pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
S$^2$GSL: Incorporating Segment to Syntactic Enhanced Graph Structure Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Bingfeng Chen, Qihan Ouyang, Yongqi Luo, Boyan Xu, Ruichu Cai, Zhifeng Hao
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Graph Learning, Graph structure learning, Sentiment Analysis

Previous graph-based approaches in Aspect based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) have demonstrated impressive performance by utilizing graph neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn structures of static dependency trees and dynamic latent trees. However, incorporating both semantic and syntactic information simultaneously within complex global structures can introduce irrelevant contexts and syntactic dependencies during the process of graph structure learning, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. In order to address the issues above, we propose S$^2$GSL, incorporating Segment to Syntactic enhanced Graph Structure Learning for ABSA. Specifically,S$^2$GSL is featured with a segment-aware semantic graph learning and a syntax-based latent graph learning enabling the removal of irrelevant contexts and dependencies, respectively. We further propose a self-adaptive aggregation network that facilitates the fusion of two graph learning branches, thereby achieving complementarity across diverse structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.
Language Model Can Do Knowledge Tracing: Simple but Effective Method to Integrate Language Model and Knowledge Tracing Task
Authors: Unggi Lee, Jiyeong Bae, Dohee Kim, Sookbun Lee, Jaekwon Park, Taekyung Ahn, Gunho Lee, Damji Stratton, Hyeoncheol Kim
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Tracing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a critical task in online learning for modeling student knowledge over time. Despite the success of deep learning-based KT models, which rely on sequences of numbers as data, most existing approaches fail to leverage the rich semantic information in the text of questions and concepts. This paper proposes Language model-based Knowledge Tracing (LKT), a novel framework that integrates pre-trained language models (PLMs) with KT methods. By leveraging the power of language models to capture semantic representations, LKT effectively incorporates textual information and significantly outperforms previous KT models on large benchmark datasets. Moreover, we demonstrate that LKT can effectively address the cold-start problem in KT by leveraging the semantic knowledge captured by PLMs. Interpretability of LKT is enhanced compared to traditional KT models due to its use of text-rich data. We conducted the local interpretable model-agnostic explanation technique and analysis of attention scores to interpret the model performance further. Our work highlights the potential of integrating PLMs with KT and paves the way for future research in KT domain.
LLM as a Scorer: The Impact of Output Order on Dialogue Evaluation
Authors: Yi-Pei Chen, KuanChao Chu, Hideki Nakayama
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Evaluation, Sensitivity

This research investigates the effect of prompt design on dialogue evaluation using large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are increasingly used for scoring various inputs, creating effective prompts for dialogue evaluation remains challenging due to model sensitivity and subjectivity in dialogue assessments. Our study experimented with different prompt structures, altering the sequence of output instructions and including explanatory reasons. We found that the order of presenting reasons and scores significantly influences LLMs' scoring, with a "reason-first" approach yielding more comprehensive evaluations. This insight is crucial for enhancing the accuracy and consistency of LLM-based evaluations.
Item-Language Model for Conversational Recommendation
Authors: Li Yang, Anushya Subbiah, Hardik Patel, Judith Yue Li, Yanwei Song, Reza Mirghaderi, Vikram Aggarwal, Qifan Wang
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Dialogue Understanding, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Recommendation Systems

Large-language Models (LLMs) have been extremely successful at tasks like complex dialogue understanding, reasoning and coding due to their emergent abilities. These emergent abilities have been extended with multi-modality to include image, audio, and video capabilities. Recommender systems, on the other hand, have been critical for information seeking and item discovery needs. Recently, there have been attempts to apply LLMs for recommendations. One difficulty of current attempts is that the underlying LLM is usually not trained on the recommender system data, which largely contains user interaction signals and is often not publicly available. Another difficulty is user interaction signals often have a different pattern from natural language text, and it is currently unclear if the LLM training setup can learn more non-trivial knowledge from interaction signals compared with traditional recommender system methods. Finally, it is difficult to train multiple LLMs for different use-cases, and to retain the original language and reasoning abilities when learning from recommender system data. To address these three limitations, we propose an Item-Language Model (ILM), which is composed of an item encoder to produce text-aligned item representations that encode user interaction signals, and a frozen LLM that can understand those item representations with preserved pretrained knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments which demonstrate both the importance of the language-alignment and of user interaction knowledge in the item encoder.
Too Big to Fail: Larger Language Models are Disproportionately Resilient to Induction of Dementia-Related Linguistic Anomalies
Authors: Changye Li, Zhecheng Sheng, Trevor Cohen, Serguei Pakhomov
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00

As artificial neural networks grow in complexity, understanding their inner workings becomes increasingly challenging, which is particularly important in healthcare applications. The intrinsic evaluation metrics of autoregressive neural language models (NLMs), perplexity (PPL), can reflect how "surprised" an NLM model is at novel input. PPL has been widely used to understand the behavior of NLMs. Previous findings show that changes in PPL when masking attention layers in pre-trained transformer-based NLMs reflect linguistic anomalies associated with Alzheimer's disease dementia. Building upon this, we explore a novel bidirectional attention head ablation method that exhibits properties attributed to the concepts of cognitive and brain reserve in human brain studies, which postulate that people with more neurons in the brain and more efficient processing are more resilient to neurodegeneration. Our results show that larger GPT-2 models require a disproportionately larger share of attention heads to be masked/ablated to display degradation of similar magnitude to masking in smaller models. These results suggest that the attention mechanism in transformer models may present an analogue to the notions of cognitive and brain reserve and could potentially be used to model certain aspects of the progression of neurodegenerative disorders and aging.
Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Tasks
Authors: Yusen Zhang, Ruoxi Sun, Yanfei Chen, Tomas Pfister, Rui Zhang, Sercan Ö. Arik
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, Long-Form Narrative Summarization, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Addressing the challenge of effectively processing long contexts has become a critical issue for Large Language Models (LLMs). Two common strategies have emerged: 1) reducing the input length, such as retrieving relevant chunks by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and 2) expanding the context window limit of LLMs. However, both strategies have drawbacks: input reduction has no guarantee of covering the part with needed information, while window extension struggles with focusing on the pertinent information for solving the task. To mitigate these limitations, we propose Chain-of-Agents (CoA), a novel framework that harnesses multi-agent collaboration through natural language to enable information aggregation and context reasoning across various LLMs over long-context tasks. CoA consists of multiple worker agents who sequentially communicate to handle different segmented portions of the text, followed by a manager agent who synthesizes these contributions into a coherent final output. CoA processes the entire input by interleaving reading and reasoning, and it mitigates long context focus issues by assigning each agent a short context. We perform comprehensive evaluation of CoA on a wide range of long-context tasks in question answering, summarization, and code completion, demonstrating significant improvements by up to 10% over strong baselines of RAG, Full-Context, and multi-agent LLMs.
Promotional Language and the Adoption of Innovative Ideas in Science
Authors: Hao Peng, Huilian Sophie Qiu, Henrik Barslund Fosse, Brian Uzzi
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00

How are the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science? Here we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which has been growing in frequency in many contexts and purportedly may convey an innovative idea's originality and significance. Our analysis attempts to surmount limitations of prior studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies: the NIH, the NSF, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world's largest private science foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas by funders and other scientists. First, the percentage of promotional language in a grant proposal is associated with up to a doubling of the grant's probability of being funded. Second, a grant's promotional language reflects its intrinsic level of innovativeness. Third, the percentage of promotional language predicts the expected citation and productivity impact of publications that are supported by funded grants. Lastly, a computer-assisted experiment that manipulates the promotional language in our data demonstrates how promotional language can communicate the merit of ideas through cognitive activation. With the incidence of promotional language in science steeply rising, and the pivotal role of grants in converting promising and aspirational ideas into solutions, our analysis provides empirical evidence that promotional language is associated with effectively communicating the merits of innovative scientific ideas.
ArguMentor: Augmenting User Experiences with Counter-Perspectives
Authors: Priya Pitre, Kurt Luther
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

We encounter arguments everyday in the form of social media posts, presidential debates, news articles, and even advertisements. A ubiquitous, influential example is the opinion piece (op-ed). Opinion pieces can provide valuable perspectives, but they often represent only one side of a story, which can make readers susceptible to confirmation bias and echo chambers. Exposure to different perspectives can help readers overcome these obstacles and form more robust, nuanced views on important societal issues. We designed ArguMentor, a human-AI collaboration system that highlights claims in opinion pieces, identifies counter-arguments for them using a LLM, and generates a context-based summary of based on current events. It further enhances user understanding through additional features like a Q\&A bot (that answers user questions pertaining to the text), DebateMe (an agent that users can argue any side of the piece with) and highlighting (where users can highlight a word or passage to get its definition or context). Our evaluation on news op-eds shows that participants can generate more arguments and counter-arguments and display higher critical thinking skills after engaging with the system. Further discussion highlights a more general need for this kind of a system.
RATT: A Thought Structure for Coherent and Correct LLM Reasoning
Authors: Jinghan Zhang, Xiting Wang, Weijieying Ren, Lu Jiang, Dongjie Wang, Kunpeng Liu
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fact Checking, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) gain substantial reasoning and decision-making capabilities from thought structures. However, existing methods such as Tree of Thought and Retrieval Augmented Thoughts often fall short in complex tasks due to the limitations of insufficient local retrieval of factual knowledge and inadequate global selection of strategies. These limitations make it challenging for these methods to balance factual accuracy and comprehensive logical optimization effectively. To address these limitations, we introduce the Retrieval Augmented Thought Tree (RATT), a novel thought structure that considers both overall logical soundness and factual correctness at each step of the thinking process. Specifically, at every point of a thought branch, RATT performs planning and lookahead to explore and evaluate multiple potential reasoning steps, and integrate the fact-checking ability of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLM's ability to assess overall strategy. Through this combination of factual knowledge and strategic feasibility, the RATT adjusts and integrates the thought tree structure to search for the most promising branches within the search space. This thought structure significantly enhances the model's coherence in logical inference and efficiency in decision-making, and thus increases the limit of the capacity of LLM to generate reliable inferences and decisions based on thought structures. A broad range of experiments on different types of tasks showcases that the RATT structure significantly outperforms existing methods in factual correctness and logical coherence.
Textless Acoustic Model with Self-Supervised Distillation for Noise-Robust Expressive Speech-to-Speech Translation
Authors: Min-Jae Hwang, Ilia Kulikov, Benjamin Peloquin, Hongyu Gong, Peng-Jen Chen, Ann Lee
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech-to-Speech Translation, Translation

In this paper, we propose a textless acoustic model with a self-supervised distillation strategy for noise-robust expressive speech-to-speech translation (S2ST). Recently proposed expressive S2ST systems have achieved impressive expressivity preservation performances by cascading unit-to-speech (U2S) generator to the speech-to-unit translation model. However, these systems are vulnerable to the presence of noise in input speech, which is an assumption in real-world translation scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a U2S generator that incorporates a distillation with no label (DINO) self-supervised training strategy into it's pretraining process. Because the proposed method captures noise-agnostic expressivity representation, it can generate qualified speech even in noisy environment. Objective and subjective evaluation results verified that the proposed method significantly improved the performance of the expressive S2ST system in noisy environments while maintaining competitive performance in clean environments.
Spiking representation learning for associative memories
Authors: Naresh Ravichandran, Anders Lansner, Pawel Herman
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Networks of interconnected neurons communicating through spiking signals offer the bedrock of neural computations. Our brains spiking neural networks have the computational capacity to achieve complex pattern recognition and cognitive functions effortlessly. However, solving real-world problems with artificial spiking neural networks (SNNs) has proved to be difficult for a variety of reasons. Crucially, scaling SNNs to large networks and processing large-scale real-world datasets have been challenging, especially when compared to their non-spiking deep learning counterparts. The critical operation that is needed of SNNs is the ability to learn distributed representations from data and use these representations for perceptual, cognitive and memory operations. In this work, we introduce a novel SNN that performs unsupervised representation learning and associative memory operations leveraging Hebbian synaptic and activity-dependent structural plasticity coupled with neuron-units modelled as Poisson spike generators with sparse firing (~1 Hz mean and ~100 Hz maximum firing rate). Crucially, the architecture of our model derives from the neocortical columnar organization and combines feedforward projections for learning hidden representations and recurrent projections for forming associative memories. We evaluated the model on properties relevant for attractor-based associative memories such as pattern completion, perceptual rivalry, distortion resistance, and prototype extraction.
When Spiking neural networks meet temporal attention image decoding and adaptive spiking neuron
Authors: Xuerui Qiu, Zheng Luan, Zhaorui Wang, Rui-Jie Zhu
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are capable of encoding and processing temporal information in a biologically plausible way. However, most existing SNN-based methods for image tasks do not fully exploit this feature. Moreover, they often overlook the role of adaptive threshold in spiking neurons, which can enhance their dynamic behavior and learning ability. To address these issues, we propose a novel method for image decoding based on temporal attention (TAID) and an adaptive Leaky-Integrate-and-Fire (ALIF) neuron model. Our method leverages the temporal information of SNN outputs to generate high-quality images that surpass the state-of-the-art (SOTA) in terms of Inception score, Fr\'echet Inception Distance, and Fr\'echet Autoencoder Distance. Furthermore, our ALIF neuron model achieves remarkable classification accuracy on MNIST (99.78\%) and CIFAR-10 (93.89\%) datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of learning adaptive thresholds for spiking neurons. The code is available at https://github.com/bollossom/ICLR_TINY_SNN.
P-SpikeSSM: Harnessing Probabilistic Spiking State Space Models for Long-Range Dependency Tasks
Authors: Malyaban Bal, Abhronil Sengupta
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, State Space Models

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are posited as a computationally efficient and biologically plausible alternative to conventional neural architectures, with their core computational framework primarily using the leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron model. However, the limited hidden state representation of LIF neurons, characterized by a scalar membrane potential, and sequential spike generation process, poses challenges for effectively developing scalable spiking models to address long-range dependencies in sequence learning tasks. In this study, we develop a scalable probabilistic spiking learning framework for long-range dependency tasks leveraging the fundamentals of state space models. Unlike LIF neurons that rely on the deterministic Heaviside function for a sequential process of spike generation, we introduce a SpikeSampler layer that samples spikes stochastically based on an SSM-based neuronal model while allowing parallel computations. To address non-differentiability of the spiking operation and enable effective training, we also propose a surrogate function tailored for the stochastic nature of the SpikeSampler layer. To enhance inter-neuron communication, we introduce the SpikeMixer block, which integrates spikes from neuron populations in each layer. This is followed by a ClampFuse layer, incorporating a residual connection to capture complex dependencies, enabling scalability of the model. Our models attain state-of-the-art performance among SNN models across diverse long-range dependency tasks, encompassing the Long Range Arena benchmark, permuted sequential MNIST, and the Speech Command dataset and demonstrate sparse spiking pattern highlighting its computational efficiency.
Maintaining Diversity Provably Helps in Evolutionary Multimodal Optimization
Authors: Shengjie Ren, Zhijia Qiu, Chao Bian, Miqing Li, Chao Qian
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Evolutionary Algorithms

In the real world, there exist a class of optimization problems that multiple (local) optimal solutions in the solution space correspond to a single point in the objective space. In this paper, we theoretically show that for such multimodal problems, a simple method that considers the diversity of solutions in the solution space can benefit the search in evolutionary algorithms (EAs). Specifically, we prove that the proposed method, working with crossover, can help enhance the exploration, leading to polynomial or even exponential acceleration on the expected running time. This result is derived by rigorous running time analysis in both single-objective and multi-objective scenarios, including $(\mu+1)$-GA solving the widely studied single-objective problem, Jump, and NSGA-II and SMS-EMOA (two well-established multi-objective EAs) solving the widely studied bi-objective problem, OneJumpZeroJump. Experiments are also conducted to validate the theoretical results. We hope that our results may encourage the exploration of diversity maintenance in the solution space for multi-objective optimization, where existing EAs usually only consider the diversity in the objective space and can easily be trapped in local optima.
Gated recurrent neural network with TPE Bayesian optimization for enhancing stock index prediction accuracy
Authors: Bivas Dinda
Date: 2024-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, feature selection, Hyperparameter Optimization

The recent advancement of deep learning architectures, neural networks, and the combination of abundant financial data and powerful computers are transforming finance, leading us to develop an advanced method for predicting future stock prices. However, the accessibility of investment and trading at everyone's fingertips made the stock markets increasingly intricate and prone to volatility. The increased complexity and volatility of the stock market have driven demand for more models, which would effectively capture high volatility and non-linear behavior of the different stock prices. This study explored gated recurrent neural network (GRNN) algorithms such as LSTM (long short-term memory), GRU (gated recurrent unit), and hybrid models like GRU-LSTM, LSTM-GRU, with Tree-structured Parzen Estimator (TPE) Bayesian optimization for hyperparameter optimization (TPE-GRNN). The aim is to improve the prediction accuracy of the next day's closing price of the NIFTY 50 index, a prominent Indian stock market index, using TPE-GRNN. A combination of eight influential factors is carefully chosen from fundamental stock data, technical indicators, crude oil price, and macroeconomic data to train the models for capturing the changes in the price of the index with the factors of the broader economy. Single-layer and multi-layer TPE-GRNN models have been developed. The models' performance is evaluated using standard matrices like R2, MAPE, and RMSE. The analysis of models' performance reveals the impact of feature selection and hyperparameter optimization (HPO) in enhancing stock index price prediction accuracy. The results show that the MAPE of our proposed TPE-LSTM method is the lowest (best) with respect to all the previous models for stock index price prediction.