pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-supervised Speech Representations Still Struggle with African American Vernacular English
Authors: Kalvin Chang, Yi-Hui Chou, Jiatong Shi, Hsuan-Ming Chen, Nicole Holliday, Odette Scharenborg, David R. Mortensen
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Underperformance of ASR systems for speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and other marginalized language varieties is a well-documented phenomenon, and one that reinforces the stigmatization of these varieties. We investigate whether or not the recent wave of Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) speech models can close the gap in ASR performance between AAVE and Mainstream American English (MAE). We evaluate four SSL models (wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, and XLS-R) on zero-shot Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for these two varieties and find that these models perpetuate the bias in performance against AAVE. Additionally, the models have higher word error rates on utterances with more phonological and morphosyntactic features of AAVE. Despite the success of SSL speech models in improving ASR for low resource varieties, SSL pre-training alone may not bridge the gap between AAVE and MAE. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/cmu-llab/s3m-aave.
Investigating the effect of Mental Models in User Interaction with an Adaptive Dialog Agent
Authors: Lindsey Vanderlyn, Dirk Väth, Ngoc Thang Vu
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Mental models play an important role in whether user interaction with intelligent systems, such as dialog systems is successful or not. Adaptive dialog systems present the opportunity to align a dialog agent's behavior with heterogeneous user expectations. However, there has been little research into what mental models users form when interacting with a task-oriented dialog system, how these models affect users' interactions, or what role system adaptation can play in this process, making it challenging to avoid damage to human-AI partnership. In this work, we collect a new publicly available dataset for exploring user mental models about information seeking dialog systems. We demonstrate that users have a variety of conflicting mental models about such systems, the validity of which directly impacts the success of their interactions and perceived usability of system. Furthermore, we show that adapting a dialog agent's behavior to better align with users' mental models, even when done implicitly, can improve perceived usability, dialog efficiency, and success. To this end, we argue that implicit adaptation can be a valid strategy for task-oriented dialog systems, so long as developers first have a solid understanding of users' mental models.
Crowd-Calibrator: Can Annotator Disagreement Inform Calibration in Subjective Tasks?
Authors: Urja Khurana, Eric Nalisnick, Antske Fokkens, Swabha Swayamdipta
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Hate Speech Detection, Natural Language Inference

Subjective tasks in NLP have been mostly relegated to objective standards, where the gold label is decided by taking the majority vote. This obfuscates annotator disagreement and the inherent uncertainty of the label. We argue that subjectivity should factor into model decisions and play a direct role via calibration under a selective prediction setting. Specifically, instead of calibrating confidence purely from the model's perspective, we calibrate models for subjective tasks based on crowd worker agreement. Our method, Crowd-Calibrator, models the distance between the distribution of crowd worker labels and the model's own distribution over labels to inform whether the model should abstain from a decision. On two highly subjective tasks, hate speech detection and natural language inference, our experiments show Crowd-Calibrator either outperforms or achieves competitive performance with existing selective prediction baselines. Our findings highlight the value of bringing human decision-making into model predictions.
Multi-Faceted Evaluation of Modeling Languages for Augmented Reality Applications -- The Case of ARWFML
Authors: Fabian Muff, Hans-Georg Fill
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

The evaluation of modeling languages for augmented reality applications poses particular challenges due to the three-dimensional environment they target. The previously introduced Augmented Reality Workflow Modeling Language (ARWFML) enables the model-based creation of augmented reality scenarios without programming knowledge. Building upon the first design cycle of the language's specification, this paper presents two further design iterations for refining the language based on multi-faceted evaluations. These include a comparative evaluation of implementation options and workflow capabilities, the introduction of a 3D notation, and the development of a new 3D modeling environment. On this basis, a comprehensibility study of the language was conducted. Thereby, we show how modeling languages for augmented reality can be evolved towards a maturity level suitable for empirical evaluations.
Enhancing Depression Diagnosis with Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Authors: Elysia Shi, Adithri Manda, London Chowdhury, Runeema Arun, Kevin Zhu, Michael Lam
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

When using AI to detect signs of depressive disorder, AI models habitually draw preemptive conclusions. We theorize that using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to evaluate Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ-8) scores will improve the accuracy of the scores determined by AI models. In our findings, when the models reasoned with CoT, the estimated PHQ-8 scores were consistently closer on average to the accepted true scores reported by each participant compared to when not using CoT. Our goal is to expand upon AI models' understanding of the intricacies of human conversation, allowing them to more effectively assess a patient's feelings and tone, therefore being able to more accurately discern mental disorder symptoms; ultimately, we hope to augment AI models' abilities, so that they can be widely accessible and used in the medical field.
Empowering Low-Resource Language ASR via Large-Scale Pseudo Labeling
Authors: Kaushal Santosh Bhogale, Deovrat Mehendale, Niharika Parasa, Sathish Kumar Reddy G, Tahir Javed, Pratyush Kumar, Mitesh M. Khapra
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

In this study, we tackle the challenge of limited labeled data for low-resource languages in ASR, focusing on Hindi. Specifically, we explore pseudo-labeling, by proposing a generic framework combining multiple ideas from existing works. Our framework integrates multiple base models for transcription and evaluators for assessing audio-transcript pairs, resulting in robust pseudo-labeling for low resource languages. We validate our approach with a new benchmark, IndicYT, comprising diverse YouTube audio files from multiple content categories. Our findings show that augmenting pseudo labeled data from YouTube with existing training data leads to significant performance improvements on IndicYT, without affecting performance on out-of-domain benchmarks, demonstrating the efficacy of pseudo-labeled data in enhancing ASR capabilities for low-resource languages. The benchmark, code and models developed as a part of this work will be made publicly available.
TF-Attack: Transferable and Fast Adversarial Attacks on Large Language Models
Authors: Zelin Li, Kehai Chen, Lemao Liu, Xuefeng Bai, Mingming Yang, Yang Xiang, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

With the great advancements in large language models (LLMs), adversarial attacks against LLMs have recently attracted increasing attention. We found that pre-existing adversarial attack methodologies exhibit limited transferability and are notably inefficient, particularly when applied to LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the core mechanisms of previous predominant adversarial attack methods, revealing that 1) the distributions of importance score differ markedly among victim models, restricting the transferability; 2) the sequential attack processes induces substantial time overheads. Based on the above two insights, we introduce a new scheme, named TF-Attack, for Transferable and Fast adversarial attacks on LLMs. TF-Attack employs an external LLM as a third-party overseer rather than the victim model to identify critical units within sentences. Moreover, TF-Attack introduces the concept of Importance Level, which allows for parallel substitutions of attacks. We conduct extensive experiments on 6 widely adopted benchmarks, evaluating the proposed method through both automatic and human metrics. Results show that our method consistently surpasses previous methods in transferability and delivers significant speed improvements, up to 20 times faster than earlier attack strategies.
Reducing the Cost: Cross-Prompt Pre-Finetuning for Short Answer Scoring
Authors: Hiroaki Funayama, Yuya Asazuma, Yuichiroh Matsubayashi, Tomoya Mizumoto, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2024-08-26 00:00:00

Automated Short Answer Scoring (SAS) is the task of automatically scoring a given input to a prompt based on rubrics and reference answers. Although SAS is useful in real-world applications, both rubrics and reference answers differ between prompts, thus requiring a need to acquire new data and train a model for each new prompt. Such requirements are costly, especially for schools and online courses where resources are limited and only a few prompts are used. In this work, we attempt to reduce this cost through a two-phase approach: train a model on existing rubrics and answers with gold score signals and finetune it on a new prompt. Specifically, given that scoring rubrics and reference answers differ for each prompt, we utilize key phrases, or representative expressions that the answer should contain to increase scores, and train a SAS model to learn the relationship between key phrases and answers using already annotated prompts (i.e., cross-prompts). Our experimental results show that finetuning on existing cross-prompt data with key phrases significantly improves scoring accuracy, especially when the training data is limited. Finally, our extensive analysis shows that it is crucial to design the model so that it can learn the task's general property.
Bidirectional Awareness Induction in Autoregressive Seq2Seq Models
Authors: Jia Cheng Hu, Roberto Cavicchioli, Alessandro Capotondi
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Machine Translation, Text Summarization

Autoregressive Sequence-To-Sequence models are the foundation of many Deep Learning achievements in major research fields such as Vision and Natural Language Processing. Despite that, they still present significant limitations. For instance, when errors occur in the early steps of the prediction, the whole output is severely affected. Such reliance on previously predicted tokens and the inherent computational unfriendliness of sequential algorithms, motivated researchers to explore different architectures and methods in the search for bidirectional approaches. In this work, we introduce the Bidirectional Awareness Induction (BAI), a training method that leverages a subset of elements in the network, the Pivots, to perform bidirectional learning without breaking the autoregressive constraints. To showcase its flexibility, we apply the method to three architectures, the Transformer, ExpansionNet v2 and GPT, then perform experiments over three tasks. Experimental results showcase BAI's effectiveness on all selected tasks and architectures. In particular, we observed an increase of up to 2.4 CIDEr in Image-Captioning, 4.96 BLEU in Neural Machine Translation, and 1.16 ROUGE in Text Summarization compared to the respective baselines. Notably, BAI not only has a positive impact on models trained from scratch but on pre-trained models as well. Such an aspect, combined with the absence of architectural requirements synergizes well with the current trend of LLMs.
CoT Rerailer: Enhancing the Reliability of Large Language Models in Complex Reasoning Tasks through Error Detection and Correction
Authors: Guangya Wan, Yuqi Wu, Jie Chen, Sheng Li
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Question Answering

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) complex reasoning abilities by generating intermediate steps. However, these steps can introduce hallucinations and accumulate errors. We propose the CoT Rerailer to address these challenges, employing self-consistency and multi-agent debate systems to identify and rectify errors in the reasoning process. The CoT Rerailer first selects the most logically correct Reasoning Path (RP) using consistency checks and critical evaluation by automated agents. It then engages a multi-agent debate system to propose and validate corrections to ensure the generation of an error-free intermediate logical path. The corrected steps are then used to generate a revised reasoning chain to further reduce hallucinations and enhance answer quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach across diverse question-answering datasets in various knowledge domains. The CoT Rerailer enhances the reliability of LLM-generated reasoning, contributing to more trustworthy AI driven decision-making processes.
MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models
Authors: Fuwen Tan, Royson Lee, Łukasz Dudziak, Shell Xu Hu, Sourav Bhattacharya, Timothy Hospedales, Georgios Tzimiropoulos, Brais Martinez
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20\%-50\% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.
SpeechCaps: Advancing Instruction-Based Universal Speech Models with Multi-Talker Speaking Style Captioning
Authors: Chien-yu Huang, Min-Han Shih, Ke-Han Lu, Chi-Yuan Hsiao, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

Instruction-based speech processing is becoming popular. Studies show that training with multiple tasks boosts performance, but collecting diverse, large-scale tasks and datasets is expensive. Thus, it is highly desirable to design a fundamental task that benefits other downstream tasks. This paper introduces a multi-talker speaking style captioning task to enhance the understanding of speaker and prosodic information. We used large language models to generate descriptions for multi-talker speech. Then, we trained our model with pre-training on this captioning task followed by instruction tuning. Evaluation on Dynamic-SUPERB shows our model outperforming the baseline pre-trained only on single-talker tasks, particularly in speaker and emotion recognition. Additionally, tests on a multi-talker QA task reveal that current models struggle with attributes such as gender, pitch, and speaking rate. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/cyhuang-tw/speechcaps.
LLM with Relation Classifier for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Authors: Xingzuo Li, Kehai Chen, Yunfei Long, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Document-level Relation Extraction, Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) have created a new paradigm for natural language processing. Despite their advancement, LLM-based methods still lag behind traditional approaches in document-level relation extraction (DocRE), a critical task for understanding complex entity relations within long context. This paper investigates the causes of this performance gap, identifying the dispersion of attention by LLMs due to entity pairs without relations as a key factor. We then introduce a novel classifier-LLM approach to DocRE. Particularly, the proposed approach begins with a classifier designed to select entity pair candidates that exhibit potential relations and then feed them to LLM for final relation classification. This method ensures that the LLM's attention is directed at relation-expressing entity pairs instead of those without relations during inference. Experiments on DocRE benchmarks reveal that our method significantly outperforms recent LLM-based DocRE models and narrows the performance gap with state-of-the-art BERT-based models.
Biomedical Large Languages Models Seem not to be Superior to Generalist Models on Unseen Medical Data
Authors: Felix J. Dorfner, Amin Dada, Felix Busch, Marcus R. Makowski, Tianyu Han, Daniel Truhn, Jens Kleesiek, Madhumita Sushil, Jacqueline Lammert, Lisa C. Adams, Keno K. Bressem
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, General Knowledge, Question Answering, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential in biomedical applications, leading to efforts to fine-tune them on domain-specific data. However, the effectiveness of this approach remains unclear. This study evaluates the performance of biomedically fine-tuned LLMs against their general-purpose counterparts on a variety of clinical tasks. We evaluated their performance on clinical case challenges from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and on several clinical tasks (e.g., information extraction, document summarization, and clinical coding). Using benchmarks specifically chosen to be likely outside the fine-tuning datasets of biomedical models, we found that biomedical LLMs mostly perform inferior to their general-purpose counterparts, especially on tasks not focused on medical knowledge. While larger models showed similar performance on case tasks (e.g., OpenBioLLM-70B: 66.4% vs. Llama-3-70B-Instruct: 65% on JAMA cases), smaller biomedical models showed more pronounced underperformance (e.g., OpenBioLLM-8B: 30% vs. Llama-3-8B-Instruct: 64.3% on NEJM cases). Similar trends were observed across the CLUE (Clinical Language Understanding Evaluation) benchmark tasks, with general-purpose models often performing better on text generation, question answering, and coding tasks. Our results suggest that fine-tuning LLMs to biomedical data may not provide the expected benefits and may potentially lead to reduced performance, challenging prevailing assumptions about domain-specific adaptation of LLMs and highlighting the need for more rigorous evaluation frameworks in healthcare AI. Alternative approaches, such as retrieval-augmented generation, may be more effective in enhancing the biomedical capabilities of LLMs without compromising their general knowledge.
Revisiting the Exit from Nuclear Energy in Germany with NLP
Authors: Sebastian Haunss, André Blessing
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Annotation of political discourse is resource-intensive, but recent developments in NLP promise to automate complex annotation tasks. Fine-tuned transformer-based models outperform human annotators in some annotation tasks, but they require large manually annotated training datasets. In our contribution, we explore to which degree a manually annotated dataset can be automatically replicated with today's NLP methods, using unsupervised machine learning and zero- and few-shot learning.
Towards Reliable Medical Question Answering: Techniques and Challenges in Mitigating Hallucinations in Language Models
Authors: Duy Khoa Pham, Bao Quoc Vo
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Hallucination, Medical Question Answering, Prompt Engineering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various domains, including healthcare and biomedicine. However, the phenomenon of hallucination, where LLMs generate outputs that deviate from factual accuracy or context, poses a critical challenge, especially in high-stakes domains. This paper conducts a scoping study of existing techniques for mitigating hallucinations in knowledge-based task in general and especially for medical domains. Key methods covered in the paper include Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based techniques, iterative feedback loops, supervised fine-tuning, and prompt engineering. These techniques, while promising in general contexts, require further adaptation and optimization for the medical domain due to its unique demands for up-to-date, specialized knowledge and strict adherence to medical guidelines. Addressing these challenges is crucial for developing trustworthy AI systems that enhance clinical decision-making and patient safety as well as accuracy of biomedical scientific research.
Poor-Supervised Evaluation for SuperLLM via Mutual Consistency
Authors: Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Boyuan Pan, HeDa Wang, Yao Hu, Kan Li
Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00

The guidance from capability evaluations has greatly propelled the progress of both human society and Artificial Intelligence. However, as LLMs evolve, it becomes challenging to construct evaluation benchmarks for them with accurate labels on hard tasks that approach the boundaries of human capabilities. To credibly conduct evaluation without accurate labels (denoted as poor-supervised evaluation), we propose the PoEM framework. We first prove that the capability of a model can be equivalently assessed by the consistency between it and certain reference model, when their prediction distributions are independent and the sample size is infinite. To alleviate the insufficiencies of the conditions in reality, we further introduce an algorithm that treats humans (when available) and the models under evaluation as reference models, alternately conducting model weights calibration and filtering during E-step and M-step. Comprehensive experiments across 3 types of tasks with 16 mainstream LLMs have shown that PoEM under poor supervision can achieve an average of 0.98 Pearson correlation coefficient with supervised evaluation results, demonstrating good effectiveness, efficiency and generalizability. More generally, PoEM has advanced the evaluation paradigm evolution from human-centric to human&model-centric by treating both of them as reference models, mitigating the limitations of human evaluation in the era of LLMs.