pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mutual Information-based Representations Disentanglement for Unaligned Multimodal Language Sequences
Authors: Fan Qian, Jiqing Han, Jianchen Li, Yongjun He, Tieran Zheng, Guibin Zheng
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

The key challenge in unaligned multimodal language sequences lies in effectively integrating information from various modalities to obtain a refined multimodal joint representation. Recently, the disentangle and fuse methods have achieved the promising performance by explicitly learning modality-agnostic and modality-specific representations and then fusing them into a multimodal joint representation. However, these methods often independently learn modality-agnostic representations for each modality and utilize orthogonal constraints to reduce linear correlations between modality-agnostic and modality-specific representations, neglecting to eliminate their nonlinear correlations. As a result, the obtained multimodal joint representation usually suffers from information redundancy, leading to overfitting and poor generalization of the models. In this paper, we propose a Mutual Information-based Representations Disentanglement (MIRD) method for unaligned multimodal language sequences, in which a novel disentanglement framework is designed to jointly learn a single modality-agnostic representation. In addition, the mutual information minimization constraint is employed to ensure superior disentanglement of representations, thereby eliminating information redundancy within the multimodal joint representation. Furthermore, the challenge of estimating mutual information caused by the limited labeled data is mitigated by introducing unlabeled data. Meanwhile, the unlabeled data also help to characterize the underlying structure of multimodal data, consequently further preventing overfitting and enhancing the performance of the models. Experimental results on several widely used benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Textualized Agent-Style Reasoning for Complex Tasks by Multiple Round LLM Generation
Authors: Chen Liang, Zhifan Feng, Zihe Liu, Wenbin Jiang, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Yong Wang
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Chain-of-thought prompting significantly boosts the reasoning ability of large language models but still faces three issues: hallucination problem, restricted interpretability, and uncontrollable generation. To address these challenges, we present AgentCOT, a llm-based autonomous agent framework, which can solve complex problems in an agent-style manner by multiple round LLM generation. At each step, AgentCOT selects an action and executes it to yield an intermediate result with supporting evidence. In addition, we integrate the step's index into the reasoning process to form a graph structure for complex inference logic. We introduce two new strategies to enhance the performance of AgentCOT.We conduct extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method on six common benchmarks. Results exhibit that our method brings in substantial improvements over current competitive approaches.
Zero-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities of Large Language Models Iteratively without Gold Labels
Authors: Chaoqun Liu, Qin Chao, Wenxuan Zhang, Xiaobao Wu, Boyang Li, Anh Tuan Luu, Lidong Bing
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance through supervised fine-tuning or in-context learning using gold labels. However, this paradigm is limited by the availability of gold labels, while in certain scenarios, LLMs may need to perform tasks that are too complex for humans to provide such labels. To tackle this challenge, this study explores whether solely utilizing unlabeled data can elicit strong model capabilities. We propose a new paradigm termed zero-to-strong generalization. We iteratively prompt LLMs to annotate unlabeled data and retain high-quality labels by filtering. Surprisingly, we obverse that this iterative process gradually unlocks LLMs' potential on downstream tasks. Our experiments on extensive classification and reasoning tasks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Our analysis indicates that this paradigm is effective for both in-context learning and fine-tuning, and for various model sizes.
Linguistic Minimal Pairs Elicit Linguistic Similarity in Large Language Models
Authors: Xinyu Zhou, Delong Chen, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Xufeng Duan, Zhenguang G. Cai
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

We introduce a novel analysis that leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). By measuring the similarity between LLM activation differences across minimal pairs, we quantify the and gain insight into the linguistic knowledge captured by LLMs. Our large-scale experiments, spanning 100+ LLMs and 150k minimal pairs in three languages, reveal properties of linguistic similarity from four key aspects: consistency across LLMs, relation to theoretical categorizations, dependency to semantic context, and cross-lingual alignment of relevant phenomena. Our findings suggest that 1) linguistic similarity is significantly influenced by training data exposure, leading to higher cross-LLM agreement in higher-resource languages. 2) Linguistic similarity strongly aligns with fine-grained theoretical linguistic categories but weakly with broader ones. 3) Linguistic similarity shows a weak correlation with semantic similarity, showing its context-dependent nature. 4) LLMs exhibit limited cross-lingual alignment in their understanding of relevant linguistic phenomena. This work demonstrates the potential of minimal pairs as a window into the neural representations of language in LLMs, shedding light on the relationship between LLMs and linguistic theory. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/ChenDelong1999/Linguistic-Similarity
Enhancing Logical Reasoning in Large Language Models through Graph-based Synthetic Data
Authors: Jiaming Zhou, Abbas Ghaddar, Ge Zhang, Liheng Ma, Yaochen Hu, Soumyasundar Pal, Mark Coates, Bin Wang, Yingxue Zhang, Jianye Hao
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Spatial Reasoning

Despite recent advances in training and prompting strategies for Large Language Models (LLMs), these models continue to face challenges with complex logical reasoning tasks that involve long reasoning chains. In this work, we explore the potential and limitations of using graph-based synthetic reasoning data as training signals to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Our extensive experiments, conducted on two established natural language reasoning tasks -- inductive reasoning and spatial reasoning -- demonstrate that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with synthetic graph-based reasoning data effectively enhances LLMs' reasoning performance without compromising their effectiveness on other standard evaluation benchmarks.
Unlocking Reasoning Potential in Large Langauge Models by Scaling Code-form Planning
Authors: Jiaxin Wen, Jian Guan, Hongning Wang, Wei Wu, Minlie Huang
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Instruction Following, Mathematical Reasoning

Despite the remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) on traditional natural language processing tasks, their planning ability remains a critical bottleneck in tackling complex multi-step reasoning tasks. Existing approaches mainly rely on prompting or task-specific fine-tuning, often suffering from poor robustness and cross-task generalization. To address the limitation, we introduce CodePlan, a scalable framework that empowers LLMs to generate and follow \textit{code-form plans} -- pseudocode that outlines high-level, structured reasoning processes. By leveraging the structured and versatile nature of code, CodePlan effectively captures the rich semantics and control flows inherent to sophisticated reasoning tasks. Importantly, CodePlan allows automatic extraction of code-form plans from massive, wide-ranging text corpora without the need for curated, task-specific datasets. This enables it to scale up efficiently and improve LLM's reasoning capabilities across diverse scenarios. To train CodePlan, we construct a large-scale dataset of 2M examples that integrate code-form plans with standard prompt-response pairs from existing corpora. With minimal computation overhead during both training and inference, CodePlan achieves a 25.1\% relative improvement compared with directly generating responses, averaged across 13 challenging multi-step reasoning benchmarks, spanning mathematical reasoning, symbolic reasoning, instruction-following, multi-hop QA, and decision-making tasks. Further analysis reveals CodePlan's increasing performance gains on more complex reasoning tasks, as well as significant data efficiency thanks to its generalization ability.
AutoMode-ASR: Learning to Select ASR Systems for Better Quality and Cost
Authors: Ahmet Gündüz, Yunsu Kim, Kamer Ali Yuksel, Mohamed Al-Badrashiny, Thiago castro Ferreira, Hassan Sawaf
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00

We present AutoMode-ASR, a novel framework that effectively integrates multiple ASR systems to enhance the overall transcription quality while optimizing cost. The idea is to train a decision model to select the optimal ASR system for each segment based solely on the audio input before running the systems. We achieve this by ensembling binary classifiers determining the preference between two systems. These classifiers are equipped with various features, such as audio embeddings, quality estimation, and signal properties. Additionally, we demonstrate how using a quality estimator can further improve performance with minimal cost increase. Experimental results show a relative reduction in WER of 16.2%, a cost saving of 65%, and a speed improvement of 75%, compared to using a single-best model for all segments. Our framework is compatible with commercial and open-source black-box ASR systems as it does not require changes in model codes.
Exploring and Enhancing the Transfer of Distribution in Knowledge Distillation for Autoregressive Language Models
Authors: Jun Rao, Xuebo Liu, Zepeng Lin, Liang Ding, Jing Li, DaCheng Tao, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique that compresses large teacher models by training smaller student models to mimic them. The success of KD in auto-regressive language models mainly relies on Reverse KL for mode-seeking and student-generated output (SGO) to combat exposure bias. Our theoretical analyses and experimental validation reveal that while Reverse KL effectively mimics certain features of the teacher distribution, it fails to capture most of its behaviors. Conversely, SGO incurs higher computational costs and presents challenges in optimization, particularly when the student model is significantly smaller than the teacher model. These constraints are primarily due to the immutable distribution of the teacher model, which fails to adjust adaptively to models of varying sizes. We introduce Online Knowledge Distillation (OKD), where the teacher network integrates small online modules to concurrently train with the student model. This strategy abolishes the necessity for on-policy sampling and merely requires minimal updates to the parameters of the teacher's online module during training, thereby allowing dynamic adaptation to the student's distribution to make distillation better. Extensive results across multiple generation datasets show that OKD achieves or exceeds the performance of leading methods in various model architectures and sizes, reducing training time by up to fourfold.
Profiling Patient Transcript Using Large Language Model Reasoning Augmentation for Alzheimer's Disease Detection
Authors: Chin-Po Chen, Jeng-Lin Li
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Alzheimer's Disease Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Alzheimer's disease (AD) stands as the predominant cause of dementia, characterized by a gradual decline in speech and language capabilities. Recent deep-learning advancements have facilitated automated AD detection through spontaneous speech. However, common transcript-based detection methods directly model text patterns in each utterance without a global view of the patient's linguistic characteristics, resulting in limited discriminability and interpretability. Despite the enhanced reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), there remains a gap in fully harnessing the reasoning ability to facilitate AD detection and model interpretation. Therefore, we propose a patient-level transcript profiling framework leveraging LLM-based reasoning augmentation to systematically elicit linguistic deficit attributes. The summarized embeddings of the attributes are integrated into an Albert model for AD detection. The framework achieves 8.51\% ACC and 8.34\% F1 improvements on the ADReSS dataset compared to the baseline without reasoning augmentation. Our further analysis shows the effectiveness of our identified linguistic deficit attributes and the potential to use LLM for AD detection interpretation.
Enhancing Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models through Efficient Multi-Modal Distribution Alignment
Authors: Tianyu Peng, Jiajun Zhang
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective model compression method that can transfer the internal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to smaller ones. However, the multi-modal probability distribution predicted by teacher LLMs causes difficulties for student models to learn. In this paper, we first demonstrate the importance of multi-modal distribution alignment with experiments and then highlight the inefficiency of existing KD approaches in learning multi-modal distributions. To address this problem, we propose Ranking Loss based Knowledge Distillation (RLKD), which encourages the consistency of the ranking of peak predictions between the teacher and student models. By incorporating word-level ranking loss, we ensure excellent compatibility with existing distillation objectives while fully leveraging the fine-grained information between different categories in peaks of two predicted distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enables the student model to better learn the multi-modal distributions of the teacher model, leading to a significant performance improvement in various downstream tasks.
RAD-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models Capabilities in Retrieval Augmented Dialogues
Authors: Tzu-Lin Kuo, Feng-Ting Liao, Mu-Wei Hsieh, Fu-Chieh Chang, Po-chun Hsu, Da-Shan Shiu
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In real-world applications with Large Language Models (LLMs), external retrieval mechanisms - such as Search-Augmented Generation (SAG), tool utilization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) - are often employed to enhance the quality of augmented generations in dialogues. These approaches often come with multi-turn dialogue, where each interaction is enriched by relevant information retrieved from external sources. Existing benchmarks either assess LLMs' chat abilities in multi-turn dialogues or their use of retrieval for augmented responses in single-turn settings. However, there is a gap in evaluating LLMs' ability to leverage retrieval for more precise responses across multiple turns. To address this limitation, we introduce RAD-Bench (Retrieval Augmented Dialogue), a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in multi-turn dialogues following retrievals, essential for their deployment in context-rich applications. RAD-Bench evaluates two key abilities of LLMs: Retrieval Synthesis and Retrieval Reasoning. These are measured using discriminative questions and retrieved contexts, and corresponding reference answers, assessing how effectively LLMs integrate and reason with context to maintain and enhance conversation quality over multiple turns. Our evaluation results on commonly used LLMs reveal that model performance deteriorates as additional layers of conditions or constraints are applied across conversation turns, even when accurate retrieved contexts are provided.
Efficient Knowledge Distillation: Empowering Small Language Models with Teacher Model Insights
Authors: Mohamad Ballout, Ulf Krumnack, Gunther Heidemann, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Knowledge Distillation, Multiple-choice

Enhancing small language models for real-life application deployment is a significant challenge facing the research community. Due to the difficulties and costs of using large language models, researchers are seeking ways to effectively deploy task-specific small models. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective knowledge distillation method to improve the performance of small language models. Our approach utilizes a teacher model with approximately 3 billion parameters to identify the most influential tokens in its decision-making process. These tokens are extracted from the input based on their attribution scores relative to the output, using methods like saliency maps. These important tokens are then provided as rationales to a student model, aiming to distill the knowledge of the teacher model. This method has proven to be effective, as demonstrated by testing it on four diverse datasets, where it shows improvement over both standard fine-tuning methods and state-of-the-art knowledge distillation models. Furthermore, we explore explanations of the success of the model by analyzing the important tokens extracted from the teacher model. Our findings reveal that in 68\% of cases, specifically in datasets where labels are part of the answer, such as multiple-choice questions, the extracted tokens are part of the ground truth.
Enhancing SLM via ChatGPT and Dataset Augmentation
Authors: Tom Pieper, Mohamad Ballout, Ulf Krumnack, Gunther Heidemann, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Natural Language Inference

This paper explores the enhancement of small language models through strategic dataset augmentation via ChatGPT-3.5-Turbo, in the domain of Natural Language Inference (NLI). By employing knowledge distillation-based techniques and synthetic dataset augmentation, we aim to bridge the performance gap between large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) without the immense cost of human annotation. Our methods involve two forms of rationale generation--information extraction and informed reasoning--to enrich the ANLI dataset. We then fine-tune T5-Small on these augmented datasets, evaluating its performance against an established benchmark. Our findings reveal that the incorporation of synthetic rationales significantly improves the model's ability to comprehend natural language, leading to 1.3\% and 2.3\% higher classification accuracy, respectively, on the ANLI dataset, demonstrating the potential of leveraging LLMs for dataset augmentation. This approach not only enhances the performance of smaller models on complex tasks but also introduces a cost-effective method for fine-tuning smaller language models. By advancing our understanding of knowledge distillation and fine-tuning strategies, this work contributes to the ongoing effort to create more capable and efficient NLP systems.
Michelangelo: Long Context Evaluations Beyond Haystacks via Latent Structure Queries
Authors: Kiran Vodrahalli, Santiago Ontanon, Nilesh Tripuraneni, Kelvin Xu, Sanil Jain, Rakesh Shivanna, Jeffrey Hui, Nishanth Dikkala, Mehran Kazemi, Bahare Fatemi, Rohan Anil, Ethan Dyer, Siamak Shakeri, Roopali Vij, Harsh Mehta, Vinay Ramasesh, Quoc Le, Ed Chi, Yifeng Lu, Orhan Firat, Angeliki Lazaridou, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Nithya Attaluri, Kate Olszewska
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce Michelangelo: a minimal, synthetic, and unleaked long-context reasoning evaluation for large language models which is also easy to automatically score. This evaluation is derived via a novel, unifying framework for evaluations over arbitrarily long contexts which measure the model's ability to do more than retrieve a single piece of information from its context. The central idea of the Latent Structure Queries framework (LSQ) is to construct tasks which require a model to ``chisel away'' the irrelevant information in the context, revealing a latent structure in the context. To verify a model's understanding of this latent structure, we query the model for details of the structure. Using LSQ, we produce three diagnostic long-context evaluations across code and natural-language domains intended to provide a stronger signal of long-context language model capabilities. We perform evaluations on several state-of-the-art models and demonstrate both that a) the proposed evaluations are high-signal and b) that there is significant room for improvement in synthesizing long-context information.
Efficient Performance Tracking: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Construction of Scientific Leaderboards
Authors: Furkan Şahinuç, Thy Thy Tran, Yulia Grishina, Yufang Hou, Bei Chen, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Scientific leaderboards are standardized ranking systems that facilitate evaluating and comparing competitive methods. Typically, a leaderboard is defined by a task, dataset, and evaluation metric (TDM) triple, allowing objective performance assessment and fostering innovation through benchmarking. However, the exponential increase in publications has made it infeasible to construct and maintain these leaderboards manually. Automatic leaderboard construction has emerged as a solution to reduce manual labor. Existing datasets for this task are based on the community-contributed leaderboards without additional curation. Our analysis shows that a large portion of these leaderboards are incomplete, and some of them contain incorrect information. In this work, we present SciLead, a manually-curated Scientific Leaderboard dataset that overcomes the aforementioned problems. Building on this dataset, we propose three experimental settings that simulate real-world scenarios where TDM triples are fully defined, partially defined, or undefined during leaderboard construction. While previous research has only explored the first setting, the latter two are more representative of real-world applications. To address these diverse settings, we develop a comprehensive LLM-based framework for constructing leaderboards. Our experiments and analysis reveal that various LLMs often correctly identify TDM triples while struggling to extract result values from publications. We make our code and data publicly available.