Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved significant success in text classification. However, they still face challenges with hard samples, which refer to instances where the model exhibits diminished confidence in distinguishing new samples. Existing research has addressed related issues, but often overlooks the semantic information inherent in the labels, treating them merely as one-hot vectors. In this paper, we propose Logits Reranking via Semantic Labels (LRSL), a model-agnostic post-processing method that leverages label semantics and auto detection of hard samples to improve classification accuracy. LRSL automatically identifies hard samples, which are then jointly processed by MLP-based and Similarity-based approaches. Applied only during inference, LRSL operates solely on classification logits, reranking them based on semantic similarities without interfering with the model’s training process. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing significant improvements across different PLMs. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGSDSscau/LRSL.
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Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots employed responsibly for social good can be an enabler of positive individual and social change. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. Furthermore, they employ only a handful of pre-defined persuasion strategies. We propose PersuaBot, a zero-shot chatbot based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that is factual and more persuasive by leveraging many more nuanced strategies. PersuaBot uses an LLM to first generate a natural responses, from which the strategies used are extracted. To combat hallucination of LLMs, Persuabot replace any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the extracted strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots.
When extracting structured information from text, recognizing entities and extracting relationships are essential. Recent advances in both tasks generate a structured representation of the information in an autoregressive manner, a time-consuming and computationally expensive approach. This naturally raises the question of whether autoregressive methods are necessary in order to achieve comparable results. In this work, we propose ITER, an efficient encoder-based relation extraction model, that performs the task in three parallelizable steps, greatly accelerating a recent language modeling approach: ITER achieves an inference throughput of over 600 samples per second for a large model on a single consumer-grade GPU. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the relation extraction datasets ADE and ACE05, and demonstrate competitive performance for both named entity recognition with GENIA and CoNLL03, and for relation extraction with SciERC and CoNLL04.
This paper introduces the innovative “LLMs-as-Instructors” framework, which leverages the advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously enhance the training of smaller target models. Inspired by the theory of “Learning from Errors”, this framework employs an instructor LLM to meticulously analyze the specific errors within a target model, facilitating targeted and efficient training cycles. Within this framework, we implement two strategies: “Learning from Error,” which focuses solely on incorrect responses to tailor training data, and “Learning from Error by Contrast,” which uses contrastive learning to analyze both correct and incorrect responses for a deeper understanding of errors. Our empirical studies, conducted with several open-source models, demonstrate significant improvements across multiple benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, coding abilities, and factual knowledge. Notably, the refined Llama-3-8b-Instruction has outperformed ChatGPT, illustrating the effectiveness of our approach. By leveraging the strengths of both strategies, we have attained a more balanced performance improvement on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks.
Make Compound Sentences Simple to Analyze: Learning to Split Sentences for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
PDF ↗In the domain of Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), generative methods have shown promising results and achieved substantial advancements. However, despite these advancements, the tasks of extracting sentiment quadruplets, which capture the nuanced sentiment expressions within a sentence, remain significant challenges. In particular, compound sentences can potentially contain multiple quadruplets, making the extraction task increasingly difficult as sentence complexity grows. To address this issue, we are focusing on simplifying sentence structures to facilitate the easier recognition of these elements and crafting a model that integrates seamlessly with various ABSA tasks. In this paper, we propose Aspect Term Oriented Sentence Splitter (ATOSS), which simplifies compound sentence into simpler and clearer forms, thereby clarifying their structure and intent. As a plug-and-play module, this approach retains the parameters of the ABSA model while making it easier to identify essential intent within input sentences. Extensive experimental results show that utilizing ATOSS outperforms existing methods in both ASQP and ACOS tasks, which are the primary tasks for extracting sentiment quadruplets
In the Minecraft Collaborative Building Task, two players collaborate: an Architect (A) provides instructions to a Builder (B) to assemble a specified structure using 3D blocks. In this work, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs) to predict the sequence of actions taken by the Builder. Leveraging LLMs’ in-context learning abilities, we use few-shot prompting techniques, that significantly improve performance over baseline methods. Additionally, we present a detailed analysis of the gaps in performance for future work.
Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-FACT, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-FACT includes factuality annotations of 112,276 events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-FACT is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-FACT also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate further research on event factuality detection.
Cross-platform topic dissemination is one of the research subjects that delved into media analysis; sometimes it fails to grasp the authentic topics due to platform-induced biases, which may be caused by aggregating documents from multiple platforms and running them on an existing topic model. This work deals with the impact of unique platform characteristics on the performance of topic models and proposes a new approach to enhance the effectiveness of topic modeling. The data utilized in this study consisted of a total of 1.5 million posts collected using the keyword ”ChatGPT” on the three social media platforms. The devised model reduces platform influence in topic models by developing a platform-invariant contrastive learning algorithm and removing platform-specific jargon word sets. The proposed approach was thoroughly validated through quantitative and qualitative experiments alongside standard and state-of-the-art topic models and showed its supremacy. This method can mitigate biases arising from platform influences when modeling topics from texts collected across various platforms.
AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap, we propose three key contributions. First, we introduce the Egocentric Video Understanding Dataset (EVUD) for training VLMs on video captioning and question answering tasks specific to egocentric videos. Second, we present , a 7B parameter VLM trained using parameter-efficient methods on EVUD. Finally, we evaluate ‘s capabilities on OpenEQA, a challenging benchmark for embodied video question answering. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming open-source models including strong Socratic models using GPT-4 as a planner by 3.6%.Additionally, we outperform Claude 3 and Gemini Pro Vision 1.0 and showcase competitive results compared to Gemini Pro 1.5 and GPT-4V, even surpassing the latter in spatial reasoning. This research paves the way for building efficient VLMs that can be deployed in robots or wearables, leveraging embodied video understanding to collaborate seamlessly with humans in everyday tasks, contributing to the advancement of next-generation Embodied AI.
Despite the recent progress in news summarization made by large language models (LLMs), they often generate summaries that are factually inconsistent with original articles, known as “hallucinations” in text generation. Unlike previous small models (e.g., BART, T5), current LLMs make fewer silly mistakes but more sophisticated ones, such as imposing cause and effect, adding false details, overgeneralizing, etc. These hallucinations are challenging to detect through traditional methods, which poses great challenges for improving the factual consistency of text summarization. In this paper, we propose Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO) to disentangle the LLMs’ propensities to generate faithful and fake content. Furthermore, we adopt a probing-based specific training method to improve their capacity of distinguishing two types of propensities. In this way, LLMs can execute the instructions more accurately and have enhanced perception of hallucinations. Experimental results show that CPO significantly improves the reliability of summarization based on LLMs.
The parametric knowledge memorized by large language models (LLMs) becomes outdated quickly. In-context editing (ICE) is currently the most effective method for updating the knowledge of LLMs. Recent advancements involve enhancing ICE by modifying the decoding strategy, obviating the need for altering internal model structures or adjusting external prompts.However, this enhancement operates across the entire sequence generation, encompassing a plethora of non-critical tokens.In this work, we introduce **A**daptive **T**oken **Bias**er (ATBias), a new decoding technique designed to enhance ICE.It focuses on the tokens that are mostly related to knowledge during decoding, biasing their logits by matching key entities related to new and parametric knowledge.Experimental results show that ATBias significantly enhances ICE performance, achieving up to a 32.3% improvement over state-of-the-art ICE methods while incurring only half the latency.ATBias not only improves the knowledge editing capabilities of ICE but can also be widely applied to LLMs with negligible cost.
Selection-p: Self-Supervised Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression for Faithfulness and Transferability
PDF ↗Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a wide range of natural language processing tasks when leveraging in-context learning. To mitigate the additional computational and financial costs associated with in-context learning, several prompt compression methods have been proposed to compress the in-context learning prompts. Despite their success, these methods face challenges with transferability due to model-specific compression, or rely on external training data, such as GPT-4. In this paper, we investigate the ability of LLMs to develop a unified compression method that discretizes uninformative tokens, utilizing a self-supervised pre-training technique. By introducing a small number of parameters during the continual pre-training, the proposed Selection-p produces a probability for each input token, indicating whether to preserve or discard it. Experiments show Selection-p achieves state-of-the-art performance across numerous classification tasks, achieving compression rates of up to 10 times while experiencing only a marginal 0.8% decrease in performance. Moreover, it exhibits superior transferability to different models compared to prior work. Additionally, we further analyze how Selection-p helps maintain performance on in-context learning with long contexts.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in understanding and generating codes. Due to these capabilities, many recent methods are proposed to automatically refine the codes with LLMs. However, we should rethink that the refined codes (from LLMs and even humans) are not always more efficient than their original versions. On the other hand, running two different versions of codes and comparing them every time is not ideal and time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel method based on the code language model that is trained to judge the efficiency between two different codes (generated across humans and machines) by either classifying the superior one or predicting the relative improvement. We validate our method on multiple programming languages with multiple refinement steps, demonstrating that the proposed method can effectively distinguish between more and less efficient versions of code.
Fighting Randomness with Randomness: Mitigating Optimisation Instability of Fine-Tuning using Delayed Ensemble and Noisy Interpolation
PDF ↗While fine-tuning of pre-trained language models generally helps to overcome the lack of labelled training samples, it also displays model performance instability. This instability mainly originates from randomness in initialisation or data shuffling. To address this, researchers either modify the training process or augment the available samples, which typically results in increased computational costs. We propose a new mitigation strategy, called **Delayed Ensemble with Noisy Interpolation (DENI)**, that leverages the strengths of ensembling, noise regularisation and model interpolation, while retaining computational efficiency. We compare DENI with 9 representative mitigation strategies across 3 models, 4 tuning strategies and 7 text classification datasets. We show that: 1) DENI outperforms the best performing mitigation strategy (Ensemble), while using only a fraction of its cost; 2) the mitigation strategies are beneficial for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, outperforming full fine-tuning in specific cases; and 3) combining DENI with data augmentation often leads to even more effective instability mitigation.
Domain-specific neural machine translation (NMT) systems (, in educational applications) are socially significant with the potential to help make information accessible to a diverse set of users in multilingual societies. Such NMT systems should be lexically constrained and draw from domain-specific dictionaries. Dictionaries could present multiple candidate translations for a source word/phrase due to the polysemous nature of words. The onus is then on the NMT model to choose the contextually most appropriate candidate. Prior work has largely ignored this problem and focused on the single candidate constraint setting wherein the target word or phrase is replaced by a single constraint. In this work, we present DictDis, a lexically constrained NMT system that disambiguates between multiple candidate translations derived from dictionaries. We achieve this by augmenting training data with multiple dictionary candidates to actively encourage disambiguation during training by implicitly aligning multiple candidate constraints. We demonstrate the utility of DictDis via extensive experiments on English-Hindi, English-German, and English-French datasets across a variety of domains including regulatory, finance, engineering, health and standard benchmark test datasets. In comparison with existing approaches for lexically constrained and unconstrained NMT, we demonstrate superior performance for the copy constraint and disambiguation-related measures on all domains, while also obtaining improved fluency of up to 2-3 BLEU points on some domains. We also release our test set consisting of 4K English-Hindi sentences in multiple domains.
Test suites assess natural language processing models’ performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. This paper introduces specification instructions: text descriptions specifying fine-grained task-specific behaviors. For each functionality in a suite, we generate an instruction that describes it. We combine the specification instructions to create specification-augmented prompts, which we feed to language models pre-trained on natural instruction data.We conduct experiments to measure how optimizing for some functionalities may negatively impact functionalities that are not covered by the specification set. Our analyses across four tasks and models of diverse sizes and families show that smaller models struggle to follow specification instructions. However, larger models (> 3B params.) can benefit from specifications and—surprisingly—even generalize certain desirable behaviors across functionalities.
Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy.
Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often involve processing multiple audio streams simultaneously. To bridge this gap, we propose the first multi-audio evaluation (MAE) benchmark that consists of 20 datasets from 11 multi-audio tasks encompassing both speech and sound scenarios. Comprehensive experiments on MAE demonstrate that the existing ALLMs, while being powerful in comprehending primary audio elements in individual audio inputs, struggling to handle multi-audio scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel multi-audio-LLM (MALLM) to capture audio context among multiple similar audios using discriminative learning on our proposed synthetic data. The results demonstrate that the proposed MALLM outperforms all baselines and achieves high data efficiency using synthetic data without requiring human annotations. The proposed MALLM opens the door for ALLMs towards multi-audio processing era and brings us closer to replicating human auditory capabilities in machines.
Mental disorders pose a global challenge, aggravated by the shortage of qualified mental health professionals. Mental disorder prediction from social media posts by current LLMs is challenging due to the complexities of sequential text data and the limited context length of language models. Current language model-based approaches split a single data instance into multiple chunks to compensate for limited context size. The predictive model is then applied to each chunk individually, and the most voted output is selected as the final prediction. This results in the loss of inter-post dependencies and important time variant information, leading to poor performance. We propose a novel framework which first compresses the large sequence of chronologically ordered social media posts into a series of numbers. We then use this time variant representation for mental disorder classification. We demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our framework by outperforming the current SOTA in three different mental conditions: depression, self-harm, and anorexia, by an absolute improvement of 5% in the F1 score. We also investigate the situation when current data instances fall within the context length of language models and present empirical results highlighting the importance of temporal properties of textual data. Furthermore, we utilize the proposed framework for a cross-domain study, exploring commonalities across disorders and the possibility of inter-domain data usage.
LLM-based agents have emerged as promising tools, which are crafted to fulfill complex tasks by iterative planning and action. However, these agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. To address this, preliminary attempts are made to enhance planning reliability by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. Despite the promise, such infused knowledge is mostly disorganized and diverse in formats, lacking rigorous formalization and comprehensive comparisons. Motivated by this, we formalize different formats of workflow knowledge and present FlowBench, the first benchmark for workflow-guided planning. FlowBench covers 51 different scenarios from 6 domains, with knowledge presented in diverse formats. To assess different LLMs on FlowBench, we design a multi-tiered evaluation framework. We evaluate the efficacy of workflow knowledge across multiple formats, and the results indicate that current LLM agents need considerable improvements for satisfactory planning. We hope that our challenging benchmark can pave the way for future agent planning research.