Thailand

Making LLMs speak for different, especially minority groups of people, and generate statements supporting their diverse or even controversial perspectives is critical to creating an inclusive environment. However, existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to the stance of their generated content, which often contains inconsistent, neutral, or biased statements. In this paper, we improve the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. We find that multi-round debates between two LLMs with opposite stances generate higher-quality and more salient statements for each, which are important training data to improve the controllability of LLMs. Motivated by this, we develop a novel debate &amp; tuning (“DEBATUNE”) pipeline finetuning LLMs to generate the statements obtained via debate. To examine DEBATUNE, we curate the largest dataset of debate topics so far, which covers 710 controversial topics and corresponding arguments for each topic. Evaluations by the GPT-4 judge with a novel controversy controllability metric show that LLMs’ capability of generating diverse perspectives is significantly improved by DEBATUNE. Moreover, such controllability can be generalized to unseen topics, generating high-quality statements supporting controversial arguments.

ACL 2024

Can LLMs Speak For Diverse People? Tuning LLMs via Debate to Generate Controllable Controversial Statements

supervised finetuning

instruction tuning

large language model

controllable generation

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Making LLMs speak for different, especially minority groups of people, and generate statements supporting their diverse or even controversial perspectives is critical to creating an inclusive environment. However, existing LLMs lack sufficient controllability to the stance of their generated content, which often contains inconsistent, neutral, or biased statements. In this paper, we improve the controllability of LLMs in generating statements supporting an argument the user defined in the prompt. We find that multi-round debates between two LLMs with opposite stances generate higher-quality and more salient statements for each, which are important training data to improve the controllability of LLMs. Motivated by this, we develop a novel debate & tuning (“DEBATUNE”) pipeline finetuning LLMs to generate the statements obtained via debate. To examine DEBATUNE, we curate the largest dataset of debate topics so far, which covers 710 controversial topics and corresponding arguments for each topic. Evaluations by the GPT-4 judge with a novel controversy controllability metric show that LLMs’ capability of generating diverse perspectives is significantly improved by DEBATUNE. Moreover, such controllability can be generalized to unseen topics, generating high-quality statements supporting controversial arguments.

poster

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Detecting implicit hate speech that is not directly hateful remains a challenge. Recent research has attempted to detect implicit hate speech by applying contrastive learning to pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa, but the proposed models still do not have a significant advantage over cross-entropy loss-based learning. We found that contrastive learning based on randomly sampled batch data does not encourage the model to learn hard negative samples. In this work, we propose Label-aware Hard Negative sampling strategies (LAHN) that encourage the model to learn detailed features from hard negative samples, instead of naive negative samples in random batch, using momentum-integrated contrastive learning. LAHN outperforms the existing models for implicit hate speech detection both in- and cross-datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Hanyang-HCC-Lab/LAHN

Label-aware Hard Negative Sampling Strategies with Momentum Contrastive Learning for Implicit Hate Speech Detection

In this paper, we aim to evaluate multi-agent systems against complex dependencies, including spatial, causal, and temporal constraints. First, we construct a new benchmark, named VillagerBench, within the Minecraft environment. VillagerBench comprises diverse tasks crafted to test various aspects of multi-agent collaboration, from workload distribution to dynamic adaptation and synchronized task execution. Second, we introduce a Directed Acyclic Graph Multi-Agent Framework (VillagerAgent) to resolve complex inter-agent dependencies and enhance collaborative efficiency. This solution incorporates a task decomposer that creates a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for structured task management, an agent controller for task distribution, and a state manager for tracking environmental and agent data.Our empirical evaluation on VillagerBench demonstrates that VillagerAgentoutperforms the existing AgentVerse model, reducing hallucinations and improving task decomposition efficacy. The results underscore VillagerAgent's potential in advancing multi-agent collaboration, offering a scalable and generalizable solution in dynamic environments. Source code is open-source on GitHub.

VillagerAgent: A Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Coordinating Complex Task Dependencies in Minecraft

To process contexts with unlimited length using Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies explore hierarchically managing the long text. Only several text fragments are taken from the external memory and passed into the temporary working memory, i.e., LLM's context window. However, existing approaches isolatedly handle the text fragments without considering their structural connections, thereby suffering limited capability on texts with intensive inter-relations, e.g., coherent stories and code repositories. This work attempts to resolve this by exploiting the fragment-level relations in external memory. First, we formulate the fragment-level relations and present several instantiations for different text types. Next, we introduce a relation-aware fragment assessment criteria upon previous independent fragment assessment. Finally, we present the fragment-connected Hierarchical Memory based LLM. We validate the benefits of involving these relations on long story understanding, repository-level code generation, and long-term chatting.

FragRel: Exploiting Fragment-level Relations in the External Memory of Large Language Models

The gap between the trepidation of program reliability and the expense of repairs underscore the indispensability for Automated Program Repair (APR). APR is instrumental in transforming vulnerable programs into more robust ones, bolstering program reliability while simultaneously diminishing the financial burden of manual repairs. Commercial-scale language models (LM) have taken APR to unprecedented levels. However, due to the limitations of model capabilities by parameters, a one-step substantial modification may not achieve the desired effect for models with parameters less than 100B. Moreover, humans interact with the LLM through explicit prompts, which hinders the LLM from receiving feedback from compiler and test cases to automatically optimize its repair policies. Explicit prompts from humans not only increase additional manpower costs, but also pose potential misunderstandings between human's intent and LMs.
Based on the above considerations, we are exploring how to ensure small-scale LM still outperform through process supervision and feedback. We start by constructing a dataset named CodeNet4Repair, replete with multiple repair records, which supervises the fine-tuning of a foundational mode. Building upon the encouraging outcomes of reinforcement learning, we develop a reward model that serves as a critic, providing feedback for the fine-tuned LM's action, progressively optimizing its policy. During inference, we require the LM to generate solutions iteratively until the repair effect no longer improves or hits the maximum step limit. The experimental results show that this process-based feedback not only outperforms larger outcome-based generation methods, but also nearly matches the performance of closed-source commercial large-scale LMs.

RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback

Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process.

Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths.

To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio.

Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.

Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models

Discovering the semantics of multimodal utterances is essential for understanding human language and enhancing human-machine interactions. Existing methods manifest limitations in leveraging nonverbal information for discerning complex semantics in unsupervised scenarios. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised multimodal clustering method (UMC), making a pioneering contribution to this field. UMC introduces a unique approach to constructing augmentation views for multimodal data, which are then used to perform pre-training to establish well-initialized representations for subsequent clustering. An innovative strategy is proposed to dynamically select high-quality samples as guidance for representation learning, gauged by the density of each sample's nearest neighbors. Besides, it is equipped to automatically determine the optimal value for the top-$K$ parameter in each cluster to refine sample selection. Finally, both high- and low-quality samples are used to learn representations conducive to effective clustering. We build baselines on benchmark multimodal intent and dialogue act datasets. UMC shows remarkable improvements of 2-6\% scores in clustering metrics over state-of-the-art methods, marking the first successful endeavor in this domain. The complete code and data are available at https://github.com/thuiar/UMC.

Unsupervised Multimodal Clustering for Semantics Discovery in Multimodal Utterances

Crafting an appealing heading is crucial for attracting readers and marketing work or products. A popular way is to summarize the main idea with a refined description and a memorable acronym. However, there lacks a systematic study and a formal benchmark including datasets and metrics. Motivated by this absence, we introduce LOgogram, a novel benchmark comprising 6,653 paper abstracts with corresponding descriptions and acronyms. To measure the quality of heading generation, we propose a set of evaluation metrics from three aspects: summarization, neology, and algorithm. Additionally, we explore three strategies for heading generation(generation ordering, tokenization of acronyms, and framework design) under various prevalent learning paradigms(supervised fine-tuning, in-context learning with Large Language Models(LLMs), and reinforcement learning) on our benchmark. Our experimental results indicate the difficulty in identifying a practice that excels across all summarization, neologistic, and algorithmic aspects.

Unveiling the Art of Heading Design: A Harmonious Blend of Summarization, Neology, and Algorithm

Relation extraction (RE) is a well-known NLP application often treated as a sentence or document-level task. However, a handful of recent efforts explore it across documents or in the cross-document setting (CrossDocRE). This is distinct from the single document case because different documents often focus on disparate themes, while text within a document tends to have a single goal.
Current CrossDocRE efforts do not consider domain knowledge, which are often assumed to be known to the reader when documents are authored. Here, we propose a novel approach, KXDocRE, that embed domain knowledge of entities with input text for cross-document RE. Our proposed framework has three main benefits over baselines: 1) it incorporates domain knowledge of entities along with documents' text; 2) it offers interpretability by producing explanatory text for predicted relations between entities 3) it improves performance over the prior methods. Code and models are available at~\url{https://github.com/kracr/cross-doc-relation-extraction}.

Knowledge-Driven Cross-Document Relation Extraction

In this work, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for a novel use case: constructing Performance Predictors (PP) that estimate the performance of specific deep neural network architectures on downstream tasks. We create PP prompts for LLMs, comprising (i) role descriptions, (ii) instructions for the LLM, (iii) hyperparameter definitions, and (iv) demonstrations presenting sample architectures with efficiency metrics and `training from scratch' performance. In machine translation (MT) tasks, GPT-4 with our PP prompts (LLM-PP) achieves a SoTA mean absolute error and a slight degradation in rank correlation coefficient compared to baseline predictors. Additionally, we demonstrate that predictions from LLM-PP can be distilled to a compact regression model (LLM-Distill-PP), which surprisingly retains much of the performance of LLM-PP. This presents a cost-effective alternative for resource-intensive performance estimation. Specifically, for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a Hybrid-Search algorithm (HS-NAS) employing LLM-Distill-PP for the initial search stages and reverting to the baseline predictor later. HS-NAS performs similarly to SoTA NAS, reducing search hours by approximately 50%, and in some cases, improving latency, GFLOPs, and model size. The code can be found at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/llmas.

LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search

Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. This work investigates the temporal chaos of pretrained LMs and explores various methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time, which we call "temporal alignment." To do this, we first automatically construct a dataset containing 20K time-sensitive questions and their answers for each year from 2000 to 2023. Based on this dataset, we empirically show that pretrained LMs (e.g., LLaMa2), despite having a recent pretraining cutoff (e.g., 2022), mostly answer questions using earlier knowledge (e.g., in 2019). We then develop several methods, from prompting to finetuning, to align LMs to use their most recent knowledge when answering questions, and investigate various factors in this alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning LLaMa2 to the year 2022 can enhance its performance by up to 62\% according to that year's answers. This improvement occurs even without explicitly mentioning time information, indicating the possibility of aligning models' internal sense of time after pretraining. Finally, we find that alignment to a historical time is also possible, with up to $2.8\times$ the performance of the unaligned LM in 2010 if finetuning models to that year. These findings hint at the sophistication of LMs' internal knowledge organization and the necessity of tuning them properly.

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Label-aware Hard Negative Sampling Strategies with Momentum Contrastive Learning for Implicit Hate Speech Detection

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