ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Chart-based Reasoning: Transferring Capabilities from LLMs to VLMs (2024)

Vision-language models (VLMs) are achieving increasingly strong performance on multimodal tasks. However, reasoning capabilities remain limited particularly for smaller VLMs, while those of large-language models (LLMs) have seen numerous improvements. We pro-pose a technique to transfer capabilities from LLMs to VLMs. On the recently introduced ChartQA, our method obtains state-of-the-artperformance when applied on the PaLI3-5B VLM by Chen et al. (2023c), while also enabling much better performance on PlotQA and FigureQA.We first improve the chart representation by continuing the pre-training stage using an improved version of the chart-to-table translation task by Liu et al. (2023a). We then propose constructing a 20x larger dataset than the original training set. To improve general reasoning capabilities and improve numerical operations, we synthesize reasoning traces using the table representation of charts. Lastly, our model is fine-tuned using the multitask loss introduced by Hsieh et al. (2023).Our variant ChartPaLI-5B outperforms even 10x larger models such as PaLIX-55B without using an upstream OCR system, while keeping inference time constant compared to the PaLI3-5B baseline. When rationales are further refined with a simple program-of-thought prompt (Chen et al., 2023a), our model outperforms the recently introduced Gemini Ultra and GPT-4V.
SLiM: Speculative Decoding with Hypothesis Reduction (2024)

Speculative decoding has emerged as a prominent alternative to autoregressive decoding for expediting inference in large language models (LLMs). However, prevailing assumptions often focus solely on latency reduction, neglecting the computational expenses. In this paper, we present \textbf{S}peculate \textbf{L}ess, val\textbf{i}date \textbf{M}ore (SLiM), a speculative decoding enhancement to reduce the speculation set while validating more effective tokens. SLiM is designed to mitigate LLMs' computation costs associated with the token verification by introducing hypothesis reduction based on a fast posterior estimation. It consistently surpasses counterparts lacking cost reduction across a spectrum from CPU to GPU. Our evaluation with diverse conversational datasets shows that SLiM can achieve a substantial 70{\%} reduction in FLOPs while generating more effective predictions on top of prior arts.
REMATCH: Robust and Efficient Matching of Local Knowledge Graphs to Improve Structural and Semantic Similarity (2024)

Knowledge graphs play a pivotal role in various applications, such as question-answering and fact-checking. Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) represents text as knowledge graphs. Evaluating the quality of these graphs involves matching them structurally to each other and semantically to the source text. Existing AMR metrics are inefficient and struggle to capture semantic similarity. We also lack a systematic evaluation benchmark for assessing structural similarity between AMR graphs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel AMR similarity metric, rematch, alongside a new evaluation for structural similarity called RARE. Among state-of-the-art metrics, rematch ranks second in structural similarity; and first in semantic similarity by 1{--}5 percentage points on the STS-B and SICK-R benchmarks. Rematch is also five times faster than the next most efficient metric.
Modeling the Sacred: Considerations when Using Religious Texts in Natural Language Processing (2024)

This position paper concerns the use of religious texts in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which is of special interest to the Ethics of NLP. Religious texts are expressions of culturally important values, and machine learned models have a propensity to reproduce cultural values encoded in their training data. Furthermore, translations of religious texts are frequently used by NLP researchers when language data is scarce. This repurposes the translations from their original uses and motivations, which often involve attracting new followers. This paper argues that NLP`s use of such texts raises considerations that go beyond model biases, including data provenance, cultural contexts, and their use in proselytism. We argue for more consideration of researcher positionality, and of the perspectives of marginalized linguistic and religious communities.
Testing the Effect of Code Documentation on Large Language Model Code Understanding (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in recent years with regards to code generation and understanding. However, little work has investigated how documentation and other code properties affect an LLM`s ability to understand and generate code or documentation. We present an empirical analysis of how underlying properties of code or documentation can affect an LLM`s capabilities. We show that providing an LLM with {\textquotedblleft}incorrect{\textquotedblright} documentation can greatly hinder code understanding, while incomplete or missing documentation does not seem to significantly affect an LLM`s ability to understand code.
Aligning Large Language Models with Recommendation Knowledge (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) have recently been used as backbones for recommender systems. However, their performance often lags behind conventional methods in standard tasks like retrieval. We attribute this to a mismatch between LLMs' knowledge and the knowledge crucial for effective recommendations. While LLMs excel at natural language reasoning, they cannot model complex user-item interactions inherent in recommendation tasks. We propose bridging the knowledge gap and equipping LLMs with recommendation-specific knowledge to address this. Operations such as Masked Item Modeling (MIM) and Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) have found success in conventional recommender systems. Inspired by this, we simulate these operations through natural language to generate auxiliary-task data samples that encode item correlations and user preferences. Fine-tuning LLMs on such auxiliary-task data samples and incorporating more informative recommendation-task data samples facilitates the injection of recommendation-specific knowledge into LLMs. Extensive experiments across retrieval, ranking, and rating prediction tasks on LLMs such as FLAN-T5-Base and FLAN-T5-XL show the effectiveness of our technique in domains such as Amazon Toys {\&} Games, Beauty, and Sports {\&} Outdoors. Notably, our method outperforms conventional and LLM-based baselines, including the current SOTA, by significant margins in retrieval, showcasing its potential for enhancing recommendation quality.
SELF-EXPERTISE: Knowledge-based Instruction Dataset Augmentation for a Legal Expert Language Model (2024)

The advent of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) has significantly advanced the field of automatic instruction dataset augmentation. However, the method of generating instructions and outputs from inherent knowledge of LLM can unintentionally produce hallucinations {---} instances of generating factually incorrect or misleading information. To overcome this, we propose SELF-EXPERTISE, automatically generating instruction dataset in the legal domain from a seed dataset. SELF-EXPERTISE extracts knowledge from the outputs of the seed dataset, and generates new instructions, inputs, and outputs. In this way, the proposed method reduces hallucination in automatic instruction augmentation. We trained an SELF-EXPERTISE augmented instruction dataset on the LLaMA-2 7B model to construct Korean legal specialized model, called LxPERT. LxPERT has demonstrated performance surpassing GPT-3.5-turbo in both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. The SELF-EXPERTISE augmentation pipeline is not only applicable to the legal field but is also expected to be extendable to various domains, potentially advancing domain-specialized LLMs.
Re-evaluating the Need for Visual Signals in Unsupervised Grammar Induction (2024)

Are multimodal inputs necessary for grammar induction? Recent work has shown that multimodal training inputs can improve grammar induction. However, these improvements are based on comparisons to weak text-only baselines that were trained on relatively little textual data. To determine whether multimodal inputs are needed in regimes with large amounts of textual training data, we design a stronger text-only baseline, which we refer to as LC-PCFG. LC-PCFG is a C-PFCG that incorporates embeddings from text-only large language models (LLMs). We use a fixed grammar family to directly compare LC-PCFG to various multimodal grammar induction methods. We compare performance on four benchmark datasets. LC-PCFG provides an up to 17{\%} relative improvement in Corpus-F1 compared to state-of-the-art multimodal grammar induction methods. LC-PCFG is also more computationally efficient, providing an up to 85{\%} reduction in parameter count and $8.8\times$ reduction in training time compared to multimodal approaches. These results suggest that multimodal inputs may not be necessary for grammar induction, and emphasize the importance of strong vision-free baselines for evaluating the benefit of multimodal approaches.
EDEntail: An Entailment-based Few-shot Text Classification with Extensional Definition (2024)

Few-shot text classification has seen significant advancements, particularly with entailment-based methods, which typically use either class labels or intensional definitions of class labels in hypotheses for label semantics expression. In this paper, we propose EDEntail, a method that employs extensional definition (EDef) of class labels in hypotheses, aiming to express the semantics of class labels more explicitly. To achieve the above goal, we develop an algorithm to gather and select extensional descriptive words of class labels and then order and format them into a sequence to form hypotheses. Our method has been evaluated and compared with state-of-the-art models on five classification datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach surpasses the supervised-learning methods and prompt-based methods under the few-shot setting, which underlines the potential of using an extensional definition of class labels for entailment-based few-shot text classification. Our code is available at https://github.com/MidiyaZhu/EDEntail.
What Makes Math Word Problems Challenging for LLMs? (2024)

This paper investigates the question of what makes math word problems (MWPs) in English challenging for large language models (LLMs). We conduct an in-depth analysis of the key linguistic and mathematical characteristics of MWPs. In addition, we train feature-based classifiers to better understand the impact of each feature on the overall difficulty of MWPs for prominent LLMs and investigate whether this helps predict how well LLMs fare against specific categories of MWPs.
SMILE: Multimodal Dataset for Understanding Laughter in Video with Language Models (2024)

Despite the recent advances in artificial intelligence, building social intelligence remains a challenge.Among social signals, laughter is one of the distinctive expressions that occurs during social interactions between humans.In this work, we tackle a new challenge for machines to understand the rationale behind laughter in video, Video Laugh Reasoning.We introduce this new task to explain why people laugh in a particular video and a dataset for this task.Our proposed dataset, SMILE, comprises video clips and language descriptions of why people laugh. We propose a baseline by leveraging the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs) with textual video representation. Experiments show that our baseline can generate plausible explanations for laughter. We further investigate the scalability of our baseline by probing other video understanding tasks and in-the-wild videos. We release our dataset, code, and model checkpoints on https://github.com/postech-ami/SMILE-Dataset.
T3M: Text Guided 3D Human Motion Synthesis from Speech (2024)

Speech-driven 3D motion synthesis seeks to create lifelike animations based on human speech, with potential uses in virtual reality, gaming, and the film production. Existing approaches reply solely on speech audio for motion generation, leading to inaccurate and inflexible synthesis results. To mitigate this problem, we introduce a novel text-guided 3D human motion synthesis method, termed T3M. Unlike traditional approaches, T3M allows precise control over motion synthesis via textual input, enhancing the degree of diversity and user customization. The experiment results demonstrate that T3M can greatly outperform the state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative evaluations. We have publicly released our code at https://github.com/Gloria2tt/naacl2024.git
Deja vu: Contrastive Historical Modeling with Prefix-tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024)

Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (TKGR) is the task of inferring missing facts for incomplete TKGs in complex scenarios (e.g., transductive and inductive settings), which has been gaining increasing attention. Recently, to mitigate dependence on structured connections in TKGs, text-based methods have been developed to utilize rich linguistic information from entity descriptions. However, suffering from the enormous parameters and inflexibility of pre-trained language models, existing text-based methods struggle to balance the textual knowledge and temporal information with computationally expensive purpose-built training strategies. To tap the potential of text-based models for TKGR in various complex scenarios, we propose ChapTER, a Contrastive historical modeling framework with prefix-tuning for TEmporal Reasoning. ChapTER feeds history-contextualized text into the pseudo-Siamese encoders to strike a textual-temporal balance via contrastive estimation between queries and candidates. By introducing virtual time prefix tokens, it applies a prefix-based tuning method to facilitate the frozen PLM capable for TKGR tasks under different settings. We evaluate ChapTER on four transductive and three few-shot inductive TKGR benchmarks, and experimental results demonstrate that ChapTER achieves superior performance compared to competitive baselines with only 0.17{\%} tuned parameters. We conduct thorough analysis to verify the effectiveness, flexibility and efficiency of ChapTER.
Explanation Extraction from Hierarchical Classification Frameworks for Long Legal Documents (2024)

Hierarchical classification frameworks have been widely used to process long sequences, especially in the legal domain for predictions from long legal documents. But being black-box models they are unable to explain their predictions making them less reliable for practical applications, more so in the legal domain. In this work, we develop an extractive explanation algorithm for hierarchical frameworks for long sequences based on the sensitivity of the trained model to its input perturbations. We perturb using occlusion and develop Ob-HEx; an Occlusion-based Hierarchical Explanation-extractor. We adapt Ob-HEx to Hierarchical Transformer models trained on long Indian legal texts. And use Ob-HEx to analyze them and extract their explanations for the ILDC-Expert dataset, achieving a minimum gain of 1 point over the previous benchmark on most of our performance evaluation metrics.
Low-Rank Adaptation for Multilingual Summarization: An Empirical Study (2024)

Although the advancements of pre-trained Large Language Models have significantly accelerated recent progress in NLP, their ever-increasing size poses significant challenges for conventional fine-tuning, especially in memory-intensive tasks. We investigate the potential of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), in the domain of multilingual summarization, a task that is both challenging (due to typically long inputs), and relatively unexplored. We conduct an extensive study across different data availability scenarios, including high- and low-data settings, and cross-lingual transfer, leveraging models of different sizes. Our findings reveal that LoRA is competitive with full fine-tuning when trained with high quantities of data, and excels in low-data scenarios and cross-lingual transfer. We also study different strategies for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, finding that continued LoRA tuning outperforms full fine-tuning and the dynamic composition of language-specific LoRA modules.
A Tree-of-Thoughts to Broaden Multi-step Reasoning across Languages (2024)

Reasoning methods, best exemplified by the well-known Chain-of-Thought (CoT), empower the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by eliciting them to solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Although they are achieving significant success, the ability to deliver multi-step reasoning remains limited to English because of the imbalance in the distribution of pre-training data, which makes other languages a barrier. In this paper, we propose Cross-lingual Tree-of-Thoughts (Cross-ToT), a method for aligning Cross-lingual CoT reasoning across languages. The proposed method, through a self-consistent cross-lingual prompting mechanism inspired by the Tree-of-Thoughts approach, provides multi-step reasoning paths in different languages that, during the steps, lead to the final solution. Experimental evaluations show that our method significantly outperforms existing prompting methods by reducing the number of interactions and achieving state-of-the-art performance.
Emergent Abilities in Reduced-Scale Generative Language Models (2024)

Large language models can solve new tasks without task-specific fine-tuning. This ability, also known as in-context learning (ICL), is considered an emergent ability and is primarily seen in large language models with billions of parameters. This study investigates if such emergent properties are strictly tied to model size or can be demonstrated by smaller models trained on reduced-scale data. To explore this, we simplify pre-training data and pre-train 36 causal language models with parameters varying from 1 million to 165 million parameters. We show that models trained on this simplified pre-training data demonstrate enhanced zero-shot capabilities across various tasks in simplified language, achieving performance comparable to that of pre-trained models six times larger on unrestricted language. This suggests that downscaling the language allows zero-shot learning capabilities to emerge in models with limited size.Additionally, we find that these smaller models pre-trained on simplified data demonstrate a power law relationship between the evaluation loss and the three scaling factors: compute, dataset size, and model size.
Context Does Matter: Implications for Crowdsourced Evaluation Labels in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2024)

Crowdsourced labels play a crucial role in evaluating task-oriented dialogue systems (TDSs). Obtaining high-quality and consistent ground-truth labels from annotators presents challenges. When evaluating a TDS, annotators must fully comprehend the dialogue before providing judgments. Previous studies suggest using only a portion of the dialogue context in the annotation process. However, the impact of this limitation on label quality remains unexplored. This study investigates the influence of dialogue context on annotation quality, considering the truncated context for relevance and usefulness labeling. We further propose to use large language models ( LLMs) to summarize the dialogue context to provide a rich and short description of the dialogue context and study the impact of doing so on the annotator`s performance. Reducing context leads to more positive ratings. Conversely, providing the entire dialogue context yields higher-quality relevance ratings but introduces ambiguity in usefulness ratings. Using the first user utterance as context leads to consistent ratings, akin to those obtained using the entire dialogue, with significantly reduced annotation effort. Our findings show how task design, particularly the availability of dialogue context, affects the quality and consistency of crowdsourced evaluation labels.
Matching Varying-Length Texts via Topic-Informed and Decoupled Sentence Embeddings (2024)

Measuring semantic similarity between texts is a crucial task in natural language processing. While existing semantic text matching focuses on pairs of similar-length sequences, matching texts with non-comparable lengths has broader applications in specific domains, such as comparing professional document summaries and content. Current approaches struggle with text pairs of non-comparable lengths due to truncation issues. To address this, we split texts into natural sentences and decouple sentence representations using supervised contrastive learning (SCL). Meanwhile, we adopt the embedded topic model (ETM) for specific domain data. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, based on decoupled and topic-informed sentence embeddings, in matching texts of significantly different lengths across three well-studied datasets.
Instruction Tuning with Human Curriculum (2024)

In this work, we (1) introduce Curriculum Instruction Tuning, (2) explore the potential advantages of employing diverse curriculum strategies, and (3) delineate a synthetic instruction-response generation framework that complements our theoretical approach. Distinct from the existing instruction tuning dataset, our generation pipeline is systematically structured to emulate the sequential and orderly characteristic of human learning. Additionally, we describe a methodology for generating instruction-response datasets that extensively span the various stages of human education, from middle school through the graduate level, utilizing educational subject catalogs.Before training, we meticulously organize the instruction data to ensure that questions escalate in difficulty regarding (A) the subject matter and (B) the intricacy of the instructions. The findings of our study reveal that substantial improvements in performance can be achieved through the mere application of curriculum ordering to instruction data{---}achieving gains of +4.76 on TruthfulQA, +2.98 on MMLU, +2.8 on OpenbookQA, and +1.28 on ARC-hard{---}compared to random shuffling. This enhancement is achieved without incurring additional computational expenses. Through comprehensive experimentation, we observe that the advantages of our proposed method are consistently evident across nine benchmarks.
Natural Language-based State Representation in Deep Reinforcement Learning (2024)

This paper investigates the potential of using natural language descriptions as an alternative to direct image-based observations for learning policies in reinforcement learning. Due to the inherent challenges in managing image-based observations, which include abundant information and irrelevant features, we propose a method that compresses images into a natural language form for state representation. This approach allows better interpretability and leverages the processing capabilities of large-language models. We conducted several experiments involving tasks that required image-based observation. The results demonstrated that policies trained using natural language descriptions of images yield better generalization than those trained directly from images, emphasizing the potential of this approach in practical settings.