pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LLMs' Reading Comprehension Is Affected by Parametric Knowledge and Struggles with Hypothetical Statements
Authors: Victoria Basmov, Yoav Goldberg, Reut Tsarfaty
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, World Knowledge

The task of reading comprehension (RC), often implemented as context-based question answering (QA), provides a primary means to assess language models' natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities. Yet, when applied to large language models (LLMs) with extensive built-in world knowledge, this method can be deceptive. If the context aligns with the LLMs' internal knowledge, it is hard to discern whether the models' answers stem from context comprehension or from LLMs' internal information. Conversely, using data that conflicts with the models' knowledge creates erroneous trends which distort the results. To address this issue, we suggest to use RC on imaginary data, based on fictitious facts and entities. This task is entirely independent of the models' world knowledge, enabling us to evaluate LLMs' linguistic abilities without the interference of parametric knowledge. Testing ChatGPT, GPT-4, LLaMA 2 and Mixtral on such imaginary data, we uncover a class of linguistic phenomena posing a challenge to current LLMs, involving thinking in terms of alternative, hypothetical scenarios. While all the models handle simple affirmative and negative contexts with high accuracy, they are much more prone to error when dealing with modal and conditional contexts. Crucially, these phenomena also trigger the LLMs' vulnerability to knowledge-conflicts again. In particular, while some models prove virtually unaffected by knowledge conflicts in affirmative and negative contexts, when faced with more semantically involved modal and conditional environments, they often fail to separate the text from their internal knowledge.
Understanding Cross-Lingual Alignment -- A Survey
Authors: Katharina Hämmerl, Jindřich Libovický, Alexander Fraser
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Survey

Cross-lingual alignment, the meaningful similarity of representations across languages in multilingual language models, has been an active field of research in recent years. We survey the literature of techniques to improve cross-lingual alignment, providing a taxonomy of methods and summarising insights from throughout the field. We present different understandings of cross-lingual alignment and their limitations. We provide a qualitative summary of results from a large number of surveyed papers. Finally, we discuss how these insights may be applied not only to encoder models, where this topic has been heavily studied, but also to encoder-decoder or even decoder-only models, and argue that an effective trade-off between language-neutral and language-specific information is key.
VI-OOD: A Unified Representation Learning Framework for Textual Out-of-distribution Detection
Authors: Li-Ming Zhan, Bo Liu, Xiao-Ming Wu
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Representation Learning, text-classification, Text Classification, Variational Inference

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety and reliability of deep neural networks in various applications. While there has been a growing focus on OOD detection in visual data, the field of textual OOD detection has received less attention. Only a few attempts have been made to directly apply general OOD detection methods to natural language processing (NLP) tasks, without adequately considering the characteristics of textual data. In this paper, we delve into textual OOD detection with Transformers. We first identify a key problem prevalent in existing OOD detection methods: the biased representation learned through the maximization of the conditional likelihood $p(y\mid x)$ can potentially result in subpar performance. We then propose a novel variational inference framework for OOD detection (VI-OOD), which maximizes the likelihood of the joint distribution $p(x, y)$ instead of $p(y\mid x)$. VI-OOD is tailored for textual OOD detection by efficiently exploiting the representations of pre-trained Transformers. Through comprehensive experiments on various text classification tasks, VI-OOD demonstrates its effectiveness and wide applicability. Our code has been released at \url{https://github.com/liam0949/LLM-OOD}.
[Call for Papers] The 2nd BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus
Authors: Leshem Choshen, Ryan Cotterell, Michael Y. Hu, Tal Linzen, Aaron Mueller, Candace Ross, Alex Warstadt, Ethan Wilcox, Adina Williams, Chengxu Zhuang
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this year's competition are as follows: First, we replace the loose track with a paper track, which allows (for example) non-model-based submissions, novel cognitively-inspired benchmarks, or analysis techniques. Second, we are relaxing the rules around pretraining data, and will now allow participants to construct their own datasets provided they stay within the 100M-word or 10M-word budget. Third, we introduce a multimodal vision-and-language track, and will release a corpus of 50% text-only and 50% image-text multimodal data as a starting point for LM model training. The purpose of this CfP is to provide rules for this year's challenge, explain these rule changes and their rationale in greater detail, give a timeline of this year's competition, and provide answers to frequently asked questions from last year's challenge.
(Not) Understanding Latin Poetic Style with Deep Learning
Authors: Ben Nagy
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

This article summarizes some mostly unsuccessful attempts to understand authorial style by examining the attention of various neural networks (LSTMs and CNNs) trained on a corpus of classical Latin verse that has been encoded to include sonic and metrical features. Carefully configured neural networks are shown to be extremely strong authorship classifiers, so it is hoped that they might therefore teach `traditional' readers something about how the authors differ in style. Sadly their reasoning is, so far, inscrutable. While the overall goal has not yet been reached, this work reports some useful findings in terms of effective ways to encode and embed verse, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the neural network families, and useful (and not so useful) techniques for designing and inspecting NN models in this domain. This article suggests that, for poetry, CNNs are better choices than LSTMs -- they train more quickly, have equivalent accuracy, and (potentially) offer better interpretability. Based on a great deal of experimentation, it also suggests that simple, trainable embeddings are more effective than domain-specific schemes, and stresses the importance of techniques to reduce overfitting, like dropout and batch normalization.
Cendol: Open Instruction-tuned Generative Large Language Models for Indonesian Languages
Authors: Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Fajri Koto, Rifki Afina Putri, Emmanuel Dave, Jhonson Lee, Nuur Shadieq, Wawan Cenggoro, Salsabil Maulana Akbar, Muhammad Ihza Mahendra, Dea Annisayanti Putri, Bryan Wilie, Genta Indra Winata, Alham Fikri Aji, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable human-like capability in various domains and languages. However, a notable quality gap arises in low-resource languages, e.g., Indonesian indigenous languages, rendering them ineffective and inefficient in such linguistic contexts. To bridge this quality gap, we introduce Cendol, a collection of Indonesian LLMs encompassing both decoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures across a range of model sizes. We highlight Cendol's effectiveness across a diverse array of tasks, attaining 20% improvement, and demonstrate its capability to generalize to unseen tasks and indigenous languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, Cendol models showcase improved human favorability despite their limitations in capturing indigenous knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia. In addition, we discuss the shortcomings of parameter-efficient tunings, such as LoRA, for language adaptation. Alternatively, we propose the usage of vocabulary adaptation to enhance efficiency. Lastly, we evaluate the safety of Cendol and showcase that safety in pre-training in one language such as English is transferable to low-resource languages, such as Indonesian, even without RLHF and safety fine-tuning.
Detection of fields of applications in biomedical abstracts with the support of argumentation elements
Authors: Mariana Neves
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00

Focusing on particular facts, instead of the complete text, can potentially improve searching for specific information in the scientific literature. In particular, argumentative elements allow focusing on specific parts of a publication, e.g., the background section or the claims from the authors. We evaluated some tools for the extraction of argumentation elements for a specific task in biomedicine, namely, for detecting the fields of the application in a biomedical publication, e.g, whether it addresses the problem of disease diagnosis or drug development. We performed experiments with the PubMedBERT pre-trained model, which was fine-tuned on a specific corpus for the task. We compared the use of title and abstract to restricting to only some argumentative elements. The top F1 scores ranged from 0.22 to 0.84, depending on the field of application. The best argumentative labels were the ones related the conclusion and background sections of an abstract.
Exploring the Necessity of Visual Modality in Multimodal Machine Translation using Authentic Datasets
Authors: Zi Long, Zhenhao Tang, Xianghua Fu, Jian Chen, Shilong Hou, Jinze Lyu
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multimodal Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Recent research in the field of multimodal machine translation (MMT) has indicated that the visual modality is either dispensable or offers only marginal advantages. However, most of these conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experimental results based on a limited set of bilingual sentence-image pairs, such as Multi30k. In these kinds of datasets, the content of one bilingual parallel sentence pair must be well represented by a manually annotated image, which is different from the real-world translation scenario. In this work, we adhere to the universal multimodal machine translation framework proposed by Tang et al. (2022). This approach allows us to delve into the impact of the visual modality on translation efficacy by leveraging real-world translation datasets. Through a comprehensive exploration via probing tasks, we find that the visual modality proves advantageous for the majority of authentic translation datasets. Notably, the translation performance primarily hinges on the alignment and coherence between textual and visual contents. Furthermore, our results suggest that visual information serves a supplementary role in multimodal translation and can be substituted.
Making Old Kurdish Publications Processable by Augmenting Available Optical Character Recognition Engines
Authors: Blnd Yaseen, Hossein Hassani
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Kurdish libraries have many historical publications that were printed back in the early days when printing devices were brought to Kurdistan. Having a good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help process these publications and contribute to the Kurdish languages resources which is crucial as Kurdish is considered a low-resource language. Current OCR systems are unable to extract text from historical documents as they have many issues, including being damaged, very fragile, having many marks left on them, and often written in non-standard fonts and more. This is a massive obstacle in processing these documents as currently processing them requires manual typing which is very time-consuming. In this study, we adopt an open-source OCR framework by Google, Tesseract version 5.0, that has been used to extract text for various languages. Currently, there is no public dataset, and we developed our own by collecting historical documents from Zheen Center for Documentation and Research, which were printed before 1950 and resulted in a dataset of 1233 images of lines with transcription of each. Then we used the Arabic model as our base model and trained the model using the dataset. We used different methods to evaluate our model, Tesseracts built-in evaluator lstmeval indicated a Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.755%. Additionally, Ocreval demonstrated an average character accuracy of 84.02%. Finally, we developed a web application to provide an easy- to-use interface for end-users, allowing them to interact with the model by inputting an image of a page and extracting the text. Having an extensive dataset is crucial to develop OCR systems with reasonable accuracy, as currently, no public datasets are available for historical Kurdish documents; this posed a significant challenge in our work. Additionally, the unaligned spaces between characters and words proved another challenge with our work.
Identifying Shopping Intent in Product QA for Proactive Recommendations
Authors: Besnik Fetahu, Nachshon Cohen, Elad Haramaty, Liane Lewin-Eytan, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Mixture-of-Experts, Question Answering

Voice assistants have become ubiquitous in smart devices allowing users to instantly access information via voice questions. While extensive research has been conducted in question answering for voice search, little attention has been paid on how to enable proactive recommendations from a voice assistant to its users. This is a highly challenging problem that often leads to user friction, mainly due to recommendations provided to the users at the wrong time. We focus on the domain of e-commerce, namely in identifying Shopping Product Questions (SPQs), where the user asking a product-related question may have an underlying shopping need. Identifying a user's shopping need allows voice assistants to enhance shopping experience by determining when to provide recommendations, such as product or deal recommendations, or proactive shopping actions recommendation. Identifying SPQs is a challenging problem and cannot be done from question text alone, and thus requires to infer latent user behavior patterns inferred from user's past shopping history. We propose features that capture the user's latent shopping behavior from their purchase history, and combine them using a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach is able to identify SPQs with a high score of F1=0.91. Furthermore, based on an online evaluation with real voice assistant users, we identify SPQs in real-time and recommend shopping actions to users to add the queried product into their shopping list. We demonstrate that we are able to accurately identify SPQs, as indicated by the significantly higher rate of added products to users' shopping lists when being prompted after SPQs vs random PQs.
AiSAQ: All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization for DRAM-free Information Retrieval
Authors: Kento Tatsuno, Daisuke Miyashita, Taiga Ikeda, Kiyoshi Ishiyama, Kazunari Sumiyoshi, Jun Deguchi
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Information Retrieval, Quantization, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Graph-based approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms work effectively against large-scale vector retrieval. Among such methods, DiskANN achieves good recall-speed tradeoffs using both DRAM and storage. DiskANN adopts product quantization (PQ) to reduce memory usage, which is still proportional to the scale of datasets. In this paper, we propose All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization (AiSAQ), which offloads compressed vectors to the SSD index. Our method achieves $\sim$10 MB memory usage in query search with billion-scale datasets without critical latency degradation. AiSAQ also reduces the index load time for query search preparation, which enables fast switch between muitiple billion-scale indices.This method can be applied to retrievers of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and be scaled out with multiple-server systems for emerging datasets. Our DiskANN-based implementation is available on GitHub.
FreeEval: A Modular Framework for Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation of Large Language Models
Authors: Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Zhengran Zeng, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, GPU, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The rapid development of large language model (LLM) evaluation methodologies and datasets has led to a profound challenge: integrating state-of-the-art evaluation techniques cost-effectively while ensuring reliability, reproducibility, and efficiency. Currently, there is a notable absence of a unified and adaptable framework that seamlessly integrates various evaluation approaches. Moreover, the reliability of evaluation findings is often questionable due to potential data contamination, with the evaluation efficiency commonly overlooked when facing the substantial costs associated with LLM inference. In response to these challenges, we introduce FreeEval, a modular and scalable framework crafted to enable trustworthy and efficient automatic evaluations of LLMs. Firstly, FreeEval's unified abstractions simplify the integration and improve the transparency of diverse evaluation methodologies, encompassing dynamic evaluation that demand sophisticated LLM interactions. Secondly, the framework integrates meta-evaluation techniques like human evaluation and data contamination detection, which, along with dynamic evaluation modules in the platform, enhance the fairness of the evaluation outcomes. Lastly, FreeEval is designed with a high-performance infrastructure, including distributed computation and caching strategies, enabling extensive evaluations across multi-node, multi-GPU clusters for open-source and proprietary LLMs.
Privacy Preserving Prompt Engineering: A Survey
Authors: Kennedy Edemacu, Xintao Wu
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Privacy Preserving, Prompt Engineering, Survey

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated significant proficiency in solving a wide range of general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have observed a direct correlation between the performance of these models and their sizes. As a result, the sizes of these models have notably expanded in recent years, persuading researchers to adopt the term large language models (LLMs) to characterize the larger-sized PLMs. The size expansion comes with a distinct capability called in-context learning (ICL), which represents a special form of prompting and allows the models to be utilized through the presentation of demonstration examples without modifications to the model parameters. Although interesting, privacy concerns have become a major obstacle in its widespread usage. Multiple studies have examined the privacy risks linked to ICL and prompting in general, and have devised techniques to alleviate these risks. Thus, there is a necessity to organize these mitigation techniques for the benefit of the community. This survey provides a systematic overview of the privacy protection methods employed during ICL and prompting in general. We review, analyze, and compare different methods under this paradigm. Furthermore, we provide a summary of the resources accessible for the development of these frameworks. Finally, we discuss the limitations of these frameworks and offer a detailed examination of the promising areas that necessitate further exploration.
Event-enhanced Retrieval in Real-time Search
Authors: Yanan Zhang, Xiaoling Bai, Tianhua Zhou
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet

The embedding-based retrieval (EBR) approach is widely used in mainstream search engine retrieval systems and is crucial in recent retrieval-augmented methods for eliminating LLM illusions. However, existing EBR models often face the "semantic drift" problem and insufficient focus on key information, leading to a low adoption rate of retrieval results in subsequent steps. This issue is especially noticeable in real-time search scenarios, where the various expressions of popular events on the Internet make real-time retrieval heavily reliant on crucial event information. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach called EER, which enhances real-time retrieval performance by improving the dual-encoder model of traditional EBR. We incorporate contrastive learning to accompany pairwise learning for encoder optimization. Furthermore, to strengthen the focus on critical event information in events, we include a decoder module after the document encoder, introduce a generative event triplet extraction scheme based on prompt-tuning, and correlate the events with query encoder optimization through comparative learning. This decoder module can be removed during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EER can significantly improve the real-time search retrieval performance. We believe that this approach will provide new perspectives in the field of information retrieval. The codes and dataset are available at https://github.com/open-event-hub/Event-enhanced_Retrieval .
Optimization Methods for Personalizing Large Language Models through Retrieval Augmentation
Authors: Alireza Salemi, Surya Kallumadi, Hamed Zamani
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

This paper studies retrieval-augmented approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs), which potentially have a substantial impact on various applications and domains. We propose the first attempt to optimize the retrieval models that deliver a limited number of personal documents to large language models for the purpose of personalized generation. We develop two optimization algorithms that solicit feedback from the downstream personalized generation tasks for retrieval optimization--one based on reinforcement learning whose reward function is defined using any arbitrary metric for personalized generation and another based on knowledge distillation from the downstream LLM to the retrieval model. This paper also introduces a pre- and post-generation retriever selection model that decides what retriever to choose for each LLM input. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks from the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark reveal statistically significant improvements in six out of seven datasets.