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Zhonghua Zheng, Lizi Liao, Yang Deng, Ee-Peng Lim, Minlie Huang, Liqiang Nie

In conversational AI, large-scale models excel in various tasks but struggle with target-driven conversation planning. Current methods, such as chain-of-thought reasoning and tree-search policy learning techniques, either neglect plan rationality or require extensive human simulation procedures. Addressing this, we propose a novel two-stage framework, named EnPL, to improve the LLMs’ capability in planning conversations towards designated targets, including (1) distilling natural language plans from target-driven conversation corpus and (2) generating new plans with demonstration-guided in-context learning. Specifically, we first propose a filter approach to distill a high-quality plan dataset, ConvPlan (Resources of this paper can be found at https://github.com/pandazzh2020/ConvPlan). With the aid of corresponding conversational data and support from relevant knowledge bases, we validate the quality and rationality of these plans. Then, these plans are leveraged to help guide LLMs to further plan for new targets. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the planning ability of LLMs, especially in target-driven conversations. Furthermore, EnPL is demonstrated to be quite effective in collecting target-driven conversation datasets and enhancing response generation, paving the way for constructing extensive target-driven conversational models.

Siyin Wang, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) can adapt to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL) based on a few examples presented in dialogue history without any model parameter update. Despite such convenience, the performance of ICL heavily depends on the quality of the in-context examples presented, which makes the in-context example selection approach a critical choice. This paper proposes a novel eBayesian in-Context example Selection method (ByCS) for ICL. Extending the inference probability conditioned on in-context examples based on Bayes’ theorem, ByCS focuses on the inverse inference conditioned on test input. Following the assumption that accurate inverse inference probability (likelihood) will result in accurate inference probability (posterior), in-context examples are selected based on their inverse inference results. Diverse and extensive cross-tasking and cross-modality experiments are performed with speech, text, and image examples. Experimental results show the efficacy and robustness of our ByCS method on various models, tasks and modalities.

Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri, Anand Mishra

We revisit knowledge-aware text-based visual question answering, also known as Text-KVQA in the light of modern advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs), and make the following contributions: (i) We propose VisTEL – a principled approach to perform visual text entity linking. The proposed VisTEL module harnesses a state-of-the-art visual text recognition engine and the power of a large multimodal model to jointly reason using textual and visual context obtained using surrounding cues in the image to link visual text entity to the correct knowledge base entity. (ii) We present KaLMA – knowledge-aware large multimodal assistant that augments an LMM with knowledge associated with visual text entity in the image to arrive at an accurate answer. Further, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis and comparison of our approach with traditional visual question answering, pre-large multimodal models, and large multimodal models, as well as prior top-performing approaches. Averaging over three splits of Text-KVQA, our proposed approach surpasses the previous best approach by a substantial 23.3% on an absolute scale and establishes a new state of the art. We make our implementation publicly available.

Talia Tseriotou, Adam Tsakalidis, Maria Liakata

Dynamic representation learning plays a pivotal role in understanding the evolution of linguistic content over time. On this front both context and time dynamics as well as their interplay are of prime importance. Current approaches model context via pre-trained representations, which are typically temporally agnostic. Previous work on modelling context and temporal dynamics has used recurrent methods, which are slow and prone to overfitting. Here we introduce TempoFormer, the first task-agnostic transformer-based and temporally-aware model for dynamic representation learning. Our approach is jointly trained on inter and intra context dynamics and introduces a novel temporal variation of rotary positional embeddings. The architecture is flexible and can be used as the temporal representation foundation of other models or applied to different transformer-based architectures. We show new SOTA performance on three different real-time change detection tasks.

Hu Xu, Po-Yao Huang, Xiaoqing Tan, Ching-Feng Yeh, Jacob Kahn, Christine Jou, Gargi Ghosh, Omer Levy, Luke Zettlemoyer, Wen-tau Yih 等

This paper focuses on creating synthetic data to improve the quality of image captions. Existing works typically have two shortcomings. First, they caption images from scratch, ignoring existing alt-text metadata, and second, lack transparency if the captioners’ training data (e.g. GPT) is unknown. In this paper, we study a principled approach Altogether based on the key idea to edit and re-align existing alt-texts associated with the images. To generate training data, we perform human annotation where annotators start with the existing alt-text and re-align it to the image content in multiple rounds, consequently constructing captions with rich visual concepts. This differs from prior work that carries out human annotation as a one-time description task solely based on images and annotator knowledge. We train a captioner on this data that generalizes the process of re-aligning alt-texts at scale. Our results show our Altogether approach leads to richer image captions that also improve text-to-image generation and zero-shot image classification tasks.

Youngtaek Oh, Jae Won Cho, Dong-Jin Kim, In So Kweon, Junmo Kim

In this paper, we propose a new method to enhance compositional understanding in pre-trained vision and language models (VLMs) without sacrificing performance in zero-shot multi-modal tasks. Traditional fine-tuning approaches often improve compositional reasoning at the cost of degrading multi-modal capabilities, primarily due to the use of global hard negative (HN) loss, which contrasts global representations of images and texts. This global HN loss pushes HN texts that are highly similar to the original ones, damaging the model’s multi-modal representations. To overcome this limitation, we propose Fine-grained Selective Calibrated CLIP (FSC-CLIP), which integrates local hard negative loss and selective calibrated regularization. These innovations provide fine-grained negative supervision while preserving the model’s representational integrity. Our extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks for both compositionality and multi-modal tasks show that FSC-CLIP not only achieves compositionality on par with state-of-the-art models but also retains strong multi-modal capabilities. Code is available at: https://github.com/ytaek-oh/fsc-clip.

Matthew Raffel, Victor Agostinelli, Lizhong Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various language processing tasks, motivating their adoption in simultaneous translation. Current fine-tuning methods to adapt LLMs for simultaneous translation focus on prompting optimization strategies using either data augmentation or prompt structure modifications. However, these methods suffer from several issues, such as unnecessarily expanded training sets, computational inefficiency from dumping the key and value cache, increased prompt sizes, or restriction to a single decision policy. To eliminate these issues, in this work, we propose SimulMask, a new paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs for simultaneous translation. It utilizes a novel attention mask approach that models simultaneous translation during fine-tuning by masking attention for a desired decision policy. Applying the proposed SimulMask on a Falcon LLM for the IWSLT 2017 dataset, we have observed a significant translation quality improvement compared to state-of-the-art prompting optimization strategies on five language pairs while reducing the computational cost.

Chao-Wei Huang, Yun-Nung Chen

Effective information retrieval (IR) from vast datasets relies on advanced techniques to extract relevant information in response to queries. Recent advancements in dense retrieval have showcased remarkable efficacy compared to traditional sparse retrieval methods. To further enhance retrieval performance, knowledge distillation techniques, often leveraging robust cross-encoder rerankers, have been extensively explored. However, existing approaches primarily distill knowledge from pointwise rerankers, which assign absolute relevance scores to documents, thus facing challenges related to inconsistent comparisons. This paper introduces Pairwise Relevance Distillation (PairDistill) to leverage pairwise reranking, offering fine-grained distinctions between similarly relevant documents to enrich the training of dense retrieval models. Our experiments demonstrate that PairDistill outperforms existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art results across multiple benchmarks. This highlights the potential of PairDistill in advancing dense retrieval techniques effectively. Our source code and trained models are released at https://github.com/MiuLab/PairDistill

Migyeong Kang, Goun Choi, Hyolim Jeon, Ji Hyun An, Daejin Choi, Jinyoung Han

As the explainability of mental disorder detection models has become important, symptom-based methods that predict disorders from identified symptoms have been widely utilized. However, since these approaches focused on the presence of symptoms, the context of symptoms can be often ignored, leading to missing important contextual information related to detecting mental disorders. Furthermore, the result of disorder detection can be vulnerable to errors that may occur in identifying symptoms. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that detects mental disorders by leveraging symptoms and their context while mitigating potential errors in symptom identification. In this way, we propose to use large language models to effectively extract contextual information and introduce an uncertainty-aware decision fusion network that combines predictions of multiple models based on quantified uncertainty values. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a new Korean mental health dataset annotated by experts, named KoMOS. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model accurately detects mental disorders even in situations where symptom information is incomplete.

Shixuan Ma, Quan Wang

The increasing capability and widespread usage of large language models (LLMs) highlight the desirability of automatic detection of LLM-generated text. Zero-shot detectors, due to their training-free nature, have received considerable attention and notable success. In this paper, we identify a new feature, token cohesiveness, that is useful for zero-shot detection, and we demonstrate that LLM-generated text tends to exhibit higher token cohesiveness than human-written text. Based on this observation, we devise TOCSIN, a generic dual-channel detection paradigm that uses token cohesiveness as a plug-and-play module to improve existing zero-shot detectors. To calculate token cohesiveness, TOCSIN only requires a few rounds of random token deletion and semantic difference measurement, making it particularly suitable for a practical black-box setting where the source model used for generation is not accessible. Extensive experiments with four state-of-the-art base detectors on various datasets, source models, and evaluation settings demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed approach. Code available at: https://github.com/Shixuan-Ma/TOCSIN.

Sagi Shaier, Ari Kobren, Philip V. Ogren

Resolving knowledge conflicts is a crucial challenge in Question Answering (QA) tasks, as the internet contains numerous conflicting facts and opinions. While some research has made progress in tackling ambiguous settings where multiple valid answers exist, these approaches often neglect to provide source citations, leaving users to evaluate the factuality of each answer. On the other hand, existing work on citation generation has focused on unambiguous settings with single answers, failing to address the complexity of real-world scenarios. Despite the importance of both aspects, no prior research has combined them, leaving a significant gap in the development of QA systems. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing the novel task of QA with source citation in ambiguous settings, where multiple valid answers exist. To facilitate research in this area, we create a comprehensive framework consisting of: (1) five novel datasets, obtained by augmenting three existing reading comprehension datasets with citation meta-data across various ambiguous settings, such as distractors and paraphrasing; (2) the first ambiguous multi-hop QA dataset featuring real-world, naturally occurring contexts; (3) two new metrics to evaluate models’ performances; and (4) several strong baselines using rule-based, prompting, and finetuning approaches over five large language models. We hope that this new task, datasets, metrics, and baselines will inspire the community to push the boundaries of QA research and develop more trustworthy and interpretable systems.

Clement Neo, Shay B. Cohen, Fazl Barez

Understanding the inner workings of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing their theoretical foundations and real-world applications. While the attention mechanism and multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) have been studied independently, their interactions remain largely unexplored. This study investigates how attention heads and next-token neurons interact in LLMs to predict new words. We propose a methodology to identify next-token neurons, find prompts that highly activate them, and determine the upstream attention heads responsible. We then generate and evaluate explanations for the activity of these attention heads in an automated manner. Our findings reveal that some attention heads recognize specific contexts relevant to predicting a token and activate a downstream token-predicting neuron accordingly. This mechanism provides a deeper understanding of how attention heads work with MLP neurons to perform next-token prediction. Our approach offers a foundation for further research into the intricate workings of LLMs and their impact on text generation and understanding.

Omar Adjali, Olivier Ferret, Sahar Ghannay, Hervé Le Borgne

The Knowledge-Aware Visual Question Answering about Entity task aims to disambiguate entities using textual and visual information, as well as knowledge. It usually relies on two independent steps, information retrieval then reading comprehension, that do not benefit each other. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a solution by using generated answers as feedback for retrieval training. RAG usually relies solely on pseudo-relevant passages retrieved from external knowledge bases which can lead to ineffective answer generation. In this work, we propose a multi-level information RAG approach that enhances answer generation through entity retrieval and query expansion. We formulate a joint-training RAG loss such that answer generation is conditioned on both entity and passage retrievals. We show through experiments new state-of-the-art performance on the VIQuAE KB-VQA benchmark and demonstrate that our approach can help retrieve more actual relevant knowledge to generate accurate answers.

Junzhuo Liu, Xuzheng Yang, Weiwei Li, Peng Wang

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) is a crucial cross-modal task that objectively evaluates the capabilities of language understanding, image comprehension, and language-to-image grounding. Consequently, it serves as an ideal testing ground for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). In pursuit of this goal, we have established a new REC dataset characterized by two key features: Firstly, it is designed with controllable varying levels of difficulty, necessitating multi-level fine-grained reasoning across object categories, attributes, and multi-hop relationships. Secondly, it includes negative text and images created through fine-grained editing and generation based on existing data, thereby testing the model’s ability to correctly reject scenarios where the target object is not visible in the image—an essential aspect often overlooked in existing datasets and approaches. Utilizing this high-quality dataset, we conducted comprehensive evaluations of both state-of-the-art specialist models and MLLMs. Our findings indicate that there remains a significant gap in achieving satisfactory grounding performance. We anticipate that our dataset will inspire new approaches to enhance visual reasoning and develop more advanced cross-modal interaction strategies, ultimately unlocking the full potential of MLLMs.

Panuthep Tasawong, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Potsawee Manakul, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Ekapol Chuangsuwanich, Sarana Nutanong

Entity disambiguation (ED) is crucial in natural language processing (NLP) for tasks such as question-answering and information extraction. A major challenge in ED is handling overshadowed entities—uncommon entities sharing mention surfaces with common entities. The current approach to enhance performance on these entities involves reasoning over facts in a knowledge base (KB), increasing computational overhead during inference. We argue that the ED performance on overshadowed entities can be enhanced during training by addressing shortcut learning, which does not add computational overhead at inference. We propose a simple yet effective debiasing technique to prevent models from shortcut learning during training. Experiments on a range of ED datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without compromising inference speed. Our findings suggest a new research direction for improving entity disambiguation via shortcut learning mitigation.

Qian Ruan, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych

Classification is a core NLP task architecture with many potential applications. While large language models (LLMs) have brought substantial advancements in text generation, their potential for enhancing classification tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a framework for thoroughly investigating fine-tuning LLMs for classification, including both generation- and encoding-based approaches. We instantiate this framework in edit intent classification (EIC), a challenging and underexplored classification task. Our extensive experiments and systematic comparisons with various training approaches and a representative selection of LLMs yield new insights into their application for EIC. We investigate the generalizability of these findings on five further classification tasks. To demonstrate the proposed methods and address the data shortage for empirical edit analysis, we use our best-performing EIC model to create Re3-Sci2.0, a new large-scale dataset of 1,780 scientific document revisions with over 94k labeled edits. The quality of the dataset is assessed through human evaluation. The new dataset enables an in-depth empirical study of human editing behavior in academic writing. We make our experimental framework, models and data publicly available.

Viktoriia A. Chekalina, Anna Rudenko, Gleb Mezentsev, Aleksandr Mikhalev, Alexander Panchenko, Ivan Oseledets

The performance of Transformer models has been enhanced by increasing the number of parameters and the length of the processed text. Consequently, fine-tuning the entire model becomes a memory-intensive process. High-performance methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) typically work with Attention blocks and often overlook MLP blocks, which contain about half of the model parameters. We propose a new selective PEFT method, namely SparseGrad, that performs well on MLP blocks. We transfer layer gradients to a space where only about 1% of the layer’s elements remain significant. By converting gradients into a sparse structure, we reduce the number of updated parameters. We apply SparseGrad to fine-tune BERT and RoBERTa for the NLU task and LLaMa-2 for the Question-Answering task. In these experiments, with identical memory requirements, our method outperforms LoRA and MeProp, robust popular state-of-the-art PEFT approaches.

Sweta Agrawal, José G. C. De Souza, Ricardo Rei, António Farinhas, Gonçalo Faria, Patrick Fernandes, Nuno M Guerreiro, Andre Martins

Alignment with human preferences is an important step in developing accurate and safe large language models. This is no exception in machine translation (MT), where better handling of language nuances and context-specific variations leads to improved quality. However, preference data based on human feedback can be very expensive to obtain and curate at a large scale. Automatic metrics, on the other hand, can induce preferences, but they might not match human expectations perfectly. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages the best of both worlds. We first collect sentence-level quality assessments from professional linguists on translations generated by multiple high-quality MT systems and evaluate the ability of current automatic metrics to recover these preferences. We then use this analysis to curate a new dataset, MT-Pref (metric induced translation preference) dataset, which comprises 18k instances covering 18 language directions, using texts sourced from multiple domains post-2022. We show that aligning TOWER models on MT-Pref significantly improves translation quality on WMT23 and FLORES benchmarks.

Yejie Wang, Keqing He, Dayuan Fu, Zhuoma GongQue, Heyang Xu, Yanxu Chen, Zhexu Wang, Yujia Fu, Guanting Dong, Muxi Diao 等

Recently, there has been a growing interest in studying how to construct better code instruction tuning data. However, we observe Code models trained with these datasets exhibit high performance on HumanEval but perform worse on other benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench. Upon further investigation, we find that many datasets suffer from severe data leakage. After cleaning up most of the leaked data, some well-known high-quality datasets perform poorly. This discovery reveals a new challenge: identifying which dataset genuinely qualify as high-quality code instruction data. To address this, we propose an efficient code data pruning strategy for selecting good samples. Our approach is based on three dimensions: instruction complexity, response quality, and instruction diversity. Based on our selected data, we present XCoder, a family of models finetuned from LLaMA3. Our experiments show Xcoder achieves new state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data, which verify the effectiveness of our data strategy. Moreover, we perform a comprehensive analysis on the data composition and find existing code datasets have different characteristics according to their construction methods, which provide new insights for future code LLMs.

Francesco Periti, David Alfter, Nina Tahmasebi

Modeling lexical semantics is a challenging task, often suffering from interpretability pitfalls. In this paper, we delve into the generation of dictionary-like sense definitions and explore their utility for modeling word meaning. We fine-tuned two Llama models and include an existing T5-based model in our evaluation. Firstly, we evaluate the quality of the generated definitions on existing English benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art results for the Definition Generation task. Next, we explore the use of definitions generated by our models as intermediate representations subsequently encoded as sentence embeddings. We evaluate this approach on lexical semantics tasks such as the Word-in-Context, Word Sense Induction, and Lexical Semantic Change, setting new state-of-the-art results in all three tasks when compared to unsupervised baselines.