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Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in multilingual translation even with limited bilingual supervision. The major challenges are catastrophic forgetting and parameter interference for finetuning LLMs when provided parallel training data. To address these challenges, we propose LANDeRMT, a Language-Aware Neuron Detecting and Routing framework that selectively finetunes LLMs to Machine Translation with diverse translation training data. In LANDeRMT, we evaluate the awareness of neurons to MT tasks and categorize them into language-general and language-specific neurons. This categorization enables selective parameter updates during finetuning, mitigating parameter interference and catastrophic forgetting issues. For the detected neurons, we further propose a conditional awareness-based routing mechanism to dynamically adjust language-general and language-specific capacity within LLMs, guided by translation signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LANDeRMT is very effective in learning translation knowledge, significantly improving translation quality over various strong baselines for multiple language pairs.

ACL 2024

LANDeRMT: Dectecting and Routing Language-Aware Neurons for Selectively Finetuning LLMs to Machine Translation

mltilingual processing

large language model

machine translation

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.

Humans understand sentences word-by-word, in the order that they hear them. This incrementality entails resolving temporary ambiguities about syntactic relationships. We investigate how humans process these syntactic ambiguities by correlating predictions from incremental generative dependency parsers with timecourse data from people undergoing functional neuroimaging while listening to an audiobook. In particular, we compare competing hypotheses regarding the number of developing syntactic analyses in play during word-by-word comprehension: one vs more than one. This comparison involves evaluating syntactic surprisal from a state-of-the-art dependency parser with LLM-adapted encodings against an existing fMRI dataset. In both English and Chinese data, we find evidence for multipath parsing. Brain regions associated with this multipath effect include bilateral superior temporal gyrus.

Multipath parsing in the brain

The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI’s difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.

More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero’s Diplomacy Play

A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability. In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.

Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles

Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to understand people’s mental states, is an essential ingredient for developing machines with human-level social intelligence. Recent machine learning models, particularly large language models, seem to show some aspects of ToM understanding. However, existing ToM benchmarks use unimodal datasets – either video or text. Human ToM, on the other hand, is more than video or text understanding. People can flexibly reason about another person’s mind based on conceptual representations (e.g., goals, beliefs, plans) extracted from any available data. To address this, we introduce a multimodal Theory of Mind question answering (MMToM-QA) benchmark. MMToM-QA comprehensively evaluates machine ToM both on multimodal data and on different kinds of unimodal data about a person’s activity in a household environment. To engineer multimodal ToM capacity, we propose a novel method, BIP-ALM (Bayesian Inverse Planning Accelerated by Language Models). BIP-ALM extracts unified representations from multimodal data and utilizes language models for scalable Bayesian inverse planning. We conducted a systematic comparison of human performance, BIP-ALM, and state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4. The experiments demonstrate that large language models and large multimodal models still lack robust ToM capacity. BIP-ALM, on the other hand, shows promising results, by leveraging the power of both model-based mental inference and language models.

MMToM-QA: Multimodal Theory of Mind Question Answering

Violence-provoking speech – speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous works have characterized and built tools for detecting other forms of harmful speech, like fear speech and hate speech, our work takes a community-centric approach to studying anti-Asian violence-provoking speech. Using data from ~420k Twitter posts spanning a 3-year duration (January 1, 2020 to February 1, 2023), we develop a codebook to characterize anti-Asian violence-provoking speech and collect a community-crowdsourced dataset to facilitate its large-scale detection using state-of-the-art classifiers. We contrast the capabilities of natural language processing classifiers, ranging from BERT-based to LLM-based classifiers, in detecting violence-provoking speech with their capabilities to detect anti-Asian hateful speech. In contrast to prior work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of such classifiers in detecting hateful speech ($F_1$ = 0.89), our work shows that accurate and reliable detection of violence-provoking speech is a challenging task ($F_1$ = 0.69). We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly the need for proactive interventions to support Asian communities during public health crises.

A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech

Scientific peer review is essential for the quality of academic publications. However, the increasing number of paper submissions to conferences has strained the reviewing process. This surge poses a burden on area chairs who have to carefully read an ever-growing volume of reviews and discern each reviewer's main arguments as part of their decision process. In this paper, we introduce \sys, a summarization method designed to offer a concise yet comprehensive overview of scholarly reviews. Unlike traditional consensus-based methods, \sys extracts both common and unique opinions from the reviews. We introduce novel uniqueness scores based on the Rational Speech Act framework to identify relevant sentences in the reviews. Our method aims to provide a pragmatic glimpse into all reviews, offering a balanced perspective on their opinions. Our experimental results with both automatic metrics and human evaluation show that \sys generates more discriminative summaries than baseline methods in terms of human evaluation while achieving comparable performance with these methods in terms of automatic metrics.

GLIMPSE: Pragmatically Informative Multi-Document Summarization for Scholarly Reviews

Speech recognition and translation systems perform poorly on noisy inputs, which are frequent in realistic environments. Augmenting these systems with visual signals has the potential to improve robustness to noise. 
However, audio-visual (AV) data is only available in limited amounts and for fewer languages than audio-only resources.
To address this gap, we present XLAVS-R, a cross-lingual audio-visual speech representation model for noise-robust speech recognition and translation in over 100 languages. It is designed to maximize the benefits of limited multilingual AV pre-training data, by building on top of audio-only multilingual pre-training and simplifying existing pre-training schemes. 
Extensive evaluation on the MuAViC benchmark shows the strength of XLAVS-R on downstream audio-visual speech recognition and translation tasks, where it outperforms the previous state of the art by up to 18.5% WER and 4.7 BLEU given noisy AV inputs, and enables strong zero-shot audio-visual ability with audio-only fine-tuning.

XLAVS-R: Cross-Lingual Audio-Visual Speech Representation Learning for Noise-Robust Speech Perception

Humans learn social skills through both imitation and social interaction. This social learning process is largely understudied by existing research on building language agents. Motivated by this gap, we propose an interactive learning method, SOTOPIA-π, that improves the social intelligence of language agents. This method leverages behavior cloning and self-reinforcement based training on filtered social interaction data according to large language model (LLM) rating. We show that our training method allows a 7B LLM to reach the social goal completion ability of an expert model (GPT-4-based agent) without the loss of more generic abilities, such as the ability to answer knowledge-based questions. We also demonstrate that this training paradigm uncovers some weaknesses in standard evaluation and safety training paradigms that (1) LLM-based evaluation of social intelligence overestimates the abilities of the language agents trained specifically for social interaction, and that (2) despite not training for better safety or question answering (QA) ability, our methods improve the safety of language agents and maintain general QA ability on the MMLU benchmark.

SOTOPIA-π: Interactive Learning of Socially Intelligent Language Agents

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence is pivotal in reshaping healthcare, enhancing diagnostic precision, and facilitating personalized treatment strategies. One major challenge for healthcare professionals is quickly navigating through long clinical documents to provide timely and effective solutions. Doctors often struggle to draw quick conclusions from these extensive documents. To address this issue and save time for healthcare professionals, an effective summarization model is essential. Most current models assume the data is only text-based. However, patients often include images of their medical conditions in clinical documents. To effectively summarize these multimodal documents, we introduce \textbf{\textit{EDI-Summ}}, an innovative Image-Guided Encoder-Decoder Model. This model uses modality-aware contextual attention on the encoder and an image cross-attention mechanism on the decoder, enhancing the BART base model to create detailed visual-guided summaries. We have tested our model extensively on three multimodal clinical benchmarks involving multimodal question and dialogue summarization tasks. Our analysis demonstrates that \textbf{\textit{EDI-Summ}} outperforms state-of-the-art large language and vision-aware models in these summarization tasks. 



\textbf{Disclaimer}: The work includes vivid medical illustrations, depicting the essential aspects of the subject matter.

From Sights to Insights: Towards Summarization of Multimodal Clinical Documents

Recently, large language models (LLMs) enhanced by self-reflection have achieved promising performance on machine transla004 tion. The key idea is guiding LLMs to generate translation with human-like feedback. However, existing self-reflection methods lack effective feedback information, limiting the translation performance. To address this, we introduce a DUAL-REFLECT framework, leveraging the dual learning of translation tasks to provide effective feedback, thereby enhancing the models’ self-reflective abilities and improving translation performance. The application of this method across various translation tasks has proven its effectiveness in improving translation accuracy and eliminating ambiguities, especially in translation tasks with low-resource language pairs.

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LANDeRMT: Dectecting and Routing Language-Aware Neurons for Selectively Finetuning LLMs to Machine Translation

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