pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
QUDSELECT: Selective Decoding for Questions Under Discussion Parsing
Authors: Ashima Suvarna, Xiao Liu, Tanmay Parekh, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Question Under Discussion (QUD) is a discourse framework that uses implicit questions to reveal discourse relationships between sentences. In QUD parsing, each sentence is viewed as an answer to a question triggered by an anchor sentence in prior context. The resulting QUD structure is required to conform to several theoretical criteria like answer compatibility (how well the question is answered), making QUD parsing a challenging task. Previous works construct QUD parsers in a pipelined manner (i.e. detect the trigger sentence in context and then generate the question). However, these parsers lack a holistic view of the task and can hardly satisfy all the criteria. In this work, we introduce QUDSELECT, a joint-training framework that selectively decodes the QUD dependency structures considering the QUD criteria. Using instruction-tuning, we train models to simultaneously predict the anchor sentence and generate the associated question. To explicitly incorporate the criteria, we adopt a selective decoding strategy of sampling multiple QUD candidates during inference, followed by selecting the best one with criteria scorers. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models by 9% in human evaluation and 4% in automatic evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.
Leveraging Encoder-only Large Language Models for Mobile App Review Feature Extraction
Authors: Quim Motger, Alessio Miaschi, Felice Dell'Orletta, Xavier Franch, Jordi Marco
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, token-classification, Token Classification

Mobile app review analysis presents unique challenges due to the low quality, subjective bias, and noisy content of user-generated documents. Extracting features from these reviews is essential for tasks such as feature prioritization and sentiment analysis, but it remains a challenging task. Meanwhile, encoder-only models based on the Transformer architecture have shown promising results for classification and information extraction tasks for multiple software engineering processes. This study explores the hypothesis that encoder-only large language models can enhance feature extraction from mobile app reviews. By leveraging crowdsourced annotations from an industrial context, we redefine feature extraction as a supervised token classification task. Our approach includes extending the pre-training of these models with a large corpus of user reviews to improve contextual understanding and employing instance selection techniques to optimize model fine-tuning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that this method improves the precision and recall of extracted features and enhances performance efficiency. Key contributions include a novel approach to feature extraction, annotated datasets, extended pre-trained models, and an instance selection mechanism for cost-effective fine-tuning. This research provides practical methods and empirical evidence in applying large language models to natural language processing tasks within mobile app reviews, offering improved performance in feature extraction.
Adaptive Contrastive Decoding in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Handling Noisy Contexts
Authors: Youna Kim, Hyuhng Joon Kim, Cheonbok Park, Choonghyun Park, Hyunsoo Cho, Junyeob Kim, Kang Min Yoo, Sang-goo Lee, Taeuk Kim
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

When using large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-domain question answering, external context can bridge the gap between external knowledge and the LLMs' parametric knowledge. Recent research has been developed to amplify contextual knowledge over the parametric knowledge of LLMs with contrastive decoding approaches. While these approaches could yield truthful responses when relevant context is provided, they are prone to vulnerabilities when faced with noisy contexts. We extend the scope of previous studies to encompass noisy contexts and propose adaptive contrastive decoding (ACD) to leverage contextual influence effectively. ACD demonstrates improvements in open-domain question answering tasks compared to baselines, especially in robustness by remaining undistracted by noisy contexts in retrieval-augmented generation.
Bridging Information Gaps in Dialogues With Grounded Exchanges Using Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Phillip Schneider, Nektarios Machner, Kristiina Jokinen, Florian Matthes
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge models are fundamental to dialogue systems for enabling conversational interactions, which require handling domain-specific knowledge. Ensuring effective communication in information-providing conversations entails aligning user understanding with the knowledge available to the system. However, dialogue systems often face challenges arising from semantic inconsistencies in how information is expressed in natural language compared to how it is represented within the system's internal knowledge. To address this problem, we study the potential of large language models for conversational grounding, a mechanism to bridge information gaps by establishing shared knowledge between dialogue participants. Our approach involves annotating human conversations across five knowledge domains to create a new dialogue corpus called BridgeKG. Through a series of experiments on this dataset, we empirically evaluate the capabilities of large language models in classifying grounding acts and identifying grounded information items within a knowledge graph structure. Our findings offer insights into how these models use in-context learning for conversational grounding tasks and common prediction errors, which we illustrate with examples from challenging dialogues. We discuss how the models handle knowledge graphs as a semantic layer between unstructured dialogue utterances and structured information items.
General-purpose Dataflow Model with Neuromorphic Primitives
Authors: Weihao Zhang, Yu Du, Hongyi Li, Songchen Ma, Rong Zhao
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Neuromorphic computing exhibits great potential to provide high-performance benefits in various applications beyond neural networks. However, a general-purpose program execution model that aligns with the features of neuromorphic computing is required to bridge the gap between program versatility and neuromorphic hardware efficiency. The dataflow model offers a potential solution, but it faces high graph complexity and incompatibility with neuromorphic hardware when dealing with control flow programs, which decreases the programmability and performance. Here, we present a dataflow model tailored for neuromorphic hardware, called neuromorphic dataflow, which provides a compact, concise, and neuromorphic-compatible program representation for control logic. The neuromorphic dataflow introduces "when" and "where" primitives, which restructure the view of control. The neuromorphic dataflow embeds these primitives in the dataflow schema with the plasticity inherited from the spiking algorithms. Our method enables the deployment of general-purpose programs on neuromorphic hardware with both programmability and plasticity, while fully utilizing the hardware's potential.
IAI Group at CheckThat! 2024: Transformer Models and Data Augmentation for Checkworthy Claim Detection
Authors: Peter Røysland Aarnes, Vinay Setty, Petra Galuščáková
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Data Augmentation, Decoder, Transfer Learning

This paper describes IAI group's participation for automated check-worthiness estimation for claims, within the framework of the 2024 CheckThat! Lab "Task 1: Check-Worthiness Estimation". The task involves the automated detection of check-worthy claims in English, Dutch, and Arabic political debates and Twitter data. We utilized various pre-trained generative decoder and encoder transformer models, employing methods such as few-shot chain-of-thought reasoning, fine-tuning, data augmentation, and transfer learning from one language to another. Despite variable success in terms of performance, our models achieved notable placements on the organizer's leaderboard: ninth-best in English, third-best in Dutch, and the top placement in Arabic, utilizing multilingual datasets for enhancing the generalizability of check-worthiness detection. Despite a significant drop in performance on the unlabeled test dataset compared to the development test dataset, our findings contribute to the ongoing efforts in claim detection research, highlighting the challenges and potential of language-specific adaptations in claim verification systems.
Task Prompt Vectors: Effective Initialization through Multi-Task Soft-Prompt Transfer
Authors: Robert Belanec, Simon Ostermann, Ivan Srba, Maria Bielikova
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Prompt tuning is an efficient solution for training large language models (LLMs). However, current soft-prompt-based methods often sacrifice multi-task modularity, requiring the training process to be fully or partially repeated for each newly added task. While recent work on task vectors applied arithmetic operations on full model weights to achieve the desired multi-task performance, a similar approach for soft-prompts is still missing. To this end, we introduce Task Prompt Vectors, created by element-wise difference between weights of tuned soft-prompts and their random initialization. Experimental results on 12 NLU datasets show that task prompt vectors can be used in low-resource settings to effectively initialize prompt tuning on similar tasks. In addition, we show that task prompt vectors are independent of the random initialization of prompt tuning on 2 different language model architectures. This allows prompt arithmetics with the pre-trained vectors from different tasks. In this way, we provide a competitive alternative to state-of-the-art baselines by arithmetic addition of task prompt vectors from multiple tasks.
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs
Authors: Chenglin Zhu, Yanjun Shen, Wenjing Luo, Yan Zhang, Hao Liang, Tao Zhang, Fan Yang, MingAn Lin, Yujing Qiao, WeiPeng Chen, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Zenan Zhou
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00

The adeptness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in comprehending and following natural language instructions is critical for their deployment in sophisticated real-world applications. Existing evaluations mainly focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user's perspective. To bridge this gap, we propose CFBench, a large-scale Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs, featuring 1,000 curated samples that cover more than 200 real-life scenarios and over 50 NLP tasks. CFBench meticulously compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs an innovative systematic framework for constraint types, which includes 10 primary categories and over 25 subcategories, and ensures each constraint is seamlessly integrated within the instructions. To make certain that the evaluation of LLM outputs aligns with user perceptions, we propose an advanced methodology that integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment. Evaluating current leading LLMs on CFBench reveals substantial room for improvement in constraints following, and we further investigate influencing factors and enhancement strategies. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/PKU-Baichuan-MLSystemLab/CFBench
The Mismeasure of Man and Models: Evaluating Allocational Harms in Large Language Models
Authors: Hannah Chen, Yangfeng Ji, David Evans
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Model Selection

Large language models (LLMs) are now being considered and even deployed for applications that support high-stakes decision-making, such as recruitment and clinical decisions. While several methods have been proposed for measuring bias, there remains a gap between predictions, which are what the proposed methods consider, and how they are used to make decisions. In this work, we introduce Rank-Allocational-Based Bias Index (RABBI), a model-agnostic bias measure that assesses potential allocational harms arising from biases in LLM predictions. We compare RABBI and current bias metrics on two allocation decision tasks. We evaluate their predictive validity across ten LLMs and utility for model selection. Our results reveal that commonly-used bias metrics based on average performance gap and distribution distance fail to reliably capture group disparities in allocation outcomes, whereas RABBI exhibits a strong correlation with allocation disparities. Our work highlights the need to account for how models are used in contexts with limited resource constraints.
Reconsidering Degeneration of Token Embeddings with Definitions for Encoder-based Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Ying Zhang, Dongyuan Li, Manabu Okumura
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Summarization

Learning token embeddings based on token co-occurrence statistics has proven effective for both pre-training and fine-tuning in natural language processing. However, recent studies have pointed out that the distribution of learned embeddings degenerates into anisotropy (i.e., non-uniform distribution), and even pre-trained language models (PLMs) suffer from a loss of semantics-related information in embeddings for low-frequency tokens. This study first analyzes the fine-tuning dynamics of encoder-based PLMs and demonstrates their robustness against degeneration. On the basis of this analysis, we propose DefinitionEMB, a method that utilizes definitions to re-construct isotropically distributed and semantics-related token embeddings for encoder-based PLMs while maintaining original robustness during fine-tuning. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging definitions from Wiktionary to re-construct such embeddings for two encoder-based PLMs: RoBERTa-base and BART-large. Furthermore, the re-constructed embeddings for low-frequency tokens improve the performance of these models across various GLUE and four text summarization datasets.
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only
Authors: He Zhu, Junyou Su, Tianle Lun, Yicheng Tao, Wenjia Zhang, Zipei Fan, Guanhua Chen
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Response Generation

Instruction fine-tuning stands as a crucial advancement in leveraging large language models (LLMs) for enhanced task performance. However, the annotation of instruction datasets has traditionally been expensive and laborious, often relying on manual annotations or costly API calls of proprietary LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce FANNO, a fully autonomous, open-sourced framework that revolutionizes the annotation process without the need for pre-existing annotated data. Utilizing a Mistral-7b-instruct model, FANNO efficiently produces diverse and high-quality datasets through a structured process involving document pre-screening, instruction generation, and response generation. Experiments on Open LLM Leaderboard and AlpacaEval benchmark show that the FANNO can generate high-quality data with diversity and complexity for free, comparable to human-annotated or cleaned datasets like Alpaca-GPT4-Cleaned.
Coalitions of Large Language Models Increase the Robustness of AI Agents
Authors: Prattyush Mangal, Carol Mak, Theo Kanakis, Timothy Donovan, Dave Braines, Edward Pyzer-Knapp
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) have fundamentally altered the way we interact with digital systems and have led to the pursuit of LLM powered AI agents to assist in daily workflows. LLMs, whilst powerful and capable of demonstrating some emergent properties, are not logical reasoners and often struggle to perform well at all sub-tasks carried out by an AI agent to plan and execute a workflow. While existing studies tackle this lack of proficiency by generalised pretraining at a huge scale or by specialised fine-tuning for tool use, we assess if a system comprising of a coalition of pretrained LLMs, each exhibiting specialised performance at individual sub-tasks, can match the performance of single model agents. The coalition of models approach showcases its potential for building robustness and reducing the operational costs of these AI agents by leveraging traits exhibited by specific models. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuning can be mitigated by considering a coalition of pretrained models and believe that this approach can be applied to other non-agentic systems which utilise LLMs.
Improving Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Utilizing Semantic and Linguistic Features
Authors: Mengyu Bu, Shuhao Gu, Yang Feng
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Transfer Learning, Translation

The many-to-many multilingual neural machine translation can be regarded as the process of integrating semantic features from the source sentences and linguistic features from the target sentences. To enhance zero-shot translation, models need to share knowledge across languages, which can be achieved through auxiliary tasks for learning a universal representation or cross-lingual mapping. To this end, we propose to exploit both semantic and linguistic features between multiple languages to enhance multilingual translation. On the encoder side, we introduce a disentangling learning task that aligns encoder representations by disentangling semantic and linguistic features, thus facilitating knowledge transfer while preserving complete information. On the decoder side, we leverage a linguistic encoder to integrate low-level linguistic features to assist in the target language generation. Experimental results on multilingual datasets demonstrate significant improvement in zero-shot translation compared to the baseline system, while maintaining performance in supervised translation. Further analysis validates the effectiveness of our method in leveraging both semantic and linguistic features. The code is available at https://github.com/ictnlp/SemLing-MNMT.
DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge
Authors: Rongwu Xu, Xuan Qi, Zehan Qi, Wei Xu, Zhijiang Guo
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled us to seek answers to inherently debatable questions on LLM chatbots, necessitating a reliable way to evaluate their ability. However, traditional QA benchmarks assume fixed answers are inadequate for this purpose. To address this, we introduce DebateQA, a dataset of 2,941 debatable questions, each accompanied by multiple human-annotated partial answers that capture a variety of perspectives. We develop two metrics: Perspective Diversity, which evaluates the comprehensiveness of perspectives, and Dispute Awareness, which assesses if the LLM acknowledges the question's debatable nature. Experiments demonstrate that both metrics align with human preferences and are stable across different underlying models. Using DebateQA with two metrics, we assess 12 popular LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation methods. Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally excel at recognizing debatable issues, their ability to provide comprehensive answers encompassing diverse perspectives varies considerably.
Quantification and Validation for Degree of Understanding in M2M Semantic Communications
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00

With the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, network communications based on the Shannon-Nyquist theorem gradually reveal their limitations due to the neglect of semantic information in the transmitted content. Semantic communication (SemCom) provides a solution for extracting information meanings from the transmitted content. The semantic information can be successfully interpreted by a receiver with the help of a shared knowledge base (KB). This paper proposes a two-stage hierarchical qualification and validation model for natural language-based machine-to-machine (M2M) SemCom. The approach can be applied in various applications, such as autonomous driving and edge computing. In the proposed model, we quantitatively measure the degree of understanding (DoU) between two communication parties at the word and sentence levels. The DoU is validated and ensured at each level before moving to the next step. The model's effectiveness is verified through a series of experiments, and the results show that the quantification and validation method proposed in this paper can significantly improve the DoU of inter-machine SemCom.
Hybrid Querying Over Relational Databases and Large Language Models
Authors: Fuheng Zhao, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00

Database queries traditionally operate under the closed-world assumption, providing no answers to questions that require information beyond the data stored in the database. Hybrid querying using SQL offers an alternative by integrating relational databases with large language models (LLMs) to answer beyond-database questions. In this paper, we present the first cross-domain benchmark, SWAN, containing 120 beyond-database questions over four real-world databases. To leverage state-of-the-art language models in addressing these complex questions in SWAN, we present two solutions: one based on schema expansion and the other based on user defined functions. We also discuss optimization opportunities and potential future directions. Our evaluation demonstrates that using GPT-4 Turbo with few-shot prompts, one can achieves up to 40.0\% in execution accuracy and 48.2\% in data factuality. These results highlights both the potential and challenges for hybrid querying. We believe that our work will inspire further research in creating more efficient and accurate data systems that seamlessly integrate relational databases and large language models to address beyond-database questions.
Prompt Refinement or Fine-tuning? Best Practices for using LLMs in Computational Social Science Tasks
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00

Large Language Models are expressive tools that enable complex tasks of text understanding within Computational Social Science. Their versatility, while beneficial, poses a barrier for establishing standardized best practices within the field. To bring clarity on the values of different strategies, we present an overview of the performance of modern LLM-based classification methods on a benchmark of 23 social knowledge tasks. Our results point to three best practices: select models with larger vocabulary and pre-training corpora; avoid simple zero-shot in favor of AI-enhanced prompting; fine-tune on task-specific data, and consider more complex forms instruction-tuning on multiple datasets only when only training data is more abundant.
Continuous-Time Neural Networks Can Stably Memorize Random Spike Trains
Authors: Hugo Aguettaz, Hans-Andrea Loeliger
Date: 2024-08-02 00:00:00

The paper explores the capability of continuous-time recurrent neural networks to store and recall precisely timed scores of spike trains. We show (by numerical experiments) that this is indeed possible: within some range of parameters, any random score of spike trains (for all neurons in the network) can be robustly memorized and autonomously reproduced with stable accurate relative timing of all spikes, with probability close to one. We also demonstrate associative recall under noisy conditions. In these experiments, the required synaptic weights are computed offline, to satisfy a template that encourages temporal stability.