Assessments of algorithmic bias in large language models (LLMs) are generally catered to uncovering systemic discrimination based on protected characteristics such as sex and ethnicity. However, there are over 180 documented cognitive biases that pervade human reasoning and decision making that are routinely ignored when discussing the ethical complexities of AI. We demonstrate the presence of these cognitive biases in LLMs and discuss the implications of using biased reasoning under the guise of expertise. We call for stronger education, risk management, and continued research as widespread adoption of this technology increases. Finally, we close with a set of best practices for when and how to employ this technology as widespread adoption continues to grow.
Internal language model (ILM) subtraction has been widely applied to improve the performance of the RNN-Transducer with external language model (LM) fusion for speech recognition. In this work, we show that sequence discriminative training has a strong correlation with ILM subtraction from both theoretical and empirical points of view. Theoretically, we derive that the global optimum of maximum mutual information (MMI) training shares a similar formula as ILM subtraction. Empirically, we show that ILM subtraction and sequence discriminative training achieve similar performance across a wide range of experiments on Librispeech, including both MMI and minimum Bayes risk (MBR) criteria, as well as neural transducers and LMs of both full and limited context. The benefit of ILM subtraction also becomes much smaller after sequence discriminative training. We also provide an in-depth study to show that sequence discriminative training has a minimal effect on the commonly used zero-encoder ILM estimation, but a joint effect on both encoder and prediction + joint network for posterior probability reshaping including both ILM and blank suppression.
From grading papers to summarizing medical documents, large language models (LLMs) are evermore used for evaluation of text generated by humans and AI alike. However, despite their extensive utility, LLMs exhibit distinct failure modes, necessitating a thorough audit and improvement of their text evaluation capabilities. Here we introduce ALLURE, a systematic approach to Auditing Large Language Models Understanding and Reasoning Errors. ALLURE involves comparing LLM-generated evaluations with annotated data, and iteratively incorporating instances of significant deviation into the evaluator, which leverages in-context learning (ICL) to enhance and improve robust evaluation of text by LLMs. Through this iterative process, we aim to refine the performance of the evaluator LLM, ultimately reducing the reliance on human annotators in the evaluation process. We anticipate ALLURE to serve diverse applications of LLMs in various domains related to evaluation of textual data and productivity in these fields.
OTTR is a language for representing ontology modeling patterns, which enables to build ontologies or knowledge bases by instantiating templates. Thereby, particularities of the ontological representation language are hidden from the domain experts, and it enables ontology engineers to, to some extent, separate the processes of deciding about what information to model from deciding about how to model the information, e.g., which design patterns to use. Certain decisions can thus be postponed for the benefit of focusing on one of these processes. To date, only few works on ontology engineering where ontology templates are applied are described in the literature. In this paper, we outline our methodology and report findings from our ontology engineering activities in the domain of Material Science. In these activities, OTTR templates play a key role. Our ontology engineering process is bottom-up, as we begin modeling activities from existing data that is then, via templates, fed into a knowledge graph, and it is top-down, as we first focus on which data to model and postpone the decision of how to model the data. We find, among other things, that OTTR templates are especially useful as a means of communication with domain experts. Furthermore, we find that because OTTR templates encapsulate modeling decisions, the engineering process becomes flexible, meaning that design decisions can be changed at little cost.
Large language models (LLMs) based on transformers have made significant strides in recent years, the success of which is driven by scaling up their model size. Despite their high algorithmic performance, the computational and memory requirements of LLMs present unprecedented challenges. To tackle the high compute requirements of LLMs, the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture was introduced which is able to scale its model size without proportionally scaling up its computational requirements. Unfortunately, MoE's high memory demands and dynamic activation of sparse experts restrict its applicability to real-world problems. Previous solutions that offload MoE's memory-hungry expert parameters to CPU memory fall short because the latency to migrate activated experts from CPU to GPU incurs high performance overhead. Our proposed Pre-gated MoE system effectively tackles the compute and memory challenges of conventional MoE architectures using our algorithm-system co-design. Pre-gated MoE employs our novel pre-gating function which alleviates the dynamic nature of sparse expert activation, allowing our proposed system to address the large memory footprint of MoEs while also achieving high performance. We demonstrate that Pre-gated MoE is able to improve performance, reduce GPU memory consumption, while also maintaining the same level of model quality. These features allow our Pre-gated MoE system to cost-effectively deploy large-scale LLMs using just a single GPU with high performance.
Large language models (LLMs) have had a huge impact on society due to their impressive capabilities and vast knowledge of the world. Various applications and tools have been created that allow users to interact with these models in a black-box scenario. However, one limitation of this scenario is that users cannot modify the internal knowledge of the model, and the only way to add or modify internal knowledge is by explicitly mentioning it to the model during the current interaction. This learning process is called in-context training, and it refers to training that is confined to the user's current session or context. In-context learning has significant applications, but also has limitations that are seldom studied. In this paper, we present a study that shows how the model can suffer from interference between information that continually flows in the context, causing it to forget previously learned knowledge, which can reduce the model's performance. Along with showing the problem, we propose an evaluation benchmark based on the bAbI dataset.
In this era of large language models (LLMs), the traditional training of models has become increasingly unimaginable for regular users and institutions. The exploration of efficient fine-tuning for high-resource languages on these models is an undeniable trend that is gradually gaining popularity. However, there has been very little exploration for various low-resource languages, such as Tibetan. Research in Tibetan NLP is inherently scarce and limited. While there is currently no existing large language model for Tibetan due to its low-resource nature, that day will undoubtedly arrive. Therefore, research on efficient fine-tuning for low-resource language models like Tibetan is highly necessary. Our research can serve as a reference to fill this crucial gap. Efficient fine-tuning strategies for pre-trained language models (PLMs) in Tibetan have seen minimal exploration. We conducted three types of efficient fine-tuning experiments on the publicly available TNCC-title dataset: "prompt-tuning," "Adapter lightweight fine-tuning," and "prompt-tuning + Adapter fine-tuning." The experimental results demonstrate significant improvements using these methods, providing valuable insights for advancing Tibetan language applications in the context of pre-trained models.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for generating text in a variety of use cases, including journalistic news articles. Given the potential malicious nature in which these LLMs can be used to generate disinformation at scale, it is important to build effective detectors for such AI-generated text. Given the surge in development of new LLMs, acquiring labeled training data for supervised detectors is a bottleneck. However, there might be plenty of unlabeled text data available, without information on which generator it came from. In this work we tackle this data problem, in detecting AI-generated news text, and frame the problem as an unsupervised domain adaptation task. Here the domains are the different text generators, i.e. LLMs, and we assume we have access to only the labeled source data and unlabeled target data. We develop a Contrastive Domain Adaptation framework, called ConDA, that blends standard domain adaptation techniques with the representation power of contrastive learning to learn domain invariant representations that are effective for the final unsupervised detection task. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, resulting in average performance gains of 31.7% from the best performing baselines, and within 0.8% margin of a fully supervised detector. All our code and data is available at //github.com/AmritaBh/ConDA-gen-text-detection.
Transformer-based pretrained language models (T-PTLMs) have achieved great success in almost every NLP task. The evolution of these models started with GPT and BERT. These models are built on the top of transformers, self-supervised learning and transfer learning. Transformed-based PTLMs learn universal language representations from large volumes of text data using self-supervised learning and transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. These models provide good background knowledge to downstream tasks which avoids training of downstream models from scratch. In this comprehensive survey paper, we initially give a brief overview of self-supervised learning. Next, we explain various core concepts like pretraining, pretraining methods, pretraining tasks, embeddings and downstream adaptation methods. Next, we present a new taxonomy of T-PTLMs and then give brief overview of various benchmarks including both intrinsic and extrinsic. We present a summary of various useful libraries to work with T-PTLMs. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions which will further improve these models. We strongly believe that this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good reference to learn the core concepts as well as to stay updated with the recent happenings in T-PTLMs.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.
Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.