pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
STLM Engineering Report: Dropout
Authors: Dylan Hillier, Leon Guertler, Bobby Cheng, Cheston Tan
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

In this work we explore the relevance of dropout for modern language models, particularly in the context of models on the scale of <100M parameters. We explore it's relevance firstly in the regime of improving the sample efficiency of models given small, high quality datasets, and secondly in the regime of improving the quality of its fit on larger datasets where models may underfit. We find that concordant with conventional wisdom, dropout remains effective in the overfitting scenario, and that furthermore it may have some relevance for improving the fit of models even in the case of excess data, as suggested by previous research. In the process we find that the existing explanation for the mechanism behind this performance gain is not applicable in the case of language modelling.
Benchmarking and Building Zero-Shot Hindi Retrieval Model with Hindi-BEIR and NLLB-E5
Authors: Arkadeep Acharya, Rudra Murthy, Vishwajeet Kumar, Jaydeep Sen
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Text 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, comprehensive benchmarks for evaluating retrieval models in Hindi are lacking. To address this gap, we introduce the Hindi-BEIR benchmark, comprising 15 datasets across seven distinct tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art multilingual retrieval models on the Hindi-BEIR benchmark, identifying task and domain-specific challenges that impact Hindi retrieval performance. Building on the insights from these results, we introduce NLLB-E5, a multilingual retrieval model that leverages a zero-shot approach to support Hindi without the need for Hindi training data. We believe our contributions, which include the release of the Hindi-BEIR benchmark and the NLLB-E5 model, will prove to be a valuable resource for researchers and promote advancements in multilingual retrieval models.
Application Specific Compression of Deep Learning Models
Authors: Rohit Raj Rai, Angana Borah, Amit Awekar
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Model Compression, Natural Language Inference, Paraphrase Identification

Large Deep Learning models are compressed and deployed for specific applications. However, current Deep Learning model compression methods do not utilize the information about the target application. As a result, the compressed models are application agnostic. Our goal is to customize the model compression process to create a compressed model that will perform better for the target application. Our method, Application Specific Compression (ASC), identifies and prunes components of the large Deep Learning model that are redundant specifically for the given target application. The intuition of our work is to prune the parts of the network that do not contribute significantly to updating the data representation for the given application. We have experimented with the BERT family of models for three applications: Extractive QA, Natural Language Inference, and Paraphrase Identification. We observe that customized compressed models created using ASC method perform better than existing model compression methods and off-the-shelf compressed models.
Diagnostic Reasoning in Natural Language: Computational Model and Application
Authors: Nils Dycke, Matej Zečević, Ilia Kuznetsov, Beatrix Suess, Kristian Kersting, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic

Diagnostic reasoning is a key component of expert work in many domains. It is a hard, time-consuming activity that requires expertise, and AI research has investigated the ways automated systems can support this process. Yet, due to the complexity of natural language, the applications of AI for diagnostic reasoning to language-related tasks are lacking. To close this gap, we investigate diagnostic abductive reasoning (DAR) in the context of language-grounded tasks (NL-DAR). We propose a novel modeling framework for NL-DAR based on Pearl's structural causal models and instantiate it in a comprehensive study of scientific paper assessment in the biomedical domain. We use the resulting dataset to investigate the human decision-making process in NL-DAR and determine the potential of LLMs to support structured decision-making over text. Our framework, open resources and tools lay the groundwork for the empirical study of collaborative diagnostic reasoning in the age of LLMs, in the scholarly domain and beyond.
RexUniNLU: Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal NLU
Authors: Chengyuan Liu, Shihang Wang, Fubang Zhao, Kun Kuang, Yangyang Kang, Weiming Lu, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification, UIE

Information Extraction (IE) and Text Classification (CLS) serve as the fundamental pillars of NLU, with both disciplines relying on analyzing input sequences to categorize outputs into pre-established schemas. However, there is no existing encoder-based model that can unify IE and CLS tasks from this perspective. To fully explore the foundation shared within NLU tasks, we have proposed a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal NLU. Specifically, we firstly redefine the true universal information extraction (UIE) with a formal formulation that covers almost all extraction schemas, including quadruples and quintuples which remain unsolved for previous UIE models. Then, we expands the formulation to all CLS and multi-modal NLU tasks. Based on that, we introduce RexUniNLU, an universal NLU solution that employs explicit schema constraints for IE and CLS, which encompasses all IE and CLS tasks and prevent incorrect connections between schema and input sequence. To avoid interference between different schemas, we reset the position ids and attention mask matrices. Extensive experiments are conducted on IE, CLS in both English and Chinese, and multi-modality, revealing the effectiveness and superiority. Our codes are publicly released.
UPCS: Unbiased Persona Construction for Dialogue Generation
Authors: Kuiyun Chen, Yanbin Wei
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Diversity, Fairness

Narrative systems, such as dialogue and storytelling systems, often utilize persona profiles to enhance personalized interactions. Existing persona profiles frequently exhibit biases, posing risks to system integrity and fairness. To address this, we introduce the UPCS framework, which categorizes character descriptions into eight dimensions, including bias mitigation strategies. Experimental results demonstrate UPCS's superiority in accuracy, diversity, bias elimination, and user satisfaction, marking a significant advancement in persona construction for reliable narrative systems.
Socially Responsible Data for Large Multilingual Language Models
Authors: Andrew Smart, Ben Hutchinson, Lameck Mbangula Amugongo, Suzanne Dikker, Alex Zito, Amber Ebinama, Zara Wudiri, Ding Wang, Erin Van Liemt, João Sedoc, Seyi Olojo, Stanley Uwakwe, Edem Wornyo, Sonja Schmer-Galunder, Jamila Smith-Loud
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly increased in size and apparent capabilities in the last three years, but their training data is largely English text. There is growing interest in multilingual LLMs, and various efforts are striving for models to accommodate languages of communities outside of the Global North, which include many languages that have been historically underrepresented in digital realms. These languages have been coined as "low resource languages" or "long-tail languages", and LLMs performance on these languages is generally poor. While expanding the use of LLMs to more languages may bring many potential benefits, such as assisting cross-community communication and language preservation, great care must be taken to ensure that data collection on these languages is not extractive and that it does not reproduce exploitative practices of the past. Collecting data from languages spoken by previously colonized people, indigenous people, and non-Western languages raises many complex sociopolitical and ethical questions, e.g., around consent, cultural safety, and data sovereignty. Furthermore, linguistic complexity and cultural nuances are often lost in LLMs. This position paper builds on recent scholarship, and our own work, and outlines several relevant social, cultural, and ethical considerations and potential ways to mitigate them through qualitative research, community partnerships, and participatory design approaches. We provide twelve recommendations for consideration when collecting language data on underrepresented language communities outside of the Global North.
Exploring Intrinsic Language-specific Subspaces in Fine-tuning Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Zhe Cao, Zhi Qu, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation models support fine-tuning hundreds of languages simultaneously. However, fine-tuning on full parameters solely is inefficient potentially leading to negative interactions among languages. In this work, we demonstrate that the fine-tuning for a language occurs in its intrinsic language-specific subspace with a tiny fraction of entire parameters. Thus, we propose language-specific LoRA to isolate intrinsic language-specific subspaces. Furthermore, we propose architecture learning techniques and introduce a gradual pruning schedule during fine-tuning to exhaustively explore the optimal setting and the minimal intrinsic subspaces for each language, resulting in a lightweight yet effective fine-tuning procedure. The experimental results on a 12-language subset and a 30-language subset of FLORES-101 show that our methods not only outperform full-parameter fine-tuning up to 2.25 spBLEU scores but also reduce trainable parameters to $0.4\%$ for high and medium-resource languages and $1.6\%$ for low-resource ones.
Interactive Machine Teaching by Labeling Rules and Instances
Authors: Giannis Karamanolakis, Daniel Hsu, Luis Gravano
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Language Modelling, Weakly-supervised Learning

Weakly supervised learning aims to reduce the cost of labeling data by using expert-designed labeling rules. However, existing methods require experts to design effective rules in a single shot, which is difficult in the absence of proper guidance and tooling. Therefore, it is still an open question whether experts should spend their limited time writing rules or instead providing instance labels via active learning. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit an expert's limited time to create effective supervision. First, to develop practical guidelines for rule creation, we conduct an exploratory analysis of diverse collections of existing expert-designed rules and find that rule precision is more important than coverage across datasets. Second, we compare rule creation to individual instance labeling via active learning and demonstrate the importance of both across 6 datasets. Third, we propose an interactive learning framework, INTERVAL, that achieves efficiency by automatically extracting candidate rules based on rich patterns (e.g., by prompting a language model), and effectiveness by soliciting expert feedback on both candidate rules and individual instances. Across 6 datasets, INTERVAL outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised approaches by 7% in F1. Furthermore, it requires as few as 10 queries for expert feedback to reach F1 values that existing active learning methods cannot match even with 100 queries.
MHS-STMA: Multimodal Hate Speech Detection via Scalable Transformer-Based Multilevel Attention Framework
Authors: Anusha Chhabra, Dinesh Kumar Vishwakarma
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Hate Speech Detection

Social media has a significant impact on people's lives. Hate speech on social media has emerged as one of society's most serious issues in recent years. Text and pictures are two forms of multimodal data that are distributed within articles. Unimodal analysis has been the primary emphasis of earlier approaches. Additionally, when doing multimodal analysis, researchers neglect to preserve the distinctive qualities associated with each modality. To address these shortcomings, the present article suggests a scalable architecture for multimodal hate content detection called transformer-based multilevel attention (STMA). This architecture consists of three main parts: a combined attention-based deep learning mechanism, a vision attention-mechanism encoder, and a caption attention-mechanism encoder. To identify hate content, each component uses various attention processes and handles multimodal data in a unique way. Several studies employing multiple assessment criteria on three hate speech datasets such as Hateful memes, MultiOff, and MMHS150K, validate the suggested architecture's efficacy. The outcomes demonstrate that on all three datasets, the suggested strategy performs better than the baseline approaches.
Hate Content Detection via Novel Pre-Processing Sequencing and Ensemble Methods
Authors: Anusha Chhabra, Dinesh Kumar Vishwakarma
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00

Social media, particularly Twitter, has seen a significant increase in incidents like trolling and hate speech. Thus, identifying hate speech is the need of the hour. This paper introduces a computational framework to curb the hate content on the web. Specifically, this study presents an exhaustive study of pre-processing approaches by studying the impact of changing the sequence of text pre-processing operations for the identification of hate content. The best-performing pre-processing sequence, when implemented with popular classification approaches like Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression and K-Neighbor provides a considerable boost in performance. Additionally, the best pre-processing sequence is used in conjunction with different ensemble methods, such as bagging, boosting and stacking to improve the performance further. Three publicly available benchmark datasets (WZ-LS, DT, and FOUNTA), were used to evaluate the proposed approach for hate speech identification. The proposed approach achieves a maximum accuracy of 95.14% highlighting the effectiveness of the unique pre-processing approach along with an ensemble classifier.
WaterSeeker: Pioneering Efficient Detection of Watermarked Segments in Large Documents
Authors: Leyi Pan, Aiwei Liu, Yijian Lu, Zitian Gao, Yichen Di, Shiyu Huang, Lijie Wen, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Text Detection

Watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) have attained high accuracy in detecting LLM-generated text. However, existing methods primarily focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only small sections within large documents. In this scenario, balancing time complexity and detection performance poses significant challenges. This paper presents WaterSeeker, a novel approach to efficiently detect and locate watermarked segments amid extensive natural text. It first applies an efficient anomaly extraction method to preliminarily locate suspicious watermarked regions. Following this, it conducts a local traversal and performs full-text detection for more precise verification. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that WaterSeeker achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. Moreover, its localization capability lays the foundation for building interpretable AI detection systems. Our code is available at https://github.com/THU-BPM/WaterSeeker.
LLM-based Abstraction and Concretization for GUI Test Migration
Authors: Yakun Zhang, Chen Liu, Xiaofei Xie, Yun Lin, Jin Song Dong, Dan Hao, Lu Zhang
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00

GUI test migration aims to produce test cases with events and assertions to test specific functionalities of a target app. Existing migration approaches typically focus on the widget-mapping paradigm that maps widgets from source apps to target apps. However, since different apps may implement the same functionality in different ways, direct mapping may result in incomplete or buggy test cases, thus significantly impacting the effectiveness of testing target functionality and the practical applicability. In this paper, we propose a new migration paradigm (i.e., abstraction-concretization paradigm) that first abstracts the test logic for the target functionality and then utilizes this logic to generate the concrete GUI test case. Furthermore, we introduce MACdroid, the first approach that migrates GUI test cases based on this paradigm. Specifically, we propose an abstraction technique that utilizes source test cases from source apps targeting the same functionality to extract a general test logic for that functionality. Then, we propose a concretization technique that utilizes the general test logic to guide an LLM in generating the corresponding GUI test case (including events and assertions) for the target app. We evaluate MACdroid on two widely-used datasets (including 31 apps, 34 functionalities, and 123 test cases). On the FrUITeR dataset, the test cases generated by MACdroid successfully test 64% of the target functionalities, improving the baselines by 191%. On the Lin dataset, MACdroid successfully tests 75% of the target functionalities, outperforming the baselines by 42%. These results underscore the effectiveness of MACdroid in GUI test migration.
Vision-fused Attack: Advancing Aggressive and Stealthy Adversarial Text against Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Yanni Xue, Haojie Hao, Jiakai Wang, Qiang Sheng, Renshuai Tao, Yu Liang, Pu Feng, Xianglong Liu
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text, Machine Translation, NMT, SSIM

While neural machine translation (NMT) models achieve success in our daily lives, they show vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Despite being harmful, these attacks also offer benefits for interpreting and enhancing NMT models, thus drawing increased research attention. However, existing studies on adversarial attacks are insufficient in both attacking ability and human imperceptibility due to their sole focus on the scope of language. This paper proposes a novel vision-fused attack (VFA) framework to acquire powerful adversarial text, i.e., more aggressive and stealthy. Regarding the attacking ability, we design the vision-merged solution space enhancement strategy to enlarge the limited semantic solution space, which enables us to search for adversarial candidates with higher attacking ability. For human imperceptibility, we propose the perception-retained adversarial text selection strategy to align the human text-reading mechanism. Thus, the finally selected adversarial text could be more deceptive. Extensive experiments on various models, including large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA and GPT-3.5, strongly support that VFA outperforms the comparisons by large margins (up to 81%/14% improvements on ASR/SSIM).
InstInfer: In-Storage Attention Offloading for Cost-Effective Long-Context LLM Inference
Authors: Xiurui Pan, Endian Li, Qiao Li, Shengwen Liang, Yizhou Shan, Ke Zhou, Yingwei Luo, Xiaolin Wang, Jie Zhang
Date: 2024-09-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing, GPU

The widespread of Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a significant milestone in generative AI. Nevertheless, the increasing context length and batch size in offline LLM inference escalate the memory requirement of the key-value (KV) cache, which imposes a huge burden on the GPU VRAM, especially for resource-constraint scenarios (e.g., edge computing and personal devices). Several cost-effective solutions leverage host memory or SSDs to reduce storage costs for offline inference scenarios and improve the throughput. Nevertheless, they suffer from significant performance penalties imposed by intensive KV cache accesses due to limited PCIe bandwidth. To address these issues, we propose InstInfer, a novel LLM inference system that offloads the most performance-critical computation (i.e., attention in decoding phase) and data (i.e., KV cache) parts to Computational Storage Drives (CSDs), which minimize the enormous KV transfer overheads. InstInfer designs a dedicated flash-aware in-storage attention engine with KV cache management mechanisms to exploit the high internal bandwidths of CSDs instead of being limited by the PCIe bandwidth. The optimized P2P transmission between GPU and CSDs further reduces data migration overheads. Experimental results demonstrate that for a 13B model using an NVIDIA A6000 GPU, InstInfer improves throughput for long-sequence inference by up to 11.1$\times$, compared to existing SSD-based solutions such as FlexGen.
Just ASR + LLM? A Study on Speech Large Language Models' Ability to Identify and Understand Speaker in Spoken Dialogue
Authors: Junkai Wu, Xulin Fan, Bo-Ru Lu, Xilin Jiang, Nima Mesgarani, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Mari Ostendorf
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Speaker Identification

In recent years, we have observed a rapid advancement in speech language models (SpeechLLMs), catching up with humans' listening and reasoning abilities. SpeechLLMs have demonstrated impressive spoken dialog question-answering (SQA) performance in benchmarks like Gaokao, the English listening test of the college entrance exam in China, which seemingly requires understanding both the spoken content and voice characteristics of speakers in a conversation. However, after carefully examining Gaokao's questions, we find the correct answers to many questions can be inferred from the conversation transcript alone, i.e.\ without speaker segmentation and identification. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art models Qwen-Audio and WavLLM on both Gaokao and our proposed "What Do You Like?" dataset shows a significantly higher accuracy in these context-based questions than in identity-critical questions, which can only be answered reliably with correct speaker identification. The results and analysis suggest that when solving SQA, the current SpeechLLMs exhibit limited speaker awareness from the audio and behave similarly to an LLM reasoning from the conversation transcription without sound. We propose that tasks focused on identity-critical questions could offer a more accurate evaluation framework of SpeechLLMs in SQA.
Exploring Straightforward Conversational Red-Teaming
Authors: George Kour, Naama Zwerdling, Marcel Zalmanovici, Ateret Anaby-Tavor, Ora Nova Fandina, Eitan Farchi
Date: 2024-09-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in business dialogue systems but they pose security and ethical risks. Multi-turn conversations, where context influences the model's behavior, can be exploited to produce undesired responses. In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of utilizing off-the-shelf LLMs in straightforward red-teaming approaches, where an attacker LLM aims to elicit undesired output from a target LLM, comparing both single-turn and conversational red-teaming tactics. Our experiments offer insights into various usage strategies that significantly affect their performance as red teamers. They suggest that off-the-shelf models can act as effective red teamers and even adjust their attack strategy based on past attempts, although their effectiveness decreases with greater alignment.