yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Many users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) – which jointly learns a vision and language model – is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters’ visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, it opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
Title: Acquiring Clean Language Models from Backdoor Poisoned Datasets by Downscaling Frequency Space
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: Despite the notable success of language models (LMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the reliability of LMs is susceptible to backdoor attacks. Prior research attempts to mitigate backdoor learning while training the LMs on the poisoned dataset, yet struggles against complex backdoor attacks in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the learning mechanisms of backdoor LMs in the frequency space by Fourier analysis. Our findings indicate that the backdoor mapping presented on the poisoned datasets exhibits a more discernible inclination towards lower frequency compared to clean mapping, resulting in the faster convergence of backdoor mapping. To alleviate this dilemma, we propose Multi-Scale Low-Rank Adaptation (MuScleLoRA), which deploys multiple radial scalings in the frequency space with low-rank adaptation to the target model and further aligns the gradients when updating parameters. Through downscaling in the frequency space, MuScleLoRA encourages the model to prioritize the learning of relatively high-frequency clean mapping, consequently mitigating backdoor learning. Experimental results demonstrate that MuScleLoRA outperforms baselines significantly. Notably, MuScleLoRA reduces the average success rate of diverse backdoor attacks to below 15% across multiple datasets and generalizes to various backbone LMs, including BERT, RoBERTa, and Llama2. The codes are publicly available at Anonymous.
Title: ANAH: Analytical Annotation of Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Reducing the ‘\textit{hallucination}' problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for their wide applications. A comprehensive and fine-grained measurement of the hallucination is the first key step for the governance of this issue but is under-explored in the community.Thus, we present \textbf{ANAH}, a bilingual dataset that offers \textbf{AN}alytical \textbf{A}nnotation of \textbf{H}allucinations in LLMs within Generative Question Answering.Each answer sentence in our dataset undergoes rigorous annotation, involving the retrieval of a reference fragment, the judgment of the hallucination type, and the correction of hallucinated content. ANAH consists of ~12k sentence-level annotations for ~4.3k LLM responses covering over 700 topics, constructed by a human-in-the-loop pipeline.Thanks to the fine granularity of the hallucination annotations, we can quantitatively confirm that the hallucinations of LLMs progressively accumulate in the answer and use ANAH to train and evaluate hallucination annotators. We conduct extensive experiments on studying generative and discriminative annotators and show that, although current open-source LLMs have difficulties in fine-grained hallucination annotation, the generative annotator trained with ANAH can surpass all open-source LLMs and GPT-3.5, obtain performance competitive with GPT-4, and exhibits better generalization ability on unseen questions.
Title: Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Inspired by the exceptional general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers have begun to explore their application in pioneering the next generation of recommender systems — systems that are conversational, explainable, and controllable. However, existing literature primarily concentrates on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template, often overlooking the diversity of recommendation tasks and the ability of LLMs to follow recommendation-specific instructions. To address this gap, we first introduce a collection of supervised learning tasks, augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model, aimed at explicitly improving LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. Next, we propose a reinforcement learning-based alignment procedure to enhance LLMs’ generalization ability. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy.
Title: Revealing the Parametric Knowledge of Language Models: A Unified Framework for Attribution Methods
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Language Models (LMs) acquire parametric knowledge from their training process, embedding it within their weights. The increasing scalability of LMs, however, poses significant challenges for understanding a model’s inner workings and further for updating or correcting this embedded knowledge without the significant cost of retraining. This underscores the importance of unveiling exactly what knowledge is stored and its association with specific model components. Instance Attribution (IA) and Neuron Attribution (NA) offer insights into this training-acquired knowledge, though they have not been compared systematically. Our study introduces a novel evaluation framework to quantify and compare the knowledge revealed by IA and NA. To align the results of the methods we introduce the attribution method NA-Instances to apply NA for retrieving influential training instances, and IA-Neurons to discover important neurons of influential instances discovered by IA. We further propose a comprehensive list of faithfulness tests to evaluate the comprehensiveness and sufficiency of the explanations provided by both methods. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that NA generally reveals more diverse and comprehensive information regarding the LM’s parametric knowledge compared to IA. Nevertheless, IA provides unique and valuable insights into the LM’s parametric knowledge, which are not revealed by NA. Our findings further suggest the potential of a synergistic approach of combining the diverse findings of IA and NA for a more holistic understanding of an LM’s parametric knowledge.
Title: Full Parameter Fine-tuning for Large Language Models with Limited Resources
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) but demand massive GPU resources for training. Lowering the threshold for LLMs training would encourage greater participation from researchers, benefiting both academia and society. While existing approaches have focused on parameter-efficient fine-tuning, which tunes or adds a small number of parameters, few have addressed the challenge of tuning the full parameters of LLMs with limited resources. In this work, we propose a new optimizer, LOw-Memory Optimization (LOMO), which fuses the gradient computation and the parameter update in one step to reduce memory usage. By integrating LOMO with existing memory saving techniques, we reduce memory usage to 10.8% compared to the standard approach (DeepSpeed solution). Consequently, our approach enables the full parameter fine-tuning of a 65B model on a single machine with 8 \times RTX 3090, each with 24GB memory. Code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LOMO.
Title: M^3CoT: A Novel Benchmark for Multi-Domain Multi-step Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) requires models to leverage knowledge from both textual and visual modalities for step-by-step reasoning, which gains increasing attention. Nevertheless, the current MCoT benchmark still faces some challenges: (1) absence of visual modal reasoning, (2) single-step visual modal reasoning, and (3) domain missing, thereby hindering the development of MCoT. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel benchmark (M^3CoT) to address the above challenges, advancing the multi-domain, multi-step, and multi-modal CoT. Additionally, we conduct a thorough evaluation involving abundant MCoT approaches on Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs). In addition, we highlight that the current VLLMs still struggle to correctly reason in M^3CoT and there is a large gap between VLLMs and human performance in M^3CoT, despite their superior results on previous MCoT benchmarks. To our knowledge, we take the first meaningful step toward the multi-domain, multi-step, and multi-modal scenario in MCoT. We hope that M^3CoT will serve as a valuable resource, providing a pioneering foundation in multi-domain, multi-step, multi-modal chain-of-thought research.
Title: Long Context is Not Long at All: A Prospector of Long-Dependency Data for Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) in various applications. However, directly training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient to enhance this capability since some training samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts.In this study, we propose a data mining framework ProLong that can assign each training sample with a long dependency score, which can be used to rank and filter samples that are more advantageous for enhancing long-context modeling abilities in LLM training. Specifically, we first use delta perplexity scores to measure the Dependency Strength between text segments in a given document. Then, we refine this metric based on the Dependency Distance of these segments to incorporate spatial relationships across long contexts. Final results are calibrated with a Dependency Specificity metric to prevent trivial dependencies introduced by repetitive patterns. Moreover, a random sampling approach is proposed to optimize the computational efficiency of ProLong. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks indicate that ProLong effectively identifies documents that carry long dependencies, and LLMs trained on these documents exhibit significantly enhanced long-context modeling capabilities.
Title: Label-Synchronous Neural Transducer for E2E Simultaneous Speech Translation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: While the neural transducer is popular for online speech recognition, simultaneous speech translation (SST) requires both streaming and re-ordering capabilities. This paper presents the LS-Transducer-SST, a label-synchronous neural transducer for SST, which naturally possesses these two properties. The LS-Transducer-SST dynamically decides when to emit translation tokens based on an Auto-regressive Integrate-and-Fire (AIF) mechanism. A latency-controllable AIF is also proposed, which can control the quality-latency trade-off either only during decoding, or it can be used in both decoding and training. The LS-Transducer-SST can naturally utilise monolingual text-only data via its prediction network which helps alleviate the key issue of data sparsity for E2E SST. During decoding, a chunk-based incremental joint decoding technique is designed to refine and expand the search space. Experiments on the Fisher-CallHome Spanish (Es-En) and MuST-C En-De data show that the LS-Transducer-SST gives a better quality-latency trade-off than existing popular methods. For example, the LS-Transducer-SST gives a 3.1/2.9 point BLEU increase (Es-En/En-De) relative to CAAT at a similar latency and a 1.4 s reduction in average lagging latency with similar BLEU scores relative to Wait-k.
Title: Hard Prompts Made Interpretable: Sparse Entropy Regularization for Prompt Tuning with RL
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: With the advent of foundation models, prompt tuning has positioned itself as an important technique for directing model behaviors and eliciting desired responses. Prompt tuning regards selecting appropriate keywords included into the input, thereby adapting to the downstream task without adjusting or fine-tuning the model parameters. There is a wide range of work in prompt tuning, from approaches that directly harness the backpropagated gradient signals from the model, to those employing black-box optimization such as reinforcement learning (RL) methods. Our primary focus is on RLPrompt, which aims to find optimal prompt tokens leveraging soft Q-learning. While the results show promise, we have observed that the prompts frequently appear unnatural, which impedes their interpretability. We address this limitation by using sparse Tsallis entropy regularization, a principled approach to filtering out unlikely tokens from consideration. We extensively evaluate our approach across various tasks, including few-shot text classification, unsupervised text style transfer, and textual inversion from images. The results indicate a notable improvement over baselines, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in addressing the challenges of prompt tuning. Moreover, we show that the prompts discovered using our method are more natural and interpretable compared to those from other baselines.
Title: A Modular Approach for Multimodal Summarization of TV Shows
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: In this paper we address the task of summarizing television shows, which touches key areas in AI research: complex reasoning, multiple modalities, and long narratives. We present a modular approach where separate components perform specialized sub-tasks which we argue affords greater flexibility compared to end-to-end methods. Our modules involve detecting scene boundaries, reordering scenes so as to minimize the number of cuts between different events, converting visual information to text, summarizing the dialogue in each scene, and fusing the scene summaries into a final summary for the entire episode. We also present a new metric, PRISMA (**P**recision and **R**ecall Evaluat**i**on of **s**ummary F**a**cts), to measure both precision and recall of generated summaries, which we decompose into atomic facts. Tested on the recently released SummScreen3D dataset (Papalampidi & Lapata, 2023), our method produces higher quality summaries than comparison models, as measured with ROUGE and our new fact-based metric.
Title: Think Twice: Perspective-Taking Improves Large Language Models’ Theory-of-Mind Capabilities
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Human interactions are deeply rooted in the interplay of thoughts, beliefs, and desires made possible by Theory of Mind (ToM): our cognitive ability to understand the mental states of ourselves and others. Although ToM may come naturally to us, emulating it presents a challenge to even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent improvements to LLMs’ reasoning capabilities from simple yet effective prompting techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have seen limited applicability to ToM. In this paper, we turn to the prominent cognitive science theory “Simulation Theory” to bridge this gap. We introduce SimToM, a novel two-stage prompting framework inspired by Simulation Theory’s notion of perspective-taking. To implement this idea on current ToM benchmarks, SimToM first filters context based on what the character in question knows before answering a question about their mental state. Our approach, which requires no additional training and minimal prompt-tuning, shows substantial improvement over existing methods, and our analysis reveals the importance of perspective-taking to Theory-of-Mind capabilities. Our findings suggest perspective-taking as a promising direction for future research into improving LLMs’ ToM capabilities.
Title: BizBench: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Business and Finance
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Answering questions within business and finance requires reasoning, precision, and a wide-breadth of technical knowledge. Together, these requirements make this domain difficult for large language models (LLMs). We introduce BizBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to reason about realistic financial problems. BizBench comprises eight quantitative reasoning tasks, focusing on question-answering (QA) over financial data via program synthesis. We include three financially-themed code-generation tasks from newly collected and augmented QA data. Additionally, we isolate the reasoning capabilities required for financial QA: reading comprehension of financial text and tables for extracting intermediate values, and understanding financial concepts and formulas needed to calculate complex solutions. Collectively, these tasks evaluate a model’s financial background knowledge, ability to parse financial documents, and capacity to solve problems with code. We conduct an in-depth evaluation of open-source and commercial LLMs, comparing and contrasting the behavior of code-focused and language-focused models. We demonstrate that the current bottleneck in performance is due to LLMs’ limited business and financial understanding, highlighting the value of a challenging benchmark for quantitative reasoning within this domain.
Title: Direct Metric Optimization for Image Captioning through Reward-Weighted Augmented Data Utilization
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: While image captioning is an essential field of vision language models (VLM), a lack of continuity between the learning objective and final performance metrics of VLMs complicates their training and optimization. Reinforcement learning (RL) can directly optimize such metrics, but it is accompanied by a significant computational cost, making it difficult to apply to recent large-scale VLMs. In this paper, we propose Direct Metric Optimization (DMO), which is a lightweight final-metric-optimizing training method. We replace the computationally expensive exploration process in RL with an offline, diverse text data augmentation and show that self-supervised training on reward-weighted augmented data leads to direct and stable metric optimization. Our experiments demonstrate that DMO achieves performance comparable to those of the state-of-the-art RL method while saving hundreds of times more model forwarding iterations and greater amounts of computation time. This suggests that DMO constitutes a promising alternative for metric optimization in the era of large-scale VLMs.
Title: Deciphering Hate: Identifying Hateful Memes and Their Targets
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Internet memes have become a powerful means for individuals to express emotions, thoughts, and perspectives on social media. While often considered as a source of humor and entertainment, memes can also disseminate hateful content targeting individuals or communities. Most existing research focuses on the negative aspects of memes in high-resource languages, overlooking the distinctive challenges associated with low-resource languages like Bengali (also known as Bangla). Furthermore, while previous work on Bengali memes has focused on detecting hateful memes, there has been no work on detecting their targeted entities. To bridge this gap and facilitate research in this arena, we introduce a novel multimodal dataset for Bengali, BHM (Bengali Hateful Memes). The dataset consists of 7,148 memes with Bengali as well as code-mixed captions, tailored for two tasks: (i) detecting hateful memes, and (ii) detecting the social entities they target (i.e., Individual, Organization, Community, and Society). To solve these tasks, we propose DORA (Dual cO-attention fRAmework), a multimodal deep neural network that systematically extracts the significant modality features from the memes and jointly evaluates them with the modality-specific features to understand the context better. Our experiments show that DORA is generalizable on other low-resource hateful meme datasets and outperforms several state-of-the-art rivaling baselines.
Title: Inducing Systematicity in Transformers by Attending to Structurally Quantized Embeddings
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Transformers generalize to novel compositions of structures and entities after being trained on a complex dataset, but easily overfit on datasets of insufficient complexity. We observe that when the training set is sufficiently complex, the model encodes structurally equivalent sentences using a systematic attention pattern. Inspired by this observation, we propose SQ-Transformer (Structurally Quantized) that explicitly encourages systematicity in the embeddings and attention layers even with low-complexity data. At the embedding level, we introduce Structure-oriented Vector Quantization (SoVQ) to cluster word embeddings into several classes of structurally equivalent entities. At the attention level, we devise the Systematic Attention Layer (SAL) and an alternative, Systematically Regularized Layer (SRL) that operate on the quantized word embeddings so that sentences of the same structure are encoded with invariant or similar attention patterns. Empirically, we show SQ-Transformer achieves stronger compositional generalization than the vanilla Transformer on multiple low-complexity semantic parsing and machine translation datasets. In our analysis, we show SoVQ indeed learns a syntactically clustered embedding space, and SAL/SRL induces generalizable attention patterns, altogether leading to improved systematicity.
Title: Label-Efficient Model Selection for Text Generation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Model selection for a given target task can be costly, as it may entail extensive annotation of the quality of outputs of different models. We introduce DiffUse, an efficient method to make an informed decision between candidate text generation models based on preference annotations. DiffUse reduces the required amount of annotations, thus saving valuable time and resources in performing evaluation.DiffUse intelligently selects instances by clustering embeddings that represent the semantic differences between model outputs. Thus, it is able to identify a subset of examples that are more informative for preference decisions. Our method is model-agnostic, and can be applied to any text generation model for selecting between models, prompts and configurations. Moreover, we propose a practical iterative approach for dynamically determining how many instances to annotate. In a series of experiments over hundreds of model pairs, we demonstrate that DiffUse can dramatically reduce the required number of annotations – by up to 75% – while maintaining high evaluation reliability.