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Hugo Sousa, Satya Almasian, Ricardo Campos, Alipio Jorge

Language models have become foundational to many widely used systems. However, these seemingly advantageous models are double-edged swords. While they excel in tasks related to resource-rich languages like English, they often lose the fine nuances of language forms, dialects, and varieties that are inherent to languages spoken in multiple regions of the world. Languages like European Portuguese are neglected in favor of their more popular counterpart, Brazilian Portuguese, leading to suboptimal performance in various linguistic tasks. To address this gap, we introduce the first open-source translation model specifically tailored for European Portuguese, along with a novel dataset specifically designed for this task. Results from automatic evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our best model surpasses existing open-source translation systems for Portuguese and approaches the performance of industry-leading closed-source systems for European Portuguese. By making our dataset, models, and code publicly available, we aim to support and encourage further research, fostering advancements in the representation of underrepresented language varieties.

Yakun Song, Zhuo Chen, Xiaofei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Xie Chen

The language model (LM) approach based on acoustic and linguistic prompts, such as VALL-E, has achieved remarkable progress in the field of zero-shot audio generation. However, existing methods still have some limitations: 1) repetitions, transpositions, and omissions in the output synthesized speech due to limited alignment constraints between audio and phoneme tokens; 2) challenges of fine-grained control over the synthesized speech with autoregressive (AR) language model; 3) infinite silence generation due to the nature of AR-based decoding, especially under the greedy strategy. To alleviate these issues, we propose ELLA-V, a simple but efficient LM-based zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) framework, which enables fine-grained control over synthesized audio at the phoneme level. The key to ELLA-V is interleaving sequences of acoustic and phoneme tokens, where phoneme tokens appear ahead of the corresponding acoustic tokens. The experimental findings reveal that our model outperforms baselines in terms of accuracy and delivers more stable results using both greedy and sampling-based decoding strategies.

Xiujie Song, Xiaoyi Pang, Haifeng Tang, Mengyue Wu, Kenny Q. Zhu

Quantifying image complexity at the entity level is straightforward, but the assessment of semantic complexity has been largely overlooked. In fact, there are differences in semantic complexity across images. Images with richer semantics can tell vivid and engaging stories and offer a wide range of application scenarios. For example, the Cookie Theft picture is such a kind of image and is widely used to assess human language and cognitive abilities due to its higher semantic complexity. Additionally, semantically rich images can benefit the development of vision models, as images with limited semantics are becoming less challenging for them. However, such images are scarce, highlighting the need for a greater number of them. For instance, there is a need for more images like Cookie Theft to cater to people from different cultural backgrounds and eras. Assessing semantic complexity requires human experts and empirical evidence. Automatic evaluation of how semantically rich an image will be the first step of mining or generating more images with rich semantics, and benefit human cognitive assessment, Artificial Intelligence, and various other applications. In response, we propose the Image Semantic Assessment (ISA) task to address this problem. We introduce the first ISA dataset and a novel method that leverages language to solve this vision problem. Experiments on our dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Xin Song, Zhikai Xue, Guoxiu He, Jiawei Liu, Wei Lu

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods optimize large language models (LLMs) by modifying or introducing a small number of parameters to enhance alignment with downstream tasks. However, they can result in catastrophic forgetting, where LLMs prioritize new knowledge at the expense of comprehensive world knowledge. A promising approach to mitigate this issue is to recall prior memories based on the original knowledge. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic PEFT framework, IMSM, which Interweaves Memories of a Siamese Large Language Model. Specifically, our siamese LLM is equipped with an existing PEFT method. Given an incoming query, it generates two distinct memories based on the pre-trained and fine-tuned parameters. IMSM then incorporates an interweaving mechanism that regulates the contributions of both original and enhanced memories when generating the next token. This framework is theoretically applicable to all open-source LLMs and existing PEFT methods. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, evaluating the performance of popular open-source LLMs using the proposed IMSM, in comparison to both classical and leading PEFT methods. Our findings indicate that IMSM maintains comparable time and space efficiency to backbone PEFT methods while significantly improving performance and effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Seoha Song, Junhyun Lee, Hyeonmok Ko

Despite the great success of large language models (LLMs), efficiently controlling the length of the output sequence still remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose Hansel, an efficient framework for length control in LLMs without affecting its generation ability. Hansel utilizes periodically outputted hidden special tokens to keep track of the remaining target length of the output sequence. Together with techniques to avoid abrupt termination of the output, this seemingly simple method proved to be efficient and versatile, while not harming the coherency and fluency of the generated text. The framework can be applied to any pre-trained LLMs during the finetuning stage of the model, regardless of its original positional encoding method. We demonstrate this by finetuning four different LLMs with Hansel and show that the mean absolute error of the output sequence decreases significantly in every model and dataset compared to the prompt-based length control finetuning. Moreover, the framework showed a substantially improved ability to extrapolate to target lengths unseen during finetuning, such as long dialog responses or extremely short summaries. This indicates that the model learns the general means of length control, rather than learning to match output lengths to those seen during training.

Oleg Somov, Elena Tutubalina

Text-to-SQL enables users to interact with databases through natural language, simplifying the retrieval and synthesis of information. Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in converting natural language questions into SQL queries, their broader adoption is limited by two main challenges: achieving robust generalization across diverse queries and ensuring interpretative confidence in their predictions. To tackle these issues, our research investigates the integration of selective classifiers into Text-to-SQL systems. We analyse the trade-off between coverage and risk using entropy based confidence estimation with selective classifiers and assess its impact on the overall performance of Text-to-SQL models. Additionally, we explore the models' initial calibration and improve it with calibration techniques for better model alignment between confidence and accuracy. Our experimental results show that encoder-decoder T5 is better calibrated than in-context-learning GPT 4 and decoder-only Llama 3, thus the designated external entropy-based selective classifier has better performance. The study also reveal that, in terms of error detection, selective classifier with a higher probability detects errors associated with irrelevant questions rather than incorrect query generations.

Pratik Rakesh Singh, Mohammadi Zaki, Pankaj Wasnik

We address the challenging task of neural machine translation (NMT) in the entertainment domain, where the objective is to automatically translate a given dialogue from a source language content to a target language. This task has various applications, particularly in automatic dubbing, subtitling, and other content localization tasks, enabling source content to reach a wider audience. Traditional NMT systems typically translate individual sentences in isolation, without facilitating knowledge transfer of crucial elements such as the context and style from previously encountered sentences. In this work, we emphasize the significance of these fundamental aspects in producing pertinent and captivating translations. We demonstrate their significance through several examples and propose a novel framework for entertainment translation, which, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. Furthermore, we introduce an algorithm to estimate the context and style of the current session and use these estimations to generate a prompt that guides a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate high-quality translations. Our method is both language and LLM-agnostic, making it a general-purpose tool. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm through various numerical studies and observe significant improvement in the COMET scores over various state-of-the-art LLMs. Moreover, our proposed method consistently outperforms baseline LLMs in terms of win-ratio.

Behzad Shayegh, Hobie H.-B. Lee, Xiaodan Zhu, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Lili Mou

We address unsupervised dependency parsing by building an ensemble of diverse existing models through post hoc aggregation of their output dependency parse structures. We observe that these ensembles often suffer from low robustness against weak ensemble components due to error accumulation. To tackle this problem, we propose an efficient ensemble-selection approach that considers error diversity and avoids error accumulation. Results demonstrate that our approach outperforms each individual model as well as previous ensemble techniques. Additionally, our experiments show that the proposed ensemble-selection method significantly enhances the performance and robustness of our ensemble, surpassing previously proposed strategies, which have not accounted for error diversity.

Alexander Shabalin, Viacheslav Meshchaninov, Egor Chimbulatov, Vladislav Lapikov, Roman Kim, Grigory Bartosh, Dmitry Molchanov, Sergey Markov, Dmitry Vetrov

This paper presents the Text Encoding Diffusion Model (TEncDM), a novel approach to diffusion modeling that operates in the space of pre-trained language model encodings. In contrast to traditionally used embeddings, encodings integrate contextual information. In our approach, we also employ a transformer-based decoder, specifically designed to incorporate context in the token prediction process. We conduct a comprehensive examination of the influence of the encoder, decoder, noise scheduler, and self-conditioning on zero-shot generation. Furthermore, we compare TEncDM with previous approaches on three conditional text generation tasks: QQP, XSum, and Wiki-Auto. The results show that TEncDM exhibits superior performance compared to existing non-autoregressive diffusion models.

Tom Segal, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici

The utility of large language models (LLMs) depends heavily on the quality and quantity of their training data. Many organizations possess large data corpora that could be leveraged to train or fine-tune LLMs tailored to their specific needs. However, these datasets often come with access restrictions that are based on user privileges and enforced by access control mechanisms. Training LLMs on such datasets could result in exposure of sensitive information to unauthorized users. A straightforward approach for preventing such exposure is to train a separate model for each access level. This, however, may result in low utility models due to the limited amount of training data per model compared to the amount in the entire organizational corpus. Another approach is to train a single LLM on all the data while limiting the exposure of unauthorized information. However, current exposure-limiting methods for LLMs are ineffective for access-controlled data, where sensitive information appears frequently across many training examples. We propose DOMBA - double model balancing - a simple approach for training and deploying LLMs that provides high utility and access-control functionality with security guarantees. DOMBA aggregates the probability distributions of two models, each trained on documents with (potentially many) different access levels, using a "min-bounded" average function (a function that is bounded by the smaller value, e.g., harmonic mean). A detailed mathematical analysis and extensive evaluation show that DOMBA safeguards restricted information while offering utility comparable to non-secure models.

Yan Rong, Li Liu

Face-based Voice Conversion (FVC) is a novel task that leverages facial images to generate the target speaker's voice style. Previous work has two shortcomings: (1) suffering from obtaining facial embeddings that are well-aligned with the speaker's voice identity information, and (2) inadequacy in decoupling content and speaker identity information from the audio input. To address these issues, we present a novel FVC method, Identity-Disentanglement Face-based Voice Conversion (ID-FaceVC), which overcomes the above two limitations. More precisely, we propose an Identity-Aware Query-based Contrastive Learning (IAQ-CL) module to extract speaker-specific facial features, and a Mutual Information-based Dual Decoupling (MIDD) module to purify content features from audio, ensuring clear and high-quality voice conversion. Besides, unlike prior works, our method can accept either audio or text inputs, offering controllable speech generation with adjustable emotional tone and speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-FaceVC achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, with qualitative and user study results confirming its effectiveness in naturalness, similarity, and diversity.

Tianyu Ren, Hui Wang, Karen Rafferty

Recent advancements in question generation (QG) have been significantly propelled by reinforcement learning (RL). Although extensive reward models have been designed to capture the attributes of ideal questions, their associated learning challenges, particularly in sample efficiency and diversity, remain underexplored. This paper introduces a bilevel policy decomposition (BPD) framework and a diversity-seeking RL (DSRL) objective to address these issues. The BPD framework utilizes two cascading policies to divide QG into two more manageable sub-tasks: answer-centric summary generation and summary-augmented QG, facilitating exploration and accelerating policy learning. Concurrently, the DSRL objective preserves the inherent diversity of QG by ensuring the bilevel policies align probabilistically with their reward models rather than merely maximizing returns. Our integrated approach, named BPD-DSRL, demonstrates superior performance over existing baselines on multiple question quality and diversity metrics across various QG benchmarks.

Shanghaoran Quan

Constructing high-quality query-response pairs from custom corpora is crucial for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) large language models (LLMs) in many applications, like creating domain-specific AI assistants or roleplaying agents. However, sourcing this data through human annotation is costly, and existing automated methods often fail to capture the diverse range of contextual granularity and tend to produce homogeneous data. To tackle these issues, we introduce a novel method named AUGCON, capable of automatically generating context-driven SFT data across multiple levels of granularity with high diversity, quality and fidelity. AUGCON begins by generating queries using the Context-SplitTree (CST), an innovative approach for recursively deriving queries and splitting context to cover full granularity. Then, we train a scorer through contrastive learning to collaborate with CST to rank and refine queries. Finally, a synergistic integration of self-alignment and self-improving is introduced to obtain high-fidelity responses. Extensive experiments are conducted incorporating both automatic and human evaluations, encompassing four widely-used benchmarks and a test scenario in English and Chinese. The results highlight the significant advantages of AUGCON in producing high diversity, quality, and fidelity SFT data against several state-of-the-art methods.

Muhammad Reza Qorib, Qisheng Hu, Hwee Tou Ng

Given news articles about an entity, such as a public figure or organization, timeline summarization (TLS) involves generating a timeline that summarizes the key events about the entity. However, the TLS task is too underspecified, since what is of interest to each reader may vary, and hence there is not a single ideal or optimal timeline. In this paper, we introduce a novel task, called Constrained Timeline Summarization (CTLS), where a timeline is generated in which all events in the timeline meet some constraint. An example of a constrained timeline concerns the legal battles of Tiger Woods, where only events related to his legal problems are selected to appear in the timeline. We collected a new human-verified dataset of constrained timelines involving 47 entities and 5 constraints per entity. We propose an approach that employs a large language model (LLM) to summarize news articles according to a specified constraint and cluster them to identify key events to include in a constrained timeline. In addition, we propose a novel self-reflection method during summary generation, demonstrating that this approach successfully leads to improved performance.

Zongyue Qin, Zifan He, Neha Prakriya, Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer architecture have shown outstanding performance across numerous real-world tasks. However, the autoregressive nature of these models makes the inference process slow and costly. Speculative decoding has emerged as a promising solution, leveraging a smaller auxiliary model to draft future tokens, which are then validated simultaneously by the larger model, achieving a speed-up of 1-2x. Although speculative decoding matches the same distribution as multinomial sampling, multinomial sampling itself is prone to suboptimal outputs, where as beam sampling is widely recognized for producing higher-quality results by maintaining multiple candidate sequences at each step. This paper explores the novel integration of speculative decoding with beam sampling. However, there are four key challenges: (1) how to generate multiple sequences from the larger model's distribution given drafts sequences from the small model; (2) how to dynamically optimize the number of beams to balance efficiency and accuracy; (3) how to efficiently verify the multiple drafts in parallel; and (4) how to address the extra memory costs inherent in beam sampling. To address these challenges, we propose dynamic-width speculative beam decoding (DSBD). Specifically, we first introduce a novel draft and verification scheme that generates multiple sequences following the large model's distribution based on beam sampling trajectories from the small model. Then, we introduce an adaptive mechanism to dynamically tune the number of beams based on the context, optimizing efficiency and effectiveness. Besides, we extend tree-based parallel verification to handle multiple trees simultaneously, accelerating the verification process. Finally, we illustrate a simple modification to our algorithm to mitigate the memory overhead of beam sampling. Experimental results show that our approach achieves a 1.5-1.9x speed-up and1.8-2.5x lower energy consumption compared to beam sampling, with no loss in downstream performance. Moreover, it can produce significantly higher-quality outputs than speculative decoding, while maintaining similar time, memory, and energy costs. In summary, our method offers a more efficient and effective inference process for LLMs.

Zeqing Qin, Yiwei Wu, Lansheng Han

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great promise in vulnerability identification. As C/C++ comprise half of the open-source Software (OSS) vulnerabilities over the past decade and updates in OSS mainly occur through commits, enhancing LLMs' ability to identify C/C++ Vulnerability-Contributing Commits (VCCs) is essential. However, current studies primarily focus on further pre-training LLMs on massive code datasets, which is resource-intensive and poses efficiency challenges. In this paper, we enhance the ability of BERT-based LLMs to identify C/C++ VCCs in a lightweight manner. We propose CodeLinguaNexus (CLNX) as a bridge facilitating communication between C/C++ programs and LLMs. Based on commits, CLNX efficiently converts the source code into a more natural representation while preserving key details. Specifically, CLNX first applies Structure-level Naturalization to decompose complex programs, followed by Token-level Naturalization to interpret complex symbols. We evaluate CLNX on public datasets of 25,872 C/C++ functions with their commits. The results demonstrate that CLNX substantially improves the ability of LLMs to detect C/C++ VCCs. Moreover, CLNX-equipped CodeBERT achieves new state-of-the-art performance and identifies 38 OSS vulnerabilities in the real world.

Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Jingxuan Zhou, Jin Wang, Hao Fei, Wanxiang Che, Min Li

Zero-shot multi-intent detection is capable of capturing multiple intents within a single utterance without any training data, which gains increasing attention. Building on the success of large language models (LLM), dominant approaches in the literature explore prompting techniques to enable zero-shot multi-intent detection. While significant advancements have been witnessed, the existing prompting approaches still face two major issues: lacking explicit reasoning and lacking interpretability. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a Divide-Solve-Combine Prompting (DSCP) to address the above issues. Specifically, DSCP explicitly decomposes multi-intent detection into three components including (1) single-intent division prompting is utilized to decompose an input query into distinct sub-sentences, each containing a single intent; (2) intent-by-intent solution prompting is applied to solve each sub-sentence recurrently; and (3) multi-intent combination prompting is employed for combining each sub-sentence result to obtain the final multi-intent result. By decomposition, DSCP allows the model to track the explicit reasoning process and improve the interpretability. In addition, we propose an interactive divide-solve-combine prompting (Inter-DSCP) to naturally capture the interaction capabilities of large language models. Experimental results on two standard multi-intent benchmarks (i.e., MixATIS and MixSNIPS) reveal that both DSCP and Inter-DSCP obtain substantial improvements over baselines, achieving superior performance and higher interpretability.

Jinghui Qin, Changsong Liu, Tianchi Tang, Dahuang Liu, Minghao Wang, Qianying Huang, Rumin Zhang

Mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression, have become a global concern that affects people of all ages. Early detection and treatment are crucial to mitigate the negative effects these disorders can have on daily life. Although AI-based detection methods show promise, progress is hindered by the lack of publicly available large-scale datasets. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Modal Psychological assessment corpus (MMPsy), a large-scale dataset containing audio recordings and transcripts from Mandarin-speaking adolescents undergoing automated anxiety/depression assessment interviews. MMPsy also includes self-reported anxiety/depression evaluations using standardized psychological questionnaires. Leveraging this dataset, we propose Mental-Perceiver, a deep learning model for estimating mental disorders from audio and textual data. Extensive experiments on MMPsy and the DAIC-WOZ dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of Mental-Perceiver in anxiety and depression detection.

Shanbao Qiao, Xuebing Liu, Seung-Hoon Na

Model knowledge editing has become a widely researched topic because it enables efficient and rapid injection of new knowledge into language models or the correction of erroneous or outdated knowledge. Existing model knowledge editing methods typically categorized into single-instance sequential editing and massive one-time editing. However, in practical applications, the batched and iterative editing manner better aligns with model updating patterns. In this work, we explored the performance of parameter-update-based models in a new batched iterative editing benchmark. Our findings show that with an increase in the number of editing iterations, the accumulation of updated parameters leads to a greater change in the distribution of model parameters, making it more challenging to maintain editing performance and model stability. To address this degradation issue, we propose two methods: the Wasserstein distance constraint and update parameter sparsification, where the Wasserstein distance constraint optimizes the transition of parameter distribution before and after the editing, and update parameter sparsification significantly reduces the number of update parameters, thereby alleviating the issue of instability in the parameter distribution caused by the accumulation of update parameters through iterations. Our methods can be generally applied to different parameter-update-based knowledge editing models. Experiments on the zsRE and CounterFact datasets demonstrate that our methods can improve editing performance and enhance the later-stage stability of batched iterative editing across different models.

Priyanshu Priya, Rishikant Chigrupaatii, Mauajama Firdaus, Asif Ekbal

Developing intelligent negotiation dialogue systems that resolve conflicts and promote equitable, inclusive, and sustainable outcomes is at the forefront of advancing automated negotiation technology for social good. Negotiation involves balancing cooperation and competition to maximize value without causing offense. Using polite language fosters mutual understanding and creates a respectful and collaborative environment essential for successful negotiations in various domains. Considering this, in this paper, we propose a polite negotiation dialogue system, GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR for social good applications to boost the overall quality of negotiation outcomes. We focus on developing a negotiation dialogue system for two key application areas, namely tourism and e-commerce. We begin by curating a unique negotiation dialogue dataset, NEGOCHAT for tourism. We further enrich the NEGOCHAT and Integrative Negotiation Dataset (IND) for e-commerce with various negotiation strategies. These datasets are then used to develop the GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR, leveraging the Large Language Model (LLM) and mixture-of-expert (MoE)-based reinforcement learning approach. The proposed MoE-based method employs heuristic experts dedicated to negotiation, politeness, and dialogue coherence to facilitate the learning of diverse semantics by analyzing the dialogue context. A novel reward function with negotiation strategy congruence, politeness, dialogue coherence, and engagingness rewards is designed to guide the policy’s learning for generating responses. Automatic and human evaluations on NEGOCHAT and IND datasets validate the effectiveness of GENTEEL-NEGOTIATOR in generating polite responses during negotiation while maintaining conversation goals, including coherence and engagingness.