United States

Generating faithful and fast responses is crucial in the knowledge-grounded dialogue. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies are effective but are inference inefficient, while previous Retrieval Free Generations (RFG) are more efficient but sacrifice faithfulness. To solve this faithfulness-efficiency trade-off dilemma, we propose a novel retrieval-free model training scheme named Retrieval Augmented to Retrieval Free Distillation (RA2FD) to build a retrieval-free model that achieves higher faithfulness than the previous RFG method while maintaining inference efficiency. The core idea of RA2FD is to use a teacher-student framework to distill the faithfulness capacity of a teacher, which is an oracle RAG model that generates multiple knowledge-infused responses. The student retrieval-free model learns how to generate faithful responses from these teacher labels through sequence-level distillation and contrastive learning. Experiment results show that RA2FD let the faithfulness performance of an RFG model surpass the previous SOTA RFG baseline on three knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets by an average of 33% and even matching an RAG model&#39;s performance while significantly improving inference efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzysjtuiwct/RA2FD.

EMNLP 2024

RA2FD: Distilling Faithfulness into Efficient Dialogue Systems

reasoning of llm

subjective topic

### Welcome to the 17th 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 had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. 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.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

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.

Generating faithful and fast responses is crucial in the knowledge-grounded dialogue. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) strategies are effective but are inference inefficient, while previous Retrieval Free Generations (RFG) are more efficient but sacrifice faithfulness. To solve this faithfulness-efficiency trade-off dilemma, we propose a novel retrieval-free model training scheme named Retrieval Augmented to Retrieval Free Distillation (RA2FD) to build a retrieval-free model that achieves higher faithfulness than the previous RFG method while maintaining inference efficiency. The core idea of RA2FD is to use a teacher-student framework to distill the faithfulness capacity of a teacher, which is an oracle RAG model that generates multiple knowledge-infused responses. The student retrieval-free model learns how to generate faithful responses from these teacher labels through sequence-level distillation and contrastive learning. Experiment results show that RA2FD let the faithfulness performance of an RFG model surpass the previous SOTA RFG baseline on three knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets by an average of 33% and even matching an RAG model's performance while significantly improving inference efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/zzysjtuiwct/RA2FD.

poster

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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful reasoning capacity, as evidenced by prior studies focusing on objective topics that with unique standard answers such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. However, the reasoning to definite answers emphasizes more on logical thinking, and falls short in effectively reflecting the comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking that is also critical for the overall reasoning prowess of LLMs. In light of this, we build a dataset SJTP comprising diverse SubJective ToPics with free responses, as well as three evaluation indicators to fully explore LLM’s reasoning ability. We observe that a sole emphasis on logical thinking falls short in effectively tackling subjective challenges. Therefore, we introduce a framework grounded in the principle of the Negation of Negation (NeoN) to unleash the potential comprehensive, reflective, and creative thinking abilities of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments on SJTP demonstrate the efficacy of NeoN, and the enhanced performance on various objective reasoning tasks unequivocally underscores the benefits of stimulating LLM’s subjective thinking in augmenting overall reasoning capabilities.

Subjective Topic meets LLMs: Unleashing Comprehensive, Reflective and Creative Thinking through the Negation of Negation

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems aim to efficiently handle task-oriented conversations, including information collection. How to utilize TOD accurately, efficiently and effectively for information collection has always been a critical and challenging task. Recent studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in dialogue, instruction generation, and reasoning, and can significantly enhance the performance of TOD through fine-tuning. However, current datasets primarily cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots, thereby necessitating improvements in the proactiveness, diversity, and capabilities of TOD. In this study, we present a detailed multi-domain task-oriented data construction process for conversations, and a Chinese dialogue dataset generated based on this process, **TransferTOD**, which authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, we trained a model using full-parameter fine-tuning called **TransferTOD-7B**, showcasing notable abilities in slot filling and questioning. Our work has demonstrated its strong generalization capabilities in various downstream scenarios, significantly enhancing both data utilization efficiency and system performance. The data is released in https://github.com/KongLongGeFDU/TransferTOD.

TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities

The great success of large language models has encouraged the development of large multimodal models, with a focus on image-language interaction. Despite promising results in various image-language downstream tasks, it is still challenging and unclear how to extend the capabilities of these models to the more complex video domain, especially when dealing with explicit temporal signals. To address the problem in existing large multimodal models, in this paper we adopt visual instruction tuning to build a unified causal video-oriented language modeling framework, named UNICORN. Specifically, we collect a comprehensive dataset under the instruction-following format, and instruction-tune the model accordingly. Experimental results demonstrate that without customized training objectives and intensive pre-training, UNICORN can achieve comparable or better performance on established temporal video-language tasks including moment retrieval, video paragraph captioning and dense video captioning. Moreover, the instruction-tuned model can be used to automatically annotate internet videos with temporally-aligned captions. Compared to commonly used ASR captions, we show that training on our generated captions improves the performance of video-language models on both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings. Source code can be found at https://github.com/xyh97/UNICORN.

UNICORN: A Unified Causal Video-Oriented Language-Modeling Framework for Temporal Video-Language Tasks

Benchmarking the performance of information retrieval (IR) is mostly conducted with a fixed set of documents (static corpora). However, in realistic scenarios, this is rarely the case and the documents to be retrieved are constantly updated and added. In this paper, we focus on Generative Retrievals (GR), which apply autoregressive language models to IR problems, and explore their adaptability and robustness in dynamic scenarios. We also conduct an extensive evaluation of computational and memory efficiency, crucial factors for real-world deployment of IR systems handling vast and ever-changing document collections. Our results on the StreamingQA benchmark demonstrate that GR is more adaptable to evolving knowledge (4–11%), robust in learning knowledge with temporal information, and efficient in terms of inference FLOPs (x2), indexing time (x6), and storage footprint (x4) compared to Dual Encoders (DE), which are commonly used in retrieval systems. Our paper highlights the potential of GR for future use in practical IR systems within dynamic environments.

Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora

Cross-lingual open domain question answering (CLQA) is a complex problem, comprising cross-lingual retrieval from a multilingual knowledge base, followed by answer generation in the query language. Both steps are usually tackled by separate models, requiring substantial annotated datasets, and typically auxiliary resources, like machine translation systems to bridge between languages. In this paper, we show that CLQA can be addressed using a single encoder-decoder model. To effectively train this model, we propose a self-supervised method based on exploiting the cross-lingual link structure within Wikipedia. We demonstrate how linked Wikipedia pages can be used to synthesise supervisory signals for cross-lingual retrieval, through a form of cloze query, and generate more natural questions to supervise answer generation. Together, we show our approach, $\texttt{CLASS}$, outperforms comparable methods on both supervised and zero-shot language adaptation settings, including those using machine translation.

Pre-training Cross-lingual Open Domain Question Answering with Large-scale Synthetic Supervision

Flashcard schedulers rely on 1) *student models* to predict the flashcards a student knows; and 2) *teaching policies* to pick which cards to show next via these predictions.
Prior student models, however, just use study data like the student's past responses, ignoring the text on cards. 
We propose **content-aware scheduling**, the first schedulers exploiting flashcard content.
To give the first evidence that such schedulers enhance student learning, we build KARL, a simple but effective content-aware student model employing deep knowledge tracing (DKT), retrieval, and BERT to predict student recall.
We train KARL by collecting a new dataset of 123,143 study logs on diverse trivia questions.
KARL bests existing student models in AUC and calibration error.
To ensure our improved predictions lead to better student learning, we create a novel delta-based teaching policy to deploy KARL online.
Based on 32 study paths from 27 users, KARL improves learning efficiency over SOTA, showing KARL's strength and encouraging researchers to look beyond historical study data to fully capture student abilities.

KARL: Knowledge-Aware Retrieval and Representations aid Retention and Learning in Students

Tools have become a mainstay of LLMs, allowing them to retrieve knowledge not in their weights, to perform tasks on the web, and even to control robots. However, most ontologies and surveys of tool-use have assumed the core challenge for LLMs is choosing the tool. Instead, we introduce a framework for tools more broadly which guides us to explore a model's ability to detect "silent" tool errors, and reflect on how to plan. This more directly aligns with the increasingly popular use of models as tools. We provide an initial approach to failure recovery with promising results both on a controlled calculator setting and embodied agent planning.

Tools Fail: Detecting Silent Errors in Faulty Tools

This study explores replacing Transformers in Visual Language Models (VLMs) with Mamba, a recent structured state space model (SSM) that demonstrates promising performance in sequence modeling. We test models up to 3B parameters under controlled conditions, showing that Mamba-based VLMs outperforms Transformers-based VLMs in captioning, question answering, and reading comprehension. However, we find that Transformers achieve greater performance in visual grounding and the performance gap widens with scale. We explore two hypotheses to explain this phenomenon: 1) the effect of task-agnostic visual encoding on the updates of the hidden states, and 2) the difficulty in performing visual grounding from the perspective of in-context multimodal retrieval. Our results indicate that a task-aware encoding yields minimal performance gains on grounding, however, Transformers significantly outperform Mamba at in-context multimodal retrieval. Overall, Mamba shows promising performance on tasks where the correct output relies on a summary of the image but struggles when retrieval of explicit information from the context is required.

Shaking Up VLMs: Comparing Transformers and Structured State Space Models for Vision & Language Modeling

In the realm of multi-intent spoken language understanding, recent advancements have leveraged the potential of prompt learning frameworks. However, critical gaps exist in these frameworks: the lack of explicit modeling of dual-task dependencies and the oversight of task-specific semantic differences among utterances. To address these shortcomings, we propose DC-Instruct, a novel generative framework based on Dual-task Inter-dependent Instructions (DII) and Supervised Contrastive Instructions (SCI). Specifically, DII guides large language models (LLMs) to generate labels for one task based on the other task's labels, thereby explicitly capturing dual-task inter-dependencies. Moreover, SCI leverages utterance semantics differences by guiding LLMs to determine whether a pair of utterances share the same or similar labels. This can improve LLMs on extracting and discriminating task-specific semantics, thus enhancing their SLU reasoning abilities. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets show that DC-Instruct markedly outperforms current generative models and state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing dialogue language understanding and reasoning.

DC-Instruct: An Effective Framework for Generative Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding

Improving the effectiveness and efficiency of large language models (LLMs) simultaneously is a critical yet challenging research goal. In this paper, we find that low-rank pre-training, normally considered as efficient methods that will compromise performance, can be scalably effective when reduced parameters are precisely targeted. Specifically, by applying low-dimensional module only to the attention layer — resolves this issue and enhances both effectiveness and efficiency. We refer to this structure as *Low-dimensional Projected Attention (LPA)* and provide an explanatory analysis. Through extensive experimentation at parameter scales of 130M, 370M, and scaling up to 3B, we have validated the effectiveness and scalability of LPA. Our results show that LPA model can save up to 12.4% in time while achieving an approximate 5% improvement in test perplexity (ppl) and on downstream tasks compared with vanilla Transformer.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Subjective Topic meets LLMs: Unleashing Comprehensive, Reflective and Creative Thinking through the Negation of Negation

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