Canada

In this paper, we present our finding that prepending a Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt (TAPP) to the input improves the instruction-following ability of various Large Language Models (LLMs) during inference. TAPP is different from canonical prompts for LLMs in that it is a fixed prompt prepended to the beginning of every input regardless of the target task for zero-shot generalization. We observe that both base LLMs (i.e. not fine-tuned to follow instructions) and instruction-tuned models benefit from TAPP, resulting in 34.58% and 12.26% improvement on average, respectively. This implies that the instruction-following ability of LLMs can be improved during inference time with a fixed prompt constructed with simple heuristics. We hypothesize that TAPP assists language models to better estimate the output distribution by focusing more on the instruction of the target task during inference. In other words, such ability does not seem to be sufficiently activated in not only base LLMs but also many instruction-fine-tuned LLMs.

AAAI 2024

Investigating the Effectiveness of Task-Agnostic Prefix Prompt for Instruction Following

instruction-following

llms

prompting

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
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The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) poses the challenge of identifying relationships between entities within a document. Existing approaches rely on logical reasoning or contextual cues from entities. This paper reframes document-level RE as link prediction over a Knowledge Graph (KG) with distinct benefits: 1) Our approach amalgamates entity context and document-derived logical reasoning, enhancing link prediction quality. 2) Predicted links between entities offer interpretability, elucidating employed reasoning. 
We evaluate our approach on benchmark datasets - DocRED, ReDocRED, and DWIE. The results indicate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models and suggests that incorporating context-based Knowledge Graph link prediction techniques can enhance the performance of document-level relation extraction models. The code and the models are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DocRE-CED1/}.

Revisiting Document-Level Relation Extraction with Context-Guided Link Prediction

Recent techniques based on Mean Field Games (MFGs) allow the scalable analysis of multi-player games with many similar, rational agents. However, standard MFGs remain limited to homogeneous players that weakly influence each other, and cannot model major players that strongly influence other players, severely limiting the class of problems that can be handled. We propose a novel discrete time version of major-minor MFGs (M3FGs), along with a learning algorithm based on fictitious play and partitioning the probability simplex. Importantly, M3FGs generalize MFGs with common noise and can handle not only random exogeneous environment states but also major players. A key challenge is that the mean field is stochastic and not deterministic as in standard MFGs. Our theoretical investigation verifies both the M3FG model and its algorithmic solution, showing firstly the well-posedness of the M3FG model starting from a finite game of interest, and secondly convergence and approximation guarantees of the fictitious play algorithm. Then, we empirically verify the obtained theoretical results, ablating some of the theoretical assumptions made, and show successful equilibrium learning in three example problems. Overall, we establish a learning framework for a novel and broad class of tractable games.

Learning Discrete-Time Major-Minor Mean Field Games | VIDEO

We address the problem of building and evaluating a computational system whose primary objective is creativity. We illustrate seven characteristics for computational creativity in the context of a system that autonomously composes Western lyrical music. We conduct an external evaluation of the system in which respondents rated the system with regard to each characteristic as well as with regard to overall creativity. Average scores for overall creativity exceeded the ratings for any single characteristic, suggesting that creativity may be an emergent property and that unique research opportunities exist for building CC systems whose design attempts to comprehend all known characteristics of creativity.

Operationalizing Essential Characteristics of Creativity in a Computational System for Music Composition

The literature on game-theoretic equilibrium finding is mainly focused on single-games or their repeated variations. However, there are natural examples where similar versions of a game occur, which go beyond repeated games, such as playing poker with different public cards, or trading on stock markets with
correlated assets. As these games are similar, their equilibrium strategies share similarity as well. Based on this observation, we investigate a way to accelerate equilibrium finding on a distribution over games. We present a novel approach: the
“learning not to regret” framework, enabling us to meta-learn a regret minimizer tailored for a specific distribution. Our key contribution, Neural Predictive Regret Matching (NPRM), offers a method to minimize regret on any game and is uniquely
meta-learned to converge rapidly for the chosen distribution of games. The practicality of NPRM is demonstrated through experiments in river poker games. The results reveal that our meta-learned algorithms provide an improvement by an order of magnitude on the distribution, compared to the variant without meta-learning.

Learning Not to Regret

Social summarization aims to provide summaries for a large number of social texts (called posts)  about a single topic. To extract a summary, both  the representation of post and summary selection method are crucial. Previous methods introduce social relation to enhance post embedding to mitigate the sparse representation due to its brief and informal expression. However, they ignore that there are multiple relations between posts. Besides, existing graph-based centrality calculation approaches tend to select posts from one aspect. This leads to facet bias especially when there are multiple viewpoints. In this paper, we propose a model named MultiSum to improve social summarization. Specifically, 1) We use graph convolutional networks to fuse text content with social and semantic relations to improve post representation; 2) The similarity between the summary and all aspects is incorporated into the centrality score during the selection phase, encouraging the model to pay attention to different facets. Experimental results on English and Chinese corpora support the effectiveness of this model. Furthermore, external evaluations by human experts and large language models demonstrate the validity of MultiSum in facet coverage and redundancy reduction.

MultiSum: A Multi-Facet Approach for Extractive Social Summarization Utilizing Semantic and Sociological Relationships

The Multi-Agent Pathfinding (MAPF) problem involves finding a set of conflict-free paths for a group of agents confined to a graph. In typical MAPF scenarios, the graph and the agents' starting and ending vertices are known beforehand, allowing the use of centralized planning algorithms. However, in this study, we focus on the decentralized MAPF setting, where the agents may observe the other agents only locally and are restricted in communications with each other. Specifically, we investigate the lifelong variant of MAPF, where new goals are continually assigned to the agents upon completion of previous ones. Drawing inspiration from the successful AlphaZero approach, we propose a decentralized multi-agent Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) method for MAPF tasks. Our approach utilizes the agent's observations to recreate the intrinsic Markov decision process, which is then used for planning with a tailored for multi-agent tasks version of neural MCTS. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art learnable MAPF solvers. The source code is available at https://github.com/AIRI-Institute/mats-lp.

Decentralized Monte Carlo Tree Search for Partially Observable Multi-Agent Pathfinding

Generalization and sample efficiency have been long-standing issues concerning reinforcement learning, and thus the field of Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) has gained increasing attention due to its potential of solving a wide range of problems with static and limited offline data. Existing OMRL methods often assume sufficient training tasks and data coverage to apply contrastive learning to extract task representations. However, such assumptions are not applicable in several real-world applications and thus undermine the generalization ability of the representations. In this paper, we consider OMRL with two types of data limitations: limited training tasks and limited behavior diversity and propose a novel algorithm called GENTLE for learning generalizable task representations in the face of data limitations. GENTLE employs Task Auto-Encoder (TAE), which is an encoder-decoder architecture to extract the characteristics of the tasks. Unlike existing methods, TAE is optimized solely by reconstruction of the state transition and reward, which captures the generative structure of the task models and produces generalizable representations when training tasks are limited. To alleviate the effect of limited behavior diversity, we consistently construct pseudo-transitions to align the data distribution used to train TAE with the data distribution encountered during testing. Empirically, GENTLE significantly outperforms existing OMRL methods on both in-distribution tasks and out-of-distribution tasks across both the given-context protocol and the one-shot protocol.

Generalizable Task Representation Learning for Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Data Limitations | VIDEO

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used as repositories of biological and chemical information to generate pharmacological lead compounds. However, for LLMs to focus on specific drug targets typically requires experimentation with progressively more refined prompts. Results thus become dependent not just on what is known about the target, but also on what is known about the prompt- engineering. In this paper, we separate the prompt into domain-constraints that can be written in a standard logical form and a simple text-based query. We investigate whether LLMs can be guided, not by refining prompts manually, but by refining the logical component automatically, keeping the query unchanged. We describe an iterative procedure LMLF (“Language Model with Logical Feedback”) in which the constraints are progressively refined using a logical notion of generalisation. On any iteration, newly generated instances are verified against the constraint, providing "logical-feedback" for the next iteration's refinement of the constraints. We evaluate LMLF using two well-known  targets (inhibition of the Janus Kinase 2; and Dopamine Receptor D2); and two different LLMs (GPT-3 and PaLM). We show that LMLF, starting with the same logical constraints and query text, can be used to guide both LLMs to generate potential leads. We find: (a)  Binding affinities of LMLF-generated molecules are skewed towards higher binding affinities than those from existing baselines; (b) LMLF results in generating molecules that are skewed towards higher binding affinities than without logical feedback; (c) Assessment by a computational chemist suggests that LMLF generated compounds may be novel inhibitors. These findings suggest that LLMs with logical feedback may provide a mechanism for generating new leads without requiring the domain-specialist to acquire sophisticated skills in prompt-engineering.

Generating Novel Leads for Drug Discovery Using LLMs with Logical Feedback

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CD-FSL) aims at recognizing samples in novel classes from unseen domains that are vastly different from training classes, with few labeled samples. However, the large domain gap between training and novel classes makes previous FSL methods perform poorly. To address this issue, we propose MetaPrompt, a Task-adaptive Prompted Transformer model for CD-FSL, by jointly exploiting prompt learning and the parameter generation framework. The proposed MetaPrompt enjoys several merits. First, a task-conditioned prompt generator is established upon attention mechanisms. It can flexibly produce a task-adaptive prompt with arbitrary length for unseen tasks, by selectively gathering task characteristics from the contextualized support embeddings. Second, the task-adaptive prompt is attached to Vision Transformer to facilitate fast task adaptation, steering the task-agnostic representation to incorporate task knowledge. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to exploit a prompt-based parameter generation mechanism for CD-FSL. Extensive experimental results on the Meta-Dataset benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves superior results against state-of-the-art methods.

Task-Adaptive Prompted Transformer for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Event extraction is an important task in natural language processing that focuses on mining event-related information from unstructured text. Despite considerable advancements, it is still challenging to achieve satisfactory performance in this task, and issues like data scarcity and imbalance obstruct progress. In this paper, we introduce an innovative approach where we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) as expert annotators for event extraction. We strategically include sample data from the training dataset in the prompt as a reference, ensuring alignment between the data distribution of LLM-generated samples and that of the benchmark dataset. This enables us to craft an augmented dataset that complements existing benchmarks, alleviating the challenges of data imbalance and scarcity and thereby enhancing the performance of fine-tuned models. We conducted extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of our proposed method, and we believe that this approach holds great potential for propelling the development and application of more advanced and reliable event extraction systems in real-world scenarios.

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Revisiting Document-Level Relation Extraction with Context-Guided Link Prediction

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Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Vision-Language Models