pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AVSS: Layer Importance Evaluation in Large Language Models via Activation Variance-Sparsity Analysis
Authors: Zichen Song, Yuxin Wu, Sitan Huang, Zhongfeng Kang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Model Optimization, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

The evaluation of layer importance in deep learning has been an active area of research, with significant implications for model optimization and interpretability. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence across various domains, yet limited studies have explored the functional importance and performance contributions of individual layers within LLMs, especially from the perspective of activation distribution. In this work, we propose the Activation Variance-Sparsity Score (AVSS), a novel metric combining normalized activation variance and sparsity to assess each layer's contribution to model performance. By identifying and removing approximately the lowest 25% of layers based on AVSS, we achieve over 90% of original model performance across tasks such as question answering, language modeling, and sentiment classification, indicating that these layers may be non-essential. Our approach provides a systematic method for identifying less critical layers, contributing to efficient large language model architectures.
Can Language Models Learn to Skip Steps?
Authors: Tengxiao Liu, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Cheng Jiayang, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Trained on vast corpora of human language, language models demonstrate emergent human-like reasoning abilities. Yet they are still far from true intelligence, which opens up intriguing opportunities to explore the parallels of humans and model behaviors. In this work, we study the ability to skip steps in reasoning - a hallmark of human expertise developed through practice. Unlike humans, who may skip steps to enhance efficiency or to reduce cognitive load, models do not inherently possess such motivations to minimize reasoning steps. To address this, we introduce a controlled framework that stimulates step-skipping behavior by iteratively refining models to generate shorter and accurate reasoning paths. Empirical results indicate that models can develop the step skipping ability under our guidance. Moreover, after fine-tuning on expanded datasets that include both complete and skipped reasoning sequences, the models can not only resolve tasks with increased efficiency without sacrificing accuracy, but also exhibit comparable and even enhanced generalization capabilities in out-of-domain scenarios. Our work presents the first exploration into human-like step-skipping ability and provides fresh perspectives on how such cognitive abilities can benefit AI models.
TriG-NER: Triplet-Grid Framework for Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Rina Carines Cabral, Soyeon Caren Han, Areej Alhassan, Riza Batista-Navarro, Goran Nenadic, Josiah Poon
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER, Triplet

Discontinuous Named Entity Recognition (DNER) presents a challenging problem where entities may be scattered across multiple non-adjacent tokens, making traditional sequence labelling approaches inadequate. Existing methods predominantly rely on custom tagging schemes to handle these discontinuous entities, resulting in models tightly coupled to specific tagging strategies and lacking generalisability across diverse datasets. To address these challenges, we propose TriG-NER, a novel Triplet-Grid Framework that introduces a generalisable approach to learning robust token-level representations for discontinuous entity extraction. Our framework applies triplet loss at the token level, where similarity is defined by word pairs existing within the same entity, effectively pulling together similar and pushing apart dissimilar ones. This approach enhances entity boundary detection and reduces the dependency on specific tagging schemes by focusing on word-pair relationships within a flexible grid structure. We evaluate TriG-NER on three benchmark DNER datasets and demonstrate significant improvements over existing grid-based architectures. These results underscore our framework's effectiveness in capturing complex entity structures and its adaptability to various tagging schemes, setting a new benchmark for discontinuous entity extraction.
Align-SLM: Textless Spoken Language Models with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
Authors: Guan-Ting Lin, Prashanth Gurunath Shivakumar, Aditya Gourav, Yile Gu, Ankur Gandhe, Hung-Yi Lee, Ivan Bulyko
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

While textless Spoken Language Models (SLMs) have shown potential in end-to-end speech-to-speech modeling, they still lag behind text-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of semantic coherence and relevance. This work introduces the Align-SLM framework, which leverages preference optimization inspired by Reinforcement Learning with AI Feedback (RLAIF) to enhance the semantic understanding of SLMs. Our approach generates multiple speech continuations from a given prompt and uses semantic metrics to create preference data for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We evaluate the framework using ZeroSpeech 2021 benchmarks for lexical and syntactic modeling, the spoken version of the StoryCloze dataset for semantic coherence, and other speech generation metrics, including the GPT4-o score and human evaluation. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for SLMs on most benchmarks, highlighting the importance of preference optimization to improve the semantics of SLMs.
Towards Pedagogical LLMs with Supervised Fine Tuning for Computing Education
Authors: Alexandra Vassar, Jake Renzella, Emily Ross, Andrew Taylor
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

This paper investigates supervised fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) to improve their pedagogical alignment in computing education, addressing concerns that LLMs may hinder learning outcomes. The project utilised a proprietary dataset of 2,500 high quality question/answer pairs from programming course forums, and explores two research questions: the suitability of university course forums in contributing to fine-tuning datasets, and how supervised fine-tuning can improve LLMs' alignment with educational principles such as constructivism. Initial findings suggest benefits in pedagogical alignment of LLMs, with deeper evaluations required.
DynaSaur: Large Language Agents Beyond Predefined Actions
Authors: Dang Nguyen, Viet Dac Lai, Seunghyun Yoon, Ryan A. Rossi, Handong Zhao, Ruiyi Zhang, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka, Yu Wang, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Existing LLM agent systems typically select actions from a fixed and predefined set at every step. While this approach is effective in closed, narrowly-scoped environments, we argue that it presents two major challenges when deploying LLM agents in real-world scenarios: (1) selecting from a fixed set of actions significantly restricts the planning and acting capabilities of LLM agents, and (2) this approach requires substantial human effort to enumerate and implement all possible actions, which becomes impractical in complex environments with a vast number of potential actions. In this work, we propose an LLM agent framework that enables the dynamic creation and composition of actions in an online manner. In this framework, the agent interacts with the environment by generating and executing programs written in a general-purpose programming language at each step. Furthermore, generated actions are accumulated over time for future reuse. Our extensive experiments on the GAIA benchmark demonstrate that this framework offers significantly greater flexibility and outperforms previous methods. Notably, it allows an LLM agent to recover in scenarios where no relevant action exists in the predefined set or when existing actions fail due to unforeseen edge cases. At the time of writing, we hold the top position on the GAIA public leaderboard. Our code can be found in \href{https://github.com/adobe-research/dynasaur}{https://github.com/adobe-research/dynasaur}.
SPES: Spectrogram Perturbation for Explainable Speech-to-Text Generation
Authors: Dennis Fucci, Marco Gaido, Beatrice Savoldi, Matteo Negri, Mauro Cettolo, Luisa Bentivogli
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Text Generation

Spurred by the demand for interpretable models, research on eXplainable AI for language technologies has experienced significant growth, with feature attribution methods emerging as a cornerstone of this progress. While prior work in NLP explored such methods for classification tasks and textual applications, explainability intersecting generation and speech is lagging, with existing techniques failing to account for the autoregressive nature of state-of-the-art models and to provide fine-grained, phonetically meaningful explanations. We address this gap by introducing Spectrogram Perturbation for Explainable Speech-to-text Generation (SPES), a feature attribution technique applicable to sequence generation tasks with autoregressive models. SPES provides explanations for each predicted token based on both the input spectrogram and the previously generated tokens. Extensive evaluation on speech recognition and translation demonstrates that SPES generates explanations that are faithful and plausible to humans.
Investigating Large Language Models for Complex Word Identification in Multilingual and Multidomain Setups
Authors: Răzvan-Alexandru Smădu, David-Gabriel Ion, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Florin Pop, Mihaela-Claudia Cercel
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Complex Word Identification, Lexical Complexity Prediction, Lexical Simplification, Meta-Learning, Prompt Learning

Complex Word Identification (CWI) is an essential step in the lexical simplification task and has recently become a task on its own. Some variations of this binary classification task have emerged, such as lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complexity evaluation of multi-word expressions (MWE). Large language models (LLMs) recently became popular in the Natural Language Processing community because of their versatility and capability to solve unseen tasks in zero/few-shot settings. Our work investigates LLM usage, specifically open-source models such as Llama 2, Llama 3, and Vicuna v1.5, and closed-source, such as ChatGPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o, in the CWI, LCP, and MWE settings. We evaluate zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings and show that LLMs struggle in certain conditions or achieve comparable results against existing methods. In addition, we provide some views on meta-learning combined with prompt learning. In the end, we conclude that the current state of LLMs cannot or barely outperform existing methods, which are usually much smaller.
Data Extraction Attacks in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Backdoors
Authors: Yuefeng Peng, Junda Wang, Hong Yu, Amir Houmansadr
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Despite significant advancements, large language models (LLMs) still struggle with providing accurate answers when lacking domain-specific or up-to-date knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by incorporating external knowledge bases, but it also introduces new attack surfaces. In this paper, we investigate data extraction attacks targeting RAG's knowledge databases. We show that previous prompt injection-based extraction attacks largely rely on the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs. As a result, they fail on models that are less responsive to such malicious prompts -- for example, our experiments show that state-of-the-art attacks achieve near-zero success on Gemma-2B-IT. Moreover, even for models that can follow these instructions, we found fine-tuning may significantly reduce attack performance. To further reveal the vulnerability, we propose to backdoor RAG, where a small portion of poisoned data is injected during the fine-tuning phase to create a backdoor within the LLM. When this compromised LLM is integrated into a RAG system, attackers can exploit specific triggers in prompts to manipulate the LLM to leak documents from the retrieval database. By carefully designing the poisoned data, we achieve both verbatim and paraphrased document extraction. For example, on Gemma-2B-IT, we show that with only 5\% poisoned data, our method achieves an average success rate of 94.1\% for verbatim extraction (ROUGE-L score: 82.1) and 63.6\% for paraphrased extraction (average ROUGE score: 66.4) across four datasets. These results underscore the privacy risks associated with the supply chain when deploying RAG systems.
Leveraging Microservices Architecture for Dynamic Pricing in the Travel Industry: Algorithms, Scalability, and Impact on Revenue and Customer Satisfaction
Authors: Biman Barua, M. Shamim Kaiser
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting

This research investigates the implementation of a real-time, microservices-oriented dynamic pricing system for the travel sector. The system is designed to address factors such as demand, competitor pricing, and other external circumstances in real-time. Both controlled simulation and real-life application showed a respectable gain of 22% in revenue generation and a 17% improvement in pricing response time which concern the issues of scaling and flexibility of classical pricing mechanisms. Demand forecasting, competitor pricing strategies, and event-based pricing were implemented as separate microservices to enhance their scalability and reduce resource consumption by 30% during peak loads. Customers were also more content as depicted by a 15% increase in satisfaction score post-implementation given the appreciation of more appropriate pricing. This research enhances the existing literature with practical illustrations of the possible application of microservices technology in developing dynamic pricing solutions in a complex and data-driven context. There exist however areas for improvement for instance inter-service latency and the need for extensive real-time data pipelines. The present research goes on to suggest combining these with direct data capture from customer behavior at the same time as machine learning capacity developments in pricing algorithms to assist in more accurate real time pricing. It is determined that the use of microservices is a reasonable and efficient model for dynamic pricing, allowing the tourism sector to employ evidence-based and customer centric pricing techniques, which ensures that their profits are not jeopardized because of the need for customers.
Explaining and Improving Contrastive Decoding by Extrapolating the Probabilities of a Huge and Hypothetical LM
Authors: Haw-Shiuan Chang, Nanyun Peng, Mohit Bansal, Anil Ramakrishna, Tagyoung Chung
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: LAMBADA, Text Generation

Contrastive decoding (CD) (Li et al., 2023) improves the next-token distribution of a large expert language model (LM) using a small amateur LM. Although CD is applied to various LMs and domains to enhance open-ended text generation, it is still unclear why CD often works well, when it could fail, and how we can make it better. To deepen our understanding of CD, we first theoretically prove that CD could be viewed as linearly extrapolating the next-token logits from a huge and hypothetical LM. We also highlight that the linear extrapolation could make CD unable to output the most obvious answers that have already been assigned high probabilities by the amateur LM. To overcome CD's limitation, we propose a new unsupervised decoding method called $\mathbf{A}$symptotic $\mathbf{P}$robability $\mathbf{D}$ecoding (APD). APD explicitly extrapolates the probability curves from the LMs of different sizes to infer the asymptotic probabilities from an infinitely large LM without inducing more inference costs than CD. In FactualityPrompts, an open-ended text generation benchmark, sampling using APD significantly boosts factuality in comparison to the CD sampling and its variants, and achieves state-of-the-art results for Pythia 6.9B and OPT 6.7B. Furthermore, in five commonsense QA datasets, APD is often significantly better than CD and achieves a similar effect of using a larger LLM. For example, the perplexity of APD on top of Pythia 6.9B is even lower than the perplexity of Pythia 12B in CommonsenseQA and LAMBADA.
DAG: Dictionary-Augmented Generation for Disambiguation of Sentences in Endangered Uralic Languages using ChatGPT
Authors: Mika Hämäläinen
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00

We showcase that ChatGPT can be used to disambiguate lemmas in two endangered languages ChatGPT is not proficient in, namely Erzya and Skolt Sami. We augment our prompt by providing dictionary translations of the candidate lemmas to a majority language - Finnish in our case. This dictionary augmented generation approach results in 50\% accuracy for Skolt Sami and 41\% accuracy for Erzya. On a closer inspection, many of the error types were of the kind even an untrained human annotator would make.
Integration of Large Vision Language Models for Efficient Post-disaster Damage Assessment and Reporting
Authors: Zhaohui Chen, Elyas Asadi Shamsabadi, Sheng Jiang, Luming Shen, Daniel Dias-da-Costa
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Disaster Response, Management

Traditional natural disaster response involves significant coordinated teamwork where speed and efficiency are key. Nonetheless, human limitations can delay critical actions and inadvertently increase human and economic losses. Agentic Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) offer a new avenue to address this challenge, with the potential for substantial socio-economic impact, particularly by improving resilience and resource access in underdeveloped regions. We introduce DisasTeller, the first multi-LVLM-powered framework designed to automate tasks in post-disaster management, including on-site assessment, emergency alerts, resource allocation, and recovery planning. By coordinating four specialised LVLM agents with GPT-4 as the core model, DisasTeller autonomously implements disaster response activities, reducing human execution time and optimising resource distribution. Our evaluations through both LVLMs and humans demonstrate DisasTeller's effectiveness in streamlining disaster response. This framework not only supports expert teams but also simplifies access to disaster management processes for non-experts, bridging the gap between traditional response methods and LVLM-driven efficiency.
Domain-specific Guided Summarization for Mental Health Posts
Authors: Lu Qian, Yuqi Wang, Zimu Wang, Haiyang Zhang, Wei Wang, Ting Yu, Anh Nguyen
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Decoder

In domain-specific contexts, particularly mental health, abstractive summarization requires advanced techniques adept at handling specialized content to generate domain-relevant and faithful summaries. In response to this, we introduce a guided summarizer equipped with a dual-encoder and an adapted decoder that utilizes novel domain-specific guidance signals, i.e., mental health terminologies and contextually rich sentences from the source document, to enhance its capacity to align closely with the content and context of guidance, thereby generating a domain-relevant summary. Additionally, we present a post-editing correction model to rectify errors in the generated summary, thus enhancing its consistency with the original content in detail. Evaluation on the MentSum dataset reveals that our model outperforms existing baseline models in terms of both ROUGE and FactCC scores. Although the experiments are specifically designed for mental health posts, the methodology we've developed offers broad applicability, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness in producing high-quality domain-specific summaries.
Teaching Models to Improve on Tape
Authors: Liat Bezalel, Eyal Orgad, Amir Globerson
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle when prompted to generate content under specific constraints. However, in such cases it is often easy to check whether these constraints are satisfied or violated. Recent works have shown that LLMs can benefit from such "corrective feedback". Here we claim that this skill of LLMs can be significantly enhanced via training. We introduce an RL framework for teaching models to use such rewards, by simulating interaction sessions, and rewarding the model according to its ability to satisfy the constraints. We refer to our method as CORGI (Controlled Generation with RL for Guided Interaction), and evaluate it on a variety of controlled generation tasks using unlabeled training data. We find that CORGI consistently outperforms the baseline reinforcement learning method that does not incorporate conversational feedback. Furthermore, CORGI's interactive framework enables meta-learning, allowing the LLM to generalize better to guided interaction in new tasks. Our results clearly show that conversational optimization, when combined with reinforcement learning, significantly improves the effectiveness of LLMs in controlled generation contexts.
MoCE: Adaptive Mixture of Contextualization Experts for Byte-based Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Langlin Huang, Mengyu Bu, Yang Feng
Date: 2024-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence

Byte-based machine translation systems have shown significant potential in massively multilingual settings. Unicode encoding, which maps each character to specific byte(s), eliminates the emergence of unknown words, even in new languages, enabling broad language scalability. However, byte-level tokenization results in sequences that are hard to interpret due to limited semantic information per byte. Local contextualization has proven effective in assigning initial semantics to tokens, improving sentence comprehension. Nevertheless, variations in encoding rules across languages necessitate an adaptive approach for effective contextualization. To this end, we propose Adaptive MultiScale-Headed Attention (Ada-MSHA), adaptively selecting and mixing attention heads, which are treated as contextualization experts. This enhances the flexibility of contextualization scales and improves the potential to discover a better strategy than previous methods. Experiment results show that our method outperforms existing methods without extensive manual adjustment of hyper-parameters and surpasses subword-based models with fewer parameters in Ted-59 dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/ictnlp/MoCE.