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Communication barriers have long posed challenges for users of Alternate and Augmentative Communication (AAC). In AAC, effective conversational aids are not solely about harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities but more about ensuring these technologies resonate deeply with AAC user&#39;s unique communication challenges. We aim to bridge the gap between generic outputs and genuine human interactions by integrating advanced Conversational AI with personal narratives. While existing solutions offer generic responses, a considerable gap in tailoring outputs reflecting an AAC user&#39;s intent must be addressed. Thus, we propose to create a custom conversational dataset centered on the experiences and words of a primary AAC user to fine-tune advanced language models. Additionally, we employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method, drawing context from a summarized version of authored content by the AAC user. This combination ensures that responses are contextually relevant and deeply personal. Preliminary evaluations underscore its transformative potential, with automated metrics and human assessments showcasing significantly enhanced response quality.

EMNLP 2024

Empowering AAC Users: A Systematic Integration of Personal Narratives with Conversational AI

user-specific language models

personalized conversational ai

retrieval-augmented generation (rag)

augmentative and alternative communication (aac)

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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ACL-IJCNLP 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Communication barriers have long posed challenges for users of Alternate and Augmentative Communication (AAC). In AAC, effective conversational aids are not solely about harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities but more about ensuring these technologies resonate deeply with AAC user's unique communication challenges. We aim to bridge the gap between generic outputs and genuine human interactions by integrating advanced Conversational AI with personal narratives. While existing solutions offer generic responses, a considerable gap in tailoring outputs reflecting an AAC user's intent must be addressed. Thus, we propose to create a custom conversational dataset centered on the experiences and words of a primary AAC user to fine-tune advanced language models. Additionally, we employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method, drawing context from a summarized version of authored content by the AAC user. This combination ensures that responses are contextually relevant and deeply personal. Preliminary evaluations underscore its transformative potential, with automated metrics and human assessments showcasing significantly enhanced response quality.

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

Product classification is a crucial task in international trade, as compliance regulations are verified and taxes and duties are applied based on product categories. Manual classification of products is time-consuming and error-prone, and the sheer volume of products imported and exported renders the manual process infeasible. Consequently, e-commerce platforms and enterprises involved in international trade have turned to automatic product classification using machine learning. However, current approaches do not consider the real-world challenges associated with product classification, such as very abbreviated and incomplete product descriptions. In addition, recent advancements in generative Large Language Models (LLMs) and their reasoning capabilities are mainly untapped in product classification and e-commerce. In this research, we explore the real-life challenges of industrial classification and we propose data perturbations that allow for realistic data simulation. Furthermore, we employ LLM-based product classification to improve the robustness of the prediction in presence of incomplete data. Our research shows that LLMs with in-context learning outperform the supervised approaches in the clean-data scenario. Additionally, we illustrate that LLMs are significantly more robust than the supervised approaches when data attacks are present.

LLM-Based Robust Product Classification in Commerce and Compliance

The success of large language models (LLMs) facilitate many parties to fine-tune LLMs on their own private data. However, this practice raises privacy concerns due to the memorization of LLMs. Existing solutions, such as utilizing synthetic data for substitution, struggle to simultaneously improve performance and preserve privacy. They either rely on a local model for generation, resulting in a performance decline, or take advantage of APIs, directly exposing the data to API servers. To address this issue, we propose KnowledgeSG, a novel client-server framework which enhances synthetic data quality and improves model performance while ensuring privacy. We achieve this by learning local knowledge from the private data with differential privacy (DP) and distilling professional knowledge from the server. Additionally, inspired by federated learning, we transmit models rather than data between the client and server to prevent privacy leakage. Extensive experiments in medical and financial domains demonstrate the effectiveness of KnowledgeSG. Our code is now publicly available at https://github.com/wwh0411/KnowledgeSG.

KnowledgeSG: Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Text Generation with Knowledge Distillation from Server

Our work studies Multilingual Federated Learning (FL), a decentralized paradigm that, although promising, grapples with issues such as client drift and suboptimal generalization in diverse, multilingual settings. We highlight limitations in existing approaches to generalize across both actively participating and inactive client language pairs. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce FedSparseNet, which incorporates sparse-network training, and LoRA, based on Low-Rank Adaptation. These approaches maintain the model's fidelity to its pretraining distribution, thereby ensuring robust performance on both seen and unseen language pairs, while simultaneously enhancing communication efficiency by selectively transmitting trainable parameters. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that FedSparseNet outperforms conventional FL models on both seen and unseen clients, while LoRA shows remarkable improvements in unseen client performance. Additionally, we propose the Continuous Relative Robustness Metric, a novel metric to uniformly assess a model's performance across diverse language pairs

Less is Fed More: Sparsity Reduces Feature Distortion in Federated Learning

The development of agents powered by large language models (LLMs) to accomplish complex high-level user intents, has attracted significant attention recently. However, employing LLMs with billions of parameters (e.g., GPT-4) may incur substantial costs on top of handcrafting extensive prompts. To address this, we introduce a Grounded Language Agent for Intelligent Web Interactions, named GLAINTEL. GLAINTEL employs Flan-T5 as its backbone and is flexible in training in various settings: unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Specifically, we tackle both the challenge of learning without human demonstrations and the opportunity to leverage human demonstrations effectively when those are available. Additionally, we explore unsupervised domain adaptation for cases where demonstrations are limited to a specific domain. Experimental evaluations across diverse setups demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAINTEL in unsupervised settings, outperforming in-context learning-based approaches that employ larger models with up to 540 billion parameters. Surprisingly, behavioral cloning-based methods that straightforwardly use human demonstrations do not outperform unsupervised variants of GLAINTEL. Additionally, we show that combining human demonstrations with reinforcement learningbased training yields results comparable to methods utilizing GPT-4.

Grounded Language Agent for Product Search via Intelligent Web Interactions

Despite the advances in the abstractive summarization task using Large Language Models (LLM), there is a lack of research that assess their abilities to easily adapt to different domains. We evaluate the domain adaptation abilities of a wide range of LLMs on the summarization task across various domains in both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. We also present AdaptEval, the first domain adaptation evaluation suite. AdaptEval includes a domain benchmark and a set of metrics to facilitate the analysis of domain adaptation. Our results demonstrate that LLMs exhibit comparable performance in the in-context learning setting, regardless of their parameter scale.

AdaptEval: Evaluating Large Language Models on Domain Adaptation for Text Summarization

Ensuring robust safety measures across a wide range of scenarios is crucial for user-facing systems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate valuable data for safety measures, they often exhibit distributional biases, focusing on common scenarios and neglecting rare but critical cases. This can undermine the effectiveness of safety protocols developed using such data. To address this, we propose a novel framework that integrates active learning with clustering to guide LLM generation, enhancing their representativeness and robustness in safety scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by constructing a dataset of 5.4K potential safety violations through an iterative process involving LLM generation and an active learner model's feedback. Our results show that the proposed framework produces a more representative set of safety scenarios without requiring prior knowledge of the underlying data distribution. Additionally, data acquired through our method improves the accuracy and F1 score of both the active learner model as well models outside the scope of active learn ing process, highlighting its broad applicability.

Active Learning for Robust and Representative LLM Generation in Safety-Critical Scenarios

Customizing text style or content typically involves extensive fine-tuning of large models, demanding significant data and training. Traditional unsupervised approaches using sampling often yield low diversity and creativity. We present a novel discrete Langevin proposal that samples directly from the categorical token distribution, overcoming these limitations. By adapting the continuous Langevin algorithm for discrete spaces, our approach enables efficient gradient-based sampling. Evaluations on style transfer tasks demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, BLEU, BERTScore, and diversity. Our proposed approach paves way for advanced customized text generation with desired styles as well as allows future scope for prompt generation for model safeguarding and jail-breaking.

Customized Style Transfer using Discrete Sampling

Although people are impressed by the content generation skills of large language models, the use of LLMs, such as ChatGPT, is limited by the domain grounding of the content. The correctness and groundedness of the generated content need to be based on a verified context, such as results from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). One important issue when adapting LLMs to a customized domain is that the generated responses are often incomplete, or the additions are not verified and may even be hallucinated. Prior studies on hallucination detection have focused on evaluation metrics, which are not easily adaptable to dynamic domains and can be vulnerable to attacks like jail-breaking. In this work, we propose 1) a post-processing algorithm that leverages knowledge triplets in RAG context to correct hallucinations and 2) a dual-decoder model that fuses RAG context to guide the generation process.

Trustful LLMs: Customizing and Grounding Text Generation with knowledge bases and Dual Decoders

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of machine learning, yet current benchmarks often fall short in capturing the diverse behavior of these models in real-world applications. A benchmark’s usefulness is determined by its ability to clearly differentiate between models of varying capabilities (separability) and closely align with human preferences. Existing frameworks like Alpaca-Eval 2.0 LC (Dubois et al., 2024a) and Arena-Hard v0.1 (Li et al., 2024a) are limited by their focus on generalpurpose queries and lack of diversity across domains such as law, medicine, and multilingual contexts. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a novel data pipeline that curates diverse, domain-specific evaluation sets tailored for LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks. Our approach leverages a combination of manual curation, semi-supervised learning to generate clusters, and stratified sampling to ensure balanced representation across a wide range of domains and languages. The resulting evaluation set, which includes 1573 samples across 14 categories, demonstrates high separability (84%) across ten topranked models, and agreement (84%) with Chatbot Arena and (0.915) Spearman correlation. The agreement values are 9% better than Arena Hard and 20% better than AlpacaEval 2.0 LC, while the Spearman coefficient is 0.7 more than the next best benchmark, showcasing a significant improvement in the usefulness of the benchmark. We further provide an open-source evaluation tool that enables fine-grained analysis of model performance across user-defined categories, offering valuable insights for practitioners. This work contributes to the ongoing effort to enhance the transparency, diversity, and effectiveness of LLM evaluation methodologies.

Constructing Domain-Specific Evaluation Sets for LLM-as-a-judge

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance after the critical "emergent phase". In preliminary experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. This motivates FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training, specifically blending general corpora with code data to accurately represent the common necessity. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

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