ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LayerSkip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decoding (2024)

We present LayerSkip, an end-to-end solution to speed-up inference of large language models (LLMs). First, during training we apply layer dropout, with low dropout rates for earlier layers and higher dropout rates for later layers, and an early exit loss where all transformer layers share the same exit. Second, during inference, we show that this training recipe increases the accuracy of early exit at earlier layers, without adding any auxiliary layers or modules to the model. Third, we present a novel self-speculative decoding solution where we exit at early layers and verify and correct with remaining layers of the model. Our proposed self-speculative decoding approach has less memory footprint than other speculative decoding approaches and benefits from shared compute and activations of the draft and verification stages. We run experiments on different Llama model sizes on different types of training: pretraining from scratch, continual pretraining, finetuning on specific data domain, and finetuning on specific task. We implement our inference solution and show speedups of up to 2.16x on summarization for CNN/DM documents, 1.82x on coding, and 2.0x on TOPv2 semantic parsing task. We open source our code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LayerSkip.
Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP (2024)

The field of sociolinguistics has studied factors affecting language use for the last century. Labov (1964) and Bernstein (1960) showed that socioeconomic class strongly influences our accents, syntax and lexicon. However, despite growing concerns surrounding fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP), there is a dearth of studies delving into the effects it may have on NLP systems. We show empirically that NLP systems' performance is affected by speakers' SES, potentially disadvantaging less-privileged socioeconomic groups. We annotate a corpus of 95K utterances from movies with social class, ethnicity and geographical language variety and measure the performance of NLP systems on three tasks: language modelling, automatic speech recognition, and grammar error correction. We find significant performance disparities that can be attributed to socioeconomic status as well as ethnicity and geographical differences. With NLP technologies becoming ever more ubiquitous and quotidian, they must accommodate all language varieties to avoid disadvantaging already marginalised groups. We argue for the inclusion of socioeconomic class in future language technologies.
ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages (2024)

Extraction of experimental procedures from human language in scientific literature and patents into actionable sequences in robotics language holds immense significance in scientific domains. Such an action extraction task is particularly challenging given the intricate details and context-dependent nature of the instructions, especially in fields like chemistry where reproducibility is paramount. In this paper, we introduce ActionIE, a method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this divide by converting actions written in natural language into executable Python code. This enables us to capture the entities of interest, and the relationship between each action, given the features of Programming Languages. Utilizing linguistic cues identified by frequent patterns, ActionIE provides an improved mechanism to discern entities of interest. While our method is broadly applicable, we exemplify its power in the domain of chemical literature, wherein we focus on extracting experimental procedures for chemical synthesis. The code generated by our method can be easily transformed into robotics language which is in high demand in scientific fields. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, we propose a graph-based metric to more accurately reflect the precision of extraction. We also develop a dataset to address the scarcity of scientific literature occurred in existing datasets.
A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech (2024)

Violence-provoking speech {--} speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous works have characterized and built tools for detecting other forms of harmful speech, like fear speech and hate speech, our work takes a community-centric approach to studying anti-Asian violence-provoking speech. Using data from {\textasciitilde}420k Twitter posts spanning a 3-year duration (January 1, 2020 to February 1, 2023), we develop a codebook to characterize anti-Asian violence-provoking speech and collect a community-crowdsourced dataset to facilitate its large-scale detection using state-of-the-art classifiers. We contrast the capabilities of natural language processing classifiers, ranging from BERT-based to LLM-based classifiers, in detecting violence-provoking speech with their capabilities to detect anti-Asian hateful speech. In contrast to prior work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of such classifiers in detecting hateful speech ($F_1$ = 0.89), our work shows that accurate and reliable detection of violence-provoking speech is a challenging task ($F_1$ = 0.69). We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly the need for proactive interventions to support Asian communities during public health crises.
Retaining Key Information under High Compression Ratios: Query-Guided Compressor for LLMs (2024)

The growing popularity of Large Language Models has sparked interest in context compression for Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the performance of previous methods degrades dramatically as compression ratios increase, sometimes even falling to the closed-book level. This decline can be attributed to the loss of key information during the compression process. Our preliminary study supports this hypothesis, emphasizing the significance of retaining key information to maintain model performance under high compression ratios. As a result, we introduce Query-Guided Compressor (QGC), which leverages queries to guide the context compression process, effectively preserving key information within the compressed context. Additionally, we employ a dynamic compression strategy. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed QGC on the Question Answering task, including NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA, and HotpotQA datasets. Experimental results show that QGC can consistently perform well even at high compression ratios, which also offers significant benefits in terms of inference cost and throughput.
COSMIC: Mutual Information for Task-Agnostic Summarization Evaluation (2024)

Assessing the quality of summarizers poses significant challenges{---}gold summaries are hard to obtain and their suitability depends on the use context of the summarization system. Who is the user of the system, and what do they intend to do with the summary? In response, we propose a novel task-oriented evaluation approach that assesses summarizers based on their capacity to produce summaries while preserving task outcomes. We theoretically establish both a lower and upper bound on the expected error rate of these tasks, which depends on the mutual information between source texts and generated summaries. We introduce COSMIC, a practical implementation of this metric, and demonstrate its strong correlation with human judgment-based metrics, as well as its effectiveness in predicting downstream task performance. Comparative analyses against established metrics like BERTScore and ROUGE highlight the competitive performance of COSMIC.
EUROPA: A Legal Multilingual Keyphrase Generation Dataset (2024)

Keyphrase generation has primarily been explored within the context of academic research articles, with a particular focus on scientific domains and the English language. In this work, we present EUROPA, a novel dataset for multilingual keyphrase generation in the legal domain. It is derived from legal judgments from the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU), and contains instances in all 24 EU official languages. We run multilingual models on our corpus and analyze the results, showing room for improvement on a domain-specific multilingual corpus such as the one we present.
GLIMPSE: Pragmatically Informative Multi-Document Summarization for Scholarly Reviews (2024)

Scientific peer review is essential for the quality of academic publications. However, the increasing number of paper submissions to conferences has strained the reviewing process. This surge poses a burden on area chairs who have to carefully read an ever-growing volume of reviews and discern each reviewer`s main arguments as part of their decision process. In this paper, we introduce , a summarization method designed to offer a concise yet comprehensive overview of scholarly reviews. Unlike traditional consensus-based methods, extracts both common and unique opinions from the reviews. We introduce novel uniqueness scores based on the Rational Speech Act framework to identify relevant sentences in the reviews. Our method aims to provide a pragmatic glimpse into all reviews, offering a balanced perspective on their opinions. Our experimental results with both automatic metrics and human evaluation show that generates more discriminative summaries than baseline methods in terms of human evaluation while achieving comparable performance with these methods in terms of automatic metrics.
Peacock: A Family of Arabic Multimodal Large Language Models and Benchmarks (2024)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have proven effective in a wide range of tasks that require complex reasoning and linguistic comprehension. However, due to a lack of high-quality multimodal resources in languages other than English, the success of MLLMs remains relatively limited to English-based settings. This poses significant challenges in developing comparable models for other languages, even those with large speaker populations, such as Arabic. To alleviate this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive family of Arabic MLLMs, dubbed *Peacock*, with strong vision and language capabilities. Through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we demonstrate the solid performance of our models on various visual reasoning tasks and further show their emerging dialectal potential. Additionally, we introduce *Henna*, a new benchmark specifically designed for assessing MLLMs on aspects related to Arabic culture, setting the first stone for culturally-aware Arabic MLLMs. The GitHub repository for the *Peacock* project is available at [https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock](https://github.com/UBC-NLP/peacock).
Generating Coherent Sequences of Visual Illustrations for Real-World Manual Tasks (2024)

Multistep instructions, such as recipes and how-to guides, greatly benefit from visual aids, such as a series of images that accompany the instruction steps. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become adept at generating coherent textual steps, Large Vision/Language Models (LVLMs) are less capable of generating accompanying image sequences. The most challenging aspect is that each generated image needs to adhere to the relevant textual step instruction, as well as be visually consistent with earlier images in the sequence. To address this problem, we propose an approach for generating consistent image sequences, which integrates a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with an LLM to transform the sequence into a caption to maintain the semantic coherence of the sequence. In addition, to maintain the visual coherence of the image sequence, we introduce a copy mechanism to initialise reverse diffusion processes with a latent vector iteration from a previously generated image from a relevant step. Both strategies will condition the reverse diffusion process on the sequence of instruction steps and tie the contents of the current image to previous instruction steps and corresponding images. Experiments show that the proposed approach is preferred by humans in 46.6{\%} of the cases against 26.6{\%} for the second best method. In addition, automatic metrics showed that the proposed method maintains semantic coherence and visual consistency across steps in both domains.
Cheetah: Natural Language Generation for 517 African Languages (2024)

Low-resource African languages pose unique challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including natural language generation (NLG). In this paper, we develop Cheetah, a massively multilingual NLG language model for African languages. Cheetah supports 517 African languages and language varieties, allowing us to address the scarcity of NLG resources and provide a solution to foster linguistic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cheetah through comprehensive evaluations across six generation downstream tasks. In five of the six tasks, Cheetah significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance for generating coherent and contextually appropriate text in a wide range of African languages. We additionally conduct a detailed human evaluation to delve deeper into the linguistic capabilities of Cheetah. The findings of this study contribute to advancing NLP research in low-resource settings, enabling greater accessibility and inclusion for African languages in a rapidly expanding digital landscape. We will publicly release our models for research.
TaPERA: Enhancing Faithfulness and Interpretability in Long-Form Table QA by Content Planning and Execution-based Reasoning (2024)

Long-form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) requires systems to generate paragraph long and complex answers to questions over tabular data. While Large language models based systems have made significant progress, it often hallucinates, especially when the task involves complex reasoning over tables. To tackle this issue, we propose a new LLM-based framework, TaPERA, for LFTQA tasks. Our framework uses a modular approach that decomposes the whole process into three sub-modules: 1) QA-based Content Planner that iteratively decomposes the input question into sub-questions; 2) Execution-based Table Reasoner that produces executable Python program for each sub-question; and 3) Answer Generator that generates long-form answer grounded on the program output. Human evaluation results on the FeTaQA and QTSumm datasets indicate that our framework significantly improves strong baselines on both accuracy and truthfulness, as our modular framework is better at table reasoning, and the long-form answer is always consistent with the program output. Our modular design further provides transparency as users are able to interact with our framework by manually changing the content plans.
FinanceMATH: Knowledge-Intensive Math Reasoning in Finance Domains (2024)

We introduce FinanceMath, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in solving knowledge-intensive math reasoning problems. Compared to prior works, this study features three core advancements. First, FinanceMath includes 1,200 problems with a hybrid of textual and tabular content. These problems require college-level knowledge in the finance domain for effective resolution. Second, we provide expert-annotated, detailed solution references in Python program format, ensuring a high-quality benchmark for LLM assessment. We also construct a finance-domain knowledge bank and investigate various knowledge integration strategies. Finally, we evaluate a wide spectrum of 44 LLMs with both Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods. Our experimental results reveal that the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) achieves only 60.9{\%} accuracy using CoT prompting, leaving substantial room for improvement. Moreover, while augmenting LLMs with external knowledge can improve model performance (e.g., from 47.5{\%} to 54.5{\%} for Gemini-1.5-Pro), their accuracy remains significantly lower than the estimated human expert performance of 92{\%}. We believe that FinanceMath can advance future research in the area of domain-specific knowledge retrieval and integration, particularly within the context of solving reasoning-intensive tasks.
API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMs (2024)

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.
LoRA-Flow: Dynamic LoRA Fusion for Large Language Models in Generative Tasks (2024)

LoRA employs lightweight modules to customize large language models (LLMs) for each downstream task or domain, where different learned additional modules represent diverse skills. Combining existing LoRAs to address new tasks can enhance the reusability of learned LoRAs, particularly beneficial for tasks with limited annotated data. Most prior works on LoRA combination primarily rely on task-level weights for each involved LoRA, making different examples and tokens share the same LoRA weights. However, in generative tasks, different tokens may necessitate diverse skills to manage. Taking the Chinese math task as an example, understanding the problem description may depend more on the Chinese LoRA, while the calculation part may rely more on the math LoRA. To this end, we propose LoRA-Flow, which utilizes dynamic weights to adjust the impact of different LoRAs. The weights at each step are determined by a fusion gate with extremely few parameters, which can be learned with only 200 training examples. Experiments across six generative tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms baselines with task-level fusion weights. This underscores the necessity of introducing dynamic fusion weights for LoRA combination.
Harder Task Needs More Experts: Dynamic Routing in MoE Models (2024)

In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic expert selection framework for Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, aiming to enhance computational efficiency and model performance by adjusting the number of activated experts based on input difficulty. Unlike existing MoE approaches that rely on fixed TopK Routing, which activates a predetermined number of experts regardless of the input`s complexity, our method dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. This allows for more efficient utilization of computational resources, activating more experts for complex tasks requiring advanced reasoning and fewer for simpler tasks. Through extensive evaluations, our dynamic routing method demonstrates substantial improvements over Top2 Routing across various benchmarks, achieving an average improvement of 0.7{\%} with less than 90{\%} activated parameters. Further analysis shows our model dispatches more experts to tasks requiring complex reasoning skills, like BBH, confirming its ability to dynamically allocate computational resources in alignment with the input`s complexity.Our findings also highlight a variation in the number of experts needed across different layers of the transformer model, offering insights into the potential for designing heterogeneous MoE frameworks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/ZhenweiAn/Dynamic{\_}MoE.
XLAVS-R: Cross-Lingual Audio-Visual Speech Representation Learning for Noise-Robust Speech Perception (2024)

Speech recognition and translation systems perform poorly on noisy inputs, which are frequent in realistic environments. Augmenting these systems with visual signals has the potential to improve robustness to noise. However, audio-visual (AV) data is only available in limited amounts and for fewer languages than audio-only resources.To address this gap, we present XLAVS-R, a cross-lingual audio-visual speech representation model for noise-robust speech recognition and translation in over 100 languages. It is designed to maximize the benefits of limited multilingual AV pre-training data, by building on top of audio-only multilingual pre-training and simplifying existing pre-training schemes. Extensive evaluation on the MuAViC benchmark shows the strength of XLAVS-R on downstream audio-visual speech recognition and translation tasks, where it outperforms the previous state of the art by up to 18.5{\%} WER and 4.7 BLEU given noisy AV inputs, and enables strong zero-shot audio-visual ability with audio-only fine-tuning.
SOTOPIA-\ensuremath\pi: Interactive Learning of Socially Intelligent Language Agents (2024)

Humans learn social skills through both imitation and social interaction. This social learning process is largely understudied by existing research on building language agents. Motivated by this gap, we propose an interactive learning method, SOTOPIA-{\ensuremath{\pi}}, that improves the social intelligence of language agents. This method leverages behavior cloning and self-reinforcement based training on filtered social interaction data according to large language model (LLM) rating. We show that our training method allows a 7B LLM to reach the social goal completion ability of an expert model (GPT-4-based agent) without the loss of more generic abilities, such as the ability to answer knowledge-based questions. We also demonstrate that this training paradigm uncovers some weaknesses in standard evaluation and safety training paradigms that (1) LLM-based evaluation of social intelligence overestimates the abilities of the language agents trained specifically for social interaction, and that (2) despite not training for better safety or question answering (QA) ability, our methods improve the safety of language agents and maintain general QA ability on the MMLU benchmark.
XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (2024)

We introduce XFT, a simple yet powerful training scheme, by simply merging upcycled Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) to unleash the performance limit of instruction-tuned code Large Language Models (LLMs). While vanilla sparse upcycling fails to improve instruction tuning, XFT introduces a shared expert mechanism with a novel routing weight normalization strategy into sparse upcycling, which significantly boosts instruction tuning. After fine-tuning the upcycled MoE model, XFT introduces a learnable model merging mechanism to compile the upcycled MoE model back to a dense model, achieving upcycled MoE-level performance with only dense-model compute. By applying XFT to a 1.3B model, we create a new state-of-the-art tiny code LLM with 67.1 and 64.6 pass@1 on HumanEval and HumanEval+ respectively. With the same data and model architecture, XFT improves supervised fine-tuning (SFT) by 13{\%} on HumanEval+, along with consistent improvements from 2{\%} to 13{\%} on MBPP+, MultiPL-E, and DS-1000, demonstrating its generalizability. XFT is fully orthogonal to existing techniques such as Evol-Instruct and OSS-Instruct, opening a new dimension for improving code instruction tuning. Codes are available at https://github.com/ise-uiuc/xft.