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North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.1.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.1/

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2024-named, title = "Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences", author = "Liu, Hongyi and Wang, Qingyun and Karisani, Payam and Ji, Heng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.1", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.1", pages = "1--21", abstract = "Named entity recognition is a key component of Information Extraction (IE), particularly in scientific domains such as biomedicine and chemistry, where large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, fall short. We investigate the applicability of transfer learning for enhancing a named entity recognition model trained in the biomedical domain (the source domain) to be used in the chemical domain (the target domain). A common practice for training such a model in a few-shot learning setting is to pretrain the model on the labeled source data, and then, to finetune it on a hand-full of labeled target examples. In our experiments, we observed that such a model is prone to mislabeling the source entities, which can often appear in the text, as the target entities. To alleviate this problem, we propose a model to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, but, at the same time, to project the source entities and target entities into separate regions of the feature space. This diminishes the risk of mislabeling the source entities as the target entities. Our model consists of two stages: 1) entity grouping in the source domain, which incorporates knowledge from annotated events to establish relations between entities, and 2) entity discrimination in the target domain, which relies on pseudo labeling and contrastive learning to enhance discrimination between the entities in the two domains. We conduct our extensive experiments across three source and three target datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms the baselines by up to 5{\%} absolute value. Code, data, and resources are publicly available for research purposes: https://github.com/Lhtie/Bio-Domain-Transfer .", }

Named entity recognition is a key component of Information Extraction (IE), particularly in scientific domains such as biomedicine and chemistry, where large language models (LLMs), e.g., ChatGPT, fall short. We investigate the applicability of transfer learning for enhancing a named entity recognition model trained in the biomedical domain (the source domain) to be used in the chemical domain (the target domain). A common practice for training such a model in a few-shot learning setting is to pretrain the model on the labeled source data, and then, to finetune it on a hand-full of labeled target examples. In our experiments, we observed that such a model is prone to mislabeling the source entities, which can often appear in the text, as the target entities. To alleviate this problem, we propose a model to transfer the knowledge from the source domain to the target domain, but, at the same time, to project the source entities and target entities into separate regions of the feature space. This diminishes the risk of mislabeling the source entities as the target entities. Our model consists of two stages: 1) entity grouping in the source domain, which incorporates knowledge from annotated events to establish relations between entities, and 2) entity discrimination in the target domain, which relies on pseudo labeling and contrastive learning to enhance discrimination between the entities in the two domains. We conduct our extensive experiments across three source and three target datasets, demonstrating that our method outperforms the baselines by up to 5{\%} absolute value. Code, data, and resources are publicly available for research purposes: https://github.com/Lhtie/Bio-Domain-Transfer .

Named Entity Recognition Under Domain Shift via Metric Learning for Life Sciences

naacl-long.1

Oral

2401.10472

https://huggingface.co/papers/2401.10472

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.2.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.2/

@inproceedings{yuan-etal-2024-text, title = "Text Diffusion Model with Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Sequence-to-Sequence Generation", author = "Yuan, Hongyi and Yuan, Zheng and Tan, Chuanqi and Huang, Fei and Huang, Songfang", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.2", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.2", pages = "22--39", abstract = "The diffusion model, a new generative modeling paradigm, has achieved great success in image, audio, and video generation.However, considering the discrete categorical nature of the text, it is not trivial to extend continuous diffusion models to natural language. In this work, we propose SeqDiffuSeq, a text diffusion model, to approach sequence-to-sequence text generation with an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture.To improve the generation performance, SeqDiffuSeq is equipped with the self-conditioning technique and our newly proposed adaptive noise schedule technique. Self-conditioning enables SeqDiffuSeq to better use the predicted sequence information during the generation process.The adaptive noise schedule balances the difficulty of denoising across time steps at the token level.Experiment results illustrate the improved performance on five sequence-to-sequence generation tasks compared to other diffusion-based models regarding text quality and inference time.", }

The diffusion model, a new generative modeling paradigm, has achieved great success in image, audio, and video generation.However, considering the discrete categorical nature of the text, it is not trivial to extend continuous diffusion models to natural language. In this work, we propose SeqDiffuSeq, a text diffusion model, to approach sequence-to-sequence text generation with an encoder-decoder Transformer architecture.To improve the generation performance, SeqDiffuSeq is equipped with the self-conditioning technique and our newly proposed adaptive noise schedule technique. Self-conditioning enables SeqDiffuSeq to better use the predicted sequence information during the generation process.The adaptive noise schedule balances the difficulty of denoising across time steps at the token level.Experiment results illustrate the improved performance on five sequence-to-sequence generation tasks compared to other diffusion-based models regarding text quality and inference time.

Text Diffusion Model with Encoder-Decoder Transformers for Sequence-to-Sequence Generation

naacl-long.2

Oral

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.3.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.3/

@inproceedings{mehta-goldwasser-2024-interactive, title = "An Interactive Framework for Profiling News Media Sources", author = "Mehta, Nikhil and Goldwasser, Dan", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.3", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.3", pages = "40--58", abstract = "The recent rise of social media has led to the spread of large amounts of fake and biased news, content published with the intent to sway beliefs. While detecting and profiling the sources that spread this news is important to maintain a healthy society, it is challenging for automated systems.In this paper, we propose an interactive framework for news media profiling. It combines the strengths of graph based news media profiling models, Pre-trained Large Language Models, and human insight to characterize the social context on social media. Experimental results show that with as little as 5 human interactions, our framework can rapidly detect fake and biased news media, even in the most challenging settings of emerging news events, where test data is unseen.", }

The recent rise of social media has led to the spread of large amounts of fake and biased news, content published with the intent to sway beliefs. While detecting and profiling the sources that spread this news is important to maintain a healthy society, it is challenging for automated systems.In this paper, we propose an interactive framework for news media profiling. It combines the strengths of graph based news media profiling models, Pre-trained Large Language Models, and human insight to characterize the social context on social media. Experimental results show that with as little as 5 human interactions, our framework can rapidly detect fake and biased news media, even in the most challenging settings of emerging news events, where test data is unseen.

An Interactive Framework for Profiling News Media Sources

naacl-long.3

Poster

2309.07384

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.4.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.4/

@inproceedings{li-etal-2024-assessing-logical, title = "Assessing Logical Puzzle Solving in Large Language Models: Insights from a Minesweeper Case Study", author = "Li, Yinghao and Wang, Haorui and Zhang, Chao", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.4", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.4", pages = "59--81", abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these advancements, it remains an open question whether LLMs are fundamentally capable of reasoning and planning, or if they primarily rely on recalling and synthesizing information from their training data. In our research, we introduce a novel task{---}Minesweeper{---}specifically designed in a format unfamiliar to LLMs and absent from their training datasets. This task challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent opened cells. Successfully completing this task requires an understanding of each cell{'}s state, discerning spatial relationships between the clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. Our experiments, including trials with the advanced GPT-4 model, indicate that while LLMs possess the foundational abilities required for this task, they struggle to integrate these into a coherent, multi-step logical reasoning process needed to solve Minesweeper. These findings highlight the need for further research to understand the nature of reasoning capabilities in LLMs under similar circumstances, and to explore pathways towards more sophisticated AI reasoning and planning models.", }

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these advancements, it remains an open question whether LLMs are fundamentally capable of reasoning and planning, or if they primarily rely on recalling and synthesizing information from their training data. In our research, we introduce a novel task{---}Minesweeper{---}specifically designed in a format unfamiliar to LLMs and absent from their training datasets. This task challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent opened cells. Successfully completing this task requires an understanding of each cell{'}s state, discerning spatial relationships between the clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. Our experiments, including trials with the advanced GPT-4 model, indicate that while LLMs possess the foundational abilities required for this task, they struggle to integrate these into a coherent, multi-step logical reasoning process needed to solve Minesweeper. These findings highlight the need for further research to understand the nature of reasoning capabilities in LLMs under similar circumstances, and to explore pathways towards more sophisticated AI reasoning and planning models.

Assessing Logical Puzzle Solving in Large Language Models: Insights from a Minesweeper Case Study

naacl-long.4

Poster

2311.07387

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.5.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.5/

@inproceedings{yun-etal-2024-telme, title = "{T}el{ME}: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation", author = "Yun, Taeyang and Lim, Hyunkuk and Lee, Jeonghwan and Song, Min", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.5", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.5", pages = "82--95", abstract = "Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) plays a crucial role in enabling dialogue sys- tems to effectively respond to user requests. The emotions in a conversation can be identi- fied by the representations from various modal- ities, such as audio, visual, and text. How- ever, due to the weak contribution of non-verbal modalities to recognize emotions, multimodal ERC has always been considered a challenging task. In this paper, we propose Teacher-leading Multimodal fusion network for ERC (TelME). TelME incorporates cross-modal knowledge distillation to transfer information from a lan- guage model acting as the teacher to the non- verbal students, thereby optimizing the efficacy of the weak modalities. We then combine multi- modal features using a shifting fusion approach in which student networks support the teacher. TelME achieves state-of-the-art performance in MELD, a multi-speaker conversation dataset for ERC. Finally, we demonstrate the effec- tiveness of our components through additional experiments.", }

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) plays a crucial role in enabling dialogue sys- tems to effectively respond to user requests. The emotions in a conversation can be identi- fied by the representations from various modal- ities, such as audio, visual, and text. How- ever, due to the weak contribution of non-verbal modalities to recognize emotions, multimodal ERC has always been considered a challenging task. In this paper, we propose Teacher-leading Multimodal fusion network for ERC (TelME). TelME incorporates cross-modal knowledge distillation to transfer information from a lan- guage model acting as the teacher to the non- verbal students, thereby optimizing the efficacy of the weak modalities. We then combine multi- modal features using a shifting fusion approach in which student networks support the teacher. TelME achieves state-of-the-art performance in MELD, a multi-speaker conversation dataset for ERC. Finally, we demonstrate the effec- tiveness of our components through additional experiments.

TelME: Teacher-leading Multimodal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

naacl-long.5

Poster

2401.12987

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.6.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.6/

@inproceedings{lee-etal-2024-effective, title = "Effective and Efficient Conversation Retrieval for Dialogue State Tracking with Implicit Text Summaries", author = "Lee, Seanie and Cheng, Jianpeng and Driesen, Joris and Coca, Alexandru and Johannsen, Anders", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.6", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.6", pages = "96--111", abstract = "Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) with Large Language Models (LLM) relies on an effective and efficient conversation retriever to find similar in-context examples for prompt learning. Previous works use raw dialogue context as search keys and queries, and a retriever is fine-tuned with annotated dialogues to achieve superior performance. However, the approach is less suited for scaling to new domains or new annotation languages, where fine-tuning data is unavailable. To address this problem, we handle the task of conversation retrieval based on text summaries of the conversations.A LLM-based conversation summarizer is adopted for query and key generation, which enables effective maximum inner product search. To avoid the extra inference cost brought by LLM-based conversation summarization, we further distill a light-weight conversation encoder which produces query embeddings without decoding summaries for test conversations. We validate our retrieval approach on MultiWOZ datasets with GPT-Neo-2.7B and LLaMA-7B/30B. The experimental results show a significant improvement over relevant baselines in real few-shot DST settings.", }

Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) with Large Language Models (LLM) relies on an effective and efficient conversation retriever to find similar in-context examples for prompt learning. Previous works use raw dialogue context as search keys and queries, and a retriever is fine-tuned with annotated dialogues to achieve superior performance. However, the approach is less suited for scaling to new domains or new annotation languages, where fine-tuning data is unavailable. To address this problem, we handle the task of conversation retrieval based on text summaries of the conversations.A LLM-based conversation summarizer is adopted for query and key generation, which enables effective maximum inner product search. To avoid the extra inference cost brought by LLM-based conversation summarization, we further distill a light-weight conversation encoder which produces query embeddings without decoding summaries for test conversations. We validate our retrieval approach on MultiWOZ datasets with GPT-Neo-2.7B and LLaMA-7B/30B. The experimental results show a significant improvement over relevant baselines in real few-shot DST settings.

Effective and Efficient Conversation Retrieval for Dialogue State Tracking with Implicit Text Summaries

naacl-long.6

Poster

2402.13043

https://huggingface.co/papers/2402.13043

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.7.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.7/

@inproceedings{mehta-etal-2024-promptly, title = "Promptly Predicting Structures: The Return of Inference", author = "Mehta, Maitrey and Pyatkin, Valentina and Srikumar, Vivek", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.7", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.7", pages = "112--130", abstract = "Prompt-based methods have been used extensively across NLP to build zero- and few-shot label predictors. Many NLP tasks are naturally structured: that is, their outputs consist of multiple labels which constrain each other. Annotating data for such tasks can be cumbersome. Can the promise of the prompt-based paradigm be extended to such structured outputs? In this paper, we present a framework for constructing zero- and few-shot linguistic structure predictors. Our key insight is that we can use structural constraints{---}and combinatorial inference derived from them{---}to filter out inconsistent structures predicted by large language models. We instantiated this framework on two structured prediction tasks, and five datasets. Across all cases, our results show that enforcing consistency not only constructs structurally valid outputs, but also improves performance over the unconstrained variants.", }

Prompt-based methods have been used extensively across NLP to build zero- and few-shot label predictors. Many NLP tasks are naturally structured: that is, their outputs consist of multiple labels which constrain each other. Annotating data for such tasks can be cumbersome. Can the promise of the prompt-based paradigm be extended to such structured outputs? In this paper, we present a framework for constructing zero- and few-shot linguistic structure predictors. Our key insight is that we can use structural constraints{---}and combinatorial inference derived from them{---}to filter out inconsistent structures predicted by large language models. We instantiated this framework on two structured prediction tasks, and five datasets. Across all cases, our results show that enforcing consistency not only constructs structurally valid outputs, but also improves performance over the unconstrained variants.

Promptly Predicting Structures: The Return of Inference

naacl-long.7

Poster

2401.06877

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.8.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.8/

@inproceedings{shao-nakashole-2024-linearizing, title = "On Linearizing Structured Data in Encoder-Decoder Language Models: Insights from Text-to-{SQL}", author = "Shao, Yutong and Nakashole, Ndapa", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.8", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.8", pages = "131--156", abstract = "Structured data, prevalent in tables, databases, and knowledge graphs, poses a significant challenge in its representation. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been a shift towards linearization-based methods, which process structured data as sequential token streams, diverging from approaches that explicitly model structure, often as a graph. Crucially, there remains a gap in our understanding of how these linearization-based methods handle structured data, which is inherently non-linear.This work investigates the linear handling of structured data in encoder-decoder language models, specifically T5. Our findings reveal the model{'}s ability to mimic human-designed processes such as schema linking and syntax prediction, indicating a deep, meaningful learning of structure beyond simple token sequencing. We also uncover insights into the model{'}s internal mechanisms, including the ego-centric nature of structure node encodings and the potential for model compression due to modality fusion redundancy. Overall, this work sheds light on the inner workings of linearization-based methods and could potentially provide guidance for future research.", }

Structured data, prevalent in tables, databases, and knowledge graphs, poses a significant challenge in its representation. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been a shift towards linearization-based methods, which process structured data as sequential token streams, diverging from approaches that explicitly model structure, often as a graph. Crucially, there remains a gap in our understanding of how these linearization-based methods handle structured data, which is inherently non-linear.This work investigates the linear handling of structured data in encoder-decoder language models, specifically T5. Our findings reveal the model{'}s ability to mimic human-designed processes such as schema linking and syntax prediction, indicating a deep, meaningful learning of structure beyond simple token sequencing. We also uncover insights into the model{'}s internal mechanisms, including the ego-centric nature of structure node encodings and the potential for model compression due to modality fusion redundancy. Overall, this work sheds light on the inner workings of linearization-based methods and could potentially provide guidance for future research.

On Linearizing Structured Data in Encoder-Decoder Language Models: Insights from Text-to-SQL

naacl-long.8

Poster

2404.02389

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.9.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.9/

@inproceedings{le-luu-2024-extractive, title = "Extractive Summarization with Text Generator", author = "Le, Thang and Luu, Anh Tuan", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.9", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.9", pages = "157--174", abstract = "Standard extractive systems suffer from the lack of gold training signals since existing corpora solely provide document and human-written summary pairs while disregarding extractive labels. As a result, existing methods resort to imperfect pseudo-labels that are both biased and error-prone, thereby hindering the learning process of extractive models. In contrast, text generators which are commonly employed in abstractive summarization can effortlessly overcome this predicament on account of flexible sequence-to-sequence architectures. Motivated to bypass this inherent limitation, we investigate the possibility of conducting extractive summarization with text generators. Through extensive experiments covering six summarization benchmarks, we show that high-quality extractive summaries can be assembled via approximating the outputs (abstractive summaries) of these generators. Moreover, we find that the approximate summaries correlate positively with the auxiliary summaries (i.e. a better generator enables the production of better extractive summaries). Our results signify a new paradigm for training extractive summarizers i.e. learning with generation (abstractive) objectives rather than extractive schemes.", }

Standard extractive systems suffer from the lack of gold training signals since existing corpora solely provide document and human-written summary pairs while disregarding extractive labels. As a result, existing methods resort to imperfect pseudo-labels that are both biased and error-prone, thereby hindering the learning process of extractive models. In contrast, text generators which are commonly employed in abstractive summarization can effortlessly overcome this predicament on account of flexible sequence-to-sequence architectures. Motivated to bypass this inherent limitation, we investigate the possibility of conducting extractive summarization with text generators. Through extensive experiments covering six summarization benchmarks, we show that high-quality extractive summaries can be assembled via approximating the outputs (abstractive summaries) of these generators. Moreover, we find that the approximate summaries correlate positively with the auxiliary summaries (i.e. a better generator enables the production of better extractive summaries). Our results signify a new paradigm for training extractive summarizers i.e. learning with generation (abstractive) objectives rather than extractive schemes.

Extractive Summarization with Text Generator

naacl-long.9

Poster

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.10.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.10/

@inproceedings{resta-bacciu-2024-self, title = "Self-generated Replay Memories for Continual Neural Machine Translation", author = "Resta, Michele and Bacciu, Davide", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.10", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.10", pages = "175--191", abstract = "Modern Neural Machine Translation systems exhibit strong performance in several different languages and are constantly improving. Their ability to learn continuously is, however, still severely limited by the catastrophic forgetting issue. In this work, we leverage a key property of encoder-decoder Transformers, i.e. their generative ability, to propose a novel approach to continually learning Neural Machine Translation systems. We show how this can effectively learn on a stream of experiences comprising different languages, by leveraging a replay memory populated by using the model itself as a generator of parallel sentences. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can counteract catastrophic forgetting without requiring explicit memorization of training data. Code will be publicly available upon publication.", }

Modern Neural Machine Translation systems exhibit strong performance in several different languages and are constantly improving. Their ability to learn continuously is, however, still severely limited by the catastrophic forgetting issue. In this work, we leverage a key property of encoder-decoder Transformers, i.e. their generative ability, to propose a novel approach to continually learning Neural Machine Translation systems. We show how this can effectively learn on a stream of experiences comprising different languages, by leveraging a replay memory populated by using the model itself as a generator of parallel sentences. We empirically demonstrate that our approach can counteract catastrophic forgetting without requiring explicit memorization of training data. Code will be publicly available upon publication.

Self-generated Replay Memories for Continual Neural Machine Translation

naacl-long.10

Oral

2403.13130

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.11.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.11/

@inproceedings{chen-etal-2024-measuring, title = "Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models", author = "Chen, Yangyi and Sikka, Karan and Cogswell, Michael and Ji, Heng and Divakaran, Ajay", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.11", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.11", pages = "192--210", abstract = "Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants that can parse natural queries about the visual content and generate human-like outputs. In this work, we explore the ability of these models to demonstrate human-like reasoning based on the perceived information. To address a crucial concern regarding the extent to which their reasoning capabilities are fully consistent and grounded, we also measure the reasoning consistency of these models. We achieve this by proposing a chain-of-thought (CoT) based consistency measure. However, such an evaluation requires a benchmark that encompasses both high-level inference and detailed reasoning chains, which is costly. We tackle this challenge by proposing an LLM-Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, which notably reduces cost while simultaneously ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. Based on this pipeline and the existing coarse-grained annotated dataset, we build the CURE benchmark to measure both the zero-shot reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art VLMs, and find that even the best-performing model is unable to demonstrate strong visual reasoning capabilities and consistency, indicating that substantial efforts are required to enable VLMs to perform visual reasoning as systematically and consistently as humans. As an early step, we propose a two-stage training framework aimed at improving both the reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. The first stage involves employing supervised fine-tuning of VLMs using step-by-step reasoning samples automatically generated by LLMs. In the second stage, we further augment the training process by incorporating feedback provided by LLMs to produce reasoning chains that are highly consistent and grounded. We empirically highlight the effectiveness of our framework in both reasoning performance and consistency.", }

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants that can parse natural queries about the visual content and generate human-like outputs. In this work, we explore the ability of these models to demonstrate human-like reasoning based on the perceived information. To address a crucial concern regarding the extent to which their reasoning capabilities are fully consistent and grounded, we also measure the reasoning consistency of these models. We achieve this by proposing a chain-of-thought (CoT) based consistency measure. However, such an evaluation requires a benchmark that encompasses both high-level inference and detailed reasoning chains, which is costly. We tackle this challenge by proposing an LLM-Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, which notably reduces cost while simultaneously ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. Based on this pipeline and the existing coarse-grained annotated dataset, we build the CURE benchmark to measure both the zero-shot reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art VLMs, and find that even the best-performing model is unable to demonstrate strong visual reasoning capabilities and consistency, indicating that substantial efforts are required to enable VLMs to perform visual reasoning as systematically and consistently as humans. As an early step, we propose a two-stage training framework aimed at improving both the reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. The first stage involves employing supervised fine-tuning of VLMs using step-by-step reasoning samples automatically generated by LLMs. In the second stage, we further augment the training process by incorporating feedback provided by LLMs to produce reasoning chains that are highly consistent and grounded. We empirically highlight the effectiveness of our framework in both reasoning performance and consistency.

Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

naacl-long.11

Poster

2309.04461

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.12.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.12/

@inproceedings{havaldar-etal-2024-building, title = "Building Knowledge-Guided Lexica to Model Cultural Variation", author = "Havaldar, Shreya and Giorgi, Salvatore and Rai, Sunny and Talhelm, Thomas and Guntuku, Sharath Chandra and Ungar, Lyle", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.12", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.12", pages = "211--226", abstract = "Cultural variation exists between nations (e.g., the United States vs. China), but also within regions (e.g., California vs. Texas, Los Angeles vs. San Francisco). Measuring this regional cultural variation can illuminate how and why people think and behave differently. Historically, it has been difficult to computationally model cultural variation due to a lack of training data and scalability constraints. In this work, we introduce a new research problem for the NLP community: How do we measure variation in cultural constructs across regions using language? We then provide a scalable solution: building knowledge-guided lexica to model cultural variation, encouraging future work at the intersection of NLP and cultural understanding. We also highlight modern LLMs{'} failure to measure cultural variation or generate culturally varied language.", }

Cultural variation exists between nations (e.g., the United States vs. China), but also within regions (e.g., California vs. Texas, Los Angeles vs. San Francisco). Measuring this regional cultural variation can illuminate how and why people think and behave differently. Historically, it has been difficult to computationally model cultural variation due to a lack of training data and scalability constraints. In this work, we introduce a new research problem for the NLP community: How do we measure variation in cultural constructs across regions using language? We then provide a scalable solution: building knowledge-guided lexica to model cultural variation, encouraging future work at the intersection of NLP and cultural understanding. We also highlight modern LLMs{'} failure to measure cultural variation or generate culturally varied language.

Building Knowledge-Guided Lexica to Model Cultural Variation

naacl-long.12

Oral

2406.11622

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.13.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.13/

@inproceedings{gao-etal-2024-adaptive, title = "Adaptive Rank Selections for Low-Rank Approximation of Language Models", author = "Gao, Shangqian and Hua, Ting and Hsu, Yen-Chang and Shen, Yilin and Jin, Hongxia", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.13", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.13", pages = "227--241", abstract = "Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) or its weighted variants has significantly progressed in compressing language models. Previous works assume the same importance for all operations and assign the same number of ranks for different layers in a language model. However, such a uniform rank selection is sub-optimal since different operations (layers) have non-uniform demand in capacity. In other words, a desired SVD strategy should allocate more ranks for important operations and vice versa. However, a globally-optimized selection of ranks for neural networks is still an open problem, and this is a non-trivial challenge since the selection is discrete. In this work, we propose a novel binary masking mechanism for optimizing the number of ranks in a differentiable framework. Our strategy uses a novel regularization to enable the masking to comply with the SVD property where the ranks have sorted singular values. The experiments examined both types of language models, encoder-only and decoder-only models, including large language models like LLaMA. Our compressed model achieves much better accuracy than previous SVD and their SOTA variants. More interestingly, our method retains significantly better accuracy with zero or limited fine-tuning, proving the substantial advantage of adaptive rank selection.", }

Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) or its weighted variants has significantly progressed in compressing language models. Previous works assume the same importance for all operations and assign the same number of ranks for different layers in a language model. However, such a uniform rank selection is sub-optimal since different operations (layers) have non-uniform demand in capacity. In other words, a desired SVD strategy should allocate more ranks for important operations and vice versa. However, a globally-optimized selection of ranks for neural networks is still an open problem, and this is a non-trivial challenge since the selection is discrete. In this work, we propose a novel binary masking mechanism for optimizing the number of ranks in a differentiable framework. Our strategy uses a novel regularization to enable the masking to comply with the SVD property where the ranks have sorted singular values. The experiments examined both types of language models, encoder-only and decoder-only models, including large language models like LLaMA. Our compressed model achieves much better accuracy than previous SVD and their SOTA variants. More interestingly, our method retains significantly better accuracy with zero or limited fine-tuning, proving the substantial advantage of adaptive rank selection.

Adaptive Rank Selections for Low-Rank Approximation of Language Models

naacl-long.13

Poster

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.14.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.14/

@inproceedings{gao-etal-2024-empirical, title = "An Empirical Study of Consistency Regularization for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation", author = "Gao, Pengzhi and Zhang, Ruiqing and He, Zhongjun and Wu, Hua and Wang, Haifeng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.14", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.14", pages = "242--256", abstract = "Consistency regularization methods, such as R-Drop (Liang et al., 2021) and CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023), have achieved impressive supervised and zero-shot performance in the neural machine translation (NMT) field. Can we also boost end-to-end (E2E) speech-to-text translation (ST) by leveraging consistency regularization? In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on intra-modal and cross-modal consistency and propose two training strategies, SimRegCR and SimZeroCR, for E2E ST in regular and zero-shot scenarios. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most translation directions. The analyses prove that regularization brought by the intra-modal consistency, instead of the modality gap, is crucial for the regular E2E ST, and the cross-modal consistency could close the modality gap and boost the zero-shot E2E ST performance.", }

Consistency regularization methods, such as R-Drop (Liang et al., 2021) and CrossConST (Gao et al., 2023), have achieved impressive supervised and zero-shot performance in the neural machine translation (NMT) field. Can we also boost end-to-end (E2E) speech-to-text translation (ST) by leveraging consistency regularization? In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on intra-modal and cross-modal consistency and propose two training strategies, SimRegCR and SimZeroCR, for E2E ST in regular and zero-shot scenarios. Experiments on the MuST-C benchmark show that our approaches achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in most translation directions. The analyses prove that regularization brought by the intra-modal consistency, instead of the modality gap, is crucial for the regular E2E ST, and the cross-modal consistency could close the modality gap and boost the zero-shot E2E ST performance.

An Empirical Study of Consistency Regularization for End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation

naacl-long.14

Poster

2308.14482

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.15.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.15/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-unleashing, title = "Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration", author = "Wang, Zhenhailong and Mao, Shaoguang and Wu, Wenshan and Ge, Tao and Wei, Furu and Ji, Heng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.15", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.15", pages = "257--279", abstract = "Human intelligence thrives on cognitive synergy, where collaboration among different minds yield superior outcomes compared to isolated individuals. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist is an intelligent agent that collaboratively combines multiple minds{'} strengths and knowledge to enhance problem-solving in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. Our in-depth analysis shows that assigning multiple fine-grained personas in LLMs improves problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, experimental results demonstrate that SPP effectively reduces factual hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Additionally, comparative experiments show that cognitive synergy only emerges in GPT-4 and does not appear in less capable models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-13b-chat, which draws an interesting analogy to human development. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.", }

Human intelligence thrives on cognitive synergy, where collaboration among different minds yield superior outcomes compared to isolated individuals. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist is an intelligent agent that collaboratively combines multiple minds{'} strengths and knowledge to enhance problem-solving in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. Our in-depth analysis shows that assigning multiple fine-grained personas in LLMs improves problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, experimental results demonstrate that SPP effectively reduces factual hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Additionally, comparative experiments show that cognitive synergy only emerges in GPT-4 and does not appear in less capable models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-13b-chat, which draws an interesting analogy to human development. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.

Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration

naacl-long.15

Poster

2307.05300

https://huggingface.co/papers/2307.05300

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.16.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.16/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-fpt, title = "{FPT}: Feature Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Readability Assessment", author = "Wang, Ziyang and Lee, Sanwoo and Huang, Hsiu-Yuan and Wu, Yunfang", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.16", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.16", pages = "280--295", abstract = "Prompt-based methods have achieved promising results in most few-shot text classification tasks. However, for readability assessment tasks, traditional prompt methods lack crucial linguistic knowledge, which has already been proven to be essential.Moreover, previous studies on utilizing linguistic features have shown non-robust performance in few-shot settings and may even impair model performance.To address these issues, we propose a novel prompt-based tuning framework that incorporates rich linguistic knowledge, called Feature Prompt Tuning (FPT). Specifically, we extract linguistic features from the text and embed them into trainable soft prompts. Further, we devise a new loss function to calibrate the similarity ranking order between categories. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method FTPnot only exhibits a significant performance improvement over the prior best prompt-based tuning approaches, but also surpasses the previous leading methods that incorporate linguistic features. Also, our proposed model significantly outperforms the large language model gpt-3.5-turbo-16k in most cases. Our proposed method establishes a new architecture for prompt tuning that sheds light on how linguistic features can be easily adapted to linguistic-related tasks.", }

Prompt-based methods have achieved promising results in most few-shot text classification tasks. However, for readability assessment tasks, traditional prompt methods lack crucial linguistic knowledge, which has already been proven to be essential.Moreover, previous studies on utilizing linguistic features have shown non-robust performance in few-shot settings and may even impair model performance.To address these issues, we propose a novel prompt-based tuning framework that incorporates rich linguistic knowledge, called Feature Prompt Tuning (FPT). Specifically, we extract linguistic features from the text and embed them into trainable soft prompts. Further, we devise a new loss function to calibrate the similarity ranking order between categories. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method FTPnot only exhibits a significant performance improvement over the prior best prompt-based tuning approaches, but also surpasses the previous leading methods that incorporate linguistic features. Also, our proposed model significantly outperforms the large language model gpt-3.5-turbo-16k in most cases. Our proposed method establishes a new architecture for prompt tuning that sheds light on how linguistic features can be easily adapted to linguistic-related tasks.

FPT: Feature Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Readability Assessment

naacl-long.16

Oral

2404.02772

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.17.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.17/

@inproceedings{li-etal-2024-self-prompting, title = "Self-Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Open-Domain {QA}", author = "Li, Junlong and Wang, Jinyuan and Zhang, Zhuosheng and Zhao, Hai", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.17", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.17", pages = "296--310", abstract = "Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) aims to answer questions without explicitly providing specific background documents. This task becomes notably challenging in a zero-shot setting where no data is available to train tailored retrieval-reader models.While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 have demonstrated their effectiveness in zero-shot ODQA using direct prompting methods, these methods still fall short of fully harnessing the potential of LLMs when implicitly invoked.In this paper, we propose a Self-Prompting framework to explicitly utilize the massive knowledge encoded in the parameters of LLMs and their strong instruction understanding abilities. Concretely, we prompt LLMs step by step to generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and explanations entirely from scratch.These generated elements are then utilized for in-context learning. Experimental results show that our method significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on three widely-used ODQA datasets and even achieves comparable performance with various customized fine-tuned models on full training data. Our code is available at https://github.com/lockon-n/self-prompting.", }

Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) aims to answer questions without explicitly providing specific background documents. This task becomes notably challenging in a zero-shot setting where no data is available to train tailored retrieval-reader models.While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 have demonstrated their effectiveness in zero-shot ODQA using direct prompting methods, these methods still fall short of fully harnessing the potential of LLMs when implicitly invoked.In this paper, we propose a Self-Prompting framework to explicitly utilize the massive knowledge encoded in the parameters of LLMs and their strong instruction understanding abilities. Concretely, we prompt LLMs step by step to generate multiple pseudo QA pairs with background passages and explanations entirely from scratch.These generated elements are then utilized for in-context learning. Experimental results show that our method significantly surpasses previous state-of-the-art zero-shot methods on three widely-used ODQA datasets and even achieves comparable performance with various customized fine-tuned models on full training data. Our code is available at https://github.com/lockon-n/self-prompting.

Self-Prompting Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Open-Domain QA

naacl-long.17

Poster

2212.08635

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.18.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.18/

@inproceedings{sun-etal-2024-head, title = "Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models ({LLM}s)? {A}.{K}.{A}. Will {LLM}s Replace Knowledge Graphs?", author = "Sun, Kai and Xu, Yifan and Zha, Hanwen and Liu, Yue and Dong, Xin Luna", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.18", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.18", pages = "311--325", abstract = "Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs?To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 16 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.", }

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs?To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 16 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Head-to-Tail: How Knowledgeable are Large Language Models (LLMs)? A.K.A. Will LLMs Replace Knowledge Graphs?

naacl-long.18

Poster

2308.10168

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.19.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.19/

@inproceedings{zhao-etal-2024-knn, title = "$k${NN}-{ICL}: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning", author = "Zhao, Wenting and Liu, Ye and Wan, Yao and Wang, Yibo and Wu, Qingyang and Deng, Zhongfen and Du, Jiangshu and Liu, Shuaiqi and Xu, Yunlong and Yu, Philip", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.19", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.19", pages = "326--337", abstract = "Task-Oriented Parsing (TOP) enables conversational assistants to interpret user commands expressed in natural language, transforming them into structured outputs that combine elements of both natural language and intent/slot tags. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in synthesizing computer programs based on a natural-language prompt, mitigating the gap between natural language and structured programs. Our paper focuses on harnessing the capabilities of LLMs for semantic parsing tasks, addressing the following three key research questions: 1) How can LLMs be effectively utilized for semantic parsing tasks? 2) What defines an effective prompt? and 3) How can LLM overcome the length constraint and streamline prompt design by including all examples as prompts? We introduce k Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning (kNN-ICL), which simplifies prompt engineering by allowing it to be built on top of any design strategy while providing access to all demo examples. Extensive experiments show that: 1) Simple ICL without kNN search can achieve a comparable performance with strong supervised models on the TOP tasks, and 2) kNN-ICL significantly improves the comprehension of complex requests by seamlessly integrating ICL with a nearest-neighbor approach. Notably, this enhancement is achieved without the need for additional data or specialized prompts.", }

Task-Oriented Parsing (TOP) enables conversational assistants to interpret user commands expressed in natural language, transforming them into structured outputs that combine elements of both natural language and intent/slot tags. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in synthesizing computer programs based on a natural-language prompt, mitigating the gap between natural language and structured programs. Our paper focuses on harnessing the capabilities of LLMs for semantic parsing tasks, addressing the following three key research questions: 1) How can LLMs be effectively utilized for semantic parsing tasks? 2) What defines an effective prompt? and 3) How can LLM overcome the length constraint and streamline prompt design by including all examples as prompts? We introduce k Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning (kNN-ICL), which simplifies prompt engineering by allowing it to be built on top of any design strategy while providing access to all demo examples. Extensive experiments show that: 1) Simple ICL without kNN search can achieve a comparable performance with strong supervised models on the TOP tasks, and 2) kNN-ICL significantly improves the comprehension of complex requests by seamlessly integrating ICL with a nearest-neighbor approach. Notably, this enhancement is achieved without the need for additional data or specialized prompts.

kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning

naacl-long.19

Poster

2312.10771

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.20.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.20/

@inproceedings{saad-falcon-etal-2024-ares, title = "{ARES}: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems", author = "Saad-Falcon, Jon and Khattab, Omar and Potts, Christopher and Zaharia, Matei", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.20", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.20", pages = "338--354", abstract = "Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG systems along the dimensions of context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. By creating its own synthetic training data, ARES finetunes lightweight LM judges to assess the quality of individual RAG components. To mitigate potential prediction errors, ARES utilizes a small set of human-annotated datapoints for prediction-powered inference (PPI). Across eight different knowledge-intensive tasks in KILT, SuperGLUE, and AIS, ARES accurately evaluates RAG systems while using only a few hundred human annotations during evaluation. Furthermore, ARES judges remain effective across domain shifts, proving accurate even after changing the type of queries and/or documents used in the evaluated RAG systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available on Github.", }

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG systems along the dimensions of context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer relevance. By creating its own synthetic training data, ARES finetunes lightweight LM judges to assess the quality of individual RAG components. To mitigate potential prediction errors, ARES utilizes a small set of human-annotated datapoints for prediction-powered inference (PPI). Across eight different knowledge-intensive tasks in KILT, SuperGLUE, and AIS, ARES accurately evaluates RAG systems while using only a few hundred human annotations during evaluation. Furthermore, ARES judges remain effective across domain shifts, proving accurate even after changing the type of queries and/or documents used in the evaluated RAG systems. We make our code and datasets publicly available on Github.

ARES: An Automated Evaluation Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

naacl-long.20

Oral

2311.09476

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.21.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.21/

@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2024-demo, title = "{DEMO}: A Statistical Perspective for Efficient Image-Text Matching", author = "Zhang, Fan and Hua, Xian-Sheng and Chen, Chong and Luo, Xiao", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.21", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.21", pages = "355--369", abstract = "Image-text matching has been a long-standing problem, which seeks to connect vision and language through semantic understanding. Due to the capability to manage large-scale raw data, unsupervised hashing-based approaches have gained prominence recently. They typically construct a semantic similarity structure using the natural distance, which subsequently guides the optimization of the hashing network. However, the similarity structure could be biased at the boundaries of semantic distributions, causing error accumulation during sequential optimization. To tackle this, we introduce a novel hashing approach termed Distribution-based Structure Mining with Consistency Learning (DEMO) for efficient image-text matching. From a statistical view, DEMO characterizes each image using multiple augmented views, which are considered as samples drawn from its intrinsic semantic distribution. Then, we employ a non-parametric distribution divergence to ensure a robust and precise similarity structure. In addition, we introduce collaborative consistency learning which not only preserves the similarity structure in the Hamming space but also encourages consistency between retrieval distribution from different directions in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that DEMO achieves superior performance compared with various state-of-the-art methods.", }

Image-text matching has been a long-standing problem, which seeks to connect vision and language through semantic understanding. Due to the capability to manage large-scale raw data, unsupervised hashing-based approaches have gained prominence recently. They typically construct a semantic similarity structure using the natural distance, which subsequently guides the optimization of the hashing network. However, the similarity structure could be biased at the boundaries of semantic distributions, causing error accumulation during sequential optimization. To tackle this, we introduce a novel hashing approach termed Distribution-based Structure Mining with Consistency Learning (DEMO) for efficient image-text matching. From a statistical view, DEMO characterizes each image using multiple augmented views, which are considered as samples drawn from its intrinsic semantic distribution. Then, we employ a non-parametric distribution divergence to ensure a robust and precise similarity structure. In addition, we introduce collaborative consistency learning which not only preserves the similarity structure in the Hamming space but also encourages consistency between retrieval distribution from different directions in a self-supervised manner. Extensive experiments on several widely used datasets demonstrate that DEMO achieves superior performance compared with various state-of-the-art methods.

DEMO: A Statistical Perspective for Efficient Image-Text Matching

naacl-long.21

Poster

2405.11496

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.22.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.22/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-seaeval, title = "{S}ea{E}val for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning", author = "Wang, Bin and Liu, Zhengyuan and Huang, Xin and Jiao, Fangkai and Ding, Yang and Aw, AiTi and Chen, Nancy", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.22", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.22", pages = "370--390", abstract = "We present SeaEval, a benchmark for multilingual foundation models. In addition to characterizing how these models understand and reason with natural language, we also investigate how well they comprehend cultural practices, nuances, and values. Alongside standard accuracy metrics, we investigate the brittleness of foundation models in the dimensions of semantics and multilinguality. Our analyses span both open-sourced and closed models, leading to empirical results across classic NLP tasks, reasoning, and cultural comprehension. Key findings indicate (1) Many models exhibit varied behavior when given paraphrased instructions. (2) Many models still suffer from exposure bias (e.g., positional bias, majority label bias). (3) For questions rooted in factual, scientific, and commonsense knowledge, consistent responses are expected across multilingual queries that are semantically equivalent. Yet, most models surprisingly demonstrate inconsistent performance on these queries. (4) Multilingually-trained models have not attained {``}balanced multilingual{''} capabilities. Our endeavors underscore the need for more generalizable semantic representations and enhanced multilingual contextualization. SeaEval can serve as a launchpad for more thorough investigations and evaluations for multilingual and multicultural scenarios.", }

We present SeaEval, a benchmark for multilingual foundation models. In addition to characterizing how these models understand and reason with natural language, we also investigate how well they comprehend cultural practices, nuances, and values. Alongside standard accuracy metrics, we investigate the brittleness of foundation models in the dimensions of semantics and multilinguality. Our analyses span both open-sourced and closed models, leading to empirical results across classic NLP tasks, reasoning, and cultural comprehension. Key findings indicate (1) Many models exhibit varied behavior when given paraphrased instructions. (2) Many models still suffer from exposure bias (e.g., positional bias, majority label bias). (3) For questions rooted in factual, scientific, and commonsense knowledge, consistent responses are expected across multilingual queries that are semantically equivalent. Yet, most models surprisingly demonstrate inconsistent performance on these queries. (4) Multilingually-trained models have not attained {``}balanced multilingual{''} capabilities. Our endeavors underscore the need for more generalizable semantic representations and enhanced multilingual contextualization. SeaEval can serve as a launchpad for more thorough investigations and evaluations for multilingual and multicultural scenarios.

SeaEval for Multilingual Foundation Models: From Cross-Lingual Alignment to Cultural Reasoning

naacl-long.22

Poster

2309.04766

https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.04766

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.23.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.23/

@inproceedings{lee-etal-2024-volcano, title = "Volcano: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination through Self-Feedback Guided Revision", author = "Lee, Seongyun and Park, Sue Hyun and Jo, Yongrae and Seo, Minjoon", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.23", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.23", pages = "391--404", abstract = "Large multimodal models suffer from multimodal hallucination, where they provide incorrect responses misaligned with the given visual information. Recent works have conjectured that one of the reasons behind multimodal hallucination is due to the vision encoder failing to ground on the image properly. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel approach that leverages self-feedback as visual cues. Building on this approach, we introduce Volcano, a multimodal self-feedback guided revision model. Volcano generates natural language feedback to its initial response based on the provided visual information and utilizes this feedback to self-revise its initial response. Volcano effectively reduces multimodal hallucination and achieves state-of-the-art on MMHal-Bench, POPE, and GAVIE. It also improves on general multimodal abilities and outperforms previous models on MM-Vet and MMBench. Through qualitative analysis, we show that Volcano{'}s feedback is properly grounded on the image than the initial response. This indicates that Volcano can provide itself with richer visual information through feedback generation, leading to self-correct hallucinations. We publicly release our model, data, and code at https://github.com/kaistAI/Volcanogithub.com/kaistAI/Volcano", }

Large multimodal models suffer from multimodal hallucination, where they provide incorrect responses misaligned with the given visual information. Recent works have conjectured that one of the reasons behind multimodal hallucination is due to the vision encoder failing to ground on the image properly. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel approach that leverages self-feedback as visual cues. Building on this approach, we introduce Volcano, a multimodal self-feedback guided revision model. Volcano generates natural language feedback to its initial response based on the provided visual information and utilizes this feedback to self-revise its initial response. Volcano effectively reduces multimodal hallucination and achieves state-of-the-art on MMHal-Bench, POPE, and GAVIE. It also improves on general multimodal abilities and outperforms previous models on MM-Vet and MMBench. Through qualitative analysis, we show that Volcano{'}s feedback is properly grounded on the image than the initial response. This indicates that Volcano can provide itself with richer visual information through feedback generation, leading to self-correct hallucinations. We publicly release our model, data, and code at https://github.com/kaistAI/Volcanogithub.com/kaistAI/Volcano

Volcano: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination through Self-Feedback Guided Revision

naacl-long.23

Poster

2311.07362

https://huggingface.co/papers/2311.07362

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.24.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.24/

@inproceedings{cahyawijaya-etal-2024-llms, title = "{LLM}s Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners", author = "Cahyawijaya, Samuel and Lovenia, Holy and Fung, Pascale", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.24", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.24", pages = "405--433", abstract = "In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-context information, offering a crucial avenue for narrowing the gap between high-resource and low-resource languages.Nonetheless, there is only a handful of works explored ICL for low-resource languages with most of them focusing on relatively high-resource languages, such as French and Spanish. In this work, we extensively study ICL and its cross-lingual variation (X-ICL) on 25 low-resource and 7 relatively higher-resource languages.Our study not only assesses the effectiveness of ICL with LLMs in low-resource languages but also identifies the shortcomings of in-context label alignment, and introduces a more effective alternative: query alignment. Moreover, we provide valuable insights into various facets of ICL for low-resource languages.Our study concludes the significance of few-shot in-context information on enhancing the low-resource understanding quality of LLMs through semantically relevant information by closing the language gap in the target language and aligning the semantics between the targeted low-resource and the high-resource language that the model is proficient in. Our work highlights the importance of advancing ICL research, particularly for low-resource languages.", }

In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to perform diverse tasks in underrepresented languages using only short in-context information, offering a crucial avenue for narrowing the gap between high-resource and low-resource languages.Nonetheless, there is only a handful of works explored ICL for low-resource languages with most of them focusing on relatively high-resource languages, such as French and Spanish. In this work, we extensively study ICL and its cross-lingual variation (X-ICL) on 25 low-resource and 7 relatively higher-resource languages.Our study not only assesses the effectiveness of ICL with LLMs in low-resource languages but also identifies the shortcomings of in-context label alignment, and introduces a more effective alternative: query alignment. Moreover, we provide valuable insights into various facets of ICL for low-resource languages.Our study concludes the significance of few-shot in-context information on enhancing the low-resource understanding quality of LLMs through semantically relevant information by closing the language gap in the target language and aligning the semantics between the targeted low-resource and the high-resource language that the model is proficient in. Our work highlights the importance of advancing ICL research, particularly for low-resource languages.

LLMs Are Few-Shot In-Context Low-Resource Language Learners

naacl-long.24

Poster

2403.16512

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.25.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.25/

@inproceedings{yao-koller-2024-simple, title = "Simple and effective data augmentation for compositional generalization", author = "Yao, Yuekun and Koller, Alexander", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.25", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.25", pages = "434--449", abstract = "Compositional generalization, the ability to predict complex meanings from training on simpler sentences, poses challenges for powerful pretrained seq2seq models. In this paper, we show that data augmentation methods that sample MRs and backtranslate them can be effective for compositional generalization, but only if we sample from the right distribution. Remarkably, sampling from a uniform distribution performs almost as well as sampling from the test distribution, and greatly outperforms earlier methods that sampled from the training distribution.We further conduct experiments to investigate the reason why this happens and where the benefit of such data augmentation methods come from.", }

Compositional generalization, the ability to predict complex meanings from training on simpler sentences, poses challenges for powerful pretrained seq2seq models. In this paper, we show that data augmentation methods that sample MRs and backtranslate them can be effective for compositional generalization, but only if we sample from the right distribution. Remarkably, sampling from a uniform distribution performs almost as well as sampling from the test distribution, and greatly outperforms earlier methods that sampled from the training distribution.We further conduct experiments to investigate the reason why this happens and where the benefit of such data augmentation methods come from.

Simple and effective data augmentation for compositional generalization

naacl-long.25

Poster

2401.09815

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.26.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.26/

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2024-rethinking, title = "Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models", author = "Liu, Tianyang and Wang, Fei and Chen, Muhao", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.26", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.26", pages = "450--482", abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6{\%} on WikiTableQuestions, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.", }

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6{\%} on WikiTableQuestions, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.

Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models

naacl-long.26

Poster

2312.16702

https://huggingface.co/papers/2312.16702

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.27.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.27/

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2024-shortcuts, title = "From Shortcuts to Triggers: Backdoor Defense with Denoised {P}o{E}", author = "Liu, Qin and Wang, Fei and Xiao, Chaowei and Chen, Muhao", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.27", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.27", pages = "483--496", abstract = "Language models are often at risk of diverse backdoor attacks, especially data poisoning. Thus, it is important to investigate defense solutions for addressing them. Existing backdoor defense methods mainly focus on backdoor attacks with explicit triggers, leaving a universal defense against various backdoor attacks with diverse triggers largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end ensemble-based backdoor defense framework, DPoE (Denoised Product-of-Experts), which is inspired by the shortcut nature of backdoor attacks, to defend various backdoor attacks. DPoE consists of two models: a shallow model that captures the backdoor shortcuts and a main model that is prevented from learning the shortcuts. To address the label flip caused by backdoor attackers, DPoE incorporates a denoising design. Experiments on three NLP tasks show that DPoE significantly improves the defense performance against various types of backdoor triggers including word-level, sentence-level, and syntactic triggers. Furthermore, DPoE is also effective under a more challenging but practical setting that mixes multiple types of triggers.", }

Language models are often at risk of diverse backdoor attacks, especially data poisoning. Thus, it is important to investigate defense solutions for addressing them. Existing backdoor defense methods mainly focus on backdoor attacks with explicit triggers, leaving a universal defense against various backdoor attacks with diverse triggers largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end ensemble-based backdoor defense framework, DPoE (Denoised Product-of-Experts), which is inspired by the shortcut nature of backdoor attacks, to defend various backdoor attacks. DPoE consists of two models: a shallow model that captures the backdoor shortcuts and a main model that is prevented from learning the shortcuts. To address the label flip caused by backdoor attackers, DPoE incorporates a denoising design. Experiments on three NLP tasks show that DPoE significantly improves the defense performance against various types of backdoor triggers including word-level, sentence-level, and syntactic triggers. Furthermore, DPoE is also effective under a more challenging but practical setting that mixes multiple types of triggers.

From Shortcuts to Triggers: Backdoor Defense with Denoised PoE

naacl-long.27

Poster

2305.14910

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.28.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.28/

@inproceedings{kumar-etal-2024-booksql, title = "{B}ook{SQL}: A Large Scale Text-to-{SQL} Dataset for Accounting Domain", author = "Kumar, Rahul and Dibbu, Amar Raja and Harsola, Shrutendra and Subrahmaniam, Vignesh and Modi, Ashutosh", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.28", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.28", pages = "497--516", abstract = "Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.", }

Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.

BookSQL: A Large Scale Text-to-SQL Dataset for Accounting Domain

naacl-long.28

Poster

2406.07860

https://huggingface.co/papers/2406.07860

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.29.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.29/

@inproceedings{roy-etal-2024-flap, title = "{FLAP}: Flow-Adhering Planning with Constrained Decoding in {LLM}s", author = "Roy, Shamik and Sengupta, Sailik and Bonadiman, Daniele and Mansour, Saab and Gupta, Arshit", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.29", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.29", pages = "517--539", abstract = "Planning is a crucial task for agents in task oriented dialogs (TODs). Human agents typically resolve user issues by following predefined workflows, decomposing workflow steps into actionable items, and performing actions by executing APIs in order; all of which require reasoning and planning. With the recent advances in LLMs, there have been increasing attempts to use them for task planning and API usage. However, the faithfulness of the plans to predefined workflows and API dependencies, is not guaranteed with LLMs. Moreover, workflows in real life are often custom-defined and prone to changes; hence, adaptation is desirable. To study this, we propose the problem of faithful planning in TODs that needs to resolve user intents by following predefined flows and preserving API dependencies. To solve this problem, we propose $\textbf{FLAP}$, a $\textbf{Fl}$ow-$\textbf{A}$dhering $\textbf{P}$lanning algorithm based on constrained decoding with lookahead heuristic for LLMs. Our algorithm alleviates the need for finetuning LLMs using domain specific (plan/dependency) data, enables quick adaptation to predefined flows, and outperforms other decoding and prompting-based baselines. Further, our algorithm empowers smaller LLMs ($\approx7$B) to perform at par larger LLMs ($\approx30$B-40B).", }

Planning is a crucial task for agents in task oriented dialogs (TODs). Human agents typically resolve user issues by following predefined workflows, decomposing workflow steps into actionable items, and performing actions by executing APIs in order; all of which require reasoning and planning. With the recent advances in LLMs, there have been increasing attempts to use them for task planning and API usage. However, the faithfulness of the plans to predefined workflows and API dependencies, is not guaranteed with LLMs. Moreover, workflows in real life are often custom-defined and prone to changes; hence, adaptation is desirable. To study this, we propose the problem of faithful planning in TODs that needs to resolve user intents by following predefined flows and preserving API dependencies. To solve this problem, we propose $\textbf{FLAP}$, a $\textbf{Fl}$ow-$\textbf{A}$dhering $\textbf{P}$lanning algorithm based on constrained decoding with lookahead heuristic for LLMs. Our algorithm alleviates the need for finetuning LLMs using domain specific (plan/dependency) data, enables quick adaptation to predefined flows, and outperforms other decoding and prompting-based baselines. Further, our algorithm empowers smaller LLMs ($\approx7$B) to perform at par larger LLMs ($\approx30$B-40B).

FLAP: Flow-Adhering Planning with Constrained Decoding in LLMs

naacl-long.29

Oral

2403.05766

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.30.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.30/

@inproceedings{feng-lakshmanan-2024-dure, title = "{D}u{RE}: Dual Contrastive Self Training for Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction", author = "Feng, Yuxi and Lakshmanan, Laks", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.30", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.30", pages = "540--555", abstract = "Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) aims to extract relation triples from documents. Existing document-RE models typically rely on supervised learning which requires substantial labeled data. To alleviate the amount of human supervision, Self-training (ST) has prospered again in language understanding by augmenting the fine-tuning of big pre-trained models whenever labeled data is insufficient. However, existing ST methods in RE fail to tackle the challenge of long-tail relations. In this work, we propose DuRE, a novel ST framework to tackle these problems. DuRE jointly models RE classification and text generation as a dual process. In this way, our model could construct and utilize both pseudo text generated from given labels and pseudo labels predicted from available unlabeled text, which are gradually refined during the ST phase. We proposed a contrastive loss to leverage the signal of the RE classifier to improve generation quality. In addition, we propose a self-adaptive way to sample pseudo text from different relation classes. Experiments on two document-level RE tasks show that DuRE significantly boosts recall and F1 score with comparable precision, especially for long-tail relations against several strong baselines.", }

Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) aims to extract relation triples from documents. Existing document-RE models typically rely on supervised learning which requires substantial labeled data. To alleviate the amount of human supervision, Self-training (ST) has prospered again in language understanding by augmenting the fine-tuning of big pre-trained models whenever labeled data is insufficient. However, existing ST methods in RE fail to tackle the challenge of long-tail relations. In this work, we propose DuRE, a novel ST framework to tackle these problems. DuRE jointly models RE classification and text generation as a dual process. In this way, our model could construct and utilize both pseudo text generated from given labels and pseudo labels predicted from available unlabeled text, which are gradually refined during the ST phase. We proposed a contrastive loss to leverage the signal of the RE classifier to improve generation quality. In addition, we propose a self-adaptive way to sample pseudo text from different relation classes. Experiments on two document-level RE tasks show that DuRE significantly boosts recall and F1 score with comparable precision, especially for long-tail relations against several strong baselines.

DuRE: Dual Contrastive Self Training for Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction

naacl-long.30

Poster

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.31.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.31/

@inproceedings{yu-etal-2024-query, title = "Query-Efficient Textual Adversarial Example Generation for Black-Box Attacks", author = "Yu, Zhen and Chen, Zhenhua and He, Kun", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.31", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.31", pages = "556--569", abstract = "Deep neural networks for Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to textual adversarial examples. Existing black-box attacks typically require thousands of queries on the target model, making them expensive in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach that guides the word substitutions using prior knowledge from the training set to improve the attack efficiency. Specifically, we introduce Adversarial Boosting Preference (ABP), a metric that quantifies the importance of words and guides adversarial word substitutions. We then propose two query-efficient attack strategies based on ABP: query-free attack ($ABP_{free}$) and guided search attack ($ABP_{guide}$). Extensive evaluations for text classification demonstrate that $ABP_{free}$ generates more natural adversarial examples than existing universal attacks, $ABP_{guide}$ significantly reduces the number of queries by a factor of 10 500 while achieving comparable or even better performance than black-box attack baselines. Furthermore, we introduce the first ensemble attack $ABP_{ens}$ in NLP, which gains further performance improvements and achieves better transferability and generalization by the ensemble of the ABP across different models and domains. Code is available at https://github.com/BaiDingHub/ABP.", }

Deep neural networks for Natural Language Processing (NLP) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to textual adversarial examples. Existing black-box attacks typically require thousands of queries on the target model, making them expensive in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach that guides the word substitutions using prior knowledge from the training set to improve the attack efficiency. Specifically, we introduce Adversarial Boosting Preference (ABP), a metric that quantifies the importance of words and guides adversarial word substitutions. We then propose two query-efficient attack strategies based on ABP: query-free attack ($ABP_{free}$) and guided search attack ($ABP_{guide}$). Extensive evaluations for text classification demonstrate that $ABP_{free}$ generates more natural adversarial examples than existing universal attacks, $ABP_{guide}$ significantly reduces the number of queries by a factor of 10 500 while achieving comparable or even better performance than black-box attack baselines. Furthermore, we introduce the first ensemble attack $ABP_{ens}$ in NLP, which gains further performance improvements and achieves better transferability and generalization by the ensemble of the ABP across different models and domains. Code is available at https://github.com/BaiDingHub/ABP.

Query-Efficient Textual Adversarial Example Generation for Black-Box Attacks

naacl-long.31

Poster

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.32.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.32/

@inproceedings{huang-etal-2024-embrace, title = "Embrace Divergence for Richer Insights: A Multi-document Summarization Benchmark and a Case Study on Summarizing Diverse Information from News Articles", author = "Huang, Kung-Hsiang and Laban, Philippe and Fabbri, Alexander and Choubey, Prafulla Kumar and Joty, Shafiq and Xiong, Caiming and Wu, Chien-Sheng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.32", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.32", pages = "570--593", abstract = "Previous research in multi-document news summarization has typically concentrated on collating information that all sources agree upon. However, the summarization of diverse information dispersed across multiple articles about an event remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a new task of summarizing diverse information encountered in multiple news articles encompassing the same event. To facilitate this task, we outlined a data collection schema for identifying diverse information and curated a dataset named DiverseSumm. The dataset includes 245 news stories, with each story comprising 10 news articles and paired with a human-validated reference. Next, to enable consistent automatic evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive analysis to pinpoint the position and verbosity biases when utilizing Large Language Model (LLM)-based metrics for evaluating the coverage and faithfulness of summaries. Through correlation analyses, we outline the best practices for effectively using automatic LLM-based metrics on the DiverseSumm dataset. Finally, we study how LLMs summarize multiple news articles by analyzing which type of diverse information LLMs are capable of identifying. Our analyses suggest that despite the extraordinary capabilities of LLMs in single-document summarization, the proposed task remains a complex challenge for them mainly due to their limited coverage, with GPT-4 only able to cover under 40{\%} of the diverse information on average.", }

Previous research in multi-document news summarization has typically concentrated on collating information that all sources agree upon. However, the summarization of diverse information dispersed across multiple articles about an event remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a new task of summarizing diverse information encountered in multiple news articles encompassing the same event. To facilitate this task, we outlined a data collection schema for identifying diverse information and curated a dataset named DiverseSumm. The dataset includes 245 news stories, with each story comprising 10 news articles and paired with a human-validated reference. Next, to enable consistent automatic evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive analysis to pinpoint the position and verbosity biases when utilizing Large Language Model (LLM)-based metrics for evaluating the coverage and faithfulness of summaries. Through correlation analyses, we outline the best practices for effectively using automatic LLM-based metrics on the DiverseSumm dataset. Finally, we study how LLMs summarize multiple news articles by analyzing which type of diverse information LLMs are capable of identifying. Our analyses suggest that despite the extraordinary capabilities of LLMs in single-document summarization, the proposed task remains a complex challenge for them mainly due to their limited coverage, with GPT-4 only able to cover under 40{\%} of the diverse information on average.

Embrace Divergence for Richer Insights: A Multi-document Summarization Benchmark and a Case Study on Summarizing Diverse Information from News Articles

naacl-long.32

Poster

2309.09369

https://huggingface.co/papers/2309.09369

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.33.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.33/

@inproceedings{qiu-etal-2024-amrfact, title = "{AMRF}act: Enhancing Summarization Factuality Evaluation with {AMR}-Driven Negative Samples Generation", author = "Qiu, Haoyi and Huang, Kung-Hsiang and Qu, Jingnong and Peng, Nanyun", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.33", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.33", pages = "594--608", abstract = "Ensuring factual consistency is crucial for natural language generation tasks, particularly in abstractive summarization, where preserving the integrity of information is paramount. Prior works on evaluating factual consistency of summarization often take the entailment-based approaches that first generate perturbed (factual inconsistent) summaries and then train a classifier on the generated data to detect the factually inconsistencies during testing time. However, previous approaches generating perturbed summaries are either of low coherence or lack error-type coverage. To address these issues, we propose AMRFact, a framework that generates perturbed summaries using Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). Our approach parses factually consistent summaries into AMR graphs and injects controlled factual inconsistencies to create negative examples, allowing for coherent factually inconsistent summaries to be generated with high error-type coverage. Additionally, we present a data selection module NegFilter based on natural language inference and BARTScore to ensure the quality of the generated negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms previous systems on the AggreFact-SOTA benchmark, showcasing its efficacy in evaluating factuality of abstractive summarization.", }

Ensuring factual consistency is crucial for natural language generation tasks, particularly in abstractive summarization, where preserving the integrity of information is paramount. Prior works on evaluating factual consistency of summarization often take the entailment-based approaches that first generate perturbed (factual inconsistent) summaries and then train a classifier on the generated data to detect the factually inconsistencies during testing time. However, previous approaches generating perturbed summaries are either of low coherence or lack error-type coverage. To address these issues, we propose AMRFact, a framework that generates perturbed summaries using Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). Our approach parses factually consistent summaries into AMR graphs and injects controlled factual inconsistencies to create negative examples, allowing for coherent factually inconsistent summaries to be generated with high error-type coverage. Additionally, we present a data selection module NegFilter based on natural language inference and BARTScore to ensure the quality of the generated negative samples. Experimental results demonstrate our approach significantly outperforms previous systems on the AggreFact-SOTA benchmark, showcasing its efficacy in evaluating factuality of abstractive summarization.

AMRFact: Enhancing Summarization Factuality Evaluation with AMR-Driven Negative Samples Generation

naacl-long.33

Oral

2311.09521

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.34.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.34/

@inproceedings{cao-etal-2024-pilot, title = "{PILOT}: Legal Case Outcome Prediction with Case Law", author = "Cao, Lang and Wang, Zifeng and Xiao, Cao and Sun, Jimeng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.34", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.34", pages = "609--621", abstract = "Machine learning shows promise in predicting the outcome of legal cases, but most research has concentrated on civil law cases rather than case law systems. We identified two unique challenges in making legal case outcome predictions with case law. First, it is crucial to identify relevant precedent cases that serve as fundamental evidence for judges during decision-making. Second, it is necessary to consider the evolution of legal principles over time, as early cases may adhere to different legal contexts. In this paper, we proposed a new framework named PILOT (PredictIng Legal case OuTcome) for case outcome prediction. It comprises two modules for relevant case retrieval and temporal pattern handling, respectively. To benchmark the performance of existing legal case outcome prediction models, we curated a dataset from a large-scale case law database. We demonstrate the importance of accurately identifying precedent cases and mitigating the temporal shift when making predictions for case law, as our method shows a significant improvement over the prior methods that focus on civil law case outcome predictions.", }

Machine learning shows promise in predicting the outcome of legal cases, but most research has concentrated on civil law cases rather than case law systems. We identified two unique challenges in making legal case outcome predictions with case law. First, it is crucial to identify relevant precedent cases that serve as fundamental evidence for judges during decision-making. Second, it is necessary to consider the evolution of legal principles over time, as early cases may adhere to different legal contexts. In this paper, we proposed a new framework named PILOT (PredictIng Legal case OuTcome) for case outcome prediction. It comprises two modules for relevant case retrieval and temporal pattern handling, respectively. To benchmark the performance of existing legal case outcome prediction models, we curated a dataset from a large-scale case law database. We demonstrate the importance of accurately identifying precedent cases and mitigating the temporal shift when making predictions for case law, as our method shows a significant improvement over the prior methods that focus on civil law case outcome predictions.

PILOT: Legal Case Outcome Prediction with Case Law

naacl-long.34

Oral

2401.15770

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.35.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.35/

@inproceedings{liu-etal-2024-alora, title = "{AL}o{RA}: Allocating Low-Rank Adaptation for Fine-tuning Large Language Models", author = "Liu, Zequan and Lyn, Jiawen and Zhu, Wei and Tian, Xing and Graham, Yvette", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.35", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.35", pages = "622--641", abstract = "Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is widely studied for its effectiveness and efficiency in the era of large language models. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated commendable performance as a popular and representative method. However, it is implemented with a fixed intrinsic rank that might not be the ideal setting for the downstream tasks. Recognizing the need for more flexible downstream task adaptation, we extend the methodology of LoRA to an innovative approach we call allocating low-rank adaptation (ALoRA) that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. First, we propose a novel method, AB-LoRA, that can effectively estimate the importance score of each LoRA rank. Second, guided by AB-LoRA, we gradually prune abundant and negatively impacting LoRA ranks and allocate the pruned LoRA budgets to important Transformer modules needing higher ranks. We have conducted experiments on various tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that our ALoRA method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters.", }

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is widely studied for its effectiveness and efficiency in the era of large language models. Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated commendable performance as a popular and representative method. However, it is implemented with a fixed intrinsic rank that might not be the ideal setting for the downstream tasks. Recognizing the need for more flexible downstream task adaptation, we extend the methodology of LoRA to an innovative approach we call allocating low-rank adaptation (ALoRA) that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. First, we propose a novel method, AB-LoRA, that can effectively estimate the importance score of each LoRA rank. Second, guided by AB-LoRA, we gradually prune abundant and negatively impacting LoRA ranks and allocate the pruned LoRA budgets to important Transformer modules needing higher ranks. We have conducted experiments on various tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that our ALoRA method can outperform the recent baselines with comparable tunable parameters.

ALoRA: Allocating Low-Rank Adaptation for Fine-tuning Large Language Models

naacl-long.35

Poster

2403.16187

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.36.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.36/

@inproceedings{chang-glass-2024-r, title = "{R}-Spin: Efficient Speaker and Noise-invariant Representation Learning with Acoustic Pieces", author = "Chang, Heng-Jui and Glass, James", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.36", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.36", pages = "642--662", abstract = "This paper introduces Robust Spin (R-Spin), a data-efficient domain-specific self-supervision method for speaker and noise-invariant speech representations by learning discrete acoustic units with speaker-invariant clustering (Spin). R-Spin resolves Spin{'}s issues and enhances content representations by learning to predict acoustic pieces. R-Spin offers a 12X reduction in computational resources compared to previous state-of-the-art methods while outperforming them in severely distorted speech scenarios. This paper provides detailed analyses to show how discrete units contribute to speech encoder training and improving robustness in diverse acoustic environments.", }

This paper introduces Robust Spin (R-Spin), a data-efficient domain-specific self-supervision method for speaker and noise-invariant speech representations by learning discrete acoustic units with speaker-invariant clustering (Spin). R-Spin resolves Spin{'}s issues and enhances content representations by learning to predict acoustic pieces. R-Spin offers a 12X reduction in computational resources compared to previous state-of-the-art methods while outperforming them in severely distorted speech scenarios. This paper provides detailed analyses to show how discrete units contribute to speech encoder training and improving robustness in diverse acoustic environments.

R-Spin: Efficient Speaker and Noise-invariant Representation Learning with Acoustic Pieces

naacl-long.36

Poster

2311.09117

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.37.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.37/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-inscl, title = "{I}ns{CL}: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions", author = "Wang, Yifan and Liu, Yafei and Shi, Chufan and Li, Haoling and Chen, Chen and Lu, Haonan and Yang, Yujiu", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.37", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.37", pages = "663--677", abstract = "Instruction tuning effectively optimizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks. Due to the changing environment in real-life applications, LLMs necessitate continual task-specific adaptation without catastrophic forgetting. Considering the heavy computational cost, replay-based Continual Learning (CL) methods are the simplest and most widely used for LLMs to address the forgetting issue. However, traditional replay-based methods do not fully utilize instructions to customize the replay strategy. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm called Instruction-based Continual Learning (InsCL). InsCL dynamically replays previous data based on task similarity, calculated by Wasserstein Distance with instructions. Moreover, we further introduce an Instruction Information Metric (InsInfo) to quantify the complexity and diversity of instructions. According to InsInfo, InsCL guides the replay process more inclined to high-quality data. We conduct extensive experiments over 16 tasks with different training orders, observing consistent performance improvements of InsCL. When all tasks have been trained, InsCL achieves performance gains of 3.0 Relative Gain compared with Random Replay, and 27.96 Relative Gain compared with No Replay.", }

Instruction tuning effectively optimizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks. Due to the changing environment in real-life applications, LLMs necessitate continual task-specific adaptation without catastrophic forgetting. Considering the heavy computational cost, replay-based Continual Learning (CL) methods are the simplest and most widely used for LLMs to address the forgetting issue. However, traditional replay-based methods do not fully utilize instructions to customize the replay strategy. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm called Instruction-based Continual Learning (InsCL). InsCL dynamically replays previous data based on task similarity, calculated by Wasserstein Distance with instructions. Moreover, we further introduce an Instruction Information Metric (InsInfo) to quantify the complexity and diversity of instructions. According to InsInfo, InsCL guides the replay process more inclined to high-quality data. We conduct extensive experiments over 16 tasks with different training orders, observing consistent performance improvements of InsCL. When all tasks have been trained, InsCL achieves performance gains of 3.0 Relative Gain compared with Random Replay, and 27.96 Relative Gain compared with No Replay.

InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions

naacl-long.37

Poster

2403.11435

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.38.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.38/

@inproceedings{utpala-etal-2024-language, title = "Language Agnostic Code Embeddings", author = "Utpala, Saiteja and Gu, Alex and Chen, Pin-Yu", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.38", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.38", pages = "678--691", abstract = "Recently, code language models have achieved notable advancements in addressing a diverse array of essential code comprehension and generation tasks. Yet, the field lacks a comprehensive deep dive and understanding of the code embeddings of multilingual code models. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on multilingual code embeddings, focusing on the cross-lingual capabilities of these embeddings across different programming languages. Through probing experiments, we demonstrate that code embeddings comprise two distinct components: one deeply tied to the nuances and syntax of a specific language, and the other remaining agnostic to these details, primarily focusing on semantics. Further, we show that when we isolate and eliminate this language-specific component, we witness significant improvements in downstream code retrieval tasks, leading to an absolute increase of up to +17 in the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).", }

Recently, code language models have achieved notable advancements in addressing a diverse array of essential code comprehension and generation tasks. Yet, the field lacks a comprehensive deep dive and understanding of the code embeddings of multilingual code models. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on multilingual code embeddings, focusing on the cross-lingual capabilities of these embeddings across different programming languages. Through probing experiments, we demonstrate that code embeddings comprise two distinct components: one deeply tied to the nuances and syntax of a specific language, and the other remaining agnostic to these details, primarily focusing on semantics. Further, we show that when we isolate and eliminate this language-specific component, we witness significant improvements in downstream code retrieval tasks, leading to an absolute increase of up to +17 in the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR).

Language Agnostic Code Embeddings

naacl-long.38

Poster

2310.16803

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.39.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.39/

@inproceedings{ma-etal-2024-examination, title = "An Examination of the Compositionality of Large Generative Vision-Language Models", author = "Ma, Teli and Li, Rong and Liang, Junwei", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.39", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.39", pages = "692--705", abstract = "With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), many Generative Vision-Language Models (GVLMs) have been constructed via multimodal instruction tuning. However, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we examine both the evaluation metrics ( VisualGPTScore, etc.) and current benchmarks for evaluating the compositionality of GVLMs. We identify the syntactical bias in current benchmarks, which is exploited by the linguistic capability of GVLMs. The bias renders VisualGPTScore an insufficient metric for assessing GVLMs. To combat this, we first introduce a **SyntaxBias Score**, leveraging LLMs to quantify such bias for mitigation. A challenging new task is subsequently added to evaluate the robustness of GVLMs against inherent inclination toward syntactical correctness. Using the bias-mitigated datasets and the new task, we propose a novel benchmark, namely **S**ynt**A**ctically **DE**-biased benchmark (SADE). Our study provides an unbiased benchmark for the compositionality of GVLMs, facilitating future research in this direction. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/TeleeMa/SADE.", }

With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), many Generative Vision-Language Models (GVLMs) have been constructed via multimodal instruction tuning. However, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains under-explored. In this paper, we examine both the evaluation metrics ( VisualGPTScore, etc.) and current benchmarks for evaluating the compositionality of GVLMs. We identify the syntactical bias in current benchmarks, which is exploited by the linguistic capability of GVLMs. The bias renders VisualGPTScore an insufficient metric for assessing GVLMs. To combat this, we first introduce a **SyntaxBias Score**, leveraging LLMs to quantify such bias for mitigation. A challenging new task is subsequently added to evaluate the robustness of GVLMs against inherent inclination toward syntactical correctness. Using the bias-mitigated datasets and the new task, we propose a novel benchmark, namely **S**ynt**A**ctically **DE**-biased benchmark (SADE). Our study provides an unbiased benchmark for the compositionality of GVLMs, facilitating future research in this direction. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/TeleeMa/SADE.

An Examination of the Compositionality of Large Generative Vision-Language Models

naacl-long.39

Poster

2308.10509

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.40.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.40/

@inproceedings{graf-etal-2024-two, title = "Two Heads are Better than One: Nested {P}o{E} for Robust Defense Against Multi-Backdoors", author = "Graf, Victoria and Liu, Qin and Chen, Muhao", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.40", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.40", pages = "706--718", abstract = "Data poisoning backdoor attacks can cause undesirable behaviors in large language models (LLMs), and defending against them is of increasing importance. Existing defense mechanisms often assume that only one type of trigger is adopted by the attacker, while defending against multiple simultaneous and independent trigger types necessitates general defense frameworks and is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose Nested Product of Experts (NPoE) defense framework, which involves a mixture of experts (MoE) as a trigger-only ensemble within the PoE defense framework to simultaneously defend against multiple trigger types. During NPoE training, the main modelis trained in an ensemble with a mixture of smaller expert models that learn the features of backdoor triggers. At inference time, only the main model is used. Experimental results on sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and question classification tasks demonstrate that NPoE effectively defends against a variety of triggers both separately and in trigger mixtures. Due to the versatility of the MoE structure in NPoE, this framework can be further expanded to defend against other attack settings.", }

Data poisoning backdoor attacks can cause undesirable behaviors in large language models (LLMs), and defending against them is of increasing importance. Existing defense mechanisms often assume that only one type of trigger is adopted by the attacker, while defending against multiple simultaneous and independent trigger types necessitates general defense frameworks and is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose Nested Product of Experts (NPoE) defense framework, which involves a mixture of experts (MoE) as a trigger-only ensemble within the PoE defense framework to simultaneously defend against multiple trigger types. During NPoE training, the main modelis trained in an ensemble with a mixture of smaller expert models that learn the features of backdoor triggers. At inference time, only the main model is used. Experimental results on sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and question classification tasks demonstrate that NPoE effectively defends against a variety of triggers both separately and in trigger mixtures. Due to the versatility of the MoE structure in NPoE, this framework can be further expanded to defend against other attack settings.

Two Heads are Better than One: Nested PoE for Robust Defense Against Multi-Backdoors

naacl-long.40

Oral

2404.02356

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.41.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.41/

@inproceedings{rusert-2024-vertattack, title = "{V}ert{A}ttack: Taking Advantage of Text Classifiers{'} Horizontal Vision", author = "Rusert, Jonathan", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.41", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.41", pages = "719--732", abstract = "Text classification systems have continuouslyimproved in performance over the years. How-ever, nearly all current SOTA classifiers have asimilar shortcoming, they process text in a hor-izontal manner. Vertically written words willnot be recognized by a classifier. In contrast,humans are easily able to recognize and readwords written both horizontally and vertically.Hence, a human adversary could write problem-atic words vertically and the meaning wouldstill be preserved to other humans. We simulatesuch an attack, VertAttack. VertAttack identifieswhich words a classifier is reliant on and thenrewrites those words vertically. We find thatVertAttack is able to greatly drop the accuracyof 4 different transformer models on 5 datasets.For example, on the SST2 dataset, VertAttackis able to drop RoBERTa{'}s accuracy from 94 to13{\%}. Furthermore, since VertAttack does notreplace the word, meaning is easily preserved.We verify this via a human study and find thatcrowdworkers are able to correctly label 77{\%}perturbed texts perturbed, compared to 81{\%} ofthe original texts. We believe VertAttack offersa look into how humans might circumvent clas-sifiers in the future and thus inspire a look intomore robust algorithms.", }

Text classification systems have continuouslyimproved in performance over the years. How-ever, nearly all current SOTA classifiers have asimilar shortcoming, they process text in a hor-izontal manner. Vertically written words willnot be recognized by a classifier. In contrast,humans are easily able to recognize and readwords written both horizontally and vertically.Hence, a human adversary could write problem-atic words vertically and the meaning wouldstill be preserved to other humans. We simulatesuch an attack, VertAttack. VertAttack identifieswhich words a classifier is reliant on and thenrewrites those words vertically. We find thatVertAttack is able to greatly drop the accuracyof 4 different transformer models on 5 datasets.For example, on the SST2 dataset, VertAttackis able to drop RoBERTa{'}s accuracy from 94 to13{\%}. Furthermore, since VertAttack does notreplace the word, meaning is easily preserved.We verify this via a human study and find thatcrowdworkers are able to correctly label 77{\%}perturbed texts perturbed, compared to 81{\%} ofthe original texts. We believe VertAttack offersa look into how humans might circumvent clas-sifiers in the future and thus inspire a look intomore robust algorithms.

VertAttack: Taking Advantage of Text Classifiers' Horizontal Vision

naacl-long.41

Oral

2404.08538

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.42.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.42/

@inproceedings{nguyen-etal-2024-kdmcse, title = "{KDMCSE}: Knowledge Distillation Multimodal Sentence Embeddings with Adaptive Angular margin Contrastive Learning", author = "Nguyen, Cong-Duy and Nguyen, Thong and Wu, Xiaobao and Luu, Anh Tuan", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.42", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.42", pages = "733--749", abstract = "Previous work on multimodal sentence embedding has proposed multimodal contrastive learning and achieved promising results. However, by taking the rest of the batch as negative samples without reviewing when forming contrastive pairs, those studies encountered many suspicious and noisy negative examples, significantly affecting the methods{'} overall performance. In this work, we propose KDMCSE (Knowledge Distillation Multimodal contrastive learning of Sentence Embeddings), a novel approach that enhances the discrimination and generalizability of multimodal representation and inherits the knowledge from the teacher model to learn the difference between positive and negative instances and via that, can detect noisy and wrong negative samples effectively before they are calculated in the contrastive objective. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of modeling the variation within negative pairs, we introduce a new contrastive objective, AdapACSE (Adaptive Angular Margin Supervised Contrastive Learning for Multimodal sentence embeddings), that enhances the discriminative representation by strengthening the margin within the angular space while capturing varying semantics within the negative. Experimental results on widely used Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.", }

Previous work on multimodal sentence embedding has proposed multimodal contrastive learning and achieved promising results. However, by taking the rest of the batch as negative samples without reviewing when forming contrastive pairs, those studies encountered many suspicious and noisy negative examples, significantly affecting the methods{'} overall performance. In this work, we propose KDMCSE (Knowledge Distillation Multimodal contrastive learning of Sentence Embeddings), a novel approach that enhances the discrimination and generalizability of multimodal representation and inherits the knowledge from the teacher model to learn the difference between positive and negative instances and via that, can detect noisy and wrong negative samples effectively before they are calculated in the contrastive objective. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of modeling the variation within negative pairs, we introduce a new contrastive objective, AdapACSE (Adaptive Angular Margin Supervised Contrastive Learning for Multimodal sentence embeddings), that enhances the discriminative representation by strengthening the margin within the angular space while capturing varying semantics within the negative. Experimental results on widely used Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

KDMCSE: Knowledge Distillation Multimodal Sentence Embeddings with Adaptive Angular margin Contrastive Learning

naacl-long.42

Poster

2403.17486

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.43.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.43/

@inproceedings{zhu-etal-2024-taste, title = "The taste of {IPA}: Towards open-vocabulary keyword spotting and forced alignment in any language", author = "Zhu, Jian and Yang, Changbing and Samir, Farhan and Islam, Jahurul", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.43", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.43", pages = "750--772", abstract = "In this project, we demonstrate that phoneme-based models for speech processing can achieve strong crosslinguistic generalizability to unseen languages. We curated the IPAPACK, a massively multilingual speech corpora with phonemic transcriptions, encompassing more than 115 languages from diverse language families, selectively checked by linguists. Based on the IPAPACK, we propose CLAP-IPA, a multi-lingual phoneme-speech contrastive embedding model capable of open-vocabulary matching between arbitrary speech signals and phonemic sequences. The proposed model was tested on 95 unseen languages, showing strong generalizability across languages. Temporal alignments between phonemes and speech signals also emerged from contrastive training, enabling zeroshot forced alignment in unseen languages. We further introduced a neural forced aligner IPA-ALIGNER by finetuning CLAP-IPA with the Forward-Sum loss to learn better phone-to-audio alignment. Evaluation results suggest that IPA-ALIGNER can generalize to unseen languages without adaptation.", }

In this project, we demonstrate that phoneme-based models for speech processing can achieve strong crosslinguistic generalizability to unseen languages. We curated the IPAPACK, a massively multilingual speech corpora with phonemic transcriptions, encompassing more than 115 languages from diverse language families, selectively checked by linguists. Based on the IPAPACK, we propose CLAP-IPA, a multi-lingual phoneme-speech contrastive embedding model capable of open-vocabulary matching between arbitrary speech signals and phonemic sequences. The proposed model was tested on 95 unseen languages, showing strong generalizability across languages. Temporal alignments between phonemes and speech signals also emerged from contrastive training, enabling zeroshot forced alignment in unseen languages. We further introduced a neural forced aligner IPA-ALIGNER by finetuning CLAP-IPA with the Forward-Sum loss to learn better phone-to-audio alignment. Evaluation results suggest that IPA-ALIGNER can generalize to unseen languages without adaptation.

The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword spotting and forced alignment in any language

naacl-long.43

Poster

2311.08323

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.44.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.44/

@inproceedings{zhang-etal-2024-think, title = "Think Before You Act: A Two-Stage Framework for Mitigating Gender Bias Towards Vision-Language Tasks", author = "Zhang, Yunqi and Li, Songda and Deng, Chunyuan and Wang, Luyi and Zhao, Hui", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.44", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.44", pages = "773--791", abstract = "Gender bias in vision-language models (VLMs) can reinforce harmful stereotypes and discrimination. In this paper, we focus on mitigating gender bias towards vision-language tasks. We identify object hallucination as the essence of gender bias in VLMs. Existing VLMs tend to focus on salient or familiar attributes in images but ignore contextualized nuances. Moreover, most VLMs rely on the co-occurrence between specific objects and gender attributes to infer the ignored features, ultimately resulting in gender bias. We propose GAMA, a task-agnostic generation framework to mitigate gender bias. GAMA consists of two stages: narrative generation and answer inference. During narrative generation, GAMA yields all-sided but gender-obfuscated narratives, which prevents premature concentration on localized image features, especially gender attributes. During answer inference, GAMA integrates the image, generated narrative, and a task-specific question prompt to infer answers for different vision-language tasks. This approach allows the model to rethink gender attributes and answers. We conduct extensive experiments on GAMA, demonstrating its debiasing and generalization ability.", }

Gender bias in vision-language models (VLMs) can reinforce harmful stereotypes and discrimination. In this paper, we focus on mitigating gender bias towards vision-language tasks. We identify object hallucination as the essence of gender bias in VLMs. Existing VLMs tend to focus on salient or familiar attributes in images but ignore contextualized nuances. Moreover, most VLMs rely on the co-occurrence between specific objects and gender attributes to infer the ignored features, ultimately resulting in gender bias. We propose GAMA, a task-agnostic generation framework to mitigate gender bias. GAMA consists of two stages: narrative generation and answer inference. During narrative generation, GAMA yields all-sided but gender-obfuscated narratives, which prevents premature concentration on localized image features, especially gender attributes. During answer inference, GAMA integrates the image, generated narrative, and a task-specific question prompt to infer answers for different vision-language tasks. This approach allows the model to rethink gender attributes and answers. We conduct extensive experiments on GAMA, demonstrating its debiasing and generalization ability.

Think Before You Act: A Two-Stage Framework for Mitigating Gender Bias Towards Vision-Language Tasks

naacl-long.44

Poster

2405.16860

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.45.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.45/

@inproceedings{li-li-2024-bellm, title = "{B}e{LLM}: Backward Dependency Enhanced Large Language Model for Sentence Embeddings", author = "Li, Xianming and Li, Jing", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.45", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.45", pages = "792--804", abstract = "Sentence embeddings are crucial in measuring semantic similarity. Most recent studies employed large language models (LLMs) to learn sentence embeddings. Existing LLMs mainly adopted autoregressive architecture without explicit backward dependency modeling. Therefore, we examined the effects of backward dependencies in LLMs for semantic similarity measurements. Concretely, we propose a novel model: backward dependency enhanced large language model (BeLLM). It learns sentence embeddings via transforming specific attention layers from uni- to bi-directional. We extensively experiment across various semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and downstream applications. BeLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in varying scenarios. It shows that autoregressive LLMs benefit from backward dependencies for sentence embeddings.", }

Sentence embeddings are crucial in measuring semantic similarity. Most recent studies employed large language models (LLMs) to learn sentence embeddings. Existing LLMs mainly adopted autoregressive architecture without explicit backward dependency modeling. Therefore, we examined the effects of backward dependencies in LLMs for semantic similarity measurements. Concretely, we propose a novel model: backward dependency enhanced large language model (BeLLM). It learns sentence embeddings via transforming specific attention layers from uni- to bi-directional. We extensively experiment across various semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks and downstream applications. BeLLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in varying scenarios. It shows that autoregressive LLMs benefit from backward dependencies for sentence embeddings.

BeLLM: Backward Dependency Enhanced Large Language Model for Sentence Embeddings

naacl-long.45

Oral

2311.05296

https://huggingface.co/papers/2311.05296

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.46.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.46/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-assessing, title = "Assessing Factual Reliability of Large Language Model Knowledge", author = "Wang, Weixuan and Haddow, Barry and Birch, Alexandra and Peng, Wei", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.46", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.46", pages = "805--819", abstract = "The factual knowledge of LLMs is typically evaluated using accuracy, yet this metric does not capture the vulnerability of LLMs to hallucination-inducing factors like prompt and context variability. How do we evaluate the capabilities of LLMs to consistently produce factually correct answers? In this paper, we propose MOdel kNowledge relIabiliTy scORe (MONITOR), a novel metric designed to directly measure LLMs{'} factual reliability. MONITOR is designed to compute the distance between the probability distributions of a valid output and its counterparts produced by the same LLM probing the same fact using different styles of prompts and contexts. Experiments on a comprehensive range of 12 LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of MONITOR in evaluating the factual reliability of LLMs while maintaining a low computational overhead. In addition, we release the FKTC (Factual Knowledge Test Corpus) to foster research along this line https://github.com/Vicky-Wil/MONITOR.", }

The factual knowledge of LLMs is typically evaluated using accuracy, yet this metric does not capture the vulnerability of LLMs to hallucination-inducing factors like prompt and context variability. How do we evaluate the capabilities of LLMs to consistently produce factually correct answers? In this paper, we propose MOdel kNowledge relIabiliTy scORe (MONITOR), a novel metric designed to directly measure LLMs{'} factual reliability. MONITOR is designed to compute the distance between the probability distributions of a valid output and its counterparts produced by the same LLM probing the same fact using different styles of prompts and contexts. Experiments on a comprehensive range of 12 LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of MONITOR in evaluating the factual reliability of LLMs while maintaining a low computational overhead. In addition, we release the FKTC (Factual Knowledge Test Corpus) to foster research along this line https://github.com/Vicky-Wil/MONITOR.

Assessing Factual Reliability of Large Language Model Knowledge

naacl-long.46

Oral

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.47.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.47/

@inproceedings{su-etal-2024-dial, title = "Dial-{MAE}: {C}on{T}extual Masked Auto-Encoder for Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems", author = "Su, Zhenpeng and W, Xing and Zhou, Wei and Ma, Guangyuan and Hu, Songlin", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.47", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.47", pages = "820--830", abstract = "Dialogue response selection aims to select an appropriate response from several candidates based on a given user and system utterance history. Most existing works primarily focus on post-training and fine-tuning tailored for cross-encoders. However, there are no post-training methods tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. We argue that when the current language model, based on dense dialogue systems (such as BERT), is employed as a dense encoder, it separately encodes dialogue context and response, leading to a struggle to achieve the alignment of both representations. Thus, we propose Dial-MAE (Dialogue Contextual Masking Auto-Encoder), a straightforward yet effective post-training technique tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. Dial-MAE uses an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to compress the dialogue semantics into dense vectors, which achieves better alignment between the features of the dialogue context and response. Our experiments have demonstrated that Dial-MAE is highly effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two commonly evaluated benchmarks.", }

Dialogue response selection aims to select an appropriate response from several candidates based on a given user and system utterance history. Most existing works primarily focus on post-training and fine-tuning tailored for cross-encoders. However, there are no post-training methods tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. We argue that when the current language model, based on dense dialogue systems (such as BERT), is employed as a dense encoder, it separately encodes dialogue context and response, leading to a struggle to achieve the alignment of both representations. Thus, we propose Dial-MAE (Dialogue Contextual Masking Auto-Encoder), a straightforward yet effective post-training technique tailored for dense encoders in dialogue response selection. Dial-MAE uses an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to compress the dialogue semantics into dense vectors, which achieves better alignment between the features of the dialogue context and response. Our experiments have demonstrated that Dial-MAE is highly effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance on two commonly evaluated benchmarks.

Dial-MAE: ConTextual Masked Auto-Encoder for Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems

naacl-long.47

Poster

2306.04357

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.48.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.48/

@inproceedings{qian-etal-2024-toolink, title = "Toolink: Linking Toolkit Creation and Using through Chain-of-Solving on Open-Source Model", author = "Qian, Cheng and Xiong, Chenyan and Liu, Zhenghao and Liu, Zhiyuan", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.48", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.48", pages = "831--854", abstract = "Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability, necessitating a valid method that leverages smaller, open-sourced models. In this paper, we introduce Toolink, a comprehensive framework that performs task-solving by first creating a toolkit and then integrating the planning and calling of tools through a chain-of-solving (CoS) approach. We first validate the efficacy of Toolink in harnessing the model{'}s creativity and CoS ability on ChatGPT. Subsequently, we curate CoS-GPT, a chain-of-solving dataset designed for tool-using, and finetune the LLaMA-7B model. It results in LLaMA-CoS, a powerful open-source model with advanced tool-planning and tool-calling capabilities. Evaluation of diverse tasks from BIG-bench demonstrates its CoS ability matches that of ChatGPT while its performance surpasses the chain-of-thought approach. Further studies highlight the generalization of LLaMA-CoS to unseen tasks and showcase its capability in using toolkits not explicitly tailored for the target task, affirming its robustness in real-world scenarios. All codes and data are released.", }

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability, necessitating a valid method that leverages smaller, open-sourced models. In this paper, we introduce Toolink, a comprehensive framework that performs task-solving by first creating a toolkit and then integrating the planning and calling of tools through a chain-of-solving (CoS) approach. We first validate the efficacy of Toolink in harnessing the model{'}s creativity and CoS ability on ChatGPT. Subsequently, we curate CoS-GPT, a chain-of-solving dataset designed for tool-using, and finetune the LLaMA-7B model. It results in LLaMA-CoS, a powerful open-source model with advanced tool-planning and tool-calling capabilities. Evaluation of diverse tasks from BIG-bench demonstrates its CoS ability matches that of ChatGPT while its performance surpasses the chain-of-thought approach. Further studies highlight the generalization of LLaMA-CoS to unseen tasks and showcase its capability in using toolkits not explicitly tailored for the target task, affirming its robustness in real-world scenarios. All codes and data are released.

Toolink: Linking Toolkit Creation and Using through Chain-of-Solving on Open-Source Model

naacl-long.48

Poster

2310.05155

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.49.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.49/

@inproceedings{wang-etal-2024-create, title = "Create! Don{'}t Repeat: A Paradigm Shift in Multi-Label Augmentation through Label Creative Generation", author = "Wang, Letian and Liu, Xianggen and Lv, Jiancheng", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.49", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.49", pages = "855--869", abstract = "We propose Label Creative Generation (LCG), a new paradigm in multi-label data augmentation. Beyond repeating data points with fixed labels, LCG creates new data by exploring innovative label combinations. Within LCG, we introduce Tail-Driven Conditional Augmentation (TDCA), combining tail-driven label sampling and label-conditioned text generation for balanced, consistent data augmentation. Our approach has demonstrated a **100.21{\%}** increase in PSP@1 across three datasets, successfully mitigating the long-tail effect in MLTC and markedly enhancing model performance.", }

We propose Label Creative Generation (LCG), a new paradigm in multi-label data augmentation. Beyond repeating data points with fixed labels, LCG creates new data by exploring innovative label combinations. Within LCG, we introduce Tail-Driven Conditional Augmentation (TDCA), combining tail-driven label sampling and label-conditioned text generation for balanced, consistent data augmentation. Our approach has demonstrated a **100.21{\%}** increase in PSP@1 across three datasets, successfully mitigating the long-tail effect in MLTC and markedly enhancing model performance.

Create! Don't Repeat: A Paradigm Shift in Multi-Label Augmentation through Label Creative Generation

naacl-long.49

Poster

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.50.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.50/

@inproceedings{safaya-yuret-2024-neurocache, title = "Neurocache: Efficient Vector Retrieval for Long-range Language Modeling", author = "Safaya, Ali and Yuret, Deniz", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.50", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.50", pages = "870--883", abstract = "This paper introduces Neurocache, an approach to extend the effective context size of large language models (LLMs) using an external vector cache to store its past states. Like recent vector retrieval approaches, Neurocache uses an efficient k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) algorithm to retrieve relevant past states and incorporate them into the attention process. Neurocache improves upon previous methods by (1) storing compressed states, which reduces cache size; (2) performing a single retrieval operation per token which increases inference speed; and (3) extending the retrieval window to neighboring states, which improves both language modeling and downstream task accuracy. Our experiments show the effectiveness of Neurocache both for models trained from scratch and for pre-trained models such as Llama2-7B and Mistral-7B when enhanced with the cache mechanism. We also compare Neurocache with text retrieval methods and show improvements in single-document question-answering and few-shot learning tasks. We made the source code available under: https://github.com/alisafaya/neurocache", }

This paper introduces Neurocache, an approach to extend the effective context size of large language models (LLMs) using an external vector cache to store its past states. Like recent vector retrieval approaches, Neurocache uses an efficient k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) algorithm to retrieve relevant past states and incorporate them into the attention process. Neurocache improves upon previous methods by (1) storing compressed states, which reduces cache size; (2) performing a single retrieval operation per token which increases inference speed; and (3) extending the retrieval window to neighboring states, which improves both language modeling and downstream task accuracy. Our experiments show the effectiveness of Neurocache both for models trained from scratch and for pre-trained models such as Llama2-7B and Mistral-7B when enhanced with the cache mechanism. We also compare Neurocache with text retrieval methods and show improvements in single-document question-answering and few-shot learning tasks. We made the source code available under: https://github.com/alisafaya/neurocache

Neurocache: Efficient Vector Retrieval for Long-range Language Modeling

naacl-long.50

Poster

2407.02486

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.51.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.51/

@inproceedings{yang-etal-2024-unveiling, title = "Unveiling the Generalization Power of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models", author = "Yang, Haoran and Zhang, Yumeng and Xu, Jiaqi and Lu, Hongyuan and Heng, Pheng-Ann and Lam, Wai", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.51", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.51", pages = "884--899", abstract = "While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their counterparts without fine-tuning. However, the comprehensive effects of fine-tuning on the LLMs{'} generalization ability are not fully understood.This paper delves into the differences between original, unmodified LLMs and their fine-tuned variants. Our primary investigation centers on whether fine-tuning affects the generalization ability intrinsic to LLMs. To elaborate on this, we conduct extensive experiments across five distinct language tasks on various datasets.Our main findings reveal that models fine-tuned on generation and classification tasks exhibit dissimilar behaviors in generalizing to different domains and tasks.Intriguingly, we observe that integrating the in-context learning strategy during fine-tuning on generation tasks can enhance the model{'}s generalization ability.Through this systematic investigation, we aim to contribute valuable insights into the evolving landscape of fine-tuning practices for LLMs.", }

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, fine-tuning these models on downstream, domain-specific datasets is often necessary to yield superior performance on test sets compared to their counterparts without fine-tuning. However, the comprehensive effects of fine-tuning on the LLMs{'} generalization ability are not fully understood.This paper delves into the differences between original, unmodified LLMs and their fine-tuned variants. Our primary investigation centers on whether fine-tuning affects the generalization ability intrinsic to LLMs. To elaborate on this, we conduct extensive experiments across five distinct language tasks on various datasets.Our main findings reveal that models fine-tuned on generation and classification tasks exhibit dissimilar behaviors in generalizing to different domains and tasks.Intriguingly, we observe that integrating the in-context learning strategy during fine-tuning on generation tasks can enhance the model{'}s generalization ability.Through this systematic investigation, we aim to contribute valuable insights into the evolving landscape of fine-tuning practices for LLMs.

Unveiling the Generalization Power of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models

naacl-long.51

Poster

2403.09162

https://huggingface.co/papers/2403.09162

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.52.bib

https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.52/

@inproceedings{hong-etal-2024-closer, title = "A Closer Look at the Self-Verification Abilities of Large Language Models in Logical Reasoning", author = "Hong, Ruixin and Zhang, Hongming and Pang, Xinyu and Yu, Dong and Zhang, Changshui", editor = "Duh, Kevin and Gomez, Helena and Bethard, Steven", booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)", month = jun, year = "2024", address = "Mexico City, Mexico", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.52", doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-long.52", pages = "900--925", abstract = "Logical reasoning has been an ongoing pursuit in the field of AI. Despite significant advancements made by large language models (LLMs), they still struggle with complex logical reasoning problems. To enhance reasoning performance, one promising direction is scalable oversight, which requires LLMs to identify their own errors and then improve by themselves. Various self-verification methods have been proposed in pursuit of this goal. Nevertheless, whether existing models understand their own errors well is still under investigation. In this paper, we take a closer look at the self-verification abilities of LLMs in the context of logical reasoning, focusing on their ability to identify logical fallacies accurately. We introduce a dataset, FALLACIES, containing 232 types of reasoning fallacies categorized in a hierarchical taxonomy. By conducting exhaustive experiments on FALLACIES, we obtain comprehensive and detailed analyses of a series of models on their verification abilities. Our main findings suggest that existing LLMs could struggle to identify fallacious reasoning steps accurately and may fall short of guaranteeing the validity of self-verification methods. Drawing from these observations, we offer suggestions for future research and practical applications of self-verification methods.", }

Logical reasoning has been an ongoing pursuit in the field of AI. Despite significant advancements made by large language models (LLMs), they still struggle with complex logical reasoning problems. To enhance reasoning performance, one promising direction is scalable oversight, which requires LLMs to identify their own errors and then improve by themselves. Various self-verification methods have been proposed in pursuit of this goal. Nevertheless, whether existing models understand their own errors well is still under investigation. In this paper, we take a closer look at the self-verification abilities of LLMs in the context of logical reasoning, focusing on their ability to identify logical fallacies accurately. We introduce a dataset, FALLACIES, containing 232 types of reasoning fallacies categorized in a hierarchical taxonomy. By conducting exhaustive experiments on FALLACIES, we obtain comprehensive and detailed analyses of a series of models on their verification abilities. Our main findings suggest that existing LLMs could struggle to identify fallacious reasoning steps accurately and may fall short of guaranteeing the validity of self-verification methods. Drawing from these observations, we offer suggestions for future research and practical applications of self-verification methods.

A Closer Look at the Self-Verification Abilities of Large Language Models in Logical Reasoning

naacl-long.52

Poster

2311.07954