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Recent advances in artificial intelligence have seen Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate notable proficiency in causal discovery tasks. This study explores the factors influencing the performance of LLMs in causal discovery tasks. Utilizing open-source LLMs, we examine how the frequency of causal relations within their pre-training corpora affects their ability to accurately respond to causal discovery queries. Our findings reveal that a higher frequency of causal mentions correlates with better model performance, suggesting that extensive exposure to causal information during training enhances the models' causal discovery capabilities. Additionally, we investigate the impact of context on the validity of causal relations. Our results indicate that LLMs might exhibit divergent predictions for identical causal relations when presented in different contexts. This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of how different factors contribute to LLM performance in causal discovery tasks.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved great success recently, demonstrating a strong capability to understand multimodal information and to interact with human users. Despite the progress made, the challenge of detecting high-risk interactions in multimodal settings, and in particular in speech modality, remains largely unexplored. Conventional research on risk for speech modality primarily emphasises the content (e.g., what is captured as transcription). However, in speech-based interactions, paralinguistic cues in audio can significantly alter the intended meaning behind utterances. In this work, we propose a speech-specific risk taxonomy, covering 8 risk categories under hostility (malicious sarcasm and threats), malicious imitation (age, gender, ethnicity), and stereotypical biases (age, gender, ethnicity). Based on the taxonomy, we create a small-scale dataset for evaluating current LMMs capability in detecting these categories of risk. We observe even the latest models remain ineffective to detect various paralinguistic-specific risks in speech (e.g., Gemini 1.5 Pro is performing only slightly above random baseline). Warning: this paper contains biased and offensive examples.

Automatically evaluating the quality of responses in open-domain dialogue systems is a challenging but crucial task. Current evaluation metrics often fail to align with human judgments, especially when assessing responses that are grammatically correct. To address this issue, we propose a novel metric, called CausalScore, which assesses the relevance of responses by measuring the causal strength between dialogue histories and responses. The causal strength is estimated by utilizing both unconditional dependence and conditional dependencies from the dialogue history to responses. We compare our metric with the existing competitive metrics in terms of their alignment with human judgements. Our experimental results demonstrate that CausalScore significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art metrics by aligning better with human judgements. Additionally, we collect a new dialogue dataset CGDIALOG+ with human-annotated causal relations and a set of pairwise human judgements to facilitate the development of future automatic metrics.

This paper tackles the task of emotion-cause pair extraction in the unsupervised domain adaptation setting. The problem is challenging as the distributions of the events causing emotions in target domains are dramatically different than those in source domains, despite the distributions of emotional expressions between domains are overlapped. Inspired by causal discovery, we propose a novel deep latent model in the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework, which not only captures the underlying latent structures of data but also utilizes the easily transferable knowledge of emotions as the bridge to link the distributions of events in different domains. To facilitate knowledge transfer across domains, we also propose a novel variational posterior regularization technique to disentangle the latent representations of emotions from those of events in order to mitigate the damage caused by the spurious correlations related to the events in source domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms the strongest baseline by approximately 11.05% on a Chinese benchmark and 2.45% on a English benchmark in terms of weighted-average F1 score. The source code will be publicly available upon acceptance., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables; Under Review in EMNLP 2024

Recent studies have shown that maintaining a consistent response style by human experts and enhancing data quality in training sets can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) while reducing the number of training examples needed. However, the precise definition of style and the relationship between style, data quality, and LLM performance remains unclear. This research decomposes response style into presentation and composition styles and finds that, among training data of similar quality, those with higher style consistency lead to better LLM performance. Inspired by this, we introduce Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking (SCAR), which automatically prioritizes instruction-response pairs in the training set based on their response stylistic consistency. By selecting the most style-consistent examples, ranging from the top 25% to 0.7% of the full dataset, the fine-tuned LLMs can match or even surpass the performance of models trained on the entire dataset in coding and open-ended question-answering benchmarks. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/SCAR ., Comment: 21 pages

Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress in integrating information across various modalities, yet real-world applications in educational and scientific domains remain challenging. This paper introduces the Multimodal Scientific ASR (MS-ASR) task, which focuses on transcribing scientific conference videos by leveraging visual information from slides to enhance the accuracy of technical terminologies. Realized that traditional metrics like WER fall short in assessing performance accurately, prompting the proposal of severity-aware WER (SWER) that considers the content type and severity of ASR errors. We propose the Scientific Vision Augmented ASR (SciVASR) framework as a baseline method, enabling MLLMs to improve transcript quality through post-editing. Evaluations of state-of-the-art MLLMs, including GPT-4o, show a 45% improvement over speech-only baselines, highlighting the importance of multimodal information integration.

Large language models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned on diverse and extensive datasets sourced from various origins to develop a comprehensive range of skills, such as writing, reasoning, chatting, coding, and more. Each skill has unique characteristics, and these datasets are often heterogeneous and imbalanced, making the fine-tuning process highly challenging. Balancing the development of each skill while ensuring the model maintains its overall performance requires sophisticated techniques and careful dataset curation. In this work, we propose a general, model-agnostic, reinforcement learning framework, Mixture-of-Skills (MoS), that learns to optimize data usage automatically during the fine-tuning process. This framework ensures the optimal comprehensive skill development of LLMs by dynamically adjusting the focus on different datasets based on their current learning state. To validate the effectiveness of MoS, we conduct extensive experiments using three diverse LLM backbones on two widely used benchmarks and demonstrate that MoS substantially enhances model performance. Building on the success of MoS, we propose MoSpec, an adaptation for task-specific fine-tuning, which harnesses the utilities of various datasets for a specific purpose. Our work underlines the significance of dataset rebalancing and present MoS as a powerful, general solution for optimizing data usage in the fine-tuning of LLMs for various purposes., Comment: Work in progress; 15 pages, 7 tables, 4 figures

Significant research has focused on improving the performance of large language model on code-related tasks due to their practical importance. Although performance is typically evaluated using public benchmark datasets, the existing datasets do not account for the concept of \emph{version}, which is crucial in professional software development. In this paper, we introduce VersiCode, the first comprehensive dataset designed to assess the ability of large language models to generate verifiable code for specific library versions. VersiCode encompasses 300 libraries across more than 2,000 versions spanning 9 years. We design two dedicated evaluation tasks: version-specific code completion (VSCC) and version-aware code editing (VACE). Comprehensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the performance of LLMs, revealing the challenging nature of these tasks and VersiCode, that even state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to generate version-correct code. This dataset, together with the proposed tasks, sheds light on LLMs' capabilities and limitations in handling version-specific code generation, and opens up an important new area of research for further investigation. The resources can be found at https://github.com/wutong8023/VersiCode.

Increasing concerns about privacy leakage issues in academia and industry arise when employing NLP models from third-party providers to process sensitive texts. To protect privacy before sending sensitive data to those models, we suggest sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies used by humans: i) deleting sensitive expressions, and ii) obscuring sensitive details by abstracting them. To explore the issues and develop a tool for text rewriting, we curate the first corpus, coined NAP^2, through both crowdsourcing and the use of large language models (LLMs). Compared to the prior works based on differential privacy, which lead to a sharp drop in information utility and unnatural texts, the human-inspired approaches result in more natural rewrites and offer an improved balance between privacy protection and data utility, as demonstrated by our extensive experiments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant capabilities in processing natural language data, promising efficient knowledge extraction from diverse textual sources to enhance situational awareness and support decision-making. However, concerns arise due to their susceptibility to hallucination, resulting in contextually inaccurate content. This work focuses on harnessing LLMs for automated Event Extraction, introducing a new method to address hallucination by decomposing the task into Event Detection and Event Argument Extraction. Moreover, the proposed method integrates dynamic schema-aware augmented retrieval examples into prompts tailored for each specific inquiry, thereby extending and adapting advanced prompting techniques such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Evaluation findings on prominent event extraction benchmarks and results from a synthesized benchmark illustrate the method's superior performance compared to baseline approaches.

A critical approach for efficiently deploying computationally demanding large language models (LLMs) is Key-Value (KV) caching. The KV cache stores key-value states of previously generated tokens, significantly reducing the need for repetitive computations and thereby lowering latency in autoregressive generation. However, the size of the KV cache grows linearly with sequence length, posing challenges for applications requiring long context input and extensive sequence generation. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective approach, called MiniCache, to compress the KV cache across layers from a novel depth perspective, significantly reducing the memory footprint for LLM inference. Our approach is based on the observation that KV cache states exhibit high similarity between the adjacent layers in the middle-to-deep portion of LLMs. To facilitate merging, we propose disentangling the states into the magnitude and direction components, interpolating the directions of the state vectors while preserving their lengths unchanged. Furthermore, we introduce a token retention strategy to keep highly distinct state pairs unmerged, thus preserving the information with minimal additional storage overhead. Our MiniCache is training-free and general, complementing existing KV cache compression strategies, such as quantization and sparsity. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MiniCache utilizing various models including LLaMA-2, LLaMA-3, Phi-3, Mistral, and Mixtral across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating its exceptional performance in achieving superior compression ratios and high throughput. On the ShareGPT dataset, LLaMA-2-7B with 4-bit MiniCache achieves a remarkable compression ratio of up to 5.02x, enhances inference throughput by approximately 5x, and reduces the memory footprint by 41% compared to the FP16 full cache baseline, all while maintaining near-lossless performance., Comment: Tech report

Recent advancements in machine translation (MT) have significantly enhanced translation quality across various domains. However, the translation of literary texts remains a formidable challenge due to their complex language, figurative expressions, and cultural nuances. In this work, we introduce a novel multi-agent framework based on large language models (LLMs) for literary translation, implemented as a company called TransAgents, which mirrors traditional translation publication process by leveraging the collective capabilities of multiple agents, to address the intricate demands of translating literary works. To evaluate the effectiveness of our system, we propose two innovative evaluation strategies: Monolingual Human Preference (MHP) and Bilingual LLM Preference (BLP). MHP assesses translations from the perspective of monolingual readers of the target language, while BLP uses advanced LLMs to compare translations directly with the original texts. Empirical findings indicate that despite lower d-BLEU scores, translations from TransAgents are preferred by both human evaluators and LLMs over human-written references, particularly in genres requiring domain-specific knowledge. We also highlight the strengths and limitations of TransAgents through case studies and suggests directions for future research., Comment: work in progress

Machine learning models have made incredible progress, but they still struggle when applied to examples from unseen domains. This study focuses on a specific problem of domain generalization, where a model is trained on one source domain and tested on multiple target domains that are unseen during training. We propose IMO: Invariant features Masks for Out-of-Distribution text classification, to achieve OOD generalization by learning invariant features. During training, IMO would learn sparse mask layers to remove irrelevant features for prediction, where the remaining features keep invariant. Additionally, IMO has an attention module at the token level to focus on tokens that are useful for prediction. Our comprehensive experiments show that IMO substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of various evaluation metrics and settings.

Speech event detection is crucial for multimedia retrieval, involving the tagging of both semantic and acoustic events. Traditional ASR systems often overlook the interplay between these events, focusing solely on content, even though the interpretation of dialogue can vary with environmental context. This paper tackles two primary challenges in speech event detection: the continual integration of new events without forgetting previous ones, and the disentanglement of semantic from acoustic events. We introduce a new task, continual event detection from speech, for which we also provide two benchmark datasets. To address the challenges of catastrophic forgetting and effective disentanglement, we propose a novel method, 'Double Mixture.' This method merges speech expertise with robust memory mechanisms to enhance adaptability and prevent forgetting. Our comprehensive experiments show that this task presents significant challenges that are not effectively addressed by current state-of-the-art methods in either computer vision or natural language processing. Our approach achieves the lowest rates of forgetting and the highest levels of generalization, proving robust across various continual learning sequences. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/status/Continual-SpeechED-6461., Comment: The first two authors contributed equally to this work

Coalition negotiations are a cornerstone of parliamentary democracies, characterised by complex interactions and strategic communications among political parties. Despite its significance, the modelling of these negotiations has remained unexplored with the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), mostly due to lack of proper data. In this paper, we introduce coalition negotiations as a novel NLP task, and model it as a negotiation between large language model-based agents. We introduce a multilingual dataset, POLCA, comprising manifestos of European political parties and coalition agreements over a number of elections in these countries. This dataset addresses the challenge of the current scope limitations in political negotiation modelling by providing a diverse, real-world basis for simulation. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical Markov decision process designed to simulate the process of coalition negotiation between political parties and predict the outcomes. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as agents in handling coalition negotiations, offering insights into their capabilities and paving the way for future advancements in political modelling.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning abilities when prompted to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations alongside answers. However, previous research on evaluating LLMs has solely focused on answer accuracy, neglecting the correctness of the generated CoT. In this paper, we delve deeper into the CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs in multi-hop question answering by utilizing knowledge graphs (KGs). We propose a novel discriminative and generative CoT evaluation paradigm to assess LLMs' knowledge of reasoning and the accuracy of the generated CoT. Through experiments conducted on 5 different families of LLMs across 2 multi-hop question-answering datasets, we find that LLMs possess sufficient knowledge to perform reasoning. However, there exists a significant disparity between answer accuracy and faithfulness of the CoT reasoning generated by LLMs, indicating that they often arrive at correct answers through incorrect reasoning., Comment: Minh-Vuong Nguyen and Linhao Luo are co-first authors and contributed equally to the preparation of this manuscript. Accepted to ACL24-Findings

Norm violations occur when individuals fail to conform to culturally accepted behaviors, which may lead to potential conflicts. Remediating norm violations requires social awareness and cultural sensitivity of the nuances at play. To equip interactive AI systems with a remediation ability, we offer ReNoVi - a large-scale corpus of 9,258 multi-turn dialogues annotated with social norms, as well as define a sequence of tasks to help understand and remediate norm violations step by step. ReNoVi consists of two parts: 512 human-authored dialogues (real data), and 8,746 synthetic conversations generated by ChatGPT through prompt learning. While collecting sufficient human-authored data is costly, synthetic conversations provide suitable amounts of data to help mitigate the scarcity of training data, as well as the chance to assess the alignment between LLMs and humans in the awareness of social norms. We thus harness the power of ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data for our task. To ensure the quality of both human-authored and synthetic data, we follow a quality control protocol during data collection. Our experimental results demonstrate the importance of remediating norm violations in socio-cultural conversations, as well as the improvement in performance obtained from synthetic data., Comment: work in progress. 15 pages, 7 figures

Simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) presents a challenging trade-off between translation quality and latency. Recent studies have shown that LLMs can achieve good performance in SimulMT tasks. However, this often comes at the expense of high inference cost and latency. In this paper, we propose a conversational SimulMT framework to enhance the inference efficiency of LLM-based SimulMT through multi-turn-dialogue-based decoding. Our experiments with Llama2-7b-chat on two SimulMT benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of LLM in translation quality while achieving comparable computational latency to specialized SimulMT models.

Post-editing has proven effective in improving the quality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, particularly when direct updating of their parameters to enhance text quality is infeasible or expensive. However, relying solely on smaller language models for post-editing can limit the LLMs' ability to generalize across domains. Moreover, the editing strategies in these methods are not optimally designed for text-generation tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a neural programmer-interpreter approach that preserves the domain generalization ability of LLMs when editing their output. The editing actions in this framework are specifically devised for text generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the programmer-interpreter significantly enhances GPT-3.5's performance in logical form-to-text conversion and low-resource machine translation, surpassing other state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM post-editing methods in cross-domain settings., Comment: EACL 2024 (findings), short paper, 5 pages

Large language models (LLMs) are not amenable to frequent re-training, due to high training costs arising from their massive scale. However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs with new skills and keep them up-to-date with rapidly evolving human knowledge. This paper surveys recent works on continual learning for LLMs. Due to the unique nature of LLMs, we catalog continue learning techniques in a novel multi-staged categorization scheme, involving continual pretraining, instruction tuning, and alignment. We contrast continual learning for LLMs with simpler adaptation methods used in smaller models, as well as with other enhancement strategies like retrieval-augmented generation and model editing. Moreover, informed by a discussion of benchmarks and evaluation, we identify several challenges and future work directions for this crucial task.

Negotiation is a crucial ability in human communication. Recently, there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems, whose goal is to create intelligent agents that can assist people in resolving conflicts or reaching agreements. Although there have been many explorations into negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has not been performed to date. We aim to fill this gap by investigating recent studies in the field of negotiation dialogue systems, and covering benchmarks, evaluations and methodologies within the literature. We also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research., Comment: Accepted by EACL 2024 (findings). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2212.09072

We develop assistive agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that aid interlocutors in business negotiations. Specifically, we simulate business negotiations by letting two LLM-based agents engage in role play. A third LLM acts as a remediator agent to rewrite utterances violating norms for improving negotiation outcomes. We introduce a simple tuning-free and label-free In-Context Learning (ICL) method to identify high-quality ICL exemplars for the remediator, where we propose a novel select criteria, called value impact, to measure the quality of the negotiation outcomes. We provide rich empirical evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in negotiations across three different negotiation topics. The source code and the generated dataset will be publicly available upon acceptance., Comment: 25 pages, 3 figures, 13 tables; Under review in EMNLP 2024

In today's globalized world, bridging the cultural divide is more critical than ever for forging meaningful connections. The Socially-Aware Dialogue Assistant System (SADAS) is our answer to this global challenge, and it's designed to ensure that conversations between individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds unfold with respect and understanding. Our system's novel architecture includes: (1) identifying the categories of norms present in the dialogue, (2) detecting potential norm violations, (3) evaluating the severity of these violations, (4) implementing targeted remedies to rectify the breaches, and (5) articulates the rationale behind these corrective actions. We employ a series of State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) techniques to build different modules, and conduct numerous experiments to select the most suitable backbone model for each of the modules. We also design a human preference experiment to validate the overall performance of the system. We will open-source our system (including source code, tools and applications), hoping to advance future research. A demo video of our system can be found at:~\url{https://youtu.be/JqetWkfsejk}. We have released our code and software at:~\url{https://github.com/AnonymousEACLDemo/SADAS}., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures

While text-based event extraction has been an active research area and has seen successful application in many domains, extracting semantic events from speech directly is an under-explored problem. In this paper, we introduce the Speech Event Extraction (SpeechEE) task and construct three synthetic training sets and one human-spoken test set. Compared to event extraction from text, SpeechEE poses greater challenges mainly due to complex speech signals that are continuous and have no word boundaries. Additionally, unlike perceptible sound events, semantic events are more subtle and require a deeper understanding. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a sequence-to-structure generation paradigm that can produce events from speech signals in an end-to-end manner, together with a conditioned generation method that utilizes speech recognition transcripts as the contextual clue. We further propose to represent events with a flat format to make outputs more natural language-like. Our experimental results show that our method brings significant improvements on all datasets, achieving a maximum F1 gain of 10.7%. The code and datasets are released on https://github.com/jodie-kang/SpeechEE., Comment: Under Review

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) aims to generate translations that are both coherent and cohesive, in contrast to its sentence-level counterpart. However, due to its longer input length and limited availability of training data, DocNMT often faces the challenge of data sparsity. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel Importance-Aware Data Augmentation (IADA) algorithm for DocNMT that augments the training data based on token importance information estimated by the norm of hidden states and training gradients. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three widely-used DocNMT benchmarks. Our empirical results show that our proposed IADA outperforms strong DocNMT baselines as well as several data augmentation approaches, with statistical significance on both sentence-level and document-level BLEU., Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 7 tables, accepted by EACL2024 main conference

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recent research indicates that moderately-sized LLMs often outperform larger ones after task-specific fine-tuning. This study focuses on adapting LLMs for document-level machine translation (DocMT) for specific language pairs. We first investigate the impact of prompt strategies on translation performance and then conduct extensive experiments using two fine-tuning methods, three LLM backbones, and 18 translation tasks across nine language pairs. Our results show that specialized models can sometimes surpass GPT-4 in translation performance but still face issues like off-target translation due to error propagation in decoding. We provide an in-depth analysis of these LLMs tailored for DocMT, examining translation errors, discourse phenomena, training strategies, the scaling law of parallel documents, recent test set evaluations, and zero-shot crosslingual transfer. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of LLM-based DocMT models and provide a foundation for future research., Comment: work in progress; 23 pages, 19 tables, 7 figures

State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models are trained on massive training corpora, and report a superlative performance on evaluation datasets. This survey delves into an important attribute of these datasets: the dialect of a language. Motivated by the performance degradation of NLP models for dialectic datasets and its implications for the equity of language technologies, we survey past research in NLP for dialects in terms of datasets, and approaches. We describe a wide range of NLP tasks in terms of two categories: natural language understanding (NLU) (for tasks such as dialect classification, sentiment analysis, parsing, and NLU benchmarks) and natural language generation (NLG) (for summarisation, machine translation, and dialogue systems). The survey is also broad in its coverage of languages which include English, Arabic, German among others. We observe that past work in NLP concerning dialects goes deeper than mere dialect classification, and . This includes early approaches that used sentence transduction that lead to the recent approaches that integrate hypernetworks into LoRA. We expect that this survey will be useful to NLP researchers interested in building equitable language technologies by rethinking LLM benchmarks and model architectures., Comment: The paper is under review at ACM Computing Surveys. Please reach out to the authors in the case of feedback

Social intelligence is essential for understanding and reasoning about human expressions, intents and interactions. One representative benchmark for its study is Social Intelligence Queries (Social-IQ), a dataset of multiple-choice questions on videos of complex social interactions. We define a comprehensive methodology to study the soundness of Social-IQ, as the soundness of such benchmark datasets is crucial to the investigation of the underlying research problem. Our analysis reveals that Social-IQ contains substantial biases, which can be exploited by a moderately strong language model to learn spurious correlations to achieve perfect performance without being given the context or even the question. We introduce DeSIQ, a new challenging dataset, constructed by applying simple perturbations to Social-IQ. Our empirical analysis shows DeSIQ significantly reduces the biases in the original Social-IQ dataset. Furthermore, we examine and shed light on the effect of model size, model style, learning settings, commonsense knowledge, and multi-modality on the new benchmark performance. Our new dataset, observations and findings open up important research questions for the study of social intelligence., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, EMNLP 2023 Long Paper

Previous studies have relied on existing question-answering benchmarks to evaluate the knowledge stored in large language models (LLMs). However, this approach has limitations regarding factual knowledge coverage, as it mostly focuses on generic domains which may overlap with the pretraining data. This paper proposes a framework to systematically assess the factual knowledge of LLMs by leveraging knowledge graphs (KGs). Our framework automatically generates a set of questions and expected answers from the facts stored in a given KG, and then evaluates the accuracy of LLMs in answering these questions. We systematically evaluate the state-of-the-art LLMs with KGs in generic and specific domains. The experiment shows that ChatGPT is consistently the top performer across all domains. We also find that LLMs performance depends on the instruction finetuning, domain and question complexity and is prone to adversarial context., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 Findings

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities in complex tasks. However, they lack up-to-date knowledge and experience hallucinations during reasoning, which can lead to incorrect reasoning processes and diminish their performance and trustworthiness. Knowledge graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. Nevertheless, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only treat KGs as factual knowledge bases and overlook the importance of their structural information for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel method called reasoning on graphs (RoG) that synergizes LLMs with KGs to enable faithful and interpretable reasoning. Specifically, we present a planning-retrieval-reasoning framework, where RoG first generates relation paths grounded by KGs as faithful plans. These plans are then used to retrieve valid reasoning paths from the KGs for LLMs to conduct faithful reasoning. Furthermore, RoG not only distills knowledge from KGs to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs through training but also allows seamless integration with any arbitrary LLMs during inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that RoG achieves state-of-the-art performance on KG reasoning tasks and generates faithful and interpretable reasoning results., Comment: Accepted by ICLR 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language generation. However, their output quality can be inconsistent, posing challenges for generating natural language from logical forms (LFs). This task requires the generated outputs to embody the exact semantics of LFs, without missing any LF semantics or creating any hallucinations. In this work, we tackle this issue by proposing a novel generate-and-rerank approach. Our approach involves initially generating a set of candidate outputs by prompting an LLM and subsequently reranking them using a task-specific reranker model. In addition, we curate a manually collected dataset to evaluate the alignment between different ranking metrics and human judgements. The chosen ranking metrics are utilized to enhance the training and evaluation of the reranker model. By conducting extensive experiments on three diverse datasets, we demonstrate that the candidates selected by our reranker outperform those selected by baseline methods in terms of semantic consistency and fluency, as measured by three comprehensive metrics. Our findings provide strong evidence for the effectiveness of our approach in improving the quality of generated outputs., Comment: IJCNLP-AACL 2023

Real-world simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) systems face more challenges than just the quality-latency trade-off. They also need to address issues related to robustness with noisy input, processing long contexts, and flexibility for knowledge injection. These challenges demand models with strong language understanding and generation capabilities which may not often equipped by dedicated MT models. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of applying Large Language Models (LLM) to SimulMT tasks by using existing incremental-decoding methods with a newly proposed RALCP algorithm for latency reduction. We conducted experiments using the \texttt{Llama2-7b-chat} model on nine different languages from the MUST-C dataset. The results show that LLM outperforms dedicated MT models in terms of BLEU and LAAL metrics. Further analysis indicates that LLM has advantages in terms of tuning efficiency and robustness. However, it is important to note that the computational cost of LLM remains a significant obstacle to its application in SimulMT.\footnote{We will release our code, weights, and data with publication.}

Logical rules are essential for uncovering the logical connections between relations, which could improve reasoning performance and provide interpretable results on knowledge graphs (KGs). Although there have been many efforts to mine meaningful logical rules over KGs, existing methods suffer from computationally intensive searches over the rule space and a lack of scalability for large-scale KGs. Besides, they often ignore the semantics of relations which is crucial for uncovering logical connections. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in the field of natural language processing and various applications, owing to their emergent ability and generalizability. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, ChatRule, unleashing the power of large language models for mining logical rules over knowledge graphs. Specifically, the framework is initiated with an LLM-based rule generator, leveraging both the semantic and structural information of KGs to prompt LLMs to generate logical rules. To refine the generated rules, a rule ranking module estimates the rule quality by incorporating facts from existing KGs. Last, the ranked rules can be used to conduct reasoning over KGs. ChatRule is evaluated on four large-scale KGs, w.r.t. different rule quality metrics and downstream tasks, showing the effectiveness and scalability of our method., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures

Cross-lingual text classification leverages text classifiers trained in a high-resource language to perform text classification in other languages with no or minimal fine-tuning (zero/few-shots cross-lingual transfer). Nowadays, cross-lingual text classifiers are typically built on large-scale, multilingual language models (LMs) pretrained on a variety of languages of interest. However, the performance of these models vary significantly across languages and classification tasks, suggesting that the superposition of the language modelling and classification tasks is not always effective. For this reason, in this paper we propose revisiting the classic "translate-and-test" pipeline to neatly separate the translation and classification stages. The proposed approach couples 1) a neural machine translator translating from the targeted language to a high-resource language, with 2) a text classifier trained in the high-resource language, but the neural machine translator generates "soft" translations to permit end-to-end backpropagation during fine-tuning of the pipeline. Extensive experiments have been carried out over three cross-lingual text classification datasets (XNLI, MLDoc and MultiEURLEX), with the results showing that the proposed approach has significantly improved performance over a competitive baseline., Comment: Accepted by the Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), pre-MIT Press publication version

Pre-trained speech encoders have been central to pushing state-of-the-art results across various speech understanding and generation tasks. Nonetheless, the capabilities of these encoders in low-resource settings are yet to be thoroughly explored. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive set of experiments using a representative set of 3 state-of-the-art encoders (Wav2vec2, WavLM, Whisper) in the low-resource setting across 7 speech understanding and generation tasks. We provide various quantitative and qualitative analyses on task performance, convergence speed, and representational properties of the encoders. We observe a connection between the pre-training protocols of these encoders and the way in which they capture information in their internal layers. In particular, we observe the Whisper encoder exhibits the greatest low-resource capabilities on content-driven tasks in terms of performance and convergence speed., Comment: INTERSPEECH 2023

Textual scene graph parsing has become increasingly important in various vision-language applications, including image caption evaluation and image retrieval. However, existing scene graph parsers that convert image captions into scene graphs often suffer from two types of errors. First, the generated scene graphs fail to capture the true semantics of the captions or the corresponding images, resulting in a lack of faithfulness. Second, the generated scene graphs have high inconsistency, with the same semantics represented by different annotations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dataset, which involves re-annotating the captions in Visual Genome (VG) using a new intermediate representation called FACTUAL-MR. FACTUAL-MR can be directly converted into faithful and consistent scene graph annotations. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate that the parser trained on our dataset outperforms existing approaches in terms of faithfulness and consistency. This improvement leads to a significant performance boost in both image caption evaluation and zero-shot image retrieval tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel metric for measuring scene graph similarity, which, when combined with the improved scene graph parser, achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple benchmark datasets for the aforementioned tasks. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zhuang-li/FACTUAL ., Comment: 9 pages, ACL 2023 (findings)

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model's ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.

Multilingual semantic parsing aims to leverage the knowledge from the high-resource languages to improve low-resource semantic parsing, yet commonly suffers from the data imbalance problem. Prior works propose to utilize the translations by either humans or machines to alleviate such issues. However, human translations are expensive, while machine translations are cheap but prone to error and bias. In this work, we propose an active learning approach that exploits the strengths of both human and machine translations by iteratively adding small batches of human translations into the machine-translated training set. Besides, we propose novel aggregated acquisition criteria that help our active learning method select utterances to be manually translated. Our experiments demonstrate that an ideal utterance selection can significantly reduce the error and bias in the translated data, resulting in higher parser accuracies than the parsers merely trained on the machine-translated data., Comment: ACL 2023

Nowadays, voice assistants help users complete tasks on the smartphone with voice commands, replacing traditional touchscreen interactions when such interactions are inhibited. However, the usability of those tools remains moderate due to the problems in understanding rich language variations in human commands, along with efficiency and comprehensibility issues. Therefore, we introduce Voicify, an Android virtual assistant that allows users to interact with on-screen elements in mobile apps through voice commands. Using a novel deep learning command parser, Voicify interprets human verbal input and performs matching with UI elements. In addition, the tool can directly open a specific feature from installed applications by fetching application code information to explore the set of in-app components. Our command parser achieved 90\% accuracy on the human command dataset. Furthermore, the direct feature invocation module achieves better feature coverage in comparison to Google Assistant. The user study demonstrates the usefulness of Voicify in real-world scenarios.

Text-based games (TGs) are language-based interactive environments for reinforcement learning. While language models (LMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) are commonly used for handling large action space in TGs, it is unclear whether these techniques are necessary or overused. In this paper, we revisit the challenge of exploring the action space in TGs and propose $ \epsilon$-admissible exploration, a minimal approach of utilizing admissible actions, for training phase. Additionally, we present a text-based actor-critic (TAC) agent that produces textual commands for game, solely from game observations, without requiring any KG or LM. Our method, on average across 10 games from Jericho, outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art agents that use LM and KG. Our approach highlights that a much lighter model design, with a fresh perspective on utilizing the information within the environments, suffices for an effective exploration of exponentially large action spaces.

Acquiring new knowledge without forgetting what has been learned in a sequence of tasks is the central focus of continual learning (CL). While tasks arrive sequentially, the training data are often prepared and annotated independently, leading to the CL of incoming supervised learning tasks. This paper considers the under-explored problem of active continual learning (ACL) for a sequence of active learning (AL) tasks, where each incoming task includes a pool of unlabelled data and an annotation budget. We investigate the effectiveness and interplay between several AL and CL algorithms in the domain, class and task-incremental scenarios. Our experiments reveal the trade-off between two contrasting goals of not forgetting the old knowledge and the ability to quickly learn new knowledge in CL and AL, respectively. While conditioning the AL query strategy on the annotations collected for the previous tasks leads to improved task performance on the domain and task incremental learning, our proposed forgetting-learning profile suggests a gap in balancing the effect of AL and CL for the class-incremental scenario.

Flowchart-grounded troubleshooting dialogue (FTD) systems, which follow the instructions of a flowchart to diagnose users' problems in specific domains (e.g., vehicle, laptop), have been gaining research interest in recent years. However, collecting sufficient dialogues that are naturally grounded on flowcharts is costly, thus FTD systems are impeded by scarce training data. To mitigate the data sparsity issue, we propose a plan-based synthetic data generation (PlanSDG) approach that generates diverse synthetic dialog data at scale by transforming concise flowchart into dialogues. Specifically, its generative model employs a variational-base framework with a hierarchical planning strategy that includes global and local latent planning variables. Experiments on the FloDial dataset show that synthetic dialogue produced by PlanSDG improves the performance of downstream tasks, including flowchart path retrieval and response generation, in particular on the Out-of-Flowchart settings. In addition, further analysis demonstrate the quality of synthetic data generated by PlanSDG in paths that are covered by current sample dialogues and paths that are not covered., Comment: Accepted by ALTA 2023

Dialogue systems have been widely applied in many scenarios and are now more powerful and ubiquitous than ever before. With large neural models and massive available data, current dialogue systems have access to more knowledge than any people in their life. However, current dialogue systems still do not perform at a human level. One major gap between conversational agents and humans lies in their abilities to be aware of social norms. The development of socially-aware dialogue systems is impeded due to the lack of resources. In this paper, we present the first socially-aware dialogue corpus - SocialDial, based on Chinese social culture. SocialDial consists of two parts: 1,563 multi-turn dialogues between two human speakers with fine-grained labels, and 4,870 synthetic conversations generated by ChatGPT. The human corpus covers five categories of social norms, which have 14 sub-categories in total. Specifically, it contains social factor annotations including social relation, context, social distance, and social norms. However, collecting sufficient socially-aware dialogues is costly. Thus, we harness the power of ChatGPT and devise an ontology-based synthetic data generation framework. This framework is able to generate synthetic data at scale. To ensure the quality of synthetic dialogues, we design several mechanisms for quality control during data collection. Finally, we evaluate our dataset using several pre-trained models, such as BERT and RoBERTa. Comprehensive empirical results based on state-of-the-art neural models demonstrate that modeling of social norms for dialogue systems is a promising research direction. To the best of our knowledge, SocialDial is the first socially-aware dialogue dataset that covers multiple social factors and has fine-grained labels., Comment: Accepted by SIGIR 2023

Knowledge graphs (KGs), as a structured form of knowledge representation, have been widely applied in the real world. Recently, few-shot knowledge graph completion (FKGC), which aims to predict missing facts for unseen relations with few-shot associated facts, has attracted increasing attention from practitioners and researchers. However, existing FKGC methods are based on metric learning or meta-learning, which often suffer from the out-of-distribution and overfitting problems. Meanwhile, they are incompetent at estimating uncertainties in predictions, which is critically important as model predictions could be very unreliable in few-shot settings. Furthermore, most of them cannot handle complex relations and ignore path information in KGs, which largely limits their performance. In this paper, we propose a normalizing flow-based neural process for few-shot knowledge graph completion (NP-FKGC). Specifically, we unify normalizing flows and neural processes to model a complex distribution of KG completion functions. This offers a novel way to predict facts for few-shot relations while estimating the uncertainty. Then, we propose a stochastic ManifoldE decoder to incorporate the neural process and handle complex relations in few-shot settings. To further improve performance, we introduce an attentive relation path-based graph neural network to capture path information in KGs. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the existing FKGC methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/RManLuo/NP-FKGC.git., Comment: Accepted by SIGIR2023

In very recent years more attention has been placed on probing the role of pre-training data in Large Language Models (LLMs) downstream behaviour. Despite the importance, there is no public tool that supports such analysis of pre-training corpora at large scale. To help research in this space, we launch Koala, a searchable index over large pre-training corpora using compressed suffix arrays with highly efficient compression rate and search support. In its first release we index the public proportion of OPT 175B pre-training data. Koala provides a framework to do forensic analysis on the current and future benchmarks as well as to assess the degree of memorization in the output from the LLMs. Koala is available for public use at https://koala-index.erc.monash.edu/., Comment: Available here: https://koala-index.erc.monash.edu/

Confidence-based pseudo-labeling is among the dominant approaches in semi-supervised learning (SSL). It relies on including high-confidence predictions made on unlabeled data as additional targets to train the model. We propose ProtoCon, a novel SSL method aimed at the less-explored label-scarce SSL where such methods usually underperform. ProtoCon refines the pseudo-labels by leveraging their nearest neighbours' information. The neighbours are identified as the training proceeds using an online clustering approach operating in an embedding space trained via a prototypical loss to encourage well-formed clusters. The online nature of ProtoCon allows it to utilise the label history of the entire dataset in one training cycle to refine labels in the following cycle without the need to store image embeddings. Hence, it can seamlessly scale to larger datasets at a low cost. Finally, ProtoCon addresses the poor training signal in the initial phase of training (due to fewer confident predictions) by introducing an auxiliary self-supervised loss. It delivers significant gains and faster convergence over state-of-the-art across 5 datasets, including CIFARs, ImageNet and DomainNet., Comment: Accepted in CVPR2023 (highlight)

In this paper, we conduct the first study on spurious correlations for open-domain response generation models based on a corpus CGDIALOG curated in our work. The cur rent models indeed suffer from spurious correlations and have a tendency of generating irrelevant and generic responses. Inspired by causal discovery algorithms, we propose a novel model-agnostic method for training and inference of response generation model using a conditional independence classifier. The classifier is trained by a constrained self-training method, coined CONSTRAIN, to overcome data scarcity. The experimental results based on both human and automatic evaluation show that our method significantly outperforms the competitive baselines in terms of relevance, informativeness, and fluency.

Existing work in document-level neural machine translation commonly concatenates several consecutive sentences as a pseudo-document, and then learns inter-sentential dependencies. This strategy limits the model's ability to leverage information from distant context. We overcome this limitation with a novel Document Flattening (DocFlat) technique that integrates Flat-Batch Attention (FBA) and Neural Context Gate (NCG) into Transformer model to utilize information beyond the pseudo-document boundaries. FBA allows the model to attend to all the positions in the batch and learns the relationships between positions explicitly and NCG identifies the useful information from the distant context. We conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on three benchmark datasets for English-German translation, and validate the effectiveness of two variants of DocFlat. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms strong baselines with statistical significance on BLEU, COMET and accuracy on the contrastive test set. The analyses highlight that DocFlat is highly effective in capturing the long-range information., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted by EACL 2023

Current multilingual semantic parsing (MSP) datasets are almost all collected by translating the utterances in the existing datasets from the resource-rich language to the target language. However, manual translation is costly. To reduce the translation effort, this paper proposes the first active learning procedure for MSP (AL-MSP). AL-MSP selects only a subset from the existing datasets to be translated. We also propose a novel selection method that prioritizes the examples diversifying the logical form structures with more lexical choices, and a novel hyperparameter tuning method that needs no extra annotation cost. Our experiments show that AL-MSP significantly reduces translation costs with ideal selection methods. Our selection method with proper hyperparameters yields better parsing performance than the other baselines on two multilingual datasets., Comment: EACL 2023 (findings)

Semantic parsing is a technique aimed at constructing a structured representation of the meaning of a natural-language question. Recent advancements in few-shot language models trained on code have demonstrated superior performance in generating these representations compared to traditional unimodal language models, which are trained on downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, existing fine-tuned neural semantic parsers are susceptible to adversarial attacks on natural-language inputs. While it has been established that the robustness of smaller semantic parsers can be enhanced through adversarial training, this approach is not feasible for large language models in real-world scenarios, as it requires both substantial computational resources and expensive human annotation on in-domain semantic parsing data. This paper presents the first empirical study on the adversarial robustness of a large prompt-based language model of code, \codex. Our results demonstrate that the state-of-the-art (SOTA) code-language models are vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples. To address this challenge, we propose methods for improving robustness without the need for significant amounts of labeled data or heavy computational resources., Comment: Accepted at EACL2023 (main)