Thailand

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language processing. Nowadays, to tackle increasingly more complex tasks, Transformer-based models are stretched to enormous sizes, requiring increasingly larger training datasets, and unsustainable amount of compute resources. The ubiquitous nature of the Transformer and its core component, the attention mechanism, are thus prime targets for efficiency research.
In this work, we propose an alternative compatibility function for the self-attention mechanism introduced by the Transformer architecture. This compatibility function exploits an overlap in the learned representation of the traditional scaled dot-product attention, leading to a symmetric with pairwise coefficient dot-product attention. When applied to the pre-training of BERT-like models, this new symmetric attention mechanism reaches a score of 79.36 on the GLUE benchmark against 78.74 for the traditional implementation, leads to a reduction of 6% in the number of trainable parameters, and reduces the number of training steps required before convergence by half.

ACL 2024

Symmetric Dot-Product Attention for Efficient Training of BERT Language Models

transformer model

machine learning

natural language processing

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

poster

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

You are required to register for this event. <br>**Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

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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.

To democratize large language models (LLMs) to most natural languages, it is imperative to make these models capable of understanding and generating texts in many languages, in particular low-resource ones. While recent multilingual LLMs demonstrate remarkable performance in such capabilities, these LLMs still support a limited number of human languages due to the lack of training data for low resource languages. Moreover, these LLMs are not yet aligned with human preference for downstream tasks, which is crucial for the success of LLMs in English. In this paper, we introduce xLLaMA-100 and xBLOOM-100 (collectively xLLMs-100), which scale the multilingual capabilities of LLaMA and BLOOM to 100 languages. To do so, we construct two datasets: a multilingual instruction dataset including 100 languages, which represents the largest language coverage to date, and a cross-lingual human feedback dataset encompassing 30 languages. We perform multilingual instruction tuning on the constructed instruction data and further align the LLMs with human feedback using the DPO algorithm on our cross-lingual human feedback dataset. We evaluate the multilingual understanding and generating capabilities of xLLMs-100 on five multilingual benchmarks. Experimental results show that xLLMs-100 consistently outperforms its peers across the benchmarks by considerable margins, defining a new state-of-the-art multilingual LLM that supports 100 languages.

LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. We introduce the first dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster AI agent development in this complex narrative environment. Our work also presents a unique multi-agent interaction framework using LLMs, allowing AI agents to autonomously engage in Jubensha games. To evaluate the gaming performance of these AI agents, we developed novel methods measuring their mastery of case information and reasoning skills. Furthermore, we incorporated the latest advancements in prompting engineering to enhance the agents' performance in information gathering, murderer identification, and logical reasoning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. This work aims to offer a novel perspective on understanding LLM capabilities and establish a new benchmark for evaluating large language model-based agents.

Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games

Task embedding, a meta-learning technique that captures task-specific information, has gained popularity, especially in areas such as multi-task learning, model editing, and interpretability. However, it faces challenges with the emergence of prompt-guided Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in a gradient-free manner. Existing task embedding methods rely on fine-tuned, task-specific language models, which hinders the adaptability of task embeddings across diverse models, especially prompt-based LLMs. To hardness the potential of task embeddings in the era of LLMs, we propose a framework for unified task embeddings (FUTE), harmonizing task embeddings from various models, including smaller language models and LLMs with varied prompts, within a single vector space. Such uniformity enables comparison and analysis of similarities amongst different models, broadening the scope and utility of existing task embedding methods in multi-model scenarios, while maintaining their performance comparable to architecture-specific methods.

Towards Unified Task Embeddings Across Multiple Models: Bridging the Gap for Prompt-Based Large Language Models and Beyond

In light of recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the expectations for the next generation of virtual assistants include enhanced naturalness and adaptability across diverse usage scenarios. However, the creation of high-quality annotated data for Task-Oriented Dialog~(TOD) is recognized to be slow and costly. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs (TOAD), a novel and scalable TOD dataset along with its automatic generation pipeline. The TOAD dataset simulates realistic app context interaction and provide a variety of system response style options. Two aspects of system response styles are considered, verbosity level and users' expression mirroring. We benchmark TOAD on two response generation tasks, and the results show that modeling more verbose responses or responses without user expression mirroring is more challenging.

TOAD: Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs with Diverse Response Styles

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a field of natural language processing that aims to present textual information in a format that allows it to be organized, analyzed and reflected upon. Numerous OIE systems are developed, claiming ever-increasing performance, marking the need for objective benchmarks. BenchIE is the latest reference we know of. Despite being very well thought out, we noticed a number of issues we believe are limiting. Therefore, we propose BenchIE^FL, a new OIE benchmark which fully enforces the principles of BenchIE while containing fewer errors, omissions and shortcomings when candidate facts are matched towards reference ones. BenchIE^FL allows insightful conclusions to be drawn on the actual performance of OIE extractors.

BenchIE^FL: A Manually Re-Annotated Fact-Based Open Information Extraction Benchmark

Code LLMs have the potential to make it easier for non-experts to understand and write code. However, current CodeLLM benchmarks rely on a single expert-written prompt per problem, making it hard to generalize their success to non-expert users. In this paper, we present a new natural-language-to-code benchmark of prompts written by a key population of non-experts: beginning programmers. StudentEval contains 1,749 prompts written by 80 students who have only completed one introductory Python course. StudentEval contains numerous non-expert prompts describing the same problem, enabling exploration of key factors in prompt success. We use StudentEval to evaluate 12 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks. Our analysis of student prompting strategies reveals that nondeterministic LLM sampling can mislead students about the quality of their descriptions, a finding with key implications for Code LLMs in education.

StudentEval: A Benchmark of Student-Written Prompts for Large Language Models of Code

One of the most important challenges in text generation systems is to produce outputs that are not only correct but also diverse.
Recently, Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding has gained prominence for generating sentences of the highest quality among the decoding algorithms. 
However, existing algorithms proposed to generate diverse outputs are predominantly based on beam search or random sampling, thus their output quality is capped by these underlying decoding algorithms. 
In this paper, we investigate an alternative approach -- we develop diversity-promoting decoding algorithms by enforcing diversity objectives to MBR decoding.
We propose two variants of MBR; (i) Diverse MBR (DMBR) that adds a diversity penalty to the decoding objective and (ii) $k$-medoids MBR (KMBR) that reformulates the decoding task as a clustering problem.
We evaluate DMBR and KMBR on a variety of directed text generation tasks using encoder-decoder models and a language model with prompting. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a better trade-off than the diverse beam search and sampling algorithms overall.

Generating Diverse and High-Quality Texts by Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

Minimum Bayes-Risk (MBR) decoding is shown to be a powerful alternative to beam search decoding for a wide range of text generation tasks. However, MBR requires a huge amount of time for inference to compute the MBR objective, which makes the method infeasible in many situations where response time is critical. Confidence-based pruning (CBP) (Cheng and Vlachos, 2023) has recently been proposed to reduce the inference time in machine translation tasks. Although it is shown to significantly reduce the amount of computation, it requires hyperparameter tuning using a development set to be effective. To this end, we propose Adaptive Minimum Bayes-Risk (AMBR) decoding, a hyperparameter-free method to run MBR decoding efficiently. AMBR is derived from the observation that the problem of computing the sample-based MBR objective is the medoid identification problem. AMBR uses the Correlated Sequential Halving (CSH) algorithm (Baharav and Tse, 2019), the algorithm with the best performance guarantee to date for the medoid identification problem, to compute the sample-based MBR objective. We evaluate AMBR on machine translation, text summarization, and image captioning tasks. The results show that AMBR achieves on par with CBP, with CBP selecting hyperparameters through an Oracle for each given computation budget.

Hyperparameter-Free Approach for Faster Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated breakthrough mathematical problem-solving capabilities in grade school math word problems (MWP). For example, on the MWP benchmark GSM8K, the accuracy of GPT-3.5-Turbo and MetaMath-70B reaches 80.80% and 82.30%, respectively. One question arises, does it mean that LLMs have truly mastered related mathematical problem-solving abilities? In this paper, by presenting two types of benchmarks, where MCGSM8K aims at selecting one correct solution from four solutions, while GSM8K-Judgement judges whether a solution to a given question is true or false, we demonstrate that the ability of most LLMs to evaluate the mathematical reasoning process of MWP is far from sufficient. To compensate for this issue, we propose hybrid supervised fine-tuning data from the training data of GSM8K, MCGSM8K, and GSM8K-Judgement, which significantly improves performance on the proposed reasoning process evaluation benchmarks. For example, fine-tuning improves the performance of LLaMA-2-13B from 33.51% to 70.89% on MCGSM8K. In conclusion, we experimentally demonstrate that most LLMs have limited ability to evaluate the mathematical reasoning process of MWP, which can be enhanced through fine-tuning.

Rationales for Answers to Simple Math Word Problems Confuse Large Language Models

The large-scale conversational recommendation dataset is pivotal for the development of conversational recommender systems (CRS). Most existing CRS datasets suffers from the problems of data inextensibility and semantic inconsistency. To tackle these limitations and establish a benchmark in the conversational recommendation scenario, in this paper, we introduce the LLM-REDIAL dataset to facilitate the research in CRS. LLM-REDIAL is constructed by leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate the high-quality dialogues. To provide the LLMs with detailed guidance, we integrate historical user behavior data with dialogue templates that are carefully designed through the combination of multiple pre-defined goals. LLM-REDIAL has two main advantages. First, it is the largest multi-domain CRS dataset which consists of 47.6k multi-turn dialogues with 482.6k utterances across 4 domains. Second, dialogue semantics and the users' historical interaction information is highly consistent. Human evaluation are conducted to verify the quality of LLM-REDIAL. In addition, we evaluate the usability of advanced LLM-based models on LLM-REDIAL.

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Next from ACL 2024

LLMs Beyond English: Scaling the Multilingual Capability of LLMs with Cross-Lingual Feedback

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