pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BabyLM Challenge: Exploring the Effect of Variation Sets on Language Model Training Efficiency
Authors: Akari Haga, Akiyo Fukatsu, Miyu Oba, Arianna Bisazza, Yohei Oseki
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

While current large language models have achieved a remarkable success, their data efficiency remains a challenge to overcome. Recently it has been suggested that child-directed speech (CDS) can improve training data efficiency of modern language models based on Transformer neural networks. However, it is not yet understood which specific properties of CDS are effective for training these models. In the context of the BabyLM Challenge, we focus on Variation Sets (VSs), sets of consecutive utterances expressing a similar intent with slightly different words and structures, which are ubiquitous in CDS. To assess the impact of VSs on training data efficiency, we augment CDS data with different proportions of artificial VSs and use these datasets to train an auto-regressive model, GPT-2. We find that the best proportion of VSs depends on the evaluation benchmark: BLiMP and GLUE scores benefit from the presence of VSs, but EWOK scores do not. Additionally, the results vary depending on multiple factors such as the number of epochs and the order of utterance presentation. Taken together, these findings suggest that VSs can have a beneficial influence on language models, while leaving room for further investigation.
The Use of Readability Metrics in Legal Text: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Yu Han, Aaron Ceross, Jeroen H. M. Bergmann
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

Understanding the text in legal documents can be challenging due to their complex structure and the inclusion of domain-specific jargon. Laws and regulations are often crafted in such a manner that engagement with them requires formal training, potentially leading to vastly different interpretations of the same texts. Linguistic complexity is an important contributor to the difficulties experienced by readers. Simplifying texts could enhance comprehension across a broader audience, not just among trained professionals. Various metrics have been developed to measure document readability. Therefore, we adopted a systematic review approach to examine the linguistic and readability metrics currently employed for legal and regulatory texts. A total of 3566 initial papers were screened, with 34 relevant studies found and further assessed. Our primary objective was to identify which current metrics were applied for evaluating readability within the legal field. Sixteen different metrics were identified, with the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level being the most frequently used method. The majority of studies (73.5%) were found in the domain of "informed consent forms". From the analysis, it is clear that not all legal domains are well represented in terms of readability metrics and that there is a further need to develop more consensus on which metrics should be applied for legal documents.
Robot Tasks with Fuzzy Time Requirements from Natural Language Instructions
Authors: Sascha Sucker, Michael Neubauer, Dominik Henrich
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Natural language allows robot programming to be accessible to everyone. However, the inherent fuzziness in natural language poses challenges for inflexible, traditional robot systems. We focus on instructions with fuzzy time requirements (e.g., "start in a few minutes"). Building on previous robotics research, we introduce fuzzy skills. These define an execution by the robot with so-called satisfaction functions representing vague execution time requirements. Such functions express a user's satisfaction over potential starting times for skill execution. When the robot handles multiple fuzzy skills, the satisfaction function provides a temporal tolerance window for execution, thus, enabling optimal scheduling based on satisfaction. We generalized such functions based on individual user expectations with a user study. The participants rated their satisfaction with an instruction's execution at various times. Our investigations reveal that trapezoidal functions best approximate the users' satisfaction. Additionally, the results suggest that users are more lenient if the execution is specified further into the future.
Everyone deserves their voice to be heard: Analyzing Predictive Gender Bias in ASR Models Applied to Dutch Speech Data
Authors: Rik Raes, Saskia Lensink, Mykola Pechenizkiy
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Fairness, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent research has shown that state-of-the-art (SotA) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, such as Whisper, often exhibit predictive biases that disproportionately affect various demographic groups. This study focuses on identifying the performance disparities of Whisper models on Dutch speech data from the Common Voice dataset and the Dutch National Public Broadcasting organisation. We analyzed the word error rate, character error rate and a BERT-based semantic similarity across gender groups. We used the moral framework of Weerts et al. (2022) to assess quality of service harms and fairness, and to provide a nuanced discussion on the implications of these biases, particularly for automatic subtitling. Our findings reveal substantial disparities in word error rate (WER) among gender groups across all model sizes, with bias identified through statistical testing.
Re-Parameterization of Lightweight Transformer for On-Device Speech Emotion Recognition
Authors: Zixing Zhang, Zhongren Dong, Weixiang Xu, Jing Han
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Model Compression, Speech Emotion Recognition

With the increasing implementation of machine learning models on edge or Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, deploying advanced models on resource-constrained IoT devices remains challenging. Transformer models, a currently dominant neural architecture, have achieved great success in broad domains but their complexity hinders its deployment on IoT devices with limited computation capability and storage size. Although many model compression approaches have been explored, they often suffer from notorious performance degradation. To address this issue, we introduce a new method, namely Transformer Re-parameterization, to boost the performance of lightweight Transformer models. It consists of two processes: the High-Rank Factorization (HRF) process in the training stage and the deHigh-Rank Factorization (deHRF) process in the inference stage. In the former process, we insert an additional linear layer before the Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of the lightweight Transformer. It is supposed that the inserted HRF layers can enhance the model learning capability. In the later process, the auxiliary HRF layer will be merged together with the following FFN layer into one linear layer and thus recover the original structure of the lightweight model. To examine the effectiveness of the proposed method, we evaluate it on three widely used Transformer variants, i.e., ConvTransformer, Conformer, and SpeechFormer networks, in the application of speech emotion recognition on the IEMOCAP, M3ED and DAIC-WOZ datasets. Experimental results show that our proposed method consistently improves the performance of lightweight Transformers, even making them comparable to large models. The proposed re-parameterization approach enables advanced Transformer models to be deployed on resource-constrained IoT devices.
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization
Authors: Chenlong Zhang, Tong Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Timeline Summarization

The rapid proliferation of online news has posed significant challenges in tracking the continuous development of news topics. Traditional timeline summarization constructs a chronological summary of the events but often lacks the flexibility to meet the diverse granularity needs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a new paradigm, Dynamic-granularity TimELine Summarization, (DTELS), which aims to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. This paper establishes a comprehensive benchmark for DTLES that includes: (1) an evaluation framework grounded in journalistic standards to assess the timeline quality across four dimensions: Informativeness, Granular Consistency, Factuality, and Coherence; (2) a large-scale, multi-source dataset with multiple granularity timeline annotations based on a consensus process to facilitate authority; (3) extensive experiments and analysis with two proposed solutions based on Large Language Models (LLMs) and existing state-of-the-art TLS methods. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLM-based solutions. However, even the most advanced LLMs struggle to consistently generate timelines that are both informative and granularly consistent, highlighting the challenges of the DTELS task.
DAHL: Domain-specific Automated Hallucination Evaluation of Long-Form Text through a Benchmark Dataset in Biomedicine
Authors: Jean Seo, Jongwon Lim, Dongjun Jang, Hyopil Shin
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Hallucination, Hallucination Evaluation, Multiple-choice, Text Generation

We introduce DAHL, a benchmark dataset and automated evaluation system designed to assess hallucination in long-form text generation, specifically within the biomedical domain. Our benchmark dataset, meticulously curated from biomedical research papers, consists of 8,573 questions across 29 categories. DAHL evaluates fact-conflicting hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by deconstructing responses into atomic units, each representing a single piece of information. The accuracy of these responses is averaged to produce the DAHL Score, offering a more in-depth evaluation of hallucinations compared to previous methods that rely on multiple-choice tasks. We conduct experiments with 8 different models, finding that larger models tend to hallucinate less; however, beyond a model size of 7 to 8 billion parameters, further scaling does not significantly improve factual accuracy. The DAHL Score holds potential as an efficient alternative to human-annotated preference labels, being able to be expanded to other specialized domains. We release the dataset and code in public.
HateGPT: Unleashing GPT-3.5 Turbo to Combat Hate Speech on X
Authors: Aniket Deroy, Subhankar Maity
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00

The widespread use of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook has enabled people of all ages to share their thoughts and experiences, leading to an immense accumulation of user-generated content. However, alongside the benefits, these platforms also face the challenge of managing hate speech and offensive content, which can undermine rational discourse and threaten democratic values. As a result, there is a growing need for automated methods to detect and mitigate such content, especially given the complexity of conversations that may require contextual analysis across multiple languages, including code-mixed languages like Hinglish, German-English, and Bangla. We participated in the English task where we have to classify English tweets into two categories namely Hate and Offensive and Non Hate-Offensive. In this work, we experiment with state-of-the-art large language models like GPT-3.5 Turbo via prompting to classify tweets into Hate and Offensive or Non Hate-Offensive. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a classification model using Macro-F1 scores across three distinct runs. The Macro-F1 score, which balances precision and recall across all classes, is used as the primary metric for model evaluation. The scores obtained are 0.756 for run 1, 0.751 for run 2, and 0.754 for run 3, indicating a high level of performance with minimal variance among the runs. The results suggest that the model consistently performs well in terms of precision and recall, with run 1 showing the highest performance. These findings highlight the robustness and reliability of the model across different runs.
Unstructured Text Enhanced Open-domain Dialogue System: A Systematic Survey
Authors: Longxuan Ma, Mingda Li, Weinan Zhang, Jiapeng Li, Ting Liu
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Response Generation, Retrieval, Survey

Incorporating external knowledge into dialogue generation has been proven to benefit the performance of an open-domain Dialogue System (DS), such as generating informative or stylized responses, controlling conversation topics. In this article, we study the open-domain DS that uses unstructured text as external knowledge sources (\textbf{U}nstructured \textbf{T}ext \textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{D}ialogue \textbf{S}ystem, \textbf{UTEDS}). The existence of unstructured text entails distinctions between UTEDS and traditional data-driven DS and we aim to analyze these differences. We first give the definition of the UTEDS related concepts, then summarize the recently released datasets and models. We categorize UTEDS into Retrieval and Generative models and introduce them from the perspective of model components. The retrieval models consist of Fusion, Matching, and Ranking modules, while the generative models comprise Dialogue and Knowledge Encoding, Knowledge Selection, and Response Generation modules. We further summarize the evaluation methods utilized in UTEDS and analyze the current models' performance. At last, we discuss the future development trends of UTEDS, hoping to inspire new research in this field.
P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs
Authors: Yidan Zhang, Yu Wan, Boyi Deng, Baosong Yang, Haoran Wei, Bowen Yu, Junyang Lin, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Transfer Learning

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) showcase varied multilingual capabilities across tasks like translation, code generation, and reasoning. Previous assessments often limited their scope to fundamental natural language processing (NLP) or isolated capability-specific tasks. To alleviate this drawback, we aim to present a comprehensive multilingual multitask benchmark. First, we introduce P-MMEval, a large-scale benchmark covering effective fundamental and capability-specialized datasets. Furthermore, P-MMEval delivers consistent language coverage across various datasets and provides parallel samples. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on representative multilingual model series to compare performances across models and tasks, explore the relationship between multilingual performances and factors such as tasks, model sizes, languages, and prompts, and examine the effectiveness of knowledge transfer from English to other languages. The resulting insights are intended to offer valuable guidance for future research. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Qwen/P-MMEval.
Personalized Help for Optimizing Low-Skilled Users' Strategy
Authors: Feng Gu, Wichayaporn Wongkamjan, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Denis Peskoff, Jonathan May
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00

AIs can beat humans in game environments; however, how helpful those agents are to human remains understudied. We augment CICERO, a natural language agent that demonstrates superhuman performance in Diplomacy, to generate both move and message advice based on player intentions. A dozen Diplomacy games with novice and experienced players, with varying advice settings, show that some of the generated advice is beneficial. It helps novices compete with experienced players and in some instances even surpass them. The mere presence of advice can be advantageous, even if players do not follow it.
Robustness and Confounders in the Demographic Alignment of LLMs with Human Perceptions of Offensiveness
Authors: Shayan Alipour, Indira Sen, Mattia Samory, Tanushree Mitra
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Large language models (LLMs) are known to exhibit demographic biases, yet few studies systematically evaluate these biases across multiple datasets or account for confounding factors. In this work, we examine LLM alignment with human annotations in five offensive language datasets, comprising approximately 220K annotations. Our findings reveal that while demographic traits, particularly race, influence alignment, these effects are inconsistent across datasets and often entangled with other factors. Confounders -- such as document difficulty, annotator sensitivity, and within-group agreement -- account for more variation in alignment patterns than demographic traits alone. Specifically, alignment increases with higher annotator sensitivity and group agreement, while greater document difficulty corresponds to reduced alignment. Our results underscore the importance of multi-dataset analyses and confounder-aware methodologies in developing robust measures of demographic bias in LLMs.
The geometry of the deep linear network
Authors: Govind Menon
Date: 2024-11-13 00:00:00

This article provides an expository account of training dynamics in the Deep Linear Network (DLN) from the perspective of the geometric theory of dynamical systems. Rigorous results by several authors are unified into a thermodynamic framework for deep learning. The analysis begins with a characterization of the invariant manifolds and Riemannian geometry in the DLN. This is followed by exact formulas for a Boltzmann entropy, as well as stochastic gradient descent of free energy using a Riemannian Langevin Equation. Several links between the DLN and other areas of mathematics are discussed, along with some open questions.
Multi-Objective Algorithms for Learning Open-Ended Robotic Problems
Authors: Martin Robert, Simon Brodeur, Francois Ferland
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Evolutionary Algorithms, MuJoCo

Quadrupedal locomotion is a complex, open-ended problem vital to expanding autonomous vehicle reach. Traditional reinforcement learning approaches often fall short due to training instability and sample inefficiency. We propose a novel method leveraging multi-objective evolutionary algorithms as an automatic curriculum learning mechanism, which we named Multi-Objective Learning (MOL). Our approach significantly enhances the learning process by projecting velocity commands into an objective space and optimizing for both performance and diversity. Tested within the MuJoCo physics simulator, our method demonstrates superior stability and adaptability compared to baseline approaches. As such, it achieved 19\% and 44\% fewer errors against our best baseline algorithm in difficult scenarios based on a uniform and tailored evaluation respectively. This work introduces a robust framework for training quadrupedal robots, promising significant advancements in robotic locomotion and open-ended robotic problems.
Sharp Matrix Empirical Bernstein Inequalities
Authors: Hongjian Wang, Aaditya Ramdas
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00

We present two sharp, closed-form empirical Bernstein inequalities for symmetric random matrices with bounded eigenvalues. By sharp, we mean that both inequalities adapt to the unknown variance in a tight manner: the deviation captured by the first-order $1/\sqrt{n}$ term asymptotically matches the matrix Bernstein inequality exactly, including constants, the latter requiring knowledge of the variance. Our first inequality holds for the sample mean of independent matrices, and our second inequality holds for a mean estimator under martingale dependence at stopping times.
On the Selection Stability of Stability Selection and Its Applications
Authors: Mahdi Nouraie, Samuel Muller
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Variable Selection

Stability selection is a widely adopted resampling-based framework for high-dimensional variable selection. This paper seeks to broaden the use of an established stability estimator to evaluate the overall stability of the stability selection results, moving beyond single-variable analysis. We suggest that the stability estimator offers two advantages: it can serve as a reference to reflect the robustness of the results obtained, and it can help identify a Pareto optimal regularization value to improve stability. By determining the regularization value, we calibrate key stability selection parameters, namely, the decision-making threshold and the expected number of falsely selected variables, within established theoretical bounds. In addition, the convergence of stability values over successive sub-samples sheds light on the required number of sub-samples addressing a notable gap in prior studies. The \texttt{stabplot} R package is developed to facilitate the use of the methodology featured in this paper.
MARM: Unlocking the Future of Recommendation Systems through Memory Augmentation and Scalable Complexity
Authors: Xiao Lv, Jiangxia Cao, Shijie Guan, Xiaoyou Zhou, Zhiguang Qi, Yaqiang Zang, Ming Li, Ben Wang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems

Scaling-law has guided the language model designing for past years, however, it is worth noting that the scaling laws of NLP cannot be directly applied to RecSys due to the following reasons: (1) The amount of training samples and model parameters is typically not the bottleneck for the model. Our recommendation system can generate over 50 billion user samples daily, and such a massive amount of training data can easily allow our model parameters to exceed 200 billion, surpassing many LLMs (about 100B). (2) To ensure the stability and robustness of the recommendation system, it is essential to control computational complexity FLOPs carefully. Considering the above differences with LLM, we can draw a conclusion that: for a RecSys model, compared to model parameters, the computational complexity FLOPs is a more expensive factor that requires careful control. In this paper, we propose our milestone work, MARM (Memory Augmented Recommendation Model), which explores a new cache scaling-laws successfully.
LLM-based Bi-level Multi-interest Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Shutong Qiao, Chen Gao, Wei Yuan, Yong Li, Hongzhi Yin
Date: 2024-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) leverages users' dynamic preferences, with recent advances incorporating multi-interest learning to model diverse user interests. However, most multi-interest SR models rely on noisy, sparse implicit feedback, limiting recommendation accuracy. Large language models (LLMs) offer robust reasoning on low-quality data but face high computational costs and latency challenges for SR integration. We propose a novel LLM-based multi-interest SR framework combining implicit behavioral and explicit semantic perspectives. It includes two modules: the Implicit Behavioral Interest Module (IBIM), which learns from user behavior using a traditional SR model, and the Explicit Semantic Interest Module (ESIM), which uses clustering and prompt-engineered LLMs to extract semantic multi-interest representations from informative samples. Semantic insights from ESIM enhance IBIM's behavioral representations via modality alignment and semantic prediction tasks. During inference, only IBIM is used, ensuring efficient, LLM-free recommendations. Experiments on four real-world datasets validate the framework's effectiveness and practicality.