Canada

Large language models (LLMs) struggle on processing complicated observations in interactive decision making. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple hierarchical prompting approach. Diverging from previous prompting approaches that always put the full observation (e.g. a web page) to the prompt, we propose to first construct an action-aware observation which is more condensed and relevant with a dedicated Summarizer prompt. The Actor prompt then predicts the next action based on the summarized history. While our method has broad applicability, we particularly demonstrate its efficacy in the complex domain of web navigation where a full observation often contains redundant and irrelevant information. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art prompting mechanism with the same LLM by 6.2% on task success rate, demonstrating its potential on interactive decision making tasks with long observation traces.

ACL 2023

Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation

interactive decision making tasks

prompting

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Users' physical safety is an increasing concern as the market for intelligent systems continues to grow, where unconstrained systems may recommend users dangerous actions that can lead to serious injury. Covertly unsafe text is an area of particular interest, as such text may arise from everyday scenarios and are challenging to detect as harmful. We propose FARM, a novel framework leveraging external knowledge for trustworthy rationale generation in the context of safety. In particular, FARM foveates on missing knowledge to qualify the information required to reason in specific scenarios and retrieves this information with attribution to trustworthy sources. This knowledge is used to both classify the safety of the original text and generate human-interpretable rationales, shedding light on the risk of systems to specific user groups and helping both stakeholders manage the risks of their systems and policymakers to provide concrete safeguards for consumer safety. Our experiments show that FARM obtains state-of-the-art results on the SafeText dataset, showing absolute improvement in safety classification accuracy by 5.9%.

Foveate, Attribute, and Rationalize: Towards Physically Safe and Trustworthy AI

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on code
generation. However, for complex programming tasks, generating the correct
solution in one go becomes challenging, thus some prior works have designed
program repair approaches to improve code generation performance. In this work,
we propose Self-Debugging, which teaches a large language model to debug its
predicted program via few-shot demonstrations. In particular, we demonstrate that Self-Debugging can teach the large language model to perform rubber duck
debugging; i.e., without any feedback on the code correctness or error messages,
the model is able to identify its mistakes by explaining the generated code in
natural language. Self-Debugging achieves the state-of-the-art performance on
several code generation benchmarks, including the Spider dataset for text-to-SQL
generation, TransCoder for C++-to-Python translation, and MBPP for text-toPython generation. On the Spider benchmark where there are no unit tests to
verify the correctness of predictions, Self-Debugging with code explanation
consistently improves the baseline by 2−3%, and improves the prediction accuracy
on problems of the hardest label by 9%. On TransCoder and MBPP where unit tests
are available, Self-Debugging improves the baseline accuracy by up to 12%.
Meanwhile, by leveraging feedback messages and reusing failed predictions, Self-Debugging notably improves sample efficiency, and can match or outperform baseline models that generate more than 10× candidate programs.

Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of performing zero-shot closed-book question answering tasks, based on their internal knowledge stored in parameters during pre-training. However, such internalized knowledge might be insufficient and incorrect, which could lead LLMs to generate factually wrong answers. Furthermore, fine-tuning LLMs to update their knowledge is expensive. To this end, we propose to augment the knowledge directly in the input of LLMs. Specifically, we first retrieve the relevant facts to the input question from the knowledge graph based on semantic similarities between the question and its associated facts. After that, we prepend the retrieved facts to the input question in the form of the prompt, which is then forwarded to LLMs to generate the answer. Our framework, Knowledge-Augmented language model PromptING (KAPING), requires no model training, thus completely zero-shot. We validate the performance of our KAPING framework on the knowledge graph question answering task, that aims to answer the user's question based on facts over a knowledge graph, on which ours outperforms relevant zero-shot baselines by up to 48% in average, across multiple LLMs of various sizes.

Knowledge-Augmented Language Model Prompting for Zero-Shot Knowledge Graph Question Answering

A common practice for text retrieval is to use an encoder to map the documents and the query to a common vector space and perform a nearest neighbor search (NNS); multi-hop retrieval also often adopts the same paradigm, usually with a modification of iteratively reformulating the query vector so that it can retrieve different documents at each hop. However, such a bi-encoder approach has limitations in multi-hop settings; (1) the reformulated query gets longer as the number of hops increases, which further tightens the embedding bottleneck of the query vector, and (2) it is prone to error propagation. In this paper, we focus on alleviating these limitations in multi-hop settings by formulating the problem in a fully generative way. We propose an encoder-decoder model that performs multi-hop retrieval by simply generating the entire text sequences of the retrieval targets, which means the query and the documents interact in the language model's parametric space rather than L2 or inner product space as in the bi-encoder approach. Our approach, Generative Multi-hop Retrieval(GMR), consistently achieves comparable or higher performance than bi-encoder models in five datasets while demonstrating superior GPU memory and storage footprint.

Generative Multi-hop Retrieval

Large language models show an emergent ability to learn a new task from a small number of input-output demonstrations.
However, recent work shows that in-context learners largely rely on their pre-trained knowledge, such as the sentiment of the labels, instead of finding new associations in the input.
However, the commonly-used few-shot evaluation settings using a random selection of in-context demonstrations can not disentangle models' ability to learn a new skill from demonstrations, as most of the randomly-selected demonstrations do not present relations informative for prediction beyond exposing the new task distribution.

To disentangle models' in-context learning ability independent of models' memory, we introduce a Conceptual few-shot learning method selecting the demonstrations sharing a possibly-informative concept with the predicted sample. We extract a set of such concepts from annotated explanations and measure how much can models benefit from presenting these concepts in few-shot demonstrations.

We find that smaller models are more sensitive to the presented concepts. While some of the models are able to benefit from concept-presenting demonstrations for each assessed concept, we find that none of the assessed in-context learners can benefit from all presented reasoning concepts consistently, leaving the in-context concept learning an open challenge.

Can In-context Learners Learn a Reasoning Concept from Demonstrations?

When people answer questions about a specific situation, e.g., “I cheated on my mid- term exam last week. Was that wrong?”, cognitive science suggests that they form a mental picture of that situation before answering. While we do not know how language models (LMs) answer such questions, we conjecture that they may answer more accurately if they are also provided with additional details about the question situation, elaborating the “scene”. To test this conjecture, we train a new model, DREAM, to answer questions that elaborate the scenes that situated questions are about, and then provide those elaborations as additional context to a question- answering (QA) model. We find that DREAM is able to create better scene elaborations (more accurate, useful, and consistent) than a representative state-of-the-art, zero- shot model (Macaw). We also find that using the scene elaborations as additional context improves the answer accuracy of a downstream QA system, including beyond that obtainable by simply further fine-tuning the QA system on DREAM's training data. These results suggest that adding focused elaborations about a situation can improve a system's reasoning about it, and may serve as an effective way of injecting new scenario-based knowledge into QA models. Finally, our approach is dataset-neutral; we observe improved QA performance across different models, with even bigger gains on models with fewer parameters.


DREAM: Improving Situational QA by First Elaborating the Situation

Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned 770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset.

Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes

Argumentation is an important means of communication. For describing especially arguments about consequences, the notion of effect relations has been introduced recently. We propose a method to extract effect relations from large text resources and apply it on encyclopedic and argumentative texts. By connecting the extracted relations, we generate a knowledge graph which we call effect graph. For evaluating the effect graph, we perform crowd and expert annotations and create a novel dataset. We demonstrate a possible use case of the effect graph by proposing a method for explaining arguments from consequences.

Effect Graph: Effect Relation Extraction for Explanation Generation

We approach competitive-level programming problem-solving as a compos- ite task of reasoning and code generation. We propose a novel method to automatically anno- tate natural language explanations to <problem, solution> pairs. We show that despite poor per- formance in solving competitive-level program- ming problems, state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit a strong capacity in describing and explaining solutions. Our explanation generation method- ology can generate a structured solution expla- nation for the problem containing descriptions and analysis. To evaluate the quality of the annotated explanations, we examine their effec- tiveness in two aspects: 1) satisfying the human programming expert who authored the oracle solution, and 2) aiding LLMs in solving prob- lems more effectively. The experimental results on the CodeContests dataset demonstrate that while LLM GPT3.5’s and GPT-4’s abilities in describing the solution are comparable, GPT-4 shows a better understanding of the key idea behind the solution.

Explaining Competitive-Level Programming Solutions using LLMs

Current natural language systems designed for multi-step claim validation typically operate in two phases: retrieve a set of relevant premise statements using heuristics (planning), then generate novel conclusions from those statements using a large language model (deduction). The planning step often requires expensive Transformer operations and does not scale to arbitrary numbers of premise statements. In this paper, we investigate whether an efficient planning heuristic is possible via embedding spaces compatible with deductive reasoning. Specifically, we evaluate whether embedding spaces exhibit a property we call deductive additivity: the sum of premise statement embeddings should be close to embeddings of conclusions based on those premises. We explore multiple sources of off-the-shelf dense embeddings in addition to fine-tuned embeddings from GPT3 and sparse embeddings from BM25. We study embedding models both intrinsically, evaluating whether the property of deductive additivity holds, and extrinsically, using them to assist planning in natural language proof generation. Lastly, we create a dataset, Single-Step Reasoning Contrast (SSRC), to further probe performance on various reasoning types. Our findings suggest that while standard embedding methods frequently embed conclusions near the sums of their premises, they fall short of being effective heuristics and lack the ability to model certain categories of reasoning.

Next from ACL 2023

Foveate, Attribute, and Rationalize: Towards Physically Safe and Trustworthy AI

Similar lecture

Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation

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