pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Model Editing as a Robust and Denoised variant of DPO: A Case Study on Toxicity
Authors: Rheeya Uppaal, Apratim Dey, Yiting He, Yiqiao Zhong, Junjie Hu
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Model Editing

Recent alignment algorithms such as direct preference optimization (DPO) have been developed to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) by training these models to match human behaviors exemplified by preference data. However, these methods are both computationally intensive and lacking in controllability and transparency, inhibiting their widespread use. Furthermore, these tuning-based methods require large-scale preference data for training and are susceptible to noisy preference data. In this paper, we introduce a tuning-free alignment alternative, ProFS (Projection Filter for Subspaces), and demonstrate its effectiveness under the use case of toxicity reduction. Grounded on theory from factor analysis, ProFS is a sample-efficient model editing approach that identifies a toxic subspace in the model parameter space and reduces model toxicity by projecting away the detected subspace. The toxic subspace is identified by extracting preference data embeddings from the language model, and removing non-toxic information from these embeddings. We show that ProFS is more sample-efficient than DPO, further showcasing greater robustness to noisy data. Finally, we attempt to connect tuning based alignment with editing, by establishing both theoretical and empirical connections between ProFS and DPO, showing that ProFS can be interpreted as a denoised version of a single DPO step.
Why Not Transform Chat Large Language Models to Non-English?
Authors: Xiang Geng, Ming Zhu, Jiahuan Li, Zhejian Lai, Wei Zou, Shuaijie She, Jiaxin Guo, Xiaofeng Zhao, Yinglu Li, Yuang Li, Chang Su, Yanqing Zhao, Xinglin Lyu, Min Zhang, Jiajun Chen, Hao Yang, ShuJian Huang
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

The scarcity of non-English data limits the development of non-English large language models (LLMs). Transforming English-centric LLMs to non-English has been identified as an effective and resource-efficient method. Previous works start from base LLMs and perform knowledge distillation (KD) with data generated by stronger LLMs, e.g. GPT-4. Compared to base LLMs, chat LLMs are further optimized for advanced abilities, e.g. multi-turn conversation and human preference alignment, and thus more powerful in both helpfulness and safety. However, transforming a chat LLM involves two critical issues: (1) How can we effectively transfer advanced abilities without their supervised data? (2) How can we prevent the original knowledge from catastrophic forgetting during transformation? We target these issues by introducing a simple framework called TransLLM. For the first issue, TransLLM divides the transfer problem into some common sub-tasks with the translation chain-of-thought, which uses the translation as the bridge between English and non-English step-by-step. We further enhance the performance of sub-tasks with publicly available data. For the second issue, we propose a method comprising two synergistic components: low-rank adaptation for training to maintain the original LLM parameters, and recovery KD, which utilizes data generated by the chat LLM itself to recover the original knowledge from the frozen parameters. In the experiments, we transform the LLaMA-2-chat-7B to the Thai language. Our method, using only single-turn data, outperforms strong baselines and ChatGPT on multi-turn benchmark MT-bench. Furthermore, our method, without safety data, rejects more harmful queries of safety benchmark AdvBench than both ChatGPT and GPT-4.
Towards Comprehensive Post Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Safety Patching
Authors: Weixiang Zhao, Yulin Hu, Zhuojun Li, Yang Deng, Jiahe Guo, Xingyu Sui, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua, Ting Liu
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) has been gaining increasing attention. However, current safety-aligned LLMs suffer from the fragile and imbalanced safety mechanisms, which can still be induced to generate unsafe responses, exhibit over-safety by rejecting safe user inputs, and fail to preserve general utility after safety alignment. To this end, we propose a novel post safety alignment (PSA) method to address these inherent and emerging safety challenges, including safety enhancement, over-safety mitigation, and utility preservation. In specific, we introduce \textsc{SafePatching}, a novel framework for comprehensive PSA, where two distinct safety patches are developed on the harmful data to enhance safety and mitigate over-safety concerns, and then seamlessly integrated into the target LLM backbone without compromising its utility. Extensive experiments on four representative aligned LLMs, including LLaMA-2/3, Gemma and Mistral, show that \textsc{SafePatching} achieves a more comprehensive PSA than baseline methods, further optimizing the balance between being helpful and harmless in current aligned LLMs. Also, \textsc{SafePatching} demonstrates its superiority in continual PSA scenarios.
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners
Authors: Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, ShuJian Huang
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities. While most of the existing LLMs have very unbalanced performance across different languages, multilingual alignment based on translation parallel data is an effective method to enhance the LLMs' multilingual capabilities. In this work, we discover and comprehensively investigate the spontaneous multilingual alignment improvement of LLMs. We find that LLMs instruction-tuned on the question translation data (i.e. without annotated answers) are able to encourage the alignment between English and a wide range of languages, even including those unseen during instruction-tuning. Additionally, we utilize different settings and mechanistic interpretability methods to analyze the LLM's performance in the multilingual scenario comprehensively. Our work suggests that LLMs have enormous potential for improving multilingual alignment efficiently with great language and task generalization.
"I Like Sunnie More Than I Expected!": Exploring User Expectation and Perception of an Anthropomorphic LLM-based Conversational Agent for Well-Being Support
Authors: Siyi Wu, Julie Y. A. Cachia, Feixue Han, Bingsheng Yao, Tianyi Xie, Xuan Zhao, Dakuo Wang
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

The human-computer interaction (HCI) research community has a longstanding interest in exploring the mismatch between users' actual experiences and expectation toward new technologies, for instance, large language models (LLMs). In this study, we compared users' (N = 38) initial expectations against their post-interaction perceptions of two LLM-powered mental well-being intervention activity recommendation systems. Both systems have a built-in LLM to recommend a personalized well-being intervention activity, but one system (Sunnie) has an anthropomorphic conversational interaction design via elements such as appearance, persona, and natural conversation. Results showed that user engagement was high with both systems, and both systems exceeded users' expectations along the utility dimension, highlighting AI's potential to offer useful intervention activity recommendations. In addition, Sunnie further outperformed the non-anthropomorphic baseline system in relational warmth. These findings suggest that anthropomorphic conversational interaction design may be particularly effective in fostering warmth in mental health support contexts.
Do Language Models Enjoy Their Own Stories? Prompting Large Language Models for Automatic Story Evaluation
Authors: Cyril Chhun, Fabian M. Suchanek, Chloé Clavel
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00

Storytelling is an integral part of human experience and plays a crucial role in social interactions. Thus, Automatic Story Evaluation (ASE) and Generation (ASG) could benefit society in multiple ways, but they are challenging tasks which require high-level human abilities such as creativity, reasoning and deep understanding. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLM) now achieve state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks. In this paper, we study whether LLMs can be used as substitutes for human annotators for ASE. We perform an extensive analysis of the correlations between LLM ratings, other automatic measures, and human annotations, and we explore the influence of prompting on the results and the explainability of LLM behaviour. Most notably, we find that LLMs outperform current automatic measures for system-level evaluation but still struggle at providing satisfactory explanations for their answers.
Grounding Toxicity in Real-World Events across Languages
Authors: Wondimagegnhue Tsegaye Tufa, Ilia Markov, Piek Vossen
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00

Social media conversations frequently suffer from toxicity, creating significant issues for users, moderators, and entire communities. Events in the real world, like elections or conflicts, can initiate and escalate toxic behavior online. Our study investigates how real-world events influence the origin and spread of toxicity in online discussions across various languages and regions. We gathered Reddit data comprising 4.5 million comments from 31 thousand posts in six different languages (Dutch, English, German, Arabic, Turkish and Spanish). We target fifteen major social and political world events that occurred between 2020 and 2023. We observe significant variations in toxicity, negative sentiment, and emotion expressions across different events and language communities, showing that toxicity is a complex phenomenon in which many different factors interact and still need to be investigated. We will release the data for further research along with our code.
CrossCheckGPT: Universal Hallucination Ranking for Multimodal Foundation Models
Authors: Guangzhi Sun, Potsawee Manakul, Adian Liusie, Kunat Pipatanakul, Chao Zhang, Phil Woodland, Mark Gales
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Hallucination, Image Captioning, Question Answering

Multimodal foundation models are prone to hallucination, generating outputs that either contradict the input or are not grounded by factual information. Given the diversity in architectures, training data and instruction tuning techniques, there can be large variations in systems' susceptibility to hallucinations. To assess system hallucination robustness, hallucination ranking approaches have been developed for specific tasks such as image captioning, question answering, summarization, or biography generation. However, these approaches typically compare model outputs to gold-standard references or labels, limiting hallucination benchmarking for new domains. This work proposes "CrossCheckGPT", a reference-free universal hallucination ranking for multimodal foundation models. The core idea of CrossCheckGPT is that the same hallucinated content is unlikely to be generated by different independent systems, hence cross-system consistency can provide meaningful and accurate hallucination assessment scores. CrossCheckGPT can be applied to any model or task, provided that the information consistency between outputs can be measured through an appropriate distance metric. Focusing on multimodal large language models that generate text, we explore two information consistency measures: CrossCheck-explicit and CrossCheck-implicit. We showcase the applicability of our method for hallucination ranking across various modalities, namely the text, image, and audio-visual domains. Further, we propose the first audio-visual hallucination benchmark, "AVHalluBench", and illustrate the effectiveness of CrossCheckGPT, achieving correlations of 98% and 89% with human judgements on MHaluBench and AVHalluBench, respectively.
Automated Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Task-Specific Exam Generation
Authors: Gauthier Guinet, Behrooz Omidvar-Tehrani, Anoop Deoras, Laurent Callot
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multiple-choice, Open-Ended Question Answering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval

We propose a new method to measure the task-specific accuracy of Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RAG). Evaluation is performed by scoring the RAG on an automatically-generated synthetic exam composed of multiple choice questions based on the corpus of documents associated with the task. Our method is an automated, cost-efficient, interpretable, and robust strategy to select the optimal components for a RAG system. We leverage Item Response Theory (IRT) to estimate the quality of an exam and its informativeness on task-specific accuracy. IRT also provides a natural way to iteratively improve the exam by eliminating the exam questions that are not sufficiently informative about a model's ability. We demonstrate our approach on four new open-ended Question-Answering tasks based on Arxiv abstracts, StackExchange questions, AWS DevOps troubleshooting guides, and SEC filings. In addition, our experiments reveal more general insights into factors impacting RAG performance like size, retrieval mechanism, prompting and fine-tuning. Most notably, our findings show that choosing the right retrieval algorithms often leads to bigger performance gains than simply using a larger language model.
ConTrans: Weak-to-Strong Alignment Engineering via Concept Transplantation
Authors: Weilong Dong, Xinwei Wu, Renren Jin, Shaoyang Xu, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00

Ensuring large language models (LLM) behave consistently with human goals, values, and intentions is crucial for their safety but yet computationally expensive. To reduce the computational cost of alignment training of LLMs, especially for those with a huge number of parameters, and to reutilize learned value alignment, we propose ConTrans, a novel framework that enables weak-to-strong alignment transfer via concept transplantation. From the perspective of representation engineering, ConTrans refines concept vectors in value alignment from a source LLM (usually a weak yet aligned LLM). The refined concept vectors are then reformulated to adapt to the target LLM (usually a strong yet unaligned base LLM) via affine transformation. In the third step, ConTrans transplants the reformulated concept vectors into the residual stream of the target LLM. Experiments demonstrate the successful transplantation of a wide range of aligned concepts from 7B models to 13B and 70B models across multiple LLMs and LLM families. Remarkably, ConTrans even surpasses instruction-tuned models in terms of truthfulness. Experiment results validate the effectiveness of both inter-LLM-family and intra-LLM-family concept transplantation. Our work successfully demonstrates an alternative way to achieve weak-to-strong alignment generalization and control.
FlashRAG: A Modular Toolkit for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Research
Authors: Jiajie Jin, Yutao Zhu, Guanting Dong, Yuyao Zhang, Xinyu Yang, Chenghao Zhang, Tong Zhao, Zhao Yang, Zhicheng Dou, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

With the advent of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has attracted considerable research attention. Various novel algorithms and models have been introduced to enhance different aspects of RAG systems. However, the absence of a standardized framework for implementation, coupled with the inherently complex RAG process, makes it challenging and time-consuming for researchers to compare and evaluate these approaches in a consistent environment. Existing RAG toolkits, such as LangChain and LlamaIndex, while available, are often heavy and inflexibly, failing to meet the customization needs of researchers. In response to this challenge, we develop \ours{}, an efficient and modular open-source toolkit designed to assist researchers in reproducing and comparing existing RAG methods and developing their own algorithms within a unified framework. Our toolkit has implemented 16 advanced RAG methods and gathered and organized 38 benchmark datasets. It has various features, including a customizable modular framework, multimodal RAG capabilities, a rich collection of pre-implemented RAG works, comprehensive datasets, efficient auxiliary pre-processing scripts, and extensive and standard evaluation metrics. Our toolkit and resources are available at https://github.com/RUC-NLPIR/FlashRAG.
ECLIPSE: Semantic Entropy-LCS for Cross-Lingual Industrial Log Parsing
Authors: Wei zhang, Xianfu Cheng, Yi Zhang, Jian Yang, Hongcheng Guo, Zhoujun Li, Xiaolin Yin, Xiangyuan Guan, Xu Shi, Liangfan Zheng, Bo Zhang
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Log Parsing, Template Matching

Log parsing, a vital task for interpreting the vast and complex data produced within software architectures faces significant challenges in the transition from academic benchmarks to the industrial domain. Existing log parsers, while highly effective on standardized public datasets, struggle to maintain performance and efficiency when confronted with the sheer scale and diversity of real-world industrial logs. These challenges are two-fold: 1) massive log templates: The performance and efficiency of most existing parsers will be significantly reduced when logs of growing quantities and different lengths; 2) Complex and changeable semantics: Traditional template-matching algorithms cannot accurately match the log templates of complicated industrial logs because they cannot utilize cross-language logs with similar semantics. To address these issues, we propose ECLIPSE, Enhanced Cross-Lingual Industrial log Parsing with Semantic Entropy-LCS, since cross-language logs can robustly parse industrial logs. On the one hand, it integrates two efficient data-driven template-matching algorithms and Faiss indexing. On the other hand, driven by the powerful semantic understanding ability of the Large Language Model (LLM), the semantics of log keywords were accurately extracted, and the retrieval space was effectively reduced. Notably, we launch a Chinese and English cross-platform industrial log parsing benchmark ECLIPSE- BENCH to evaluate the performance of mainstream parsers in industrial scenarios. Our experimental results across public benchmarks and ECLIPSE- BENCH underscore the superior performance and robustness of our proposed ECLIPSE. Notably, ECLIPSE both delivers state-of-the-art performance when compared to strong baselines and preserves a significant edge in processing efficiency.
Knowledge-Driven Cross-Document Relation Extraction
Authors: Monika Jain, Raghava Mutharaju, Kuldeep Singh, Ramakanth Kavuluru
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Relation extraction (RE) is a well-known NLP application often treated as a sentence- or document-level task. However, a handful of recent efforts explore it across documents or in the cross-document setting (CrossDocRE). This is distinct from the single document case because different documents often focus on disparate themes, while text within a document tends to have a single goal. Linking findings from disparate documents to identify new relationships is at the core of the popular literature-based knowledge discovery paradigm in biomedicine and other domains. Current CrossDocRE efforts do not consider domain knowledge, which are often assumed to be known to the reader when documents are authored. Here, we propose a novel approach, KXDocRE, that embed domain knowledge of entities with input text for cross-document RE. Our proposed framework has three main benefits over baselines: 1) it incorporates domain knowledge of entities along with documents' text; 2) it offers interpretability by producing explanatory text for predicted relations between entities 3) it improves performance over the prior methods.
The correlation between nativelike selection and prototypicality: a multilingual onomasiological case study using semantic embedding
Authors: Huasheng Zhang
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00

In native speakers' lexical choices, a concept can be more readily expressed by one expression over another grammatical one, a phenomenon known as nativelike selection (NLS). In previous research, arbitrary chunks such as collocations have been considered crucial for this phenomenon. However, this study examines the possibility of analyzing the semantic motivation and deducibility behind some NLSs by exploring the correlation between NLS and prototypicality, specifically the onomasiological hypothesis of Grondelaers and Geeraerts (2003, Towards a pragmatic model of cognitive onomasiology. In Hubert Cuyckens, Ren\'e Dirven & John R. Taylor (eds.), Cognitive approaches to lexical semantics, 67-92. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). They hypothesized that "[a] referent is more readily named by a lexical item if it is a salient member of the category denoted by that item". To provide a preliminary investigation of this important but rarely explored phenomenon, a series of innovative methods and procedures, including the use of semantic embedding and interlingual comparisons, is designed. Specifically, potential NLSs are efficiently discovered through an automatic exploratory analysis using topic modeling techniques, and then confirmed by manual inspection through frame semantics. Finally, to account for the NLS in question, cluster analysis and behavioral profile analysis are conducted to uncover a language-specific prototype for the Chinese verb shang 'harm', providing supporting evidence for the correlation between NLS and prototypicality.
WaterPool: A Watermark Mitigating Trade-offs among Imperceptibility, Efficacy and Robustness
Authors: Baizhou Huang, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2024-05-22 00:00:00

With the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) in daily life, concerns have emerged regarding their potential misuse and societal impact. Watermarking is proposed to trace the usage of specific models by injecting patterns into their generated texts. An ideal watermark should produce outputs that are nearly indistinguishable from those of the original LLM (imperceptibility), while ensuring a high detection rate (efficacy), even when the text is partially altered (robustness). Despite many methods having been proposed, none have simultaneously achieved all three properties, revealing an inherent trade-off. This paper utilizes a key-centered scheme to unify existing watermarking techniques by decomposing a watermark into two distinct modules: a key module and a mark module. Through this decomposition, we demonstrate for the first time that the key module significantly contributes to the trade-off issues observed in prior methods. Specifically, this reflects the conflict between the scale of the key sampling space during generation and the complexity of key restoration during detection. To this end, we introduce \textbf{WaterPool}, a simple yet effective key module that preserves a complete key sampling space required by imperceptibility while utilizing semantics-based search to improve the key restoration process. WaterPool can integrate with most watermarks, acting as a plug-in. Our experiments with three well-known watermarking techniques show that WaterPool significantly enhances their performance, achieving near-optimal imperceptibility and markedly improving efficacy and robustness (+12.73\% for KGW, +20.27\% for EXP, +7.27\% for ITS).