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The task of text privatization using Differential Privacy has recently taken the form of $\textit{text rewriting}$, in which an input text is obfuscated via the use of generative (large) language models. While these methods have shown promising results in the ability to preserve privacy, these methods rely on autoregressive models which lack a mechanism to contextualize the private rewriting process. In response to this, we propose $\textbf{DP-MLM}$, a new method for differentially private text rewriting based on leveraging masked language models (MLMs) to rewrite text in a semantically similar $\textit{and}$ obfuscated manner. We accomplish this with a simple contextualization technique, whereby we rewrite a text one token at a time. We find that utilizing encoder-only MLMs provides better utility preservation at lower $\varepsilon$ levels, as compared to previous methods relying on larger models with a decoder. In addition, MLMs allow for greater customization of the rewriting mechanism, as opposed to generative approaches. We make the code for $\textbf{DP-MLM}$ public and reusable, found at https://github.com/sjmeis/DPMLM.

ACL 2024

DP-MLM: Differentially Private Text Rewriting Using Masked Language Models

text privatization

text rewriting

differential privacy

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COLING 2022

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

poster

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Large Language models (LLMs) are achieving state-of-the-art performance in many different downstream tasks. However, the increasing urgency of data privacy puts pressure on practitioners to train LLMs with Differential Privacy (DP) on private data. Concurrently, the exponential growth in parameter size of LLMs necessitates model compression before deployment of LLMs on resource-constrained devices or latency-sensitive applications. Differential privacy and model compression generally must trade off utility loss to achieve their objectives. Moreover, simultaneously applying both schemes can compound the utility degradation. To this end, we propose DistilDP: a novel differentially private knowledge distillation algorithm that exploits synthetic data generated by a differentially private teacher LLM. The knowledge of a teacher LLM is transferred onto the student in two ways: one way from the synthetic data itself-- the hard labels, and the other way by the output distribution of the teacher evaluated on the synthetic data-- the soft labels. Furthermore, if the teacher and student share a similar architectural structure, we can further distill knowledge by aligning the hidden representations between both. Our experimental results demonstrate that DistilDP can substantially improve the utility over existing baselines, at least $9.0$ PPL on the Big Patent dataset, with strong privacy parameters, $\epsilon=2$. These promising results progress privacy-preserving compression of autoregressive LLMs. Our code can be accessed here: https://github.com/james-flemings/dp_compress.

Differentially Private Knowledge Distillation via Synthetic Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) show great performance in various tasks, but face deployment challenges from limited memory capacity and bandwidth.
Low-bit weight quantization can save memory and accelerate inference.
Although floating-point (FP) formats show good performance in LLM quantization, they tend to perform poorly with small group sizes or sub-4 bits.
We find the reason is that the absence of asymmetry in previous FP quantization makes it unsuitable for handling asymmetric value distribution of LLM weight tensors.
In this work, we propose asymmetric FP quantization (AFPQ), which sets separate scales for positive and negative values.
Our method leads to large accuracy improvements and can be easily plugged into other quantization methods, including GPTQ and AWQ, for better performance.
Besides, no additional storage is needed compared with asymmetric integer (INT) quantization.
The code is available at https://github.com/zhangsichengsjtu/AFPQ.

AFPQ: Asymmetric Floating Point Quantization for LLMs

Many existing end-to-end systems for hybrid question answering tasks can often be boiled down to a "prompt-and-pray" paradigm, where the user has limited control and insight into the intermediate reasoning steps used to achieve the final result. Additionally, due to the context size limitation of many transformer-based LLMs, it is often not reasonable to expect that the full structured and unstructured context will fit into a given prompt in a zero-shot setting, let alone a few-shot setting. We introduce BlendSQL, a superset of SQLite to act as a unified dialect for orchestrating reasoning across both unstructured and structured data. For hybrid question answering tasks involving multi-hop reasoning, we encode the full decomposed reasoning roadmap into a single interpretable BlendSQL query. Notably, we show that BlendSQL can scale to massive datasets and improve the performance of end-to-end systems while using 35% fewer tokens. Our code is available and installable as a package at https://github.com/parkervg/blendsql.

BlendSQL: A Scalable Dialect for Unifying Hybrid Question Answering in Relational Algebra

Several post-training quantization methods have been applied to large language models (LLMs), and have been shown to perform well down to 8-bits. We find that these methods break down at lower bit precision, and investigate quantization-aware training for LLMs (LLM-QAT) to push quantization levels even further. We propose a data-free distillation method that leverages generations produced by the pre-trained model, which better preserves the original output distribution and allows quantizing any generative model independent of its training data, similar to post-training quantization methods. In addition to quantizing weights and activations, we also quantize the KV cache, which is critical for increasing throughput and supporting long sequence dependencies at current model sizes. We experiment with LLaMA models of sizes 7B, 13B, and 30B, at quantization levels down to 4-bits. We observe large improvements over training-free methods, especially in the low-bit settings.

LLM-QAT: Data-Free Quantization Aware Training for Large Language Models

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions based on facts in knowledge bases. A typical approach to KBQA is semantic parsing, which translates a question into an executable logical form in a formal language. Recent works leverage the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for logical form generation to improve performance. However, although it is validated that LLMs are capable of solving some KBQA problems, there has been little discussion on the differences in LLMs' proficiency in formal languages used in semantic parsing. In this work, we propose to evaluate the understanding and generation ability of LLMs to deal with differently structured logical forms by examining the inter-conversion of natural and formal language through in-context learning of LLMs. Extensive experiments with models of different sizes show that state-of-the-art LLMs can understand formal languages as well as humans, but generating correct logical forms given a few examples remains a challenge. Most importantly, our results also indicate that LLMs exhibit considerable sensitivity. In general, the formal language with a lower formalization level, i.e., the more similar it is to natural language, is more friendly to LLMs. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/Matthewlliu/structure_probe.

How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answering

Within the context of reading comprehension, the task of Distractor Generation (DG) aims to generate several incorrect options to confuse readers. In recent years, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides a potential for unsupervised DG without expensive human-annotated distractor labels. In this paper, we leverage LLMs as a cost-effective annotator to enhance the DG capability of smaller student models. To perform knowledge distilling, we propose a dual task training framework that integrates pseudo distractors from LLMs and answer information as the objective target with a two-stage training process. Moreover, we devise a counterfactual contrastive decoding mechanism for increasing the distracting capability of the DG model. Experiments show that our unsupervised generation method with Bart-base greatly surpasses GPT-3.5-turbo zero-shot performance with only 200$\times$ fewer model parameters. Our proposed unsupervised DG method offers a cost-effective framework for practical reading comprehension applications, without the need of laborious distractor annotation and costly large-size models.

Unsupervised Distractor Generation via Large Language Model Distilling and Counterfactual Contrastive Decoding

Human annotator simulation (HAS) serves as a cost-effective substitute for human evaluation tasks such as data annotation and system assessment. It is important to incorporate the variability present in human evaluation into HAS, since it helps capture diverse subjective interpretations and mitigate potential biases and over-representation. This work introduces a novel framework for modelling variability in HAS. Conditional softmax flow (S-CNF) is proposed to model the distribution of subjective human annotations, which leverages diverse human annotations via meta-learning. This enables efficient generation of annotations that exhibit human variability for unlabelled input. In addition, a wide range of evaluation metrics are adopted to assess the capability and efficiency of HAS systems in predicting the aggregated behaviours of human annotators, matching the distribution of human annotations, and simulating the inter-annotator disagreements. Results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two real-world human evaluation tasks: emotion recognition and toxic speech detection.

Modelling Variability in Human Annotator Simulation

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is a nascent multimodal task that aims to identify named entities, entity types and their corresponding visual regions. GMNER task exhibits two challenging properties: 1) The weak correlation between image-text pairs in social media results in a significant portion of named entities being ungroundable. 2) There exists a distinction between coarse-grained referring expressions commonly used in similar tasks (e.g., phrase localization, referring expression comprehension) and fine-grained named entities. In this paper, we propose RiVEG, a unified framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models (LLMs) as a connecting bridge. This reformulation brings two benefits: 1) It maintains the optimal MNER performance and eliminates the need for employing object detection methods to pre-extract regional features, thereby naturally addressing two major limitations of existing GMNER methods. 2) The introduction of entity expansion expression and Visual Entailment (VE) module unifies Visual Grounding (VG) and Entity Grounding (EG). It enables RiVEG to effortlessly inherit the Visual Entailment and Visual Grounding capabilities of any current or prospective multimodal pretraining models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RiVEG outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks.

LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition

Concept embeddings offer a practical and efficient mechanism for injecting commonsense knowledge into downstream tasks. Their core purpose is often not to predict the commonsense properties of concepts themselves, but rather to identify commonalities, i.e. sets of concepts which share some property of interest. Such commonalities are the basis for inductive generalisation, hence high-quality concept embeddings can make learning easier and more robust. Unfortunately, standard embeddings primarily reflect basic taxonomic categories, making them unsuitable for finding commonalities that refer to more specific aspects (e.g. the colour of objects or the materials they are made of). In this paper, we address this limitation by explicitly modelling the different facets of interest when learning concept embeddings. We show that this leads to embeddings which capture a more diverse range of commonsense properties, and consistently improves results in downstream tasks such as ultra-fine entity typing and ontology completion.

Modelling Commonsense Commonalities with Multi-Facet Concept Embeddings

We introduce SPAGHETTI: Semantic Parsing Augmented Generation for Hybrid English information from Text Tables and Infoboxes, a hybrid question-answering (QA) pipeline that utilizes information from heterogeneous knowledge sources, including knowledge base, text, tables, and infoboxes. Our LLM-augmented approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Compmix dataset, the most comprehensive heterogeneous open-domain QA dataset, with 56.5% exact match (EM) rate. More importantly, manual analysis on a sample of the dataset suggests that SPAGHETTI is more than 90% accurate, indicating that EM is no longer suitable for assessing the capabilities of QA systems today.

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Differentially Private Knowledge Distillation via Synthetic Text Generation

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DP-Rewrite: Towards Reproducibility and Transparency in Differentially Private Text Rewriting

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