and show that it consistently recovers the conditional graph as well as the number of latent variables. We highlight the improved performances of our approach on synthetic and real data.
Scalability of Metropolis-within-Gibbs schemes for high-dimensional Bayesian models
Authors: Filippo Ascolani, Gareth O. Roberts, Giacomo Zanella
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00

We study general coordinate-wise MCMC schemes (such as Metropolis-within-Gibbs samplers), which are commonly used to fit Bayesian non-conjugate hierarchical models. We relate their convergence properties to the ones of the corresponding (potentially not implementable) Gibbs sampler through the notion of conditional conductance. This allows us to study the performances of popular Metropolis-within-Gibbs schemes for non-conjugate hierarchical models, in high-dimensional regimes where both number of datapoints and parameters increase. Given random data-generating assumptions, we establish dimension-free convergence results, which are in close accordance with numerical evidences. Applications to Bayesian models for binary regression with unknown hyperparameters and discretely observed diffusions are also discussed. Motivated by such statistical applications, auxiliary results of independent interest on approximate conductances and perturbation of Markov operators are provided.
Analysis of singular subspaces under random perturbations
Authors: Ke Wang
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00

We present a comprehensive analysis of singular vector and singular subspace perturbations in the context of the signal plus random Gaussian noise matrix model. Assuming a low-rank signal matrix, we extend the Davis-Kahan-Wedin theorem in a fully generalized manner, applicable to any unitarily invariant matrix norm, extending previous results of O'Rourke, Vu and the author. We also obtain the fine-grained results, which encompass the $\ell_\infty$ analysis of singular vectors, the $\ell_{2, \infty}$ analysis of singular subspaces, as well as the exploration of linear and bilinear functions related to the singular vectors. Moreover, we explore the practical implications of these findings, in the context of the Gaussian mixture model and the submatrix localization problem.
Viral Load Inference in Non-Adaptive Pooled Testing
Authors: Mansoor Sheikh, David Saad
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Medical diagnostic testing can be made significantly more efficient using pooled testing protocols. These typically require a sparse infection signal and use either binary or real-valued entries of O(1). However, existing methods do not allow for inferring viral loads which span many orders of magnitude. We develop a message passing algorithm coupled with a PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) specific noise function to allow accurate inference of realistic viral load signals. This work is in the non-adaptive setting and could open the possibility of efficient screening where viral load determination is clinically important.
Logical Discrete Graphical Models Must Supplement Large Language Models for Information Synthesis
Authors: Gregory Coppola
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Given the emergent reasoning abilities of large language models, information retrieval is becoming more complex. Rather than just retrieve a document, modern information retrieval systems advertise that they can synthesize an answer based on potentially many different documents, conflicting data sources, and using reasoning. We review recent literature and argue that the large language model has crucial flaws that prevent it from on its own ever constituting general intelligence, or answering general information synthesis requests. This review shows that the following are problems for large language models: hallucinations, complex reasoning, planning under uncertainty, and complex calculations. We outline how logical discrete graphical models can solve all of these problems, and outline a method of training a logical discrete model from unlabeled text.
Seed-based information retrieval in networks of research publications: Evaluation of direct citations, bibliographic coupling, co-citations and PubMed related article score
Authors: Peter Sjögårde, Per Ahlgren
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

In this contribution, we deal with seed-based information retrieval in networks of research publications. Using systematic reviews as a baseline, and publication data from the NIH Open Citation Collection, we compare the performance of the three citation-based approaches direct citation, co-citation, and bibliographic coupling with respect to recall and precision measures. In addition, we include the PubMed Related Article score as well as combined approaches in the comparison. We also provide a fairly comprehensive review of earlier research in which citation relations have been used for information retrieval purposes. The results show an advantage for co-citation over bibliographic coupling and direct citation. However, combining the three approaches outperforms the exclusive use of co-citation in the study. The results further indicate, in line with previous research, that combining citation-based approaches with textual approaches enhances the performance of seed-based information retrieval. The results from the study may guide approaches combining citation-based and textual approaches in their choice of citation similarity measures. We suggest that future research use more structured approaches to evaluate methods for seed-based retrieval of publications, including comparative approaches as well as the elaboration of common data sets and baselines for evaluation.
Online and Offline Evaluation in Search Clarification
Authors: Leila Tavakoli, Johanne R. Trippas, Hamed Zamani, Falk Scholer, Mark Sanderson
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

The effectiveness of clarification question models in engaging users within search systems is currently constrained, casting doubt on their overall usefulness. To improve the performance of these models, it is crucial to employ assessment approaches that encompass both real-time feedback from users (online evaluation) and the characteristics of clarification questions evaluated through human assessment (offline evaluation). However, the relationship between online and offline evaluations has been debated in information retrieval. This study aims to investigate how this discordance holds in search clarification. We use user engagement as ground truth and employ several offline labels to investigate to what extent the offline ranked lists of clarification resemble the ideal ranked lists based on online user engagement.