pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Decoding the Echoes of Vision from fMRI: Memory Disentangling for Past Semantic Information
Authors: Runze Xia, Congchi Yin, Piji Li
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

The human visual system is capable of processing continuous streams of visual information, but how the brain encodes and retrieves recent visual memories during continuous visual processing remains unexplored. This study investigates the capacity of working memory to retain past information under continuous visual stimuli. And then we propose a new task Memory Disentangling, which aims to extract and decode past information from fMRI signals. To address the issue of interference from past memory information, we design a disentangled contrastive learning method inspired by the phenomenon of proactive interference. This method separates the information between adjacent fMRI signals into current and past components and decodes them into image descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that this method effectively disentangles the information within fMRI signals. This research could advance brain-computer interfaces and mitigate the problem of low temporal resolution in fMRI.
Anti-stereotypical Predictive Text Suggestions Do Not Reliably Yield Anti-stereotypical Writing
Authors: Connor Baumler, Hal Daumé III
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

AI-based systems such as language models can replicate and amplify social biases reflected in their training data. Among other questionable behavior, this can lead to LM-generated text--and text suggestions--that contain normatively inappropriate stereotypical associations. In this paper, we consider the question of how "debiasing" a language model impacts stories that people write using that language model in a predictive text scenario. We find that (n=414), in certain scenarios, language model suggestions that align with common social stereotypes are more likely to be accepted by human authors. Conversely, although anti-stereotypical language model suggestions sometimes lead to an increased rate of anti-stereotypical stories, this influence is far from sufficient to lead to "fully debiased" stories.
Wait, but Tylenol is Acetaminophen... Investigating and Improving Language Models' Ability to Resist Requests for Misinformation
Authors: Shan Chen, Mingye Gao, Kuleen Sasse, Thomas Hartvigsen, Brian Anthony, Lizhou Fan, Hugo Aerts, Jack Gallifant, Danielle Bitterman
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Misinformation

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are trained to follow directions, but this introduces a vulnerability to blindly comply with user requests even if they generate wrong information. In medicine, this could accelerate the generation of misinformation that impacts human well-being. Objectives/Methods: We analyzed compliance to requests to generate misleading content about medications in settings where models know the request is illogical. We investigated whether in-context directions and instruction-tuning of LLMs to prioritize logical reasoning over compliance reduced misinformation risk. Results: While all frontier LLMs complied with misinformation requests, both prompt-based and parameter-based approaches can improve the detection of logic flaws in requests and prevent the dissemination of medical misinformation. Conclusion: Shifting LLMs to prioritize logic over compliance could reduce risks of exploitation for medical misinformation.
Word-wise intonation model for cross-language TTS systems
Authors: Tomilov A. A., Gromova A. Y., Svischev A. N
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Prosody Prediction, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

In this paper we propose a word-wise intonation model for Russian language and show how it can be generalized for other languages. The proposed model is suitable for automatic data markup and its extended application to text-to-speech systems. It can also be implemented for an intonation contour modeling by using rule-based algorithms or by predicting contours with language models. The key idea is a partial elimination of the variability connected with different placements of a stressed syllable in a word. It is achieved with simultaneous applying of pitch simplification with a dynamic time warping clustering. The proposed model could be used as a tool for intonation research or as a backbone for prosody description in text-to-speech systems. As the advantage of the model, we show its relations with the existing intonation systems as well as the possibility of using language models for prosody prediction. Finally, we demonstrate some practical evidence of the system robustness to parameter variations.
Disentangling Singlish Discourse Particles with Task-Driven Representation
Authors: Linus Tze En Foo, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Machine Translation, Representation Learning

Singlish, or formally Colloquial Singapore English, is an English-based creole language originating from the SouthEast Asian country Singapore. The language contains influences from Sinitic languages such as Chinese dialects, Malay, Tamil and so forth. A fundamental task to understanding Singlish is to first understand the pragmatic functions of its discourse particles, upon which Singlish relies heavily to convey meaning. This work offers a preliminary effort to disentangle the Singlish discourse particles (lah, meh and hor) with task-driven representation learning. After disentanglement, we cluster these discourse particles to differentiate their pragmatic functions, and perform Singlish-to-English machine translation. Our work provides a computational method to understanding Singlish discourse particles, and opens avenues towards a deeper comprehension of the language and its usage.
Boosting Hybrid Autoregressive Transducer-based ASR with Internal Acoustic Model Training and Dual Blank Thresholding
Authors: Takafumi Moriya, Takanori Ashihara, Masato Mimura, Hiroshi Sato, Kohei Matsuura, Ryo Masumura, Taichi Asami
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

A hybrid autoregressive transducer (HAT) is a variant of neural transducer that models blank and non-blank posterior distributions separately. In this paper, we propose a novel internal acoustic model (IAM) training strategy to enhance HAT-based speech recognition. IAM consists of encoder and joint networks, which are fully shared and jointly trained with HAT. This joint training not only enhances the HAT training efficiency but also encourages IAM and HAT to emit blanks synchronously which skips the more expensive non-blank computation, resulting in more effective blank thresholding for faster decoding. Experiments demonstrate that the relative error reductions of the HAT with IAM compared to the vanilla HAT are statistically significant. Moreover, we introduce dual blank thresholding, which combines both HAT- and IAM-blank thresholding and a compatible decoding algorithm. This results in a 42-75% decoding speed-up with no major performance degradation.
Alignment-Free Training for Transducer-based Multi-Talker ASR
Authors: Takafumi Moriya, Shota Horiguchi, Marc Delcroix, Ryo Masumura, Takanori Ashihara, Hiroshi Sato, Kohei Matsuura, Masato Mimura
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Extending the RNN Transducer (RNNT) to recognize multi-talker speech is essential for wider automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications. Multi-talker RNNT (MT-RNNT) aims to achieve recognition without relying on costly front-end source separation. MT-RNNT is conventionally implemented using architectures with multiple encoders or decoders, or by serializing all speakers' transcriptions into a single output stream. The first approach is computationally expensive, particularly due to the need for multiple encoder processing. In contrast, the second approach involves a complex label generation process, requiring accurate timestamps of all words spoken by all speakers in the mixture, obtained from an external ASR system. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment-free training scheme for the MT-RNNT (MT-RNNT-AFT) that adopts the standard RNNT architecture. The target labels are created by appending a prompt token corresponding to each speaker at the beginning of the transcription, reflecting the order of each speaker's appearance in the mixtures. Thus, MT-RNNT-AFT can be trained without relying on accurate alignments, and it can recognize all speakers' speech with just one round of encoder processing. Experiments show that MT-RNNT-AFT achieves performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art alternatives, while greatly simplifying the training process.
LexEval: A Comprehensive Chinese Legal Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models
Authors: Haitao Li, You Chen, Qingyao Ai, Yueyue Wu, Ruizhe Zhang, Yiqun Liu
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks. (2) Scale: To our knowledge, LexEval is currently the largest Chinese legal evaluation dataset, comprising 23 tasks and 14,150 questions. (3) Data: we utilize formatted existing datasets, exam datasets and newly annotated datasets by legal experts to comprehensively evaluate the various capabilities of LLMs. LexEval not only focuses on the ability of LLMs to apply fundamental legal knowledge but also dedicates efforts to examining the ethical issues involved in their application. We evaluated 38 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtained some interesting findings. The experiments and findings offer valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions for developing Chinese legal systems and LLM evaluation pipelines. The LexEval dataset and leaderboard are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/CSHaitao/LexEval} and will be continuously updated.
Analysing Zero-Shot Readability-Controlled Sentence Simplification
Authors: Abdullah Barayan, Jose Camacho-Collados, Fernando Alva-Manchego
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Text Simplification

Readability-controlled text simplification (RCTS) rewrites texts to lower readability levels while preserving their meaning. RCTS models often depend on parallel corpora with readability annotations on both source and target sides. Such datasets are scarce and difficult to curate, especially at the sentence level. To reduce reliance on parallel data, we explore using instruction-tuned large language models for zero-shot RCTS. Through automatic and manual evaluations, we examine: (1) how different types of contextual information affect a model's ability to generate sentences with the desired readability, and (2) the trade-off between achieving target readability and preserving meaning. Results show that all tested models struggle to simplify sentences (especially to the lowest levels) due to models' limitations and characteristics of the source sentences that impede adequate rewriting. Our experiments also highlight the need for better automatic evaluation metrics tailored to RCTS, as standard ones often misinterpret common simplification operations, and inaccurately assess readability and meaning preservation.
PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling
Authors: Huachuan Qiu, Lizhi Ma, Zhenzhong Lan
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00

As awareness of mental health issues grows, online counseling support services are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Detecting whether users express suicidal ideation in text-based counseling services is crucial for identifying and prioritizing at-risk individuals. However, the lack of domain-specific systems to facilitate fine-grained suicide detection and corresponding risk assessment in online counseling poses a significant challenge for automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. In this paper, we propose PsyGUARD, an automated system for detecting suicide ideation and assessing risk in psychological counseling. To achieve this, we first develop a detailed taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation based on foundational theories. We then curate a large-scale, high-quality dataset called PsySUICIDE for suicide detection. To evaluate the capabilities of automated systems in fine-grained suicide detection, we establish a range of baselines. Subsequently, to assist automated services in providing safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment, we propose to build a suite of risk assessment frameworks. Our study not only provides an insightful analysis of the effectiveness of automated risk assessment systems based on fine-grained suicide detection but also highlights their potential to improve mental health services on online counseling platforms. Code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/qiuhuachuan/PsyGUARD.
Divided by discipline? A systematic literature review on the quantification of online sexism and misogyny using a semi-automated approach
Authors: Aditi Dutta, Susan Banducci, Chico Q. Camargo
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review, text-classification, Text Classification

Several computational tools have been developed to detect and identify sexism, misogyny, and gender-based hate speech, particularly on online platforms. These tools draw on insights from both social science and computer science. Given the increasing concern over gender-based discrimination in digital spaces, the contested definitions and measurements of sexism, and the rise of interdisciplinary efforts to understand its online manifestations, a systematic literature review is essential for capturing the current state and trajectory of this evolving field. In this review, we make four key contributions: (1) we synthesize the literature into five core themes: definitions of sexism and misogyny, disciplinary divergences, automated detection methods, associated challenges, and design-based interventions; (2) we adopt an interdisciplinary lens, bridging theoretical and methodological divides across disciplines; (3) we highlight critical gaps, including the need for intersectional approaches, the under-representation of non-Western languages and perspectives, and the limited focus on proactive design strategies beyond text classification; and (4) we offer a methodological contribution by applying a rigorous semi-automated systematic review process guided by PRISMA, establishing a replicable standard for future work in this domain. Our findings reveal a clear disciplinary divide in how sexism and misogyny are conceptualized and measured. Through an evidence-based synthesis, we examine how existing studies have attempted to bridge this gap through interdisciplinary collaboration. Drawing on both social science theories and computational modeling practices, we assess the strengths and limitations of current methodologies. Finally, we outline key challenges and future directions for advancing research on the detection and mitigation of online sexism and misogyny.
AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representation model for African languages
Authors: Jesujoba O. Alabi, Xuechen Liu, Dietrich Klakow, Junichi Yamagishi
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Cross-corpus, Language Identification, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken language identification

In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 covered 16 African languages, we expand this to 1,226 through continued pretraining on 10K+ hours of speech data from diverse sources, benefiting an African population of over 600M. We evaluate AfriHuBERT on two key speech tasks, Spoken Language Identification (SLID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), using the FLEURS benchmark. Our results show a +3.6% F1 score improvement for SLID and a -2.1% average Word Error Rate (WER) reduction for ASR over mHuBERT-147, and demonstrates competitiveness with larger SSL models such as MMS and XEUS. Further analysis shows that ASR models trained on AfriHuBERT exhibit improved cross-corpus generalization and are competitive in extremely low-resource ASR scenarios.
TaskComplexity: A Dataset for Task Complexity Classification with In-Context Learning, FLAN-T5 and GPT-4o Benchmarks
Authors: Areeg Fahad Rasheed, M. Zarkoosh, Safa F. Abbas, Sana Sabah Al-Azzawi
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

This paper addresses the challenge of classifying and assigning programming tasks to experts, a process that typically requires significant effort, time, and cost. To tackle this issue, a novel dataset containing a total of 4,112 programming tasks was created by extracting tasks from various websites. Web scraping techniques were employed to collect this dataset of programming problems systematically. Specific HTML tags were tracked to extract key elements of each issue, including the title, problem description, input-output, examples, problem class, and complexity score. Examples from the dataset are provided in the appendix to illustrate the variety and complexity of tasks included. The dataset's effectiveness has been evaluated and benchmarked using two approaches; the first approach involved fine-tuning the FLAN-T5 small model on the dataset, while the second approach used in-context learning (ICL) with the GPT-4o mini. The performance was assessed using standard metrics: accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score. The results indicated that in-context learning with GPT-4o-mini outperformed the FLAN-T5 model.
Reference Trustable Decoding: A Training-Free Augmentation Paradigm for Large Language Models
Authors: Luohe Shi, Yao Yao, Zuchao Li, Lefei Zhang, Hai Zhao
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and demonstrated impressive capabilities. In-Context Learning (ICL) and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) are currently two mainstream methods for augmenting LLMs to downstream tasks. ICL typically constructs a few-shot learning scenario, either manually or by setting up a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, helping models quickly grasp domain knowledge or question-answering patterns without changing model parameters. However, this approach involves trade-offs, such as slower inference speed and increased space occupancy. PEFT assists the model in adapting to tasks through minimal parameter modifications, but the training process still demands high hardware requirements, even with a small number of parameters involved. To address these challenges, we propose Reference Trustable Decoding (RTD), a paradigm that allows models to quickly adapt to new tasks without fine-tuning, maintaining low inference costs. RTD constructs a reference datastore from the provided training examples and optimizes the LLM's final vocabulary distribution by flexibly selecting suitable references based on the input, resulting in more trustable responses and enabling the model to adapt to downstream tasks at a low cost. Experimental evaluations on various LLMs using different benchmarks demonstrate that RTD establishes a new paradigm for augmenting models to downstream tasks. Furthermore, our method exhibits strong orthogonality with traditional methods, allowing for concurrent usage. Our code can be found at https://github.com/ShiLuohe/ReferenceTrustableDecoding
How Entangled is Factuality and Deception in German?
Authors: Aswathy Velutharambath, Amelie Wührl, Roman Klinger
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deception Detection, Fact Checking, Natural Language Inference

The statement "The earth is flat" is factually inaccurate, but if someone truly believes and argues in its favor, it is not deceptive. Research on deception detection and fact checking often conflates factual accuracy with the truthfulness of statements. This assumption makes it difficult to (a) study subtle distinctions and interactions between the two and (b) gauge their effects on downstream tasks. The belief-based deception framework disentangles these properties by defining texts as deceptive when there is a mismatch between what people say and what they truly believe. In this study, we assess if presumed patterns of deception generalize to German language texts. We test the effectiveness of computational models in detecting deception using an established corpus of belief-based argumentation. Finally, we gauge the impact of deception on the downstream task of fact checking and explore if this property confounds verification models. Surprisingly, our analysis finds no correlation with established cues of deception. Previous work claimed that computational models can outperform humans in deception detection accuracy, however, our experiments show that both traditional and state-of-the-art models struggle with the task, performing no better than random guessing. For fact checking, we find that Natural Language Inference-based verification performs worse on non-factual and deceptive content, while prompting Large Language Models for the same task is less sensitive to these properties.
PACE: Abstractions for Communicating Efficiently
Authors: Jonathan D. Thomas, Andrea Silvi, Devdatt Dubhashi, Moa Johansson
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00

A central but unresolved aspect of problem-solving in AI is the capability to introduce and use abstractions, something humans excel at. Work in cognitive science has demonstrated that humans tend towards higher levels of abstraction when engaged in collaborative task-oriented communication, enabling gradually shorter and more information-efficient utterances. Several computational methods have attempted to replicate this phenomenon, but all make unrealistic simplifying assumptions about how abstractions are introduced and learned. Our method, Procedural Abstractions for Communicating Efficiently (PACE), overcomes these limitations through a neuro-symbolic approach. On the symbolic side, we draw on work from library learning for proposing abstractions. We combine this with neural methods for communication and reinforcement learning, via a novel use of bandit algorithms for controlling the exploration and exploitation trade-off in introducing new abstractions. PACE exhibits similar tendencies to humans on a collaborative construction task from the cognitive science literature, where one agent (the architect) instructs the other (the builder) to reconstruct a scene of block-buildings. PACE results in the emergence of an efficient language as a by-product of collaborative communication. Beyond providing mechanistic insights into human communication, our work serves as a first step to providing conversational agents with the ability for human-like communicative abstractions.