pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Counterfactual Debating with Preset Stances for Hallucination Elimination of LLMs
Authors: Yi Fang, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Hui Lin, Fuli Feng
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Hallucination

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various natural language processing tasks but struggle with hallucination issues. Existing solutions have considered utilizing LLMs' inherent reasoning abilities to alleviate hallucination, such as self-correction and diverse sampling methods. However, these methods often overtrust LLMs' initial answers due to inherent biases. The key to alleviating this issue lies in overriding LLMs' inherent biases for answer inspection. To this end, we propose a CounterFactual Multi-Agent Debate (CFMAD) framework. CFMAD presets the stances of LLMs to override their inherent biases by compelling LLMs to generate justifications for a predetermined answer's correctness. The LLMs with different predetermined stances are engaged with a skeptical critic for counterfactual debate on the rationality of generated justifications. Finally, the debate process is evaluated by a third-party judge to determine the final answer. Extensive experiments on four datasets of three tasks demonstrate the superiority of CFMAD over existing methods.
CrAM: Credibility-Aware Attention Modification in LLMs for Combating Misinformation in RAG
Authors: Boyi Deng, Wenjie Wang, Fengbin Zhu, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, TriviaQA

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can alleviate hallucinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) by referencing external documents. However, the misinformation in external documents may mislead LLMs' generation. To address this issue, we explore the task of "credibility-aware RAG", in which LLMs automatically adjust the influence of retrieved documents based on their credibility scores to counteract misinformation. To this end, we introduce a plug-and-play method named $\textbf{Cr}$edibility-aware $\textbf{A}$ttention $\textbf{M}$odification (CrAM). CrAM identifies influential attention heads in LLMs and adjusts their attention weights based on the credibility of the documents, thereby reducing the impact of low-credibility documents. Experiments on Natual Questions and TriviaQA using Llama2-13B, Llama3-8B, and Qwen1.5-7B show that CrAM improves the RAG performance of LLMs against misinformation pollution by over 20%, even surpassing supervised fine-tuning methods.
Automating Easy Read Text Segmentation
Authors: Jesús Calleja, Thierry Etchegoyhen, David Ponce
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Text Segmentation

Easy Read text is one of the main forms of access to information for people with reading difficulties. One of the key characteristics of this type of text is the requirement to split sentences into smaller grammatical segments, to facilitate reading. Automated segmentation methods could foster the creation of Easy Read content, but their viability has yet to be addressed. In this work, we study novel methods for the task, leveraging masked and generative language models, along with constituent parsing. We conduct comprehensive automatic and human evaluations in three languages, analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed alternatives, under scarce resource limitations. Our results highlight the viability of automated Easy Read text segmentation and remaining deficiencies compared to expert-driven human segmentation.
BAMBINO-LM: (Bilingual-)Human-Inspired Continual Pretraining of BabyLM
Authors: Zhewen Shen, Aditya Joshi, Ruey-Cheng Chen
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Pretraining, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Children from bilingual backgrounds benefit from interactions with parents and teachers to re-acquire their heritage language. In this paper, we investigate how this insight from behavioral study can be incorporated into the learning of small-scale language models. We introduce BAMBINO-LM, a continual pre-training strategy for BabyLM that uses a novel combination of alternation and PPO-based perplexity reward induced from a parent Italian model. Upon evaluation on zero-shot classification tasks for English and Italian, BAMBINO-LM improves the Italian language capability of a BabyLM baseline. Our ablation analysis demonstrates that employing both the alternation strategy and PPO-based modeling is key to this effectiveness gain. We also show that, as a side effect, the proposed method leads to a similar degradation in L1 effectiveness as human children would have had in an equivalent learning scenario. Through its modeling and findings, BAMBINO-LM makes a focused contribution to the pre-training of small-scale language models by first developing a human-inspired strategy for pre-training and then showing that it results in behaviours similar to that of humans.
Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Astronomical Entity Disambiguation
Authors: Golnaz Shapurian
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Entity Disambiguation, Graph Clustering, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This paper presents an experiment conducted during a hackathon, focusing on using large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graph clustering to extract entities and relationships from astronomical text. The study demonstrates an approach to disambiguate entities that can appear in various contexts within the astronomical domain. By collecting excerpts around specific entities and leveraging the GPT-4 language model, relevant entities and relationships are extracted. The extracted information is then used to construct a knowledge graph, which is clustered using the Leiden algorithm. The resulting Leiden communities are utilized to identify the percentage of association of unknown excerpts to each community, thereby enabling disambiguation. The experiment showcases the potential of combining LLMs and knowledge graph clustering techniques for information extraction in astronomical research. The results highlight the effectiveness of the approach in identifying and disambiguating entities, as well as grouping them into meaningful clusters based on their relationships.
MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic
Authors: Yuyan Zhou, Liang Song, Bingning Wang, WeiPeng Chen
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Multi-Task Learning, Task Arithmetic

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has catalyzed the exploration of multi-task learning (MTL), in which a single model demonstrates proficiency across diverse tasks. Task arithmetic has emerged as a cost-effective approach for MTL. It enables performance enhancement across multiple tasks by adding their corresponding task vectors to a pre-trained model. However, the current lack of a method that can simultaneously achieve optimal performance, computational efficiency, and data privacy limits their application to LLMs. In this paper, we propose \textbf{M}odel \textbf{E}xclusive \textbf{T}ask \textbf{A}rithmetic for merging \textbf{GPT}-scale models, which formalizes the objective of model merging into a multi-task learning framework, aiming to minimize the average loss difference between the merged model and each individual task model. Since data privacy limits the use of multi-task training data, we leverage LLMs' local linearity and task vectors' orthogonality to separate the data term and scaling coefficients term and derive a model-exclusive task arithmetic method. Our proposed MetaGPT is data-agnostic and bypasses the heavy search process, making it cost-effective and easy to implement for LLMs.Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaGPT leads to improvements in task arithmetic and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks.
Evaluating LLMs for Quotation Attribution in Literary Texts: A Case Study of LLaMa3
Authors: Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in a variety of literary tasks, often using complex memorized details of narration and fictional characters. In this work, we evaluate the ability of Llama-3 at attributing utterances of direct-speech to their speaker in novels. The LLM shows impressive results on a corpus of 28 novels, surpassing published results with ChatGPT and encoder-based baselines by a large margin. We then validate these results by assessing the impact of book memorization and annotation contamination. We found that these types of memorization do not explain the large performance gain, making Llama-3 the new state-of-the-art for quotation attribution in English literature. We release publicly our code and data.
Improving Quotation Attribution with Fictional Character Embeddings
Authors: Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Authorship Verification

Humans naturally attribute utterances of direct speech to their speaker in literary works. When attributing quotes, we process contextual information but also access mental representations of characters that we build and revise throughout the narrative. Recent methods to automatically attribute such utterances have explored simulating human logic with deterministic rules or learning new implicit rules with neural networks when processing contextual information. However, these systems inherently lack \textit{character} representations, which often leads to errors in more challenging examples of attribution: anaphoric and implicit quotes. In this work, we propose to augment a popular quotation attribution system, BookNLP, with character embeddings that encode global stylistic information of characters derived from an off-the-shelf stylometric model, Universal Authorship Representation (UAR). We create DramaCV (Code and data can be found at https://github.com/deezer/character_embeddings_qa ), a corpus of English drama plays from the 15th to 20th century that we automatically annotate for Authorship Verification of fictional characters utterances, and release two versions of UAR trained on DramaCV, that are tailored for literary characters analysis. Then, through an extensive evaluation on 28 novels, we show that combining BookNLP's contextual information with our proposed global character embeddings improves the identification of speakers for anaphoric and implicit quotes, reaching state-of-the-art performance.
A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models as Soft Reasoners: The Case of Syllogistic Inferences
Authors: Leonardo Bertolazzi, Albert Gatt, Raffaella Bernardi
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, valid, World Knowledge

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive psychology. Previous research has shown that pre-trained LLMs exhibit reasoning biases, such as $\textit{content effects}$, avoid answering that $\textit{no conclusion follows}$, display human-like difficulties, and struggle with multi-step reasoning. We contribute to this research line by systematically investigating the effects of chain-of-thought reasoning, in-context learning (ICL), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on syllogistic reasoning, considering syllogisms with conclusions that support or violate world knowledge, as well as ones with multiple premises. Crucially, we go beyond the standard focus on accuracy, with an in-depth analysis of the conclusions generated by the models. Our results suggest that the behavior of pre-trained LLMs can be explained by heuristics studied in cognitive science and that both ICL and SFT improve model performance on valid inferences, although only the latter mitigates most reasoning biases without harming model consistency.
Fine-grained Controllable Text Generation through In-context Learning with Feedback
Authors: Sarubi Thillainathan, Alexander Koller
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Sentence, Text Generation

We present a method for rewriting an input sentence to match specific values of nontrivial linguistic features, such as dependency depth. In contrast to earlier work, our method uses in-context learning rather than finetuning, making it applicable in use cases where data is sparse. We show that our model performs accurate rewrites and matches the state of the art on rewriting sentences to a specified school grade level.
Are Large Language Models True Healthcare Jacks-of-All-Trades? Benchmarking Across Health Professions Beyond Physician Exams
Authors: Zheheng Luo, Chenhan Yuan, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Benchmarking, World Knowledge

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in delivering accurate answers to questions about world knowledge. Despite this, existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs in healthcare predominantly focus on medical doctors, leaving other critical healthcare professions underrepresented. To fill this research gap, we introduce the Examinations for Medical Personnel in Chinese (EMPEC), a pioneering large-scale healthcare knowledge benchmark in traditional Chinese. EMPEC consists of 157,803 exam questions across 124 subjects and 20 healthcare professions, including underrepresented occupations like Optometrists and Audiologists. Each question is tagged with its release time and source, ensuring relevance and authenticity. We conducted extensive experiments on 17 LLMs, including proprietary, open-source models, general domain models and medical specific models, evaluating their performance under various settings. Our findings reveal that while leading models like GPT-4 achieve over 75\% accuracy, they still struggle with specialized fields and alternative medicine. Surprisingly, general-purpose LLMs outperformed medical-specific models, and incorporating EMPEC's training data significantly enhanced performance. Additionally, the results on questions released after the models' training cutoff date were consistent with overall performance trends, suggesting that the models' performance on the test set can predict their effectiveness in addressing unseen healthcare-related queries. The transition from traditional to simplified Chinese characters had a negligible impact on model performance, indicating robust linguistic versatility. Our study underscores the importance of expanding benchmarks to cover a broader range of healthcare professions to better assess the applicability of LLMs in real-world healthcare scenarios.
An Empirical Investigation of Matrix Factorization Methods for Pre-trained Transformers
Authors: Ashim Gupta, Sina Mahdipour Saravani, P. Sadayappan, Vivek Srikumar
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression, text-classification, Text Classification

The increasing size of transformer-based models in NLP makes the question of compressing them important. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of factorization based model compression techniques. Specifically, we focus on comparing straightforward low-rank factorization against the recently introduced Monarch factorization, which exhibits impressive performance preservation on the GLUE benchmark. To mitigate stability issues associated with low-rank factorization of the matrices in pre-trained transformers, we introduce a staged factorization approach wherein layers are factorized one by one instead of being factorized simultaneously. Through this strategy we significantly enhance the stability and reliability of the compression process. Further, we introduce a simple block-wise low-rank factorization method, which has a close relationship to Monarch factorization. Our experiments lead to the surprising conclusion that straightforward low-rank factorization consistently outperforms Monarch factorization across both different compression ratios and six different text classification tasks.
A Systematic Survey of Text Summarization: From Statistical Methods to Large Language Models
Authors: Haopeng Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Survey, Text Summarization

Text summarization research has undergone several significant transformations with the advent of deep neural networks, pre-trained language models (PLMs), and recent large language models (LLMs). This survey thus provides a comprehensive review of the research progress and evolution in text summarization through the lens of these paradigm shifts. It is organized into two main parts: (1) a detailed overview of datasets, evaluation metrics, and summarization methods before the LLM era, encompassing traditional statistical methods, deep learning approaches, and PLM fine-tuning techniques, and (2) the first detailed examination of recent advancements in benchmarking, modeling, and evaluating summarization in the LLM era. By synthesizing existing literature and presenting a cohesive overview, this survey also discusses research trends, open challenges, and proposes promising research directions in summarization, aiming to guide researchers through the evolving landscape of summarization research.
Self and Cross-Model Distillation for LLMs: Effective Methods for Refusal Pattern Alignment
Authors: Jie Li, Yi Liu, Chongyang Liu, Xiaoning Ren, Ling Shi, Weisong Sun, Yinxing Xue
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI's GPT series, Anthropic's Claude, and Meta's LLaMa have shown remarkable capabilities in text generation. However, their susceptibility to toxic prompts presents significant security challenges. This paper investigates alignment techniques, including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), to mitigate these risks. We conduct an empirical study on refusal patterns across nine LLMs, revealing that models with uniform refusal patterns, such as Claude3, exhibit higher security. Based on these findings, we propose self-distilling and cross-model distilling methods to enhance LLM security. Our results show that these methods significantly improve refusal rates and reduce unsafe content, with cross-model distilling achieving refusal rates close to Claude3's 94.51%. These findings underscore the potential of distillation-based alignment in securing LLMs against toxic prompts.
Do Not Design, Learn: A Trainable Scoring Function for Uncertainty Estimation in Generative LLMs
Authors: Duygu Nur Yaldiz, Yavuz Faruk Bakman, Baturalp Buyukates, Chenyang Tao, Anil Ramakrishna, Dimitrios Dimitriadis, Jieyu Zhao, Salman Avestimehr
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Uncertainty estimation (UE) of generative large language models (LLMs) is crucial for evaluating the reliability of generated sequences. A significant subset of UE methods utilize token probabilities to assess uncertainty, aggregating multiple token probabilities into a single UE score using a scoring function. Existing scoring functions for probability-based UE, such as length-normalized scoring and semantic contribution-based weighting, are designed to solve certain aspects of the problem but exhibit limitations, including the inability to handle biased probabilities and complex semantic dependencies between tokens. To address these issues, in this work, we propose Learnable Response Scoring (LARS) function, a novel scoring function that leverages supervised data to capture complex dependencies between tokens and probabilities, thereby producing more reliable and calibrated response scores in computing the uncertainty of LLM generations. Our comprehensive experiments across question-answering and arithmetical reasoning tasks with various datasets demonstrate that LARS significantly outperforms existing scoring functions, achieving improvements of up to 16\% AUROC score.
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector
Authors: Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, Hongzhi Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, Hallucination

Hallucination detection is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), and existing studies heavily rely on powerful closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. In this paper, we propose an autonomous LLM-based agent framework, called HaluAgent, which enables relatively smaller LLMs (e.g. Baichuan2-Chat 7B) to actively select suitable tools for detecting multiple hallucination types such as text, code, and mathematical expression. In HaluAgent, we integrate the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and design a fine-grained three-stage detection framework along with memory mechanism. To facilitate the effectiveness of HaluAgent, we leverage existing Chinese and English datasets to synthesize detection trajectories for fine-tuning, which endows HaluAgent with the capability for bilingual hallucination detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that only using 2K samples for tuning LLMs, HaluAgent can perform hallucination detection on various types of tasks and datasets, achieving performance comparable to or even higher than GPT-4 without tool enhancements on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/HaluAgent.
Self-training Large Language Models through Knowledge Detection
Authors: Wei Jie Yeo, Teddy Ferdinan, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Ranjan Satapathy, Erik Cambria
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large language models (LLMs) often necessitate extensive labeled datasets and training compute to achieve impressive performance across downstream tasks. This paper explores a self-training paradigm, where the LLM autonomously curates its own labels and selectively trains on unknown data samples identified through a reference-free consistency method. Empirical evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in reducing hallucination in generation across multiple subjects. Furthermore, the selective training framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting in out-of-distribution benchmarks, addressing a critical limitation in training LLMs. Our findings suggest that such an approach can substantially reduce the dependency on large labeled datasets, paving the way for more scalable and cost-effective language model training.
Skip-Layer Attention: Bridging Abstract and Detailed Dependencies in Transformers
Authors: Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Qinglin Zhang, Siqi Zheng, Shiliang Zhang, Chong Deng, Hai Yu, Jiaqing Liu, Yukun Ma, Chong Zhang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows, refining the Transformer's architecture becomes critical. This paper introduces Skip-Layer Attention (SLA) to enhance Transformer models by enabling direct attention between non-adjacent layers. This method improves the model's ability to capture dependencies between high-level abstract features and low-level details. By facilitating direct attention between these diverse feature levels, our approach overcomes the limitations of current Transformers, which often rely on suboptimal intra-layer attention. Our implementation extends the Transformer's functionality by enabling queries in a given layer to interact with keys and values from both the current layer and one preceding layer, thus enhancing the diversity of multi-head attention without additional computational burden. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our enhanced Transformer model achieves superior performance in language modeling tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our skip-layer attention mechanism.