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We introduce an evaluation methodology for reading comprehension tasks based on the intuition that certain examples, by the virtue of their linguistic complexity, consistently yield lower scores regardless of model size or architecture. We capitalize on semantic frame annotation for characterizing this complexity, and study seven complexity factors that may account for model&#39;s difficulty. We first deploy this methodology on a carefully annotated French reading comprehension benchmark showing that two of those complexity factors are indeed good predictors of models&#39; failure, while others are less so. We further deploy our methodology on a well studied English benchmark by using chatGPT as a proxy for semantic annotation.

Our study reveals that fine-grained linguistically-motivated automatic evaluation of a reading comprehension task is not only possible, but helps understand models&#39; abilities to handle specific linguistic characteristics of input examples. It also shows that current state-of-the-art models fail with some for those characteristics which suggests that adequately handling them requires more than merely increasing model size.

EMNLP 2024

A linguistically-motivated evaluation methodology for unraveling model&#39;s abilities in reading comprehension tasks

guardrail models

safety

benchmark

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CogSci 2025

The 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

We introduce an evaluation methodology for reading comprehension tasks based on the intuition that certain examples, by the virtue of their linguistic complexity, consistently yield lower scores regardless of model size or architecture. We capitalize on semantic frame annotation for characterizing this complexity, and study seven complexity factors that may account for model's difficulty. We first deploy this methodology on a carefully annotated French reading comprehension benchmark showing that two of those complexity factors are indeed good predictors of models' failure, while others are less so. We further deploy our methodology on a well studied English benchmark by using chatGPT as a proxy for semantic annotation.

Our study reveals that fine-grained linguistically-motivated automatic evaluation of a reading comprehension task is not only possible, but helps understand models' abilities to handle specific linguistic characteristics of input examples. It also shows that current state-of-the-art models fail with some for those characteristics which suggests that adequately handling them requires more than merely increasing model size.

A linguistically-motivated evaluation methodology for unraveling model's abilities in reading comprehension tasks

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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This study identifies the potential vulnerabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to 'jailbreak' attacks, specifically focusing on the Arabic language and its various forms. While most research has concentrated on English-based prompt manipulation, our investigation broadens the scope to investigate the Arabic language. We initially tested the AdvBench benchmark in Standardized Arabic, finding that even with prompt manipulation techniques like prefix injection, it was insufficient to provoke LLMs into generating unsafe content. However, when using Arabic transliteration and chatspeak (or arabizi), we found that unsafe content could be produced on platforms like OpenAI GPT-4 and Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet. Our findings suggest that using Arabic and its various forms could expose information that might remain hidden, potentially increasing the risk of jailbreak attacks. We hypothesize that this exposure could be due to the model's learned connection to specific words, highlighting the need for more comprehensive safety training across all language forms.

Jailbreaking LLMs with Arabic Transliteration and Arabizi

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to propagate and amplify harmful stereotypes, particularly those that disproportionately affect marginalised communities. To understand the effect of these stereotypes more comprehensively, we introduce GlobalBias, a dataset of 876k sentences incorporating 40 distinct gender-by-ethnicity groups alongside descriptors typically used in bias literature, which enables us to study a broad set of stereotypes from around the world. We use GlobalBias to directly probe a suite of LMs via perplexity, which we use as a proxy to determine how certain stereotypes are represented in the model's internal representations. Following this, we generate character profiles based on given names and evaluate the prevalence of stereotypes in model outputs. We find that the demographic groups associated with various stereotypes remain consistent across model likelihoods and model outputs. Furthermore, larger models consistently display higher levels of stereotypical outputs, even when explicitly instructed not to.

Who is better at math, Jenny or Jingzhen? Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models

Next-token prediction serves as the dominant component in current neural language models.
During the training phase, the model employs teacher forcing, which predicts tokens based on all preceding ground truth tokens.
However, this approach has been found to create shortcuts, utilizing the revealed prefix to spuriously fit future tokens, potentially compromising the accuracy of the next-token predictor.
In this paper, we introduce Semformer, a novel method of training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response.
Specifically, we incorporate a sequence of planning tokens into the prefix, guiding the planning token representations to predict the latent semantic representations of the response, which are induced by an autoencoder.
In a minimal planning task (i.e., graph path-finding), our model exhibits near-perfect performance and effectively mitigates shortcut learning, a feat that standard training methods and baseline models have been unable to accomplish.
Furthermore, we pretrain Semformer from scratch with 125M parameters, demonstrating its efficacy through measures of perplexity, in-context learning, and fine-tuning on summarization tasks.

Semformer: Transformer Language Models with Semantic Planning

Transformers are considered conceptually different than the previous generation of state-of-the-art NLP models - recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In this work, we demonstrate that decoder-only transformers can in fact be conceptualized as $\textit{unbounded}$ multi-state RNNs—an RNN variant with unlimited hidden state size.

We further show that transformers can be converted into $\textit{bounded}$ multi-state RNNs by fixing the size of their hidden state, effectively compressing their key-value cache.

We introduce a novel, training-free compression policy - $\textit{T}$oken $\textit{O}$mission $\textit{V}$ia $\textit{A}$ttention (TOVA).

Our experiments with four long range tasks and several LLMs show that TOVA outperforms several baseline compression policies. Particularly, our results are nearly on par with the full model, using in some cases only $\frac{1}{8}$ of the original cache size, which translates to 4.8X higher throughput.

Our results shed light on the connection between transformers and RNNs, and help mitigate one of LLMs' most painful computational bottlenecks---the size of their key-value cache. We will publicly release our code upon publication.

Transformers are Multi-State RNNs

While large language models exhibit certain cross-lingual generalization capabilities, they suffer from performance degradation (PD) on unseen closely-related languages (CRLs) and dialects relative to their high-resource language neighbour (HRLN). However, we currently lack a fundamental understanding of what kinds of linguistic distances contribute to PD, and to what extent. Furthermore, studies of cross-lingual generalization are confounded by unknown quantities of CRL language traces in the training data, and by the frequent lack of availability of evaluation data in lower-resource related languages and dialects. To address these issues, we model phonological, morphological, and lexical distance as Bayesian noise processes to synthesize artificial languages that are controllably distant from the HRLN. We analyse PD as a function of underlying noise parameters, offering insights on model robustness to isolated and composed linguistic phenomena, and the impact of task and HRL characteristics on PD. We calculate parameter posteriors on real CRL-HRLN pair data and show that they follow computed trends of artificial languages, demonstrating the viability of our noisers. Our framework offers a cheap solution for estimating task performance on an unseen CRL given HRLN performance using its posteriors, as well as for diagnosing observed PD on a CRL in terms of its linguistic distances from its HRLN, and opens doors to principled methods of mitigating performance degradation.

Evaluating Large Language Models along Dimensions of Language Variation: A Systematik Invesdigatiom uv Cross-lingual Generalization

Model fusion research aims to aggregate the knowledge of multiple individual models to enhance performance by combining their weights. In this work, we study the inverse problem: investigating whether model fusion can be used to reduce unwanted knowledge. We investigate the effects of model fusion in three scenarios: the learning of shortcuts, social biases, and memorization of training data in fine-tuned language models. Through experiments covering classification and generation tasks, our analysis highlights that shared knowledge among models is enhanced during model fusion, while unshared knowledge is usually forgotten. Based on this observation, we demonstrate the potential of model fusion as a debiasing tool and showcase its efficacy in addressing privacy concerns associated with language models.

Fuse to Forget: Bias Reduction and Selective Memorization through Model Fusion

The fusion of language models (LMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) is widely used in commonsense question answering, but generating faithful explanations remains challenging. Current methods often overlook path decoding faithfulness, leading to divergence between graph encoder outputs and model predictions. We identify confounding effects and LM-KG misalignment as key factors causing spurious explanations. To address this, we introduce the LM-KG Fidelity metric to assess KG representation reliability and propose the LM-KG Distribution-aware Alignment (LKDA) algorithm to improve explanation faithfulness. Without ground truth, we evaluate KG explanations using the proposed Fidelity-Sparsity Trade-off Curve. Experiments on CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA show that LKDA significantly enhances explanation fidelity and model performance, highlighting the need to address distributional misalignment for reliable commonsense reasoning.

Towards Faithful Knowledge Graph Explanation Through Deep Alignment in Commonsense Question Answering

Argument relation classification (ARC) identifies supportive, contrasting and neutral relations between argumentative units. The current approaches rely on transformer architectures which have proven to be more effective than traditional methods based on hand-crafted linguistic features. In this paper, we introduce DISARM, which advances the state of the art with a training procedure combining multi-task and adversarial learning strategies. By jointly solving the ARC and discourse marker detection tasks and aligning their embedding spaces into a unified latent space, DISARM outperforms the accuracy of existing approaches.

Argument Relation Classification through Discourse Markers and Adversarial Training

Pre-trained transformers such as BERT have been shown to be effective in many natural language tasks. However, they are under-explored for character-level sequence to sequence tasks. In this work, we investigate pre-training transformers for the character-level task of morphological inflection in several languages. We compare various training setups and secondary tasks where unsupervised data taken directly from the target task is used. We show that training on secondary unsupervised tasks increases inflection performance even without any external data, suggesting that models learn from additional unsupervised tasks themselves---not just from additional data. We also find that this does not hold true for specific combinations of secondary task and training setup, which has interesting implications for denoising objectives in character-level tasks.

Getting The Most Out of Your Training Data: Exploring Unsupervised Tasks for Morphological Inflection

While natural language inference (NLI) has emerged as a prominent task for evaluating a model's capability to perform natural language understanding, creating large benchmarks for training deep learning models imposes a significant challenge since it requires extensive human annotations. To overcome this, we propose to construct pseudo-generated samples (premise-hypothesis pairs) using class-specific fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) thereby reducing the human effort and the costs in annotating large amounts of data. However, despite the impressive performance of LLMs, it is necessary to verify that the pseudo-generated labels are actually correct. Towards this goal, in this paper, we propose VerifyMatch, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach in which the LLM pseudo-labels guide the training of the SSL model and, at the same time, the SSL model acts as a verifier of the LLM-generated data. In our approach, we retain all pseudo-labeled samples, but to ensure unlabeled data quality, we further propose to use MixUp whenever the verifier does not agree with the LLM-generated label or when they both agree on the label but the verifier has a low confidence---lower than an adaptive confidence threshold. We achieve competitive accuracy compared to strong baselines for NLI datasets in low-resource settings.

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Jailbreaking LLMs with Arabic Transliteration and Arabizi

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