Thailand

Psychological inoculation, a strategy designed to build resistance against persuasive misinformation, has shown efficacy in curbing its spread and mitigating its adverse effects at early stages. Despite its effectiveness, the design and optimization of these inoculations typically demand substantial human and financial resources, primarily due to the need for repeated experimental trials. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Simulated Misinformation Susceptibility Tests (SMISTs), leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate participant responses in misinformation studies. SMIST employs a life experience-driven simulation methodology, which accounts for various aspects of participants&#39; backgrounds, to mitigate common issues of caricatures and stereotypes in LLM simulations and enhance response diversity. Our extensive experimentation demonstrates that SMIST, utilizing GPT-4 as the backend model, yields results that align closely with those obtained from human-subject studies in misinformation susceptibility. This alignment suggests that LLMs can effectively serve as proxies in evaluating the impact of psychological inoculations. Moreover, SMIST offers the critical benefit of being applicable to emerging or anticipated misinformation scenarios without exposing human participants to potentially harmful content. This characteristic of SMIST not only preserves participant safety but also expands the scope of misinformation research to include more sensitive or speculative topics.

ACL 2024

Simulated Misinformation Susceptibility (SMISTS): Enhancing Misinformation Research with Large Language Model Simulations

large language model simulation

simulated misinformation susceptibility test

misinformation susceptibility test

natural language processing

computational social science

Psychological inoculation, a strategy designed to build resistance against persuasive misinformation, has shown efficacy in curbing its spread and mitigating its adverse effects at early stages. Despite its effectiveness, the design and optimization of these inoculations typically demand substantial human and financial resources, primarily due to the need for repeated experimental trials. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Simulated Misinformation Susceptibility Tests (SMISTs), leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to simulate participant responses in misinformation studies. SMIST employs a life experience-driven simulation methodology, which accounts for various aspects of participants' backgrounds, to mitigate common issues of caricatures and stereotypes in LLM simulations and enhance response diversity. Our extensive experimentation demonstrates that SMIST, utilizing GPT-4 as the backend model, yields results that align closely with those obtained from human-subject studies in misinformation susceptibility. This alignment suggests that LLMs can effectively serve as proxies in evaluating the impact of psychological inoculations. Moreover, SMIST offers the critical benefit of being applicable to emerging or anticipated misinformation scenarios without exposing human participants to potentially harmful content. This characteristic of SMIST not only preserves participant safety but also expands the scope of misinformation research to include more sensitive or speculative topics.

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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.

The rapid proliferation of online content necessitates effective summarization methods, among which dynamic aspect-based summarization stands out. Unlike its traditional counterpart, which assumes a fixed set of known aspects, this approach adapts to the varied aspects of the input text. We introduce a novel multi-objective learning framework employing a Longformer-Encoder-Decoder for this task. The framework optimizes aspect number prediction, minimizes disparity between generated and reference summaries for each aspect, and maximizes dissimilarity across aspect-specific summaries. Extensive experiments show our method significantly outperforms baselines on three diverse datasets, largely due to the effective alignment of generated and reference aspect counts without sacrificing single-aspect summarization quality.

MODABS: Multi-Objective Learning for Dynamic Aspect-Based Summarization

Real-world news comments pose a significant challenge due to their noisy and ambiguous nature, which complicates their modeling for clustering and summarization tasks. Most previous research has predominantly focused on extractive summarization methods within specific constraints. This paper concentrates on Clustering and Abstractive Summarization of online news Comments (CASC). First, we introduce an enhanced fast clustering algorithm that maintains a dynamic similarity threshold to ensure the high density of each comment cluster being built. Moreover, we pioneer the exploration of tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) through a chain-of-thought strategy to generate summaries for each comment cluster. On the other hand, a notable challenge in CASC research is the scarcity of evaluation data. To address this problem, we design an annotation scheme and contribute a manual test suite tailored for CASC. Experimental results on the test suite demonstrate the effectiveness of our improvements to the baseline methods. In addition, the quantitative and qualitative analyses illustrate the adaptability of our approach to real-world news comment scenarios.

Comprehensive Abstractive Comment Summarization with Dynamic Clustering and Chain of Thought

Zero-shot Relation Extraction (ZSRE) aims to predict unseen relations between entity pairs from input sentences. Existing prototype-based ZSRE methods encode relation descriptions into prototype embeddings and predict by measuring the similarity between sentence embeddings and prototype embeddings. However, these methods often overlook abundant side information of relations and suffer from a significant encoding gap between prototypes and sentences, limiting performance. To this end, we propose a framework named AlignRE, based on two Alignment methods for ZSRE. Specifically, we present a novel perspective centered on encoding schema alignment to enhance prototype-based ZSRE methods. We utilize well-designed prompt-tuning to bridge the encoding gap. To improve prototype quality, we explore and leverage multiple side information and propose a prototype aggregation method based on semantic alignment to create comprehensive relation prototype representations. We conduct experiments on FewRel and Wiki-ZSL datasets and consistently outperform state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our method exhibits substantially faster performance and reduces the need for extensive manual labor in prototype construction. Code is available at https://github.com/lizehan1999/AlignRE.

AlignRE: An Encoding and Semantic Alignment Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as LLaMA and T5, have shown exceptional performance across various tasks through fine-tuning. Although low-rank adaption (LoRA) has emerged to cheaply fine-tune these LLMs on downstream tasks, their deployment is still hindered by the vast model scale and computational costs. 
Post-training model pruning offers a way to compress LLMs. However, the current pruning methods designed for LLMs are not compatible with LoRA. This is due to their utilization of unstructured pruning on LLMs, impeding the merging of LoRA weights, or their dependence on the gradients of pre-trained weights to guide pruning, which can impose significant memory overhead.
To this end, we propose LoRAPrune, a new framework that delivers an accurate structured pruned model in a highly memory-efficient manner. Specifically, we first design a LoRA-guided pruning criterion, which uses the weights and gradients of LoRA, rather than the gradients of pre-trained weights for importance estimation. We subsequently integrate this criterion into an iterative pruning process, effectively removing redundant channels and heads. 
Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our LoRAPrune over existing approaches on the LLaMA series models.
At a 50\% compression rate, LoRAPrune demonstrates superior performance over LLM-Pruner, achieving a reduction in perplexity by 4.81 on WikiText2 and 3.46 on PTB, while also decreasing memory usage by 52.6\%.
Besides, LoRAPrune also matches semi-structural pruning across multiple LLMs, proving its wide applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/aim-uofa/LoRAPrune.

LoRAPrune: Structured Pruning Meets Low-Rank Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Structured pruning is a widely used technique for reducing the size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), but current methods often overlook the potential of compressing the hidden dimension $d$ in PLMs, a dimension critical to model size and efficiency. This paper introduces a novel structured pruning approach, Structured Pruning with PCA Projection ($\rm SP^3$), targeting the effective reduction of $d$ by projecting features into a space defined by principal components before masking. 
Extensive experiments on benchmarks (GLUE and SQuAD) show that \smodel can reduce $d$ by 70\%, compress 94\% of the $\rm BERT_{base}$ model, and maintain over 96\% accuracy and outperform other methods that compress $d$ by 6\% in accuracy at the same compression ratio. $\rm SP^3$ has also proven effective with other models, including OPT and Llama.
Our data and code are available at https://github.com/hyx1999/SP3

$\rm SP^3$: Enhancing Structured Pruning via PCA Projection

With the proliferation of digital communication, dialogue summarization has become increasingly important. However, it still faces a shortage of data. To address this issue, we developed **Gen**erative **D**ata Augmentation Strategy Leveraging **Ex**ternal Data for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (**GENDEX**), which is based on the hypothetical foundation that texts containing people and their interpersonal interactions can potentially serve as summaries of corresponding dialogues. We filter short texts containing people and resolve coreferences for better contextual analysis. We then identify the semantic roles of words within the texts and filter them based on the patterns observed in the dialogue summarization datasets. Using these texts, we generate synthetic dialogues through a controlled generation method. To better leverage the augmented data, we utilize noise-tolerant training to fine-tune the summarization model. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showing its robust performance, generalizability, and scalability. Moreover, performance improvements by *GENDEX* were observed regardless of complexity of dialogues. The code is available at https://github.com/DMCB-GIST/GENDEX.

GENDEX: Generative Data Augmentation Strategy Leveraging External Data for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable comprehension abilities but face challenges in GPU memory usage during inference, hindering their scalability for real-time applications like chatbots. To accelerate inference, we store computed keys and values (KV cache) in the GPU memory. Existing methods study the KV cache compression to reduce memory by pruning the pre-computed KV cache. However, they neglect the inter-layer dependency between layers and huge memory consumption in pre-computation. To explore these deficiencies, we find that the number of crucial keys and values that influence future generations decreases layer by layer and we can extract them by the consistency in attention weights. Based on the findings, we propose PyramidInfer, a method that compresses the KV cache by layer-wise retaining crucial context. PyramidInfer saves significant memory by computing fewer keys and values without sacrificing performance. Experimental results show PyramidInfer improves 2.2x throughput compared to Accelerate with over 54% GPU memory reduction in KV cache.

PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference

Answering Questions over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) is key to well-functioning autonomous language agents in various real-life applications. To improve the neural-symbolic reasoning capabilities of language agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in KGQA, we propose the Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Agent (DARA) framework. DARA effectively parses questions into formal queries through a dual mechanism: high-level iterative task decomposition and low-level task grounding. Importantly, DARA can be efficiently trained with a small number of high-quality reasoning trajectories. Our experimental results demonstrate that DARA fine-tuned on LLMs (e.g. Llama-2-7B, Mistral) outperforms both in-context learning-based agents with GPT-4 and alternative fine-tuned agents, across different benchmarks, making such models more accessible for real-life applications. We also show that DARA attains performance comparable to state-of-the-art enumerating-and-ranking-based methods for KGQA.

$\texttt{DARA}$: Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Autonomous Language Agent for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

According to the Entropy Rate Constancy (ERC) principle, the information density of a text is approximately constant over its length. Whether this principle also applies to nonverbal communication signals is still under investigation. We perform empirical analyses of video-recorded dialogue data and investigate whether listener gaze, as an important nonverbal communication signal, adheres to the ERC principle. Results show (1) that the ERC principle holds for listener gaze; and (2) that the two linguistic factors syntactic complexity and turn transition potential are weakly correlated with local entropy of listener gaze.

How Much Does Nonverbal Communication Conform to Entropy Rate Constancy?: A Case Study on Listener Gaze in Interaction

Knowledge Graph (KG) inductive reasoning, which aims to infer missing facts from new KGs that are not seen during training, has been widely adopted in various applications. One critical challenge of KG inductive reasoning is handling low-resource scenarios with scarcity in both textual and structural aspects. In this paper, we attempt to address this challenge with Large Language Models (LLMs). Particularly, we utilize the state-of-the-art LLMs to generate a graph-structural prompt to enhance the pre-trained Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which brings us new methodological insights into the KG inductive reasoning methods, as well as high generalizability in practice. On the methodological side, we introduce a novel pretraining and prompting framework ProLINK, designed for low-resource inductive reasoning across arbitrary KGs without requiring additional training. On the practical side, we experimentally evaluate our approach on 36 low-resource KG datasets and find that ProLINK outperforms previous methods in three-shot, one-shot, and zero-shot reasoning tasks, exhibiting average 
performance improvements by 20%, 45%, and 147%, respectively. Furthermore, ProLINK demonstrates strong robustness for various LLM promptings as well as full-shot scenarios.

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