pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing News Summarization with ELearnFit through Efficient In-Context Learning and Efficient Fine-Tuning
Authors: Che Guan, Andrew Chin, Puya Vahabi
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, News Summarization, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

With the deluge of information delivered by the daily news cycle, there is a growing need to effectively and efficiently summarize news feeds for quick consumption. We leverage large language models (LLMs), with their advanced learning and generative abilities as compared to conventional language models, to generate concise and coherent summaries for news articles from the XSum dataset. Our paper focuses on two key aspects of LLMs: Efficient in-context Learning (ELearn) and Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning (EFit). Under ELearn, we find that increasing the number of shots in prompts and utilizing simple templates generally improve the quality of summaries. We also find that utilizing relevant examples in few-shot learning for ELearn does not improve model performance. In addition, we studied EFit using different methods and demonstrate that fine-tuning the first layer of LLMs produces better outcomes as compared to fine-tuning other layers or utilizing LoRA. We also find that leveraging more relevant training samples using selective layers does not result in better performance. By combining ELearn and EFit, we create a new model (ELearnFit) that leverages the benefits of both few-shot learning and fine-tuning and produces superior performance to either model alone. We also use ELearnFit to highlight the trade-offs between prompting and fine-tuning, especially for situations where only a limited number of annotated samples are available. Ultimately, our research provides practical techniques to optimize news summarization during the prompting and fine-tuning stages and enhances the synthesis of news articles.
Evaluating the Ability of Computationally Extracted Narrative Maps to Encode Media Framing
Authors: Sebastián Concha Macías, Brian Keith Norambuena
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00

Narratives serve as fundamental frameworks in our understanding of the world and play a crucial role in collaborative sensemaking, providing a versatile foundation for sensemaking. Framing is a subtle yet potent mechanism that influences public perception through specific word choices, shaping interpretations of reported news events. Despite the recognized importance of narratives and framing, a significant gap exists in the literature with regard to the explicit consideration of framing within the context of computational extraction and representation. This article explores the capabilities of a specific narrative extraction and representation approach -- narrative maps -- to capture framing information from news data. The research addresses two key questions: (1) Does the narrative extraction method capture the framing distribution of the data set? (2) Does it produce a representation with consistent framing? Our results indicate that while the algorithm captures framing distributions, achieving consistent framing across various starting and ending events poses challenges. Our results highlight the potential of narrative maps to provide users with insights into the intricate framing dynamics within news narratives. However, we note that directly leveraging framing information in the computational narrative extraction process remains an open challenge.
On the Information Redundancy in Non-Autoregressive Translation
Authors: Zhihao Wang, Longyue Wang, Jinsong Su, Junfeng Yao, Zhaopeng Tu
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Token repetition is a typical form of multi-modal problem in fully non-autoregressive translation (NAT). In this work, we revisit the multi-modal problem in recently proposed NAT models. Our study reveals that these advanced models have introduced other types of information redundancy errors, which cannot be measured by the conventional metric - the continuous repetition ratio. By manually annotating the NAT outputs, we identify two types of information redundancy errors that correspond well to lexical and reordering multi-modality problems. Since human annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive, we propose automatic metrics to evaluate the two types of redundant errors. Our metrics allow future studies to evaluate new methods and gain a more comprehensive understanding of their effectiveness.
R4: Reinforced Retriever-Reorder-Responder for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Authors: Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li, Qizhou Chen, Chengyu Wang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Xiaofeng He, Jun Huang
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Hallucination, Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Response Generation, Retrieval, Text Generation

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) leverage relevant content retrieved by information retrieval systems to generate correct responses, aiming to alleviate the hallucination problem. However, existing retriever-responder methods typically append relevant documents to the prompt of LLMs to perform text generation tasks without considering the interaction of fine-grained structural semantics between the retrieved documents and the LLMs. This issue is particularly important for accurate response generation as LLMs tend to "lose in the middle" when dealing with input prompts augmented with lengthy documents. In this work, we propose a new pipeline named "Reinforced Retriever-Reorder-Responder" (R$^4$) to learn document orderings for retrieval-augmented LLMs, thereby further enhancing their generation abilities while the large numbers of parameters of LLMs remain frozen. The reordering learning process is divided into two steps according to the quality of the generated responses: document order adjustment and document representation enhancement. Specifically, document order adjustment aims to organize retrieved document orderings into beginning, middle, and end positions based on graph attention learning, which maximizes the reinforced reward of response quality. Document representation enhancement further refines the representations of retrieved documents for responses of poor quality via document-level gradient adversarial learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed pipeline achieves better factual question-answering performance on knowledge-intensive tasks compared to strong baselines across various public datasets. The source codes and trained models will be released upon paper acceptance.
Mixat: A Data Set of Bilingual Emirati-English Speech
Authors: Maryam Al Ali, Hanan Aldarmaki
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper introduces Mixat: a dataset of Emirati speech code-mixed with English. Mixat was developed to address the shortcomings of current speech recognition resources when applied to Emirati speech, and in particular, to bilignual Emirati speakers who often mix and switch between their local dialect and English. The data set consists of 15 hours of speech derived from two public podcasts featuring native Emirati speakers, one of which is in the form of conversations between the host and a guest. Therefore, the collection contains examples of Emirati-English code-switching in both formal and natural conversational contexts. In this paper, we describe the process of data collection and annotation, and describe some of the features and statistics of the resulting data set. In addition, we evaluate the performance of pre-trained Arabic and multi-lingual ASR systems on our dataset, demonstrating the shortcomings of existing models on this low-resource dialectal Arabic, and the additional challenge of recognizing code-switching in ASR. The dataset will be made publicly available for research use.
A Combination of BERT and Transformer for Vietnamese Spelling Correction
Authors: Hieu Ngo Trung, Duong Tran Ham, Tin Huynh, Kiem Hoang
Date: 2024-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Spelling Correction

Recently, many studies have shown the efficiency of using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Specifically, English spelling correction task that uses Encoder-Decoder architecture and takes advantage of BERT has achieved state-of-the-art result. However, to our knowledge, there is no implementation in Vietnamese yet. Therefore, in this study, a combination of Transformer architecture (state-of-the-art for Encoder-Decoder model) and BERT was proposed to deal with Vietnamese spelling correction. The experiment results have shown that our model outperforms other approaches as well as the Google Docs Spell Checking tool, achieves an 86.24 BLEU score on this task.
Mothman at SemEval-2024 Task 9: An Iterative System for Chain-of-Thought Prompt Optimization
Authors: Alvin Po-Chun Chen, Ray Groshan, Sean von Bayern
Date: 2024-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, Prompt Engineering

Extensive research exists on the performance of large language models on logic-based tasks, whereas relatively little has been done on their ability to generate creative solutions on lateral thinking tasks. The BrainTeaser shared task tests lateral thinking and uses adversarial datasets to prevent memorization, resulting in poor performance for out-of-the-box models. We propose a system for iterative, chain-of-thought prompt engineering which optimizes prompts using human evaluation. Using this shared task, we demonstrate our system's ability to significantly improve model performance by optimizing prompts and evaluate the input dataset.
Semantic Scaling: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimates with Large Language Models
Authors: Michael Burnham
Date: 2024-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey, valid

This paper introduces "Semantic Scaling," a novel method for ideal point estimation from text. I leverage large language models to classify documents based on their expressed stances and extract survey-like data. I then use item response theory to scale subjects from these data. Semantic Scaling significantly improves on existing text-based scaling methods, and allows researchers to explicitly define the ideological dimensions they measure. This represents the first scaling approach that allows such flexibility outside of survey instruments and opens new avenues of inquiry for populations difficult to survey. Additionally, it works with documents of varying length, and produces valid estimates of both mass and elite ideology. I demonstrate that the method can differentiate between policy preferences and in-group/out-group affect. Among the public, Semantic Scaling out-preforms Tweetscores according to human judgement; in Congress, it recaptures the first dimension DW-NOMINATE while allowing for greater flexibility in resolving construct validity challenges.
What does the Knowledge Neuron Thesis Have to do with Knowledge?
Authors: Jingcheng Niu, Andrew Liu, Zining Zhu, Gerald Penn
Date: 2024-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Editing

We reassess the Knowledge Neuron (KN) Thesis: an interpretation of the mechanism underlying the ability of large language models to recall facts from a training corpus. This nascent thesis proposes that facts are recalled from the training corpus through the MLP weights in a manner resembling key-value memory, implying in effect that "knowledge" is stored in the network. Furthermore, by modifying the MLP modules, one can control the language model's generation of factual information. The plausibility of the KN thesis has been demonstrated by the success of KN-inspired model editing methods (Dai et al., 2022; Meng et al., 2022). We find that this thesis is, at best, an oversimplification. Not only have we found that we can edit the expression of certain linguistic phenomena using the same model editing methods but, through a more comprehensive evaluation, we have found that the KN thesis does not adequately explain the process of factual expression. While it is possible to argue that the MLP weights store complex patterns that are interpretable both syntactically and semantically, these patterns do not constitute "knowledge." To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the knowledge representation process, we must look beyond the MLP weights and explore recent models' complex layer structures and attention mechanisms.
The Call for Socially Aware Language Technologies
Authors: Diyi Yang, Dirk Hovy, David Jurgens, Barbara Plank
Date: 2024-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis

Language technologies have made enormous progress, especially with the introduction of large language models (LLMs). On traditional tasks such as machine translation and sentiment analysis, these models perform at near-human level. These advances can, however, exacerbate a variety of issues that models have traditionally struggled with, such as bias, evaluation, and risks. In this position paper, we argue that many of these issues share a common core: a lack of awareness of the factors, context, and implications of the social environment in which NLP operates, which we call social awareness. While NLP is getting better at solving the formal linguistic aspects, limited progress has been made in adding the social awareness required for language applications to work in all situations for all users. Integrating social awareness into NLP models will make applications more natural, helpful, and safe, and will open up new possibilities. Thus we argue that substantial challenges remain for NLP to develop social awareness and that we are just at the beginning of a new era for the field.
Early Transformers: A study on Efficient Training of Transformer Models through Early-Bird Lottery Tickets
Authors: Shravan Cheekati
Date: 2024-05-02 00:00:00

The training of Transformer models has revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, but it remains a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. This paper investigates the applicability of the early-bird ticket hypothesis to optimize the training efficiency of Transformer models. We propose a methodology that combines iterative pruning, masked distance calculation, and selective retraining to identify early-bird tickets in various Transformer architectures, including ViT, Swin-T, GPT-2, and RoBERTa. Our experimental results demonstrate that early-bird tickets can be consistently found within the first few epochs of training or fine-tuning, enabling significant resource optimization without compromising performance. The pruned models obtained from early-bird tickets achieve comparable or even superior accuracy to their unpruned counterparts while substantially reducing memory usage. Furthermore, our comparative analysis highlights the generalizability of the early-bird ticket phenomenon across different Transformer models and tasks. This research contributes to the development of efficient training strategies for Transformer models, making them more accessible and resource-friendly. By leveraging early-bird tickets, practitioners can accelerate the progress of natural language processing and computer vision applications while reducing the computational burden associated with training Transformer models.
Trackable Island-model Genetic Algorithms at Wafer Scale
Authors: Matthew Andres Moreno, Connor Yang, Emily Dolson, Luis Zaman
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Emerging ML/AI hardware accelerators, like the 850,000 processor Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), hold great promise to scale up the capabilities of evolutionary computation. However, challenges remain in maintaining visibility into underlying evolutionary processes while efficiently utilizing these platforms' large processor counts. Here, we focus on the problem of extracting phylogenetic information from digital evolution on the WSE platform. We present a tracking-enabled asynchronous island-based genetic algorithm (GA) framework for WSE hardware. Emulated and on-hardware GA benchmarks with a simple tracking-enabled agent model clock upwards of 1 million generations a minute for population sizes reaching 16 million. This pace enables quadrillions of evaluations a day. We validate phylogenetic reconstructions from these trials and demonstrate their suitability for inference of underlying evolutionary conditions. In particular, we demonstrate extraction of clear phylometric signals that differentiate wafer-scale runs with adaptive dynamics enabled versus disabled. Together, these benchmark and validation trials reflect strong potential for highly scalable evolutionary computation that is both efficient and observable. Kernel code implementing the island-model GA supports drop-in customization to support any fixed-length genome content and fitness criteria, allowing it to be leveraged to advance research interests across the community.
Markov Chain-based Optimization Time Analysis of Bivalent Ant Colony Optimization for Sorting and LeadingOnes
Authors: Matthias Kergaßner, Oliver Keszocze, Rolf Wanka
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

So far, only few bounds on the runtime behavior of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) have been reported. To alleviate this situation, we investigate the ACO variant we call Bivalent ACO (BACO) that uses exactly two pheromone values. We provide and successfully apply a new Markov chain-based approach to calculate the expected optimization time, i. e., the expected number of iterations until the algorithm terminates. This approach allows to derive exact formulae for the expected optimization time for the problems Sorting and LeadingOnes. It turns out that the ratio of the two pheromone values significantly governs the runtime behavior of BACO. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we can present tight bounds for Sorting ($\Theta(n^3)$) with a specifically chosen objective function and prove the missing lower bound $\Omega(n^2)$ for LeadingOnes which, thus, is tightly bounded by $\Theta(n^2)$. We show that despite we have a drastically simplified ant algorithm with respect to the influence of the pheromones on the solving process, known bounds on the expected optimization time for the problems OneMax ($O(n\log n)$) and LeadingOnes ($O(n^2)$) can be re-produced as a by-product of our approach. Experiments validate our theoretical findings.
Deep Learning and genetic algorithms for cosmological Bayesian inference speed-up
Authors: Isidro Gómez-Vargas, J. Alberto Vázquez
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Hyperparameter Optimization, parameter estimation

In this paper, we present a novel approach to accelerate the Bayesian inference process, focusing specifically on the nested sampling algorithms. Bayesian inference plays a crucial role in cosmological parameter estimation, providing a robust framework for extracting theoretical insights from observational data. However, its computational demands can be substantial, primarily due to the need for numerous likelihood function evaluations. Our proposed method utilizes the power of deep learning, employing feedforward neural networks to approximate the likelihood function dynamically during the Bayesian inference process. Unlike traditional approaches, our method trains neural networks on-the-fly using the current set of live points as training data, without the need for pre-training. This flexibility enables adaptation to various theoretical models and datasets. We perform simple hyperparameter optimization using genetic algorithms to suggest initial neural network architectures for learning each likelihood function. Once sufficient accuracy is achieved, the neural network replaces the original likelihood function. The implementation integrates with nested sampling algorithms and has been thoroughly evaluated using both simple cosmological dark energy models and diverse observational datasets. Additionally, we explore the potential of genetic algorithms for generating initial live points within nested sampling inference, opening up new avenues for enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Bayesian inference methods.
FIMP-HGA: A Novel Approach to Addressing the Partitioning Min-Max Weighted Matching Problem
Authors: Yuxuan Wang, Jiongzhi Zheng, Jinyao Xie, Kun He
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

The Partitioning Min-Max Weighted Matching (PMMWM) problem, being a practical NP-hard problem, integrates the task of partitioning the vertices of a bipartite graph into disjoint sets of limited size with the classical Maximum-Weight Perfect Matching (MPWM) problem. Initially introduced in 2015, the state-of-the-art method for addressing PMMWM is the MP$_{\text{LS}}$. In this paper, we present a novel approach, the Fast Iterative Match-Partition Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (FIMP-HGA), for addressing PMMWM. Similar to MP$_{\text{LS}}$, FIMP-HGA divides the solving into match and partition stages, iteratively refining the solution. In the match stage, we propose the KM-M algorithm, which reduces matching complexity through incremental adjustments, significantly enhancing runtime efficiency. For the partition stage, we introduce a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) incorporating an elite strategy and design a Greedy Partition Crossover (GPX) operator alongside a Multilevel Local Search (MLS) to optimize individuals in the population. Population initialization employs various methods, including the multi-way Karmarkar-Karp (KK) algorithm, ensuring both quality and diversity. At each iteration, the bipartite graph is adjusted based on the current solution, aiming for continuous improvement. To conduct comprehensive experiments, we develop a new instance generation method compatible with existing approaches, resulting in four benchmark groups. Extensive experiments evaluate various algorithm modules, accurately assessing each module's impact on improvement. Evaluation results on our benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed FIMP-HGA significantly enhances solution quality compared to MP$_{\text{LS}}$, meanwhile reducing runtime by 3 to 20 times.
Self-Organized Construction by Minimal Surprise
Authors: Tanja Katharina Kaiser, Heiko Hamann
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00

For the robots to achieve a desired behavior, we can program them directly, train them, or give them an innate driver that makes the robots themselves desire the targeted behavior. With the minimal surprise approach, we implant in our robots the desire to make their world predictable. Here, we apply minimal surprise to collective construction. Simulated robots push blocks in a 2D torus grid world. In two variants of our experiment we either allow for emergent behaviors or predefine the expected environment of the robots. In either way, we evolve robot behaviors that move blocks to structure their environment and make it more predictable. The resulting controllers can be applied in collective construction by robots.