pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Novel End-To-End Event Geolocation Method Leveraging Hyperbolic Space and Toponym Hierarchies
Authors: Yaqiong Qiao, Guojun Huang
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection

Timely detection and geolocation of events based on social data can provide critical information for applications such as crisis response and resource allocation. However, most existing methods are greatly affected by event detection errors, leading to insufficient geolocation accuracy. To this end, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end event geolocation method (GTOP) leveraging Hyperbolic space and toponym hierarchies. Specifically, the proposed method contains one event detection module and one geolocation module. The event detection module constructs a heterogeneous information networks based on social data, and then constructs a homogeneous message graph and combines it with the text and time feature of the message to learning initial features of nodes. Node features are updated in Hyperbolic space and then fed into a classifier for event detection. To reduce the geolocation error, this paper proposes a noise toponym filtering algorithm (HIST) based on the hierarchical structure of toponyms. HIST analyzes the hierarchical structure of toponyms mentioned in the event cluster, taking the highly frequent city-level locations as the coarse-grained locations for events. By comparing the hierarchical structure of the toponyms within the cluster against those of the coarse-grained locations of events, HIST filters out noisy toponyms. To further improve the geolocation accuracy, we propose a fine-grained pseudo toponyms generation algorithm (FIT) based on the output of HIST, and combine generated pseudo toponyms with filtered toponyms to locate events based on the geographic center points of the combined toponyms. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Chinese dataset constructed in this paper and another public English dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art baselines.
CRENER: A Character Relation Enhanced Chinese NER Model
Authors: Yaqiong Qiao, Shixuan Peng
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Chinese Named Entity Recognition, model, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation

Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important task in information extraction, which has a significant impact on downstream applications. Due to the lack of natural separators in Chinese, previous NER methods mostly relied on external dictionaries to enrich the semantic and boundary information of Chinese words. However, such methods may introduce noise that affects the accuracy of named entity recognition. To this end, we propose a character relation enhanced Chinese NER model (CRENER). This model defines four types of tags that reflect the relationships between characters, and proposes a fine-grained modeling of the relationships between characters based on three types of relationships: adjacency relations between characters, relations between characters and tags, and relations between tags, to more accurately identify entity boundaries and improve Chinese NER accuracy. Specifically, we transform the Chinese NER task into a character-character relationship classification task, ensuring the accuracy of entity boundary recognition through joint modeling of relation tags. To enhance the model's ability to understand contextual information, WRENER further constructed an adapted transformer encoder that combines unscaled direction-aware and distance-aware masked self-attention mechanisms. Moreover, a relationship representation enhancement module was constructed to model predefined relationship tags, effectively mining the relationship representations between characters and tags. Experiments conducted on four well-known Chinese NER benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. The ablation experiment also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician
Authors: Peter G. Brodeur, Thomas A. Buckley, Zahir Kanjee, Ethan Goh, Evelyn Bin Ling, Priyank Jain, Stephanie Cabral, Raja-Elie Abdulnour, Adrian D. Haimovich, Jason A. Freed, Andrew Olson, Daniel J. Morgan, Jason Hom, Robert Gallo, Liam G. McCoy, Haadi Mombini, Christopher Lucas, Misha Fotoohi, Matthew Gwiazdon, Daniele Restifo, Daniel Restrepo, Eric Horvitz, Jonathan Chen, Arjun K. Manrai, Adam Rodman
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Management, Multiple-choice

A seminal paper published by Ledley and Lusted in 1959 introduced complex clinical diagnostic reasoning cases as the gold standard for the evaluation of expert medical computing systems, a standard that has held ever since. Here, we report the results of a physician evaluation of a large language model (LLM) on challenging clinical cases against a baseline of hundreds of physicians. We conduct five experiments to measure clinical reasoning across differential diagnosis generation, display of diagnostic reasoning, triage differential diagnosis, probabilistic reasoning, and management reasoning, all adjudicated by physician experts with validated psychometrics. We then report a real-world study comparing human expert and AI second opinions in randomly-selected patients in the emergency room of a major tertiary academic medical center in Boston, MA. We compared LLMs and board-certified physicians at three predefined diagnostic touchpoints: triage in the emergency room, initial evaluation by a physician, and admission to the hospital or intensive care unit. In all experiments--both vignettes and emergency room second opinions--the LLM displayed superhuman diagnostic and reasoning abilities, as well as continued improvement from prior generations of AI clinical decision support. Our study suggests that LLMs have achieved superhuman performance on general medical diagnostic and management reasoning, fulfilling the vision put forth by Ledley and Lusted, and motivating the urgent need for prospective trials.
Rethinking Chain-of-Thought from the Perspective of Self-Training
Authors: Zongqian Wu, Baoduo Xu, Ruochen Cui, Mengmeng Zhan, Xiaofeng Zhu, Lei Feng
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging model-generated information to progressively reduce prediction uncertainty. Building on this insight, we propose a novel CoT framework to improve reasoning performance. Our framework integrates two key components: (i) a task-specific prompt module that optimizes the initial reasoning process, and (ii) an adaptive reasoning iteration module that dynamically refines the reasoning process and addresses the limitations of previous CoT approaches, \ie over-reasoning and high similarity between consecutive reasoning iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant advantages in both performance and computational efficiency.
Are Language Models Agnostic to Linguistically Grounded Perturbations? A Case Study of Indic Languages
Authors: Poulami Ghosh, Raj Dabre, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to be susceptible to perturbations to the input text, but existing works do not explicitly focus on linguistically grounded attacks, which are subtle and more prevalent in nature. In this paper, we study whether PLMs are agnostic to linguistically grounded attacks or not. To this end, we offer the first study addressing this, investigating different Indic languages and various downstream tasks. Our findings reveal that although PLMs are susceptible to linguistic perturbations, when compared to non-linguistic attacks, PLMs exhibit a slightly lower susceptibility to linguistic attacks. This highlights that even constrained attacks are effective. Moreover, we investigate the implications of these outcomes across a range of languages, encompassing diverse language families and different scripts.
WEPO: Web Element Preference Optimization for LLM-based Web Navigation
Authors: Jiarun Liu, Jia Hao, Chunhong Zhang, Zheng Hu
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Web Navigation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The rapid advancement of autonomous web navigation has significantly benefited from grounding pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents. However, current research has yet to fully leverage the redundancy of HTML elements for contrastive training. This paper introduces a novel approach to LLM-based web navigation tasks, called Web Element Preference Optimization (WEPO). WEPO utilizes unsupervised preference learning by sampling distance-based non-salient web elements as negative samples, optimizing maximum likelihood objective within Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We evaluate WEPO on the Mind2Web benchmark and empirically demonstrate that WEPO aligns user high-level intent with output actions more effectively. The results show that our method achieved the state-of-the-art, with an improvement of 13.8% over WebAgent and 5.3% over the visual language model CogAgent baseline. Our findings underscore the potential of preference optimization to enhance web navigation and other web page based tasks, suggesting a promising direction for future research.
HITgram: A Platform for Experimenting with n-gram Language Models
Authors: Shibaranjani Dasgupta, Chandan Maity, Somdip Mukherjee, Rohan Singh, Diptendu Dutta, Debasish Jana
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful but resource intensive, limiting accessibility. HITgram addresses this gap by offering a lightweight platform for n-gram model experimentation, ideal for resource-constrained environments. It supports unigrams to 4-grams and incorporates features like context sensitive weighting, Laplace smoothing, and dynamic corpus management to e-hance prediction accuracy, even for unseen word sequences. Experiments demonstrate HITgram's efficiency, achieving 50,000 tokens/second and generating 2-grams from a 320MB corpus in 62 seconds. HITgram scales efficiently, constructing 4-grams from a 1GB file in under 298 seconds on an 8 GB RAM system. Planned enhancements include multilingual support, advanced smoothing, parallel processing, and model saving, further broadening its utility.
Towards Effective, Efficient and Unsupervised Social Event Detection in the Hyperbolic Space
Authors: Xiaoyan Yu, Yifan Wei, Shuaishuai Zhou, Zhiwei Yang, Li Sun, Hao Peng, Liehuang Zhu, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection

The vast, complex, and dynamic nature of social message data has posed challenges to social event detection (SED). Despite considerable effort, these challenges persist, often resulting in inadequately expressive message representations (ineffective) and prolonged learning durations (inefficient). In response to the challenges, this work introduces an unsupervised framework, HyperSED (Hyperbolic SED). Specifically, the proposed framework first models social messages into semantic-based message anchors, and then leverages the structure of the anchor graph and the expressiveness of the hyperbolic space to acquire structure- and geometry-aware anchor representations. Finally, HyperSED builds the partitioning tree of the anchor message graph by incorporating differentiable structural information as the reflection of the detected events. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate HyperSED's competitive performance, along with a substantial improvement in efficiency compared to the current state-of-the-art unsupervised paradigm. Statistically, HyperSED boosts incremental SED by an average of 2%, 2%, and 25% in NMI, AMI, and ARI, respectively; enhancing efficiency by up to 37.41 times and at least 12.10 times, illustrating the advancement of the proposed framework. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/XiaoyanWork/HyperSED.
Efficient Adaptation of Multilingual Models for Japanese ASR
Authors: Mark Bajo, Haruka Fukukawa, Ryuji Morita, Yuma Ogasawara
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This study explores fine-tuning multilingual ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) models, specifically OpenAI's Whisper-Tiny, to improve performance in Japanese. While multilingual models like Whisper offer versatility, they often lack precision in specific languages. Conversely, monolingual models like ReazonSpeech excel in language-specific tasks but are less adaptable. Using Japanese-specific datasets and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) along with end-to-end (E2E) training, we fine-tuned Whisper-Tiny to bridge this gap. Our results show that fine-tuning reduced Whisper-Tiny's Character Error Rate (CER) from 32.7 to 20.8 with LoRA and to 14.7 with end-to-end fine-tuning, surpassing Whisper-Base's CER of 20.2. However, challenges with domain-specific terms remain, highlighting the need for specialized datasets. These findings demonstrate that fine-tuning multilingual models can achieve strong language-specific performance while retaining their flexibility. This approach provides a scalable solution for improving ASR in resource-constrained environments and languages with complex writing systems like Japanese.
VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Franck Dernoncourt, Kanika Goswami, Ryan A. Rossi, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Understanding information from a collection of multiple documents, particularly those with visually rich elements, is important for document-grounded question answering. This paper introduces VisDoMBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate QA systems in multi-document settings with rich multimodal content, including tables, charts, and presentation slides. We propose VisDoMRAG, a novel multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach that simultaneously utilizes visual and textual RAG, combining robust visual retrieval capabilities with sophisticated linguistic reasoning. VisDoMRAG employs a multi-step reasoning process encompassing evidence curation and chain-of-thought reasoning for concurrent textual and visual RAG pipelines. A key novelty of VisDoMRAG is its consistency-constrained modality fusion mechanism, which aligns the reasoning processes across modalities at inference time to produce a coherent final answer. This leads to enhanced accuracy in scenarios where critical information is distributed across modalities and improved answer verifiability through implicit context attribution. Through extensive experiments involving open-source and proprietary large language models, we benchmark state-of-the-art document QA methods on VisDoMBench. Extensive results show that VisDoMRAG outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM baselines for end-to-end multimodal document QA by 12-20%.
Neural-Symbolic Collaborative Distillation: Advancing Small Language Models for Complex Reasoning Tasks
Authors: Huanxuan Liao, Shizhu He, Yao Xu, Yuanzhe Zhang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, GSM8K, Knowledge Distillation

In this paper, we propose $\textbf{Ne}$ural-$\textbf{Sy}$mbolic $\textbf{C}$ollaborative $\textbf{D}$istillation ($\textbf{NesyCD}$), a novel knowledge distillation method for learning the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., \textgreater 13B). We argue that complex reasoning tasks are difficult for Small Language Models (SLMs, e.g., $\leq$ 7B), as these tasks demand not only general cognitive abilities but also specialized knowledge, which is often sparse and difficult for these neural-based SLMs to effectively capture. Therefore, NesyCD distills the general capabilities and specialized knowledge in LLMs using different manners. On the one hand, we distill only general abilities from teacher LLMs into the student SLMs of parameterized neural networks. On the other hand, for the specialized abilities and uncommon knowledge of a complex reasoning task, we employ a symbolic knowledge distillation approach to obtain and store the specialized knowledge within a symbolic knowledge base (KB). By decoupling general and specialized capabilities, the proposed NesyCD can achieve superior performance cost-effectively, utilizing smaller models and blending parameterized neural networks with symbolic KB. Moreover, the specialized KB generalizes well and is comprehended and manipulated by humans. Our experiments show that NesyCD significantly boosts SLMs' complex reasoning performance on in-domain (BBH, GSM8K) and out-of-domain (AGIEval, ARC) datasets. Notably, our approach enabled the LLaMA3-8B and Qwen2-7B to surpass GPT-3.5-turbo in performance and come close to matching LLaMA3-70B, despite the latter having nine times more parameters. Our code will be available at https://github.com/Xnhyacinth/NesyCD.
Learning to Verify Summary Facts with Fine-Grained LLM Feedback
Authors: Jihwan Oh, Jeonghwan Choi, Nicole Hee-Yeon Kim, Taewon Yun, Hwanjun Song
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Verification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Training automatic summary fact verifiers often faces the challenge of a lack of human-labeled data. In this paper, we explore alternative way of leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) generated feedback to address the inherent limitation of using human-labeled data. We introduce FineSumFact, a large-scale dataset containing fine-grained factual feedback on summaries. We employ 10 distinct LLMs for diverse summary generation and Llama-3-70B-Instruct for feedback. We utilize this dataset to fine-tune the lightweight open-source model Llama-3-8B-Instruct, optimizing resource efficiency while maintaining high performance. Our experimental results reveal that the model trained on extensive LLM-generated datasets surpasses that trained on smaller human-annotated datasets when evaluated using human-generated test sets. Fine-tuning fact verification models with LLM feedback can be more effective and cost-efficient than using human feedback. The dataset is available at https://github.com/DISL-Lab/FineSumFact.
Inference Scaling for Bridging Retrieval and Augmented Generation
Authors: Youngwon Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Daniel Campos, Filip Graliński, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a popular approach to steering the output of a large language model (LLM) by incorporating retrieved contexts as inputs. However, existing work observed the generator bias, such that improving the retrieval results may negatively affect the outcome. In this work, we show such bias can be mitigated, from inference scaling, aggregating inference calls from the permuted order of retrieved contexts. The proposed Mixture-of-Intervention (MOI) explicitly models the debiased utility of each passage with multiple forward passes to construct a new ranking. We also show that MOI can leverage the retriever's prior knowledge to reduce the computational cost by minimizing the number of permutations considered and lowering the cost per LLM call. We showcase the effectiveness of MOI on diverse RAG tasks, improving ROUGE-L on MS MARCO and EM on HotpotQA benchmarks by ~7 points.
Chasing Progress, Not Perfection: Revisiting Strategies for End-to-End LLM Plan Generation
Authors: Sukai Huang, Trevor Cohn, Nir Lipovetzky
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Misconceptions

The capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to plan remains a topic of debate. Some critics argue that strategies to boost LLMs' reasoning skills are ineffective in planning tasks, while others report strong outcomes merely from training models on a planning corpus. This study reassesses recent strategies by developing an end-to-end LLM planner and employing diverse metrics for a thorough evaluation. We find that merely fine-tuning LLMs on a corpus of planning instances does not lead to robust planning skills, as indicated by poor performance on out-of-distribution test sets. At the same time, we find that various strategies, including Chain-of-Thought, do enhance the probability of a plan being executable. This indicates progress towards better plan quality, despite not directly enhancing the final validity rate. Among the strategies we evaluated, reinforcement learning with our novel `Longest Contiguous Common Subsequence' reward emerged as the most effective, contributing to both plan validity and executability. Overall, our research addresses key misconceptions in the LLM-planning literature; we validate incremental progress in plan executability, although plan validity remains a challenge. Hence, future strategies should focus on both these aspects, drawing insights from our findings.
BinarySelect to Improve Accessibility of Black-Box Attack Research
Authors: Shatarupa Ghosh, Jonathan Rusert
Date: 2024-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Text

Adversarial text attack research is useful for testing the robustness of NLP models, however, the rise of transformers has greatly increased the time required to test attacks. Especially when researchers do not have access to adequate resources (e.g. GPUs). This can hinder attack research, as modifying one example for an attack can require hundreds of queries to a model, especially for black-box attacks. Often these attacks remove one token at a time to find the ideal one to change, requiring $n$ queries (the length of the text) right away. We propose a more efficient selection method called BinarySelect which combines binary search and attack selection methods to greatly reduce the number of queries needed to find a token. We find that BinarySelect only needs $\text{log}_2(n) * 2$ queries to find the first token compared to $n$ queries. We also test BinarySelect in an attack setting against 5 classifiers across 3 datasets and find a viable tradeoff between number of queries saved and attack effectiveness. For example, on the Yelp dataset, the number of queries is reduced by 32% (72 less) with a drop in attack effectiveness of only 5 points. We believe that BinarySelect can help future researchers study adversarial attacks and black-box problems more efficiently and opens the door for researchers with access to less resources.
Evaluation of GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini's Vision Capabilities for Compositional Analysis from Dried Solution Drops
Authors: Deven B. Dangi, Beni B. Dangi, Oliver Steinbock
Date: 2024-12-13 00:00:00

When microliter drops of salt solutions dry on non-porous surfaces, they form erratic yet characteristic deposit patterns influenced by complex crystallization dynamics and fluid motion. Using OpenAI's image-enabled language models, we analyzed deposits from 12 salts with 200 images per salt and per model. GPT-4o classified 57% of the salts accurately, significantly outperforming random chance and GPT-4o mini. This study underscores the promise of general-use AI tools for reliably identifying salts from their drying patterns.