ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AttributionBench: How Hard is Automatic Attribution Evaluation? (2024)

Modern generative search engines enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) responses by providing cited evidence. However, evaluating the answer`s attribution, i.e., whether every claim within the generated responses is fully supported by its cited evidence, remains an open problem. This verification, traditionally dependent on costly human evaluation, underscores the urgent need for automatic attribution evaluation methods. To bridge the gap in the absence of standardized benchmarks for these methods, we present AttributionBench, a comprehensive benchmark compiled from various existing attribution datasets. Our extensive experiments on AttributionBench reveal the challenges of automatic attribution evaluation, even for state-of-the-art LLMs. Specifically, our findings show that even a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 only achieves around 80{\%} macro-F1 under a binary classification formulation. A detailed analysis of more than 300 error cases indicates that a majority of failures stem from the model`s inability to process nuanced information, and the discrepancy between the information the model has access to and that human annotators do.
Diffusion Guided Language Modeling (2024)

Current language models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in text generation. However, for many applications it is desirable to control attributes, such as sentiment, or toxicity, of the generated language{---}ideally tailored towards each specific use case and target audience. For auto-regressive language models, existing guidance methods are prone to decoding errors that cascade during generation and degrade performance. In contrast, text diffusion models can easily be guided with, for example, a simple linear sentiment classifier{---}however they do suffer from significantly higher perplexity than auto-regressive alternatives. In this paper we use a guided diffusion model to produce a latent proposal that steers an auto-regressive language model to generate text with desired properties. Our model inherits the unmatched fluency of the auto-regressive approach and the plug-and-play flexibility of diffusion. We show that it outperforms previous plug-and-play guidance methods across a wide range of benchmark data sets. Further, controlling a new attribute in our framework is reduced to training a single logistic regression classifier.
InstructEd: Soft-Instruction Tuning for Model Editing with Hops (2024)

The task of model editing becomes popular for correcting inaccurate or outdated parametric knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there are major limitations of state of the art (SOTA) model editing methods, including the excessive memorization issue caused by the direct editing methods, as well as the error propagation and knowledge conflict issues from the memory enhancement methods, resulting in hindering models' *portability*, e.g., the ability to transfer the new knowledge to related one-hop or multi-hop content. To address these issues, we propose the InstructEd method, the idea of which is to insert soft instructions into the attention module so as to facilitate interactions between instructions and questions and to understand and utilize new facts. Our main findings are: (i) InstructEd has achieved SOTA performance on three datasets for one-hop/multi-hop evaluation with LLaMAs and GPT2, achieving 10{\%} (5{\%}) improvement in one-hop (multi-hop) model editing.(ii) Different from earlier methods on editing parameters in FFN, we show that editing attention can also help. (iii) Model editing is highly related to retrieval augmented methods, which can help improve the locality of model editing while slightly decrease the editing performance with hops.
TLCR: Token-Level Continuous Reward for Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2024)

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages human preference data to train language models to align more closely with human essence. These human preference data, however, are labeled at the sequence level, creating a mismatch between sequence-level preference labels and tokens, which are autoregressively generated from the language model. Although several recent approaches have tried to provide token-level (i.e., dense) rewards for each individual token, these typically rely on predefined discrete reward values (e.g., positive: +1, negative: -1, neutral: 0), failing to account for varying degrees of preference inherent to each token. To address this limitation, we introduce TLCR (Token-Level Continuous Reward) for RLHF, which incorporates a discriminator trained to distinguish positive and negative tokens, and the confidence of the discriminator is used to assign continuous rewards to each token considering the context. Extensive experiments show that our proposed TLCR leads to consistent performance improvements over previous sequence-level or token-level discrete rewards on open-ended generation benchmarks.
Found in the middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization (2024)

Large language models (LLMs), even when specifically trained to process long input contexts, struggle to capture relevant information located in the middle of their input. This phenomenon has been known as the lost-in-the-middle problem. In this work, we make three contributions. First, we set out to understand the factors that cause this phenomenon. In doing so, we establish a connection between lost-in-the-middle to LLMs' intrinsic attention bias: LLMs exhibit an U-shaped attention bias where the tokens at the beginning and at the end of its input receive higher attention, regardless of their relevance. Second, we mitigate this positional bias through a calibration mechanism, found-in-the-middle, that allows the model to attend to contexts faithfully according to their relevance, even though when they are in the middle. Third, we show found-in-the-middle not only achieves better performance in locating relevant information within a long context, but also eventually leads to improved retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) performance across various tasks, outperforming existing methods by up to 10 percentage point. These findings open up future directions in understanding LLM attention bias and its potential consequences.
S3-DST: Structured Open-Domain Dialogue Segmentation and State Tracking in the Era of LLMs (2024)

Traditional Dialogue State Tracking (DST) has focused on tracking preferences and intents in conversations centered around specific tasks (e.g. booking services). These conventional systems assume a relatively restricted conversation flow in which each turn gradually offers new information. However, advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in more versatile open-domain chat systems in which extended dialogue sessions encompassing numerous tasks and topics are common{---}in turn requiring new conversational tracking tools in order to successfully orchestrate such systems. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel approach combining dialogue segmentation and state tracking within open-domain dialogues, tailored for zero-shot applications appropriate to a true open-domain dialogue system. Our proposed method S3-DST employs a unique structured prompting technique and *Pre-Analytical Recollection*, a novel grounding mechanism we designed for improving long context tracking. Tested on proprietary anonymized open-domain dialogue datasets as well as publicly available DST and segmentation datasets, S3-DST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, showcasing its effectiveness and adaptability state tracking in the next wave of LLM-based chat systems. We also release S3-DST annotations with GPT-4 on a curated subset of LMSYS-Chat-1M to be used as a testbed to fuel research in this direction.
Set the Clock: Temporal Alignment of Pretrained Language Models (2024)

Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. This work investigates the temporal chaos of pretrained LMs and explores various methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time, which we call {\textquotedblleft}temporal alignment.{\textquotedblright} To do this, we first automatically construct a dataset containing 20K time-sensitive questions and their answers for each year from 2000 to 2023. Based on this dataset, we empirically show that pretrained LMs (e.g., LLaMa2), despite having a recent pretraining cutoff (e.g., 2022), mostly answer questions using earlier knowledge (e.g., in 2019). We then develop several methods, from prompting to finetuning, to align LMs to use their most recent knowledge when answering questions, and investigate various factors in this alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning LLaMa2 to the year 2022 can enhance its performance by up to 62{\%} according to that year`s answers. This improvement occurs even without explicitly mentioning time information, indicating the possibility of aligning models' internal sense of time after pretraining. Finally, we find that alignment to a historical time is also possible, with up to $2.8\times$ the performance of the unaligned LM in 2010 if finetuning models to that year. These findings hint at the sophistication of LMs' internal knowledge organization and the necessity of tuning them properly.
From One to Many: Expanding the Scope of Toxicity Mitigation in Language Models (2024)

To date, toxicity mitigation in language models has almost entirely been focused on single-language settings. As language models embrace multilingual capabilities, it`s crucial our safety measures keep pace. Recognizing this research gap, our approach expands the scope of conventional toxicity mitigation to address the complexities presented by multiple languages. In the absence of sufficient annotated datasets across languages, we employ translated data to evaluate and enhance our mitigation techniques. We also compare finetuning mitigation approaches against retrieval-augmented techniques under both static and continual toxicity mitigation scenarios. This allows us to examine the effects of translation quality and the cross-lingual transfer on toxicity mitigation. We also explore how model size and data quantity affect the success of these mitigation efforts. Covering nine languages, our study represents a broad array of linguistic families and levels of resource availability, ranging from high to mid-resource languages. Through comprehensive experiments, we provide insights into the complexities of multilingual toxicity mitigation, offering valuable insights and paving the way for future research in this increasingly important field.
Here`s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge (2024)

The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks, where hidden malicious behaviors are triggered by specific inputs, compromising natural language processing (NLP) system integrity and reliability. This paper suggests that merging a backdoored model with other homogeneous models can significantly remediate backdoor vulnerabilities even if such models are not entirely secure. In our experiments, we verify our hypothesis on various models (BERT-Base, RoBERTa-Large, Llama2-7B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (SST-2, OLID, AG News, and QNLI). Compared to multiple advanced defensive approaches, our method offers an effective and efficient inference-stage defense against backdoor attacks on classification and instruction-tuned tasks without additional resources or specific knowledge. Our approach consistently outperforms recent advanced baselines, leading to an average of about 75{\%} reduction in the attack success rate. Since model merging has been an established approach for improving model performance, the extra advantage it provides regarding defense can be seen as a cost-free bonus.
Enhancing Sentence Simplification in Portuguese: Leveraging Paraphrases, Context, and Linguistic Features (2024)

Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.
How Far can 100 Samples Go? Unlocking Zero-Shot Translation with Tiny Multi-Parallel Data (2024)

Zero-shot translation aims to translate between language pairs not seen during training in Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) and is widely considered an open problem. A common, albeit resource-consuming, solution is to add as many related translation directions as possible to the training corpus. In this paper, we show that for an English-centric model, surprisingly large zero-shot improvements can be achieved by simply fine-tuning with a very small amount of multi-parallel data. For example, on the EC30 dataset, we obtain up to +21.7 ChrF++ non-English overall improvements (870 directions) by using only 100 multi-parallel samples while preserving English-centric translation quality. This performance exceeds M2M100 by an average of 5.9 ChrF++ in the involved non-English directions. When investigating the size effect of fine-tuning data on translation quality, we found that already a small, randomly sampled set of fine-tuning directions is sufficient to achieve comparable improvements. The resulting non-English performance is close to the complete translation upper bound. Even in a minimal setting{---}fine-tuning with only one single sample{---}the well-known off-target issue is almost completely resolved, explaining parts{---}but not all{---}of the observed improvements in translation quality.
Toward Reliable Ad-hoc Scientific Information Extraction: A Case Study on Two Materials Dataset (2024)

We explore the ability of GPT-4 to perform ad-hoc schema-based information extraction from scientific literature. We assess specifically whether it can, with a basic one-shot prompting approach over the full text of the included manusciprts, replicate two existing material science datasets, one pertaining to multi-principal element alloys (MPEAs), and one to silicate diffusion. We collaborate with materials scientists to perform a detailed manual error analysis to assess where and why the model struggles to faithfully extract the desired information, and draw on their insights to suggest research directions to address this broadly important task.
Structural Optimization Ambiguity and Simplicity Bias in Unsupervised Neural Grammar Induction (2024)

Neural parameterization has significantly advanced unsupervised grammar induction. However, training these models with a traditional likelihood loss for all possible parses exacerbates two issues: 1) *structural optimization ambiguity* that arbitrarily selects one among structurally ambiguous optimal grammars despite the specific preference of gold parses, and 2) *structural simplicity bias* that leads a model to underutilize rules to compose parse trees. These challenges subject unsupervised neural grammar induction (UNGI) to inevitable prediction errors, high variance, and the necessity for extensive grammars to achieve accurate predictions. This paper tackles these issues, offering a comprehensive analysis of their origins. As a solution, we introduce *sentence-wise parse-focusing* to reduce the parse pool per sentence for loss evaluation, using the structural bias from pre-trained parsers on the same dataset.In unsupervised parsing benchmark tests, our method significantly improves performance while effectively reducing variance and bias toward overly simplistic parses. Our research promotes learning more compact, accurate, and consistent explicit grammars, facilitating better interpretability.
LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction and Localization (2024)

Large Language Models (LLM) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), improving state-of-the-art and exhibiting emergent capabilities across various tasks. However, their application in extracting information from visually rich documents, which is at the core of many document processing workflows and involving the extraction of key entities from semi-structured documents, has not yet been successful. The main obstacles to adopting LLMs for this task include the absence of layout encoding within LLMs, which is critical for high quality extraction, and the lack of a grounding mechanism to localize the predicted entities within the document. In this paper, we introduce Language Model-based Document Information EXtraction and Localization (LMDX), a methodology to reframe the document information extraction task for a LLM. LMDX enables extraction of singular, repeated, and hierarchical entities, both with and without training data, while providing grounding guarantees and localizing the entities within the document. Finally, we apply LMDX to the PaLM 2-S and Gemini Pro LLMs and evaluate it on VRDU and CORD benchmarks, setting a new state-of-the-art and showing how LMDX enables the creation of high quality, data-efficient parsers.
DBQR-QA: A Question Answering Dataset on a Hybrid of Database Querying and Reasoning (2024)

This paper introduces the Database Querying and Reasoning Dataset for Question Answering (DBQR-QA), aimed at addressing the gap in current question-answering (QA) research by emphasizing the essential processes of database querying and reasoning to answer questions. Specifically designed to accommodate sequential questions and multi-hop queries, DBQR-QA more accurately mirrors the dynamics of real-world information retrieval and analysis, with a particular focus on the financial reports of US companies. The dataset`s construction, the challenges encountered during its development, the performance of large language models on this dataset, and a human evaluation are thoroughly discussed to illustrate the dataset`s complexity and highlight future research directions in querying and reasoning tasks.
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024)

We introduce NoteChat, a novel cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate patient-physician dialogues. NoteChat embodies the principle that an ensemble of role-specific LLMs, through structured role-play and strategic prompting, can perform their assigned roles more effectively. The synergy among these role-playing LLMs results in a cohesive and efficient dialogue generation. Evaluation on MTS-dialogue, a benchmark dataset for patient-physician dialogues-note pairs, shows that models trained with the augmented synthetic patient-physician dialogues by NoteChat outperforms other state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation demonstrates that NoteChat substantially surpasses state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 up to 22.78{\%} by domain experts in generating superior synthetic patient-physician dialogues based on clinical notes. NoteChat has the potential to engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout.
Model Editing at Scale leads to Gradual and Catastrophic Forgetting (2024)

Editing knowledge in large language models is an attractive capability that allows us to correct incorrectly learned facts during pre-training, as well as update the model with an ever-growing list of new facts. While existing model editing techniques have shown promise, they are usually evaluated using metrics for reliability, specificity and generalization over one or few edits. We argue that for model editing to have practical utility, we must be able to make multiple edits to the same model. With this in mind, we evaluate current model editing methods at scale, focusing on two state of the art methods - ROME and MEMIT. With the lens of scalability, we evaluate model editing methods for three crucial properties - editing proficiency, fact forgetting and downstream performance. We find that as a model is edited sequentially with multiple facts, it continually becomes less editable, forgets previously edited facts and loses the ability to perform downstream tasks. For ROME and MEMIT, this {\textquotedblleft}forgetting{\textquotedblright} happens in two phases - an initial gradual but progressive forgetting phase followed by an abrupt or catastrophic forgetting. Both gradual and catastrophic forgetting limit the usefulness of model editing methods at scale - the former makes model editing less effective as multiple edits are made to the model while the latter caps the scalability of such model editing methods. Our analysis also highlights other key limitations of ROME and MEMIT at scale. With our work, we push for better evaluation of model editing and development of model editing methods keeping scalability in mind.
3MVRD: Multimodal Multi-task Multi-teacher Visually-Rich Form Document Understanding (2024)

This paper presents a groundbreaking multimodal, multi-task, multi-teacher joint-grained knowledge distillation model for visually-rich form document understanding. The model is designed to leverage insights from both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels by facilitating a nuanced correlation between token and entity representations, addressing the complexities inherent in form documents. Additionally, we introduce new inter-grained and cross-grained loss functions to further refine diverse multi-teacher knowledge distillation transfer process, presenting distribution gaps and a harmonised understanding of form documents. Through a comprehensive evaluation across publicly available form document understanding datasets, our proposed model consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its efficacy in handling the intricate structures and content of visually complex form documents.