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Despite recent advances in large language models, building dependable and deployable NLP models typically requires abundant, high-quality training data. However, task-specific data is not available for many use cases, and manually curating task-specific data is labor-intensive. Recent work has studied prompt-driven synthetic data generation using large language models, but these generated datasets tend to lack complexity and diversity. To address these limitations, we introduce a method, _DataTune_, to make better use of existing, publicly available datasets to improve automatic dataset generation. DataTune performs _dataset transformation_, enabling the repurposing of publicly available datasets into a format that is directly aligned with the specific requirements of target tasks. On a diverse set of language-based tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, we find that finetuning language models via DataTune improves over a few-shot prompting baseline by 49% and improves over existing methods that use synthetic or retrieved training data by 34%. We find that dataset transformation significantly increases the diversity and difficulty of generated data on many tasks. We release a Python package and open-source repository to make this method accessible to the community (URL will be added upon acceptance).

ACL 2024

Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasets

synthetic dataset generation

retrieval-augmented generation

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.

Although language model performance across diverse tasks continues to improve, these models still struggle to understand and explain the beliefs of other people. This skill requires perspective-taking, the process of conceptualizing the point of view of another person. Perspective taking becomes challenging when the text reflects more personal and potentially more controversial beliefs.We explore this task through natural language generation of responses to conflict situations. We evaluate novel modifications to recent architectures for conditioning generation on an individual's comments and self-disclosure statements. Our work extends the Social-Chem-101 corpus, using 95k judgements written by 6k authors from English Reddit data, for each of whom we obtained 20-500 self-disclosure statements. Our evaluation methodology borrows ideas from both personalized generation and theory of mind literature. Our proposed perspective-taking models outperform recent work, especially the twin encoder model conditioned on self-disclosures with high similarity to the conflict situation.

Perspective Taking through Generating Responses to Conflict Situations

Multi-document summarization (MDS) is a challenging task, often decomposed to subtasks of salience and redundancy detection, followed by text generation.
In this context, alignment of corresponding sentences between a reference summary and its source documents has been leveraged to generate training data for some of the component tasks. Yet, this enabling alignment step has usually been applied heuristically on the sentence level on a limited number of subtasks.
In this paper, we propose extending the summary-source alignment framework by (1) applying it at the more fine-grained proposition span level, (2) annotating alignment manually in a multi-document setup, and (3) revealing the great potential of summary-source alignments to yield several datasets for at least six different tasks. Specifically, for each of the tasks, we release a manually annotated test set that was derived automatically from the alignment annotation. We also release development and train sets in the same way, but from automatically derived alignments.
Using the datasets, each task is demonstrated with baseline models and corresponding evaluation metrics to spur future research on this broad challenge.

The Power of Summary-Source Alignments

Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has played a crucial role in achieving the remarkable zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in modern large language models (LLMs). However, the annotation efforts required to produce high quality responses for instructions are becoming prohibitively expensive, especially as the number of tasks spanned by instruction datasets continues to increase. Active learning is effective in identifying useful subsets of samples to annotate from an unlabeled pool, but its high computational cost remains a barrier to its widespread applicability in the context of LLMs. To mitigate the annotation cost of SFT and circumvent the computational bottlenecks of active learning, we propose using experimental design. Experimental design techniques select the most informative samples to label, and typically maximize some notion of uncertainty and/or diversity. In our work, we implement a framework that evaluates several existing and novel experimental design techniques and find that these methods consistently yield significant gains in label efficiency with little computational overhead. On generative tasks, to reach the same generalization performance, our methods save 50% of the annotation cost compared to random sampling.

An Experimental Design Framework for Label-Efficient Supervised Finetuning of Large Language Models

While Language Agents have achieved promising success by placing Large Language Models at the core of a more versatile design that dynamically interacts with the external world, the existing approaches neglect the notion of uncertainty during these interactions. We present the Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent (UALA), a framework that orchestrates the interaction between the agent and the external world using uncertainty quantification. Compared with other well-known counterparts like ReAct, our extensive experiments across 3 representative tasks (HotpotQA, StrategyQA, MMLU) and various LLM sizes demonstrate that UALA brings a significant improvement of performance, while having a substantially lower reliance on the external world (i.e., reduced number of tool calls and tokens). Our analyses provide various insights including the great potential of UALA compared with agent fine-tuning, and underscore the unreliability of verbalised confidence of LLMs as a proxy for uncertainty.

Towards Uncertainty-Aware Language Agent

Transformer Architecture Search (TAS) methods aim to automate searching for the optimal Transformer architecture configurations for a given task. However, they are impeded by the prohibitive cost of evaluating Transformer architectures. Recently, several Zero-Shot TAS methods have been proposed to mitigate this problem by utilizing zero-cost proxies to evaluate Transformer architectures without training. Unfortunately, they are limited to specific computer vision or natural language processing tasks. Nonetheless, most of them are developed based on empirical observations and lack theoretical guarantees. To solve this problem, we develop a new zero-cost proxy called NTSR that combines two theoretically-inspired indicators to measure the trainability and expressivity of Transformer networks separately. We then integrate it into an effective regularized evolution framework called ETAS to demonstrate its efficacy on various tasks. The results show that our proposed NTSR proxy can consistently achieve a higher correlation with the true performance of Transformer networks on both computer vision and natural language processing tasks. Further, it can significantly accelerate the search process for finding the best-performing Transformer architecture configurations.

ETAS: Zero-Shot Transformer Architecture Search via Network Trainability and Expressivity

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has emerged as an effective method for adapting pre-trained language models to various tasks efficiently. Recently, there has been a growing interest in transferring knowledge from one or multiple tasks to the downstream target task to achieve performance improvements. However, current approaches typically either train adapters on individual tasks or distill shared knowledge from source tasks, failing to fully exploit task-specific knowledge and the correlation between source and target tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose PEMT, a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework based on multi-task transfer learning. PEMT extends the mixture-of-experts (MoE) framework to capture the transferable knowledge as a weighted combination of adapters trained on source tasks. These weights are determined by a gated unit, measuring the correlation between the target and each source task using task description prompt vectors. To fully exploit the task-specific knowledge, we also propose the Task Sparsity Loss to improve the sparsity of the gated unit. We conduct experiments on a broad range of tasks over 17 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate our PEMT yields stable improvements over full fine-tuning, and state-of-the-art PEFT and knowledge transferring methods on various tasks. The results highlight the effectiveness of our method which is capable of sufficiently exploiting the knowledge and correlation features across multiple tasks.

PEMT: Multi-Task Correlation Guided Mixture-of-Experts Enables Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning

Recent advances in LLMs have sparked a debate on whether they understand text. In this position paper, we argue that opponents in this debate hold different definitions for understanding, and particularly differ in their view on the role of consciousness. To substantiate this claim, we propose a thought experiment involving an open-source chatbot Z which excels on every possible benchmark, seemingly without subjective experience. We ask whether Z is capable of understanding, and show that different schools of thought within seminal AI research seem to answer this question differently, uncovering their terminological disagreement. Moving forward, we propose two distinct working definitions for understanding which explicitly acknowledge the question of consciousness, and draw connections with a rich literature in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

Do Zombies Understand? A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Exploration of Machine Cognition

Relation triplet extraction is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify semantic relationships between entities in text. It is particularly challenging in the zero-shot setting, i.e., zero-shot relation triplet extraction (ZeroRTE), where the relation sets between training and test are disjoint. Existing methods deal with this task by integrating relations into prompts, which may lack sufficient understanding of the unseen relations. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel Two-Agent Game (TAG) approach to deliberate and debate the semantics of unseen relations. TAG consists of two agents, a generator and an extractor. They iteratively interact in three key steps: attempting, criticizing, and rectifying. This enables the agents to fully debate and understand the unseen relations. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvement over ALBERT-Large, BART, and
GPT3.5, without incurring additional inference costs in all cases. Remarkably, our method outperforms strong baselines by a significant margin, achieving an impressive 6%-16% increase in F1 scores, particularly when dealing
with FewRel with five unseen relations.

A Two-Agent Game for Zero-shot Relation Triplet Extraction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: $\textit{Prompt Chaining}$ and $\textit{Stepwise Prompt}$. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization

Detecting temporal semantic changes of words is an important task for various NLP applications that must make time-sensitive predictions.
Lexical Semantic Change Detection (SCD) task involves predicting whether a given target word, $w$, changes its meaning between two different text corpora, $C_1$ and $C_2$.
For this purpose, we propose a supervised two-staged SCD method that uses existing Word-in-Context (WiC) datasets.
In the first stage, for a target word $w$, we learn two sense-aware encoders that represent the meaning of $w$ in a given sentence selected from a corpus.
Next, in the second stage, we learn a sense-aware distance metric that compares the semantic representations of a target word across all of its occurrences in $C_1$ and $C_2$.
Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets for SCD show that our proposed method achieves strong performance in multiple languages.
Additionally, our method achieves significant improvements on WiC benchmarks compared to a sense-aware encoder with conventional distance functions.

Better Synthetic Data by Retrieving and Transforming Existing Datasets

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