yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: In this paper, we present an innovative process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd, which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. The training of Math-shepherd is achieved using automatically constructed process-wise supervision data, breaking the bottleneck of heavy reliance on manual annotation in existing work. We explore the effectiveness of Math-shepherd in two scenarios: 1) \textit{Verification}: Math-shepherd is utilized for reranking multiple outputs generated by Large Language Models (LLMs); 2) \textit{Reinforcement Learning (RL)}: Math-shepherd is employed to reinforce LLMs.With Math-shepherd, a series of open-source LLMs demonstrates exceptional performance. For instance, process RL with Math-shepherd significantly enhances Mistral-7B (77.9%\to84.1% on GSM8K and 28.6%\to33.0% on MATH).The accuracy can be further improved to 89.1% and 43.5% on two benchmarks with verification of Math-shepherd.We believe that automatic process supervision holds significant potential for the future evolution of LLMs.
Title: Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: In this paper, we uncover a positional bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. We propose a simple yet effective calibration framework to address our discovered positional bias.To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we manually annotate the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark’s question prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments.
Title: Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Event relations are crucial for narrative understanding and reasoning. Governed by nuanced logic, event relation extraction (ERE) is a challenging task that demands thorough semantic understanding and rigorous logical reasoning. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation to systematically explore the capability of LLMs in understanding and applying event relation logic. More in detail, we first investigate the deficiencies of LLMs in logical reasoning across different tasks. Our study reveals that LLMs are not logically consistent reasoners, which results in their suboptimal performance on tasks that need rigorous reasoning. To address this, we explore three different approaches to endow LLMs with event relation logic, and thus enable them to generate more coherent answers across various scenarios. Based on our approach, we also contribute a synthesized dataset (LLM-ERL) involving high-order reasoning for evaluation and fine-tuning. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on different tasks also validate the effectiveness of our approach and provide insights for solving practical tasks with LLMs in future work. Codes are available at https://github.com/chenmeiqii/Teach-LLM-LR.
Title: Synchronized Video Storytelling: Generating Video Narrations with Structured Storyline
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Video storytelling is engaging multimedia content that utilizes video and its accompanying narration to share a story and attract the audience, where a key challenge is creating narrations for recorded visual scenes. Previous studies on dense video captioning and video story generation have made some progress. However, in practical applications, we typically require synchronized narrations for ongoing visual scenes. In this work, we introduce a new task of Synchronized Video Storytelling, which aims to generate synchronous and informative narrations for videos. These narrations, associated with each video clip, should relate to the visual content, integrate relevant knowledge, and have an appropriate word count corresponding to the clip’s duration. Specifically, a structured storyline is beneficial to guide the generation process, ensuring coherence and integrity. To support the exploration of this task, we introduce a new benchmark dataset E-SyncVidStory with rich annotations. Since existing Multimodal LLMs are not effective in addressing this task in one-shot or few-shot settings, we propose a framework named VideoNarrator that can generate a storyline for input videos and simultaneously generate narrations with the guidance of the generated or predefined storyline. We further introduce a set of evaluation metrics to thoroughly assess the generation. Both automatic and human evaluations validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our dataset, codes, and evaluations will be released.
Title: Fine-Grained Image-Text Alignment in Medical Imaging Enables Explainable Cyclic Image-Report Generation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Fine-grained vision-language models (VLM) have been widely used for inter-modality local alignment between the predefined fixed patches and textual words. However, in medical analysis, lesions exhibit varying sizes and positions, and using fixed patches may cause incomplete representations of lesions. Moreover, these methods provide explainability by using heatmaps to show the general image areas potentially associated with texts rather than specific regions, making their explanations not explicit and specific enough. To address these issues, we propose a novel Adaptive patch-word Matching (AdaMatch) model to correlate chest X-ray (CXR) image regions with words in medical reports and apply it to CXR-report generation to provide explainability for the generation process. AdaMatch exploits the fine-grained relation between adaptive patches and words to provide explanations of specific image regions with corresponding words. To capture the abnormal regions of varying sizes and positions, we introduce an Adaptive Patch extraction (AdaPatch) module to acquire adaptive patches for these regions adaptively. Aiming to provide explicit explainability for the CXR-report generation task, we propose an AdaMatch-based bidirectional LLM for Cyclic CXR-report generation (AdaMatch-Cyclic). It employs AdaMatch to obtain the keywords for CXR images and ‘keypatches’ for medical reports as hints to guide CXR-report generation. Extensive experiments on two publicly available CXR datasets validate the effectiveness of our method and its superior performance over existing methods. Source code will be released.
Title: T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks and are augmented by tools for broader applications. Yet, how to evaluate and analyze the tool utilization capability of LLMs is still under-explored. In contrast to previous works that evaluate models holistically, we comprehensively decompose the tool utilization into multiple sub-processes, including instruction following, planning, reasoning, retrieval, understanding, and review. Based on that, we further introduce T-Eval to evaluate the tool-utilization capability step by step. T-Eval disentangles the tool utilization evaluation into several sub-domains along model capabilities, facilitating the inner understanding of both holistic and isolated competency of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on T-Eval and in-depth analysis of various LLMs. T-Eval not only exhibits consistency with the outcome-oriented evaluation but also provides a more fine-grained analysis of the capabilities of LLMs, providing a new perspective in LLM evaluation on tool-utilization ability. The benchmark will be available.
Title: Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria?
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Some prior work has shown that LLMs perform well in NLG evaluation for different tasks. However, we discover that LLMs seem to confuse different evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability. For further verification, we first consider avoiding issues of inconsistent conceptualization and vague expression in existing NLG quality criteria themselves. So we summarize a clear hierarchical classification system for 11 common aspects with corresponding different criteria from previous studies involved. Inspired by behavioral testing, we elaborately design 18 types of aspect-targeted perturbation attacks for fine-grained analysis of the evaluation behaviors of different LLMs. We also conduct human annotations beyond the guidance of the classification system to validate the impact of the perturbations. Our experimental results reveal confusion issues inherent in LLMs, as well as other noteworthy phenomena, and necessitate further research and improvements for LLM-based evaluation.
Title: Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Information retrieval (IR) plays a crucial role in locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data, and its applications have evolved from traditional knowledge bases to modern retrieval models (RMs). The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has further revolutionized the IR field by enabling users to interact with search systems in natural languages. In this paper, we explore the advantages and disadvantages of LLMs and RMs, highlighting their respective strengths in understanding user-issued queries and retrieving up-to-date information. To leverage the benefits of both paradigms while circumventing their limitations, we propose **InteR**, a novel framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. InteR allows RMs to expand knowledge in queries using LLM-generated knowledge collections and enables LLMs to enhance prompt formulation using retrieved documents. This iterative refinement process augments the inputs of RMs and LLMs, leading to more accurate retrieval. Experiments on large-scale retrieval benchmarks involving web search and low-resource retrieval tasks show that InteR achieves overall superior **zero-shot** retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, even those using relevance judgment. Source code is available at https://github.com/Cyril-JZ/InteR.
Title: Linear Transformers with Learnable Kernel Functions are Better In-Context Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Advancing the frontier of subquadratic architectures for Language Models (LMs) is crucial in the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing. Current innovations, including State Space Models, were initially celebrated for surpassing Transformer performance on language modeling tasks. However, these models have revealed deficiencies in essential In-Context Learning capabilities – a domain where the Transformer traditionally shines. The Based model emerged as a hybrid solution, blending a Linear Transformer with a kernel inspired by the Taylor expansion of exponential functions, augmented by convolutional networks. Mirroring the Transformer’s in-context adeptness, it became a strong contender in the field. In our work, we present a singular, elegant alteration to the Based kernel that amplifies its In-Context Learning abilities evaluated with the Multi-Query Associative Recall task and overall language modeling process, as demonstrated on the Pile dataset.
Title: Temperature-scaling surprisal estimates improve fit to human reading times – but does it do so for the “right reasons”?
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: A wide body of evidence shows that human language processing difficulty is predicted by the information-theoretic measure surprisal, a word’s negative log probability in context. However, it is still unclear how to best estimate these probabilities needed for predicting human processing difficulty – while a long-standing belief held that models with lower perplexity would provide more accurate estimates of word predictability, and therefore lead to better reading time predictions, recent work has shown that for very large models, psycholinguistic predictive power decreases. One reason could be that language models might be more confident of their predictions than humans, because they have had exposure to several magnitudes more data. In this paper, we test what effect temperature-scaling of large language model (LLM) predictions has on surprisal estimates and their predictive power of reading times of English texts. Firstly, we show that calibration of large language models typically improves with model size, i.e. poorer calibration cannot account for poorer fit to reading times. Secondly, we find that temperature-scaling probabilities lead to a systematically better fit to reading times (up to 89% improvement in delta log likelihood), across several reading time corpora. Finally, we show that this improvement in fit is chiefly driven by words that are composed of multiple subword tokens.
Title: Beyond Recognising Entailment: Formalising Natural Language Inference from an Argumentative Perspective
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: In argumentation theory, argument schemes are a characterisation of stereotypical patterns of inference. There has been little work done to develop computational approaches to identify these schemes in natural language. Moreover, advancements in recognizing textual entailment lack a standardized definition of inference, which makes it challenging to compare methods trained on different datasets and rely on the generalisability of their results. In this work, we propose a rigorous approach to align entailment recognition with argumentation theory. Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments (PTA), a taxonomy of argument schemes, provides the appropriate framework to unify these two fields. To operationalise the theoretical model, we introduce a tool to assist humans in annotating arguments according to the PTA. Beyond providing insights into non-expert annotator training, we present Kialo-PTA24, the first multi-topic dataset for the PTA. Finally, we benchmark the performance of pre-trained language models on various aspects of argument analysis. Our experiments show that the task of argument canonicalisation poses a significant challenge for state-of-the-art models, suggesting an inability to represent argumentative reasoning and a direction for future investigation.
Title: AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: We introduce AnyGPT, an any-to-any multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for the unified processing of various modalities, including speech, text, images, and music. AnyGPT can be trained stably without any alterations to the current large language model (LLM) architecture or training paradigms. Instead, it relies exclusively on data-level preprocessing, facilitating the seamless integration of new modalities into LLMs, akin to the incorporation of new languages.We build a multimodal text-centric dataset for multimodal alignment pre-training. Utilizing generative models, we synthesize the first large-scale any-to-any multimodal instruction dataset. It consists of 108k samples of multi-turn conversations that intricately interweave various modalities, thus equipping the model to handle arbitrary combinations of multimodal inputs and outputs.Experimental results demonstrate that AnyGPT is capable of facilitating any-to-any multimodal conversation while achieving performance comparable to specialized models across all modalities, proving that discrete representations can effectively and conveniently unify multiple modalities within a language model. Demos are shown in https://junzhan2000.github.io/AnyGPT.github.io/.
Title: CofiPara: A Coarse-to-fine Paradigm for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification with Large Multimodal Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Social media abounds with multimodal sarcasm, and identifying sarcasm targets is particularly challenging due to the implicit incongruity not directly evident in the text and image modalities. Current methods for Multimodal Sarcasm Target Identification (MSTI) predominantly focus on superficial indicators in an end-to-end manner, overlooking the nuanced understanding of multimodal sarcasm conveyed through both the text and image. This paper proposes a versatile MSTI framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm, by augmenting sarcasm explainability with reasoning and pre-training knowledge. Inspired by the powerful capacity of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on multimodal reasoning, we first engage LMMs to generate competing rationales for coarser-grained pre-training of a small language model on multimodal sarcasm detection. We then propose fine-tuning the model for finer-grained sarcasm target identification. Our framework is thus empowered to adeptly unveil the intricate targets within multimodal sarcasm and mitigate the negative impact posed by potential noise inherently in LMMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our model far outperforms state-of-the-art MSTI methods, and markedly exhibits explainability in deciphering sarcasm as well.
Title: Direct Large Language Model Alignment Through Self-Rewarding Contrastive Prompt Distillation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human expectations without human-annotated preference data is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the response preference by using the output probabilities of response pairs under contrastive prompt pairs, which could achieve better performance on LLaMA2-7B and LLaMA2-13B compared to RLAIF. Based on this, we propose an automatic alignment method, Direct Large Model Alignment (DLMA). First, we use contrastive prompt pairs to automatically generate preference data. Then, we continue to evaluate the generated preference data using contrastive prompt pairs and calculate a self-rewarding score. Finally, we use the DPO algorithm to effectively align LLMs by combining this self-rewarding score. In the experimental stage, our DLMA method could surpass the RLHF method without relying on human-annotated preference data.
Title: Diffusion Lens: Interpreting Text Encoders in Text-to-Image Pipelines
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) use a latent representation of a text prompt to guide the image generation process. However, the process by which the encoder produces the text representation is unknown. We propose the Diffusion Lens, a method for analyzing the text encoder of T2I models by generating images from its intermediate representations. Using the Diffusion Lens, we perform an extensive analysis of two recent T2I models. Exploring compound prompts, we find that complex scenes describing multiple objects are composed progressively and more slowly compared to simple scenes; Exploring knowledge retrieval, we find that representation of uncommon concepts require further computation compared to common concepts, and that knowledge retrieval is gradual across layers. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights into the text encoder component in T2I pipelines.
Title: Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Humans often interact with large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn interaction to obtain desired answers or more information. However, most existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of LLMs, in terms of training dataset, training method, and evaluation benchmark. In this paper, we introduce Parrot, a solution aiming to enhance multi-turn instruction following for LLMs. First, we introduce an efficient but effective method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis. Second, we propose a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries in multi-turn interaction. Moreover, to quantitatively evaluate LLMs in multi-turn instruction following, we manually build a multi-turn benchmark derived from existing ones. Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. Our dataset and codes will be open-sourced to facilitate future research.
Title: Robust Singing Voice Transcription Serves Synthesis
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: Note-level Automatic Singing Voice Transcription (AST) converts singing recordings into note sequences, facilitating the automatic annotation of singing datasets for Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) applications. Current AST methods, however, struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. This paper presents ROSVOT, the first robust AST model that serves SVS, incorporating a multi-scale framework that effectively captures coarse-grained note information and ensures fine-grained frame-level segmentation, coupled with an attention-based pitch decoder for reliable pitch prediction. We also established a comprehensive annotation-and-training pipeline for SVS to test the model in real-world settings. Experimental findings reveal that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art transcription accuracy with either clean or noisy inputs. Moreover, when trained on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets, the SVS model outperforms its baseline, affirming the capability for practical application. Audio samples are available at https://rosvot.github.io. Codes can be found at https://github.com/RickyL-2000/ROSVOT.