Thailand

We introduce ALaRM, the first framework modeling hierarchical rewards in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which is designed to enhance the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. The framework addresses the limitations of current alignment approaches, which often struggle with the inconsistency and sparsity of human supervision signals, by integrating holistic rewards with aspect-specific rewards. This integration enables more precise and consistent guidance of language models towards desired outcomes, particularly in complex and open text generation tasks. By employing a methodology that filters and combines multiple rewards based on their consistency, the framework provides a reliable mechanism for improving model alignment. We validate our approach through applications in long-form question answering and machine translation tasks, employing gpt-3.5-turbo for pairwise comparisons, and demonstrate improvements over existing baselines. Our work underscores the effectiveness of hierarchical rewards modeling in refining LLM training processes for better human preference alignment. We release our code at https://ALaRM-fdu.github.io.

ACL 2024

ALaRM: Align Language Models via Hierarchical Rewards Modeling

scalable oversight

ai alignment

rlhf

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.

Time-series forecasting (TSF) finds broad applications in real-world scenarios. Prompting off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates strong zero-shot TSF capabilities while preserving computational efficiency. However, existing prompting methods oversimplify TSF as language next-token predictions, overlooking its dynamic nature and lack of integration with state-of-the-art prompt strategies such as Chain-of-Thought. Thus, we propose LSTPrompt, a novel approach for prompting LLMs in zero-shot TSF tasks. LSTPrompt decomposes TSF into short-term and long-term forecasting sub-tasks, tailoring prompts to each. LSTPrompt guides LLMs to regularly reassess forecasting mechanisms to enhance adaptability. Extensive evaluations demonstrate consistently better performance of LSTPrompt than existing prompting methods, and competitive results compared to foundation TSF models.

LSTPrompt: Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters by Long-Short-Term Prompting

Task-agnostic and transferable backdoors implanted in pre-trained language models (PLMs) pose a severe security threat as they can be inherited to any downstream task. However, existing methods rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations, hindering their effectiveness and universality across different PLMs or usage paradigms. In this paper, we propose a new backdoor attack method called UOR, which overcomes these limitations by turning manual selection into automatic optimization. Specifically, we design poisoned supervised contrastive learning, which can automatically learn more uniform and universal backdoor representations. This allows for more even coverage of the output space, thus hitting more labels in downstream tasks after fine-tuning. Furthermore, we utilize gradient search to select appropriate trigger words that can be adapted to different PLMs and vocabularies. Experiments show that UOR achieves better attack performance on various text classification tasks compared to manual methods. Moreover, we test on PLMs with different architectures, usage paradigms, and more challenging tasks, achieving higher scores for universality.

UOR: Universal Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Language Models

Humans follow criteria when they execute tasks, and these criteria are directly used to assess the quality of task completion. Therefore, having models learn to use criteria to provide feedback can help humans or models to perform tasks better. However, current research in this area tends to consider only a limited number of criteria, or only a limited number of quality assessment aspects. To fill this gap, we propose a general framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to use comprehensive criteria for a task in delivering natural language feedback on task execution. In particular, we present a model-in-the-loop framework that semi-automatically derives criteria from collected guidelines for different writing tasks and constructs in-context demonstrations for each criterion. We choose three tasks from real-world scenarios to operationalize this idea: paper introduction writing, Python code writing, and Reddit post writing, and evaluate our feedback generation framework using different LLMs. The results reveal the fine-grained effects of adding criteria and demonstrations and provide valuable guidance on how to teach LLMs to use criteria more effectively.

LLMCrit: Teaching Large Language Models to Use Criteria

Japanese input method editors (IMEs) are essential tools for inputting Japanese text using a limited set of characters such as the kana syllabary. However, despite their importance, the potential of newer attention-based encoder-decoder neural networks, such as Transformer, has not yet been fully explored for IMEs due to their high computational cost and low-quality intermediate output in simultaneous settings, leading to high latencies. In this work, we propose a simple decoding policy to enable the use of attention-based encoder-decoder networks for simultaneous kana-kanji conversion in the context of Japanese IMEs inspired by simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT). We demonstrate that simply decoding by explicitly considering the word boundaries achieves a fairly strong quality-latency trade-off, as it can be seen as equivalent to performing decoding on aligned prefixes and thus achieving an incremental anticipation-free conversion. We further show how such a policy can be applied in practice to achieve high-quality conversions with minimal computational overhead. Our experiments show that our approach can achieve a noticeably better quality-latency trade-off compared to the baselines, while also being a more practical approach due to its ability to directly handle streaming input. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/transformer_ime-D327.

Alignment-Based Decoding Policy for Low-Latency and Anticipation-Free Neural Japanese Input Method Editors

Despite the promising performance of state space models (SSMs) in long sequence modeling, limitations still exist. Advanced SSMs like S5 and S6 (Mamba) in addressing non-uniform sampling, their recursive structures impede efficient SSM computation via convolution. To overcome compatibility limitations in parallel convolutional computation, this paper proposes a novel non-recursive non-uniform sample processing strategy. Theoretical analysis of SSMs through the lens of Event-Triggered Control (ETC) theory reveals the Non-Stable State (NSS) problem, where deviations from sampling point requirements lead to error transmission and accumulation, causing the divergence of the SSM's hidden state. Our analysis further reveals that adjustments of input sequences with early memories can mitigate the NSS problem, achieving Sampling Step Adaptation (SSA).
Building on this insight, we introduce a simple yet effective plug-and-play mechanism, State Memory Replay (SMR), which utilizes learnable memories to adjust the current state with multi-step information for generalization at sampling points different from those in the training data. This enables SSMs to stably model varying sampling points. Experiments on long-range modeling tasks in autoregressive language modeling and Long Range Arena demonstrate the general effectiveness of the SMR mechanism for a series of SSM models.

SMR: State Memory Replay for Long Sequence Modeling

Machine-Generated Text (MGT) detection aims to identify a piece of text as machine or human written. Prior work has primarily formulated MGT detection as a binary classification task over an entire document, with limited work exploring cases where only part of a document is machine generated. This paper provides the first in-depth study of MGT that localizes the portions of a document that were machine generated. Thus, if a bad actor were to change a key portion of a news article to spread misinformation, whole document MGT detection may fail since the vast majority is human written, but our approach can succeed due to its granular approach. A key challenge in our MGT localization task is that short spans of text, *e.g.*, a single sentence, provides little information indicating if it is machine generated due to its short length. To address this, we leverage contextual information, where we predict whether multiple sentences are machine or human written at once. This enables our approach to identify changes in style or content to boost performance. A gain of 4-13% mean Average Precision (mAP) over prior work demonstrates the effectiveness of approach on five diverse datasets: GoodNews, VisualNews, WikiText, Essay, and WP. We release our implementation at https://github.com/Zhongping-Zhang/MGT_Localization.

Machine-Generated Text Localization

This work studies mitigating fact-conflicting hallucinations for large language model (LLM) at inference time.
Particularly, we propose a self-endorsement framework that leverages the fine-grained fact-level comparisons across multiple sampled responses.
Compared with prior ensemble methods (e.g., self-consistency) that perform response-level selection, our approach can better alleviate hallucinations for knowledge-intensive tasks.
Our approach can broadly benefit smaller and open-source LLMs as it mainly conducts simple content-based comparisons.
Experiments on Biographies show that our method can effectively improve the factuality of generations with simple and intuitive prompts across different scales of LLMs.
Besides, comprehensive analyses on TriviaQA and GSM8K demonstrate the potential of self-endorsement for broader application.

Improving LLM Generations via Fine-Grained Self-Endorsement

Lexical Substitution discovers appropriate substitutes for a given target word in a context sentence. However, the task fails to consider substitutes that are of equal or higher proficiency than the target, an aspect that could be beneficial for language learners looking to improve their writing. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task --- language proficiency-oriented lexical substitution. We also introduce ProLex, a novel benchmark designed to assess systems' ability to generate not only appropriate substitutes but also substitutes that demonstrate better language proficiency. Besides the benchmark, we propose models that can automatically perform the new task. We show that our best model, a Llama2-13B model fine-tuned with task-specific synthetic data, outperforms ChatGPT by an average of 3.2% in F-score and achieves comparable results with GPT-4 on ProLex.

ProLex: A Benchmark for Language Proficiency-oriented Lexical Substitution

In recent years, neural machine translation (NMT) has become widely used in everyday life. However, the current NMT lacks a mechanism to adjust the difficulty level of translations to match the user's language level. Additionally, due to the bias in the training data for NMT, translations of simple source sentences are often produced with complex words. In particular, this could pose a problem for children, who may not be able to understand the meaning of the translations correctly. In this study, we propose a method that replaces high Age of Acquisitions (AoA) words in translations with simpler words to match the translations to the user's level. We achieve this by using large language models (LLMs), providing a triple of a source sentence, a translation, and a target word to be replaced. We create a benchmark dataset using back-translation on Simple English Wikipedia. The experimental results obtained from the dataset show that our method effectively replaces high-AoA words with lower-AoA words and, moreover, can iteratively replace most of the high-AoA words while still maintaining high BLEU and COMET scores.

Simplifying Translations for Children: Iterative Simplification Considering Age of Acquisition with LLMs

LLMs are increasingly powerful and widely used to assist users in a variety of tasks. This use risks introducing LLM biases into consequential decisions such as job hiring, human performance evaluation, and criminal sentencing. Bias in NLP systems along the lines of gender and ethnicity has been widely studied, especially for specific stereotypes (e.g., Asians are good at math). In this paper, we investigate bias along less-studied but still consequential, dimensions, such as age and beauty, measuring subtler correlated decisions that LLMs make between social groups and unrelated positive and negative attributes. Although these subtler biases are understudied they follow people as much as gender and ethnicity do. So, we want to see whether they also follow one with LLMs.
We introduce a template-generated dataset of sentence completion tasks that asks the model to select the most appropriate attribute to complete an evaluative statement about a person described as a member of a specific social group. We also reverse the completion task to select the social group based on an attribute. We report the correlations that we find for 4 cutting-edge LLMs. This dataset can be used as a benchmark to evaluate progress in more generalized biases and the templating technique can be used to expand the benchmark with minimal additional human annotation.

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