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In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without needing any parameter updates. Although there have been extensive studies on English in-context learning, multilingual in-context learning remains under-explored, and we lack an in-depth understanding of the role of demonstrations in this context. To address this gap, we conduct a multidimensional analysis of multilingual in-context learning, experimenting with 5 models from different model families, 9 datasets covering classification and generation tasks, and 56 typologically diverse languages. Our results reveal that the effectiveness of demonstrations varies significantly across models, tasks, and languages. We also find that strong instruction-following models including Llama 2-Chat, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 are largely insensitive to the quality of demonstrations. Instead, a carefully crafted template often eliminates the benefits of demonstrations for some tasks and languages altogether. These findings show that the importance of demonstrations might be overestimated. Our work highlights the need for granular evaluation across multiple axes towards a better understanding of in-context learning.

ACL 2024

The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysis

demonstration analysis

multilingual evaluation

in-context learning

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. More information will be announced soon.

Among the recently emerged knowledge editing methods, in-context knowledge editing (IKE) has shown respectable abilities on knowledge editing in terms of generalization and specificity. Noting the promising advantages but unexplored issues of IKE, we propose **DistillMIKE** as a novel extension of IKE, i.e., editing **distill**ation of "**M**assive'' **I**n-context **K**nowledge **E**diting in large language models (LLMs), mainly consisting of two expansions; 1) *Massive in-context knowledge editing (MIKE)*, which extends IKE to a massive editing task, aiming to inject not a single edit but a set of massive edits to LLMs; To preserve specificity, our key novel extension is a "selective'' retrieval augmentation, where the retrieval-augmented IKE is only applied to "in-scope'' examples, whereas the unedited model without IKE is employed for "out-of-scope'' ones. 2) *Editing distillation* of MIKE using low-rank adaptation (LoRA), which distills editing abilities of MIKE to parameters of LLMs in a manner of eliminating the need of lengthy in-context demonstrations, thus removing the computational overhead encountered at the inference time. Experimental results on the zsRE and CounterFact datasets demonstrate that MIKE shows the state-of-the-art perfomrances and DistilMIKE show comparable performances with MIKE. Our code is available at https://github.com/JoveReCode/DistillMIKE.git.

DistillMIKE: Editing Distillation of Massive In-Context Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

For humans and robots to collaborate more in the real world, robots need to understand human intentions from the different manner of their behaviors. In our study, we focus on the meaning of adverbs which describe human motions. We propose a topic model, Hierarchical Dirichlet Process-Spectral Mixture Latent Dirichlet Allocation, which concurrently learns the relationship between those human motions and those adverbs by capturing the frequency kernels that represent motion characteristics and the shared topics of adverbs that depict such motions. We trained the model on datasets we made from movies about "walking" and "dancing", and found that our model outperforms representative neural network models in terms of perplexity score. We also demonstrate our model’s ability to determine the adverbs for a given motion and confirmed that the model predicts more appropriate adverbs.

Learning Adverbs with Spectral Mixture Kernels

Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capacity to leverage in-context demonstrations, it is still unclear to what extent they can learn new facts or concept definitions via prompts. To address this question, we examine the capacity of instruction-tuned LLMs to follow in-context concept annotation guidelines for zero-shot sentence labeling tasks. We design guidelines that present different types of factual and counterfactual concept definitions, which are used as prompts for zero-shot sentence classification tasks. Our results show that although concept definitions consistently help in task performance, only the larger models (with 70B parameters or more) have limited ability to work under counterfactual contexts. Importantly, only proprietary models such as GPT-3.5 can recognize nonsensical guidelines, which we hypothesize is due to more sophisticated alignment methods. Finally, we find that Falcon-180B-chat is outperformed by Llama-2-70B-chat is most cases, which indicates that increasing model scale does not guarantee better adherence to guidelines. Altogether, our simple evaluation method reveals significant gaps in concept understanding between the most capable open-source language models and the leading proprietary APIs.

Can Large Language Models Follow Concept Annotation Guidelines? A Case Study on Scientific and Financial Domains

Large language models (LLMs) are proficient at generating fluent text with minimal task-specific supervision. However, their ability to generate rationales for knowledge-intensive tasks (KITs) remains under-explored. Generating rationales for KIT solutions, such as commonsense multiple-choice QA, requires external knowledge to support predictions and refute alternate options. In this work, we consider the task of generating retrieval-augmented rationalization of KIT model predictions via external knowledge guidance within a few-shot setting. Surprisingly, crowd-workers preferred LLM-generated rationales over existing crowd-sourced rationales, generated in a similar knowledge-guided setting, on aspects such as factuality, sufficiency, and convincingness. However, fine-grained evaluation of such rationales highlights the need for further improvements in conciseness, novelty, and domain invariance. Additionally, through an expert-sourced study evaluating the reliability of the rationales, we demonstrate that humans' trust in LLM-generated rationales erodes when communicated faithfully, i.e., without taking model prediction accuracy into account. We find that even instrumenting simple guardrails can be effective for reliable rationalization.

Characterizing Large Language Models as Rationalizers of Knowledge-intensive Tasks

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has marked a notable milestone in the field of artificial intelligence. The conventional evaluation of LLMs primarily relies on existing tasks and benchmarks, raising concerns about test set contamination and the genuine comprehension abilities of LLMs. To address these concerns, we propose to evaluate LLMs by designing new tasks, automatically generating evaluation datasets for the tasks, and conducting detailed error analyses to scrutinize LLMs' adaptability to new tasks, their sensitivity to prompt variations, and their error tendencies. We investigate the capacity of LLMs to adapt to new but simple tasks, especially when they diverge from the models' pre-existing knowledge. Our methodology emphasizes the creation of straightforward tasks, facilitating a precise error analysis to uncover the underlying causes of LLM failures. This strategic approach also aims to uncover effective strategies for enhancing LLM performance based on the detailed error analysis of system output.

Challenging Large Language Models with New Tasks: A Study on their Adaptability and Robustness

Advances in model editing through neuron pruning hold promise for removing undesirable concepts from large language models. However, it remains unclear whether models have the capacity to reacquire pruned concepts after editing. To investigate this, we evaluate concept relearning in models by tracking concept saliency and similarity in pruned neurons during retraining for named entity recognition tasks. Our findings reveal that models can quickly regain performance post-pruning by relocating advanced concepts to earlier layers and reallocating pruned concepts to primed neurons with similar semantics. This suggests that models exhibit polysemantic capacities and can blend old and new concepts in individual neurons. While neuron pruning provides interpretability into model concepts, our results highlight the challenges of permanent concept removal for improved model *safety*. Monitoring concept reemergence and developing techniques to mitigate relearning of unsafe concepts will be important directions for more robust model editing. Overall, our work strongly demonstrates the resilience and fluidity of concept representations in LLMs post concept removal.

Large Language Models Relearn Removed Concepts

Large language models show compelling performance on reasoning tasks but they tend to perform much worse in languages other than English. This is unsurprising given that their training data largely consists of English text and instructions. A typical solution is to translate instruction data into all languages of interest, and then train on the resulting multilingual data, which is called translate-training. This approach not only incurs high cost, but also results in poorly translated data due to the non-standard formatting of mathematical chain-of-thought. In this paper, we explore the benefits of question alignment, where we train the model to translate reasoning questions into English by finetuning on X-English parallel question data. In this way we perform targeted, in-domain language alignment which makes best use of English instruction data to unlock the LLMs' multilingual reasoning abilities. Experimental results on LLaMA2-13B show that question alignment leads to consistent improvements over the translate-training approach: an average improvement of 11.3% and 16.1% accuracy across ten languages on the MGSM and MSVAMP multilingual reasoning benchmarks.

Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoning

For a LLM to be trustworthy, its confidence level should be well-calibrated with its actual performance. While it is now common sense that LLM performances are greatly impacted by prompts, the confidence calibration in prompting LLMs has yet to be thoroughly explored.
In this paper, we explore how different prompting strategies influence LLM confidence calibration and how it could be improved. We conduct extensive experiments on six prompting methods in the question-answering context and we observe that, while these methods help improve the expected LLM calibration, they also trigger LLMs to be over-confident when responding to some instances.
Inspired by human cognition, we propose Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) prompting, which improves the LLM calibration in two steps. First, FaR elicits the known "facts" that are relevant to the input prompt from the LLM. And then it asks the model to "reflect" over them to generate the final answer.
Experiments show that FaR prompting achieves significantly better calibration; it lowers the Expected Calibration Error by 23.5% on our multi-purpose QA tasks. 
Notably, FaR prompting even elicits the capability of verbally expressing concerns in less confident scenarios, which helps trigger retrieval augmentation for solving these harder instances.

Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models

Recently, there is a surge in interest surrounding video large language models (Video LLMs). However, existing benchmarks fail to provide a comprehensive feedback on the temporal perception ability of Video LLMs. On the one hand, most of them are unable to distinguish between different temporal aspects (e.g., speed, direction) and thus cannot reflect the nuanced performance on these specific aspects. On the other hand, they are limited in the diversity of task formats (e.g., only multi-choice QA), which hinders the understanding of how temporal perception performance may vary across different types of tasks. Motivated by these two problems, we propose the \textbf{TempCompass} benchmark, which introduces a diversity of temporal aspects and task formats. To collect high-quality test data, we devise two novel strategies: (1) In video collection, we construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect, which prevents Video LLMs from leveraging single-frame bias or language priors. (2) To collect the task instructions, we propose a paradigm where humans first annotate meta-information for a video and then an LLM generates the instruction. We also design an LLM-based approach to automatically and accurately evaluate the responses from Video LLMs. Based on TempCompass, we comprehensively evaluate 9 state-of-the-art (SOTA) Video LLMs and 3 Image LLMs, and reveal the discerning fact that these models exhibit notably poor temporal perception ability.

TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos?

Existing large language models struggle to support numerous low-resource languages, particularly the extremely low-resource ones, for which there is minimal training data available for effective parameter updating. We thus investigate whether LLMs can learn a new language on the fly solely through prompting. To study this question, we collect a research suite for Zhuang, a language supported by no LLMs currently. We introduce DiPMT++, a framework for adapting LLMs to unseen languages by in-context learning. Using a dictionary and 5K parallel sentences only, DiPMT++ significantly enhances the performance of GPT-4 from 0 to 16 BLEU for Chinese-to-Zhuang translation and achieves 32 BLEU for Zhuang-to-Chinese translation. We also validate the effectiveness of our framework on Kalamang, another unseen language. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of DiPMT++ in aiding humans in translating completely unseen languages, which could contribute to the preservation of linguistic diversity.

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The Impact of Demonstrations on Multilingual In-Context Learning: A Multidimensional Analysis

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DistillMIKE: Editing Distillation of Massive In-Context Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models

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