pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Helpful assistant or fruitful facilitator? Investigating how personas affect language model behavior
Authors: Pedro Henrique Luz de Araujo, Benjamin Roth
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Math

One way to personalize and steer generations from large language models (LLM) is to assign a persona: a role that describes how the user expects the LLM to behave (e.g., a helpful assistant, a teacher, a woman). This paper investigates how personas affect diverse aspects of model behavior. We assign to seven LLMs 162 personas from 12 categories spanning variables like gender, sexual orientation, and occupation. We prompt them to answer questions from five datasets covering objective (e.g., questions about math and history) and subjective tasks (e.g., questions about beliefs and values). We also compare persona's generations to two baseline settings: a control persona setting with 30 paraphrases of "a helpful assistant" to control for models' prompt sensitivity, and an empty persona setting where no persona is assigned. We find that for all models and datasets, personas show greater variability than the control setting and that some measures of persona behavior generalize across models.
Crossroads of Continents: Automated Artifact Extraction for Cultural Adaptation with Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Anjishnu Mukherjee, Ziwei Zhu, Antonios Anastasopoulos
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

We present a comprehensive three-phase study to examine (1) the cultural understanding of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) by introducing DalleStreet, a large-scale dataset generated by DALL-E 3 and validated by humans, containing 9,935 images of 67 countries and 10 concept classes; (2) the underlying implicit and potentially stereotypical cultural associations with a cultural artifact extraction task; and (3) an approach to adapt cultural representation in an image based on extracted associations using a modular pipeline, CultureAdapt. We find disparities in cultural understanding at geographic sub-region levels with both open-source (LLaVA) and closed-source (GPT-4V) models on DalleStreet and other existing benchmarks, which we try to understand using over 18,000 artifacts that we identify in association to different countries. Our findings reveal a nuanced picture of the cultural competence of LMMs, highlighting the need to develop culture-aware systems. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/iamshnoo/crossroads
Leveraging Large Language Models for Actionable Course Evaluation Student Feedback to Lecturers
Authors: Mike Zhang, Euan D Lindsay, Frederik Bode Thorbensen, Danny Bøgsted Poulsen, Johannes Bjerva
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00

End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose. This paper explores the use of open-source generative AI to synthesise factual, actionable and appropriate summaries of student feedback from these survey responses. In our setup, we have 742 student responses ranging over 75 courses in a Computer Science department. For each course, we synthesise a summary of the course evaluations and actionable items for the instructor. Our results reveal a promising avenue for enhancing teaching practices in the classroom setting. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility of using generative AI to produce insightful feedback for teachers, thus providing a cost-effective means to support educators' development. Overall, our work highlights the possibility of using generative AI to produce factual, actionable, and appropriate feedback for teachers in the classroom setting.
Accompanied Singing Voice Synthesis with Fully Text-controlled Melody
Authors: RuiQi Li, Zhiqing Hong, Yongqi Wang, Lichao Zhang, Rongjie Huang, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Music Generation, Singing Voice Synthesis

Text-to-song (TTSong) is a music generation task that synthesizes accompanied singing voices. Current TTSong methods, inherited from singing voice synthesis (SVS), require melody-related information that can sometimes be impractical, such as music scores or MIDI sequences. We present MelodyLM, the first TTSong model that generates high-quality song pieces with fully text-controlled melodies, achieving minimal user requirements and maximum control flexibility. MelodyLM explicitly models MIDI as the intermediate melody-related feature and sequentially generates vocal tracks in a language model manner, conditioned on textual and vocal prompts. The accompaniment music is subsequently synthesized by a latent diffusion model with hybrid conditioning for temporal alignment. With minimal requirements, users only need to input lyrics and a reference voice to synthesize a song sample. For full control, just input textual prompts or even directly input MIDI. Experimental results indicate that MelodyLM achieves superior performance in terms of both objective and subjective metrics. Audio samples are available at https://melodylm666.github.io.
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models
Authors: Yang Xu, Yunlong Feng, Honglin Mu, Yutai Hou, Yitong Li, Xinghao Wang, Wanjun Zhong, Zhongyang Li, Dandan Tu, Qingfu Zhu, Min Zhang, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process. Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths. To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio. Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.
Prompt Stability Scoring for Text Annotation with Large Language Models
Authors: Christopher Barrie, Elli Palaiologou, Petter Törnberg
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: text annotation

Researchers are increasingly using language models (LMs) for text annotation. These approaches rely only on a prompt telling the model to return a given output according to a set of instructions. The reproducibility of LM outputs may nonetheless be vulnerable to small changes in the prompt design. This calls into question the replicability of classification routines. To tackle this problem, researchers have typically tested a variety of semantically similar prompts to determine what we call "prompt stability." These approaches remain ad-hoc and task specific. In this article, we propose a general framework for diagnosing prompt stability by adapting traditional approaches to intra- and inter-coder reliability scoring. We call the resulting metric the Prompt Stability Score (PSS) and provide a Python package PromptStability for its estimation. Using six different datasets and twelve outcomes, we classify >150k rows of data to: a) diagnose when prompt stability is low; and b) demonstrate the functionality of the package. We conclude by providing best practice recommendations for applied researchers.
Show Less, Instruct More: Enriching Prompts with Definitions and Guidelines for Zero-Shot NER
Authors: Andrew Zamai, Andrea Zugarini, Leonardo Rigutini, Marco Ernandes, Marco Maggini
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, TAG

Recently, several specialized instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) for Named Entity Recognition (NER) have emerged. Compared to traditional NER approaches, these models have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities. Existing LLMs primarily focus on addressing zero-shot NER on Out-of-Domain inputs, while fine-tuning on an extensive number of entity classes that often highly or completely overlap with test sets. In this work instead, we propose SLIMER, an approach designed to tackle never-seen-before entity tags by instructing the model on fewer examples, and by leveraging a prompt enriched with definition and guidelines. Experiments demonstrate that definition and guidelines yield better performance, faster and more robust learning, particularly when labelling unseen named entities. Furthermore, SLIMER performs comparably to state-of-the-art approaches in out-of-domain zero-shot NER, while being trained in a more fair, though certainly more challenging, setting.
An End-to-End Speech Summarization Using Large Language Model
Authors: Hengchao Shang, Zongyao Li, Jiaxin Guo, Shaojun Li, Zhiqiang Rao, Yuanchang Luo, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Summarization

Abstractive Speech Summarization (SSum) aims to generate human-like text summaries from spoken content. It encounters difficulties in handling long speech input and capturing the intricate cross-modal mapping between long speech inputs and short text summaries. Research on large language models (LLMs) and multimodal information fusion has provided new insights for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end SSum model that utilizes Q-Former as a connector for the audio-text modality and employs LLMs to generate text summaries directly from speech features. We adopt a multi-stage training approach that includes LLM based ASR and Text Summarization (TSum) tasks as auxiliary tasks. ASR tasks are used to align feature spaces and enhance the LLM's ability to handle longer speech. Then, we utilize a curriculum learning strategy to facilitate the model's transition from TSum to SSum. Finally, our model achieves competitive performance on the How-2 dataset.
Is Your Large Language Model Knowledgeable or a Choices-Only Cheater?
Authors: Nishant Balepur, Rachel Rudinger
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Mining, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multiple-choice

Recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) can answer multiple-choice questions using only the choices, but does this mean that MCQA leaderboard rankings of LLMs are largely influenced by abilities in choices-only settings? To answer this, we use a contrast set that probes if LLMs over-rely on choices-only shortcuts in MCQA. While previous works build contrast sets via expensive human annotations or model-generated data which can be biased, we employ graph mining to extract contrast sets from existing MCQA datasets. We use our method on UnifiedQA, a group of six commonsense reasoning datasets with high choices-only accuracy, to build an 820-question contrast set. After validating our contrast set, we test 12 LLMs, finding that these models do not exhibit reliance on choice-only shortcuts when given both the question and choices. Thus, despite the susceptibility~of MCQA to high choices-only accuracy, we argue that LLMs are not obtaining high ranks on MCQA leaderboards just due to their ability to exploit choices-only shortcuts.
HyperLoader: Integrating Hypernetwork-Based LoRA and Adapter Layers into Multi-Task Transformers for Sequence Labelling
Authors: Jesus-German Ortiz-Barajas, Helena Gomez-Adorno, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2024-07-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Position

We present HyperLoader, a simple approach that combines different parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods in a multi-task setting. To achieve this goal, our model uses a hypernetwork to generate the weights of these modules based on the task, the transformer layer, and its position within this layer. Our method combines the benefits of multi-task learning by capturing the structure of all tasks while reducing the task interference problem by encapsulating the task-specific knowledge in the generated weights and the benefits of combining different parameter-efficient methods to outperform full-fine tuning. We provide empirical evidence that HyperLoader outperforms previous approaches in most datasets and obtains the best average performance across tasks in high-resource and low-resource scenarios.
Enabling Discriminative Reasoning in LLMs for Legal Judgment Prediction
Authors: Chenlong Deng, Kelong Mao, Yuyao Zhang, Zhicheng Dou
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Legal judgment prediction is essential for enhancing judicial efficiency. In this work, we identify that existing large language models (LLMs) underperform in this domain due to challenges in understanding case complexities and distinguishing between similar charges. To adapt LLMs for effective legal judgment prediction, we introduce the Ask-Discriminate-Predict (ADAPT) reasoning framework inspired by human judicial reasoning. ADAPT involves decomposing case facts, discriminating among potential charges, and predicting the final judgment. We further enhance LLMs through fine-tuning with multi-task synthetic trajectories to improve legal judgment prediction accuracy and efficiency under our ADAPT framework. Extensive experiments conducted on two widely-used datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in legal judgment prediction, particularly when dealing with complex and confusing charges.
S2D: Sorted Speculative Decoding For More Efficient Deployment of Nested Large Language Models
Authors: Parsa Kavehzadeh, Mohammadreza Pourreza, Mojtaba Valipour, Tinashu Zhu, Haoli Bai, Ali Ghodsi, Boxing Chen, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Deployment of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) is costly, and as these models increase in size, the associated costs will become even more considerable. Consequently, different methods have been proposed to accelerate the token generation process and reduce costs. Speculative decoding (SD) is among the most promising approaches to speed up the LLM decoding process by verifying multiple tokens in parallel and using an auxiliary smaller draft model to generate the possible tokens. In SD, usually, one draft model is used to serve a specific target model; however, in practice, LLMs are diverse, and we might need to deal with many target models or more than one target model simultaneously. In this scenario, it is not clear which draft model should be used for which target model, and searching among different draft models or training customized draft models can further increase deployment costs. In this paper, we first introduce a novel multi-target scenario for the deployment of draft models for faster inference. Then, we present a novel, more efficient sorted speculative decoding mechanism that outperforms regular baselines in multi-target settings. We evaluated our method on Spec-Bench in different settings, including base models such as Vicuna 7B, 13B, and LLama Chat 70B. Our results suggest that our draft models perform better than baselines for multiple target models at the same time.
Step-Controlled DPO: Leveraging Stepwise Error for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Zimu Lu, Aojun Zhou, Ke Wang, Houxing Ren, Weikang Shi, Junting Pan, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective at improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on downstream tasks such as reasoning and alignment. In this work, we propose Step-Controlled DPO (SCDPO), a method for automatically providing stepwise error supervision by creating negative samples of mathematical reasoning rationales that start making errors at a specified step. By applying these samples in DPO training, SCDPO can better align the model to understand reasoning errors and output accurate reasoning steps. We apply SCDPO to both code-integrated and chain-of-thought solutions, empirically showing that it consistently improves the performance compared to naive DPO on three different SFT models, including one existing SFT model and two models we finetuned. Qualitative analysis of the credit assignment of SCDPO and DPO demonstrates the effectiveness of SCDPO at identifying errors in mathematical solutions. We then apply SCDPO to an InternLM2-20B model, resulting in a 20B model that achieves high scores of 88.5% on GSM8K and 58.1% on MATH, rivaling all other open-source LLMs, showing the great potential of our method.
Efficient-Empathy: Towards Efficient and Effective Selection of Empathy Data
Authors: Linzhuang Sun, Hao Liang, Jingxuan Wei, Linkun Sun, Bihui Yu, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

In recent years, with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), achieving excellent empathetic response capability has become a crucial prerequisite. Consequently, managing and understanding large-scale video datasets has gained increasing importance. However, empathetic data are typically trained without any quality selection, leading to inefficient data usage and wasted computational resources. Additionally, using raw data can result in low performance in empathetic dialogues. In this work, we present Efficient-Empathy, a sensibility and rationality score-based data selection algorithm that automatically selects sensibility and rationality data while discarding low-quality data. With only the sensibility data (59% of the full dataset), our trained sensibility model efficiently achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance. Furthermore, with multiple data selection hyperparameters, the sensibility model demonstrates SoTA performance, showcasing the robustness of our method. By integrating sensibility and rationality data with a MoE structure, we achieve even higher performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our Efficient-Empathy algorithm.
Investigating the Effects of Large-Scale Pseudo-Stereo Data and Different Speech Foundation Model on Dialogue Generative Spoken Language Model
Authors: Yu-Kuan Fu, Cheng-Kuang Lee, Hsiu-Hsuan Wang, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent efforts in Spoken Dialogue Modeling aim to synthesize spoken dialogue without the need for direct transcription, thereby preserving the wealth of non-textual information inherent in speech. However, this approach faces a challenge when speakers talk simultaneously, requiring stereo dialogue data with speakers recorded on separate channels, a notably scarce resource. To address this, we have developed an innovative pipeline capable of transforming single-channel dialogue data into pseudo-stereo data. This expanded our training dataset from a mere 2,000 to an impressive 17,600 hours, significantly enriching the diversity and quality of the training examples available. The inclusion of this pseudo-stereo data has proven to be effective in improving the performance of spoken dialogue language models. Additionally, we explored the use of discrete units of different speech foundation models for spoken dialogue generation.
Pinyin Regularization in Error Correction for Chinese Speech Recognition with Large Language Models
Authors: Zhiyuan Tang, Dong Wang, Shen Huang, Shidong Shang
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent studies have demonstrated the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) in error correction for automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, much of the research focuses on the English language. This paper redirects the attention to Chinese. Firstly, we construct a specialized benchmark dataset aimed at error correction for Chinese ASR with 724K hypotheses-transcription pairs, named the Chinese Hypotheses Paradise dataset (ChineseHP), which contains a wide range of scenarios and presents significant challenges. Subsequently, we conduct a preliminary evaluation using the dataset for both direct-prompting and fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs. Furthermore, we propose a straightforward method of Pinyin regularization for prompts, which involves the transcription of Pinyin directly from text hypotheses. The experimental results reveal that Pinyin regularization consistently enhances the error-correcting ability of LLMs when compared with those without regularization. The dataset is available on the website.
Scope-enhanced Compositional Semantic Parsing for DRT
Authors: Xiulin Yang, Jonas Groschwitz, Alexander Koller, Johan Bos
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing, Sentence

Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) distinguishes itself from other semantic representation frameworks by its ability to model complex semantic and discourse phenomena through structural nesting and variable binding. While seq2seq models hold the state of the art on DRT parsing, their accuracy degrades with the complexity of the sentence, and they sometimes struggle to produce well-formed DRT representations. We introduce the AMS parser, a compositional, neurosymbolic semantic parser for DRT. It rests on a novel mechanism for predicting quantifier scope. We show that the AMS parser reliably produces well-formed outputs and performs well on DRT parsing, especially on complex sentences.
Proposal Report for the 2nd SciCAP Competition 2024
Authors: Pengpeng Li, Tingmin Li, Jingyuan Wang, Boyuan Wang, Yang Yang
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text Generation

In this paper, we propose a method for document summarization using auxiliary information. This approach effectively summarizes descriptions related to specific images, tables, and appendices within lengthy texts. Our experiments demonstrate that leveraging high-quality OCR data and initially extracted information from the original text enables efficient summarization of the content related to described objects. Based on these findings, we enhanced popular text generation model models by incorporating additional auxiliary branches to improve summarization performance. Our method achieved top scores of 4.33 and 4.66 in the long caption and short caption tracks, respectively, of the 2024 SciCAP competition, ranking highest in both categories.