yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: VariErr NLI: Separating Annotation Error from Human Label Variation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: Human label variation arises when annotators assign different labels to the same item for valid reasons, while annotation errors occur when labels are assigned for invalid reasons. These two issues are prevalent in NLP benchmarks, yet existing research has studied them in isolation. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no prior work that focuses on teasing apart error from signal, especially in cases where signal is beyond black-and-white.To fill this gap, we introduce a systematic methodology and a new dataset, VariErr (variation versus error), focusing on the NLI task in English. We propose a 2-round annotation procedure with annotators explaining each label and subsequently judging the validity of label-explanation pairs.VariErr contains 7,732 validity judgments on 1,933 explanations for 500 re-annotated MNLI items. We assess the effectiveness of various automatic error detection (AED) methods and GPTs in uncovering errors versus human label variation. We find that state-of-the-art AED methods significantly underperform GPTs and humans. While GPT-4 is the best system, it still falls short of human performance. Our methodology is applicable beyond NLI, offering fertile ground for future research on error versus plausible variation, which in turn can yield better and more trustworthy NLP systems.
Title: Benchmarking Knowledge Boundary for Large Language Models: A Different Perspective on Model Evaluation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: In recent years, substantial advancements have been made in the development of large language models, achieving remarkable performance across diverse tasks.To evaluate the knowledge ability of language models, previous studies have proposed lots of benchmarks based on question-answering pairs.We argue that it is not reliable and comprehensive to evaluate language models with a fixed question or limited paraphrases as the query, since language models are sensitive to prompt.Therefore, we introduce a novel concept named knowledge boundary to encompass both prompt-agnostic and prompt-sensitive knowledge within language models.Knowledge boundary avoids prompt sensitivity in language model evaluations, rendering them more dependable and robust.To explore the knowledge boundary for a given model, we propose projected gradient descent method with semantic constraints, a new algorithm designed to identify the optimal prompt for each piece of knowledge.Experiments demonstrate a superior performance of our algorithm in computing the knowledge boundary compared to existing methods.Furthermore, we evaluate the ability of multiple language models in several domains with knowledge boundary.
Title: ListT5: Listwise Reranking with Fusion-in-Decoder Improves Zero-shot Retrieval
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: We propose ListT5, a novel reranking approach based on Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) that handles multiple candidate passages at both train and inference time. We also introduce an efficient inference framework for listwise ranking based on m-ary tournament sort with output caching. We evaluate and compare our model on the BEIR benchmark for zero-shot retrieval task, demonstrating that ListT5 (1) outperforms the state-of-the-art RankT5 baseline with a notable +1.3 gain in the average NDCG@10 score, (2) has an efficiency comparable to pointwise ranking models and surpasses the efficiency of previous listwise ranking models, and (3) overcomes the lost-in-the-middle problem of previous listwise rerankers. Our code, model checkpoints, and the evaluation framework will be fully open-sourced.
Title: Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Computational Argumentation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Computational argumentation has become an essential tool in various domains, including law, public policy, and artificial intelligence. It is an emerging research field in natural language processing that attracts increasing attention. Research on computational argumentation mainly involves two types of tasks: argument mining and argument generation. As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding context and generating natural language, it is worthwhile to evaluate the performance of LLMs on diverse computational argumentation tasks. This work aims to embark on an assessment of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, Flan models, and LLaMA2 models, in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. We organize existing tasks into six main categories and standardize the format of fourteen openly available datasets. In addition, we present a new benchmark dataset on counter speech generation that aims to holistically evaluate the end-to-end performance of LLMs on argument mining and argument generation. Extensive experiments show that LLMs exhibit commendable performance across most of the datasets, demonstrating their capabilities in the field of argumentation. Our analysis offers valuable suggestions for evaluating computational argumentation and its integration with LLMs in future research endeavors.
Title: TaxoLLaMA: WordNet-based Model for Solving Multiple Lexical Semantic Tasks
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: In this paper, we explore the capabilities of LLMs in capturing lexical-semantic knowledge from WordNet on the example of the LLaMA-2-7b model and test it on multiple lexical semantic tasks. As the outcome of our experiments, we present TaxoLLaMA, the “all-in-one” model for taxonomy-related tasks, lightweight due to 4-bit quantization and LoRA. TaxoLLaMA achieves 11 SOTA results, and 4 top-2 results out of 16 tasks on the Taxonomy Enrichment, Hypernym Discovery, Taxonomy Construction, and Lexical Entailment tasks. Moreover, it demonstrates a very strong zero-shot performance on Lexical Entailment and Taxonomy Construction with no fine-tuning. We also explore its hidden multilingual and domain adaptation capabilities with a little tuning or few-shot learning. All datasets, code, and pre-trained models are available online (code: https://github.com/VityaVitalich/TaxoLLaMA)
Title: CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavilyrely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE (ConceptuAlizationand INstantiation Distillation from Large Language ModEls), a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. Our data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.
Title: MEFT: Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning through Sparse Adapter
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) facilitates the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) under limited resources. However, the fine-tuning performance with PEFT on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks is limited due to the constrained model capacity, which originates from the limited number of additional trainable parameters. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a novel mechanism that fine-tunes LLMs with adapters of larger size yet memory-efficient. This is achieved by leveraging the inherent activation sparsity in the Feed-Forward Networks (FFNs) of LLMs and utilizing the larger capacity of Central Processing Unit (CPU) memory compared to Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). We store and update the parameters of larger adapters on the CPU. Moreover, we employ a Mixture of Experts (MoE)-like architecture to mitigate unnecessary CPU computations and reduce the communication volume between the GPU and CPU. This is particularly beneficial over the limited bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe). Our method can achieve fine-tuning results comparable to those obtained with larger memory capacities, even when operating under more limited resources such as a 24GB memory single GPU setup, with acceptable loss in training efficiency. Our codes are available at https://github.com/CURRENTF/MEFT.
Title: Surgical Feature-Space Decomposition of LLMs: Why, When and How?
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Low-rank approximations, of the weight and feature space can enhance the performance of deep learning models, whether in terms of improving generalization or reducing the latency of inference. However, there is no clear consensus yet on how, when and why these approximations are helpful for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we empirically study the efficacy of weight and feature space decomposition in transformer-based LLMs. We demonstrate that surgical decomposition not only provides critical insights into the trade-off between compression and language modelling performance, but also sometimes enhances commonsense reasoning performance of LLMs. Our empirical analysis identifies specific network segments that intrinsically exhibit a low-rank structure. Furthermore, we extend our investigation to the implications of low-rank approximations on model bias. Overall, our findings offer a novel perspective on optimizing LLMs, presenting the low-rank approximation not only as a tool for performance enhancements, but also as a means to potentially rectify biases within these models.
Title: Reasoning in Flux: Enhancing Large Language Models Reasoning through Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Machine reasoning, which involves solving complex problems through step-by-step deduction and analysis, is a crucial indicator of the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, as the complexity of tasks escalates, LLMs often encounter increasing errors in their multi-step reasoning process. This study delves into the underlying factors contributing to these reasoning errors and seeks to leverage uncertainty to refine them. Specifically, we introduce Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Guidance (UAG), a novel approach for guiding LLM reasoning onto an accurate and reliable trajectory. UAG first identifies and evaluates uncertainty signals within each step of the reasoning chain. Upon detecting a significant increase in uncertainty, UAG intervenes by retracting to a previously reliable state and then introduces certified reasoning clues for refinement. By dynamically adjusting the reasoning process, UAG offers a plug-and-play solution for improving LLMs’ performance in complex reasoning. Extensive experiments across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that UAG not only enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but also consistently outperforms several strong baselines with minimal computational overhead. Further analysis reveals that UAG is notably effective in identifying and diminishing reasoning errors.
Title: Modality-Aware Integration with Large Language Models for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) has been extensively studied to answer visual questions with external knowledge, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs). While several attempts have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) as an implicit knowledge source, it remains challenging since LLMs may generate hallucinations. Moreover, multiple knowledge sources, e.g., images, KGs and LLMs, cannot be readily aligned for complex scenarios. To tackle these, we present a novel modality-aware integration with LLMs for KVQA (\texttt{MAIL}). It carefully leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning. Specifically, (i) we propose a two-stage prompting strategy with LLMs to densely embody the image into a *scene graph* with detailed visual features; (ii) We construct a coupled *concept graph* by linking the mentioned entities with external facts. (iii) A tailored pseudo-siamese graph medium fusion is designed for sufficient multimodal fusion. We utilize the shared mentioned entities in two graphs as mediums to bridge a tight inter-modal exchange, while maximally preserving insightful intra-modal learning by constraining the fusion within mediums. Extensive experiments show the superiority of \texttt{MAIL}.
Title: Unlocking Data-free Low-bit Quantization with Matrix Decomposition for KV Cache Compression
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Key-value (KV) caching is an important technique to accelerate the inference of large language models (LLMs), but incurs significant memory overhead. To compress the size of KV cache, existing methods often compromise precision or require extra data for calibration, limiting their practicality in LLM deployment. In this paper, we introduce DecoQuant, a novel data-free low-bit quantization technique based on tensor decomposition methods, to effectively compress KV cache. Our core idea is to adjust the outlier distribution of the original matrix by performing tensor decomposition, so that the quantization difficulties are migrated from the matrix to decomposed local tensors. Specially, we find that outliers mainly concentrate on small local tensors, while large tensors tend to have a narrower value range. Based on this finding, we propose to apply low-bit quantization to the large tensor, while maintaining high-precision representation for the small tensor. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed quantization method to compress the KV cache of LLMs to accelerate the inference, and develop an efficient dequantization kernel tailored specifically for DecoQuant. Through extensive experiments, DecoQuant demonstrates remarkable efficiency gains, showcasing up to a 75% reduction in memory footprint while maintaining comparable generation quality.
Title: VerifiNER: Verification-augmented NER via Knowledge-grounded Reasoning with Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Recent approaches in domain-specific named entity recognition (NER), such as biomedical NER, have shown remarkable advances. However, they still lack of faithfulness, producing erroneous predictions. We assume that knowledge of entities can be useful in verifying the correctness of the predictions. Despite the usefulness of knowledge, resolving such errors with knowledge is nontrivial, since the knowledge itself does not directly indicate the ground-truth label. To this end, we propose VerifiNER, a post-hoc verification framework that identifies errors from existing NER methods using knowledge and revises them into more faithful predictions. Our framework leverages the reasoning abilities of large language models to adequately ground on knowledge and the contextual information in the verification process. We validate effectiveness of VerifiNER through extensive experiments on biomedical datasets. The results suggest that VerifiNER can successfully verify errors from existing models as a model-agnostic approach. Further analyses on out-of-domain and low-resource settings show the usefulness of VerifiNER on real-world applications.
Title: Making Long-Context Language Models Better Multi-Hop Reasoners
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Recent advancements in long-context modeling have enhanced language models (LMs) for complex tasks across multiple NLP applications. Despite this progress, we find that these models struggle with multi-hop reasoning and exhibit decreased performance in the presence of noisy contexts. In this paper, we introduce Reasoning with Attributions, a novel approach that prompts LMs to supply attributions for each assertion during their reasoning. We validate our approach through experiments on three multi-hop datasets, employing both proprietary and open-source models, and demonstrate its efficacy and resilience. Furthermore, we explore methods to augment reasoning capabilities via fine-tuning and offer an attribution-annotated dataset and a specialized training strategy. Our fine-tuned model achieves competitive performance on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, closely paralleling proprietary LMs such as ChatGPT and Claude-instant.
Title: TransliCo: A Contrastive Learning Framework to Address the Script Barrier in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: The world’s more than 7000 languages are written in at least 293 scripts. Due to various reasons, many closely related languages use different scripts, which poses a difficulty for multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) in learning crosslingual knowledge through lexical overlap. As a consequence, mPLMs are faced with a script barrier: representations from different scripts are located in different subspaces, which can result in crosslingual transfer involving languages of different scripts performing suboptimally. To address this problem, we propose TransliCo, a framework that optimizes the Transliteration Contrastive Modeling (TCM) objective to fine-tune an mPLM by contrasting sentences in its training data and their transliterations in a unified script (in our case Latin), which enhances uniformity in the representation space for different scripts. Using Glot500-m, an mPLM pretrained on over 500 languages, as our source model, we fine-tune it on a small portion (5%) of its training data, and refer to the resulting model as Furina. We show that Furina not only better aligns representations from distinct scripts but also outperforms the original Glot500-m on various zero-shot crosslingual transfer tasks. Additionally, we achieve consistent improvement in a case study on the Indic group where the languages exhibit areal features but use different scripts. We make our code and models publicly available.
Title: Extreme Miscalibration and the Illusion of Adversarial Robustness
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Deep learning-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where small perturbations can cause a model to misclassify. Adversarial Training (AT) is often used to increase model robustness. However, we have discovered an intriguing phenomenon: deliberately or accidentally miscalibrating models masks gradients in a way that interferes with adversarial attack search methods, giving rise to an apparent increase in robustness. We show that this observed gain in robustness is an illusion of robustness (IOR), and demonstrate how an adversary can perform various forms of test-time temperature calibration to nullify the aforementioned interference and allow the adversarial attack to find adversarial examples. Hence, we urge the NLP community to incorporate test-time temperature scaling into their robustness evaluations to ensure that any observed gains are genuine. Finally, we show how the temperature can be scaled during training to improve genuine robustness.
Title: HyCoRec: Hypergraph-Enhanced Multi-Preference Learning for Alleviating Matthew Effect in Conversational Recommendation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: The Matthew effect is a notorious issue in Recommender Systems (RSs), i.e., the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, wherein popular items are overexposed while less popular ones are regularly ignored. Most methods examine Matthew effect in static or nearly-static recommendation scenarios. However, the Matthew effect will be increasingly amplified when the user interacts with the system over time. To address these issues, we propose a novel paradigm, Hypergraph-Enhanced Multi-Preference Learning for Alleviating Matthew Effect in Conversational Recommendation (HyCoRec), which aims to alleviate the Matthew effect in conversational recommendation. Concretely, HyCoRec devotes to alleviate the Matthew effect by learning multi-aspect preferences, i.e., item-, entity-, word-, review-, and knowledge-aspect preferences, to effectively generate responses in the conversational task and accurately predict items in the recommendation task when the user chats with the system over time. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmarks validate that HyCoRec achieves new state-of-the-art performance and the superior of alleviating Matthew effect.
Title: Co-training for Low Resource Scientific Natural Language Inference
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Scientific Natural Language Inference (NLI) is the task of predicting the semantic relation between a pair of sentences extracted from research articles. The automatic annotation method based on distant supervision for the training set of SciNLI, the first and most popular dataset for this task, results in label noise which inevitably degenerates the performance of classifiers. In this paper, we propose a novel co-training method that assigns weights based on the training dynamics of the classifiers to the distantly supervised labels, reflective of the manner they are used in the subsequent training epochs. That is, unlike the existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches, we consider the historical behavior of the classifiers to evaluate the quality of the automatically annotated labels. Furthermore, by assigning importance weights instead of filtering out examples based on an arbitrary threshold on the predicted confidence, we maximize the usage of automatically labeled data, while ensuring that the noisy labels have a minimal impact on model training. The proposed method obtains an improvement of 1.5% in Macro F1 over the distant supervision baseline, and substantial improvements over several other strong SSL baselines. We make our code and data available on Github.
Title: RLHFPoison: Reward Poisoning Attack for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback in Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is a methodology designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, playing an important role in LLMs alignment. Despite its advantages, RLHF relies on human annotators to rank the text, which can introduce potential security vulnerabilities if any adversarial annotator (i.e., attackers) manipulates the ranking score by up-ranking any malicious text to steer the LLM adversarially. To assess the red-teaming of RLHF against human preference data poisoning, we propose RankPoison, a poisoning attack method on candidates’ selection of preference rank flipping to reach certain malicious behaviors (e.g., generating longer sequences, which can increase the computational cost). With poisoned dataset generated by RankPoison, we can perform poisoning attacks on LLMs to generate longer tokens without hurting the original safety alignment performance. Moreover, applying RankPoison, we also successfully implement a backdoor attack where LLMs can generate longer answers under questions with the trigger word. Our findings highlight critical security challenges in RLHF, underscoring the necessity for more robust alignment methods for LLMs.