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Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models can be specialized by domain adaptation, often involving fine-tuning on a dataset of interest. This process risks catastrophic forgetting: rapid loss of generic translation quality. Forgetting has been widely observed, with many mitigation methods proposed. However, the causes of forgetting and the relationship between forgetting and adaptation data are underexplored.

This paper takes a novel approach to understanding catastrophic forgetting during NMT adaptation by investigating the impact of the data. We provide a first investigation of what is forgotten, and why. We examine the relationship between forgetting and the in-domain data, and show that the amount and type of forgetting is linked to that data&#39;s target vocabulary coverage. Our findings pave the way toward better informed NMT domain adaptation.

EMNLP 2024

Domain adapted machine translation: What does catastrophic forgetting forget and why?

classifier guidance

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controlled text generation

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models can be specialized by domain adaptation, often involving fine-tuning on a dataset of interest. This process risks catastrophic forgetting: rapid loss of generic translation quality. Forgetting has been widely observed, with many mitigation methods proposed. However, the causes of forgetting and the relationship between forgetting and adaptation data are underexplored.

This paper takes a novel approach to understanding catastrophic forgetting during NMT adaptation by investigating the impact of the data. We provide a first investigation of what is forgotten, and why. We examine the relationship between forgetting and the in-domain data, and show that the amount and type of forgetting is linked to that data's target vocabulary coverage. Our findings pave the way toward better informed NMT domain adaptation.

poster

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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.

Foundation models (FMs) adapt surprisingly well to downstream tasks with fine-tuning. However, their colossal parameter space prohibits their training on resource-constrained edge-devices. For federated fine-tuning, we need to consider the smaller FMs of few billion parameters at most, namely on-device FMs (ODFMs), which can be deployed on-device. Federated fine-tuning of ODFMs has unique challenges non-present in standard fine-tuning: i) ODFMs poorly generalize to downstream tasks due to their limited sizes making proper fine-tuning imperative to their performance, and ii) devices have limited and heterogeneous system capabilities and data that can deter the performance of fine-tuning.

Tackling these challenges, we propose HetLoRA, a feasible and effective federated fine-tuning method for ODFMs that leverages the system and data heterogeneity at the edge. HetLoRA allows heterogeneous LoRA ranks across clients for their individual system resources, and efficiently aggregates and distributes these LoRA modules in a data-aware manner by applying rank self-pruning locally and sparsity-weighted aggregation at the server. It combines the advantages of high and low-rank LoRAs, achieving improved convergence speed and final performance compared to homogeneous LoRA. Furthermore, HetLoRA has enhanced computation and communication efficiency compared to full fine-tuning making it more feasible for the edge.

Heterogeneous LoRA for Federated Fine-tuning of On-Device Foundation Models

Stories are not only designed to entertain but encode lessons reflecting their authors' beliefs about the world. In this paper, we propose a new task of narrative schema labelling based on the concept of ``story morals'' to identify the values and lessons conveyed in stories. Using large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, we develop methods to automatically extract and validate story morals across a diverse set of narrative genres, including folktales, novels, movies and TV, personal stories from social media and the news. Our approach involves a multi-step prompting sequence to derive morals and validate them through both automated metrics and human assessments. The findings suggest that LLMs can effectively approximate human story moral interpretations and offer a new avenue for computational narrative understanding. By clustering the extracted morals on a sample dataset of folktales from around the world, we highlight the commonalities and distinctiveness of narrative values, providing preliminary insights into the distribution of values across cultures. This work opens up new possibilities for studying narrative schemas and their role in shaping human beliefs and behaviors.

Story Morals: Surfacing value-driven narrative schemas using large language models

This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking with $n$ state changes. To address this issue, we propose an efficient and frugal enhancement to the standard attention mechanism, enabling it to manage long-term dependencies more efficiently. 
By considering attention as an adjacency matrix, our model can track entity states with a single layer.
Empirical results demonstrate significant improvements in entity tracking datasets while keeping competitive performance on standard natural language modeling. Our modified attention allows us to achieve the same performance with drastically fewer layers. 
Additionally, our enhanced mechanism reveals structured internal representations of attention. Extensive experiments on both toy and complex datasets validate our approach. Our contributions include theoretical insights, an improved attention mechanism, and empirical validation.

Chain and Causal Attention for Efficient Entity Tracking

Authorship attribution aims to identify the origin or author of a document. Traditional approaches have heavily relied on manual features and fail to capture long-range correlations, limiting their effectiveness. Recent advancements leverage text embeddings from pre-trained language models, which require significant fine-tuning on labeled data, posing challenges in data dependency and limited interpretability. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their deep reasoning capabilities and ability to maintain long-range textual associations, offer a promising alternative. This study explores the potential of pre-trained LLMs in one-shot authorship attribution, specifically utilizing Bayesian approaches and probability outputs of LLMs. Our methodology calculates the probability that a text entails previous writings of an author, reflecting a more nuanced understanding of authorship. By utilizing only pre-trained models such as Llama-3-70B, our results on the IMDb and blog datasets show an impressive 85% accuracy in one-shot authorship classification across ten authors. Our findings set new baselines for one-shot authorship analysis using LLMs and expand the application scope of these models in forensic linguistics. This work also includes extensive ablation studies to validate our approach.

A Bayesian Approach to Harnessing the Power of LLMs in Authorship Attribution

Speculative decoding is a widely used method that accelerates the generation process of large language models (LLMs) with no compromise in model performance. It achieves this goal by using an existing smaller model for drafting and then employing the target LLM to verify the draft in a low-cost parallel manner. Under such a drafting-verification framework, drafting efficiency has become a bottleneck in the final speedup of speculative decoding. Therefore, generating longer drafts at less cost can lead to better decoding speedup. To achieve this, we introduce Ouroboros, which can generate draft phrases to parallelize the drafting process and meanwhile lengthen drafts in a training-free manner. The experimental results on various typical text generation tasks show that Ouroboros can achieve speedups of up to $2.4\times$ over speculative decoding and $3.9\times$ over vanilla decoding, without fine-tuning draft and target models. Code available at https://github.com/thunlp/Ouroboros.

Ouroboros: Generating Longer Drafts Phrase by Phrase for Faster Speculative Decoding

Text style transfer (TST) aims to modify the style of a text without altering its original meaning. Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate superior performance across multiple tasks, including TST. However, in zero-shot setups, they tend to directly copy a significant portion of the input text to the output without effectively changing its style. To enhance the stylistic variety and fluency of the text, we present sNeuron-TST, a novel approach for steering LLMs using style-specific neurons in TST. Specifically, we identify neurons associated with the source and target styles and deactivate source-style-only neurons to give target-style words a higher probability, aiming to enhance the stylistic diversity of the generated text. However, we find that this deactivation negatively impacts the fluency of the generated text, which we address by proposing an improved contrastive decoding method that accounts for rapid token probability shifts across layers caused by deactivated source-style neurons. Empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on six benchmarks, encompassing formality, toxicity, politics, politeness, authorship, and sentiment.

Style-Specific Neurons for Steering LLMs in Text Style Transfer

We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding advanced coding skills in grounding and planning. Second, examples in DA-Code are all based on real and diverse data, covering a wide range of complex data wrangling and analytics tasks. Third, to solve the tasks, the models must utilize complex data science programming languages, including Python and SQL, to perform intricate data processing and derive the answers. We set up the benchmark in a controllable and executable environment that aligns with real-world data analysis scenarios and is scalable. The annotators meticulously designed the evaluation suite to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the evaluation. We developed the DA-Agent baseline. Experiments show that although the baseline performs better than other existing frameworks, using the current best LLMs achieves only 30.5% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at [link](https://github.com/yiyihum/dabench)

DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scalable self-alignment method to utilize the LLM itself to enhance its response-ability to different types of unknown questions, being capable of not just refusing to answer but further proactively providing explanations to the unanswerability of unknown questions. Specifically, the Self-Align method first employ a two-stage class-aware self-augmentation approach to generate a large amount of unknown question-response data. Then we conduct disparity-driven self-curation to select qualified data for fine-tuning the LLM itself for aligning the responses to unknown questions as desired. Experimental results on two datasets across four types of unknown questions validate the superiority of the Self-Aligned method over existing baselines in terms of three types of task formulation.

Gotcha! Don't trick me with unanswerable questions! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Proactively Responding to Unknown Questions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, yet they still struggle with math reasoning. In this work, we propose CoT-Influx, a novel approach that pushes the boundary of few-shot Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) learning to improve LLM mathematical reasoning. Motivated by the observation that adding more concise CoT examples in the prompt can improve LLM reasoning performance, CoT-Influx employs a coarse-to-fine pruner to maximize the input of effective and concise CoT examples. The pruner first selects as many crucial CoT examples as possible and then prunes unimportant tokens to fit the context window. As a result, by enabling more CoT examples with double the context window size in tokens, CoT-Influx significantly outperforms various prompting baselines across various LLMs (LLaMA2-7B, 13B, 70B) and 5 math datasets, achieving up to 4.55% absolute improvements. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, LLaMA2-70B with CoT-Influx surpasses GPT-3.5 and a wide range of larger LLMs (PaLM, Minerva 540B, etc.) on the GSM8K. CoT-Influx is a plug-and-play module for LLMs, adaptable in various scenarios. It's compatible with advanced reasoning prompting techniques, such as self-consistency, and supports different long-context LLMs, including Mistral-7B-v0.3-32K and Yi-6B-200K.

Fewer is More: Boosting Math Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning

In the rapidly evolving landscape of language, resolving new linguistic expressions in continuously updating knowledge bases remains a formidable challenge. This challenge becomes critical in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with knowledge bases, as emerging expressions hinder the retrieval of relevant documents, leading to generator hallucinations. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task aimed at resolving emerging mentions to dynamic entities and present \textproc{DynamicER} benchmark. Our benchmark includes dynamic entity mention resolution and entity-centric knowledge-intensive QA task, evaluating entity linking and RAG model's adaptability to new expressions, respectively. We discovered that current entity linking models struggle to link these new expressions to entities. Therefore, we propose a temporal segmented clustering method with continual adaptation, effectively managing the temporal dynamics of evolving entities and emerging mentions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, enhancing RAG model performance on QA task with resolved mentions.

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Heterogeneous LoRA for Federated Fine-tuning of On-Device Foundation Models

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Investigating Catastrophic Forgetting During Continual Training for Neural Machine Translation

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