pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Defining Boundaries: A Spectrum of Task Feasibility for Large Language Models
Authors: Wenbo Zhang, Zihang Xu, Hengrui Cai
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks but often fail to handle queries that exceed their knowledge and capabilities, leading to incorrect or fabricated responses. This paper addresses the need for LLMs to recognize and refuse infeasible tasks due to the required skills surpassing their capabilities. We first conceptualize infeasible tasks for LLMs and provide categorizations that cover a spectrum of related hallucinations over existing literature. We develop and benchmark a new dataset comprising diverse infeasible and feasible tasks to evaluate multiple LLMs' abilities to reject infeasible tasks. Furthermore, we explore the potential of increasing LLMs' refusal capabilities with fine-tuning. Experiments validate the effectiveness of our trained models, offering promising directions for refining the operational boundaries of LLMs in real applications.
Iterative Improvement of an Additively Regularized Topic Model
Authors: Alex Gorbulev, Vasiliy Alekseev, Konstantin Vorontsov
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Topic Models

Topic modelling is fundamentally a soft clustering problem (of known objects -- documents, over unknown clusters -- topics). That is, the task is incorrectly posed. In particular, the topic models are unstable and incomplete. All this leads to the fact that the process of finding a good topic model (repeated hyperparameter selection, model training, and topic quality assessment) can be particularly long and labor-intensive. We aim to simplify the process, to make it more deterministic and provable. To this end, we present a method for iterative training of a topic model. The essence of the method is that a series of related topic models are trained so that each subsequent model is at least as good as the previous one, i.e., that it retains all the good topics found earlier. The connection between the models is achieved by additive regularization. The result of this iterative training is the last topic model in the series, which we call the iteratively updated additively regularized topic model (ITAR). Experiments conducted on several collections of natural language texts show that the proposed ITAR model performs better than other popular topic models (LDA, ARTM, BERTopic), its topics are diverse, and its perplexity (ability to "explain" the underlying data) is moderate.
SAGA: A Participant-specific Examination of Story Alternatives and Goal Applicability for a Deeper Understanding of Complex Events
Authors: Sai Vallurupalli, Katrin Erk, Francis Ferraro
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

Interpreting and assessing goal driven actions is vital to understanding and reasoning over complex events. It is important to be able to acquire the knowledge needed for this understanding, though doing so is challenging. We argue that such knowledge can be elicited through a participant achievement lens. We analyze a complex event in a narrative according to the intended achievements of the participants in that narrative, the likely future actions of the participants, and the likelihood of goal success. We collect 6.3K high quality goal and action annotations reflecting our proposed participant achievement lens, with an average weighted Fleiss-Kappa IAA of 80%. Our collection contains annotated alternate versions of each narrative. These alternate versions vary minimally from the "original" story, but can license drastically different inferences. Our findings suggest that while modern large language models can reflect some of the goal-based knowledge we study, they find it challenging to fully capture the design and intent behind concerted actions, even when the model pretraining included the data from which we extracted the goal knowledge. We show that smaller models fine-tuned on our dataset can achieve performance surpassing larger models.
HiLight: A Hierarchy-aware Light Global Model with Hierarchical Local ConTrastive Learning
Authors: Zhijian Chen, Zhonghua Li, Jianxin Yang, Ye Qi
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, text-classification, Text Classification

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a special sub-task of multi-label classification (MLC) whose taxonomy is constructed as a tree and each sample is assigned with at least one path in the tree. Latest HTC models contain three modules: a text encoder, a structure encoder and a multi-label classification head. Specially, the structure encoder is designed to encode the hierarchy of taxonomy. However, the structure encoder has scale problem. As the taxonomy size increases, the learnable parameters of recent HTC works grow rapidly. Recursive regularization is another widely-used method to introduce hierarchical information but it has collapse problem and generally relaxed by assigning with a small weight (ie. 1e-6). In this paper, we propose a Hierarchy-aware Light Global model with Hierarchical local conTrastive learning (HiLight), a lightweight and efficient global model only consisting of a text encoder and a multi-label classification head. We propose a new learning task to introduce the hierarchical information, called Hierarchical Local Contrastive Learning (HiLCL). Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.
LI-TTA: Language Informed Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition
Authors: Eunseop Yoon, Hee Suk Yoon, John Harvill, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Chang D. Yoo
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Test-time Adaptation

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a crucial solution to the domain shift challenge, wherein the target environment diverges from the original training environment. A prime exemplification is TTA for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which enhances model performance by leveraging output prediction entropy minimization as a self-supervision signal. However, a key limitation of this self-supervision lies in its primary focus on acoustic features, with minimal attention to the linguistic properties of the input. To address this gap, we propose Language Informed Test-Time Adaptation (LI-TTA), which incorporates linguistic insights during TTA for ASR. LI-TTA integrates corrections from an external language model to merge linguistic with acoustic information by minimizing the CTC loss from the correction alongside the standard TTA loss. With extensive experiments, we show that LI-TTA effectively improves the performance of TTA for ASR in various distribution shift situations.
Language-Informed Beam Search Decoding for Multilingual Machine Translation
Authors: Yilin Yang, Stefan Lee, Prasad Tadepalli
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Beam search decoding is the de-facto method for decoding auto-regressive Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, including multilingual NMT where the target language is specified as an input. However, decoding multilingual NMT models commonly produces ``off-target'' translations -- yielding translation outputs not in the intended language. In this paper, we first conduct an error analysis of off-target translations for a strong multilingual NMT model and identify how these decodings are produced during beam search. We then propose Language-informed Beam Search (LiBS), a general decoding algorithm incorporating an off-the-shelf Language Identification (LiD) model into beam search decoding to reduce off-target translations. LiBS is an inference-time procedure that is NMT-model agnostic and does not require any additional parallel data. Results show that our proposed LiBS algorithm on average improves +1.1 BLEU and +0.9 BLEU on WMT and OPUS datasets, and reduces off-target rates from 22.9\% to 7.7\% and 65.8\% to 25.3\% respectively.
Training an NLP Scholar at a Small Liberal Arts College: A Backwards Designed Course Proposal
Authors: Grusha Prasad, Forrest Davis
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

The rapid growth in natural language processing (NLP) over the last couple years has generated student interest and excitement in learning more about the field. In this paper, we present two types of students that NLP courses might want to train. First, an "NLP engineer" who is able to flexibly design, build and apply new technologies in NLP for a wide range of tasks. Second, an "NLP scholar" who is able to pose, refine and answer questions in NLP and how it relates to the society, while also learning to effectively communicate these answers to a broader audience. While these two types of skills are not mutually exclusive -- NLP engineers should be able to think critically, and NLP scholars should be able to build systems -- we think that courses can differ in the balance of these skills. As educators at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, the strengths of our students and our institution favors an approach that is better suited to train NLP scholars. In this paper we articulate what kinds of skills an NLP scholar should have, and then adopt a backwards design to propose course components that can aid the acquisition of these skills.
WiDe-analysis: Enabling One-click Content Moderation Analysis on Wikipedia's Articles for Deletion
Authors: Hsuvas Borkakoty, Luis Espinosa-Anke
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentiment Analysis

Content moderation in online platforms is crucial for ensuring activity therein adheres to existing policies, especially as these platforms grow. NLP research in this area has typically focused on automating some part of it given that it is not feasible to monitor all active discussions effectively. Past works have focused on revealing deletion patterns with like sentiment analysis, or on developing platform-specific models such as Wikipedia policy or stance detectors. Unsurprisingly, however, this valuable body of work is rather scattered, with little to no agreement with regards to e.g., the deletion discussions corpora used for training or the number of stance labels. Moreover, while efforts have been made to connect stance with rationales (e.g., to ground a deletion decision on the relevant policy), there is little explanability work beyond that. In this paper, we introduce a suite of experiments on Wikipedia deletion discussions and wide-analyis (Wikipedia Deletion Analysis), a Python package aimed at providing one click analysis to content moderation discussions. We release all assets associated with wide-analysis, including data, models and the Python package, and a HuggingFace space with the goal to accelerate research on automating content moderation in Wikipedia and beyond.
Large Language Model-based Role-Playing for Personalized Medical Jargon Extraction
Authors: Jung Hoon Lim, Sunjae Kwon, Zonghai Yao, John P. Lalor, Hong Yu
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Term Extraction

Previous studies reveal that Electronic Health Records (EHR), which have been widely adopted in the U.S. to allow patients to access their personal medical information, do not have high readability to patients due to the prevalence of medical jargon. Tailoring medical notes to individual comprehension by identifying jargon that is difficult for each person will enhance the utility of generative models. We present the first quantitative analysis to measure the impact of role-playing in LLM in medical term extraction. By comparing the results of Mechanical Turk workers over 20 sentences, our study demonstrates that LLM role-playing improves F1 scores in 95% of cases across 14 different socio-demographic backgrounds. Furthermore, applying role-playing with in-context learning outperformed the previous state-of-the-art models. Our research showed that ChatGPT can improve traditional medical term extraction systems by utilizing role-play to deliver personalized patient education, a potential that previous models had not achieved.
Improving Whisper's Recognition Performance for Under-Represented Language Kazakh Leveraging Unpaired Speech and Text
Authors: Jinpeng Li, Yu Pu, Qi Sun, Wei-Qiang Zhang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Whisper and other large-scale automatic speech recognition models have made significant progress in performance. However, their performance on many low-resource languages, such as Kazakh, is not satisfactory. It is worth researching how to utilize low-cost data to improve the performance of Whisper on under-represented languages. In this study, we utilized easily accessible unpaired speech and text data and combined the language model GPT with Whisper on Kazakh. We implemented end of transcript (EOT) judgment modification and hallucination penalty to improve the performance of speech recognition. Further, we employed the decoding average token log probability as a criterion to select samples from unlabeled speech data and used pseudo-labeled data to fine-tune the model to further improve its performance. Ultimately, we achieved more than 10\% absolute WER reduction in multiple experiments, and the whole process has the potential to be generalized to other under-represented languages.
P3: A Policy-Driven, Pace-Adaptive, and Diversity-Promoted Framework for data pruning in LLM Training
Authors: Yingxuan Yang, Huayi Wang, Muning Wen, Xiaoyun Mo, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang, Weinan Zhang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Logical Reasoning, Math

In the rapidly advancing field of Large Language Models (LLMs), effectively leveraging existing datasets during fine-tuning to maximize the model's potential is of paramount importance. This paper introduces P3, an adaptive framework aimed at optimizing the task-specific fine-tuning process through iterative data pruning. P3 consists of three key components: (1) Policy-driven Difficulty Measurement, which dynamically assesses data difficulty based on the model's real-time performance, replacing static metrics with adaptable evaluations; (2) Pace-Adaptive Selection, leveraging self-paced learning to progressively introduce more challenging data, thereby enhancing model capability; (3) Diversity Promotion, incorporating Determinantal Point Process (DPP) to ensure data diversity across epochs, enriching the learning process. We validate P3 on the reasoning scenarios, APPS and MATH, demonstrating significant improvements over traditional data pruning methods. By advancing dynamic data selection and utilization strategies, P3 contributes both a theoretical framework and concrete approach to fully exploit existing data for LLMs' performance improvement, offering utility across diverse tasks.
Context-Driven Index Trimming: A Data Quality Perspective to Enhancing Precision of RALMs
Authors: Kexin Ma, Ruochun Jin, Xi Wang, Huan Chen, Jing Ren, Yuhua Tang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALMs) have made significant strides in enhancing the accuracy of generated responses.However, existing research often overlooks the data quality issues within retrieval results, often caused by inaccurate existing vector-distance-based retrieval methods.We propose to boost the precision of RALMs' answers from a data quality perspective through the Context-Driven Index Trimming (CDIT) framework, where Context Matching Dependencies (CMDs) are employed as logical data quality rules to capture and regulate the consistency between retrieved contexts.Based on the semantic comprehension capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), CDIT can effectively identify and discard retrieval results that are inconsistent with the query context and further modify indexes in the database, thereby improving answer quality.Experiments demonstrate on challenging question-answering tasks.Also, the flexibility of CDIT is verified through its compatibility with various language models and indexing methods, which offers a promising approach to bolster RALMs' data quality and retrieval precision jointly.
SWIFT:A Scalable lightWeight Infrastructure for Fine-Tuning
Authors: Yuze Zhao, Jintao Huang, Jinghan Hu, Xingjun Wang, Yunlin Mao, Daoze Zhang, Hong Zhang, Zeyinzi Jiang, Zhikai Wu, Baole Ai, Ang Wang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Quantization, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Recent development in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have leverage Attention-based Transformer architectures and achieved superior performance and generalization capabilities. They have since covered extensive areas of traditional learning tasks. For instance, text-based tasks such as text-classification and sequence-labeling, as well as multi-modal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which were previously addressed using different models, can now be tackled based on one foundation model. Consequently, the training and lightweight fine-tuning of LLMs and MLLMs, especially those based on Transformer architecture, has become particularly important. In recognition of these overwhelming needs, we develop SWIFT, a customizable one-stop infrastructure for large models. With support of over $300+$ LLMs and $50+$ MLLMs, SWIFT stands as the open-source framework that provide the most comprehensive support for fine-tuning large models. In particular, it is the first training framework that provides systematic support for MLLMs. In addition to the core functionalities of fine-tuning, SWIFT also integrates post-training processes such as inference, evaluation, and model quantization, to facilitate fast adoptions of large models in various application scenarios. With a systematic integration of various training techniques, SWIFT offers helpful utilities such as benchmark comparisons among different training techniques for large models. For fine-tuning models specialized in agent framework, we show that notable improvements on the ToolBench leader-board can be achieved by training with customized dataset on SWIFT, with an increase of 5.2%-21.8% in the Act.EM metric over various baseline models, a reduction in hallucination by 1.6%-14.1%, and an average performance improvement of 8%-17%.
Your Context Is Not an Array: Unveiling Random Access Limitations in Transformers
Authors: MohammadReza Ebrahimi, Sunny Panchal, Roland Memisevic
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00

Despite their recent successes, Transformer-based large language models show surprising failure modes. A well-known example of such failure modes is their inability to length-generalize: solving problem instances at inference time that are longer than those seen during training. In this work, we further explore the root cause of this failure by performing a detailed analysis of model behaviors on the simple parity task. Our analysis suggests that length generalization failures are intricately related to a model's inability to perform random memory accesses within its context window. We present supporting evidence for this hypothesis by demonstrating the effectiveness of methodologies that circumvent the need for indexing or that enable random token access indirectly, through content-based addressing. We further show where and how the failure to perform random memory access manifests through attention map visualizations.
MABR: Multilayer Adversarial Bias Removal Without Prior Bias Knowledge
Authors: Maxwell J. Yin, Boyu Wang, Charles Ling
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Models trained on real-world data often mirror and exacerbate existing social biases. Traditional methods for mitigating these biases typically require prior knowledge of the specific biases to be addressed, such as gender or racial biases, and the social groups associated with each instance. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial training strategy that operates independently of prior bias-type knowledge and protected attribute labels. Our approach proactively identifies biases during model training by utilizing auxiliary models, which are trained concurrently by predicting the performance of the main model without relying on task labels. Additionally, we implement these auxiliary models at various levels of the feature maps of the main model, enabling the detection of a broader and more nuanced range of bias features. Through experiments on racial and gender biases in sentiment and occupation classification tasks, our method effectively reduces social biases without the need for demographic annotations. Moreover, our approach not only matches but often surpasses the efficacy of methods that require detailed demographic insights, marking a significant advancement in bias mitigation techniques.
Path-LLM: A Shortest-Path-based LLM Learning for Unified Graph Representation
Authors: Wenbo Shang, Xuliang Zhu, Xin Huang
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Unified graph representation learning aims to produce node embeddings, which can be applied to multiple downstream applications. However, existing studies based on graph neural networks and language models either suffer from the limitations of numerous training needed toward specific downstream predictions or have shallow semantic features. In this work, we propose a novel Path-LLM model to learn unified graph representation, which leverages a powerful large language model (LLM) to incorporate our proposed path features. Our Path-LLM framework consists of several well-designed techniques. First, we develop a new mechanism of long-to-short shortest path (L2SP) selection, which covers essential connections between different dense groups. An in-depth comparison of different path selection plans is offered to illustrate the strength of our designed L2SP. Then, we design path textualization to obtain L2SP-based training texts. Next, we feed the texts into a self-supervised LLM training process to learn embeddings. Extensive experiments on benchmarks validate the superiority of Path-LLM against the state-of-the-art WalkLM method on two classical graph learning tasks (node classification and link prediction) and one NP-hard graph query processing task (keyword search), meanwhile saving more than 90% of training paths.
Chain of Condition: Construct, Verify and Solve Conditions for Conditional Question Answering
Authors: Jiuheng Lin, Yuxuan Lai, Yansong Feng
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Conditional question answering (CQA) is an important task that aims to find probable answers and identify missing conditions. Existing approaches struggle with CQA due to two challenges: (1) precisely identifying necessary conditions and the logical relationship, and (2) verifying conditions to detect any that are missing. In this paper, we propose a novel prompting approach, Chain of condition, by first identifying all conditions and constructing their logical relationships explicitly according to the document, then verifying whether these conditions are satisfied, finally solving the logical expression to indicate any missing conditions and generating the answer accordingly. Experiments on two CQA benchmark datasets show our chain of condition outperforms existing prompting baselines, establishing a new state of the art. Furthermore, with only a few examples, our method can facilitate GPT-3.5-Turbo or GPT-4 to outperform all existing supervised models.