Thailand

Conversational recommender systems are an emerging area that has garnered increasing interest in the community, especially with the advancements in large language models (LLMs) that enable sophisticated handling of conversational input. Despite the progress, the field still has many aspects left to explore. The currently available public datasets for conversational recommendation lack specific user preferences and explanations for recommendations, hindering high-quality recommendations. To address such challenges, we present a novel conversational recommendation dataset named PEARL, synthesized with persona- and knowledge-augmented LLM simulators. We obtain detailed persona and knowledge from real-world reviews and construct a large-scale dataset with over 57k dialogues. Our experimental results demonstrate that PEARL contains more specific user preferences, show expertise in the target domain, and provides recommendations more relevant to the dialogue context than those in prior datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of PEARL by showing that our downstream models outperform baselines in both human and automatic evaluations. We release our dataset and code.

ACL 2024

Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset

large language model

data synthesis

conversational recommendation

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.

In this study, we introduce BEnQA, a dataset comprising parallel Bengali and English exam questions for middle and high school levels in Bangladesh. Our dataset consists of approximately 5K questions covering several subjects in science with different types of questions, including factual, application, and reasoning-based questions. We benchmark several Large Language Models (LLMs) with our parallel dataset and observe a notable performance disparity between the models in Bengali and English. We also investigate some prompting methods, and find that Chain-of-Thought prompting is beneficial mostly on reasoning questions, but not so much on factual ones. We also find that appending English translation helps to answer questions in Bengali. Our findings point to promising future research directions for improving the performance of LLMs in Bengali and more generally in low-resource languages.

BEnQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Bengali and English

Tables are recognized for their high information density and widespread usage, serving as essential sources of information. Seeking information from tables (TIS) is a crucial capability for Large Language Models (LLMs), serving as the foundation of knowledge-based Q&A systems. However, this field presently suffers from an absence of thorough and reliable evaluation. This paper introduces a more reliable benchmark for Table Information Seeking (TabIS). To avoid the unreliable evaluation caused by text similarity-based metrics, TabIS adopts a single-choice question format (with two options per question) instead of a text generation format. We establish an effective pipeline for generating options, ensuring their difficulty and quality. Experiments conducted on 12 LLMs reveal that while the performance of GPT-4-turbo is marginally satisfactory, both other proprietary and open-source models perform inadequately. Further analysis shows that LLMs exhibit a poor understanding of table structures, and struggle to balance between TIS performance and robustness against pseudo-relevant tables (common in retrieval-augmented systems). These findings uncover the limitations and potential challenges of LLMs in seeking information from tables. We release our data and code to facilitate further research in this field.

Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to critique and refine their reasoning is crucial for their application in evaluation, feedback provision, and self-improvement. This paper introduces CriticBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess LLMs' abilities to critique and rectify their reasoning across a variety of tasks. CriticBench encompasses five reasoning domains: mathematical, commonsense, symbolic, coding, and algorithmic. It compiles 15 datasets and incorporates responses from three LLM families. Utilizing CriticBench, we evaluate and dissect the performance of 17 LLMs in generation, critique, and correction reasoning, i.e., GQC reasoning. Our findings reveal: (1) a linear relationship in GQC capabilities, with critique-focused training markedly enhancing performance; (2) a task-dependent variation in correction effectiveness, with logic-oriented tasks being more amenable to correction; (3) GQC knowledge inconsistencies that decrease as model size increases; and (4) an intriguing inter-model critiquing dynamic, where stronger models are better at critiquing weaker ones, while weaker models can surprisingly surpass stronger ones in their self-critique. We hope these insights into the nuanced critique-correct reasoning of LLMs will foster further research in LLM critique and self-improvement.

CriticBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Critique-Correct Reasoning

This paper introduce a novel thought prompting approach called ''Everything of Thoughts'' (XoT) for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defy the law of ''Penrose triangle'' of existing thought paradigms, to achieve three key perspectives in thought generation simultaneously: performance, efficiency, and flexibility. XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge and planning capability into thoughts, thereby enhancing LLMs' decision-making capabilities. Through the MCTS-LLM collaborative thought revision framework, XoT autonomously produces high-quality comprehensive cognitive mappings with minimal LLM interactions. Additionally, XoT empowers LLMs to utilize flexible cognitive mappings for solving problems with multiple solutions.

We evaluate XoT on several challenging problem-solving tasks, including Game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube. Our results demonstrate that XoT significantly outperforms existing approaches in various dimensions, showcasing its remarkable proficiency in addressing complex problems across diverse domains. The data and code are available at https://github.com/microsoft/Everything-of-Thoughts-XoT.

Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in integrating safety and knowledge alignment. However, adversarial actors can manipulate these models into generating unsafe responses, and excessive safety alignment can lead to unintended hallucinations. To address these challenges, we introduce UniWiz, a novel 2-step data orchestration framework that unifies safety and knowledge data generation. We propose a "safety-priming" method to generate synthetic safety data and overcome safety bottlenecks. We also inject relevant knowledge into conversations by retrieving factual information from curated sources. UniWiz dataset consists of $17,638$ quality-controlled conversations and $10,000$ augmented preference data. Pretrained models fine-tuned on UniWiz show improvements across various metrics and outperform state-of-the-art instruction-tuned models trained on much larger datasets.

UNIWIZ: A Unified Large Language Model Orchestrated Wizard for Safe Knowledge Grounded Conversations

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated their vast potential across various domains, attributed to their extensive pretraining knowledge and exceptional generalizability. However, LLMs often encounter challenges in generating harmful content when faced with problematic prompts. To address this problem, existing work attempted to implement a gradient ascent based approach to prevent LLMs from producing harmful output. While these methods can be effective, they frequently impact the model utility in responding to normal prompts. To address this gap, we introduce Selective Knowledge negation Unlearning (SKU), a novel unlearning framework for LLMs, designed to eliminate harmful knowledge while preserving utility on normal prompts. Specifically, SKU is consisted of two stages: harmful knowledge acquisition stage and knowledge negation stage. The first stage aims to identify and acquire harmful knowledge within the model, whereas the second is dedicated to remove this knowledge. SKU selectively isolates and removes harmful knowledge in model parameters, ensuring the model's performance remains robust on normal prompts. Our experiments conducted across various LLM architectures demonstrate that SKU identifies a good balance point between removing harmful information and preserving utility.

Towards Safer Large Language Models through Machine Unlearning

Understanding the deep semantics of images is essential in the era dominated by social media. However, current research works primarily on the superficial description of images, revealing a notable deficiency in the systematic investigation of the inherent deep semantics. In this work, we introduce DEEPEVAL, a comprehensive benchmark to assess Large Multimodal Models' (LMMs) capacities of visual deep semantics. DEEPEVAL includes human-annotated dataset and three progressive subtasks: fine-grained description selection, in-depth title matching, and deep semantics understanding. Utilizing DEEPEVAL, we evaluate 9 open-source LMMs and GPT-4V(ision). Our evaluation demonstrates a substantial gap between the deep semantic comprehension capabilities of existing LMMs and humans. For example, GPT-4V is 30% behind humans in understanding deep semantics, even though it achieves human-comparable performance in image description. Further analysis reveals that LMM performance on DEEPEVAL varies according to the specific facets of deep semantics explored, indicating the fundamental challenges remaining in developing LMMs.

Can Large Multimodal Models Uncover Deep Semantics Behind Images?

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the development of various AI conversational agents, including role-playing agents that mimic diverse characters and human behaviors. While prior research has predominantly focused on enhancing the conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style of these agents, there has been a noticeable gap in assessing their social intelligence. In this paper, we introduce SocialBench, the first benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents at both individual and group levels of social interactions. SocialBench is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on this benchmark using mainstream LLMs. 
We find that agents excelling in individual level does not imply their proficiency in group level. 
Experimental results on SocialBench confirm its significance as a testbed for assessing the social interaction of role-playing agents. The benchmark is publicly accessible at https://github.com/X-PLUG/RoleInteract.

SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents

Since the emergence of large language models, prompt learning has become a popular method for optimizing and customizing these models. Special prompts, such as Chain-of-Thought, have even revealed previously unknown reasoning capabilities within these models. However, the progress of discovering effective prompts has been slow, driving a desire for general prompt optimization methods. Unfortunately, few existing prompt learning methods satisfy the criteria of being truly "general", i.e., automatic, discrete, black-box, gradient-free, and interpretable all at once. In this paper, we introduce metaheuristics, a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options, as a promising approach to prompt learning. Within our paradigm, we test six typical methods: hill climbing, simulated annealing, genetic algorithms with/without crossover, tabu search, and harmony search, demonstrating their effectiveness in white-box and black-box prompt learning. Furthermore, we show that these methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown in both reasoning and image generation tasks, opening the door to a cornucopia of possibilities in prompt optimization.

Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristics

Knowledge distillation optimises a smaller student model to behave similarly to a larger teacher model, retaining some of the performance benefits. While this method can improve results on in-distribution examples, it does not necessarily generalise to out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We investigate two complementary methods for improving the robustness of the resulting student models on OOD domains. The first approach augments the distillation with generated unlabeled examples that match the target distribution. The second method upsamples data points among the training set that are similar to the target distribution. When applied on the task of natural language inference (NLI), our experiments on MNLI show that distillation with these modifications outperforms previous robustness solutions. We also find that these methods improve performance on OOD domains even beyond the target domain.

Pearl: A Review-driven Persona-Knowledge Grounded Conversational Recommendation Dataset

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BEnQA: A Question Answering Benchmark for Bengali and English

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