United Arab Emirates

Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, and
several recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase and it is not well understood how different fine-tuning methods (such as fine-tuning the full model, the model head, and adapter) compare in terms of memorization risk. This presents increasing concern as the ``pre-train and fine-tune&#39;&#39; paradigm proliferates. In this paper, we empirically study memorization of fine-tuning methods using membership inference and extraction attacks, and show that their susceptibility to attacks is very different. We observe that fine-tuning the head of the model has the highest susceptibility to attacks, whereas fine-tuning smaller adapters appears to be less vulnerable to known extraction attacks.

EMNLP 2022

An Empirical Analysis of Memorization in Fine-tuned Autoregressive Language Models

auto-regressive

safety

memorization

ethics

privacy

fine-tuning

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ACL 2024

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.

Large language models are shown to present privacy risks through memorization of training data, and
several recent works have studied such risks for the pre-training phase. Little attention, however, has been given to the fine-tuning phase and it is not well understood how different fine-tuning methods (such as fine-tuning the full model, the model head, and adapter) compare in terms of memorization risk. This presents increasing concern as the ``pre-train and fine-tune'' paradigm proliferates. In this paper, we empirically study memorization of fine-tuning methods using membership inference and extraction attacks, and show that their susceptibility to attacks is very different. We observe that fine-tuning the head of the model has the highest susceptibility to attacks, whereas fine-tuning smaller adapters appears to be less vulnerable to known extraction attacks.

technical paper

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Calibration strengthens the trustworthiness of black-box models by producing better accurate confidence estimates on given examples. However, little is known about if model explanations can help confidence calibration. Intuitively, humans look at important features attributions and decide whether the model is trustworthy. Similarly, the explanations may tell us when the model might know and when it does not. Inspired by this, we propose a method named CME that leverages model explanations to make the model less confident with non-inductive attributions. The idea is that when the model is not highly confident, it is difficult to identify strong indications of any class, and the tokens accordingly do not have high attribution scores for any class and vice versa. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets with two popular pre-trained language models in the in-domain and out-of-domain settings. The results show that CME improves calibration performance in all settings. The expected calibration errors are further reduced when combined with temperature scaling. Our findings highlight that model explanations can help calibrate posterior estimates.

Calibration Meets Explanation: A Simple and Effective Approach for Model Confidence Estimates

Accessing longitudinal multimodal Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) is challenging due to privacy concerns, which hinders the use of ML for healthcare applications. Synthetic EHRs generation bypasses the need to share sensitive real patient records. However, existing methods generate single-modal EHRs by unconditional generation or by longitudinal inference, which falls short of low flexibility and makes unrealistic EHRs. In this work, we propose to formulate EHRs generation as a text-to-text translation task by language models (LMs), which suffices to highly flexible event imputation during generation. We also design prompt learning to control the generation conditioned by numerical and categorical demographic features. We evaluate synthetic EHRs quality by two perplexity measures accounting for their longitudinal pattern (longitudinal imputation perplexity, lpl) and the connections cross modalities (cross-modality imputation perplexity, mpl). Moreover, we utilize two adversaries: membership and attribute inference attacks for privacy-preserving evaluation. Experiments on MIMIC-III data demonstrate the superiority of our methods on realistic EHRs generation (53.1\% decrease of lpl and 45.3\% decrease of mpl on average compared to the best baselines) with low privacy risks. Software is available at https://github.com/RyanWangZf/PromptEHR.

PromptEHR: Conditional Electronic Healthcare Records Generation with Prompt Learning

For the missing modality problem in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), the inconsistency phenomenon occurs when the sentiment changes due to the absence of a modality. The absent modality that determines the overall semantic can be considered as a key missing modality. However, previous works all ignored the inconsistency phenomenon, simply discarding missing modalities or solely generating associated features from available modalities. The neglect of the key missing modality case may lead to incorrect semantic results. To tackle the issue, we propose an Ensemble-based Missing Modality Reconstruction (EMMR) network to detect and recover semantic features of the key missing modality. Specifically, we first learn joint representations with remaining modalities via a backbone encoder-decoder network. Then, based on the recovered features, we check the semantic consistency to determine whether the absent modality is crucial to the overall sentiment polarity. Once the inconsistency problem due to the key missing modality exists, we integrate several encoder-decoder approaches for better decision making. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on CMU-MOSI and IEMOCAP datasets, validating the superiority of the proposed method.

Mitigating Inconsistencies in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis under Uncertain Missing Modalities

Query-aware webpage snippet extraction is widely used in search engines to help users better understand the content of the returned webpages before clicking. The extracted snippet is expected to summarize the webpage in the context of the input query. Existing snippet extraction methods mainly rely on handcrafted features of overlapping words, which cannot capture deep semantic relationships between the query and webpages. Another idea is to extract the sentences which are most relevant to queries as snippets with existing text matching methods. However, these methods ignore the contextual information of webpages, which may be sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an effective query-aware webpage snippet extraction method named DeepQSE. In DeepQSE, the concatenation of title, query and each candidate sentence serves as an input of query-aware sentence encoder, aiming to capture the fine-grained relevance between the query and sentences. Then, these query-aware sentence representations are modeled jointly through a document-aware relevance encoder to capture contextual information of the webpage. Since the query and each sentence are jointly modeled in DeepQSE, its online inference may be slow. Thus, we further propose an efficient version of DeepQSE, named Efficient-DeepQSE, which can significantly improve the inference speed of DeepQSE without affecting its performance. The core idea of Efficient-DeepQSE is to decompose the query-aware snippet extraction task into two stages, i.e., a coarse-grained candidate sentence selection stage where sentence representations can be cached, and a fine-grained relevance modeling stage. Experiments on two datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

Effective and Efficient Query-aware Snippet Extraction for Web Search

Reasoning over natural language is a challenging problem in NLP. In this work, we focus on proof generation: Given a hypothesis and a set of supporting facts, the model generates a proof tree indicating how to derive the hypothesis from supporting facts. Compared to generating the entire proof in one shot, stepwise generation can better exploit the compositionality and generalize to longer proofs but has achieved limited success on real-world data. Existing stepwise methods struggle to generate proof steps that are both logically valid and relevant to the hypothesis. Instead, they tend to hallucinate invalid steps given the hypothesis. In this paper, we present a novel stepwise method, NLProofS (Natural Language Proof Search), which learns to generate relevant steps conditioning on the hypothesis. At the core of our approach, we train an independent verifier to check the validity of the proof steps to prevent hallucination. Instead of generating steps greedily, we search for proofs maximizing a global proof score judged by the verifier. NLProofS achieves state-of-the-art performance on EntailmentBank and RuleTaker. Specifically, it improves the correctness of predicted proofs from 27.7% to 33.3% in the distractor setting of EntailmentBank, demonstrating the effectiveness of NLProofS in generating challenging human-authored proofs.

Generating Natural Language Proofs with Verifier-Guided Search

Text-to-image generative models have achieved unprecedented success in generating high-quality images based on natural language descriptions. However, it is shown that these models tend to favor specific social groups when prompted with neutral text descriptions (e.g., `a photo of a lawyer'). Following Zhao et al. (2021), we study the effect on the diversity of the generated images when adding \textit{ethical intervention} that supports equitable judgment (e.g., `if all individuals can be a lawyer irrespective of their gender') in the input prompts. To this end, we introduce an Ethical NaTural Language Interventions in Text-to-Image GENeration (ENTIGEN) benchmark dataset to evaluate the change in image generations conditional on ethical interventions across three social axes -- gender, skin color, and culture. Through CLIP-based and human evaluation on minDALL.E, DALL.E-mini and Stable Diffusion, we find that the model generations cover diverse social groups while preserving the image quality. In some cases, the generations would be anti-stereotypical (e.g., models tend to create images with individuals that are perceived as man when fed with prompts about makeup) in the presence of ethical intervention. Preliminary studies indicate that a large change in the model predictions is triggered by certain phrases such as `irrespective of gender' in the context of gender bias in the ethical interventions. We release code and annotated data at https://github.com/Hritikbansal/entigen\_emnlp.

How well can Text-to-Image Generative Models understand Ethical Natural Language Interventions?

Quantitative reasoning is an important aspect of question answering, especially when numeric and verbal cues interact to indicate sophisticated, multi-step programs. In this paper, we demonstrate how modeling the compositional nature of quantitative text can enhance the performance and robustness of QA models, allowing them to capture arithmetic logic that is expressed verbally. Borrowing from the literature on semantic parsing, we propose a method that encourages the QA models to adjust their attention patterns and capture input/output alignments that are meaningful to the reasoning task. We show how this strategy improves program accuracy and renders the models more robust against overfitting as the number of reasoning steps grows. Our approach is designed as a standalone module which can be prepended to many existing models and trained in an end-to-end fashion without the need for additional supervisory signal. As part of this exercise, we also create a unified dataset building on four previously released numerical QA datasets over tabular data.

Improving compositional generalization for multi-step quantitative reasoning in question answering

While Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) internalize a great amount of world knowledge, they have been shown incapable of recalling these knowledge to solve tasks requiring complex & multi-step reasoning. Similar to how humans develop a "chain of thought" for these tasks, how can we equip PLMs with such abilities? In this work, we explore an iterative prompting framework, a new prompting paradigm which progressively elicits relevant knowledge from PLMs for multi-step inference. We identify key limitations of existing prompting methods, namely they are either restricted to queries with a single identifiable relation/predicate, or being agnostic to input contexts, which makes it difficult to capture variabilities across different inference steps. We propose an iterative context-aware prompter, which addresses these limitations by learning to dynamically synthesize prompts conditioned on the current step's contexts. Experiments on three datasets involving multi-step reasoning show the effectiveness of the iterative scheme and the context-aware prompter design.

Iteratively Prompt Pre-trained Language Models for Chain of Thought

We introduce the task of microblog opinion summarisation (MOS) and share a dataset of 3100 gold-standard opinion summaries to facilitate research in this domain. The dataset contains summaries of tweets spanning a 2-year period and covers more topics than any other public Twitter summarisation dataset. Summaries are abstractive in nature and have been created by journalists skilled in summarising news articles following a template separating factual information (main story) from author opinions. Our method differs from previous work on generating gold-standard summaries from social media, which usually involves selecting representative posts and thus favours extractive summarisation models. To showcase the dataset's utility and challenges, we benchmark a range of abstractive and extractive state-of-the-art summarisation models and achieve good performance, with the former outperforming the latter. We also show fine-tuning is necessary to improve performance and investigate the benefits of using different sample sizes.

Template-based Abstractive Microblog Opinion Summarisation

We investigate how disagreement in natural language inference (NLI) annotation arises. We developed a taxonomy of disagreement sources with 10 categories spanning 3 high-level classes. We found that some disagreements are due to uncertainty in the sentence meaning, others to annotator biases and task artifacts, leading to different interpretations of the label distribution. We explore two modeling approaches for detecting items with potential disagreement: a 4-way classification with a "Complicated" label in addition to the three standard NLI labels, and a multilabel classification approach. We found that the multilabel classification is more expressive and gives better recall of the possible interpretations in the data.

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