pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Magnetic Preference Optimization: Achieving Last-iterate Convergence for Language Model Alignment
Authors: Mingzhi Wang, Chengdong Ma, Qizhi Chen, Linjian Meng, Yang Han, Jiancong Xiao, Zhaowei Zhang, Jing Huo, Weijie J. Su, Yaodong Yang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Models Alignment

Self-play methods have demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing model capabilities across various domains. In the context of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), self-play not only boosts Large Language Model (LLM) performance but also overcomes the limitations of traditional Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumptions by finding the Nash equilibrium (NE) of a preference-based, two-player constant-sum game. However, existing methods either guarantee only average-iterate convergence, incurring high storage and inference costs, or converge to the NE of a regularized game, failing to accurately reflect true human preferences. In this paper, we introduce Magnetic Preference Optimization (MPO), a novel approach capable of achieving last-iterate convergence to the NE of the original game, effectively overcoming the limitations of existing methods. Building upon Magnetic Mirror Descent (MMD), MPO attains a linear convergence rate, making it particularly suitable for fine-tuning LLMs. To ensure our algorithm is both theoretically sound and practically viable, we present a simple yet effective implementation that adapts the theoretical insights to the RLHF setting. Empirical results demonstrate that MPO can significantly enhance the performance of LLMs, highlighting the potential of self-play methods in alignment.
DENOASR: Debiasing ASRs through Selective Denoising
Authors: Anand Kumar Rai, Siddharth D Jaiswal, Shubham Prakash, Bendi Pragnya Sree, Animesh Mukherjee
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Denoising, Speech Denoising, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have been examined and shown to exhibit biases toward particular groups of individuals, influenced by factors such as demographic traits, accents, and speech styles. Noise can disproportionately impact speakers with certain accents, dialects, or speaking styles, leading to biased error rates. In this work, we introduce a novel framework DENOASR, which is a selective denoising technique to reduce the disparity in the word error rates between the two gender groups, male and female. We find that a combination of two popular speech denoising techniques, viz. DEMUCS and LE, can be effectively used to mitigate ASR disparity without compromising their overall performance. Experiments using two state-of-the-art open-source ASRs - OpenAI WHISPER and NVIDIA NEMO - on multiple benchmark datasets, including TIE, VOX-POPULI, TEDLIUM, and FLEURS, show that there is a promising reduction in the average word error rate gap across the two gender groups. For a given dataset, the denoising is selectively applied on speech samples having speech intelligibility below a certain threshold, estimated using a small validation sample, thus ameliorating the need for large-scale human-written ground-truth transcripts. Our findings suggest that selective denoising can be an elegant approach to mitigate biases in present-day ASR systems.
Atomic Fact Decomposition Helps Attributed Question Answering
Authors: Zhichao Yan, Jiapu Wang, Jiaoyan Chen, XiaoLi Li, Ru Li, Jeff Z. Pan
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Retrieval

Attributed Question Answering (AQA) aims to provide both a trustworthy answer and a reliable attribution report for a given question. Retrieval is a widely adopted approach, including two general paradigms: Retrieval-Then-Read (RTR) and post-hoc retrieval. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency, prompting growing interest in AQA among researchers. However, RTR-based AQA often suffers from irrelevant knowledge and rapidly changing information, even when LLMs are adopted, while post-hoc retrieval-based AQA struggles with comprehending long-form answers with complex logic, and precisely identifying the content needing revision and preserving the original intent. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes an Atomic fact decomposition-based Retrieval and Editing (ARE) framework, which decomposes the generated long-form answers into molecular clauses and atomic facts by the instruction-tuned LLMs. Notably, the instruction-tuned LLMs are fine-tuned using a well-constructed dataset, generated from large scale Knowledge Graphs (KGs). This process involves extracting one-hop neighbors from a given set of entities and transforming the result into coherent long-form text. Subsequently, ARE leverages a search engine to retrieve evidences related to atomic facts, inputting these evidences into an LLM-based verifier to determine whether the facts require expansion for re-retrieval or editing. Furthermore, the edited facts are backtracked into the original answer, with evidence aggregated based on the relationship between molecular clauses and atomic facts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method over the state-of-the-arts on several datasets, with an additionally proposed new metric $Attr_{p}$ for evaluating the precision of evidence attribution.
SafetyAnalyst: Interpretable, Transparent, and Steerable Safety Moderation for AI Behavior
Authors: Jing-Jing Li, Valentina Pyatkin, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Liwei Jiang, Nouha Dziri, Anne G. E. Collins, Jana Schaich Borg, Maarten Sap, Yejin Choi, Sydney Levine
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

The ideal AI safety moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be reliably explained) and steerable (to align to safety standards and reflect a community's values), which current systems fall short on. To address this gap, we present SafetyAnalyst, a novel AI safety moderation framework. Given an AI behavior, SafetyAnalyst uses chain-of-thought reasoning to analyze its potential consequences by creating a structured "harm-benefit tree," which enumerates harmful and beneficial actions and effects the AI behavior may lead to, along with likelihood, severity, and immediacy labels that describe potential impacts on stakeholders. SafetyAnalyst then aggregates all effects into a harmfulness score using 28 fully interpretable weight parameters, which can be aligned to particular safety preferences. We applied this framework to develop an open-source LLM prompt safety classification system, distilled from 18.5 million harm-benefit features generated by frontier LLMs on 19k prompts. On comprehensive benchmarks, we show that SafetyAnalyst (average F1=0.81) outperforms existing moderation systems (average F1$<$0.72) on prompt safety classification, while offering the additional advantages of interpretability, transparency, and steerability.
Adsorb-Agent: Autonomous Identification of Stable Adsorption Configurations via Large Language Model Agent
Authors: Janghoon Ock, Tirtha Vinchurkar, Yayati Jadhav, Amir Barati Farimani
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Adsorption energy is a key reactivity descriptor in catalysis, enabling efficient screening for optimal catalysts. However, determining adsorption energy typically requires evaluating numerous adsorbate-catalyst configurations. Current algorithmic approaches rely on exhaustive enumeration of adsorption sites and configurations, which makes the process computationally intensive and does not inherently guarantee the identification of the global minimum energy. In this work, we introduce Adsorb-Agent, a Large Language Model (LLM) agent designed to efficiently identify system-specific stable adsorption configurations corresponding to the global minimum adsorption energy. Adsorb-Agent leverages its built-in knowledge and emergent reasoning capabilities to strategically explore adsorption configurations likely to hold adsorption energy. By reducing the reliance on exhaustive sampling, it significantly decreases the number of initial configurations required while improving the accuracy of adsorption energy predictions. We evaluate Adsorb-Agent's performance across twenty representative systems encompassing a range of complexities. The Adsorb-Agent successfully identifies comparable adsorption energies for 83.7% of the systems and achieves lower energies, closer to the actual global minimum, for 35% of the systems, while requiring significantly fewer initial configurations than conventional methods. Its capability is particularly evident in complex systems, where it identifies lower adsorption energies for 46.7% of systems involving intermetallic surfaces and 66.7% of systems with large adsorbate molecules. These results demonstrate the potential of Adsorb-Agent to accelerate catalyst discovery by reducing computational costs and improving the reliability of adsorption energy predictions.
A Statistical Analysis of LLMs' Self-Evaluation Using Proverbs
Authors: Ryosuke Sonoda, Ramya Srinivasan
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Claude-3, and Llama are being integrated across a variety of industries. Despite this rapid proliferation, experts are calling for caution in the interpretation and adoption of LLMs, owing to numerous associated ethical concerns. Research has also uncovered shortcomings in LLMs' reasoning and logical abilities, raising questions on the potential of LLMs as evaluation tools. In this paper, we investigate LLMs' self-evaluation capabilities on a novel proverb reasoning task. We introduce a novel proverb database consisting of 300 proverb pairs that are similar in intent but different in wordings, across topics spanning gender, wisdom, and society. We propose tests to evaluate textual consistencies as well as numerical consistencies across similar proverbs, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and dataset in identifying failures in LLMs' self-evaluation which in turn can highlight issues related to gender stereotypes and lack of cultural understanding in LLMs.
Distill-SynthKG: Distilling Knowledge Graph Synthesis Workflow for Improved Coverage and Efficiency
Authors: Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Xin Su, Man Luo, Xiangyu Peng, Caiming Xiong, Tiep Le, Shachar Rosenman, Vasudev Lal, Phil Mui, Ricky Ho, Phillip Howard, Chien-Sheng Wu
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Knowledge graphs (KGs) generated by large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly valuable for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications that require knowledge-intensive reasoning. However, existing KG extraction methods predominantly rely on prompt-based approaches, which are inefficient for processing large-scale corpora. These approaches often suffer from information loss, particularly with long documents, due to the lack of specialized design for KG construction. Additionally, there is a gap in evaluation datasets and methodologies for ontology-free KG construction. To overcome these limitations, we propose SynthKG, a multi-step, document-level ontology-free KG synthesis workflow based on LLMs. By fine-tuning a smaller LLM on the synthesized document-KG pairs, we streamline the multi-step process into a single-step KG generation approach called Distill-SynthKG, substantially reducing the number of LLM inference calls. Furthermore, we re-purpose existing question-answering datasets to establish KG evaluation datasets and introduce new evaluation metrics. Using KGs produced by Distill-SynthKG, we also design a novel graph-based retrieval framework for RAG. Experimental results demonstrate that Distill-SynthKG not only surpasses all baseline models in KG quality -- including models up to eight times larger -- but also consistently excels in retrieval and question-answering tasks. Our proposed graph retrieval framework also outperforms all KG-retrieval methods across multiple benchmark datasets. We release the SynthKG dataset and Distill-SynthKG model publicly to support further research and development.
Learning from others' mistakes: Finetuning machine translation models with span-level error annotations
Authors: Lily H. Zhang, Hamid Dadkhahi, Mara Finkelstein, Firas Trabelsi, Jiaming Luo, Markus Freitag
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Despite growing interest in incorporating feedback to improve language models, most efforts focus only on sequence-level annotations. In this work, we explore the potential of utilizing fine-grained span-level annotations from offline datasets to improve model quality. We develop a simple finetuning algorithm, called Training with Annotations (TWA), to directly train machine translation models on such annotated data. TWA utilizes targeted span-level error information while also flexibly learning what to penalize within a span. Moreover, TWA considers the overall trajectory of a sequence when deciding which non-error spans to utilize as positive signals. Experiments on English-German and Chinese-English machine translation show that TWA outperforms baselines such as Supervised FineTuning on sequences filtered for quality and Direct Preference Optimization on pairs constructed from the same data.
Rulebreakers Challenge: Revealing a Blind Spot in Large Language Models' Reasoning with Formal Logic
Authors: Jason Chan, Robert Gaizauskas, Zhixue Zhao
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Formal Logic, World Knowledge

Formal logic has long been applied to natural language reasoning, but this approach can sometimes lead to conclusions that, while logically entailed, are factually inconsistent with the premises or are not typically inferred by humans. This study introduces the concept of "rulebreakers", which refers to instances where logical entailment diverges from factually acceptable inference. We present RULEBREAKERS, a novel dataset for evaluating Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to distinguish between rulebreakers and non-rulebreakers. Focusing on modus tollens and disjunctive syllogism, we assess six state-of-the-art LLMs using RULEBREAKERS, measuring their performance in terms of token-level exact accuracy and model confidence. Our findings reveal that while most models perform poorly to moderately in recognizing rulebreakers, they demonstrate a latent ability to distinguish rulebreakers when assessed by their confidence levels. Further analysis suggests that the failure to recognize rulebreakers is potentially associated with the models' world knowledge and their attention distribution patterns. This research highlights the limitation of LLMs' reasoning capabilities, and contributes to the ongoing discussion on reasoning in LLMs.
Natural Language Processing for Human Resources: A Survey
Authors: Naoki Otani, Nikita Bhutani, Estevam Hruschka
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Survey, text-classification, Text Classification, Text Generation

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have the potential to transform HR processes, from recruitment to employee management. While recent breakthroughs in NLP have generated significant interest in its industrial applications, a comprehensive overview of how NLP can be applied across HR activities is still lacking. This paper discovers opportunities for researchers and practitioners to harness NLP's transformative potential in this domain. We analyze key fundamental tasks such as information extraction and text classification, and their roles in downstream applications like recommendation and language generation, while also discussing ethical concerns. Additionally, we identify gaps in current research and encourage future work to explore holistic approaches for achieving broader objectives in this field.
BIG5-CHAT: Shaping LLM Personalities Through Training on Human-Grounded Data
Authors: Wenkai Li, Jiarui Liu, Andy Liu, Xuhui Zhou, Mona Diab, Maarten Sap
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

In this work, we tackle the challenge of embedding realistic human personality traits into LLMs. Previous approaches have primarily focused on prompt-based methods that describe the behavior associated with the desired personality traits, suffering from realism and validity issues. To address these limitations, we introduce BIG5-CHAT, a large-scale dataset containing 100,000 dialogues designed to ground models in how humans express their personality in text. Leveraging this dataset, we explore Supervised Fine-Tuning and Direct Preference Optimization as training-based methods to align LLMs more naturally with human personality patterns. Our methods outperform prompting on personality assessments such as BFI and IPIP-NEO, with trait correlations more closely matching human data. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that models trained to exhibit higher conscientiousness, higher agreeableness, lower extraversion, and lower neuroticism display better performance on reasoning tasks, aligning with psychological findings on how these traits impact human cognitive performance. To our knowledge, this work is the first comprehensive study to demonstrate how training-based methods can shape LLM personalities through learning from real human behaviors.
Multi-head Sequence Tagging Model for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Kamal Al-Sabahi, Kang Yang, Wangwang Liu, Guanyu Jiang, Xian Li, Ming Yang
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Grammatical Error Correction, Multi-Task Learning

To solve the Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) problem , a mapping between a source sequence and a target one is needed, where the two differ only on few spans. For this reason, the attention has been shifted to the non-autoregressive or sequence tagging models. In which, the GEC has been simplified from Seq2Seq to labeling the input tokens with edit commands chosen from a large edit space. Due to this large number of classes and the limitation of the available datasets, the current sequence tagging approaches still have some issues handling a broad range of grammatical errors just by being laser-focused on one single task. To this end, we simplified the GEC further by dividing it into seven related subtasks: Insertion, Deletion, Merge, Substitution, Transformation, Detection, and Correction, with Correction being our primary focus. A distinct classification head is dedicated to each of these subtasks. the novel multi-head and multi-task learning model is proposed to effectively utilize training data and harness the information from related task training signals. To mitigate the limited number of available training samples, a new denoising autoencoder is used to generate a new synthetic dataset to be used for pretraining. Additionally, a new character-level transformation is proposed to enhance the sequence-to-edit function and improve the model's vocabulary coverage. Our single/ensemble model achieves an F0.5 of 74.4/77.0, and 68.6/69.1 on BEA-19 (test) and CoNLL-14 (test) respectively. Moreover, evaluated on JFLEG test set, the GLEU scores are 61.6 and 61.7 for the single and ensemble models, respectively. It mostly outperforms recently published state-of-the-art results by a considerable margin.
DocEdit-v2: Document Structure Editing Via Multimodal LLM Grounding
Authors: Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Franck Dernoncourt, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I Morariu, Ramit Sawhney, Preslav Nakov, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

Document structure editing involves manipulating localized textual, visual, and layout components in document images based on the user's requests. Past works have shown that multimodal grounding of user requests in the document image and identifying the accurate structural components and their associated attributes remain key challenges for this task. To address these, we introduce the DocEdit-v2, a novel framework that performs end-to-end document editing by leveraging Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). It consists of three novel components: (1) Doc2Command, which simultaneously localizes edit regions of interest (RoI) and disambiguates user edit requests into edit commands; (2) LLM-based Command Reformulation prompting to tailor edit commands originally intended for specialized software into edit instructions suitable for generalist LMMs. (3) Moreover, DocEdit-v2 processes these outputs via Large Multimodal Models like GPT-4V and Gemini, to parse the document layout, execute edits on grounded Region of Interest (RoI), and generate the edited document image. Extensive experiments on the DocEdit dataset show that DocEdit-v2 significantly outperforms strong baselines on edit command generation (2-33%), RoI bounding box detection (12-31%), and overall document editing (1-12\%) tasks.
Beyond Browsing: API-Based Web Agents
Authors: Yueqi Song, Frank Xu, Shuyan Zhou, Graham Neubig
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

Web browsers are a portal to the internet, where much of human activity is undertaken. Thus, there has been significant research work in AI agents that interact with the internet through web browsing. However, there is also another interface designed specifically for machine interaction with online content: application programming interfaces (APIs). In this paper we ask -- what if we were to take tasks traditionally tackled by Browsing Agents, and give AI agents access to APIs? To do so, we propose two varieties of agents: (1) an API-calling agent that attempts to perform online tasks through APIs only, similar to traditional coding agents, and (2) a Hybrid Agent that can interact with online data through both web browsing and APIs. In experiments on WebArena, a widely-used and realistic benchmark for web navigation tasks, we find that API-Based Agents outperform web Browsing Agents. Hybrid Agents out-perform both others nearly uniformly across tasks, resulting in a more than 24.0% absolute improvement over web browsing alone, achieving a success rate of 38.9%, the SOTA performance among task-agnostic agents. These results strongly suggest that when APIs are available, they present an attractive alternative to relying on web browsing alone.
Comparative Study of Multilingual Idioms and Similes in Large Language Models
Authors: Paria Khoshtab, Danial Namazifard, Mostafa Masoudi, Ali Akhgary, Samin Mahdizadeh Sani, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

This study addresses the gap in the literature concerning the comparative performance of LLMs in interpreting different types of figurative language across multiple languages. By evaluating LLMs using two multilingual datasets on simile and idiom interpretation, we explore the effectiveness of various prompt engineering strategies, including chain-of-thought, few-shot, and English translation prompts. We extend the language of these datasets to Persian as well by building two new evaluation sets. Our comprehensive assessment involves both closed-source (GPT-3.5, GPT-4o mini, Gemini 1.5), and open-source models (Llama 3.1, Qwen2), highlighting significant differences in performance across languages and figurative types. Our findings reveal that while prompt engineering methods are generally effective, their success varies by figurative type, language, and model. We also observe that open-source models struggle particularly with low-resource languages in similes. Additionally, idiom interpretation is nearing saturation for many languages, necessitating more challenging evaluations.