Thailand

Although pre-training has become a prevalent approach for addressing various biomedical tasks, the current efficacy of pre-trained models is hindered by their reliance on a limited scope of medical sources. This limitation results in data scarcity during pre-training and restricts the range of applicable downstream tasks. In response to these challenges, we develop MedCSP, a new pre-training strategy designed to bridge the gap between multimodal medical sources. MedCSP employs modality-level aggregation to unify patient data within individual sources. Additionally, leveraging temporal information and diagnosis history, MedCSP effectively captures explicit and implicit correlations between patients across different sources. To evaluate the proposed strategy, we conduct comprehensive experiments, where the experiments are based on 6 modalities from 2 real-world medical data sources, and MedCSP is evaluated on 4 tasks against 19 baselines, marking an initial yet essential step towards cross-source modeling in the medical domain.

ACL 2024

Unity in Diversity: Collaborative Pre-training Across Multimodal Medical Sources

cross-source medical pre-training

multimodal learning

contrastive learning

poster

### Welcome!
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.

The customization of large language models (LLMs) for user-specified tasks gets important. However, maintaining all the customized LLMs on cloud servers incurs substantial memory and computational overheads, and uploading user data can also lead to privacy concerns. On-device LLMs can offer a promising solution by mitigating these issues. Yet, the performance of on-device LLMs is inherently constrained by the limitations of small-scaled models. To overcome these restrictions, we first propose Crayon, a novel approach for on-device LLM customization. Crayon begins by constructing a pool of diverse base adapters, and then we instantly blend them into a customized adapter without extra training. In addition, we develop a device-server hybrid inference strategy, which deftly allocates more demanding queries or non-customized tasks to a larger, more capable LLM on a server. This ensures optimal performance without sacrificing the benefits of on-device customization. We carefully craft a novel benchmark from multiple question-answer datasets, and show the efficacy of our method in the LLM customization.

Crayon: Customized On-Device LLM via Instant Adapter Blending and Edge-Server Hybrid Inference

In this work, we introduce a semiparametric token-sequence co-supervision training method. It trains a language model by simultaneously leveraging supervision from the traditional next token prediction loss which is calculated over the parametric token embedding space and the next sequence prediction loss which is calculated over the nonparametric sequence embedding space. The nonparametric sequence embedding space is constructed by a separate language model tasked to condense an input text into a single representative embedding. 
Our experiments demonstrate that a model trained via both supervisions consistently surpasses models trained via each supervision independently. Analysis suggests that this co-supervision encourages a broader generalization capability across the model. Especially, the robustness of parametric token space which is established during the pretraining step tends to effectively enhance the stability of nonparametric sequence embedding space, a new space established by another language model.

Semiparametric Token-Sequence Co-Supervision

New Intent Discovery (NID) aims at detecting known and previously undefined categories of user intent by utilizing limited labeled and massive unlabeled data. Most prior works often operate under the unrealistic assumption that the distribution of both familiar and new intent classes is uniform, overlooking the skewed and long-tailed distributions frequently encountered in real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, our work introduces the imbalanced new intent discovery i-NID task, which seeks to identify familiar and novel intent categories within long-tailed distributions. A new benchmark baNID-Bench comprised of three datasets is created to simulate the real-world long-tail distributions. ImbaNID-Bench ranges from broad cross-domain to specific single-domain intent categories, providing a thorough representation of practical use cases. Besides, a robust baseline model ImbaNID is proposed to achieve cluster-friendly intent representations. It includes three stages: model pre-training, generation of reliable pseudo-labels, and robust representation learning that strengthens the model performance to handle the intricacies of real-world data distributions. Our extensive experiments on previous benchmarks and the newly established benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of ImbaNID in addressing the i-NID task, highlighting its potential as a powerful baseline for uncovering and categorizing user intents in imbalanced and long-tailed distributions.

Towards Real-world Scenario: Imbalanced New Intent Discovery

The Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) task aims to detect and correct misspelled characters in Chinese text, and has received lots of attention in the past few years. Most recent studies adopt a Transformer-based model and leverage different features of characters such as pronunciation, glyph and contextual information to enhance the model's ability to complete the task. Despite their state-of-the-art performance, we observe two issues that should be addressed to further advance the CSC task. First, the widely-used benchmark datasets SIGHAN13, SIGHAN14 and SIGHAN15, contain many mistakes. Hence the performance of existing models is not accurate and should be re-evaluated. Second, existing models seem to have reached a performance bottleneck, where the improvements on the SIGHAN's testing sets are increasingly smaller and unstable. To deal with the two issues, we make two contributions: (1) we manually fix the SIGHAN datasets and re-evaluate four representative CSC models using the fixed datasets; (2) we analyze the new results to identify the spelling errors that none of the four models successfully corrects, based on which we propose a simple yet effective refinement solution. Experimental results show that our solution improves the four models in all metrics by notable margins.

Two Issues with Chinese Spelling Correction and A Refinement Solution

Text simplification aims to make technical texts more accessible to laypeople but often results in deletion of information and vagueness. This work proposes InfoLossQA, a framework to characterize and recover simplification-induced information loss in form of question-and-answer (QA) pairs. Building on the theory of Questions Under Discussion, the QA pairs are designed to help readers deepen their knowledge of a text. First, we collect a dataset of 1,000 linguist-curated QA pairs derived from 104 LLM simplifications of English medical study abstracts. Our analyses of this data reveal that information loss occurs frequently, and that the QA pairs give a high-level overview of what information was lost. Second, we devise two methods for this task: end-to-end prompting of open-source and commercial language models, and a natural language inference pipeline. With a novel evaluation framework considering the correctness of QA pairs and their linguistic suitability, our expert evaluation reveals that models struggle to reliably identify information loss and applying similar standards as humans at what constitutes information loss.

InfoLossQA: Characterizing and Recovering Information Loss in Text Simplification

With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues.

CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following

Knowledge editing techniques, aiming to efficiently modify a minor proportion of knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without negatively impacting performance across other inputs, have garnered widespread attention. However, existing methods predominantly rely on memorizing the updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. To this end, we propose a Learning to Edit (LTE) framework, focusing on teaching LLMs to apply updated knowledge into input questions, inspired by the philosophy of "Teach a man to fish." LTE features a two-phase process: (i) the Alignment Phase, which fine-tunes LLMs on a meticulously curated parallel dataset to make reliable, in-scope edits while preserving out-of-scope information and linguistic proficiency; and (ii) the Inference Phase, which employs a retrieval-based mechanism for real-time and mass knowledge editing. By comparing our approach with seven advanced baselines across four popular knowledge editing benchmarks and two LLM architectures, we demonstrate LTE's superiority in knowledge editing performance, robustness in both batch and sequential editing, minimal interference on general tasks, and rapid editing speeds. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/LTE.

Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing

Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in code-related tasks. Various instruction finetuning approaches have been proposed to boost the code generation performance of pre-trained Code LLMs. In this paper, we introduce a diverse instruction model DolphCoder with self-evaluating for code generation. It learns diverse instruction targets and combines a code evaluation objective to enhance its code generation ability. Our model achieves superior performance on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks, demonstrating new insights for future code instruction tuning work. Our key findings are: (1) Augmenting more diverse responses with more distinct reasoning paths increases the code capability of LLMs. (2) Improving one’s ability to evaluate the correctness of code also enhances their ability to create it.

DolphCoder: Echo-Locating Code Large Language Models with Diverse and Multi-Objective Instruction Tuning

Spatial reasoning is a crucial component of both biological and artificial intelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the capability of current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning. To support our study, we created and contribute a novel Spatial Reasoning Characterization (SpaRC) framework and Spatial Reasoning Paths (SpaRP) datasets, to enable an in-depth understanding of the spatial relations and compositions as well as the usefulness of spatial reasoning chains. We found that all the state-of-the-art LLMs do not perform well on the datasets---their performances are consistently low across different setups. The spatial reasoning capability improves substantially as model sizes scale up. Finetuning both large language models (e.g., Llama-2-70B) and smaller ones (e.g., Llama-2-13B) can significantly improve their F1-scores by 7--32 absolute points. We also found that the top proprietary LLMs still significantly outperform their open-source counterparts in topological spatial understanding and reasoning.

SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) bring unprecedented flexibility in defining and executing complex, creative natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Yet, this flexibility brings new challenges, as it introduces new degrees of freedom in formulating the task inputs and instructions and in evaluating model performance. To facilitate the exploration of creative NLG tasks, we propose a three-component research framework that consists of systematic input manipulation, reference data, and output measurement. We use this framework to explore citation text generation -- a popular scholarly NLP task that lacks consensus on the task definition and evaluation metric and has not yet been tackled within the LLM paradigm. Our results highlight the importance of systematically investigating both task instruction and input configuration when prompting LLMs, and reveal non-trivial relationships between different evaluation metrics used for citation text generation. Additional human generation and human evaluation experiments provide new qualitative insights into the task to guide future research in citation text generation. We make our code and data publicly available.

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Unity in Diversity: Collaborative Pre-training Across Multimodal Medical Sources

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