Thailand

In-context learning has become a popular paradigm in natural language processing. However, its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-context demonstration examples. In this paper, we found that causal language models (CausalLMs) are more sensitive to this order compared to prefix language models (PrefixLMs). We attribute this phenomenon to the auto-regressive attention masks within CausalLMs, which restrict each token from accessing information from subsequent tokens. This results in different receptive fields for samples at different positions, thereby leading to representation disparities across positions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an unsupervised fine-tuning method, termed the Information-Augmented and Consistency-Enhanced approach. This approach utilizes contrastive learning to align representations of in-context examples across different positions and introduces a consistency loss to ensure similar representations for inputs with different permutations. This enhances the model&#39;s predictive consistency across permutations. Experimental results on five benchmarks suggest that our proposed method can reduce the sensitivity of CausalLMs to the order of in-context examples and exhibit robust generalizability, particularly when demonstrations are sourced from a candidate pool different from that used in the training phase, or when the number of in-context examples differs from what is used during training.

ACL 2024

Addressing Order Sensitivity of In-Context Demonstration Examples in Causal Language Models

causal language models

order sensitivity

in-context learning

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In-context learning has become a popular paradigm in natural language processing. However, its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-context demonstration examples. In this paper, we found that causal language models (CausalLMs) are more sensitive to this order compared to prefix language models (PrefixLMs). We attribute this phenomenon to the auto-regressive attention masks within CausalLMs, which restrict each token from accessing information from subsequent tokens. This results in different receptive fields for samples at different positions, thereby leading to representation disparities across positions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an unsupervised fine-tuning method, termed the Information-Augmented and Consistency-Enhanced approach. This approach utilizes contrastive learning to align representations of in-context examples across different positions and introduces a consistency loss to ensure similar representations for inputs with different permutations. This enhances the model's predictive consistency across permutations. Experimental results on five benchmarks suggest that our proposed method can reduce the sensitivity of CausalLMs to the order of in-context examples and exhibit robust generalizability, particularly when demonstrations are sourced from a candidate pool different from that used in the training phase, or when the number of in-context examples differs from what is used during training.

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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.

In many practical scenarios, contents from different modalities are not semantically aligned; for instance, visual and textual information may conflict with each other, resulting in non-compositional expression effects such as irony or humor. Effective modeling and smooth integration of multimodal information are crucial for achieving good understanding of the contrast across modalities. Being focusing on image-text matching, most current studies face challenges in identifying such contrast, leading to limitations in exploring the extended semantics when images and texts do not match. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based approach for learning multimodal contrast following the encoding-decoding paradigm, enhanced by a memory module with reinforced contrast recognition, and use a series of tasks that have the nature of multimodal contrast to verify our approach. The memory module learns the integration between visual and textual features with trainable memory vectors and the reinforced contrast recognition uses self-rejection sampling to optimize the memory to further enhance learning multimodal contrast. The resulted information, accompanied with visual and text features, is finally fed into the LLM to predict corresponding labels. We experiment our approach on four English and Chinese benchmark datasets, where it outperforms strong baselines and state-of-the-art studies.

Learning Multimodal Contrast with Cross-modal Memory and Reinforced Contrast Recognition

This research introduces a Positive Reconstruction Framework based on positive psychology theory. Overcoming negative thoughts can be challenging, our objective is to address and reframe them through a positive reinterpretation. To tackle this challenge, a two-fold approach is necessary: identifying cognitive distortions and suggesting a positively reframed alternative while preserving the original thought's meaning. Recent studies have investigated the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in English for each stage of this process. In this study, we emphasize the theoretical foundation for the Positive Reconstruction Framework, grounded in broaden-and-build theory. We provide a shared corpus containing 4001 instances for detecting cognitive distortions and 1900 instances for positive reconstruction in Mandarin. Leveraging recent NLP techniques, including transfer learning, fine-tuning pretrained networks, and prompt engineering, we demonstrate the effectiveness of automated tools for both tasks. In summary, our study contributes to multilingual positive reconstruction, highlighting the effectiveness of NLP in cognitive distortion detection and positive reconstruction.

Detection and Positive Reconstruction of Cognitive Distortion Sentences: Mandarin Dataset and Evaluation

Verifying a question's validity before answering is crucial in real-world applications, where users may provide imperfect instructions. In this scenario, an ideal model should address the discrepancies in the query and convey them to the users rather than generating the best possible answer. Addressing this requirement, we introduce a new compositional visual question-answering dataset, VisReas, that consists of answerable and unanswerable visual queries formulated by traversing and perturbing commonalities and differences among objects, attributes, and relations. VisReas contains 2.07M semantically diverse queries generated automatically using Visual Genome scene graphs. The unique feature of this task, validating question answerability with respect to an image before answering, and the poor performance of state-of-the-art models inspired the design of a new modular baseline, Logic2Vision that reasons by producing and executing pseudocode without any external modules to generate the answer. Logic2Vision outperforms generative models in VisReas (+4.82% over LLaVA-1.5; +12.23% over InstructBLIP) and achieves a significant gain in performance against the classification models.

VISREAS: Complex Visual Reasoning with Unanswerable Questions

Object hallucination has been an Achilles' heel which hinders the broader applications of large vision-language models (LVLMs). Object hallucination refers to the phenomenon that the LVLMs claim non-existent objects in the image. To mitigate the object hallucinations, instruction tuning and external model-based detection methods have been proposed, which either require large-scare computational resources or depend on the detection result of external models. However, there remains an under-explored field to utilize the LVLM itself to alleviate object hallucinations. In this work, we adopt the intuition that the LVLM tends to respond logically consistently for existent objects but inconsistently for hallucinated objects. Therefore, we propose a Logical Closed Loop-based framework for Object Hallucination Detection and Mitigation, namely $\textbf{LogicCheckGPT}$. In specific, we devise logical consistency probing to raise questions with logical correlations, inquiring about attributes from objects and vice versa. Whether their responses can form a logical closed loop serves as an indicator of object hallucination. As a plug-and-play method, it can be seamlessly applied to all existing LVLMs. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three benchmarks across four LVLMs have demonstrated significant improvements brought by our method, indicating its effectiveness and generality.

Logical Closed Loop: Uncovering Object Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

We introduces ***LLaST***, a framework for building high-performance Large Language model based Speech-to-text Translation systems. We address the limitations of end-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) models by exploring model architecture design and optimization techniques tailored for LLMs. Our approach includes LLM-based speech translation architecture design, ASR-augmented training, multilingual data augmentation, and dual-LoRA optimization. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on the CoVoST-2 benchmark and showcases exceptional scaling capabilities powered by LLMs.
We believe this effective method will serve as a strong baseline for speech translation and provide insights for future
improvements of the LLM-based speech translation framework.

LLaST: Improved End-to-end Speech Translation System Leveraged by Large Language Models

Recent studies have illuminated the promising capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in handling long texts. However, their performance in machine translation (MT) of long documents remains underexplored. This paper aims to shed light on how LLMs navigate this complex task, offering a comprehensive evaluation of their capabilities and limitations in long-text MT. First, we collect and construct an instruction-based benchmark dataset, specifically designed for the finetuning and evaluation of LLMs, encompassing multilingual, multi-domain, and document-level parallel data. Second, we conduct a comprehensive comparison between MT and LLM models concerning document-level translation. Our analysis uncovers that LLMs exhibit shortcomings in long-text domains, and their performance diminishes as document size escalates. By exploiting various extrapolation strategies, we enhance the capacity of LLMs to translate longer texts. We release data, code, and models at https://github.com/longyuewangdcu/Document-MT-LLM.

Benchmarking and Improving Long-Text Translation with Large Language Models

In the task of aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP), generative methods for predicting sentiment quads have shown promising
results. However, they still suffer from imprecise predictions and limited interpretability, caused by data scarcity and inadequate modeling of the quadruplet composition process. In this paper, we propose Self-Consistent Reasoning-based Aspect sentiment quadruple Prediction (SCRAP), optimizing its model to generate reasonings and the corresponding sentiment quadruplets in sequence. SCRAP adopts the Extract-Then-Assign reasoning strategy, which closely mimics human cognition. In the end, SCRAP significantly improves the model’s ability to handle complex reasoning tasks and correctly predict quadruplets through consistency voting, resulting in enhanced interpretability and accuracy in ASQP.

Self-Consistent Reasoning-based Aspect-Sentiment Quad Prediction with Extract-Then-Assign Strategy

In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without needing any parameter updates. Although there have been extensive studies on English in-context learning, multilingual in-context learning remains under-explored, and we lack an in-depth understanding of the role of demonstrations in this context. To address this gap, we conduct a multidimensional analysis of multilingual in-context learning, experimenting with 5 models from different model families, 9 datasets covering classification and generation tasks, and 56 typologically diverse languages. Our results reveal that the effectiveness of demonstrations varies significantly across models, tasks, and languages. We also find that strong instruction-following models including Llama 2-Chat, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 are largely insensitive to the quality of demonstrations. Instead, a carefully crafted template often eliminates the benefits of demonstrations for some tasks and languages altogether. These findings show that the importance of demonstrations might be overestimated. Our work highlights the need for granular evaluation across multiple axes towards a better understanding of in-context learning.

The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysis

Among the recently emerged knowledge editing methods, in-context knowledge editing (IKE) has shown respectable abilities on knowledge editing in terms of generalization and specificity. Noting the promising advantages but unexplored issues of IKE, we propose **DistillMIKE** as a novel extension of IKE, i.e., editing **distill**ation of "**M**assive'' **I**n-context **K**nowledge **E**diting in large language models (LLMs), mainly consisting of two expansions; 1) *Massive in-context knowledge editing (MIKE)*, which extends IKE to a massive editing task, aiming to inject not a single edit but a set of massive edits to LLMs; To preserve specificity, our key novel extension is a "selective'' retrieval augmentation, where the retrieval-augmented IKE is only applied to "in-scope'' examples, whereas the unedited model without IKE is employed for "out-of-scope'' ones. 2) *Editing distillation* of MIKE using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which distills editing abilities of MIKE to parameters of LLMs in a manner of eliminating the need of lengthy in-context demonstrations, thus removing the computational overhead encountered at the inference time. Experimental results on the zsRE and CounterFact datasets demonstrate that MIKE shows the state-of-the-art perfomrances and DistilMIKE show comparable performances with MIKE. Our code is available at https://github.com/JoveReCode/DistillMIKE.git.

DistillMIKE: Editing Distillation of Massive In-Context Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

For humans and robots to collaborate more in the real world, robots need to understand human intentions from the different manner of their behaviors. In our study, we focus on the meaning of adverbs which describe human motions. We propose a topic model, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process-Spectral Mixture Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which concurrently learns the relationship between those human motions and those adverbs by capturing the frequency kernels that represent motion characteristics and the shared topics of adverbs that depict such motions. We trained the model on datasets we made from movies about "walking" and "dancing", and found that our model outperforms representative neural network models in terms of perplexity score. We also demonstrate our model’s ability to determine the adverbs for a given motion and confirmed that the model predicts more appropriate adverbs.

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Learning Multimodal Contrast with Cross-modal Memory and Reinforced Contrast Recognition

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Learning to Retrieve In-Context Examples for Large Language Models