ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ProTrix: Building Models for Planning and Reasoning over Tables with Sentence Context (2024)

Tables play a crucial role in conveying information in various domains. We propose a Plan-then-Reason framework to answer different types of user queries over tables with sentence context. The framework first plans the reasoning paths over the context, then assigns each step to program-based or textual reasoning to reach the final answer. This framework enhances the table reasoning abilities for both in-context learning and fine-tuning methods. GPT-3.5-Turbo following Plan-then-Reason framework surpasses other prompting baselines without self-consistency while using less API calls and in-context demonstrations. We also construct an instruction tuning set TrixInstruct to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning with this framework. We present ProTrix model family by finetuning models on TrixInstruct. Our experiments show that ProTrix family generalizes to diverse unseen tabular tasks with only 6k training instances. We further demonstrate that ProTrix can generate accurate and faithful explanations to answer complex free-form questions. Our work underscores the importance of the planning and reasoning abilities towards a model over tabular tasks with generalizability and interpretability. We will open-source our dataset and models.
Recent Advances in Online Hate Speech Moderation: Multimodality and the Role of Large Models (2024)

Moderating hate speech (HS) in the evolving online landscape is a complex challenge, compounded by the multimodal nature of digital content. This survey examines recent advancements in HS moderation, focusing on the burgeoning role of large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) in detecting, explaining, debiasing, and countering HS. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of current literature, uncovering how text, images, and audio interact to spread HS. The combination of these modalities adds complexity and subtlety to HS dissemination. We also identified research gaps, particularly in underrepresented languages and cultures, and highlight the need for solutions in low-resource settings. The survey concludes with future research directions, including novel AI methodologies, ethical AI governance, and the development of context-aware systems. This overview aims to inspire further research and foster collaboration towards responsible and human-centric approaches to HS moderation in the digital age.
Quantifying Generative Media Bias with a Corpus of Real-world and Generated News Articles (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilised across a range of tasks and domains, with a burgeoning interest in their application within the field of journalism. This trend raises concerns due to our limited understanding of LLM behaviour in this domain, especially with respect to political bias. Existing studies predominantly focus on LLMs undertaking political questionnaires, which offers only limited insights into their biases and operational nuances. To address this gap, our study establishes a new curated dataset that contains 2,100 human-written articles and utilises their descriptions to generate 56,700 synthetic articles using nine LLMs. This enables us to analyse shifts in properties between human-authored and machine-generated articles, with this study focusing on political bias, detecting it using both supervised models and LLMs. Our findings reveal significant disparities between base and instruction-tuned LLMs, with instruction-tuned models exhibiting consistent political bias. Furthermore, we are able to study how LLMs behave as classifiers, observing their display of political bias even in this role. Overall, for the first time within the journalistic domain, this study outlines a framework and provides a structured dataset for quantifiable experiments, serving as a foundation for further research into LLM political bias and its implications.
OEE-CFC: A Dataset for Open Event Extraction from Chinese Financial Commentary (2024)

To meet application needs, event extraction has shifted from simple entities to unconventional entities serving as event arguments. However, current corpora with unconventional entities as event arguments are limited in event types and lack rich multi-events and shared arguments. Financial commentary not only describes the basic elements of an event but also states the background, scope, manner, condition, result, and tool used for the event, as well as the tense, intensity, and emotions of actions or state changes. Therefore, it is not suitable to develop event types that include only a few specific roles, as these cannot comprehensively capture the event`s semantics. Also, there are affluent complex entities serving as event arguments, multiple events, and shared event arguments. To advance the practicality of event extraction technology, this paper first develops a general open event template from the perspective of understanding the meaning of events, aiming to comprehensively reveal useful information about events. This template includes 21 event argument roles, divided into three categories: core event roles, situational event roles, and adverbial roles. Then, based on the constructed event template, Chinese financial commentaries are collected and manually annotated to create a corpus OEE-CFC supporting open event extraction. This corpus includes 17,469 events, 44,221 arguments, 3,644 complex arguments, and 5,898 shared arguments. Finally, based on the characteristics of OEE-CFC, we design four types of prompts, and two models for event argument extraction are developed, with experiments conducted on the prompts.
Graph-tree Fusion Model with Bidirectional Information Propagation for Long Document Classification (2024)

Long document classification presents challenges in capturing both local and global dependencies due to their extensive content and complex structure. Existing methods often struggle with token limits and fail to adequately model hierarchical relationships within documents. To address these constraints, we propose a novel model leveraging a graph-tree structure. Our approach integrates syntax trees for sentence encodings and document graphs for document encodings, which capture fine-grained syntactic relationships and broader document contexts, respectively. We use Tree Transformers to generate sentence encodings, while a graph attention network models inter- and intra-sentence dependencies. During training, we implement bidirectional information propagation from word-to-sentence-to-document and vice versa, which enriches the contextual representation. Our proposed method enables a comprehensive understanding of content at all hierarchical levels and effectively handles arbitrarily long contexts without token limit constraints. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in all types of long document classification tasks.
BookWorm: A Dataset for Character Description and Analysis (2024)

Characters are at the heart of every story, driving the plot and engaging readers. In this study, we explore the understanding of characters in full-length books, which contain complex narratives and numerous interacting characters. We define two tasks: character description, which generates a brief factual profile, and character analysis, which offers an in-depth interpretation, including character development, personality, and social context. We introduce the BookWorm dataset, pairing books from the Gutenberg Project with human-written descriptions and analyses. Using this dataset, we evaluate state-of-the-art long-context models in zero-shot and fine-tuning settings, utilizing both retrieval-based and hierarchical processing for book-length inputs. Our findings show that retrieval-based approaches outperform hierarchical ones in both tasks. Additionally, fine-tuned models using coreference-based retrieval produce the most factual descriptions, as measured by fact- and entailment-based metrics. We hope our dataset, experiments, and analysis will inspire further research in character-based narrative understanding.
Leveraging Grammar Induction for Language Understanding and Generation (2024)

Grammar induction has made significant progress in recent years. However, it is not clear how the application of induced grammar could enhance practical performance in downstream tasks. In this work, we introduce an unsupervised grammar induction method for language understanding and generation. We construct a grammar parser to induce constituency structures and dependency relations, which is simultaneously trained on downstream tasks without additional syntax annotations. The induced grammar features are subsequently incorporated into Transformer as a syntactic mask to guide self-attention. We evaluate and apply our method to multiple machine translation tasks and natural language understanding tasks. Our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the original Transformer and other models enhanced with external parsers. Experimental results indicate that our method is effective in both from-scratch and pre-trained scenarios. Additionally, our research highlights the contribution of explicitly modeling the grammatical structure of texts to neural network models.
SH2: Self-Highlighted Hesitation Helps You Decode More Truthfully (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate great performance in text generation. However, LLMs are still suffering from hallucinations. In this work, we propose an inference-time method, Self-Highlighted Hesitation (SH2), to help LLMs decode more truthfully. SH2 is based on a simple fact rooted in information theory that for an LLM, the tokens predicted with lower probabilities are prone to be more informative than others. Our analysis shows that these low-confidence tokens are more likely to be closely related to factual information, such as nouns, proper nouns, and adjectives. Therefore, we propose to {\textquotedblright}highlight{\textquotedblright} the factual information by selecting key tokens with the lowest probabilities and concatenating them to the original context, thus forcing the model to repeatedly read and hesitate on these tokens before generation. During decoding, we also adopt contrastive decoding to emphasize the difference in output probabilities brought by the hesitation. Experimental results demonstrate that our SH2, requiring no additional data or models, can effectively help LLMs elicit factual knowledge and distinguish hallucinated contexts by themselves. Significant and consistent improvements are achieved by SH2 for LLaMA-7b, LLaMA2-7b and Mistral-7b on various hallucination tasks.
RoQLlama: A Lightweight Romanian Adapted Language Model (2024)

The remarkable achievements obtained by open-source large language models (LLMs) in recent years have predominantly been concentrated on tasks involving the English language. In this paper, we aim to advance the performance of Llama2 models on Romanian tasks. We tackle the problem of reduced computing resources by using QLoRA for training. We release RoQLlama-7b, a quantized LLM, which shows equal or improved results compared to its full-sized counterpart when tested on seven Romanian downstream tasks in the zero-shot setup. Also, it consistently achieves higher average scores across all few-shot prompts. Additionally, we introduce a novel Romanian dataset, namely RoMedQA, which contains single-choice medical questions in Romanian.
Reference-free Hallucination Detection for Large Vision-Language Models (2024)

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have made significant progress in recent years. While LVLMs exhibit excellent ability in language understanding, question answering, and conversations of visual inputs, they are prone to producing hallucinations. While several methods are proposed to evaluate the hallucinations in LVLMs, most are reference-based and depend on external tools, which complicates their practical application. To assess the viability of alternative methods, it is critical to understand whether the reference-free approaches, which do not rely on any external tools, can efficiently detect hallucinations. Therefore, we initiate an exploratory study to demonstrate the effectiveness of different reference-free solutions in detecting hallucinations in LVLMs. In particular, we conduct an extensive study on three kinds of techniques: uncertainty-based, consistency-based, and supervised uncertainty quantification methods on four representative LVLMs across two different tasks. The empirical results show that the reference-free approaches are capable of effectively detecting non-factual responses in LVLMs, with the supervised uncertainty quantification method outperforming the others, achieving the best performance across different settings.
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024)

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope in natural language processing (NLP) to encompass multimodal functions. However, integrating listening capabilities effectively remains a significant challenge for generalization and complex auditory task execution. In this work, we introduce WavLLM, a robust and adaptive speech large language model featuring dual encoders{---}a Whisper encoder for semantics and a WavLM encoder for speaker characteristics. Within the two-stage curriculum learning framework, WavLLM first builds its foundational capabilities by optimizing on mixed elementary single tasks, followed by advanced multi-task training on more complex tasks such as combinations of the elementary tasks. To enhance the flexibility and adherence to different tasks and instructions, a prompt-aware LoRA weight adapter is introduced in the second advanced multi-task training stage. We validate the proposed model on universal speech benchmarks and also apply it to specialized speech-question-answer (SQA) dataset, and speech Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation set. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities in executing complex tasks using CoT approach. The codes, models, audio samples, and SQA evaluation set can be accessed at \url{https://github.com/microsoft/SpeechT5/tree/main/WavLLM}.
Learning from Implicit User Feedback, Emotions and Demographic Information in Task-Oriented and Document-Grounded Dialogues (2024)

Implicit user feedback, user emotions and demographic information have shown to be promising sources for improving the accuracy and user engagement of responses generated by dialogue systems. However, the influence of such information on task completion and factual consistency, which are important criteria for task-oriented and document-grounded dialogues, is not yet known. To address this, we introduce FEDI, the first English task-oriented and document-grounded dialogue dataset annotated with this information. Our experiments with Flan-T5, GPT-2 and Llama 2 show a particularly positive impact on task completion and factual consistency. Participants in our human evaluation reported that the responses generated by the feedback-trained models were more informative (Flan-T5 and GPT-2), relevant and factual consistent (Llama 2).
Improving Argument Effectiveness Across Ideologies using Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (2024)

Different political ideologies (e.g., liberal and conservative Americans) hold different worldviews, which leads to opposing stances on different issues (e.g., gun control) and, thereby, fostering societal polarization. Arguments are a means of bringing the perspectives of people with different ideologies closer together, depending on how well they reach their audience. In this paper, we study how to computationally turn ineffective arguments into effective arguments for people with certain ideologies by using instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), looking closely at style features. For development and evaluation, we collect ineffective arguments per ideology from debate.org, and we generate about 30k, which we rewrite using three LLM methods tailored to our task: zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and LLM steering. Our experiments provide evidence that LLMs naturally improve argument effectiveness for liberals. Our LLM-based and human evaluation show a clear preference towards the rewritten arguments. Code and link to the data are available here: https://github.com/roxanneelbaff/emnlp2024-iesta.
KV Cache Compression, But What Must We Give in Return? A Comprehensive Benchmark of Long Context Capable Approaches (2024)

Long context capability is a crucial competency for large language models (LLMs) as it mitigates the human struggle to digest long-form texts. This capability enables complex task-solving scenarios such as book summarization, code assistance, and many more tasks that are traditionally manpower-intensive. However, transformer-based LLMs face significant challenges with long context input due to the growing size of the KV cache and the intrinsic complexity of attending to extended inputs; where multiple schools of efficiency-driven approaches {---} such as KV cache quantization, token dropping, prompt compression, linear-time sequence models, and hybrid architectures {---} have been proposed to produce efficient yet long context-capable models. Despite these advancements, no existing work has comprehensively benchmarked these methods in a reasonably aligned environment. In this work, we fill this gap by providing a taxonomy of current methods and evaluating 10+ state-of-the-art approaches across seven categories of long context tasks. Our work reveals numerous previously unknown phenomena and offers insights {---} as well as a friendly workbench {---} for the future development of long context-capable LLMs. The source code is available at https://github.com/henryzhongsc/longctx{\_}bench.
An Evaluation Mechanism of LLM-based Agents on Manipulating APIs (2024)

LLM-based agents can greatly extend the abilities of LLMs and thus attract sharply increased studies. An ambitious vision {--} serving users by manipulating massive API-based tools {--} has been proposed and explored. However, we find a widely accepted evaluation mechanism for generic agents is still missing. This work aims to fill this gap. We decompose tool use capability into seven aspects and form a thorough evaluation schema. In addition, we design and release an instruction dataset and a toolset {--} the two sides that the agents bridge between {--} following the principle of reflecting real-world challenges. Furthermore, we evaluate multiple generic agents. Our findings can inspire future research in improving LLM-based agents and rethink the philosophy of API design.
Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly in textual mathematical problem-solving. However, existing open-source image instruction fine-tuning datasets, containing limited question-answer pairs per image, do not fully exploit visual information to enhance the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To bridge this gap, we address the lack of high-quality, diverse multimodal mathematical datasets by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs, creating the MathV360K dataset, which enhances both the breadth and depth of multimodal mathematical questions. We introduce Math-LLaVA, a LLaVA-1.5-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K. This novel approach significantly improves the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5, achieving a 19-point increase and comparable performance to GPT-4V on MathVista`s minitest split, and yielding leading performance on Math-V and MathVerse. Furthermore, Math-LLaVA demonstrates enhanced generalizability, showing substantial improvements on the MMMU benchmark. Our research highlights the importance of dataset diversity and synthesis in advancing MLLMs' mathematical reasoning abilities. The code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/HZQ950419/Math-LLaVA}.
Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation (2024)

This study presents a novel evaluation framework for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task. It aims to diagnose current models for various instruction categories at a finer-grained level. The framework is structured around the context-free grammar (CFG) of the task. The CFG serves as the basis for the problem decomposition and the core premise of the instruction categories design. We propose a semi-automatic method for CFG construction with the help of Large-Language Models (LLMs). Then, we induct and generate data spanning five principal instruction categories (i.e. direction change, landmark recognition, region recognition, vertical movement, and numerical comprehension). Our analysis of different models reveals notable performance discrepancies and recurrent issues. The stagnation of numerical comprehension, heavy selective biases over directional concepts, and other interesting findings contribute to the development of future language-guided navigation systems. The project is now available at https://zehao-wang.github.io/navnuances.
Re-Invoke: Tool Invocation Rewriting for Zero-Shot Tool Retrieval (2024)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous agents with complex reasoning and task-fulfillment capabilities using a wide range of tools. However, effectively identifying the most relevant tools for a given task becomes a key bottleneck as the toolset size grows, hindering reliable tool utilization. To address this, we introduce Re-Invoke, an unsupervised tool retrieval method designed to scale effectively to large toolsets without training. Specifically, we first generate a diverse set of synthetic queries that comprehensively cover different aspects of the query space associated with each tool document during the tool indexing phase. Second, we leverage LLM`s query understanding capabilities to extract key tool-related context and underlying intents from user queries during the inference phase. Finally, we employ a novel multi-view similarity ranking strategy based on intents to pinpoint the most relevant tools for each query. Our evaluation demonstrates that Re-Invoke significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios, all within a fully unsupervised setting. Notably, on the ToolE datasets, we achieve a 20{\%} relative improvement in nDCG@5 for single-tool retrieval and a 39{\%} improvement for multi-tool retrieval.