ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gold Panning in Vocabulary: An Adaptive Method for Vocabulary Expansion of Domain-Specific LLMs (2024)

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive generation abilities, they frequently struggle when it comes to specialized domains due to their limited domain-specific knowledge. Studies on domain-specific LLMs resort to expanding the vocabulary before fine-tuning on domain-specific corpus, aiming to decrease the sequence length and enhance efficiency during decoding, without thoroughly investigating the results of vocabulary expansion to LLMs over different domains. Our pilot study reveals that expansion with only a subset of the entire vocabulary may lead to superior performance. Guided by the discovery, this paper explores how to identify a vocabulary subset to achieve the optimal results. We introduce VEGAD, an adaptive method that automatically identifies valuable words from a given domain vocabulary. Our method has been validated through experiments on three Chinese datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness. Additionally, we have undertaken comprehensive analyses of the method. The selection of a optimal subset for expansion has shown to enhance performance on both domain-specific tasks and general tasks, showcasing the potential of VEGAD.
Strategic Demonstration Selection for Improved Fairness in LLM In-Context Learning (2024)

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of using in-context learning (ICL) to steer large language models (LLMs) in processing tabular data, a challenging task given the structured nature of such data. Despite advancements in performance, the fairness implications of these methods are less understood. This study investigates how varying demonstrations within ICL prompts influence the fairness outcomes of LLMs. Our findings reveal that deliberately including minority group samples in prompts significantly boosts fairness without sacrificing predictive accuracy. Further experiments demonstrate that the proportion of minority to majority samples in demonstrations affects the trade-off between fairness and prediction accuracy. Based on these insights, we introduce a mitigation technique that employs clustering and evolutionary strategies to curate a diverse and representative sample set from the training data. This approach aims to enhance both predictive performance and fairness in ICL applications. Experimental results validate that our proposed method dramatically improves fairness across various metrics, showing its efficacy in real-world scenarios.
Multi-Dialect Vietnamese: Task, Dataset, Baseline Models and Challenges (2024)

Vietnamese, a low-resource language, is typically categorized into three primary dialect groups that belong to Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam. However, each province within these regions exhibits its own distinct pronunciation variations. Despite the existence of various speech recognition datasets, none of them has provided a fine-grained classification of the 63 dialects specific to individual provinces of Vietnam. To address this gap, we introduce Vietnamese Multi-Dialect (ViMD) dataset, a novel comprehensive dataset capturing the rich diversity of 63 provincial dialects spoken across Vietnam. Our dataset comprises 102.56 hours of audio, consisting of approximately 19,000 utterances, and the associated transcripts contain over 1.2 million words. To provide benchmarks and simultaneously demonstrate the challenges of our dataset, we fine-tune state-of-the-art pre-trained models for two downstream tasks: (1) Dialect identification and (2) Speech recognition. The empirical results suggest two implications including the influence of geographical factors on dialects, and the constraints of current approaches in speech recognition tasks involving multi-dialect speech data. Our dataset is available for research purposes.
Is LLM-as-a-Judge Robust? Investigating Universal Adversarial Attacks on Zero-shot LLM Assessment (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful zero-shot assessors used in real-world situations such as assessing written exams and benchmarking systems. Despite these critical applications, no existing work has analyzed the vulnerability of judge-LLMs to adversarial manipulation. This work presents the first study on the adversarial robustness of assessment LLMs, where we demonstrate that short universal adversarial phrases can be concatenated to deceive judge LLMs to predict inflated scores. Since adversaries may not know or have access to the judge-LLMs, we propose a simple surrogate attack where a surrogate model is first attacked, and the learned attack phrase then transferred to unknown judge-LLMs. We propose a practical algorithm to determine the short universal attack phrases and demonstrate that when transferred to unseen models, scores can be drastically inflated such that irrespective of the assessed text, maximum scores are predicted. It is found that judge-LLMs are significantly more susceptible to these adversarial attacks when used for absolute scoring, as opposed to comparative assessment. Our findings raise concerns on the reliability of LLM-as-a-judge methods, and emphasize the importance of addressing vulnerabilities in LLM assessment methods before deployment in high-stakes real-world scenarios.
Rethinking the Reversal Curse of LLMs: a Prescription from Human Knowledge Reversal (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across diverse domains. However, recent studies reveal that LLMs are plagued by the {\textquotedblleft}reversal curse{\textquotedblright}. Most existing methods rely on aggressive sample permutation and pay little attention to delving into the underlying reasons for this issue, resulting in only partial mitigation. In this paper, inspired by human knowledge reversal, we investigate and quantify the individual influence of three potential reasons on the reversal curse: 1) knowledge clarity, 2) entity correlation modeling, and 3) pairwise relationship reasoning capability. Motivated by the analysis of these reasons, we propose a novel **P**airwise entity **O**rder- and **R**elationship-**E**nhanced (**PORE**) data strategy, which facilitates bidirectional entity correlation modeling and pairwise relationship reasoning to overcome the reversal curse. Specifically, PORE augments the samples with entity order-reversal and semantically preserved question-answer pairs, enhancing the encoding of entity correlations in both directions. PORE also employs entity-interleaved pairwise relationship data, which elevates the model`s capability for relationship reasoning. Additionally, to improve the recall of reverse relationships, we leverage knowledge clarity to construct high-clarity data for PORE. Extensive experimental results on available and two newly assembled datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method in both data-sufficient and -constrained situations.
More Than Catastrophic Forgetting: Integrating General Capabilities For Domain-Specific LLMs (2024)

The performance on general tasks decreases after Large Language Models (LLMs) are fine-tuned on domain-specific tasks, the phenomenon is known as Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). However, this paper presents a further challenge for real application of domain-specific LLMs beyond CF, called General Capabilities Integration (GCI), which necessitates the integration of both the general capabilities and domain knowledge within a single instance. The objective of GCI is not merely to retain previously acquired general capabilities alongside new domain knowledge, but to harmonize and utilize both sets of skills in a cohesive manner to enhance performance on domain-specific tasks. Taking legal domain as an example, we carefully design three groups of training and testing tasks without lacking practicability, and construct the corresponding datasets. To better incorporate general capabilities across domain-specific scenarios, we introduce ALoRA, which utilizes a multi-head attention module upon LoRA, facilitating direct information transfer from preceding tokens to the current one. This enhancement permits the representation to dynamically switch between domain-specific knowledge and general competencies according to the attention. Extensive experiments are conducted on the proposed tasks. The results exhibit the significance of our setting, and the effectiveness of our method.
GENRA: Enhancing Zero-shot Retrieval with Rank Aggregation (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to effectively perform zero-shot document retrieval, a process that typically consists of two steps: i) retrieving relevant documents, and ii) re-ranking them based on their relevance to the query. This paper presents GENRA, a new approach to zero-shot document retrieval that incorporates rank aggregation to improve retrieval effectiveness. Given a query, GENRA first utilizes LLMs to generate informative passages that capture the query`s intent. These passages are then employed to guide the retrieval process, selecting similar documents from the corpus. Next, we use LLMs again for a second refinement step. This step can be configured for either direct relevance assessment of each retrieved document or for re-ranking the retrieved documents. Ultimately, both approaches ensure that only the most relevant documents are kept. Upon this filtered set of documents, we perform multi-document retrieval, generating individual rankings for each document. As a final step, GENRA leverages rank aggregation, combining the individual rankings to produce a single refined ranking. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GENRA improves existing approaches, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in zero-shot retrieval.
XplainLLM: A Knowledge-Augmented Dataset for Reliable Grounded Explanations in LLMs (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language tasks, yet understanding their reasoning processes remains a significant challenge. We address this by introducing XplainLLM, a dataset accompanying an explanation framework designed to enhance LLM transparency and reliability. Our dataset comprises 24,204 instances where each instance interprets the LLM`s reasoning behavior using knowledge graphs (KGs) and graph attention networks (GAT), and includes explanations of LLMs such as the decoder-only Llama-3 and the encoder-only RoBERTa. XplainLLM also features a framework for generating grounded explanations and the \textit{debugger-scores} for multidimensional quality analysis. Our explanations include \textit{why-choose} and \textit{why-not-choose} components, \textit{reason-elements}, and \textit{debugger-scores} that collectively illuminate the LLM`s reasoning behavior. Our evaluations demonstrate XplainLLM`s potential to reduce hallucinations and improve grounded explanation generation in LLMs. XplainLLM is a resource for researchers and practitioners to build trust and verify the reliability of LLM outputs. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
Divide and Conquer Radiology Report Generation via Observation Level Fine-grained Pretraining and Prompt Tuning (2024)

The automation of radiology report generation (RRG) holds immense potential to alleviate radiologists' workloads and improve diagnostic accuracy. Despite advancements in image captioning and vision-language pretraining, RRG remains challenging due to the lengthy and complex nature of radiology reports. In this work, we proposes the Divide and Conquer Radiology Report Generation (DCRRG) model, which breaks down full-text radiology reports into concise observation descriptions. This approach enables the model to capture fine-grained representations from each observation through a two-stage process: an encoding stage focusing on observation prediction tasks to learn fine-grained representations, and a decoding stage for integrating these descriptions into cohesive and comprehensive radiology reports. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that DCRRG achieves significant improvements across all evaluated metrics, underscoring its capability to generate semantically coherent and clinically accurate radiology reports.
SURf: Teaching Large Vision-Language Models to Selectively Utilize Retrieved Information (2024)

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have become pivotal at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. However, the full potential of LVLMs' Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities remains underutilized. Existing works either focus solely on the text modality or are limited to specific tasks. Moreover, most LVLMs struggle to selectively utilize retrieved information and are sensitive to irrelevant or misleading references. To address these challenges, we propose a self-refinement framework designed to teach LVLMs to \textbf{S}electively \textbf{U}tilize \textbf{R}etrieved In\textbf{f}ormation (SURf). Specifically, when given questions that are incorrectly answered by the LVLM backbone, we obtain references that help correct the answers (positive references) and those that do not (negative references). We then fine-tune the LVLM backbone using a combination of these positive and negative references. Our experiments across three tasks and seven datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances LVLMs' ability to effectively utilize retrieved multimodal references and improves their robustness against irrelevant or misleading information. The source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SURf-6433.
UNO Arena for Evaluating Sequential Decision-Making Capability of Large Language Models (2024)

Sequential decision-making refers to algorithms that take into account the dynamics of the environment, where early decisions affect subsequent decisions. With large language models (LLMs) demonstrating powerful capabilities between tasks, we can`t help but ask: Can Current LLMs Effectively Make Sequential Decisions? In order to answer this question, we propose the UNO Arena based on the card game UNO to evaluate the sequential decision-making capability of LLMs and explain in detail why we choose UNO. In UNO Arena, We evaluate the sequential decision-making capability of LLMs dynamically with novel metrics based Monte Carlo methods. We set up random players, DQN-based reinforcement learning players, and LLM players (e.g. GPT-4, Gemini-pro) for comparison testing. Furthermore, in order to improve the sequential decision-making capability of LLMs, we propose the TUTRI player, which can involves having LLMs reflect their own actions with the summary of game history and the game strategy. Numerous experiments demonstrate that the TUTRI player achieves a notable breakthrough in the performance of sequential decision-making compared to the vanilla LLM player.
Middleware for LLMs: Tools Are Instrumental for Language Agents in Complex Environments (2024)

The applications of large language models (LLMs) have expanded well beyond the confines of text processing, signaling a new era where LLMs are envisioned as generalist agents capable of operating within complex environments. These environments are often highly expansive, making it impossible for the LLM to process them within its short-term memory. Motivated by recent research on extending the capabilities of LLMs with tools, we seek to investigate the intriguing potential of tools to augment LLMs in handling such complexity by introducing a novel class of tools, termed *middleware*, to aid in the proactive exploration within these massive environments. Such specialized tools can serve as a middleware layer shielding the LLM from environmental complexity. In two representative complex environments{---}knowledge bases (KBs) and databases{---}we demonstrate the significant potential of augmenting language agents with tools in complex environments. Notably, equipped with the middleware, GPT-4 achieves **2.8**X the performance of the best baseline in tasks requiring access to database content and **2.2**X in KB tasks. Our findings illuminate the path for advancing language agents in real-world applications.
MORPHEUS: Modeling Role from Personalized Dialogue History by Exploring and Utilizing Latent Space (2024)

Personalized Dialogue Generation (PDG) aims to create coherent responses according to roles or personas. Traditional PDG relies on external role data, which can be scarce and raise privacy concerns. Approaches address these issues by extracting role information from dialogue history, which often fail to generically model roles in continuous space. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework Models Roles from Personalized Dialogue History by Exploring and Utilizing Latent Space (MORPHEUS) through a three-stage training process. Specifically, we create a persona codebook to represent roles in latent space compactly, and this codebook is used to construct a posterior distribution of role information. This method enables the model to generalize across roles, allowing the generation of personalized dialogues even for unseen roles. Experiments on both Chinese and English datasets demonstrate that MORPHEUS enhances the extraction of role information, and improves response generation without external role data. Additionally, MORPHEUS can be considered an efficient fine-tuning for large language models.
KnowledgeSG: Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Text Generation with Knowledge Distillation from Server (2024)

The success of large language models (LLMs) facilitate many parties to fine-tune LLMs on their own private data. However, this practice raises privacy concerns due to the memorization of LLMs. Existing solutions, such as utilizing synthetic data for substitution, struggle to simultaneously improve performance and preserve privacy.They either rely on a local model for generation, resulting in a performance decline, or take advantage of APIs, directly exposing the data to API servers. To address this issue, we propose \textit{KnowledgeSG}, a novel client-server framework which enhances synthetic data quality and improves model performance while ensuring privacy. We achieve this by learning local knowledge from the private data with differential privacy (DP) and distilling professional knowledge from the server. Additionally, inspired by federated learning, we transmit models rather than data between the client and server to prevent privacy leakage.Extensive experiments in medical and financial domains demonstrate the effectiveness of *KnowledgeSG*. Our code is now publicly available at https://github.com/wwh0411/KnowledgeSG.
DAMRO: Dive into the Attention Mechanism of LVLM to Reduce Object Hallucination (2024)

Despite the great success of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), they inevitably suffer from hallucination. As we know, both the visual encoder and the Large Language Model (LLM) decoder in LVLMs are Transformer-based, allowing the model to extract visual information and generate text outputs via attention mechanisms. We find that the attention distribution of LLM decoder on image tokens is highly consistent with the visual encoder and both distributions tend to focus on particular background tokens rather than the referred objects in the image. We attribute to the unexpected attention distribution to an inherent flaw in the visual encoder itself, which misguides LLMs to over emphasize the redundant information and generate object hallucination. To address the issue, we propose DAMRO, a novel training-free strategy that **D**ive into **A**ttention **M**echanism of LVLM to **R**educe **O**bject Hallucination. Specifically, our approach employs classification token (CLS) of ViT to filter out high-attention tokens scattered in the background and then eliminate their influence during decoding stage. We evaluate our method on LVLMs including LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT and InstructBLIP, using various benchmarks such as POPE, CHAIR, MME and GPT-4V Aided Evaluation. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces the impact of these outlier tokens, thus effectively alleviating the hallucination of LVLMs.
Unlocking the Future: Exploring Look-Ahead Planning Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2024)

Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been considered in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.
Breaking Language Barriers: Cross-Lingual Continual Pre-Training at Scale (2024)

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides towards Artificial General Intelligence. However, training these models from scratch requires substantial computational resources and vast amounts of text data. In this paper, we explores an alternative approach to constructing a LLM for a new language by continually pre-training (CPT) from existing pre-trained LLMs, instead of using randomly initialized parameters. Based on parallel experiments on 40 model sizes ranging from 40M to 5B parameters, we find that 1) CPT converges faster and saves significant resources in a scalable manner. 2) CPT adheres to an extended scaling law derived from with a joint data-parameter scaling term. 3) The compute-optimal data-parameter allocation for CPT markedly differs based on our estimated scaling factors. 4) The effectiveness of transfer scale is influenced by training duration and linguistic properties, while robust to data replaying, a method that effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in CPT. We hope our findings provide deeper insights into the transferability of LLMs at scale for the research community.
An Empirical Study of Multilingual Reasoning Distillation for Question Answering (2024)

Reasoning is one crucial capability in Large Language Models (LLMs), allowing them to perform complex tasks such as solving math problems and multi-step planning. While reasoning capability can emerge in larger models, smaller ones usually have to rely on distillation to transfer this capability from a larger model. However, recent efforts to distill reasoning capabilities have focused mainly on English, leaving multilingual distillation underexplored. To address this gap, this paper examines existing English reasoning distillation methods that utilize a variety of positive rationales in multilingual settings and proposes d-CoT-nR, a novel approach that incorporates incorrect rationales as additional guidance. Empirical results from multilingual high-school examinations show that d-CoT-nR significantly surpasses the baseline, improving accuracy in unseen languages and correctness in step-by-step reasoning.