Thailand

Large language model (LLM)-based recommender models that bridge users and items through textual prompts for effective semantic reasoning have gained considerable attention. However, few methods consider the underlying rationales behind interactions, such as user preferences and item attributes, limiting the reasoning ability of LLMs for recommendations. This paper proposes a rationale distillation recommender (RDRec), a compact model designed to learn rationales generated by a larger language model (LM). By leveraging rationales from reviews related to users and items, RDRec remarkably specifies their profiles for recommendations. Experiments show that RDRec achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both top-N and sequential recommendations. Our code is available online.

ACL 2024

RDRec: Rationale Distillation for LLM-based Recommendation

rationale distillation; recommendation; large language model

poster

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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 (LLMs) suffer from catastrophic forgetting during continual learning. Conventional rehearsal-based methods rely on previous training data to retain the model's ability, which may not be feasible in real-world applications. When conducting continual learning based on a publicly-released LLM checkpoint, the availability of the original training data may be non-existent. To address this challenge, we propose a framework called Self-Synthesized Rehearsal (SSR) that uses the LLM to generate synthetic instances for rehearsal. 
Concretely, we first employ the base LLM for in-context learning to generate synthetic instances. Subsequently, we utilize the latest LLM to refine the instance outputs based on the synthetic inputs, preserving its acquired ability. Finally, we select diverse high-quality synthetic instances for rehearsal in future stages. Experimental results demonstrate that SSR achieves superior or comparable performance compared to conventional rehearsal-based approaches while being more data-efficient. Besides, SSR effectively preserves the generalization capabilities of LLMs in general domains.

Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models with Self-Synthesized Rehearsal

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable ability in code generation. However, generating the correct solution in a single attempt still remains a challenge. Prior works utilize verification properties in software engineering to verify and re-rank solutions in a majority voting manner. But the assumption behind them that generated verification properties have better qualities than solutions may not always hold. 
In this paper, we treat them equally as different perspectives of LLMs' reasoning processes. We propose the Multi-Perspective Self-Consistency (MPSC) framework incorporating both inter- and intra-consistency across outputs from multiple perspectives. Specifically, we prompt LLMs to generate diverse outputs from three perspectives, Solution, Specification and Test case, constructing a 3-partite graph. With two measure functions of consistency, we embed both inter- and intra-consistency information into the graph. The optimal choice of solutions is then determined based on analysis in the graph.
MPSC significantly boosts performance of foundation models (ChatGPT in this paper) on various benchmarks, including HumanEval (+15.91%), MBPP (+6.43%) and CodeContests (+9.37%), even surpassing GPT-4.

Enhancing Large Language Models in Coding Through Multi-Perspective Self-Consistency

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful general intelligence across diverse scenarios, including their integration into chatbots. However, a vital challenge of LLM-based chatbots is that they may produce hallucinated content in responses, which significantly limits their applicability. Various efforts have been made to alleviate hallucination, such as retrieval augmented generation and reinforcement learning with human feedback, but most of them require additional training and data annotation. In this paper, we propose a novel post-hoc Citation-Enhanced Generation (CEG) approach combined with retrieval argumentation. Unlike previous studies that focus on preventing hallucinations during generation, our method addresses this issue in a post-hoc way. It incorporates a retrieval module to search for supporting documents relevant to the generated content, and employs a natural language inference-based citation generation module. Once the statements in the generated content lack of reference, our model can regenerate responses until all statements are supported by citations. Note that our method is a training-free plug-and-play plugin that is capable of various LLMs. Experiments on various hallucination-related datasets show our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both hallucination detection and response regeneration on three benchmarks. Our code and datasets can be found at https://github.com/Tsinghua-dhy/CEG.

Citation-Enhanced Generation for LLM-based Chatbots

Psychological measurement is essential for mental health, self-understanding, and personal development. Traditional methods, such as self-report scales and psychologist interviews, often face challenges with engagement and accessibility. While game-based and LLM-based tools have been explored to improve user interest and automate assessment, they struggle to balance engagement with generalizability. In this work, we propose PsychoGAT (Psychological Game AgenTs) to achieve a generic gamification of psychological assessment. The main insight is that powerful LLMs can function both as adept psychologists and innovative game designers. By incorporating LLM agents into designated roles and carefully managing their interactions, PsychoGAT can transform any standardized scales into personalized and engaging interactive fiction games. To validate the proposed method, we conduct psychometric evaluations to assess its effectiveness and employ human evaluators to examine the generated content across various psychological constructs, including depression, cognitive distortions, and personality traits. Results demonstrate that PsychoGAT serves as an effective assessment tool, achieving statistically significant excellence in psychometric metrics such as reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity. Moreover, human evaluations confirm PsychoGAT's enhancements in content coherence, interactivity, interest, immersion, and satisfaction.

PsychoGAT: A Novel Psychological Measurement Paradigm through Interactive Fiction Games with LLM Agents

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a task dedicated to rectifying texts with minimal edits, which can be decoupled into two components: detection and correction. However, previous works have predominantly focused on direct correction, with no prior efforts to integrate both into a single model. Moreover, the exploration of the detection-correction paradigm by large language models (LLMs) remains underdeveloped. This paper introduces an integrated detection-correction structure, named DeCoGLM, based on the General Language Model (GLM). The detection phase employs a fault-tolerant detection template, while the correction phase leverages autoregressive mask infilling for localized error correction. Through the strategic organization of input tokens and modification of attention masks, we facilitate multi-task learning within a single model. Our model demonstrates competitive performance against the state-of-the-art models on English and Chinese GEC datasets. Further experiments present the effectiveness of the detection-correction structure in LLMs, suggesting a promising direction for GEC.

Detection-Correction Structure via General Language Model for Grammatical Error Correction

Ensuring correctness is a pivotal aspect of software engineering. Among the various strategies available, software verification offers a definitive assurance of correctness. Nevertheless, writing verification proofs is resource-intensive and manpower-consuming, and there is a great need to automate this process. We introduce Selene in this paper, which is the first project-level automated proof benchmark constructed based on the real-world industrial-level operating system microkernel, seL4. Selene provides a comprehensive framework for end-to-end proof generation and a lightweight verification environment. Our experimental results with advanced large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4, highlight the capabilities of LLMs in the domain of automated proof generation. Additionally, our further proposed augmentations indicate that the challenges presented by Selene can be mitigated in future research endeavors.

Selene: Pioneering Automated Proof in Software Verification

Intermediate reasoning or acting steps have successfully improved large language models (LLMs) for handling various downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks.
When applying LLMs for code generation, recent works mainly focus on directing the models to articulate intermediate natural-language reasoning steps, as in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, and then output code with the natural language or other structured intermediate steps. However, such output is not suitable for code translation or generation tasks since the standard CoT has different logical structures and forms of expression with the code. In this work, we introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation. It is a description of algorithm steps using a mix of conventions of programming languages, such as assignment operator, conditional operator, and loop. Hence, we collect an instruction dataset UniCoder-Instruct to train our model UniCoder on multi-task learning objectives. UniCoder-Instruct comprises natural-language questions, code solutions, and the corresponding universal code. The alignment between the intermediate universal code representation and the final code solution significantly improves the quality of the generated code. The experimental results demonstrate that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin, showcasing the effectiveness of the structural clues in pseudo-code.

UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code

The burgeoning generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have raised growing concerns about abuse, demanding automatic machine-generated text detectors. DetectGPT, a zero-shot metric-based detector, first introduces perturbation and shows great performance improvement. However, in DetectGPT, the random perturbation strategy could introduce noise, and logit regression depends on the threshold, harming the generalizability and applicability of individual or small-batch inputs. Hence, we propose a novel fine-tuned detector, PECOLA, bridging metric-based and fine-tuned methods by contrastive learning on selective perturbation. Selective strategy retains important tokens during perturbation and weights for multi-pair contrastive learning. The experiments show that PECOLA outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by 1.20% in accuracy on average on four public datasets. And we further analyze the effectiveness, robustness, and generalization of the method.

Does DetectGPT Fully Utilize Perturbation? Bridging Selective Perturbation to Fine-tuned Contrastive Learning Detector would be Better

With the rise of generative AI, automated fact-checking methods to combat misinformation are becoming more and more important. However, factual claim detection, the first step in a fact-checking pipeline, suffers from two key issues that limit its scalability and generalizability: (1) inconsistency in definitions of the task and what a claim is, and (2) the high cost of manual annotation. To address (1), we review the definitions in related work and propose a unifying definition of factual claims that focuses on verifiability. To address (2), we introduce AFaCTA (Automatic Factual Claim deTection Annotator), a novel framework that assists in the annotation of factual claims with the help of large language models (LLMs). AFaCTA calibrates its annotation confidence with consistency along three predefined reasoning paths. Extensive evaluation and experiments in the domain of political speech reveal that AFaCTA can efficiently assist experts in annotating factual claims and training high-quality classifiers, and can work with or without expert supervision. Our analyses also result in PoliClaim, a comprehensive claim detection dataset spanning diverse political topics.

AFaCTA: Assisting the Annotation of Factual Claim Detection with Reliable LLM Annotators

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a crucial step for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to align with human instructions and enhance their capabilities in downstream tasks. Substantially increasing instruction data is a direct solution to align the model with a broader range of downstream tasks or notably improve its performance on a specific task. However, we find that large-scale increases in instruction data can damage the world knowledge previously stored in LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose LoRAMoE, a novelty framework that introduces several low-rank adapters (LoRA) and integrates them by using a router network, like a plugin version of Mixture of Experts (MoE). It freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting. Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ablustrund/LoRAMoE.

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Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models with Self-Synthesized Rehearsal

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