pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Measuring and Addressing Indexical Bias in Information Retrieval
Authors: Caleb Ziems, William Held, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Diyi Yang
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Fairness, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed to deliver relevant content, but traditional systems may not optimize rankings for fairness, neutrality, or the balance of ideas. Consequently, IR can often introduce indexical biases, or biases in the positional order of documents. Although indexical bias can demonstrably affect people's opinion, voting patterns, and other behaviors, these issues remain understudied as the field lacks reliable metrics and procedures for automatically measuring indexical bias. Towards this end, we introduce the PAIR framework, which supports automatic bias audits for ranked documents or entire IR systems. After introducing DUO, the first general-purpose automatic bias metric, we run an extensive evaluation of 8 IR systems on a new corpus of 32k synthetic and 4.7k natural documents, with 4k queries spanning 1.4k controversial issue topics. A human behavioral study validates our approach, showing that our bias metric can help predict when and how indexical bias will shift a reader's opinion.
What Languages are Easy to Language-Model? A Perspective from Learning Probabilistic Regular Languages
Authors: Nadav Borenstein, Anej Svete, Robin Chan, Josef Valvoda, Franz Nowak, Isabelle Augenstein, Eleanor Chodroff, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributions over strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of distributions over strings. While prior work in this direction focused on assessing the theoretical limits, in contrast, we seek to understand the empirical learnability. Unlike prior empirical work, we evaluate neural LMs on their home turf-learning probabilistic languages-rather than as classifiers of formal languages. In particular, we investigate the learnability of regular LMs (RLMs) by RNN and Transformer LMs. We empirically test the learnability of RLMs as a function of various complexity parameters of the RLM and the hidden state size of the neural LM. We find that the RLM rank, which corresponds to the size of linear space spanned by the logits of its conditional distributions, and the expected length of sampled strings are strong and significant predictors of learnability for both RNNs and Transformers. Several other predictors also reach significance, but with differing patterns between RNNs and Transformers.
Characterizing Similarities and Divergences in Conversational Tones in Humans and LLMs by Sampling with People
Authors: Dun-Ming Huang, Pol van Rijn, Ilia Sucholutsky, Raja Marjieh, Nori Jacoby
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Conversational tones -- the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate -- are essential to effective communication. Amidst the increasing popularization of Large Language Models (LLMs) over recent years, it becomes necessary to characterize the divergences in their conversational tones relative to humans. However, existing investigations of conversational modalities rely on pre-existing taxonomies or text corpora, which suffer from experimenter bias and may not be representative of real-world distributions for the studies' psycholinguistic domains. Inspired by methods from cognitive science, we propose an iterative method for simultaneously eliciting conversational tones and sentences, where participants alternate between two tasks: (1) one participant identifies the tone of a given sentence and (2) a different participant generates a sentence based on that tone. We run 100 iterations of this process with human participants and GPT-4, then obtain a dataset of sentences and frequent conversational tones. In an additional experiment, humans and GPT-4 annotated all sentences with all tones. With data from 1,339 human participants, 33,370 human judgments, and 29,900 GPT-4 queries, we show how our approach can be used to create an interpretable geometric representation of relations between conversational tones in humans and GPT-4. This work demonstrates how combining ideas from machine learning and cognitive science can address challenges in human-computer interactions.
Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with Large Language Models
Authors: Ling Yang, Zhaochen Yu, Tianjun Zhang, Shiyi Cao, Minkai Xu, Wentao Zhang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Bin Cui
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Arithmetic Reasoning, Code Generation, Common Sense Reasoning, Mathematical Reasoning

We introduce Buffer of Thoughts (BoT), a novel and versatile thought-augmented reasoning approach for enhancing accuracy, efficiency and robustness of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose meta-buffer to store a series of informative high-level thoughts, namely thought-template, distilled from the problem-solving processes across various tasks. Then for each problem, we retrieve a relevant thought-template and adaptively instantiate it with specific reasoning structures to conduct efficient reasoning. To guarantee the scalability and stability, we further propose buffer-manager to dynamically update the meta-buffer, thus enhancing the capacity of meta-buffer as more tasks are solved. We conduct extensive experiments on 10 challenging reasoning-intensive tasks, and achieve significant performance improvements over previous SOTA methods: 11% on Game of 24, 20% on Geometric Shapes and 51% on Checkmate-in-One. Further analysis demonstrate the superior generalization ability and model robustness of our BoT, while requiring only 12% of the cost of multi-query prompting methods (e.g., tree/graph of thoughts) on average. Notably, we find that our Llama3-8B+BoT has the potential to surpass Llama3-70B model. Our project is available at: https://github.com/YangLing0818/buffer-of-thought-llm
Benchmark Data Contamination of Large Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Cheng Xu, Shuhao Guan, Derek Greene, M-Tahar Kechadi
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude-3, and Gemini has transformed the field of natural language processing. However, it has also resulted in a significant issue known as Benchmark Data Contamination (BDC). This occurs when language models inadvertently incorporate evaluation benchmark information from their training data, leading to inaccurate or unreliable performance during the evaluation phase of the process. This paper reviews the complex challenge of BDC in LLM evaluation and explores alternative assessment methods to mitigate the risks associated with traditional benchmarks. The paper also examines challenges and future directions in mitigating BDC risks, highlighting the complexity of the issue and the need for innovative solutions to ensure the reliability of LLM evaluation in real-world applications.
Linguistic Steganalysis via LLMs: Two Modes for Efficient Detection of Strongly Concealed Stego
Authors: Yifan Tang, Yihao Wang, Ru Zhang, Jianyi Liu
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Steganalysis

To detect stego (steganographic text) in complex scenarios, linguistic steganalysis (LS) with various motivations has been proposed and achieved excellent performance. However, with the development of generative steganography, some stegos have strong concealment, especially after the emergence of LLMs-based steganography, the existing LS has low detection or cannot detect them. We designed a novel LS with two modes called LSGC. In the generation mode, we created an LS-task "description" and used the generation ability of LLM to explain whether texts to be detected are stegos. On this basis, we rethought the principle of LS and LLMs, and proposed the classification mode. In this mode, LSGC deleted the LS-task "description" and used the "causalLM" LLMs to extract steganographic features. The LS features can be extracted by only one pass of the model, and a linear layer with initialization weights is added to obtain the classification probability. Experiments on strongly concealed stegos show that LSGC significantly improves detection and reaches SOTA performance. Additionally, LSGC in classification mode greatly reduces training time while maintaining high performance.
ValueBench: Towards Comprehensively Evaluating Value Orientations and Understanding of Large Language Models
Authors: Yuanyi Ren, Haoran Ye, Hanjun Fang, Xin Zhang, Guojie Song
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming diverse fields and gaining increasing influence as human proxies. This development underscores the urgent need for evaluating value orientations and understanding of LLMs to ensure their responsible integration into public-facing applications. This work introduces ValueBench, the first comprehensive psychometric benchmark for evaluating value orientations and value understanding in LLMs. ValueBench collects data from 44 established psychometric inventories, encompassing 453 multifaceted value dimensions. We propose an evaluation pipeline grounded in realistic human-AI interactions to probe value orientations, along with novel tasks for evaluating value understanding in an open-ended value space. With extensive experiments conducted on six representative LLMs, we unveil their shared and distinctive value orientations and exhibit their ability to approximate expert conclusions in value-related extraction and generation tasks. ValueBench is openly accessible at https://github.com/Value4AI/ValueBench.
DICE: Detecting In-distribution Contamination in LLM's Fine-tuning Phase for Math Reasoning
Authors: Shangqing Tu, Kejian Zhu, Yushi Bai, Zijun Yao, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) relies on evaluation using public benchmarks, but data contamination can lead to overestimated performance. Previous researches focus on detecting contamination by determining whether the model has seen the exact same data during training. Besides, prior work has already shown that even training on data similar to benchmark data inflates performance, namely \emph{In-distribution contamination}. In this work, we argue that in-distribution contamination can lead to the performance drop on OOD benchmarks. To effectively detect in-distribution contamination, we propose DICE, a novel method that leverages the internal states of LLMs to locate-then-detect the contamination. DICE first identifies the most sensitive layer to contamination, then trains a classifier based on the internal states of that layer. Experiments reveal DICE's high accuracy in detecting in-distribution contamination across various LLMs and math reasoning datasets. We also show the generalization capability of the trained DICE detector, which is able to detect contamination across multiple benchmarks with similar distributions. Additionally, we find that DICE's predictions correlate with the performance of LLMs fine-tuned by either us or other organizations, achieving a coefficient of determination ($R^2$) between 0.61 and 0.75. The code and data are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/DICE.
Towards Understanding Task-agnostic Debiasing Through the Lenses of Intrinsic Bias and Forgetfulness
Authors: Guangliang Liu, Milad Afshari, Xitong Zhang, Zhiyu Xue, Avrajit Ghosh, Bidhan Bashyal, Rongrong Wang, Kristen Johnson
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

While task-agnostic debiasing provides notable generalizability and reduced reliance on downstream data, its impact on language modeling ability and the risk of relearning social biases from downstream task-specific data remain as the two most significant challenges when debiasing Pretrained Language Models (PLMs). The impact on language modeling ability can be alleviated given a high-quality and long-contextualized debiasing corpus, but there remains a deficiency in understanding the specifics of relearning biases. We empirically ascertain that the effectiveness of task-agnostic debiasing hinges on the quantitative bias level of both the task-specific data used for downstream applications and the debiased model. We empirically show that the lower bound of the bias level of the downstream fine-tuned model can be approximated by the bias level of the debiased model, in most practical cases. To gain more in-depth understanding about how the parameters of PLMs change during fine-tuning due to the forgetting issue of PLMs, we propose a novel framework which can Propagate Socially-fair Debiasing to Downstream Fine-tuning, ProSocialTuning. Our proposed framework can push the fine-tuned model to approach the bias lower bound during downstream fine-tuning, indicating that the ineffectiveness of debiasing can be alleviated by overcoming the forgetting issue through regularizing successfully debiased attention heads based on the PLMs' bias levels from stages of pretraining and debiasing.
Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables
Authors: Chaoxu Pang, Yixuan Cao, ChunHao Yang, Ping Luo
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Single Choice Question, Text Generation, text similarity

Tables are recognized for their high information density and widespread usage, serving as essential sources of information. Seeking information from tables (TIS) is a crucial capability for Large Language Models (LLMs), serving as the foundation of knowledge-based Q&A systems. However, this field presently suffers from an absence of thorough and reliable evaluation. This paper introduces a more reliable benchmark for Table Information Seeking (TabIS). To avoid the unreliable evaluation caused by text similarity-based metrics, TabIS adopts a single-choice question format (with two options per question) instead of a text generation format. We establish an effective pipeline for generating options, ensuring their difficulty and quality. Experiments conducted on 12 LLMs reveal that while the performance of GPT-4-turbo is marginally satisfactory, both other proprietary and open-source models perform inadequately. Further analysis shows that LLMs exhibit a poor understanding of table structures, and struggle to balance between TIS performance and robustness against pseudo-relevant tables (common in retrieval-augmented systems). These findings uncover the limitations and potential challenges of LLMs in seeking information from tables. We release our data and code to facilitate further research in this field.
Intention and Face in Dialog
Authors: Adil Soubki, Owen Rambow
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00

The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far less attention. We present an analysis of three computational systems trained for classifying both intention and politeness, focusing on how the former influences the latter. In politeness theory, agents attend to the desire to have their wants appreciated (positive face), and a complementary desire to act unimpeded and maintain freedom (negative face). Similar to speech acts, utterances can perform so-called face acts which can either raise or threaten the positive or negative face of the speaker or hearer. We begin by using an existing corpus to train a model which classifies face acts, achieving a new SoTA in the process. We then observe that every face act has an underlying intention that motivates it and perform additional experiments integrating dialog act annotations to provide these intentions by proxy. Our analysis finds that dialog acts improve performance on face act detection for minority classes and points to a close relationship between aspects of face and intent.
Explainability and Hate Speech: Structured Explanations Make Social Media Moderators Faster
Authors: Agostina Calabrese, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah, Maarten W. Bos, Björn Ross, Mirella Lapata, Francesco Barbieri
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Content moderators play a key role in keeping the conversation on social media healthy. While the high volume of content they need to judge represents a bottleneck to the moderation pipeline, no studies have explored how models could support them to make faster decisions. There is, by now, a vast body of research into detecting hate speech, sometimes explicitly motivated by a desire to help improve content moderation, but published research using real content moderators is scarce. In this work we investigate the effect of explanations on the speed of real-world moderators. Our experiments show that while generic explanations do not affect their speed and are often ignored, structured explanations lower moderators' decision making time by 7.4%.
The syntax-semantics interface in a child's path: A study of 3- to 11-year-olds' elicited production of Mandarin recursive relative clauses
Authors: Caimei Yang, Qihang Yang, Xingzhi Su, Chenxi Fu, Xiaoyi Wang, Ziman Zhuang, Zaijiang Man
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition, Object

There have been apparently conflicting claims over the syntax-semantics relationship in child acquisition. However, few of them have assessed the child's path toward the acquisition of recursive relative clauses (RRCs). The authors of the current paper did experiments to investigate 3- to 11-year-olds' most-structured elicited production of eight Mandarin RRCs in a 4 (syntactic types)*2 (semantic conditions) design. The four syntactic types were RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in an object-gapped RC (SORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in another object-gapped RC (OORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in a subject-gapped RC (OSRRCs), and RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in another subject-gapped RC (SSRRCs). Each syntactic type was put in two conditions differing in internal semantics: irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS). For example, "the balloon that [the girl that _ eats the banana] holds _" is SORRCs in the IIS condition; "the monkey that [the dog that _ bites the pig] hits_" is SORRCs in the RIS condition. For each target, the participants were provided with a speech-visual stimulus constructing a condition of irreversible external semantics (IES). The results showed that SSRRCs, OSRRCs and SORRCs in the IIS-IES condition were produced two years earlier than their counterparts in the RIS-IES condition. Thus, a 2-stage development path is proposed: the language acquisition device starts with the interface between (irreversible) syntax and IIS, and ends with the interface between syntax and IES, both abiding by the syntax-semantic interface principle.
Assessing LLMs for Zero-shot Abstractive Summarization Through the Lens of Relevance Paraphrasing
Authors: Hadi Askari, Anshuman Chhabra, Muhao Chen, Prasant Mohapatra
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Articles

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance at zero-shot generation of abstractive summaries for given articles. However, little is known about the robustness of such a process of zero-shot summarization. To bridge this gap, we propose relevance paraphrasing, a simple strategy that can be used to measure the robustness of LLMs as summarizers. The relevance paraphrasing approach identifies the most relevant sentences that contribute to generating an ideal summary, and then paraphrases these inputs to obtain a minimally perturbed dataset. Then, by evaluating model performance for summarization on both the original and perturbed datasets, we can assess the LLM's one aspect of robustness. We conduct extensive experiments with relevance paraphrasing on 4 diverse datasets, as well as 4 LLMs of different sizes (GPT-3.5-Turbo, Llama-2-13B, Mistral-7B, and Dolly-v2-7B). Our results indicate that LLMs are not consistent summarizers for the minimally perturbed articles, necessitating further improvements.
On The Persona-based Summarization of Domain-Specific Documents
Authors: Ankan Mullick, Sombit Bose, Rounak Saha, Ayan Kumar Bhowmick, Pawan Goyal, Niloy Ganguly, Prasenjit Dey, Ravi Kokku
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00

In an ever-expanding world of domain-specific knowledge, the increasing complexity of consuming, and storing information necessitates the generation of summaries from large information repositories. However, every persona of a domain has different requirements of information and hence their summarization. For example, in the healthcare domain, a persona-based (such as Doctor, Nurse, Patient etc.) approach is imperative to deliver targeted medical information efficiently. Persona-based summarization of domain-specific information by humans is a high cognitive load task and is generally not preferred. The summaries generated by two different humans have high variability and do not scale in cost and subject matter expertise as domains and personas grow. Further, AI-generated summaries using generic Large Language Models (LLMs) may not necessarily offer satisfactory accuracy for different domains unless they have been specifically trained on domain-specific data and can also be very expensive to use in day-to-day operations. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold: 1) We present an approach to efficiently fine-tune a domain-specific small foundation LLM using a healthcare corpus and also show that we can effectively evaluate the summarization quality using AI-based critiquing. 2) We further show that AI-based critiquing has good concordance with Human-based critiquing of the summaries. Hence, such AI-based pipelines to generate domain-specific persona-based summaries can be easily scaled to other domains such as legal, enterprise documents, education etc. in a very efficient and cost-effective manner.
A + B: A General Generator-Reader Framework for Optimizing LLMs to Unleash Synergy Potential
Authors: Wei Tang, Yixin Cao, Jiahao Ying, Bo wang, Yuyue Zhao, Yong Liao, Pengyuan Zhou
Date: 2024-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to supplement necessary knowledge to large language models (LLMs). Targeting its bottleneck of retriever performance, "generate-then-read" pipeline is proposed to replace the retrieval stage with generation from the LLM itself. Although promising, this research direction is underexplored and still cannot work in the scenario when source knowledge is given. In this paper, we formalize a general "A + B" framework with varying combinations of foundation models and types for systematic investigation. We explore the efficacy of the base and chat versions of LLMs and found their different functionalities suitable for generator A and reader B, respectively. Their combinations consistently outperform single models, especially in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we extend the application of the "A + B" framework to scenarios involving source documents through continuous learning, enabling the direct integration of external knowledge into LLMs. This approach not only facilitates effective acquisition of new knowledge but also addresses the challenges of safety and helpfulness post-adaptation. The paper underscores the versatility of the "A + B" framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance the practical application of LLMs across various domains.