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.
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Pretrained language models memorize vast amounts of information, including private and copyrighted data, raising significant safety concerns. Retraining these models after excluding sensitive data is prohibitively expensive, making machine unlearning a viable, cost-effective alternative. Previous research has focused on machine unlearning for monolingual models, but we find that unlearning in one language does not necessarily transfer to others. This vulnerability makes models susceptible to low-resource language attacks, where sensitive information remains accessible in less dominant languages. This paper presents a pioneering approach to machine unlearning for multilingual language models, selectively erasing information across different languages while maintaining overall performance. Specifically, our method employs an adaptive unlearning scheme that assigns language-dependent weights to address different language performances of multilingual language models. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared to existing unlearning baselines, setting a new standard for secure and adaptable multilingual language models.
In many PDF documents, the reading order of text blocks is missing, which can hinder machine understanding of the document’s content.Existing works try to extract one universal reading order for a PDF file.However, applications, like Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), require breaking long articles into sections and subsections for better indexing.For this reason, this paper introduces a new task and dataset, PDF-to-Tree, which organizes the text blocks of a PDF into a tree structure.Since a PDF may contain thousands of text blocks, far exceeding the number of words in a sentence, this paper proposes a transition-based parser that uses a greedy strategy to build the tree structure.Compared to parser for plain text, we also use multi-modal features to encode the parser state.Experiments show that our approach achieves an accuracy of 93.93%, surpassing the performance of baseline methods by an improvement of 6.72%.
Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation
PDF ↗Recent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extensive knowledge retrieved from external sources. However, such approach encounters some challenges: Firstly, the original queries may not be suitable for precise retrieval, resulting in erroneous contextual knowledge; Secondly, the language model can easily generate inconsistent answer with external references due to their knowledge boundary limitation. To address these issues, we propose the chain-of-verification (CoV-RAG) to enhance the external retrieval correctness and internal generation consistency. Specifically, we integrate the verification module into the RAG, engaging in scoring, judgment, and rewriting. To correct external retrieval errors, CoV-RAG retrieves new knowledge using a revised query. To correct internal generation errors, we unify QA and verification tasks with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning during training. Our comprehensive experiments across various LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability compared with other strong baselines. Especially, our CoV-RAG can significantly surpass the state-of-the-art baselines using different LLM backbones.
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific disciplines. These advancements encourage the investigation of molecule-text modeling within synthetic chemistry, a field dedicated to designing and conducting chemical reactions to synthesize new compounds with desired properties and applications. Current approaches, however, often neglect the critical role of multi-molecule graph interaction in understanding chemical reactions, leading to suboptimal performance in synthetic chemistry tasks. This study introduces PRESTO (Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes), a new framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. It progressively improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PRESTO offers competitive results in downstream synthetic chemistry tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/IDEA-XL/PRESTO.
Prompt engineering is pivotal for harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications. While existing prompt optimization methods improve prompt effectiveness, they often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously successful cases while addressing failures. Furthermore, these methods tend to rely heavily on LLMs’ intrinsic capabilities for prompt optimization tasks. In this paper, we introduce STRAGO (StrategicGuided Optimization), a novel approach designed to mitigate prompt drifting by leveraging insights from both successful and failed cases to identify critical factors for achieving optimization objectives. STRAGO employs a how-to-do methodology, integrating in-context learning to formulate specific, actionable strategies that provide detailed, step-by-step guidance for prompt optimization. Extensive experiments conducted across a range of tasks, including reasoning, natural language understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and industrial applications, demonstrate STRAGO’s superior performance. It establishes a new stateof-the-art in prompt optimization, showcasing its ability to deliver stable and effective prompt improvements.
Sign words are the building blocks of any sign language. In this work, we present wSignGen, a word-conditioned 3D American Sign Language (ASL) generation model dedicated to synthesizing realistic and grammatically accurate motion sequences for sign words. Our approach leverages a transformer-based diffusion model, trained on a curated dataset of 3D motion meshes from word-level ASL videos. By integrating CLIP, wSignGen offers two advantages: image-based generation, which is particularly useful for children learning sign language but not yet able to read, and the ability to generalize to unseen synonyms. Experiments demonstrate that wSignGen significantly outperforms the baseline model in the task of sign word generation. Moreover, human evaluation experiments show that wSignGen can generate high-quality, grammatically correct ASL signs effectively conveyed through 3D avatars.
Video Discourse Parsing and Its Application to Multimodal Summarization: A Dataset and Baseline Approaches
PDF ↗This paper tackles a new task: discourse parsing for videos, inspired by text discourse parsing based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The task aims to construct an RST tree for a video to represent its storyline and illustrate the event relationships. We first construct a benchmark dataset by identifying events with their time spans, providing corresponding captions, and constructing RST trees with events as leaves. We then evaluate baseline approaches to video RST parsing: the ‘parsing after captioning’ framework and parsing via visual features. The results show that a parser using gold captions performed the best, while parsers relying on generated captions performed the worst; a parser using visual features provided intermediate performance. However, we observed that parsing via visual features could be improved by pre-training it with video captioning designed to produce a coherent video story. Furthermore, we demonstrated that RST trees obtained from videos contribute to multimodal summarization consisting of keyframes with texts.
Investigating “Hadith” texts, crucial for theological studies and Islamic jurisprudence, presents challenges due to the linguistic complexity of Arabic, such as its complex morphology. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to address the challenges of topic modeling in Hadith studies by utilizing the Contextualized Topic Model (CTM). Our study introduces RoBERT2VecTM, a novel neural-based approach that combines the RoBERTa transformer model with Doc2Vec, specifically targeting the semantic analysis of “Matn” (the actual content). The methodology outperforms many traditional state-of-the-art NLP models by generating more coherent and diverse Arabic topics. The diversity of the generated topics allows for further categorization, deepening the understanding of discussed concepts. Notably, our research highlights the critical impact of lemmatization and stopwords in enhancing topic modeling. This breakthrough marks a significant stride in applying NLP to non-Latin languages and opens new avenues for the nuanced analysis of complex religious texts.
Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) is a critical task for designing effective retrieval-based Question Answering (QA) systems. Most advancements in AS2 focus on English due to the scarcity of annotated datasets for other languages. This lack of resources prevents the training of effective AS2 models in different languages, creating a performance gap between QA systems in English and other locales. In this paper, we introduce new high-quality datasets for AS2 in five European languages (French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), obtained through supervised Automatic Machine Translation (AMT) of existing English AS2 datasets such as ASNQ, WikiQA, and TREC-QA using a Large Language Model (LLM). We evaluated our approach and the quality of the translated datasets through multiple experiments with different Transformer architectures. The results indicate that our datasets are pivotal in producing robust and powerful multilingual AS2 models, significantly contributing to closing the performance gap between English and other languages.
TS-Align: A Teacher-Student Collaborative Framework for Scalable Iterative Finetuning of Large Language Models
PDF ↗Mainstream approaches to aligning large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on human preference data, particularly when models require periodic updates. The standard process for iterative alignment of LLMs involves collecting new human feedback for each update. However, the data collection process is costly and challenging to scale. To address this issue, we introduce the “TS-Align” framework, which fine-tunes a policy model using pairwise feedback data automatically mined from its outputs. This automatic mining process is efficiently accomplished through the collaboration between a large-scale teacher model and a small-scale student model. The policy fine-tuning process can be iteratively repeated using on-policy generations within our proposed teacher-student collaborative framework. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our final aligned policy outperforms the base policy model with an average win rate of 69.7% across seven conversational or instruction-following datasets. Furthermore, we show that the ranking capability of the teacher is effectively distilled into the student through our pipeline, resulting in a small-scale yet effective reward model for policy model alignment.
Hit the Nail on the Head: Parameter-Efficient Multi-task Tuning via Human Language Intervention
PDF ↗Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) on small Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance their multi-tasking capabilities. Prevalent methods simultaneously train additional modules (i.e., one task-shared module and multiple task-specific modules) for adapting PLMs to downstream tasks. However, their adaptability to new tasks is constrained, as the task-specific modules independently adapt to each task, overlooking the potential for knowledge transfer across tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework, Inspirational Pointer (IP), that enables the transfer of prior knowledge across tasks through human language intervention. Specifically, we attach task descriptions to the input samples, which are then mapped to corresponding task embeddings. Based on those embeddings, we adapt PLMs for downstream tasks. Similar tasks share akin descriptions, allowing new task samples close to similar trained tasks in the task embedding space, hitting the memory about trained tasks of the model. Our experiments on the T5 model demonstrate performance improvements of our method in multi-task learning and few-shot transfer learning. Further, we implemented the IP in decoder-only models including GPT2 and large language models (LLMs), and the results show that IP enhances the capabilities of decoder-only models.
We present a new approach called MeritOpt based on the Personalized Federated Learning algorithm MeritFed that can be applied to Natural Language Tasks with heterogeneous data. We evaluate it on the Low-Resource Machine Translation task, using the datasets of South East Asian and Finno-Ugric languages. In addition to its effectiveness, MeritOpt is also highly interpretable, as it can be applied to track the impact of each language used for training. Our analysis reveals that target dataset size affects weight distribution across auxiliary languages, that unrelated languages do not interfere with the training, and auxiliary optimizer parameters have minimal impact. Our approach is easy to apply with a few lines of code, and we provide scripts for reproducing the experiments (https://github.com/VityaVitalich/MeritOpt).
Adapting large language models (LLMs) to new languages typically involves continual pre-training (CT) followed by supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this CT-then-SFT approach struggles with limited data in the context of low-resource languages, failing to balance language modeling and task-solving capabilities. We thus propose a new model merging solution as an alternative for low-resource languages, combining models with distinct capabilities into a single model without additional training. We use model merging to develop task-solving LLMs for low-resource languages without SFT data in the target languages. Our experiments based on Llama-2-7B demonstrate that model merging effectively endows LLMs for low-resource languages with task-solving abilities, outperforming CT-then-SFT in scenarios with extremely scarce data. Observing performance saturation in model merging with increasingly more training tokens, we further analyze the merging process and introduce a slack variable to the model merging algorithm to mitigate the loss of important parameters, thereby enhancing model performance. We hope that model merging can benefit more human languages suffering from data scarcity with its higher data efficiency.
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are prone to hallucinations, where certain contextual cues in an image can trigger the language module to produce overconfident and incorrect reasoning about abnormal or hypothetical objects. While some benchmarks have been developed to investigate LVLM hallucinations, they often rely on hand-crafted corner cases whose failure patterns may not generalize well. Additionally, fine-tuning on these examples could undermine their validity. To address this, we aim to scale up the number of cases through an automated approach, reducing human bias in crafting such corner cases. This motivates the development of AutoHallusion, the first automated benchmark generation approach that employs several key strategies to create a diverse range of hallucination examples. Our generated visual-question pairs pose significant challenges to LVLMs, requiring them to overcome contextual biases and distractions to arrive at correct answers. AutoHallusion enables us to create new benchmarks at the minimum cost and thus overcomes the fragility of hand-crafted benchmarks. It also reveals common failure patterns and reasons, providing key insights to detect, avoid, or control hallucinations. Comprehensive evaluations of top-tier LVLMs, e.g., GPT-4V(ision), Gemini Pro Vision, Claude 3, and LLaVA-1.5, show a 97.7% and 98.7% success rate of hallucination induction on synthetic and real-world datasets of AutoHallusion, paving the way for a long battle against hallucinations. The codebase and data can be accessed at https://github.com/wuxiyang1996/AutoHallusion
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to enhance task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. However, existing RL methods tend to mainly focus on generation tasks, such as dialogue policy learning (DPL) or response generation (RG), while neglecting dialogue state tracking (DST) for understanding. This narrow focus limits the systems to achieve globally optimal performance by overlooking the interdependence between understanding and generation. Additionally, RL methods face challenges with sparse and delayed rewards, which complicates training and optimization. To address these issues, we extend RL into both understanding and generation tasks by introducing step-by-step rewards throughout the token generation. The understanding reward increases as more slots are correctly filled in DST, while the generation reward grows with the accurate inclusion of user requests. Our approach provides a balanced optimization aligned with task completion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively enhances the performance of TOD systems and achieves new state-of-the-art results on three widely used datasets, including MultiWOZ2.0, MultiWOZ2.1, and In-Car. Our approach also shows superior few-shot ability in low-resource settings compared to current models.
New intent discovery is a crucial capability for task-oriented dialogue systems. Existing methods focus on transferring in-domain (IND) prior knowledge to out-of-domain (OOD) data through pre-training and clustering stages. They either handle the two processes in a pipeline manner, which exhibits a gap between intent representation and clustering process or use typical contrastive clustering that overlooks the potential supervised signals from the whole data. Besides, they often deal with either open intent discovery or OOD settings individually. To this end, we propose a Pseudo-Label enhanced Prototypical Contrastive Learning (PLPCL) model for uniformed intent discovery. We iteratively utilize pseudo-labels to explore potential positive/negative samples for contrastive learning and bridge the gap between representation and clustering. To enable better knowledge transfer, we design a prototype learning method integrating the supervised and pseudo signals from IND and OOD samples. In addition, our method has been proven effective in two different settings of discovering new intents. Experiments on three benchmark datasets and two task settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
BIPEFT: Budget-Guided Iterative Search for Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Pretrained Language Models
PDF ↗Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an efficient solution for fine-tuning large pretrained language models for downstream tasks. However, most PEFT strategies are manually designed, often resulting in suboptimal performance. Recent automatic PEFT approaches aim to address this but face challenges such as search space entanglement, inefficiency, and lack of integration between parameter budgets and search processes. To overcome these issues, we introduce a novel Budget-guided Iterative search strategy for automatic PEFT (BIPEFT), significantly enhancing search efficiency. BIPEFT employs a new iterative search strategy to disentangle the binary module and rank dimension search spaces. Additionally, we design early selection strategies based on parameter budgets, accelerating the learning process by gradually removing unimportant modules and fixing rank dimensions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of BIPEFT in achieving efficient and effective PEFT for downstream tasks with a low parameter budget.
Instructions augmentation is a crucial step for unleashing the full potential of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. Existing Self-Instruct methods primarily simulate new instructions from a few initial instructions with in-context learning. However, our study identifies a critical flaw in this approach: even with GPT4o, it cannot generate complex instructions of length \ge 100, which is necessary in complex tasks such as code completion.To address this issue, our key insight is that fine-tuning open source LLMs with only ten examples can produce complex instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed through fine-tuning. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct’s efficacy across different applications. The results highlight Ada-Instruct’s capacity to generate long, intricate, and distributionally consistent instructions.
Generalization and robustness to input variation are core desiderata of machine learning research. Language varies along several axes, most importantly, language instance (e.g. French) and domain (e.g. news). While adapting NLP models to new languages within a single domain, or to new domains within a single language, is widely studied, research in joint adaptation is hampered by the lack of evaluation datasets. This prevents the transfer of NLP systems from well-resourced languages and domains to non-dominant language-domain combinations. To address this gap, we introduce M2QA, a multi-domain multilingual question answering benchmark.M2QA includes 13,500 SQuAD 2.0-style question-answer instances in German, Turkish, and Chinese for the domains of product reviews, news, and creative writing. We use M2QA to explore cross-lingual cross-domain performance of fine-tuned models and state-of-the-art LLMs and investigate modular approaches to domain and language adaptation.We witness **1)** considerable performance _variations_ across domain-language combinations within model classes and **2)** considerable performance _drops_ between source and target language-domain combinations across all model sizes. We demonstrate that M2QA is far from solved, and new methods to effectively transfer both linguistic and domain-specific information are necessary.