pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Aligning Large Language Models via Self-Steering Optimization
Authors: Hao Xiang, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Keming Lu, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Automated alignment develops alignment systems with minimal human intervention. The key to automated alignment lies in providing learnable and accurate preference signals for preference learning without human annotation. In this paper, we introduce Self-Steering Optimization ($SSO$), an algorithm that autonomously generates high-quality preference signals based on predefined principles during iterative training, eliminating the need for manual annotation. $SSO$ maintains the accuracy of signals by ensuring a consistent gap between chosen and rejected responses while keeping them both on-policy to suit the current policy model's learning capacity. $SSO$ can benefit the online and offline training of the policy model, as well as enhance the training of reward models. We validate the effectiveness of $SSO$ with two foundation models, Qwen2 and Llama3.1, indicating that it provides accurate, on-policy preference signals throughout iterative training. Without any manual annotation or external models, $SSO$ leads to significant performance improvements across six subjective or objective benchmarks. Besides, the preference data generated by $SSO$ significantly enhanced the performance of the reward model on Rewardbench. Our work presents a scalable approach to preference optimization, paving the way for more efficient and effective automated alignment.
PAPILLON: Privacy Preservation from Internet-based and Local Language Model Ensembles
Authors: Li Siyan, Vethavikashini Chithrra Raghuram, Omar Khattab, Julia Hirschberg, Zhou Yu
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Users can divulge sensitive information to proprietary LLM providers, raising significant privacy concerns. While open-source models, hosted locally on the user's machine, alleviate some concerns, models that users can host locally are often less capable than proprietary frontier models. Toward preserving user privacy while retaining the best quality, we propose Privacy-Conscious Delegation, a novel task for chaining API-based and local models. We utilize recent public collections of user-LLM interactions to construct a natural benchmark called PUPA, which contains personally identifiable information (PII). To study potential approaches, we devise PAPILLON, a multi-stage LLM pipeline that uses prompt optimization to address a simpler version of our task. Our best pipeline maintains high response quality for 85.5% of user queries while restricting privacy leakage to only 7.5%. We still leave a large margin to the generation quality of proprietary LLMs for future work. Our data and code is available at https://github.com/siyan-sylvia-li/PAPILLON.
Enhancing Answer Attribution for Faithful Text Generation with Large Language Models
Authors: Juraj Vladika, Luca Mülln, Florian Matthes
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Text Generation

The increasing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years has changed the way users interact with and pose questions to AI-based conversational systems. An essential aspect for increasing the trustworthiness of generated LLM answers is the ability to trace the individual claims from responses back to relevant sources that support them, the process known as answer attribution. While recent work has started exploring the task of answer attribution in LLMs, some challenges still remain. In this work, we first perform a case study analyzing the effectiveness of existing answer attribution methods, with a focus on subtasks of answer segmentation and evidence retrieval. Based on the observed shortcomings, we propose new methods for producing more independent and contextualized claims for better retrieval and attribution. The new methods are evaluated and shown to improve the performance of answer attribution components. We end with a discussion and outline of future directions for the task.
Continuous Speech Tokenizer in Text To Speech
Authors: Yixing Li, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Yu Cheng, Zhanhui Kang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

The fusion of speech and language in the era of large language models has garnered significant attention. Discrete speech token is often utilized in text-to-speech tasks for speech compression and portability, which is convenient for joint training with text and have good compression efficiency. However, we found that the discrete speech tokenizer still suffers from information loss. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective continuous speech tokenizer named Cont-SPT, and a text-to-speech model based on continuous speech tokens. Our results show that the speech language model based on the continuous speech tokenizer has better continuity and higher estimated Mean Opinion Scores (MoS). This enhancement is attributed to better information preservation rate of the continuous speech tokenizer across both low and high frequencies in the frequency domain. The code and resources for Cont-SPT can be found in https://github.com/Yixing-Li/Continuous-Speech-Tokenizer
Data-driven Coreference-based Ontology Building
Authors: Shir Ashury-Tahan, Amir David Nissan Cohen, Nadav Cohen, yoram louzoun, Yoav Goldberg
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, document understanding

While coreference resolution is traditionally used as a component in individual document understanding, in this work we take a more global view and explore what can we learn about a domain from the set of all document-level coreference relations that are present in a large corpus. We derive coreference chains from a corpus of 30 million biomedical abstracts and construct a graph based on the string phrases within these chains, establishing connections between phrases if they co-occur within the same coreference chain. We then use the graph structure and the betweeness centrality measure to distinguish between edges denoting hierarchy, identity and noise, assign directionality to edges denoting hierarchy, and split nodes (strings) that correspond to multiple distinct concepts. The result is a rich, data-driven ontology over concepts in the biomedical domain, parts of which overlaps significantly with human-authored ontologies. We release the coreference chains and resulting ontology under a creative-commons license, along with the code.
Arabic Dataset for LLM Safeguard Evaluation
Authors: Yasser Ashraf, Yuxia Wang, Bin Gu, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

The growing use of large language models (LLMs) has raised concerns regarding their safety. While many studies have focused on English, the safety of LLMs in Arabic, with its linguistic and cultural complexities, remains under-explored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present an Arab-region-specific safety evaluation dataset consisting of 5,799 questions, including direct attacks, indirect attacks, and harmless requests with sensitive words, adapted to reflect the socio-cultural context of the Arab world. To uncover the impact of different stances in handling sensitive and controversial topics, we propose a dual-perspective evaluation framework. It assesses the LLM responses from both governmental and opposition viewpoints. Experiments over five leading Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs reveal substantial disparities in their safety performance. This reinforces the need for culturally specific datasets to ensure the responsible deployment of LLMs.
DIRI: Adversarial Patient Reidentification with Large Language Models for Evaluating Clinical Text Anonymization
Authors: John X. Morris, Thomas R. Campion, Sri Laasya Nutheti, Yifan Peng, Akhil Raj, Ramin Zabih, Curtis L. Cole
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: De-identification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Anonymization

Sharing protected health information (PHI) is critical for furthering biomedical research. Before data can be distributed, practitioners often perform deidentification to remove any PHI contained in the text. Contemporary deidentification methods are evaluated on highly saturated datasets (tools achieve near-perfect accuracy) which may not reflect the full variability or complexity of real-world clinical text and annotating them is resource intensive, which is a barrier to real-world applications. To address this gap, we developed an adversarial approach using a large language model (LLM) to re-identify the patient corresponding to a redacted clinical note and evaluated the performance with a novel De-Identification/Re-Identification (DIRI) method. Our method uses a large language model to reidentify the patient corresponding to a redacted clinical note. We demonstrate our method on medical data from Weill Cornell Medicine anonymized with three deidentification tools: rule-based Philter and two deep-learning-based models, BiLSTM-CRF and ClinicalBERT. Although ClinicalBERT was the most effective, masking all identified PII, our tool still reidentified 9% of clinical notes Our study highlights significant weaknesses in current deidentification technologies while providing a tool for iterative development and improvement.
SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine
Authors: Xiaochen Wang, Junqing He, Liang Chen, Reza Haf Zhe Yang, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Kunhao Pan, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Multi-hop Question Answering, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering

Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs' performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.
Exploring Forgetting in Large Language Model Pre-Training
Authors: Chonghua Liao, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Haowen Sun, Zhanhui Kang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

Catastrophic forgetting remains a formidable obstacle to building an omniscient model in large language models (LLMs). Despite the pioneering research on task-level forgetting in LLM fine-tuning, there is scant focus on forgetting during pre-training. We systematically explored the existence and measurement of forgetting in pre-training, questioning traditional metrics such as perplexity (PPL) and introducing new metrics to better detect entity memory retention. Based on our revised assessment of forgetting metrics, we explored low-cost, straightforward methods to mitigate forgetting during the pre-training phase. Further, we carefully analyzed the learning curves, offering insights into the dynamics of forgetting. Extensive evaluations and analyses on forgetting of pre-training could facilitate future research on LLMs.
IPL: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Intelligent Product Listing
Authors: Kang Chen, Qingheng Zhang, Chengbao Lian, Yixin Ji, Xuwei Liu, Shuguang Han, Guoqiang Wu, Fei Huang, Jufeng Chen
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms (e.g., Facebook marketplace) are mainly targeting individual sellers who usually lack sufficient experience in e-commerce. Individual sellers often struggle to compose proper descriptions for selling products. With the recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we attempt to integrate such state-of-the-art generative AI technologies into the product listing process. To this end, we develop IPL, an Intelligent Product Listing tool tailored to generate descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc. IPL enables users to compose product descriptions by merely uploading photos of the selling product. More importantly, it can imitate the content style of our C2C platform Xianyu. This is achieved by employing domain-specific instruction tuning on MLLMs and adopting the multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process. A comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that the underlying model of IPL significantly outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination. IPL has been successfully deployed in our production system, where 72% of users have their published product listings based on the generated content, and those product listings are shown to have a quality score 5.6% higher than those without AI assistance.
Tracing the Development of the Virtual Particle Concept Using Semantic Change Detection
Authors: Michael Zichert, Adrian Wüthrich
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Dependency Parsing, Philosophy, Word Embeddings

Virtual particles are peculiar objects. They figure prominently in much of theoretical and experimental research in elementary particle physics. But exactly what they are is far from obvious. In particular, to what extent they should be considered "real" remains a matter of controversy in philosophy of science. Also their origin and development has only recently come into focus of scholarship in the history of science. In this study, we propose using the intriguing case of virtual particles to discuss the efficacy of Semantic Change Detection (SCD) based on contextualized word embeddings from a domain-adapted BERT model in studying specific scientific concepts. We find that the SCD metrics align well with qualitative research insights in the history and philosophy of science, as well as with the results obtained from Dependency Parsing to determine the frequency and connotations of the term "virtual." Still, the metrics of SCD provide additional insights over and above the qualitative research and the Dependency Parsing. Among other things, the metrics suggest that the concept of the virtual particle became more stable after 1950 but at the same time also more polysemous.
ETHIC: Evaluating Large Language Models on Long-Context Tasks with High Information Coverage
Authors: Taewhoo Lee, Chanwoong Yoon, Kyochul Jang, Donghyeon Lee, Minju Song, Hyunjae Kim, Jaewoo Kang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Recent advancements in large language models (LLM) capable of processing extremely long texts highlight the need for a dedicated evaluation benchmark to assess their long-context capabilities. However, existing methods, like the needle-in-a-haystack test, do not effectively assess whether these models fully utilize contextual information, raising concerns about the reliability of current evaluation techniques. To thoroughly examine the effectiveness of existing benchmarks, we introduce a new metric called information coverage (IC), which quantifies the proportion of the input context necessary for answering queries. Our findings indicate that current benchmarks exhibit low IC; although the input context may be extensive, the actual usable context is often limited. To address this, we present ETHIC, a novel benchmark designed to assess LLMs' ability to leverage the entire context. Our benchmark comprises 2,648 test instances spanning four long-context tasks with high IC scores in the domains of books, debates, medicine, and law. Our evaluations reveal significant performance drops in contemporary LLMs, highlighting a critical challenge in managing long contexts. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/dmis-lab/ETHIC.
Trustworthy Alignment of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zongmeng Zhang, Yufeng Shi, Jinhua Zhu, Wengang Zhou, Xiang Qi, Peng Zhang, Houqiang Li
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Trustworthiness is an essential prerequisite for the real-world application of large language models. In this paper, we focus on the trustworthiness of language models with respect to retrieval augmentation. Despite being supported with external evidence, retrieval-augmented generation still suffers from hallucinations, one primary cause of which is the conflict between contextual and parametric knowledge. We deem that retrieval-augmented language models have the inherent capabilities of supplying response according to both contextual and parametric knowledge. Inspired by aligning language models with human preference, we take the first step towards aligning retrieval-augmented language models to a status where it responds relying merely on the external evidence and disregards the interference of parametric knowledge. Specifically, we propose a reinforcement learning based algorithm Trustworthy-Alignment, theoretically and experimentally demonstrating large language models' capability of reaching a trustworthy status without explicit supervision on how to respond. Our work highlights the potential of large language models on exploring its intrinsic abilities by its own and expands the application scenarios of alignment from fulfilling human preference to creating trustworthy agents.
Analyzing and Evaluating Correlation Measures in NLG Meta-Evaluation
Authors: Mingqi Gao, Xinyu Hu, Li Lin, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: nlg evaluation

The correlation between NLG automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation is often regarded as a critical criterion for assessing the capability of an evaluation metric. However, different grouping methods and correlation coefficients result in various types of correlation measures used in meta-evaluation. In specific evaluation scenarios, prior work often directly follows conventional measure settings, but the characteristics and differences between these measures have not gotten sufficient attention. Therefore, this paper analyzes 12 common correlation measures using a large amount of real-world data from six widely-used NLG evaluation datasets and 32 evaluation metrics, revealing that different measures indeed impact the meta-evaluation results. Furthermore, we propose three perspectives that reflect the capability of meta-evaluation: discriminative power, ranking consistency, and sensitivity to score granularity. We find that the measure using global grouping and Pearson correlation coefficient exhibits the best performance in both discriminative power and ranking consistency. Besides, the measures using system-level grouping or Kendall correlation are the least sensitive to score granularity.
Optimizing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Tackling Arranging Bottleneck via Plan Augmentation
Authors: Yuli Qiu, Jiashu Yao, Heyan Huang, Yuhang Guo
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Math

Multi-step reasoning ability of large language models is crucial in tasks such as math and tool utilization. Current researches predominantly focus on enhancing model performance in these multi-step reasoning tasks through fine-tuning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) steps, yet these methods tend to be heuristic, without exploring nor resolving the bottleneck. In this study, we subdivide CoT reasoning into two parts: arranging and executing, and identify that the bottleneck of models mainly lies in arranging rather than executing. Based on this finding, we propose a plan-based training and reasoning method that guides models to generate arranging steps through abstract plans. We experiment on both math (GSM8k) and tool utilization (ToolBench) benchmarks. Results show that compared to fine-tuning directly with CoT data, our approach achieves a better performance on alleviating arranging bottleneck, particularly excelling in long-distance reasoning generalization.
Context-Aware LLM Translation System Using Conversation Summarization and Dialogue History
Authors: Mingi Sung, Seungmin Lee, Jiwon Kim, Sejoon Kim
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversation Summarization, Translation

Translating conversational text, particularly in customer support contexts, presents unique challenges due to its informal and unstructured nature. We propose a context-aware LLM translation system that leverages conversation summarization and dialogue history to enhance translation quality for the English-Korean language pair. Our approach incorporates the two most recent dialogues as raw data and a summary of earlier conversations to manage context length effectively. We demonstrate that this method significantly improves translation accuracy, maintaining coherence and consistency across conversations. This system offers a practical solution for customer support translation tasks, addressing the complexities of conversational text.
Forewarned is Forearmed: Leveraging LLMs for Data Synthesis through Failure-Inducing Exploration
Authors: Qintong Li, Jiahui Gao, Sheng Wang, Renjie Pi, Xueliang Zhao, Chuan Wu, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Lingpeng Kong
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly benefited from training on diverse, high-quality task-specific data, leading to impressive performance across a range of downstream applications. Current methods often rely on human-annotated data or predefined task templates to direct powerful LLMs in synthesizing task-relevant data for effective model training. However, this dependence on manually designed components may constrain the scope of generated data, potentially overlooking critical edge cases or novel scenarios that could challenge the model. In this paper, we present a novel approach, ReverseGen, designed to automatically generate effective training samples that expose the weaknesses of LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a dedicated proposer trained to produce queries that lead target models to generate unsatisfactory responses. These failure-inducing queries are then used to construct training data, helping to address the models' shortcomings and improve overall performance. Our approach is flexible and can be applied to models of various scales (3B, 7B, and 8B). We evaluate ReverseGen on three key applications (safety, honesty, and math), demonstrating that our generated data is both highly effective and diverse. Models fine-tuned with ReverseGen-generated data consistently outperform those trained on human-annotated or general model-generated data, offering a new perspective on data synthesis for task-specific LLM enhancement.