pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On The Origin of Cultural Biases in Language Models: From Pre-training Data to Linguistic Phenomena
Authors: Tarek Naous, Wei Xu
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to exhibit a strong preference towards entities associated with Western culture when operating in non-Western languages. In this paper, we aim to uncover the origins of entity-related cultural biases in LMs by analyzing several contributing factors, including the representation of entities in pre-training data and the impact of variations in linguistic phenomena across languages. We introduce CAMeL-2, a parallel Arabic-English benchmark of 58,086 entities associated with Arab and Western cultures and 367 masked natural contexts for entities. Our evaluations using CAMeL-2 reveal reduced performance gaps between cultures by LMs when tested in English compared to Arabic. We find that LMs struggle in Arabic with entities that appear at high frequencies in pre-training, where entities can hold multiple word senses. This also extends to entities that exhibit high lexical overlap with languages that are not Arabic but use the Arabic script. Further, we show how frequency-based tokenization leads to this issue in LMs, which gets worse with larger Arabic vocabularies. We will make CAMeL-2 available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/camel2
Quantum-inspired Embeddings Projection and Similarity Metrics for Representation Learning
Authors: Ivan Kankeu, Stefan Gerd Fritsch, Gunnar Schönhoff, Elie Mounzer, Paul Lukowicz, Maximilian Kiefer-Emmanouilidis
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Information Retrieval, Representation Learning

Over the last decade, representation learning, which embeds complex information extracted from large amounts of data into dense vector spaces, has emerged as a key technique in machine learning. Among other applications, it has been a key building block for large language models and advanced computer vision systems based on contrastive learning. A core component of representation learning systems is the projection head, which maps the original embeddings into different, often compressed spaces, while preserving the similarity relationship between vectors. In this paper, we propose a quantum-inspired projection head that includes a corresponding quantum-inspired similarity metric. Specifically, we map classical embeddings onto quantum states in Hilbert space and introduce a quantum circuit-based projection head to reduce embedding dimensionality. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we extended the BERT language model by integrating our projection head for embedding compression. We compared the performance of embeddings, which were compressed using our quantum-inspired projection head, with those compressed using a classical projection head on information retrieval tasks using the TREC 2019 and TREC 2020 Deep Learning benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our quantum-inspired method achieves competitive performance relative to the classical method while utilizing 32 times fewer parameters. Furthermore, when trained from scratch, it notably excels, particularly on smaller datasets. This work not only highlights the effectiveness of the quantum-inspired approach but also emphasizes the utility of efficient, ad hoc low-entanglement circuit simulations within neural networks as a powerful quantum-inspired technique.
rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking
Authors: Xinyu Guan, Li Lyna Zhang, Yifei Liu, Ning Shang, Youran Sun, Yi Zhu, Fan Yang, Mao Yang
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

We present rStar-Math to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can rival or even surpass the math reasoning capability of OpenAI o1, without distillation from superior models. rStar-Math achieves this by exercising "deep thinking" through Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), where a math policy SLM performs test-time search guided by an SLM-based process reward model. rStar-Math introduces three innovations to tackle the challenges in training the two SLMs: (1) a novel code-augmented CoT data sythesis method, which performs extensive MCTS rollouts to generate step-by-step verified reasoning trajectories used to train the policy SLM; (2) a novel process reward model training method that avoids na\"ive step-level score annotation, yielding a more effective process preference model (PPM); (3) a self-evolution recipe in which the policy SLM and PPM are built from scratch and iteratively evolved to improve reasoning capabilities. Through 4 rounds of self-evolution with millions of synthesized solutions for 747k math problems, rStar-Math boosts SLMs' math reasoning to state-of-the-art levels. On the MATH benchmark, it improves Qwen2.5-Math-7B from 58.8% to 90.0% and Phi3-mini-3.8B from 41.4% to 86.4%, surpassing o1-preview by +4.5% and +0.9%. On the USA Math Olympiad (AIME), rStar-Math solves an average of 53.3% (8/15) of problems, ranking among the top 20% the brightest high school math students. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/rStar.
Developing a Modular Compiler for a Subset of a C-like Language
Authors: Debasish Dutta, Neeharika Sonowal, Irani Hazarika
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

The paper introduces the development of a modular compiler for a subset of a C-like language, which addresses the challenges in constructing a compiler for high-level languages. This modular approach will allow developers to modify a language by adding or removing subsets as required, resulting in a minimal and memory-efficient compiler. The development process is divided into small, incremental steps, where each step yields a fully functioning compiler for an expanding subset of the language. The paper outlines the iterative developmental phase of the compiler, emphasizing progressive enhancements in capabilities and functionality. Adherence to industry best practices of modular design, code reusability, and documentation has enabled the resulting compiler's functional efficiency, maintainability, and extensibility. The compiler proved to be effective not only in managing the language structure but also in developing optimized code, which demonstrates its practical usability. This was also further assessed using the compiler on a tiny memory-deficient single-board computer, again showing the compiler's efficiency and suitability for resource-constrained devices.
PolInterviews -- A Dataset of German Politician Public Broadcast Interviews
Authors: Lukas Birkenmaier, Laureen Sieber, Felix Bergstein
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification

This paper presents a novel dataset of public broadcast interviews featuring high-ranking German politicians. The interviews were sourced from YouTube, transcribed, processed for speaker identification, and stored in a tidy and open format. The dataset comprises 99 interviews with 33 different German politicians across five major interview formats, containing a total of 28,146 sentences. As the first of its kind, this dataset offers valuable opportunities for research on various aspects of political communication in the (German) political contexts, such as agenda-setting, interviewer dynamics, or politicians' self-presentation.
When LLMs Struggle: Reference-less Translation Evaluation for Low-resource Languages
Authors: Archchana Sindhujan, Diptesh Kanojia, Constantin Orasan, Shenbin Qian
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Transliteration

This paper investigates the reference-less evaluation of machine translation for low-resource language pairs, known as quality estimation (QE). Segment-level QE is a challenging cross-lingual language understanding task that provides a quality score (0-100) to the translated output. We comprehensively evaluate large language models (LLMs) in zero/few-shot scenarios and perform instruction fine-tuning using a novel prompt based on annotation guidelines. Our results indicate that prompt-based approaches are outperformed by the encoder-based fine-tuned QE models. Our error analysis reveals tokenization issues, along with errors due to transliteration and named entities, and argues for refinement in LLM pre-training for cross-lingual tasks. We release the data, and models trained publicly for further research.
Hidden Entity Detection from GitHub Leveraging Large Language Models
Authors: Lu Gan, Martin Blum, Danilo Dessi, Brigitte Mathiak, Ralf Schenkel, Stefan Dietze
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Prompt Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Named entity recognition is an important task when constructing knowledge bases from unstructured data sources. Whereas entity detection methods mostly rely on extensive training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way towards approaches that rely on zero-shot learning (ZSL) or few-shot learning (FSL) by taking advantage of the capabilities LLMs acquired during pretraining. Specifically, in very specialized scenarios where large-scale training data is not available, ZSL / FSL opens new opportunities. This paper follows this recent trend and investigates the potential of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) in such scenarios to automatically detect datasets and software within textual content from GitHub repositories. While existing methods focused solely on named entities, this study aims to broaden the scope by incorporating resources such as repositories and online hubs where entities are also represented by URLs. The study explores different FSL prompt learning approaches to enhance the LLMs' ability to identify dataset and software mentions within repository texts. Through analyses of LLM effectiveness and learning strategies, this paper offers insights into the potential of advanced language models for automated entity detection.
End-to-End Bangla AI for Solving Math Olympiad Problem Benchmark: Leveraging Large Language Model Using Integrated Approach
Authors: H. M. Shadman Tabib, Jaber Ahmed Deedar
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Math, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This work introduces systematic approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs) to address Bangla AI mathematical challenges. Through the assessment of diverse LLM configurations, fine-tuning with specific datasets, and the implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), we enhanced the model's reasoning precision in a multilingual setting. Crucial discoveries indicate that customized prompting, dataset augmentation, and iterative reasoning improve the model's efficiency regarding Olympiad-level mathematical challenges.
SEO: Stochastic Experience Optimization for Large Language Models
Authors: Jitao Xu, Hongyun Zhou, Lei Shen, Conghui Zhu, Jin Huang, Yitao Duan
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) can benefit from useful experiences to improve their performance on specific tasks. However, finding helpful experiences for different LLMs is not obvious, since it is unclear what experiences suit specific LLMs. Previous studies intended to automatically find useful experiences using LLMs, while it is difficult to ensure the effectiveness of the obtained experience. In this paper, we propose Stochastic Experience Optimization (SEO), an iterative approach that finds optimized model-specific experience without modifying model parameters through experience update in natural language. In SEO, we propose a stochastic validation method to ensure the update direction of experience, avoiding unavailing updates. Experimental results on three tasks for three LLMs demonstrate that experiences optimized by SEO can achieve consistently improved performance. Further analysis indicates that SEO-optimized experience can generalize to out-of-distribution data, boosting the performance of LLMs on similar tasks.
Understanding Before Reasoning: Enhancing Chain-of-Thought with Iterative Summarization Pre-Prompting
Authors: Dong-Hai Zhu, Yu-jie Xiong, Jia-Chen Zhang, Xi-Jiong Xie, Chun-Ming Xia
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting is a dominant paradigm in Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance complex reasoning. It guides LLMs to present multi-step reasoning, rather than generating the final answer directly. However, CoT encounters difficulties when key information required for reasoning is implicit or missing. This occurs because CoT emphasizes the sequence of reasoning steps while overlooking the early extraction of essential information. We propose a pre-prompting method called Iterative Summarization Pre-Prompting (ISP^2) to refine LLM reasoning when key information is not explicitly provided. First, entities and their corresponding descriptions are extracted to form potential key information pairs. Next, we use a reliability rating to assess these pairs, then merge the two lowest-ranked pairs into a new entity description. This process is repeated until a unique key information pair is obtained. Finally, that pair, along with the original question, is fed into LLMs to produce the answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate a 7.1% improvement compared to existing methods. Unlike traditional prompting, ISP^2 adopts an inductive approach with pre-prompting, offering flexible integration into diverse reasoning frameworks. The code is available at https://github.com/zdhgreat/ISP-2.
Who Does the Giant Number Pile Like Best: Analyzing Fairness in Hiring Contexts
Authors: Preethi Seshadri, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Retrieval, Sensitivity

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in high-stakes applications like hiring, yet their potential for unfair decision-making and outcomes remains understudied, particularly in generative settings. In this work, we examine the fairness of LLM-based hiring systems through two real-world tasks: resume summarization and retrieval. By constructing a synthetic resume dataset and curating job postings, we investigate whether model behavior differs across demographic groups and is sensitive to demographic perturbations. Our findings reveal that race-based differences appear in approximately 10% of generated summaries, while gender-based differences occur in only 1%. In the retrieval setting, all evaluated models display non-uniform selection patterns across demographic groups and exhibit high sensitivity to both gender and race-based perturbations. Surprisingly, retrieval models demonstrate comparable sensitivity to non-demographic changes, suggesting that fairness issues may stem, in part, from general brittleness issues. Overall, our results indicate that LLM-based hiring systems, especially at the retrieval stage, can exhibit notable biases that lead to discriminatory outcomes in real-world contexts.
LLM4SR: A Survey on Large Language Models for Scientific Research
Authors: Ziming Luo, Zonglin Yang, Zexin Xu, Wei Yang, Xinya Du
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

In recent years, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of scientific research, offering unprecedented support across various stages of the research cycle. This paper presents the first systematic survey dedicated to exploring how LLMs are revolutionizing the scientific research process. We analyze the unique roles LLMs play across four critical stages of research: hypothesis discovery, experiment planning and implementation, scientific writing, and peer reviewing. Our review comprehensively showcases the task-specific methodologies and evaluation benchmarks. By identifying current challenges and proposing future research directions, this survey not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs, but also aims to inspire and guide researchers and practitioners in leveraging LLMs to advance scientific inquiry. Resources are available at the following repository: https://github.com/du-nlp-lab/LLM4SR
Preference-grounded Token-level Guidance for Language Model Fine-tuning
Authors: Shentao Yang, Shujian Zhang, Congying Xia, Yihao Feng, Caiming Xiong, Mingyuan Zhou
Date: 2023-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation, Text Summarization

Aligning language models (LMs) with preferences is an important problem in natural language generation. A key challenge is that preferences are typically provided at the sequence level while LM training and generation both occur at the token level. There is, therefore, a granularity mismatch between the preference and the LM training losses, which may complicate the learning problem. In this paper, we address this issue by developing an alternate training process, where we iterate between grounding the sequence-level preference into token-level training guidance, and improving the LM with the learned guidance. For guidance learning, we design a framework that extends the pairwise-preference learning in imitation learning to both variable-length LM generation and the utilization of the preference among multiple generations. For LM training, based on the amount of supervised data, we present two minimalist learning objectives that utilize the learned guidance. In experiments, our method performs competitively on two distinct representative LM tasks -- discrete-prompt generation and text summarization.
Multimodal Graph Constrastive Learning and Prompt for ChartQA
Authors: Yue Dai, Soyeon Caren Han, Wei Liu
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder

ChartQA presents significant challenges due to the complex distribution of chart elements and the implicit patterns embedded within the underlying data. In this chapter, we have developed a joint multimodal scene graph for charts, explicitly representing the relationships between chart elements and their associated patterns. Our proposed multimodal scene graph consists of two components: a visual graph and a textual graph, each designed to capture the structural and semantic information within the chart. To unify representations across these different modalities, we introduce a multimodal graph contrastive learning approach that learns unified representations by maximizing similarity between nodes representing the same object across multimodal graphs. The learned graph representations can be seamlessly incorporated into a transformer decoder as a soft prompt. Additionally, given the growing need for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in zero-shot scenarios, we have designed Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts for MLLMs to reduce hallucinations. We tested both methods on public benchmarks such as ChartQA, OpenCQA, and ChartX, demonstrating improved performance and validating the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
IOLBENCH: Benchmarking LLMs on Linguistic Reasoning
Authors: Satyam Goyal, Soham Dan
Date: 2025-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Despite the remarkable advancements and widespread applications of deep neural networks, their ability to perform reasoning tasks remains limited, particularly in domains requiring structured, abstract thought. In this paper, we investigate the linguistic reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) by introducing IOLBENCH, a novel benchmark derived from International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) problems. This dataset encompasses diverse problems testing syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics, all carefully designed to be self-contained and independent of external knowledge. These tasks challenge models to engage in metacognitive linguistic reasoning, requiring the deduction of linguistic rules and patterns from minimal examples. Through extensive benchmarking of leading LLMs, we find that even the most advanced models struggle to handle the intricacies of linguistic complexity, particularly in areas demanding compositional generalization and rule abstraction. Our analysis highlights both the strengths and persistent limitations of current models in linguistic problem-solving, offering valuable insights into their reasoning capabilities. By introducing IOLBENCH, we aim to foster further research into developing models capable of human-like reasoning, with broader implications for the fields of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.
"Yeah Right!" -- Do LLMs Exhibit Multimodal Feature Transfer?
Authors: Benjamin Reichman, Kartik Talamadupula
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00

Human communication is a multifaceted and multimodal skill. Communication requires an understanding of both the surface-level textual content and the connotative intent of a piece of communication. In humans, learning to go beyond the surface level starts by learning communicative intent in speech. Once humans acquire these skills in spoken communication, they transfer those skills to written communication. In this paper, we assess the ability of speech+text models and text models trained with special emphasis on human-to-human conversations to make this multimodal transfer of skill. We specifically test these models on their ability to detect covert deceptive communication. We find that with no special prompting speech+text LLMs have an advantage over unimodal LLMs in performing this task. Likewise, we find that human-to-human conversation-trained LLMs are also advantaged in this skill.
Hardware-In-The-Loop Training of a 4f Optical Correlator with Logarithmic Complexity Reduction for CNNs
Authors: Lorenzo Pes, Maryam Dehbashizadeh Chehreghan, Rick Luiken, Sander Stuijk, Ripalta Stabile, Federico Corradi
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00

This work evaluates a forward-only learning algorithm on the MNIST dataset with hardware-in-the-loop training of a 4f optical correlator, achieving 87.6% accuracy with O(n2) complexity, compared to backpropagation, which achieves 88.8% accuracy with O(n2 log n) complexity.
A Survey on Large Language Models with some Insights on their Capabilities and Limitations
Authors: Andrea Matarazzo, Riccardo Torlone
Date: 2025-01-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Question Answering, Text Generation

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, particularly with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) built on the transformer architecture, has redefined the capabilities of natural language processing. These models now exhibit remarkable performance across various language-related tasks, such as text generation, question answering, translation, and summarization, often rivaling human-like comprehension. More intriguingly, LLMs have demonstrated emergent abilities extending beyond their core functions, showing proficiency in tasks like commonsense reasoning, code generation, and arithmetic. This survey paper explores the foundational components, scaling mechanisms, and architectural strategies that drive these capabilities. Emphasizing models like GPT and LLaMA, we analyze the impact of exponential data and computational growth on LLM performance, while also addressing the trade-offs associated with scaling. We also examine LLM applications across sectors, such as healthcare, finance, education, and law, highlighting their adaptability and potential to solve domain-specific challenges. Central to this work are the questions of how LLMs generalize across diverse tasks, exhibit planning, and reasoning abilities, and whether these emergent abilities can be systematically elicited or enhanced. In particular, we provide some insights into the CoT (Chain of Thought) and PoT (Plan of Thought) abilities within LLMs, focusing on how pre-training data influences their emergence. Additionally, we investigate LLM-modulo frameworks that integrate external systems, allowing LLMs to handle complex, dynamic tasks. By analyzing these factors, this paper aims to foster the ongoing discussion on the capabilities and limits of LLMs, promoting their responsible development and application in novel and increasingly complex environments.