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LLM have achieved success in many fields but still troubled by problematic content in the training corpora. LLM unlearning aims at reducing their influence and avoid undesirable behaviours. However, existing unlearning methods remain vulnerable to adversarial queries and the unlearned knowledge resurfaces after the manually designed attack queries. As part of a red-team effort to proactively assess the vulnerabilities of unlearned models, we design Dynamic Unlearning Attack (DUA), a dynamic and automated framework to attack these models and evaluate their robustness. It optimizes adversarial suffixes to reintroduce the unlearned knowledge in various scenarios. We find that unlearned knowledge can be recovered in $55.2\%$ of the questions, even without revealing the unlearned model's parameters. In response to this vulnerability, we propose Latent Adversarial Unlearning (LAU), a universal framework that effectively enhances the robustness of the unlearned process. It formulates the unlearning process as a min-max optimization problem and resolves it through two stages: an attack stage, where perturbation vectors are trained and added to the latent space of LLMs to recover the unlearned knowledge, and a defense stage, where previously trained perturbation vectors are used to enhance unlearned model's robustness. With our LAU framework, we obtain two robust unlearning methods, AdvGA and AdvNPO. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple unlearning benchmarks and various models, and demonstrate that they improve the unlearning effectiveness by over $53.5\%$, cause only less than a $11.6\%$ reduction in neighboring knowledge, and have almost no impact on the model's general capabilities., Comment: 13 pages

Knowledge editing aims to update outdated or incorrect knowledge in large language models (LLMs). However, current knowledge editing methods have limited scalability for lifelong editing. This study explores the fundamental reason why knowledge editing fails in lifelong editing. We begin with the closed-form solution derived from linear associative memory, which underpins state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods. We extend the solution from single editing to lifelong editing, and through rigorous mathematical derivation, identify an interference term in the final solution, suggesting that editing knowledge may impact irrelevant knowledge. Further analysis of the interference term reveals a close relationship with superposition between knowledge representations. When knowledge superposition does not exist in language models, the interference term vanishes, allowing for lossless knowledge editing. Experiments across numerous language models reveal that knowledge superposition is universal, exhibiting high kurtosis, zero mean, and heavy-tailed distributions with clear scaling laws. Ultimately, by combining theory and experiments, we demonstrate that knowledge superposition is the fundamental reason for the failure of lifelong editing. Moreover, this is the first study to investigate knowledge editing from the perspective of superposition and provides a comprehensive observation of superposition across numerous real-world language models. Code available at https://github.com/ChenhuiHu/knowledge_in_superposition.

Enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate citations in Question-Answering (QA) tasks is an emerging paradigm aimed at enhancing the verifiability of their responses when LLMs are utilizing external references to generate an answer. However, there is currently no unified framework to standardize and fairly compare different citation generation methods, leading to difficulties in reproducing different methods and a comprehensive assessment. To cope with the problems above, we introduce \name, an open-source and modular toolkit designed to facilitate the implementation and evaluation of existing citation generation methods, while also fostering the development of new approaches to improve citation quality in LLM outputs. This tool is highly extensible, allowing users to utilize 4 main modules and 14 components to construct a pipeline, evaluating an existing method or innovative designs. Our experiments with two state-of-the-art LLMs and 11 citation generation baselines demonstrate varying strengths of different modules in answer accuracy and citation quality improvement, as well as the challenge of enhancing granularity. Based on our analysis of the effectiveness of components, we propose a new method, self-RAG \snippet, obtaining a balanced answer accuracy and citation quality. Citekit is released at https://github.com/SjJ1017/Citekit., Comment: 7 pages, 13 figures

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have transformed ML/AI development, necessitating a reevaluation of AutoML principles for the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. To address the challenges of hyper-parameter optimization and online adaptation in RAG, we propose the AutoRAG-HP framework, which formulates the hyper-parameter tuning as an online multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem and introduces a novel two-level Hierarchical MAB (Hier-MAB) method for efficient exploration of large search spaces. We conduct extensive experiments on tuning hyper-parameters, such as top-k retrieved documents, prompt compression ratio, and embedding methods, using the ALCE-ASQA and Natural Questions datasets. Our evaluation from jointly optimization all three hyper-parameters demonstrate that MAB-based online learning methods can achieve Recall@5 $\approx 0.8$ for scenarios with prominent gradients in search space, using only $\sim20\%$ of the LLM API calls required by the Grid Search approach. Additionally, the proposed Hier-MAB approach outperforms other baselines in more challenging optimization scenarios. The code will be made available at https://aka.ms/autorag.

Large language models have become integral to question-answering applications despite their propensity for generating hallucinations and factually inaccurate content. Querying knowledge graphs to reduce hallucinations in LLM meets the challenge of incomplete knowledge coverage in knowledge graphs. On the other hand, updating knowledge graphs by information extraction and knowledge graph completion faces the knowledge update misalignment issue. In this work, we introduce a collaborative augmentation framework, CogMG, leveraging knowledge graphs to address the limitations of LLMs in QA scenarios, explicitly targeting the problems of incomplete knowledge coverage and knowledge update misalignment. The LLMs identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through a supervised fine-tuned LLM within an agent framework, showing significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual accuracy in QA responses. Our code and video are publicly available.

Planning, as the core module of agents, is crucial in various fields such as embodied agents, web navigation, and tool using. With the development of large language models (LLMs), some researchers treat large language models as intelligent agents to stimulate and evaluate their planning capabilities. However, the planning mechanism is still unclear. In this work, we focus on exploring the look-ahead planning mechanism in large language models from the perspectives of information flow and internal representations. First, we study how planning is done internally by analyzing the multi-layer perception (MLP) and multi-head self-attention (MHSA) components at the last token. We find that the output of MHSA in the middle layers at the last token can directly decode the decision to some extent. Based on this discovery, we further trace the source of MHSA by information flow, and we reveal that MHSA mainly extracts information from spans of the goal states and recent steps. According to information flow, we continue to study what information is encoded within it. Specifically, we explore whether future decisions have been encoded in advance in the representation of flow. We demonstrate that the middle and upper layers encode a few short-term future decisions to some extent when planning is successful. Overall, our research analyzes the look-ahead planning mechanisms of LLMs, facilitating future research on LLMs performing planning tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but still tend to generate factually erroneous responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. A recent trend is to use preference learning to fine-tune models to align with factuality. However, existing work primarily evaluates fine-tuned models on in-domain (ID) datasets and the factuality on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the factuality of different models tuned by various preference learning algorithms and demonstrate that their performance on OOD datasets either increases minimally or decreases. Subsequently, we reveal that the main cause of model's failure to uphold factuality under a distribution shift is \textbf{under-alignment}, rather than \textbf{over-alignment}, by analyzing the token distribution shift of the models before and after tuning. Finally, we propose \textbf{APEFT} (\textbf{A}tomic \textbf{P}reference \textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{F}actuality \textbf{T}uning), a framework that enhances model's awareness of factuality at the granularity of individual facts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APEFT improves model performance by an average of $\boldsymbol{3.45\%}$ on both ID and OOD datasets, which is highly effective.

Knowledge editing aims to adjust the knowledge within large language models (LLMs) to prevent their responses from becoming obsolete or inaccurate. However, existing works on knowledge editing are primarily conducted in a single language, which is inadequate for multilingual language models. In this paper, we focus on multilingual knowledge editing (MKE), which requires propagating updates across multiple languages. This necessity poses a significant challenge for the task. Furthermore, the limited availability of a comprehensive dataset for MKE exacerbates this challenge, hindering progress in this area. Hence, we introduce the Multilingual Knowledge Editing Benchmark (MKEB), a novel dataset comprising 12 languages and providing a complete evaluation framework. Additionally, we propose a method that enhances Multilingual knowledge Editing with neuron-Masked Low-Rank Adaptation (MEMLA). Specifically, we identify two categories of knowledge neurons to improve editing precision. Moreover, we perform LoRA-based editing with neuron masks to efficiently modify parameters and facilitate the propagation of updates across multiple languages. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines and significantly enhances the multi-hop reasoning capability of the edited model, with minimal impact on its downstream task performance. The dataset and code will be made publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) inevitably memorize sensitive, copyrighted, and harmful knowledge from the training corpus; therefore, it is crucial to erase this knowledge from the models. Machine unlearning is a promising solution for efficiently removing specific knowledge by post hoc modifying models. In this paper, we propose a Real-World Knowledge Unlearning benchmark (RWKU) for LLM unlearning. RWKU is designed based on the following three key factors: (1) For the task setting, we consider a more practical and challenging unlearning setting, where neither the forget corpus nor the retain corpus is accessible. (2) For the knowledge source, we choose 200 real-world famous people as the unlearning targets and show that such popular knowledge is widely present in various LLMs. (3) For the evaluation framework, we design the forget set and the retain set to evaluate the model's capabilities across various real-world applications. Regarding the forget set, we provide four four membership inference attack (MIA) methods and nine kinds of adversarial attack probes to rigorously test unlearning efficacy. Regarding the retain set, we assess locality and utility in terms of neighbor perturbation, general ability, reasoning ability, truthfulness, factuality, and fluency. We conduct extensive experiments across two unlearning scenarios, two models and six baseline methods and obtain some meaningful findings. We release our benchmark and code publicly at http://rwku-bench.github.io for future work., Comment: 48 pages, 7 figures, 12 tables

Large language models (LLMs) suffer from serious unfaithful chain-of-thought (CoT) issues. Previous work attempts to measure and explain it but lacks in-depth analysis within CoTs and does not consider the interactions among all reasoning components jointly. In this paper, we first study the CoT faithfulness issue at the granularity of CoT steps, identify two reasoning paradigms: centralized reasoning and distributed reasoning, and find their relationship with faithfulness. Subsequently, we conduct a joint analysis of the causal relevance among the context, CoT, and answer during reasoning. The result proves that, when the LLM predicts answers, it can recall correct information missing in the CoT from the context, leading to unfaithfulness issues. Finally, we propose the inferential bridging method to mitigate this issue, in which we use the attribution method to recall information as hints for CoT generation and filter out noisy CoTs based on their semantic consistency and attribution scores. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively alleviates the unfaithful CoT problem., Comment: 25 pages, under review

Large language models (LLMs) store extensive factual knowledge, but the mechanisms behind how they store and express this knowledge remain unclear. The Knowledge Neuron (KN) thesis is a prominent theory for explaining these mechanisms. This theory is based on the knowledge localization (KL) assumption, which suggests that a fact can be localized to a few knowledge storage units, namely knowledge neurons. However, this assumption may be overly strong regarding knowledge storage and neglects knowledge expression mechanisms. Thus, we re-examine the KL assumption and confirm the existence of facts that do not adhere to it from both statistical and knowledge modification perspectives. Furthermore, we propose the Query Localization (QL) assumption. (1) Query-KN Mapping: The localization results are associated with the query rather than the fact. (2) Dynamic KN Selection: The attention module contributes to the selection of KNs for answering a query. Based on this, we further propose the Consistency-Aware KN modification method, which improves the performance of knowledge modification. We conduct 39 sets of experiments, along with additional visualization experiments, to rigorously validate our conclusions.

Traditional continual event detection relies on abundant labeled data for training, which is often impractical to obtain in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce continual few-shot event detection (CFED), a more commonly encountered scenario when a substantial number of labeled samples are not accessible. The CFED task is challenging as it involves memorizing previous event types and learning new event types with few-shot samples. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a memory-based framework: Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (HANet). To memorize previous event types with limited memory, we incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set. For the issue of learning new event types in few-shot scenarios, we propose a contrastive augmentation module for token representations. Despite comparing with previous state-of-the-art methods, we also conduct comparisons with ChatGPT. Experiment results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all of these methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks., Comment: Accepted to LREC-COLING 2024

With the development of deep learning, natural language processing technology has effectively improved the efficiency of various aspects of the traditional judicial industry. However, most current efforts focus on tasks within individual judicial stages, making it difficult to handle complex tasks that span multiple stages. As the autonomous agents powered by large language models are becoming increasingly smart and able to make complex decisions in real-world settings, offering new insights for judicial intelligence. In this paper, (1) we propose a novel multi-agent framework, AgentsCourt, for judicial decision-making. Our framework follows the classic court trial process, consisting of court debate simulation, legal resources retrieval and decision-making refinement to simulate the decision-making of judge. (2) we introduce SimuCourt, a judicial benchmark that encompasses 420 Chinese judgment documents, spanning the three most common types of judicial cases. Furthermore, to support this task, we construct a large-scale legal knowledge base, Legal-KB, with multi-resource legal knowledge. (3) Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the existing advanced methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles, where our model achieves significant improvements of 8.6% and 9.1% F1 score in the first and second instance settings, respectively., Comment: This paper was first submitted to ACL ARR 2024 April (Under review)

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance., Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the false premise hallucination and elucidate its internal working mechanism: a small subset of attention heads (which we designate as false premise heads) disturb the knowledge extraction process, leading to the occurrence of false premise hallucination. Based on our analysis, we propose \textbf{FAITH} (\textbf{F}alse premise \textbf{A}ttention head constra\textbf{I}ining for mi\textbf{T}igating \textbf{H}allucinations), a novel and effective method to mitigate false premise hallucinations. It constrains the false premise attention heads during the model inference process. Impressively, extensive experiments demonstrate that constraining only approximately $1\%$ of the attention heads in the model yields a notable increase of nearly $20\%$ of model performance., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers turning wrong, which we define as the Toxic CoT problem. To interpret and mitigate this problem, we first utilize attribution tracing and causal tracing methods to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM during CoT reasoning. Through comparisons, we prove that the model exhibits information loss from the question over the shallow attention layers when generating rationales or answers. Based on the probing findings, we design a novel method called RIDERS (Residual decodIng and sERial-position Swap), which compensates for the information deficit in the model from both decoding and serial-position perspectives. Through extensive experiments on multiple commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we validate that this method not only significantly eliminates Toxic CoT problems (decreased by 23.6%), but also effectively improves the model's overall commonsense reasoning performance (increased by 5.5%)., Comment: Accepted as a long paper to ACL 2024 Main, 25 pages, 22 figures

Recently, retrieval augmentation and tool augmentation have demonstrated a remarkable capability to expand the internal memory boundaries of language models (LMs) by providing external context. However, internal memory and external context inevitably clash, leading to knowledge conflicts within LMs. In this paper, we aim to interpret the mechanism of knowledge conflicts through the lens of information flow, and then mitigate conflicts by precise interventions at the pivotal point. We find there are some attention heads with opposite effects in the later layers, where memory heads can recall knowledge from internal memory, and context heads can retrieve knowledge from external context. Moreover, we reveal that the pivotal point at which knowledge conflicts emerge in LMs is the integration of inconsistent information flows by memory heads and context heads. Inspired by the insights, we propose a novel method called Pruning Head via PatH PatcHing (PH3), which can efficiently mitigate knowledge conflicts by pruning conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. PH3 can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory ($\uparrow$ 44.0%) or external context ($\uparrow$ 38.5%). Moreover, PH3 can also improve the performance of LMs on open-domain QA tasks. We also conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the cross-model, cross-relation, and cross-format generalization of our method., Comment: 21 pages, 42 figures, 4 tables

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have demonstrated significant potential in refining and expanding their internal memory by retrieving evidence from external sources. However, RALMs will inevitably encounter knowledge conflicts when integrating their internal memory with external sources. Knowledge conflicts can ensnare RALMs in a tug-of-war between knowledge, limiting their practical applicability. In this paper, we focus on exploring and resolving knowledge conflicts in RALMs. First, we present an evaluation framework for assessing knowledge conflicts across various dimensions. Then, we investigate the behavior and preference of RALMs from the following two perspectives: (1) Conflicts between internal memory and external sources: We find that stronger RALMs emerge with the Dunning-Kruger effect, persistently favoring their faulty internal memory even when correct evidence is provided. Besides, RALMs exhibit an availability bias towards common knowledge; (2) Conflicts between truthful, irrelevant and misleading evidence: We reveal that RALMs follow the principle of majority rule, leaning towards placing trust in evidence that appears more frequently. Moreover, we find that RALMs exhibit confirmation bias, and are more willing to choose evidence that is consistent with their internal memory. To solve the challenge of knowledge conflicts, we propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model's confidence. Experimental results demonstrate that our CD2 can effectively resolve knowledge conflicts in RALMs., Comment: Accepted at LREC-COLING 2024

Large language models (LLMs) store extensive factual knowledge, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Previous research suggests that factual knowledge is stored within multi-layer perceptron weights, and some storage units exhibit degeneracy, referred to as Degenerate Knowledge Neurons (DKNs). Despite the novelty and unique properties of this concept, it has not been rigorously defined or systematically studied. We first consider the connection weight patterns of MLP neurons and define DKNs from both structural and functional aspects. Based on this, we introduce the Neurological Topology Clustering method, which allows the formation of DKNs in any numbers and structures, leading to a more accurate DKN acquisition. Furthermore, inspired by cognitive science, we explore the relationship between DKNs and the robustness, evolvability, and complexity of LLMs. Our execution of 34 experiments under 6 settings demonstrates the connection between DKNs and these three properties. The code will be available soon.

Knowledge editing aims to rectify inaccuracies in large language models (LLMs) without costly retraining for outdated or erroneous knowledge. However, current knowledge editing methods primarily focus on single editing, failing to meet the requirements for lifelong editing. This study reveals a performance degradation encountered by knowledge editing in lifelong editing, characterized by toxicity buildup and toxicity flash, with the primary cause identified as pattern unmatch. We introduce a knowledge editing approach named Wise-Layer Knowledge Editor (WilKE), which selects editing layer based on the pattern matching degree of editing knowledge across different layers in language models. Experimental results demonstrate that, in lifelong editing, WilKE exhibits an average improvement of 46.2% and 67.8% on editing GPT2-XL and GPT-J relative to state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods., Comment: To be published in ACL Findings 2024

Mitigating the hallucinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) and enhancing them is a crucial task. Although some existing methods employ model self-enhancement techniques, they fall short of effectively addressing unknown factual hallucinations. Using Knowledge Graph (KG) enhancement approaches fails to address the generalization across different KG sources and the enhancement of open-ended answer questions simultaneously. To tackle these limitations, there is a framework that combines Pseudo-Graph Generation and Atomic Knowledge Verification proposed. The enhancement of LLM using KG in an open-ended question-answering setting is implemented by leveraging the Pseudo-Graph Generation. Atomic Knowledge Verification utilizes atomic-level knowledge querying and verification to achieve generalizability under different KG sources. Compared to the baseline, this approach yields a minimum improvement of 11.5 in the ROUGE-L score for open-ended questions. For precise questions, we observe a minimum accuracy improvement of 7.5. Moreover, there is also demonstration that this framework exhibits generalizability across different KG sources. In summary, our results pave the way for enhancing LLMs by incorporating Pseudo- and Multisource-KGs, particularly in the context of open-ended questions.

Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.

Knowledge-based visual question answering is a very challenging and widely concerned task. Previous methods adopts the implicit knowledge in large language models (LLM) to achieve excellent results, but we argue that existing methods may suffer from biasing understanding of the image and insufficient knowledge to solve the problem. In this paper, we propose PROOFREAD -PROmpting vision language model with knOwledge From laRgE lAnguage moDel, a novel, lightweight and efficient kowledge-based VQA framework, which make the vision language model and the large language model cooperate to give full play to their respective strengths and bootstrap each other. In detail, our proposed method uses LLM to obtain knowledge explicitly, uses the vision language model which can see the image to get the knowledge answer, and introduces knowledge perceiver to filter out knowledge that is harmful for getting the correct final answer. Experimental results on two datasets prove the effectiveness of our approach. Our method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on the A-OKVQA dataset in two settings and also achieves relatively good performance on the OKVQA dataset.

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) requires comprehensive and accurate evaluation. We argue that for LLMs evaluation, benchmarks need to be comprehensive and systematic. To this end, we propose the ZhuJiu benchmark, which has the following strengths: (1) Multi-dimensional ability coverage: We comprehensively evaluate LLMs across 7 ability dimensions covering 51 tasks. Especially, we also propose a new benchmark that focuses on knowledge ability of LLMs. (2) Multi-faceted evaluation methods collaboration: We use 3 different yet complementary evaluation methods to comprehensively evaluate LLMs, which can ensure the authority and accuracy of the evaluation results. (3) Comprehensive Chinese benchmark: ZhuJiu is the pioneering benchmark that fully assesses LLMs in Chinese, while also providing equally robust evaluation abilities in English. (4) Avoiding potential data leakage: To avoid data leakage, we construct evaluation data specifically for 37 tasks. We evaluate 10 current mainstream LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion and analysis of their results. The ZhuJiu benchmark and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at http://www.zhujiu-benchmark.com/ and we also provide a demo video at https://youtu.be/qypkJ89L1Ic.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) contain vast amounts of factual knowledge, but how the knowledge is stored in the parameters remains unclear. This paper delves into the complex task of understanding how factual knowledge is stored in multilingual PLMs, and introduces the Architecture-adapted Multilingual Integrated Gradients method, which successfully localizes knowledge neurons more precisely compared to current methods, and is more universal across various architectures and languages. Moreover, we conduct an in-depth exploration of knowledge neurons, leading to the following two important discoveries: (1) The discovery of Language-Independent Knowledge Neurons, which store factual knowledge in a form that transcends language. We design cross-lingual knowledge editing experiments, demonstrating that the PLMs can accomplish this task based on language-independent neurons; (2) The discovery of Degenerate Knowledge Neurons, a novel type of neuron showing that different knowledge neurons can store the same fact. Its property of functional overlap endows the PLMs with a robust mastery of factual knowledge. We design fact-checking experiments, proving that the degenerate knowledge neurons can help the PLMs to detect wrong facts. Experiments corroborate these findings, shedding light on the mechanisms of factual knowledge storage in multilingual PLMs, and contribute valuable insights to the field. The code is available at https://github.com/heng840/AMIG., Comment: Accepted in the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024)

Endoscopy plays a major role in identifying any underlying abnormalities within the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. There are multiple GI tract diseases that are life-threatening, such as precancerous lesions and other intestinal cancers. In the usual process, a diagnosis is made by a medical expert which can be prone to human errors and the accuracy of the test is also entirely dependent on the expert's level of experience. Deep learning, specifically Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) which are designed to perform automatic feature learning without any prior feature engineering, has recently reported great benefits for GI endoscopy image analysis. Previous research has developed models that focus only on improving performance, as such, the majority of introduced models contain complex deep network architectures with a large number of parameters that require longer training times. However, there is a lack of focus on developing lightweight models which can run in low-resource environments, which are typically encountered in medical clinics. We investigate three KD-based learning frameworks, response-based, feature-based, and relation-based mechanisms, and introduce a novel multi-head attention-based feature fusion mechanism to support relation-based learning. Compared to the existing relation-based methods that follow simplistic aggregation techniques of multi-teacher response/feature-based knowledge, we adopt the multi-head attention technique to provide flexibility towards localising and transferring important details from each teacher to better guide the student. We perform extensive evaluations on two widely used public datasets, KVASIR-V2 and Hyper-KVASIR, and our experimental results signify the merits of our proposed relation-based framework in achieving an improved lightweight model (only 51.8k trainable parameters) that can run in a resource-limited environment.

Adversarial attacks, particularly patch attacks, pose significant threats to the robustness and reliability of deep learning models. Developing reliable defenses against patch attacks is crucial for real-world applications. This paper introduces DIFFender, a novel defense framework that harnesses the capabilities of a text-guided diffusion model to combat patch attacks. Central to our approach is the discovery of the Adversarial Anomaly Perception (AAP) phenomenon, which empowers the diffusion model to detect and localize adversarial patches through the analysis of distributional discrepancies. DIFFender integrates dual tasks of patch localization and restoration within a single diffusion model framework, utilizing their close interaction to enhance defense efficacy. Moreover, DIFFender utilizes vision-language pre-training coupled with an efficient few-shot prompt-tuning algorithm, which streamlines the adaptation of the pre-trained diffusion model to defense tasks, thus eliminating the need for extensive retraining. Our comprehensive evaluation spans image classification and face recognition tasks, extending to real-world scenarios, where DIFFender shows good robustness against adversarial attacks. The versatility and generalizability of DIFFender are evident across a variety of settings, classifiers, and attack methodologies, marking an advancement in adversarial patch defense strategies.

Mining aligned natural language (NL) and programming language (PL) pairs is a critical task to NL-PL understanding. Existing methods applied specialized hand-crafted features or separately-trained models for each PL. However, they usually suffered from low transferability across multiple PLs, especially for niche PLs with less annotated data. Fortunately, a Stack Overflow answer post is essentially a sequence of text and code blocks and its global textual context can provide PL-agnostic supplementary information. In this paper, we propose a Sequence Labeling based Question Answering (SLQA) method to mine NL-PL pairs in a PL-agnostic manner. In particular, we propose to apply the BIO tagging scheme instead of the conventional binary scheme to mine the code solutions which are often composed of multiple blocks of a post. Experiments on current single-PL single-block benchmarks and a manually-labeled cross-PL multi-block benchmark prove the effectiveness and transferability of SLQA. We further present a parallel NL-PL corpus named Lang2Code automatically mined with SLQA, which contains about 1.4M pairs on 6 PLs. Under statistical analysis and downstream evaluation, we demonstrate that Lang2Code is a large-scale high-quality data resource for further NL-PL research.

Pioneering dual-encoder pre-training works (e.g., CLIP and ALIGN) have revealed the potential of aligning multi-modal representations with contrastive learning. However, these works require a tremendous amount of data and computational resources (e.g., billion-level web data and hundreds of GPUs), which prevent researchers with limited resources from reproduction and further exploration. To this end, we propose a stack of novel methods, which significantly cut down the heavy resource dependency and allow us to conduct dual-encoder multi-modal representation alignment with limited resources. Besides, we provide a reproducible baseline of competitive results, namely ZeroVL, with only 14M publicly accessible academic datasets and 8 V100 GPUs. Additionally, we collect 100M web data for pre-training, and achieve comparable or superior results than state-of-the-art methods, further proving the effectiveness of our methods on large-scale data. We hope that this work will provide useful data points and experience for future research in contrastive vision-language pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/zerovl/ZeroVL., Comment: Accepted to ECCV2022

Modern models for event causality identification (ECI) are mainly based on supervised learning, which are prone to the data lacking problem. Unfortunately, the existing NLP-related augmentation methods cannot directly produce the available data required for this task. To solve the data lacking problem, we introduce a new approach to augment training data for event causality identification, by iteratively generating new examples and classifying event causality in a dual learning framework. On the one hand, our approach is knowledge-guided, which can leverage existing knowledge bases to generate well-formed new sentences. On the other hand, our approach employs a dual mechanism, which is a learnable augmentation framework and can interactively adjust the generation process to generate task-related sentences. Experimental results on two benchmarks EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) our method can augment suitable task-related training data for ECI; 2) our method outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.5 and +2.1 points on F1 value respectively)., Comment: Accepted to ACL 2021

Current models for event causality identification (ECI) mainly adopt a supervised framework, which heavily rely on labeled data for training. Unfortunately, the scale of current annotated datasets is relatively limited, which cannot provide sufficient support for models to capture useful indicators from causal statements, especially for handing those new, unseen cases. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel approach, shortly named CauSeRL, which leverages external causal statements for event causality identification. First of all, we design a self-supervised framework to learn context-specific causal patterns from external causal statements. Then, we adopt a contrastive transfer strategy to incorporate the learned context-specific causal patterns into the target ECI model. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods on EventStoryLine and Causal-TimeBank (+2.0 and +3.4 points on F1 value respectively)., Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 2021

In this paper, we present CogNet, a knowledge base (KB) dedicated to integrating three types of knowledge: (1) linguistic knowledge from FrameNet, which schematically describes situations, objects and events. (2) world knowledge from YAGO, Freebase, DBpedia and Wikidata, which provides explicit knowledge about specific instances. (3) commonsense knowledge from ConceptNet, which describes implicit general facts. To model these different types of knowledge consistently, we introduce a three-level unified frame-styled representation architecture. To integrate free-form commonsense knowledge with other structured knowledge, we propose a strategy that combines automated labeling and crowdsourced annotation. At present, CogNet integrates 1,000+ semantic frames from linguistic KBs, 20,000,000+ frame instances from world KBs, as well as 90,000+ commonsense assertions from commonsense KBs. All these data can be easily queried and explored on our online platform, and free to download in RDF format for utilization under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. The demo and data are available at http://cognet.top/., Comment: AAAI 2021 Demonstrations

The joint entity and relation extraction task aims to extract all relational triples from a sentence. In essence, the relational triples contained in a sentence are unordered. However, previous seq2seq based models require to convert the set of triples into a sequence in the training phase. To break this bottleneck, we treat joint entity and relation extraction as a direct set prediction problem, so that the extraction model can get rid of the burden of predicting the order of multiple triples. To solve this set prediction problem, we propose networks featured by transformers with non-autoregressive parallel decoding. Unlike autoregressive approaches that generate triples one by one in a certain order, the proposed networks directly output the final set of triples in one shot. Furthermore, we also design a set-based loss that forces unique predictions via bipartite matching. Compared with cross-entropy loss that highly penalizes small shifts in triple order, the proposed bipartite matching loss is invariant to any permutation of predictions; thus, it can provide the proposed networks with a more accurate training signal by ignoring triple order and focusing on relation types and entities. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our proposed model significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods. Training code and trained models will be available at http://github.com/DianboWork/SPN4RE.

Modern models of event causality detection (ECD) are mainly based on supervised learning from small hand-labeled corpora. However, hand-labeled training data is expensive to produce, low coverage of causal expressions and limited in size, which makes supervised methods hard to detect causal relations between events. To solve this data lacking problem, we investigate a data augmentation framework for ECD, dubbed as Knowledge Enhanced Distant Data Augmentation (KnowDis). Experimental results on two benchmark datasets EventStoryLine corpus and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) KnowDis can augment available training data assisted with the lexical and causal commonsense knowledge for ECD via distant supervision, and 2) our method outperforms previous methods by a large margin assisted with automatically labeled training data., Comment: Accepted to COLING2020

Causal explanation analysis (CEA) can assist us to understand the reasons behind daily events, which has been found very helpful for understanding the coherence of messages. In this paper, we focus on Causal Explanation Detection, an important subtask of causal explanation analysis, which determines whether a causal explanation exists in one message. We design a Pyramid Salient-Aware Network (PSAN) to detect causal explanations on messages. PSAN can assist in causal explanation detection via capturing the salient semantics of discourses contained in their keywords with a bottom graph-based word-level salient network. Furthermore, PSAN can modify the dominance of discourses via a top attention-based discourse-level salient network to enhance explanatory semantics of messages. The experiments on the commonly used dataset of CEA shows that the PSAN outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 1.8% F1 value on the Causal Explanation Detection task., Comment: Accepted to CCL2020

Event coreference resolution(ECR) is an important task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and nearly all the existing approaches to this task rely on event argument information. However, these methods tend to suffer from error propagation from the stage of event argument extraction. Besides, not every event mention contains all arguments of an event, and argument information may confuse the model that events have arguments to detect event coreference in real text. Furthermore, the context information of an event is useful to infer the coreference between events. Thus, in order to reduce the errors propagated from event argument extraction and use context information effectively, we propose a multi-loss neural network model that does not need any argument information to do the within-document event coreference resolution task and achieve a significant performance than the state-of-the-art methods., Comment: Published on SCIENCE CHINA Information Sciences

This paper investigates distantly supervised relation extraction in federated settings. Previous studies focus on distant supervision under the assumption of centralized training, which requires collecting texts from different platforms and storing them on one machine. However, centralized training is challenged by two issues, namely, data barriers and privacy protection, which make it almost impossible or cost-prohibitive to centralize data from multiple platforms. Therefore, it is worthy to investigate distant supervision in the federated learning paradigm, which decouples the model training from the need for direct access to the raw data. Overcoming label noise of distant supervision, however, becomes more difficult in federated settings, since the sentences containing the same entity pair may scatter around different platforms. In this paper, we propose a federated denoising framework to suppress label noise in federated settings. The core of this framework is a multiple instance learning based denoising method that is able to select reliable instances via cross-platform collaboration. Various experimental results on New York Times dataset and miRNA gene regulation relation dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

The training of deep-learning-based text classification models relies heavily on a huge amount of annotation data, which is difficult to obtain. When the labeled data is scarce, models tend to struggle to achieve satisfactory performance. However, human beings can distinguish new categories very efficiently with few examples. This is mainly due to the fact that human beings can leverage knowledge obtained from relevant tasks. Inspired by human intelligence, we propose to introduce external knowledge into few-shot learning to imitate human knowledge. A novel parameter generator network is investigated to this end, which is able to use the external knowledge to generate relation network parameters. Metrics can be transferred among tasks when equipped with these generated parameters, so that similar tasks use similar metrics while different tasks use different metrics. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art few-shot text classification models.

Knowledge graph models world knowledge as concepts, entities, and the relationships between them, which has been widely used in many real-world tasks. CCKS 2019 held an evaluation track with 6 tasks and attracted more than 1,600 teams. In this paper, we give an overview of the knowledge graph evaluation tract at CCKS 2019. By reviewing the task definition, successful methods, useful resources, good strategies and research challenges associated with each task in CCKS 2019, this paper can provide a helpful reference for developing knowledge graph applications and conducting future knowledge graph researches., Comment: 21 pages, in Chinese, 9 figures and 17 tables, CCKS 2019 held an evaluation track about knowledge graph with 6 tasks and attracted more than 1,600 teams