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One strength of modern language models is their ability to incorporate information from a user-input context when answering queries. 
However, they are not equally sensitive to the subtle changes to that context.
To quantify this, Du et al. (2024) gives an information-theoretic metric to measure such sensitivity. 
Their metric, susceptibility, is defined as the degree to which contexts can influence a model&#39;s response to a query at a distributional level.
However, exactly computing susceptibility is difficult and, thus, Du et al. (2024) falls back on a Monte Carlo approximation.
Due to the large number of samples required, the Monte Carlo approximation is inefficient in practice. 
As a faster alternative, we propose Fisher susceptibility, an efficient method to estimate the susceptibility based on Fisher information.
Empirically, we validate that Fisher susceptibility is comparable to Monte Carlo estimated susceptibility across a diverse set of query domains despite its being $70\times$ faster.
Exploiting the improved efficiency, we apply Fisher susceptibility to analyze factors affecting the susceptibility of language models.
We observe that larger models are as susceptible as smaller ones.

EMNLP 2024

Measuring Susceptibility to Irrelevant Context in Language Models

esg information extraction

esg dataset

low resource

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One strength of modern language models is their ability to incorporate information from a user-input context when answering queries. 
However, they are not equally sensitive to the subtle changes to that context.
To quantify this, Du et al. (2024) gives an information-theoretic metric to measure such sensitivity. 
Their metric, susceptibility, is defined as the degree to which contexts can influence a model's response to a query at a distributional level.
However, exactly computing susceptibility is difficult and, thus, Du et al. (2024) falls back on a Monte Carlo approximation.
Due to the large number of samples required, the Monte Carlo approximation is inefficient in practice. 
As a faster alternative, we propose Fisher susceptibility, an efficient method to estimate the susceptibility based on Fisher information.
Empirically, we validate that Fisher susceptibility is comparable to Monte Carlo estimated susceptibility across a diverse set of query domains despite its being $70\times$ faster.
Exploiting the improved efficiency, we apply Fisher susceptibility to analyze factors affecting the susceptibility of language models.
We observe that larger models are as susceptible as smaller ones.

poster

In this paper, we study whether transformer-based language models can extract predicate argument structure from simple sentences. We firstly show that language models sometimes confuse which predicates apply to which objects. To mitigate this, we explore two tasks: question answering (Q/A), and first order logic (FOL) translation, and two regimes, prompting and finetuning. In FOL translation, we finetune several large language models on synthetic datasets designed to gauge their generalization abilities. For Q/A, we finetune encoder models like BERT and RoBERTa and use prompting for LLMs. The results show that FOL translation for LLMs is better suited to learn predicate argument structure.

Learning Semantic Structure through First-Order-Logic Translation

As artificial intelligence reasoning abilities gain prominence, generating reliable benchmarks becomes crucial. The Abstract and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) offers challenging problems yet unsolved by AI. While ARC effectively assesses reasoning, its generation-based evaluation overlooks other assessment aspects. Bloom's Taxonomy suggests evaluating six cognitive stages: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. To extend ARC's focus beyond the \textit{Create} stage, we developed MC-LARC, a multiple-choice format suitable for assessing stages like Understand and Apply in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our evaluation of ChatGPT4V's analogical reasoning using MC-LARC confirmed that this format supports LLMs' reasoning capabilities and facilitates evidence analysis. However, we observed LLMs using shortcuts in MC-LARC tasks. To address this, we propose a self-feedback framework where LLMs identify issues and generate improved options. MC-LARC is available at https://mc-larc.github.io/.

From Generation to Selection Findings of Converting Analogical Problem-Solving into Multiple-Choice Questions

Existing rhetorical understanding and generation datasets or corpora primarily focus on single coarse-grained categories or fine-grained categories, neglecting the common interrelations between different rhetorical devices by treating them as independent sub-tasks. In this paper, we propose the $\textbf{C}$hinese $\textbf{E}$ssay $\textbf{R}$hetoric $\textbf{D}$ataset (CERD), consisting of 4 commonly used coarse-grained categories including metaphor, personification, hyperbole and parallelism and 23 fine-grained categories across both form and content levels. CERD is a manually annotated and comprehensive Chinese rhetoric dataset with five interrelated sub-tasks. Unlike previous work, our dataset aids in understanding various rhetorical devices, recognizing corresponding rhetorical components, and generating rhetorical sentences under given conditions, thereby improving the author's writing proficiency and language usage skills. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the interrelations between multiple tasks in CERD, as well as to establish a benchmark for future research on rhetoric. The experimental results indicate that Large Language Models achieve the best performance across most tasks, and jointly fine-tuning with multiple tasks further enhances performance.

CERD: A Comprehensive Chinese Rhetoric Dataset for Rhetorical Understanding and Generation in Essays

Speech recognition and speech synthesis models are typically trained separately, each with its own set of learning objectives, training data, and model parameters, resulting in two distinct large networks. We propose a parameter-efficient approach to learning ASR and TTS jointly via a multi-task learning objective and shared parameters. Our evaluation demonstrates that
the performance of our multi-task model is comparable to that of individually trained models while significantly saving
computational and memory costs ($\sim$50\% reduction in the total number of parameters required for the two tasks combined). We experiment with English as a resource-rich language, and Arabic as a relatively low-resource language due to shortage of TTS data. Our models are trained with publicly available data, and both the training code and model checkpoints are openly available for further research.

STTATTS: Unified Speech-To-Text And Text-To-Speech Model

Traditional benchmarking in NLP typically involves using static, held-out test sets and calculating aggregated statistics based on diverse examples. However, this approach often results in an overestimation of performance and lacks the ability to offer comprehensive, interpretable, and dynamic assessments of NLP models. Recently, works like DynaBench and Checklist have addressed these limitations through behavioral testing of NLP models with test types generated by a multi-step human-annotated pipeline. Unfortunately, manually creating a variety of test types requires significant human labor, thus weakening efficiency. In this work, we propose SynthEval, a hybrid behavioral testing framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate a wide range of test types for a comprehensive evaluation of NLP models. The SynthEval framework first generates sentences via LLMs using controlled generation, and then identifies challenging examples by comparing the predictions made by LLMs with task-specific NLP models. In the last stage, human experts investigate the challenging examples, manually design templates, and identify the types of failures the task-specific models consistently exhibit. We apply SynthEval to two classification tasks and show that our framework is effective in identifying weaknesses of strong models on these tasks.

SynthEval: Hybrid Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with Synthetic Evaluation

Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs' understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU}

TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish

Understanding knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing towards trustworthy AGI. This paper reviews knowledge mechanism analysis from a novel taxonomy including knowledge utilization and evolution. Knowledge utilization delves into the mechanism of memorization, comprehension and application, and creation. Knowledge evolution focuses on the dynamic progression of knowledge within individual and group LLMs. Moreover, we discuss what knowledge LLMs have learned, the reasons for the fragility of parametric knowledge, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) that will be challenging to address. We hope this work can help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research.

Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective

Large language models (LLMs) are utilized in various studies, and they also demonstrate a potential to function independently as a recommendation model. Nevertheless, training sequences and text labels modifies LLMs' pre-trained weights, diminishing their inherent strength in constructing and comprehending natural language sentences. In this study, we propose a reconstruction-based LLM recommendation model (ReLRec) that harnesses the feature extraction capability of LLMs, while preserving LLMs' sentence generation abilities. We reconstruct the user and item pseudo-labels generated from user reviews, while training on sequential data, aiming to exploit the key features of both users and items. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of label reconstruction in sequential recommendation tasks.

Enhancing Large Language Model Based Sequential Recommender Systems with Pseudo Labels Reconstruction

In this paper, we compare general-purpose models, $\texttt{GPT-4-Turbo}$ and $\texttt{Llama-3-8b}$, with special-purpose models—$\texttt{XLM-Roberta-large}$, $\texttt{mT5-large}$, and $\texttt{Llama-3-8b}$—that have been fine-tuned on specific tasks. We focus on seven classification and seven generation tasks to evaluate the performance of these models on Urdu language. Urdu has 70 million native speakers, yet it remains underrepresented in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Despite the frequent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance in low-resource languages, including Urdu, still needs to be explored. We also conduct a human evaluation for the generation tasks and compare the results with the evaluations performed by $\texttt{GPT-4-Turbo}$, $\texttt{Llama-3-8b}$ and $\texttt{Claude 3.5 Sonnet}$. We find that special-purpose models consistently outperform general-purpose models across various tasks. We also find that the evaluation done by $\texttt{GPT-4-Turbo}$ for generation tasks aligns more closely with human evaluation compared to the evaluation done by $\texttt{Llama-3-8b}$. This paper contributes to the NLP community by providing insights into the effectiveness of general and specific-purpose LLMs for low-resource languages.

Generalists vs. Specialists: Evaluating Large Language Models for Urdu

Reward models (RM) capture the values and preferences of humans and play a central role in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) to align pretrained large language models (LLMs). Traditionally, training these models relies on extensive human-annotated preference data, which poses significant challenges in terms of scalability and cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose Semi-Supervised Reward Modeling (SSRM), an approach that enhances RM training using unlabeled data. Given an unlabeled dataset, SSRM involves three key iterative steps: pseudo-labeling unlabeled examples, selecting high-confidence examples through a confidence threshold, and supervised finetuning on the refined dataset. Across extensive experiments on various model configurations, we demonstrate that SSRM significantly improves reward models without incurring additional labeling costs. Notably, SSRM can achieve performance comparable to models trained entirely on labeled data of equivalent volumes. Overall, SSRM substantially reduces the dependency on large volumes of human-annotated data, thereby decreasing the overall cost and time involved in training effective reward models.

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