ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024)

The powerful generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) show potential in generating relevance labels for search applications. Previous work has found that directly asking about relevancy, such as ''*How relevant is document A to query Q?*{\textquotedblright}, results in suboptimal ranking. Instead, the pairwise-ranking prompting (PRP) approach produces promising ranking performance through asking about pairwise comparisons, e.g., ''*Is document A more relevant than document B to query Q?*{\textquotedblright}. Thus, while LLMs are effective at their ranking ability, this is not reflected in their relevance label generation.In this work, we propose a post-processing method to consolidate the relevance labels generated by an LLM with its powerful ranking abilities. Our method takes both LLM generated relevance labels and pairwise preferences. The labels are then altered to satisfy the pairwise preferences of the LLM, while staying as close to the original values as possible. Our experimental results indicate that our approach effectively balances label accuracy and ranking performance. Thereby, our work shows it is possible to combine both the ranking and labeling abilities of LLMs through post-processing.
Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation (2024)

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system`s objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose TRIP to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TRIP in catering to diverse users.
Impeding LLM-assisted Cheating in Introductory Programming Assignments via Adversarial Perturbation (2024)

While Large language model (LLM)-based programming assistants such as CoPilot and ChatGPT can help improve the productivity of professional software developers, they can also facilitate cheating in introductory computer programming courses. Assuming instructors have limited control over the industrial-strength models, this paper investigates the baseline performance of 5 widely used LLMs on a collection of introductory programming problems, examines adversarial perturbations to degrade their performance, and describes the results of a user study aimed at measuring the efficacy of such perturbations in hindering actual code generation for introductory programming assignments. The user study suggests that i) perturbations combinedly reduced the average correctness score by 77{\%}, ii) the drop in correctness caused by these perturbations was affected based on their detectability.
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024)

With contributions from the open-source community, a vast amount of instruction tuning (IT) data has emerged. Given the significant resource allocation required by training and evaluating models, it is advantageous to have an efficient method for selecting high-quality IT data. However, existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. In this paper, we propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). CaR consists of two steps. The first step involves ranking instruction pairs using a scoring model that is well aligned with expert preferences (achieving an accuracy of 84.25{\%}). The second step involves preserving dataset diversity through a clustering process. In our experiment, CaR selected a subset containing only 1.96{\%} of Alpaca`s IT data, yet the underlying AlpaCaR model trained on this subset outperforms Alpaca by an average of 32.1{\%} in GPT-4 evaluations. Furthermore, our method utilizes small models (550M parameters) and requires only 11.2{\%} of the monetary cost compared to existing methods, making it easily deployable in industrial scenarios.
On the Influence of Gender and Race in Romantic Relationship Prediction from Large Language Models (2024)

We study the presence of heteronormative biases and prejudice against interracial romantic relationships in large language models by performing controlled name-replacement experiments for the task of relationship prediction. We show that models are less likely to predict romantic relationships for (a) same-gender character pairs than different-gender pairs; and (b) intra/inter-racial character pairs involving Asian names as compared to Black, Hispanic, or White names. We examine the contextualized embeddings of first names and find that gender for Asian names is less discernible than non-Asian names. We discuss the social implications of our findings, underlining the need to prioritize the development of inclusive and equitable technology.
EmphAssess : a Prosodic Benchmark on Assessing Emphasis Transfer in Speech-to-Speech Models (2024)

We introduce EmphAssess, a prosodic benchmark designed to evaluate the capability of speech-to-speech models to encode and reproduce prosodic emphasis. We apply this to two tasks: speech resynthesis and speech-to-speech translation. In both cases, the benchmark evaluates the ability of the model to encode emphasis in the speech input and accurately reproduce it in the output, potentially across a change of speaker and language. As part of the evaluation pipeline, we introduce EmphaClass, a new model that classifies emphasis at the frame or word level.
On Fake News Detection with LLM Enhanced Semantics Mining (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as valuable tools for enhancing textual features in various text-related tasks. Despite their superiority in capturing the lexical semantics between tokens for text analysis, our preliminary study on two popular LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT and Llama2, showcases that simply applying the news embeddings from LLMs is ineffective for fake news detection. Such embeddings only encapsulate the language styles between tokens. Meanwhile, the high-level semantics among named entities and topics, which reveal the deviating patterns of fake news, have been ignored. Therefore, we propose a topic model together with a set of specially designed prompts to extract topics and real entities from LLMs and model the relations among news, entities, and topics as a heterogeneous graph to facilitate investigating news semantics. We then propose a Generalized Page-Rank model and a consistent learning criteria for mining the local and global semantics centered on each news piece through the adaptive propagation of features across the graph. Our model shows superior performance on five benchmark datasets over seven baseline methods and the efficacy of the key ingredients has been thoroughly validated.
On Sensitivity of Learning with Limited Labelled Data to the Effects of Randomness: Impact of Interactions and Systematic Choices (2024)

While learning with limited labelled data can effectively deal with a lack of labels, it is also sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness introduced by so-called randomness factors (i.e., non-deterministic decisions such as choice or order of samples). We propose and formalise a method to systematically investigate the effects of individual randomness factors while taking the interactions (dependence) between them into consideration. To this end, our method mitigates the effects of other factors while observing how the performance varies across multiple runs. Applying our method to multiple randomness factors across in-context learning and fine-tuning approaches on 7 representative text classification tasks and meta-learning on 3 tasks, we show that: 1) disregarding interactions between randomness factors in existing works led to inconsistent findings due to incorrect attribution of the effects of randomness factors, such as disproving the consistent sensitivity of in-context learning to sample order even with random sample selection; and 2) besides mutual interactions, the effects of randomness factors, especially sample order, are also dependent on more systematic choices unexplored in existing works, such as number of classes, samples per class or choice of prompt format.
Evaluating the Instruction-Following Robustness of Large Language Models to Prompt Injection (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in instruction-following, making them increasingly integral to various applications. However, this capability introduces the risk of prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions are embedded in the input to trigger unintended actions or content. Understanding the robustness of LLMs against such attacks is critical for ensuring their safe deployment. In this work, we establish a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of instruction-following LLMs against prompt injection attacks, assessing their ability to discern which instructions to follow and which to disregard. Through extensive experiments with leading instruction-following LLMs, we reveal significant vulnerabilities, particularly in models that mis-follow injected instructions. Our results show that certain models are excessively inclined to prioritize embedded instructions in prompts, often focusing on the latter parts of the prompt without fully understanding the overall context. Conversely, models that exhibit stronger contextual understanding and instruction-following capabilities tend to be more easily compromised by injected instructions. These findings highlight the need to balance improving LLMs' instruction-following abilities with enhancing their overall comprehension of prompts, to prevent mis-following inappropriate instructions. We hope our analysis provides valuable insights into these vulnerabilities, contributing to the development of more robust solutions in the future.
A Study of Nationality Bias in Names and Perplexity using Off-the-Shelf Affect-related Tweet Classifiers (2024)

In this paper, we apply a method to quantify biases associated with named entities from various countries. We create counterfactual examples with small perturbations on target-domain data instead of relying on templates or specific datasets for bias detection. On widely used classifiers for subjectivity analysis, including sentiment, emotion, hate speech, and offensive text using Twitter data, our results demonstrate positive biases related to the language spoken in a country across all classifiers studied. Notably, the presence of certain country names in a sentence can strongly influence predictions, up to a 23{\%} change in hate speech detection and up to a 60{\%} change in the prediction of negative emotions such as anger. We hypothesize that these biases stem from the training data of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and find correlations between affect predictions and PLMs likelihood in English and unknown languages like Basque and Maori, revealing distinct patterns with exacerbate correlations. Further, we followed these correlations in-between counterfactual examples from a same sentence to remove the syntactical component, uncovering interesting results suggesting the impact of the pre-training data was more important for English-speaking-country names.
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024)

LLMs acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. To investigate alignment tax, we conducted experiments with existing RLHF algorithms using OpenLLaMA-3B, which revealed a pronounced alignment tax in NLP tasks. Whereas, despite various techniques to mitigate forgetting, they are often at odds with the RLHF performance, leading to a trade-off between alignment performance and forgetting mitigation, leading to an alignment-forgetting trade-off. In this paper we show that model averaging, which simply interpolates between pre and post RLHF model weights, surprisingly achieves the most strongest alignment-forgetting Pareto front among a wide range of competing methods. To understand its effectiveness, we offer theoretical insights into model averaging, revealing that it enhances performance Pareto front by increasing feature diversity on the layers where tasks share overlapped feature spaces. Empirical evidence corroborates our analysis by showing the benefits of averaging low-level transformer layers. Building on the analysis and the observation that averaging different layers of the transformer leads to significantly different alignment-forgetting trade-offs, we propose Heterogeneous Model Averaging (HMA) to Heterogeneously find various combination ratios of model layers. HMA seeks to maximize the alignment performance while incurring minimal alignment tax. Moreover, we validate HMA`s performance across a range of RLHF algorithms over OpenLLaMA-3B and further extend our findings to Mistral-7B which is evaluated by open-sourced preference model and GPT4. Code available here.
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations (2024)

With the growing popularity of general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), comes a need for more global explanations of model behaviors. Concept-based explanations arise as a promising avenue for explaining high-level patterns learned by LLMs. Yet their evaluation poses unique challenges, especially due to their non-local nature and high dimensional representation in a model`s hidden space. Current methods approach concepts from different perspectives, lacking a unified formalization. This makes evaluating the core measures of concepts, namely faithfulness or readability, challenging. To bridge the gap, we introduce a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations' settings. Based on this, we quantify the faithfulness of a concept explanation via perturbation. We ensure adequate perturbation in the high-dimensional space for different concepts via an optimization problem. Readability is approximated via an automatic and deterministic measure, quantifying the coherence of patterns that maximally activate a concept while aligning with human understanding. Finally, based on measurement theory, we apply a meta-evaluation method for evaluating these measures, generalizable to other types of explanations or tasks as well. Extensive experimental analysis has been conducted to inform the selection of explanation evaluation measures.
Personality-aware Student Simulation for Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (2024)

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) can provide personalized and self-paced learning experience. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) further enables better human-machine interaction, and facilitates the development of conversational ITSs in various disciplines such as math and language learning. In dialogic teaching, recognizing and adapting to individual characteristics can significantly enhance student engagement and learning efficiency. However, characterizing and simulating student`s persona remain challenging in training and evaluating conversational ITSs. In this work, we propose a framework to construct profiles of different student groups by refining and integrating both cognitive and noncognitive aspects, and leverage LLMs for personality-aware student simulation in a language learning scenario. We further enhance the framework with multi-aspect validation, and conduct extensive analysis from both teacher and student perspectives. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art LLMs can produce diverse student responses according to the given language ability and personality traits, and trigger teacher`s adaptive scaffolding strategies.
MSI-Agent: Incorporating Multi-Scale Insight into Embodied Agents for Superior Planning and Decision-Making (2024)

Insight gradually becomes a crucial form of long-term memory for an agent. However, the emergence of irrelevant insight and the lack of general insight can greatly undermine the effectiveness of insight. To solve this problem, in this paper, we introduce **M**ulti-**S**cale **I**nsight Agent (MSI-Agent), an embodied agent designed to improve LLMs' planning and decision-making ability by summarizing and utilizing insight effectively across different scales. MSI achieves this through the experience selector, insight generator, and insight selector. Leveraging a three-part pipeline, MSI can generate task-specific and high-level insight, store it in a database, and then use relevant insight from it to aid in decision-making. Our experiments show that MSI outperforms another insight strategy when planning by GPT3.5. Moreover, We delve into the strategies for selecting seed experience and insight, aiming to provide LLM with more useful and relevant insight for better decision-making. Our observations also indicate that MSI exhibits better robustness when facing domain-shifting scenarios.
CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds (2024)

Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers' interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.
Tokenization Is More Than Compression (2024)

Tokenization is a foundational step in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, bridging raw text and language models. Existing tokenization approaches like Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) originate from the field of data compression, and it has been suggested that the effectiveness of BPE stems from its ability to condense text into a relatively small number of tokens. We test the hypothesis that fewer tokens lead to better downstream performance by introducing PathPiece, a new tokenizer that segments a document`s text into the minimum number of tokens for a given vocabulary. Through extensive experimentation we find this hypothesis not to be the case, casting doubt on the understanding of the reasons for effective tokenization. To examine which other factors play a role, we evaluate design decisions across all three phases of tokenization: pre-tokenization, vocabulary construction, and segmentation, offering new insights into the design of effective tokenizers. Specifically, we illustrate the importance of pre-tokenization and the benefits of using BPE to initialize vocabulary construction. We train 64 language models with varying tokenization, ranging in size from 350M to 2.4B parameters, all of which are made publicly available.
FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming (2024)

Warning: this paper contains content that may be inappropriate or offensive.As generative models become available for public use in various applications, testing and analyzing vulnerabilities of these models has become a priority. In this work, we propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. Our framework uses in-context learning in a feedback loop to red team models and trigger them into unsafe content generation. In particular, taking text-to-image models as target models, we explore different feedback mechanisms to automatically learn effective and diverse adversarial prompts. Our experiments demonstrate that even with enhanced safety features, Stable Diffusion (SD) models are vulnerable to our adversarial prompts, raising concerns on their robustness in practical uses. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective for red teaming text-to-text models.
Successfully Guiding Humans with Imperfect Instructions by Highlighting Potential Errors and Suggesting Corrections (2024)

Language models will inevitably err in situations with which they are unfamiliar. However, by effectively communicating uncertainties, they can still guide humans toward making sound decisions in those contexts. We demonstrate this idea by developing HEAR, a system that can successfully guide humans in simulated residential environments despite generating potentially inaccurate instructions. Diverging from systems that provide users with only the instructions they generate, HEAR warns users of potential errors in its instructions and suggests corrections. This rich uncertainty information effectively prevents misguidance and reduces the search space for users. Evaluation with 80 users shows that HEAR achieves a 13{\%} increase in success rate and a 29{\%} reduction in final location error distance compared to only presenting instructions to users. Interestingly, we find that offering users possibilities to explore, HEAR motivates them to make more attempts at the task, ultimately leading to a higher success rate. To our best knowledge, this work is the first to show the practical benefits of uncertainty communication in a long-horizon sequential decision-making problem.
Parameter-Efficient Sparsity Crafting from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts for Instruction Tuning on General Tasks (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable proficiency in general natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Instruction tuning, a successful paradigm, enhances the ability of LLMs to follow natural language instructions and exhibit robust generalization across general tasks. However, these models often encounter performance limitations across multiple tasks due to constrained model capacity. Expanding this capacity during the instruction tuning phase poses significant challenges. To address this issue, we introduce parameter-efficient sparsity crafting (PESC), which crafts dense models into sparse models using the mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. PESC integrates adapters into the MoE layers of sparse models, differentiating experts without altering the individual weights within these layers. This method significantly reduces computational costs and GPU memory requirements, facilitating model capacity expansion through a minimal parameter increase when guaranteeing the quality of approximation in function space compared to original sparse upcycling. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the PESC method. Using PESC during instruction tuning, our best sparse model outperforms other sparse and dense models and exhibits superior general capabilities compared to GPT-3.5.Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/Parameter-Efficient-MoE.