pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
No Such Thing as a General Learner: Language models and their dual optimization
Authors: Emmanuel Chemla, Ryan M. Nefdt
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition

What role can the otherwise successful Large Language Models (LLMs) play in the understanding of human cognition, and in particular in terms of informing language acquisition debates? To contribute to this question, we first argue that neither humans nor LLMs are general learners, in a variety of senses. We make a novel case for how in particular LLMs follow a dual-optimization process: they are optimized during their training (which is typically compared to language acquisition), and modern LLMs have also been selected, through a process akin to natural selection in a species. From this perspective, we argue that the performance of LLMs, whether similar or dissimilar to that of humans, does not weigh easily on important debates about the importance of human cognitive biases for language.
Activated Parameter Locating via Causal Intervention for Model Merging
Authors: Fanshuang Kong, Richong Zhang, Ziqiao Wang
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00

Model merging combines multiple homologous models into one model, achieving convincing generalization without the necessity of additional training. A key challenge in this problem is resolving parameter redundancies and conflicts across multiple models. Existing models have demonstrated that dropping a portion of delta parameters can alleviate conflicts while maintaining performance. However, these methods often drop parameters either randomly or based on magnitude, overlooking task-specific information embedded in fine-tuned models. In this paper, we propose an Activated Parameter Locating (APL) method that utilizes causal intervention to estimate parameter importance, enabling more precise parameter drops and better conflict mitigation. Moreover, to reduce the computational complexity associated with a large number of parameter partitions, we also introduce a theoretically supported gradient approximation strategy for APL. Experiments on model merging within both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, along with associated analyses, showcase the effectiveness of APL.
WPN: An Unlearning Method Based on N-pair Contrastive Learning in Language Models
Authors: Guitao Chen, Yunshen Wang, Hongye Sun, Guang Chen
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Generative language models (LMs) offer numerous advantages but may produce inappropriate or harmful outputs due to the harmful knowledge acquired during pre-training. This knowledge often manifests as undesirable correspondences, such as "harmful prompts" leading to "harmful outputs," which our research aims to mitigate through unlearning techniques.However, existing unlearning methods based on gradient ascent can significantly impair the performance of LMs. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Weighted Positional N-pair (WPN) Learning, which leverages position-weighted mean pooling within an n-pair contrastive learning framework. WPN is designed to modify the output distribution of LMs by eliminating specific harmful outputs (e.g., replacing toxic responses with neutral ones), thereby transforming the model's behavior from "harmful prompt-harmful output" to "harmful prompt-harmless response".Experiments on OPT and GPT-NEO LMs show that WPN effectively reduces the proportion of harmful responses, achieving a harmless rate of up to 95.8\% while maintaining stable performance on nine common benchmarks (with less than 2\% degradation on average). Moreover, we provide empirical evidence to demonstrate WPN's ability to weaken the harmful correspondences in terms of generalizability and robustness, as evaluated on out-of-distribution test sets and under adversarial attacks.
Identifying Speakers and Addressees of Quotations in Novels with Prompt Learning
Authors: Yuchen Yan, Hanjie Zhao, Senbin Zhu, Hongde Liu, Zhihong Zhang, Yuxiang Jia
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Quotations in literary works, especially novels, are important to create characters, reflect character relationships, and drive plot development. Current research on quotation extraction in novels primarily focuses on quotation attribution, i.e., identifying the speaker of the quotation. However, the addressee of the quotation is also important to construct the relationship between the speaker and the addressee. To tackle the problem of dataset scarcity, we annotate the first Chinese quotation corpus with elements including speaker, addressee, speaking mode and linguistic cue. We propose prompt learning-based methods for speaker and addressee identification based on fine-tuned pre-trained models. Experiments on both Chinese and English datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed methods, which outperform methods based on zero-shot and few-shot large language models.
Hindi-BEIR : A Large Scale Retrieval Benchmark in Hindi
Authors: Arkadeep Acharya, Rudra Murthy, Vishwajeet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Given the large number of Hindi speakers worldwide, there is a pressing need for robust and efficient information retrieval systems for Hindi. Despite ongoing research, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmark for evaluating retrieval models in Hindi. To address this gap, we introduce the Hindi version of the BEIR benchmark, which includes a subset of English BEIR datasets translated to Hindi, existing Hindi retrieval datasets, and synthetically created datasets for retrieval. The benchmark is comprised of $15$ datasets spanning across $8$ distinct tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual retrieval models on this benchmark to identify task and domain-specific challenges and their impact on retrieval performance. By releasing this benchmark and a set of relevant baselines, we enable researchers to understand the limitations and capabilities of current Hindi retrieval models, promoting advancements in this critical area. The datasets from Hindi-BEIR are publicly available.
Improving and Assessing the Fidelity of Large Language Models Alignment to Online Communities
Authors: Minh Duc Chu, Zihao He, Rebecca Dorn, Kristina Lerman
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Models Alignment

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in representing individuals and communities, offering new ways to study complex social dynamics. However, effectively aligning LLMs with specific human groups and systematically assessing the fidelity of the alignment remains a challenge. This paper presents a robust framework for aligning LLMs with online communities via instruction-tuning and comprehensively evaluating alignment across various aspects of language, including authenticity, emotional tone, toxicity, and harm. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by applying it to online communities centered on dieting and body image. We administer an eating disorder psychometric test to the aligned LLMs to reveal unhealthy beliefs and successfully differentiate communities with varying levels of eating disorder risk. Our results highlight the potential of LLMs in automated moderation and broader applications in public health and social science research.
SkyScript-100M: 1,000,000,000 Pairs of Scripts and Shooting Scripts for Short Drama
Authors: Jing Tang, Quanlu Jia, Yuqiang Xie, Zeyu Gong, Xiang Wen, Jiayi Zhang, Yalong Guo, Guibin Chen, Jiangping Yang
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Script Generation, Video Captioning

Generating high-quality shooting scripts containing information such as scene and shot language is essential for short drama script generation. We collect 6,660 popular short drama episodes from the Internet, each with an average of 100 short episodes, and the total number of short episodes is about 80,000, with a total duration of about 2,000 hours and totaling 10 terabytes (TB). We perform keyframe extraction and annotation on each episode to obtain about 10,000,000 shooting scripts. We perform 100 script restorations on the extracted shooting scripts based on our self-developed large short drama generation model SkyReels. This leads to a dataset containing 1,000,000,000 pairs of scripts and shooting scripts for short dramas, called SkyScript-100M. We compare SkyScript-100M with the existing dataset in detail and demonstrate some deeper insights that can be achieved based on SkyScript-100M. Based on SkyScript-100M, researchers can achieve several deeper and more far-reaching script optimization goals, which may drive a paradigm shift in the entire field of text-to-video and significantly advance the field of short drama video generation. The data and code are available at https://github.com/vaew/SkyScript-100M.
Fostering Natural Conversation in Large Language Models with NICO: a Natural Interactive COnversation dataset
Authors: Renliang Sun, Mengyuan Liu, Shiping Yang, Rui Wang, Junqing He, Jiaxing Zhang
Date: 2024-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Benefiting from diverse instruction datasets, contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) perform effectively as AI assistants in collaborating with humans. However, LLMs still struggle to generate natural and colloquial responses in real-world applications such as chatbots and psychological counseling that require more human-like interactions. To address these limitations, we introduce NICO, a Natural Interactive COnversation dataset in Chinese. We first use GPT-4-turbo to generate dialogue drafts and make them cover 20 daily-life topics and 5 types of social interactions. Then, we hire workers to revise these dialogues to ensure that they are free of grammatical errors and unnatural utterances. We define two dialogue-level natural conversation tasks and two sentence-level tasks for identifying and rewriting unnatural sentences. Multiple open-source and closed-source LLMs are tested and analyzed in detail. The experimental results highlight the challenge of the tasks and demonstrate how NICO can help foster the natural dialogue capabilities of LLMs. The dataset will be released.
An Open-Source American Sign Language Fingerspell Recognition and Semantic Pose Retrieval Interface
Authors: Kevin Jose Thomas
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Pose Retrieval, Retrieval, Sign Language Translation

This paper introduces an open-source interface for American Sign Language fingerspell recognition and semantic pose retrieval, aimed to serve as a stepping stone towards more advanced sign language translation systems. Utilizing a combination of convolutional neural networks and pose estimation models, the interface provides two modular components: a recognition module for translating ASL fingerspelling into spoken English and a production module for converting spoken English into ASL pose sequences. The system is designed to be highly accessible, user-friendly, and capable of functioning in real-time under varying environmental conditions like backgrounds, lighting, skin tones, and hand sizes. We discuss the technical details of the model architecture, application in the wild, as well as potential future enhancements for real-world consumer applications.
CyberPal.AI: Empowering LLMs with Expert-Driven Cybersecurity Instructions
Authors: Matan Levi, Yair Alluouche, Daniel Ohayon, Anton Puzanov
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP), providing versatile capabilities across various applications. However, their application to complex, domain-specific tasks, such as cyber-security, often faces substantial challenges. In this study, we introduce SecKnowledge and CyberPal.AI to address these challenges and train security-expert LLMs. SecKnowledge is a domain-knowledge-driven cyber-security instruction dataset, meticulously designed using years of accumulated expert knowledge in the domain through a multi-phase generation process. CyberPal.AI refers to a family of LLMs fine-tuned using SecKnowledge, aimed at building security-specialized LLMs capable of answering and following complex security-related instructions. Additionally, we introduce SecKnowledge-Eval, a comprehensive and diverse cyber-security evaluation benchmark, composed of an extensive set of cyber-security tasks we specifically developed to assess LLMs in the field of cyber-security, along with other publicly available security benchmarks. Our results show a significant average improvement of up to 24% over the baseline models, underscoring the benefits of our expert-driven instruction dataset generation process. These findings contribute to the advancement of AI-based cyber-security applications, paving the way for security-expert LLMs that can enhance threat-hunting and investigation processes.
ConVerSum: A Contrastive Learning-based Approach for Data-Scarce Solution of Cross-Lingual Summarization Beyond Direct Equivalents
Authors: Sanzana Karim Lora, M. Sohel Rahman, Rifat Shahriyar
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Contrastive Learning

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) is a sophisticated branch in Natural Language Processing that demands models to accurately translate and summarize articles from different source languages. Despite the improvement of the subsequent studies, This area still needs data-efficient solutions along with effective training methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, there is no feasible solution for CLS when there is no available high-quality CLS data. In this paper, we propose a novel data-efficient approach, ConVerSum, for CLS leveraging the power of contrastive learning, generating versatile candidate summaries in different languages based on the given source document and contrasting these summaries with reference summaries concerning the given documents. After that, we train the model with a contrastive ranking loss. Then, we rigorously evaluate the proposed approach against current methodologies and compare it to powerful Large Language Models (LLMs)- Gemini, GPT 3.5, and GPT 4o proving our model performs better for low-resource languages' CLS. These findings represent a substantial improvement in the area, opening the door to more efficient and accurate cross-lingual summarizing techniques.
Generating Data with Text-to-Speech and Large-Language Models for Conversational Speech Recognition
Authors: Samuele Cornell, Jordan Darefsky, Zhiyao Duan, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, Synthetic Data Generation, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Currently, a common approach in many speech processing tasks is to leverage large scale pre-trained models by fine-tuning them on in-domain data for a particular application. Yet obtaining even a small amount of such data can be problematic, especially for sensitive domains and conversational speech scenarios, due to both privacy issues and annotation costs. To address this, synthetic data generation using single speaker datasets has been employed. Yet, for multi-speaker cases, such an approach often requires extensive manual effort and is prone to domain mismatches. In this work, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline for multi-speaker conversational ASR, leveraging a large language model (LLM) for content creation and a conversational multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) model for speech synthesis. We conduct evaluation by fine-tuning the Whisper ASR model for telephone and distant conversational speech settings, using both in-domain data and generated synthetic data. Our results show that the proposed method is able to significantly outperform classical multi-speaker generation approaches that use external, non-conversational speech datasets.
TableBench: A Comprehensive and Complex Benchmark for Table Question Answering
Authors: Xianjie Wu, Jian Yang, Linzheng Chai, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinrun Du, Di Liang, Daixin Shu, Xianfu Cheng, Tianzhen Sun, Guanglin Niu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have markedly enhanced the interpretation and processing of tabular data, introducing previously unimaginable capabilities. Despite these achievements, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when applied in industrial scenarios, particularly due to the increased complexity of reasoning required with real-world tabular data, underscoring a notable disparity between academic benchmarks and practical applications. To address this discrepancy, we conduct a detailed investigation into the application of tabular data in industrial scenarios and propose a comprehensive and complex benchmark TableBench, including 18 fields within four major categories of table question answering (TableQA) capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce TableLLM, trained on our meticulously constructed training set TableInstruct, achieving comparable performance with GPT-3.5. Massive experiments conducted on TableBench indicate that both open-source and proprietary LLMs still have significant room for improvement to meet real-world demands, where the most advanced model, GPT-4, achieves only a modest score compared to humans.
Automatic Metrics in Natural Language Generation: A Survey of Current Evaluation Practices
Authors: Patrícia Schmidtová, Saad Mahamood, Simone Balloccu, Ondřej Dušek, Albert Gatt, Dimitra Gkatzia, David M. Howcroft, Ondřej Plátek, Adarsa Sivaprasad
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey, Text Generation

Automatic metrics are extensively used to evaluate natural language processing systems. However, there has been increasing focus on how they are used and reported by practitioners within the field. In this paper, we have conducted a survey on the use of automatic metrics, focusing particularly on natural language generation (NLG) tasks. We inspect which metrics are used as well as why they are chosen and how their use is reported. Our findings from this survey reveal significant shortcomings, including inappropriate metric usage, lack of implementation details and missing correlations with human judgements. We conclude with recommendations that we believe authors should follow to enable more rigour within the field.
CodeTaxo: Enhancing Taxonomy Expansion with Limited Examples via Code Language Prompts
Authors: Qingkai Zeng, Yuyang Bai, Zhaoxuan Tan, Zhenyu Wu, Shangbin Feng, Meng Jiang
Date: 2024-08-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Taxonomy Expansion

Taxonomies play a crucial role in various applications by providing a structural representation of knowledge. The task of taxonomy expansion involves integrating emerging concepts into existing taxonomies by identifying appropriate parent concepts for these new query concepts. Previous approaches typically relied on self-supervised methods that generate annotation data from existing taxonomies. However, these methods are less effective when the existing taxonomy is small (fewer than 100 entities). In this work, we introduce \textsc{CodeTaxo}, a novel approach that leverages large language models through code language prompts to capture the taxonomic structure. Extensive experiments on five real-world benchmarks from different domains demonstrate that \textsc{CodeTaxo} consistently achieves superior performance across all evaluation metrics, significantly outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. The code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/QingkaiZeng/CodeTaxo-Pub}.
Studying the Effects of Collaboration in Interactive Theme Discovery Systems
Authors: Alvin Po-Chun Chen, Dananjay Srinivas, Alexandra Barry, Maksim Seniw, Maria Leonor Pacheco
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00

NLP-assisted solutions have gained considerable traction to support qualitative data analysis. However, there does not exist a unified evaluation framework that can account for the many different settings in which qualitative researchers may employ them. In this paper, we take a first step in this direction by proposing an evaluation framework to study the way in which different tools may result in different outcomes depending on the collaboration strategy employed. Specifically, we study the impact of synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration using two different NLP-assisted qualitative research tools and present a comprehensive analysis of significant differences in the consistency, cohesiveness, and correctness of their outputs.
From Lazy to Prolific: Tackling Missing Labels in Open Vocabulary Extreme Classification by Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning
Authors: Ranran Haoran Zhang, Bensu Uçar, Soumik Dey, Hansi Wu, Binbin Li, Rui Zhang
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Extreme Multi-Label Classification, Keyphrase Generation, Missing Labels, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Selection bias

Open-vocabulary Extreme Multi-label Classification (OXMC) extends traditional XMC by allowing prediction beyond an extremely large, predefined label set (typically $10^3$ to $10^{12}$ labels), addressing the dynamic nature of real-world labeling tasks. However, self-selection bias in data annotation leads to significant missing labels in both training and test data, particularly for less popular inputs. This creates two critical challenges: generation models learn to be "lazy'" by under-generating labels, and evaluation becomes unreliable due to insufficient annotation in the test set. In this work, we introduce Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning (PUSL), which reframes OXMC as an infinite keyphrase generation task, addressing the generation model's laziness. Additionally, we propose to adopt a suite of evaluation metrics, F1@$\mathcal{O}$ and newly proposed B@$k$, to reliably assess OXMC models with incomplete ground truths. In a highly imbalanced e-commerce dataset with substantial missing labels, PUSL generates 30% more unique labels, and 72% of its predictions align with actual user queries. On the less skewed EURLex-4.3k dataset, PUSL demonstrates superior F1 scores, especially as label counts increase from 15 to 30. Our approach effectively tackles both the modeling and evaluation challenges in OXMC with missing labels.
See What LLMs Cannot Answer: A Self-Challenge Framework for Uncovering LLM Weaknesses
Authors: Yulong Chen, Yang Liu, Jianhao Yan, Xuefeng Bai, Ming Zhong, Yinghao Yang, ZiYi Yang, Chenguang Zhu, Yue Zhang
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00

The impressive performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) has consistently surpassed numerous human-designed benchmarks, presenting new challenges in assessing the shortcomings of LLMs. Designing tasks and finding LLMs' limitations are becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we investigate the question of whether an LLM can discover its own limitations from the errors it makes. To this end, we propose a Self-Challenge evaluation framework with human-in-the-loop. Starting from seed instances that GPT-4 fails to answer, we prompt GPT-4 to summarize error patterns that can be used to generate new instances and incorporate human feedback on them to refine these patterns for generating more challenging data, iteratively. We end up with 8 diverse patterns, such as text manipulation and questions with assumptions. We then build a benchmark, SC-G4, consisting of 1,835 instances generated by GPT-4 using these patterns, with human-annotated gold responses. The SC-G4 serves as a challenging benchmark that allows for a detailed assessment of LLMs' abilities. Our results show that only 44.96\% of instances in SC-G4 can be answered correctly by GPT-4. Interestingly, our pilot study indicates that these error patterns also challenge other LLMs, such as Claude-3 and Llama-3, and cannot be fully resolved through fine-tuning. Our work takes the first step to demonstrate that LLMs can autonomously identify their inherent flaws and provide insights for future dynamic and automatic evaluation.