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Magdalena Kaiser, Patrick Ernst, György Szarvas

Task-oriented Dialog (ToD) systems have to solve multiple subgoals to accomplish user goals, whereas feedback is often obtained only at the end of the dialog. In this work, we propose SUIT (SUbgoal-aware ITerative Training), an iterative training approach for improving ToD systems. We sample dialogs from the model we aim to improve and determine subgoals that contribute to dialog success using distant supervision to obtain high quality training samples. We show how this data improves supervised fine-tuning or, alternatively, preference learning results. Performance improves when applying these steps over several iterations: SUIT reaches new state-of-the-art performance on a popular ToD benchmark.

Zhenrong Zhang, Shuhang Liu, Pengfei Hu, Jiefeng Ma, Jun Du, Jianshu Zhang, Yu Hu

In the digital era, table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. Previous methods primarily focus on visual aspects of table structure recovery but often fail to effectively comprehend the textual semantics within tables, particularly for descriptive textual cells. In this paper, we introduce UniTabNet, a novel framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model. UniTabNet employs a “divide-and-conquer” strategy, utilizing an image-to-text model to decouple table cells and integrating both physical and logical decoders to reconstruct the complete table structure. We further enhance our framework with the Vision Guider, which directs the model’s focus towards pertinent areas, thereby boosting prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Language Guider to refine the model’s capability to understand textual semantics in table images. Evaluated on prominent table structure datasets such as PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB, UniTabNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. The code will also be made publicly available.

Michael Ginn, Mans Hulden, Alexis Palmer

Interlinear glossed text (IGT) is a popular format in language documentation projects, where each morpheme is labeled with a descriptive annotation. Automating the creation of interlinear glossed text would be desirable to reduce annotator effort and maintain consistency across annotated corpora. Prior research has explored a number of statistical and neural methods for automatically producing IGT. As large language models (LLMs) have showed promising results across multilingual tasks, even for rare, endangered languages, it is natural to wonder whether they can be utilized for the task of generating IGT. We explore whether LLMs can be effective at the task of interlinear glossing with in-context learning, without any traditional training. We propose new approaches for selecting examples to provide in-context, observing that targeted selection can significantly improve performance. We find that LLM-based methods beat standard transformer baselines, despite requiring no training at all. These approaches still underperform state-of-the-art supervised systems for the task, but are highly practical for researchers outside of the NLP community, requiring minimal effort to use.

Dongyue Li, Ziniu Zhang, Lu Wang, Hongyang R. Zhang

We study the problem of fine-tuning a language model (LM) for a target task by optimally using the information from n auxiliary tasks. This problem has broad applications in NLP, such as targeted instruction tuning and data selection in chain-of-thought fine-tuning. The key challenge of this problem is that not all auxiliary tasks are useful to improve the performance of the target task. Thus, choosing the right subset of auxiliary tasks is crucial. Conventional subset selection methods, such as forward & backward selection, are unsuitable for LM fine-tuning because they require repeated training on subsets of auxiliary tasks. This paper introduces a new algorithm to estimate model fine-tuning performances without repeated training. Our algorithm first performs multitask training using the data of all the tasks to obtain a meta initialization. Then, we approximate the model fine-tuning loss of a subset using functional values and gradients from the meta initialization. Empirically, we find that this gradient-based approximation holds with remarkable accuracy for twelve transformer-based LMs. Thus, we can now estimate fine-tuning performances on CPUs within a few seconds. We conduct extensive experiments to validate our approach, delivering a speedup of 30\times over conventional subset selection while incurring only 1% error of the true fine-tuning performances. In downstream evaluations of instruction tuning and chain-of-thought fine-tuning, our approach improves over prior methods that utilize gradient or representation similarity for subset selection by up to 3.8%.

Zengqing Wu, Run Peng, Shuyuan Zheng, Qianying Liu, Xu Han, Brian I. Kwon, Makoto Onizuka, Shaojie Tang, Chuan Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly been utilized in social simulations, where they are often guided by carefully crafted instructions to stably exhibit human-like behaviors during simulations. Nevertheless, we doubt the necessity of shaping agents’ behaviors for accurate social simulations. Instead, this paper emphasizes the importance of spontaneous phenomena, wherein agents deeply engage in contexts and make adaptive decisions without explicit directions. We explored spontaneous cooperation across three competitive scenarios and successfully simulated the gradual emergence of cooperation, findings that align closely with human behavioral data. This approach not only aids the computational social science community in bridging the gap between simulations and real-world dynamics but also offers the AI community a novel method to assess LLMs’ capability of deliberate reasoning.Our source code is available at https://github.com/wuzengqing001225/SABM_ShallWeTeamUp

Roy Xie, Chengxuan Huang, Junlin Wang, Bhuwan Dhingra

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the educational landscape. As current plagiarism detection tools struggle to keep pace with LLMs’ rapid advancements, the educational community faces the challenge of assessing students’ true problem-solving abilities in the presence of LLMs. In this work, we explore a new paradigm for ensuring fair evaluation—generating adversarial examples which preserve the structure and difficulty of the original questions aimed for assessment, but are unsolvable by LLMs. Focusing on the domain of math word problems, we leverage abstract syntax trees to structurally generate adversarial examples that cause LLMs to produce incorrect answers by simply editing the numeric values in the problems. We conduct experiments on various open- and closed-source LLMs, quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrating that our method significantly degrades their math problem-solving ability. We identify shared vulnerabilities among LLMs and propose a cost-effective approach to attack high-cost models. Additionally, we conduct automatic analysis to investigate the cause of failure, providing further insights into the limitations of LLMs.

Amit Rozner, Barak Battash, Lior Wolf, Ofir Lindenbaum

Large Language Models (LLMs) can become outdated over time as they may lack updated world knowledge, leading to factual knowledge errors and gaps. Knowledge Editing (KE) aims to overcome this challenge using weight updates that do not require expensive retraining. We propose treating KE as an LLM alignment problem. Toward this goal, we introduce Knowledge Direct Preference Optimization (KDPO), a variation of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that is more effective for knowledge modifications. Our method is based on an online approach that continually updates the knowledge stored in the model. We use the current knowledge as a negative sample and the new knowledge we want to introduce as a positive sample in a process called DPO. We also use teacher-forcing for negative sample generation and optimize using the positive sample, which helps maintain localized changes. We tested our KE method on various datasets and models, comparing it to several cutting-edge methods, with 100 and 500 sequential edits. Additionally, we conducted an ablation study comparing our method to the standard DPO approach. Our experimental results show that our modified DPO method allows for more refined KE, achieving similar or better performance compared to previous methods.

Wenhao Shi, Zhiqiang Hu, Yi Bin, Junhua Liu, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Lidong Bing, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly in textual mathematical problem-solving. However, existing open-source image instruction fine-tuning datasets, containing limited question-answer pairs per image, do not fully exploit visual information to enhance the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To bridge this gap, we address the lack of high-quality, diverse multimodal mathematical datasets by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs, creating the MathV360K dataset, which enhances both the breadth and depth of multimodal mathematical questions. We introduce Math-LLaVA, a LLaVA-1.5-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K. This novel approach significantly improves the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5, achieving a 19-point increase and comparable performance to GPT-4V on MathVista’s minitest split, and yielding leading performance on Math-V and MathVerse. Furthermore, Math-LLaVA demonstrates enhanced generalizability, showing substantial improvements on the MMMU benchmark. Our research highlights the importance of dataset diversity and synthesis in advancing MLLMs’ mathematical reasoning abilities. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/HZQ950419/Math-LLaVA.

Zhongwei Wan, Ziang Wu, Che Liu, Jinfa Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Peng Jin, Longyue Wang, Li Yuan

Long-context Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demand substantial computational resources for inference as the growth of their multimodal Key-Value (KV) cache, in response to increasing input lengths, challenges memory and time efficiency. Unlike single-modality LLMs that manage only textual contexts, the KV cache of long-context MLLMs includes representations from multiple images with temporal and spatial relationships and related textual contexts. The predominance of image tokens means traditional optimizations for LLMs’ KV caches are unsuitable for multimodal long-context settings, and no prior works have addressed this challenge.In this work, we introduce **LOOK-M**, a pioneering, fine-tuning-free approach that efficiently reduces the multimodal KV cache size while maintaining performance comparable to a full cache. We observe that during prompt prefill, the model prioritizes more textual attention over image features, and based on the multimodal interaction observation, a new proposed text-prior method is explored to compress the KV cache. Furthermore, to mitigate the degradation of image contextual information, we propose several compensatory strategies using KV pairs merging. **LOOK-M** demonstrates that with a significant reduction in KV Cache memory usage, such as reducing it by **80%** in some cases, it not only achieves approximately **1.3x** faster decoding but also maintains or even **enhances** performance across a variety of long context multimodal tasks.

Chengpeng Wang, Wuqi Zhang, Zian Su, Xiangzhe Xu, Xiangyu Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) show potential in code reasoning tasks, facilitating the customization of detecting bugs in software development. However, the hallucination effect can significantly compromise the reliability of bug reports. This work formulates a new schema of bug detection and presents a novel sanitization technique that detects false positives for hallucination mitigation. Our key idea is to enforce LLMs to emit data-flow paths in few-shot chain-of-thought prompting and validate them via the program-property decomposition. Specifically, we dissect data-flow paths into basic properties upon concise code snippets and leverage parsing-based analysis and LLMs for validation. Our approach averagely achieves 91.03% precision and 74.00% recall upon synthetic benchmarks and boosts the precision by 21.99% with the sanitization. The evaluation upon real-world Android malware applications also demonstrates the superiority over an industrial analyzer, surpassing the precision and recall by 15.36% and 3.61%, respectively.

Fali Wang, Runxue Bao, Suhang Wang, Wenchao Yu, Yanchi Liu, Wei Cheng, Haifeng Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved exceptional capabilities in open generation across various domains, yet they encounter difficulties with tasks that require intensive knowledge. To address these challenges, methods for integrating knowledge have been developed, which augment LLMs with domain-specific knowledge graphs through external modules. These approaches, however, face data inefficiency issues as they necessitate the processing of both known and unknown knowledge for fine-tuning. Thus, our research focuses on a novel problem: efficiently integrating unknown knowledge into LLMs without unnecessary overlap of known knowledge. A risk of introducing new knowledge is the potential forgetting of existing knowledge. To mitigate this risk, we propose the innovative InfuserKI framework. This framework employs transformer internal states to determine when to enrich LLM outputs with additional information, effectively preventing knowledge forgetting. Performance evaluations using the UMLS-2.5k and MetaQA domain knowledge graphs reveal that InfuserKI not only successfully integrates new knowledge but also outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing knowledge forgetting by 9% and 6%, respectively.

Zifan Xu, Haozhu Wang, Dmitriy Bespalov, Xian Wu, Peter Stone, Yanjun Qi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain questions similar to the input question. However, CoT prompting, which includes crucial intermediate reasoning steps (rationales) within its examples, necessitates selecting examples based on these rationales rather than the questions themselves. Existing methods require human experts or pre-trained LLMs to describe the skill, a high-level abstraction of rationales, to guide the selection. These methods, however, are often costly and difficult to scale. Instead, this paper introduces a new approach named Latent Reasoning Skills (LaRS) that employs unsupervised learning to create a latent space representation of rationales, with a latent variable called a reasoning skill. Concurrently, LaRS learns a reasoning policy to determine the required reasoning skill for a given question. Then the ICL examples are selected by aligning the reasoning skills between past examples and the question. This approach is theoretically grounded and compute-efficient, eliminating the need for auxiliary LLM inference or manual prompt design. Empirical results demonstrate that LaRS consistently outperforms SOTA skill-based selection methods, processing example banks four times faster, reducing LLM inferences during the selection stage by half, and showing greater robustness to sub-optimal example banks.

Elnaz Rahmati, Hossein Sameti

Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have made significant strides, enabling the generation of speech from grapheme sequences. However, for low-resource languages, these models still struggle to produce natural and intelligible speech. Grapheme-to-Phoneme conversion (G2P) addresses this challenge by enhancing the input sequence with phonetic information. Despite these advancements, existing G2P systems face limitations when dealing with Persian texts due to the complexity of Persian transcription. In this study, we focus on enriching resources for the Persian language. To achieve this, we introduce two novel G2P training datasets: one manually labeled and the other machine-generated. These datasets comprise over five million sentences alongside their corresponding phoneme sequences. Additionally, we propose two evaluation datasets tailored for Persian sub-tasks, including Kasre-Ezafe detection, homograph disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To tackle the unique challenges of the Persian language, we develop a new sentence-level End-to-End (E2E) model leveraging a two-step training approach, as outlined in our paper, to maximize the impact of manually labeled data. The results show that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art performance by 1.86% in word error rate, 4.03% in Kasre-Ezafe detection recall, and 3.42% in homograph disambiguation accuracy.

Yinqiao Li, Linqi Song, Hanxu Hou

In this paper, we study parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for large pre-trained models. Specifically, we improve LoRA approaches to alleviate the performance loss from the constrained adapter by introducing a non-linear transformation (call it LoRAN). For a better adaptation, we also design a new non-linear function to appropriately fit the accumulated weight updates. We test our method in multiple advanced large language models. Experimental results show that our LoRAN significantly outperforms a strong baseline on SAMSum and 20 Newsgroups tasks. Moreover, when a lower rank is applied, our approach even yields a 1.95-point improvement in the classification task.

Yujie Sun, Chuyi Fan, Qun Chen

It has been well recognized that text classification can be satisfactorily performed by Deep Neural Network (DNN) models, provided that there are sufficient in-distribution training data. However, in the presence of distribution drift, a well trained DNN model may not perform well on a new dataset even though class labels are aligned between training and target datasets. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel approach based on model risk analysis to adapt a pre-trained DNN model towards a new dataset given only a small set of representative data. We first present a solution of model risk analysis for text classification, which can effectively quantify misprediction risk of a classifier on a dataset. Built upon the existing framework of LearnRisk, the proposed solution, denoted by LearnRisk-TC, first generates interpretable risk features, then constructs a risk model by aggregating these features, and finally trains the risk model on a small set of labeled data. Furthermore, we present a transfer learning solution based on model risk analysis, which can effectively fine-tune a pre-trained model toward a target dataset by minimizing its misprediction risk. We have conducted extensive experiments on real datasets. Our experimental results show that the proposed solution performs considerably better than the existing alternative approaches. By using text classification as a test case, we demonstrate the potential applicability of risk-based transfer learning to various challenging NLP tasks. Our codes are available at https://github.com/syjcomputer/LRTC.

Lianghao Xia, Ben Kao, Chao Huang

Graph learning has become essential in various domains, including recommendation systems and social network analysis. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as promising techniques for encoding structural information and improving performance in tasks like link prediction and node classification. However, a key challenge remains: the difficulty of generalizing to unseen graph data with different properties. In this work, we propose a novel graph foundation model, called OpenGraph, to address this challenge. Our approach tackles several technical obstacles. Firstly, we enhance data augmentation using a large language model (LLM) to overcome data scarcity in real-world scenarios. Secondly, we introduce a unified graph tokenizer that enables the model to generalize effectively to diverse graph data, even when encountering unseen properties during training. Thirdly, our developed scalable graph transformer captures node-wise dependencies within the global topological context. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework. By adapting OpenGraph to new graph characteristics and comprehending diverse graphs, our approach achieves remarkable zero-shot graph learning performance across various settings. We release the model implementation at https://github.com/HKUDS/OpenGraph.

Iwo Naglik, Mateusz Lango

Aspect-Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a recently proposed task of aspect-based sentiment analysis that consists in extracting (aspect phrase, opinion phrase, sentiment polarity) triples from a given sentence. Recent state-of-the-art methods approach this task by first extracting all possible text spans from a given text, then filtering the potential aspect and opinion phrases with a classifier, and finally considering all their pairs with another classifier that additionally assigns sentiment polarity to them. Although several variations of the above scheme have been proposed, the common feature is that the final result is constructed by a sequence of independent classifier decisions. This hinders the exploitation of dependencies between extracted phrases and prevents the use of knowledge about the interrelationships between classifier predictions to improve performance. In this paper, we propose a new ASTE approach consisting of three transformer-inspired layers, which enables the modelling of dependencies both between phrases and between the final classifier decisions. Experimental results show that the method achieves higher performance in terms of F1 measure than other methods studied on popular benchmarks. In addition, we show that a simple pre-training technique further improves the performance of the model.

Canshi Wei

Fine-grained image classification, especially in zero-/few-shot scenarios, poses a considerable challenge for vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, which often struggle to differentiate between semantically similar classes due to insufficient supervision for fine-grained tasks. On the other hand, Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) but remain underexplored in the context of fine-grained image classification. This paper presents CascadeVLM, a novel framework that harnesses the complementary strengths of both CLIP-like and LVLMs VLMs to tackle these challenges. Using granular knowledge effectively in LVLMs and integrating a cascading approach, CascadeVLM dynamically allocates samples using an entropy threshold, balancing computational efficiency with classification accuracy. Experiments on multiple fine-grained datasets, particularly the Stanford Cars dataset, show that CascadeVLM outperforms existing models, achieving 92% accuracy. Our results highlight the potential of combining VLM and LVLM for robust, efficient and interpretable fine-grained image classification, offering new insights into their synergy.

Young Kyun Jang, Junmo Kang, Yong Jae Lee, Donghyun Kim

While advancements in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have significantly improved the alignment of visual and textual data, these models primarily focus on aligning images with short descriptive captions. This focus limits their ability to handle complex text interactions, particularly with longer texts such as lengthy captions or documents, which have not been extensively explored yet. In this paper, we introduce Meet At The Embedding (MATE), a novel approach that combines the capabilities of VLMs with Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome this challenge without the need for additional image-long text pairs. Specifically, we replace the text encoder of the VLM with a pretrained LLM-based encoder that excels in understanding long texts. To bridge the gap between VLM and LLM, MATE incorporates a projection module that is trained in a multi-stage manner. It starts by aligning the embeddings from the VLM text encoder with those from the LLM using extensive text pairs. This module is then employed to seamlessly align image embeddings closely with LLM embeddings. We propose two new cross-modal retrieval benchmarks to assess the task of connecting images with long texts (lengthy captions / documents). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MATE effectively connects images with long texts, uncovering diverse semantic relationships.

Lihu Chen, Alexandre Perez-Lebel, Fabian M. Suchanek, Gaël Varoquaux

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT and LLaMA, are susceptible to generating hallucinated answers in a confident tone. While previous efforts to elicit and calibrate confidence scores have shown some success, they often overlook biases towards certain groups, such as specific nationalities. Existing calibration methods typically focus on average performance, failing to address this disparity. In our study, we demonstrate that the concept of grouping loss is an effective metric for understanding and correcting the heterogeneity in confidence levels. We introduce a novel evaluation dataset, derived from a knowledge base, specifically designed to assess the confidence scores of LLM responses across different groups. Our experimental results highlight significant variations in confidence, which are accurately captured by grouping loss. To tackle this issue, we propose a new method to calibrate the confidence scores of LLMs by considering different groups, a process we term reconfidencing. Our findings indicate that this approach effectively mitigates biases against minority groups, contributing to the development of fairer LLMs.