Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we shed light on the linguistic causes of cross-lingual similarity in colexification and phonology, by exploring genealogical stability (persistence) and contact-induced change (diffusibility). We construct large-scale graphs incorporating semantic, genealogical, phonological and geographical data for 1,966 languages. We then show the potential of this resource, by investigating several established hypotheses from previous work in linguistics, while proposing new ones. Our results strongly support a previously established hypothesis in the linguistic literature, while offering contradicting evidence to another. Our large scale resource opens for further research across disciplines, e.g.~in multilingual NLP and comparative linguistics.
Explainable AI methods facilitate the understanding of model behaviour, yet, small, imperceptible perturbations to inputs can vastly distort explanations. As these explanations are typically evaluated holistically, before model deployment, it is difficult to assess when a particular explanation is trustworthy. Some studies have tried to create confidence estimators for explanations, but none have investigated an existing link between uncertainty and explanation quality. We artificially simulate epistemic uncertainty in text input by introducing noise at inference time. In this large-scale empirical study, we insert different levels of noise perturbations and measure the effect on the output of pre-trained language models and different uncertainty metrics. Realistic perturbations have minimal effect on performance and explanations, yet masking has a drastic effect. We find that high uncertainty doesn't necessarily imply low explanation plausibility; the correlation between the two metrics can be moderately positive when noise is exposed during the training process. This suggests that noise-augmented models may be better at identifying salient tokens when uncertain. Furthermore, when predictive and epistemic uncertainty measures are over-confident, the robustness of a saliency map to perturbation can indicate model stability issues. Integrated Gradients shows the overall greatest robustness to perturbation, while still showing model-specific patterns in performance; however, this phenomenon is limited to smaller Transformer-based language models.
The rise of the Internet and the exponential increase in data have made manual data summarization and analysis a challenging task. Instagram social network is a prominent social network widely utilized in Iran for information sharing and communication across various age groups. The inherent structure of Instagram, characterized by its text-rich content and graph-like data representation, enables the utilization of text and graph processing techniques for data analysis purposes. The degree distributions of these networks exhibit scale-free characteristics, indicating non-random growth patterns. Recently, word co-occurrence has gained attention from researchers across multiple disciplines due to its simplicity and practicality. Keyword extraction is a crucial task in natural language processing. In this study, we demonstrated that high-precision extraction of keywords from Instagram posts in the Persian language can be achieved using unsupervised word co-occurrence methods without resorting to conventional techniques such as clustering or pre-trained models. After graph visualization and community detection, it was observed that the top topics covered by news agencies are represented by these graphs. This approach is generalizable to new and diverse datasets and can provide acceptable outputs for new data. To the author's knowledge, this method has not been employed in the Persian language before on Instagram social network. The new crawled data has been publicly released on GitHub for exploration by other researchers. By employing this method, it is possible to use other graph-based algorithms, such as community detections. The results help us to identify the key role of different news agencies in information diffusion among the public, identify hidden communities, and discover latent patterns among a massive amount of data.
A novel feature, based on the chirp z-transform, that offers an improved representation of the underlying true spectrum is proposed. This feature, the chirp MFCC, is derived by computing the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients from the chirp magnitude spectrum, instead of the Fourier transform magnitude spectrum. The theoretical foundations for the proposal, and the experimental validation using product of likelihood Gaussians, to show the improved class separation offered by the proposed chirp MFCC, when compared with vanilla MFCC are discussed. Further, real world evaluation of the feature is performed using three diverse tasks, namely, speech-music classification, speaker identification, and speech commands recognition. It is shown in all three tasks that the proposed chirp MFCC offers considerable improvements.
Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have been used in some of the most widely deployed AI models to date, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. While there has been significant work developing these methods, our understanding of the benefits and downsides of each stage in RLHF is still limited. To fill this gap, we present an extensive analysis of how each stage of the process (i.e. supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reward modelling, and RLHF) affects two key properties: out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation and output diversity. OOD generalisation is crucial given the wide range of real-world scenarios in which these models are being used, while output diversity refers to the model's ability to generate varied outputs and is important for a variety of use cases. We perform our analysis across two base models on both summarisation and instruction following tasks, the latter being highly relevant for current LLM use cases. We find that RLHF generalises better than SFT to new inputs, particularly as the distribution shift between train and test becomes larger. However, RLHF significantly reduces output diversity compared to SFT across a variety of measures, implying a tradeoff in current LLM fine-tuning methods between generalisation and diversity. Our results provide guidance on which fine-tuning method should be used depending on the application, and show that more research is needed to improve the tradeoff between generalisation and diversity.
Index spaces serve as valuable metric models for studying properties relevant to various applications, such as social science or economics. These properties are represented by real Lipschitz functions that describe the degree of association with each element within the underlying metric space. After determining the index value within a given sample subset, the classic McShane and Whitney formulas allow a Lipschitz regression procedure to be performed to extend the index values over the entire metric space. To improve the adaptability of the metric model to specific scenarios, this paper introduces the concept of a composition metric, which involves composing a metric with an increasing, positive and subadditive function $\phi$. The results presented here extend well-established results for Lipschitz indices on metric spaces to composition metrics. In addition, we establish the corresponding approximation properties that facilitate the use of this functional structure. To illustrate the power and simplicity of this mathematical framework, we provide a concrete application involving the modelling of livability indices in North American cities.
In a misspecified social learning setting, agents are condescending if they perceive their peers as having private information that is of lower quality than it is in reality. Applying this to a standard sequential model, we show that outcomes improve when agents are mildly condescending. In contrast, too much condescension leads to worse outcomes, as does anti-condescension.
Numerical reasoning is an essential ability for NLP systems to handle numeric information. Recent research indicates that fine-tuning a small-scale model to learn generating reasoning processes alongside answers can significantly enhance performance. However, current methods have the limitation that most methods generate reasoning processes with large language models (LLMs), which are "unreliable" since such processes could contain information unrelated to the answer. To address this limitation, we introduce Enhancing NumeriCal reasOning with Reliable procEsses (Encore), which derives the reliable reasoning process by decomposing the answer formula, ensuring which fully supports the answer. Nevertheless, models could lack enough data to learn the reasoning process generation adequately, since our method generates only one single reasoning process for one formula. To overcome this difficulty, we present a series of pre-training tasks to help models learn the reasoning process generation with synthesized data. The experiments show that Encore yields improvement on all five experimental datasets with an average of 1.8%, proving the effectiveness of our method.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.