ACL 2024 论文列表

Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven substantial progress in artificial intelligence in recent years, exhibiting impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, including mathematical problem-solving. Inspired by the success of subgoal-based methods, we propose a novel framework called SEquential subGoal Optimization (SEGO) to enhance LLMs’ ability to solve mathematical problems. By establishing a connection between the subgoal breakdown process and the probability of solving problems, SEGO aims to identify better subgoals with theoretical guarantees. Addressing the challenge of identifying suitable subgoals in a large solution space, our framework generates problem-specific subgoals and adjusts them according to carefully designed criteria. Incorporating these optimized subgoals into the policy model training leads to significant improvements in problem-solving performance. We validate SEGO’s efficacy through experiments on two benchmarks, GSM8K and MATH, where our approach outperforms existing methods, highlighting the potential of SEGO in AI-driven mathematical problem-solving.

Elucidating the reasoning process with structured explanations from question to answer is crucial, as it significantly enhances the interpretability, traceability, and trustworthiness of question-answering (QA) systems. However, structured explanations demand models to perform intricately structured reasoning, which poses great challenges. Most existing methods focus on single-step reasoning through supervised learning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning (RL) based methods overlook the structured relationships, underutilizing the potential of RL in structured reasoning. In this paper, we propose SEER, a novel method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. Our proposed structure-based return precisely describes the hierarchical and branching structure inherent in structured reasoning, effectively capturing the intricate relationships between different reasoning steps. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained reward function to meticulously delineate diverse reasoning steps. Extensive experiments show that SEER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement of 6.9% over RL-based methods on EntailmentBank, a 4.4% average improvement on STREET benchmark, and exhibiting outstanding efficiency and cross-dataset generalization performance.

In the realm of text-conditioned image retrieval, models utilize a query composed of a reference image and modification text to retrieve corresponding images. Despite its significance, this task is fraught with challenges, including small-scale datasets due to labeling costs and the complexity of attributes in modification texts. These challenges often result in models learning a generalized representation of the query, thereby missing the semantic correlations of image and text attributes.In this paper, we introduce a general boosting framework designed to address these issues by employing semantic discrepancy alignment. Our framework first leverages the ChatGPT to augment text data by modifying the original modification text’s attributes. The augmented text is then combined with the original reference image to create an augmented composed query. Then we generate corresponding images using GPT-4 for the augmented composed query.We realize the cross-modal semantic discrepancy alignment by formulating distance consistency and neighbor consistency between the image and text domains. Through this novel approach, attribute in the text domain can be more effectively transferred to the image domain, enhancing retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on three prominent datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach, with state-of-the-art results on a majority of evaluation metrics compared to various baseline methods.

In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a collaborative framework that connects a compact Specialized Translation Model (STM) and a general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM) as one unified translation engine. By introducing translation from STM into the triplet in-context demonstrations, SCALE unlocks refinement and pivoting ability of LLM, thus 1) mitigating language bias of LLMs and parallel data bias of STMs, 2) enhancing LLM speciality without sacrificing generality, and 3) facilitating continual learning in a LLM-tuning-free way.Our comprehensive experiments show that SCALE significantly outperforms both LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5) and supervised models (NLLB, M2M) in either high-resource or challenging low-resource settings. Moreover SCALE shows great scalability by only updating the lightweight STM and witness consistent system improvement, an averaged 4 BLEURT score across 4 languages without tuning LLM. Interestingly, SCALE could also effectively exploit the existing language bias of LLMs by using an English-centric STM as a pivot to conduct translation between any language pairs, outperforming GPT-4 by an average of 6 COMET points across eight translation directions. Furthermore we provide an in-depth analysis of SCALE’s robustness, translation characteristics, latency costs and inherent language bias, providing solid foundation for future studies exploring the potential synergy between LLMs and more specialized models.

Text style transfer (TST) aims to vary the style polarity of text while preserving the semantic content. Although recent advancements have demonstrated remarkable progress in short TST, it remains a relatively straightforward task with limited practical applications. The more comprehensive long TST task presents two challenges: (1) existing methods encounter difficulties in accurately evaluating content attributes in multiple words, leading to content degradation; (2) the conventional vanilla style classifier loss encounters obstacles in maintaining consistent style across multiple generated sentences.In this paper, we propose a novel method SC2, where a multilayer Joint Style-Content Weighed (JSCW) module and a Style Consistency loss are designed to address the two issues. The JSCW simultaneously assesses the amounts of style and content attributes within a token, aiming to acquire a lossless content representation and thereby enhancing content preservation. The multiple JSCW layers further progressively refine content representations. We design a style consistency loss to ensure the generated multiple sentences consistently reflect the target style polarity. Moreover, we incorporate a denoising non-autoregressive decoder to accelerate the training. We conduct plentiful experiments and the results show significant improvements of SC2 over competitive baselines. Our code: https://github.com/jiezhao6/SC2.

Subtitling plays a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of audiovisual content and encompasses three primary subtasks: translating spoken dialogue, segmenting translations into concise textual units, and estimating timestamps that govern their on-screen duration. Past attempts to automate this process rely, to varying degrees, on automatic transcripts, employed diversely for the three subtasks. In response to the acknowledged limitations associated with this reliance on transcripts, recent research has shifted towards transcription-free solutions for translation and segmentation, leaving the direct generation of timestamps as uncharted territory. To fill this gap, we introduce the first direct model capable of producing automatic subtitles, entirely eliminating any dependence on intermediate transcripts also for timestamp prediction. Experimental results, backed by manual evaluation, showcase our solution’s new state-of-the-art performance across multiple language pairs and diverse conditions.

The continual learning (CL) ability is vital for deploying large language models (LLMs) in the dynamic world. Existing methods devise the learning module to acquire task-specific knowledge with parameter-efficient tuning (PET) block and the selection module to pick out the corresponding one for the testing input, aiming at handling the challenges of catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in CL. However, these methods tend to address only one of the challenges, ignoring the potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. To this end, we propose a novel Shared Attention Framework (SAPT), to align the PET learning and selection via the Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module. Extensive Experiments on two CL benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SAPT. Moreover, SAPT consistently demonstrates its superiority when we scale it to different model sizes (from 770M to 13B), different model architectures (T5 and LLaMA-2) and unseen tasks.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring robust safety measures is paramount. To meet this crucial need, we propose SALAD-Bench, a safety benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs, attack, and defense methods. Distinguished by its breadth, SALAD-Bench transcends conventional benchmarks through its large scale, rich diversity, intricate taxonomy spanning three levels, and versatile functionalities.SALAD-Bench is crafted with a meticulous array of questions, from standard queries to complex ones enriched with attack, defense modifications and multiple-choice. To effectively manage the inherent complexity, we introduce an innovative evaluators: the LLM-based MD-Judge for QA pairs with a particular focus on attack-enhanced queries, ensuring a seamless, and reliable evaluation. Above components extend SALAD-Bench from standard LLM safety evaluation to both LLM attack and defense methods evaluation, ensuring the joint-purpose utility. Our extensive experiments shed light on the resilience of LLMs against emerging threats and the efficacy of contemporary defense tactics. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/OpenSafetyLab/SALAD-BENCH

Interpreting and assessing goal driven actions is vital to understanding and reasoning over complex events. It is important to be able to acquire the knowledge needed for this understanding, though doing so is challenging. We argue that such knowledge can be elicited through a participant achievement lens. We analyze a complex event in a narrative according to the intended achievements of the participants in that narrative, the likely future actions of the participants, and the likelihood of goal success. We collect 6.3K high quality goal and action annotations reflecting our proposed participant achievement lens, with an average weighted Fleiss-Kappa IAA of 80%. Our collection contains annotated alternate versions of each narrative. These alternate versions vary minimally from the “original” story, but can license drastically different inferences. Our findings suggest that while modern large language models can reflect some of the goal-based knowledge we study, they find it challenging to fully capture the design and intent behind concerted actions, even when the model pretraining included the data from which we extracted the goal knowledge. We show that smaller models fine-tuned on our dataset can achieve performance surpassing larger models.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in knowledge-intensive tasks across specialized domains, where the acquisition of precise and dependable knowledge is crucial. However, existing KG construction methods heavily rely on human intervention to attain qualified KGs, which severely hinders the practical applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a general KG construction framework, named **SAC-KG**, to exploit large language models (LLMs) as **S**killed **A**utomatic **C**onstructors for domain **K**nowledge **G**raph. SAC-KG effectively involves LLMs as domain experts to generate specialized and precise multi-level KGs. Specifically, SAC-KG consists of three components: Generator, Verifier, and Pruner. For a given entity, Generator produces its relations and tails from raw domain corpora, to construct a specialized single-level KG. Verifier and Pruner then work together to ensure precision by correcting generation errors and determining whether newly produced tails require further iteration for the next-level KG. Experiments demonstrate that SAC-KG automatically constructs a domain KG at the scale of over one million nodes and achieves a precision of 89.32%, leading to a superior performance with over 20% increase in precision rate compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for the KG construction task.

Traditional Dialogue State Tracking (DST) has focused on tracking preferences and intents in conversations centered around specific tasks (e.g. booking services). These conventional systems assume a relatively restricted conversation flow in which each turn gradually offers new information. However, advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in more versatile open-domain chat systems in which extended dialogue sessions encompassing numerous tasks and topics are common—in turn requiring new conversational tracking tools in order to successfully orchestrate such systems. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel approach combining dialogue segmentation and state tracking within open-domain dialogues, tailored for zero-shot applications appropriate to a true open-domain dialogue system. Our proposed method S3-DST employs a unique structured prompting technique and *Pre-Analytical Recollection*, a novel grounding mechanism we designed for improving long context tracking. Tested on proprietary anonymized open-domain dialogue datasets as well as publicly available DST and segmentation datasets, S3-DST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, showcasing its effectiveness and adaptability state tracking in the next wave of LLM-based chat systems. We also release S3-DST annotations with GPT-4 on a curated subset of LMSYS-Chat-1M to be used as a testbed to fuel research in this direction.

Previous graph-based approaches in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) have demonstrated impressive performance by utilizing graph neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn structures of static dependency trees and dynamic latent trees. However, incorporating both semantic and syntactic information simultaneously within complex global structures can introduce irrelevant contexts and syntactic dependencies during the process of graph structure learning, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. In order to address the issues above, we propose S2GSL, incorporating Segment to Syntactic enhanced Graph Structure Learning for ABSA. Specifically, S2GSL is featured with a segment-aware semantic graph learning and a syntax-based latent graph learning enabling the removal of irrelevant contexts and dependencies, respectively. We further propose a self-adaptive aggregation network that facilitates the fusion of two graph learning branches, thereby achieving complementarity across diverse structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Building machines with commonsense has been a longstanding challenge in NLP due to the reporting bias of commonsense rules and the exposure bias of rule-based commonsense reasoning. In contrast, humans convey and pass down commonsense implicitly through stories. This paper investigates the inherent commonsense ability of large language models (LLMs) expressed through storytelling. We systematically investigate and compare stories and rules for retrieving and leveraging commonsense in LLMs. Experimental results on 28 commonsense QA datasets show that stories outperform rules as the expression for retrieving commonsense from LLMs, exhibiting higher generation confidence and commonsense accuracy. Moreover, stories are the more effective commonsense expression for answering questions regarding daily events, while rules are more effective for scientific questions. This aligns with the reporting bias of commonsense in text corpora. We further show that the correctness and relevance of commonsense stories can be further improved via iterative self-supervised fine-tuning. These findings emphasize the importance of using appropriate language to express, retrieve, and leverage commonsense for LLMs, highlighting a promising direction for better exploiting their commonsense abilities.

Knowledge graph reasoning is an important problem for knowledge graphs. In this paper, we propose a novel and principled framework called RulE (stands for Rule Embedding) to effectively leverage logical rules to enhance KG reasoning. Unlike knowledge graph embedding methods, RulE learns rule embeddings from existing triplets and first-order rules by jointly representing entities, relations and logical rules in a unified embedding space. Based on the learned rule embeddings, a confidence score can be calculated for each rule, reflecting its consistency with the observed triplets. This allows us to perform logical rule inference in a soft way, thus alleviating the brittleness of logic. On the other hand, RulE injects prior logical rule information into the embedding space, enriching and regularizing the entity/relation embeddings. This makes KGE alone perform better too. RulE is conceptually simple and empirically effective. We conduct extensive experiments to verify each component of RulE.Results on multiple benchmarks reveal that our model outperforms the majority of existing embedding-based and rule-based approaches.

This study addresses the challenge of extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to non-English languages, specifically those using non-Roman scripts. We propose an approach that utilizes the romanized form of text as an interface for LLMs, hypothesizing that its frequent informal use and shared tokens with English enhance cross-lingual alignment. Our approach involve the continual pretraining of a English LLM like Llama 2 on romanized text of non-English, non-Roman script languages, followed by instruction tuning on romanized data. The results indicate that romanized text not only reduces token fertility by 2x-4x but also matches if not outperforms native script representation across various NLU, NLG and MT tasks. Moreover, the embeddings computed on romanized text exhibit closer alignment with their English translations than those from the native script. Our approach presents a promising direction for leveraging the power of English LLMs in languages traditionally underrepresented in NLP research.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing, which enhances user interactions by enabling models to imitate various characters. However, the closed-source nature of state-of-the-art LLMs and their general-purpose training limit role-playing optimization. In this paper, we introduce RoleLLM, a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in LLMs. RoleLLM comprises four stages: (1) Role Profile Construction for 100 roles; (2) Context-Based Instruction Generation (Context-Instruct) for role-specific knowledge extraction; (3) Role Prompting using GPT (RoleGPT) for speaking style imitation; and (4) Role-Conditioned Instruction Tuning (RoCIT) for fine-tuning open-source models along with role customization. By Context-Instruct and RoleGPT, we create RoleBench, the first systematic and fine-grained character-level benchmark dataset for role-playing with 168,093 samples. Moreover, RoCIT on RoleBench yields RoleLLaMA (English) and RoleGLM (Chinese), significantly enhancing role-playing abilities and even achieving comparable results with RoleGPT (using GPT-4).

Note-level Automatic Singing Voice Transcription (AST) converts singing recordings into note sequences, facilitating the automatic annotation of singing datasets for Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) applications. Current AST methods, however, struggle with accuracy and robustness when used for practical annotation. This paper presents ROSVOT, the first robust AST model that serves SVS, incorporating a multi-scale framework that effectively captures coarse-grained note information and ensures fine-grained frame-level segmentation, coupled with an attention-based pitch decoder for reliable pitch prediction. We also established a comprehensive annotation-and-training pipeline for SVS to test the model in real-world settings. Experimental findings reveal that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art transcription accuracy with either clean or noisy inputs. Moreover, when trained on enlarged, automatically annotated datasets, the SVS model outperforms its baseline, affirming the capability for practical application. Audio samples are available at https://rosvot.github.io. Codes can be found at https://github.com/RickyL-2000/ROSVOT.

We present novel advancements in frame-semantic parsing, specifically focusing on target identification and frame identification. Our target identification model employs a novel prefix tree modification to enable robust support for multi-word lexical units, resulting in a coverage of 99.4% of the targets in the FrameNet 1.7 fulltext annotations. It utilizes a RoBERTa-based filter to achieve an F1 score of 0.775, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art solution by +0.012. For frame identification, we introduce a modification to the standard multiple-choice classification paradigm by incorporating additional negative frames for targets with limited candidate frames, resulting in a +0.014 accuracy improvement over the frame-only model of FIDO, the previous state-of-the-art system, and +0.002 over its full system. Our approach significantly enhances performance on rare frames, exhibiting an improvement of +0.044 over FIDO’s accuracy on frames with 5 or fewer samples, and on under-utilized frames, with an improvement of +0.139 on targets with a single candidate frame. Overall, our contributions address critical challenges and advance the state-of-the-art in frame-semantic parsing.

In code search, the Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) framework, which generates exemplar code snippets to augment queries, has emerged as a promising strategy to address the principal challenge of modality misalignment between code snippets and natural language queries, particularly with the demonstrated code generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Nevertheless, our preliminary investigations indicate that the improvements conferred by such an LLM-augmented framework are somewhat constrained. This limitation could potentially be ascribed to the fact that the generated codes, albeit functionally accurate, frequently display a pronounced stylistic deviation from the ground truth code in the codebase. In this paper, we extend the foundational GAR framework and propose a simple yet effective method that additionally Rewrites the Code (ReCo) within the codebase for style normalization. Experimental results demonstrate that ReCo significantly boosts retrieval accuracy across sparse (up to 35.7%), zero-shot dense (up to 27.6%), and fine-tuned dense (up to 23.6%) retrieval settings in diverse search scenarios. To further elucidate the advantages of ReCo and stimulate research in code style normalization, we introduce Code Style Similarity, the first metric tailored to quantify stylistic similarities in code. Notably, our empirical findings reveal the inadequacy of existing metrics in capturing stylistic nuances. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/Alex-HaochenLi/ReCo.