The scarcity of available text corpora for low-resource languages like Albanian is a serious hurdle for research in natural language processing tasks. This paper introduces AlbNews, a collection of 600 topically labeled news headlines and 2600 unlabeled ones in Albanian. The data can be freely used for conducting topic modeling research. We report the initial classification scores of some traditional machine learning classifiers trained with the AlbNews samples. These results show that basic models outrun the ensemble learning ones and can serve as a baseline for future experiments.
Emotions are a central aspect of communication. Consequently, emotion analysis (EA) is a rapidly growing field in natural language processing (NLP). However, there is no consensus on scope, direction, or methods. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of 154 relevant NLP publications from the last decade. Based on this review, we address four different questions: (1) How are EA tasks defined in NLP? (2) What are the most prominent emotion frameworks and which emotions are modeled? (3) Is the subjectivity of emotions considered in terms of demographics and cultural factors? and (4) What are the primary NLP applications for EA? We take stock of trends in EA and tasks, emotion frameworks used, existing datasets, methods, and applications. We then discuss four lacunae: (1) the absence of demographic and cultural aspects does not account for the variation in how emotions are perceived, but instead assumes they are universally experienced in the same manner; (2) the poor fit of emotion categories from the two main emotion theories to the task; (3) the lack of standardized EA terminology hinders gap identification, comparison, and future goals; and (4) the absence of interdisciplinary research isolates EA from insights in other fields. Our work will enable more focused research into EA and a more holistic approach to modeling emotions in NLP.
Monocular depth estimation (MDE) has advanced significantly, primarily through the integration of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and more recently, Transformers. However, concerns about their susceptibility to adversarial attacks have emerged, especially in safety-critical domains like autonomous driving and robotic navigation. Existing approaches for assessing CNN-based depth prediction methods have fallen short in inducing comprehensive disruptions to the vision system, often limited to specific local areas. In this paper, we introduce SSAP (Shape-Sensitive Adversarial Patch), a novel approach designed to comprehensively disrupt monocular depth estimation (MDE) in autonomous navigation applications. Our patch is crafted to selectively undermine MDE in two distinct ways: by distorting estimated distances or by creating the illusion of an object disappearing from the system's perspective. Notably, our patch is shape-sensitive, meaning it considers the specific shape and scale of the target object, thereby extending its influence beyond immediate proximity. Furthermore, our patch is trained to effectively address different scales and distances from the camera. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach induces a mean depth estimation error surpassing 0.5, impacting up to 99% of the targeted region for CNN-based MDE models. Additionally, we investigate the vulnerability of Transformer-based MDE models to patch-based attacks, revealing that SSAP yields a significant error of 0.59 and exerts substantial influence over 99% of the target region on these models.
Though majority vote among annotators is typically used for ground truth labels in natural language processing, annotator disagreement in tasks such as hate speech detection may reflect differences in opinion across groups, not noise. Thus, a crucial problem in hate speech detection is determining whether a statement is offensive to the demographic group that it targets, when that group may constitute a small fraction of the annotator pool. We construct a model that predicts individual annotator ratings on potentially offensive text and combines this information with the predicted target group of the text to model the opinions of target group members. We show gains across a range of metrics, including raising performance over the baseline by 22% at predicting individual annotators' ratings and by 33% at predicting variance among annotators, which provides a metric for model uncertainty downstream. We find that annotator ratings can be predicted using their demographic information and opinions on online content, without the need to track identifying annotator IDs that link each annotator to their ratings. We also find that use of non-invasive survey questions on annotators' online experiences helps to maximize privacy and minimize unnecessary collection of demographic information when predicting annotators' opinions.
The advent of the Transformer architecture has propelled the growth of natural language processing (NLP) models, leading to remarkable achievements in numerous NLP tasks. Yet, the absence of specialized hardware like expansive GPU memory and high-speed interconnects poses challenges for training large-scale models. This makes it daunting for many users to experiment with pre-training and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). In this study, we introduce \atom, a resilient distributed training framework designed for asynchronous training of vast models in a decentralized setting using cost-effective hardware, including consumer-grade GPUs and Ethernet. Unlike conventional model partitioning methods that distribute sub-models across GPUs, \atom aims to accommodate a complete LLM on one host (peer) through seamlessly model swapping and concurrently trains multiple copies across various peers to optimize training throughput. Through static analysis, \atom identifies the best model partitioning strategy and flawlessly merges model execution with swapping. Key benefits of \atom include: Avoiding the central point of failure found in pipeline parallelism methods. Demonstrating superior performance and scalability compared to closely-integrated pipeline parallelism in slower networks. Our experiments using different GPT-3 model configurations reveal that, in scenarios with suboptimal network connections, \atom can enhance training efficiency up to $20 \times$ when juxtaposed with the state-of-the-art decentralized pipeline parallelism approaches.
Large-scale password data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace, which has enabled researchers to produce a substantial body of password security research utilising real-world password datasets, which often contain numbers of records in the tens or even hundreds of millions. While much study has been conducted on how password composition policies (sets of rules that a user must abide by when creating a password) influence the distribution of user-chosen passwords on a system, much less research has been done on inferring the password composition policy that a given set of user-chosen passwords was created under. In this paper, we state the problem with the naive approach to this challenge, and suggest a simple approach that produces more reliable results. We also present pol-infer, a tool that implements this approach, and demonstrates its use in inferring password composition policies.
Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) for the Korean language, there remains an obvious lack of benchmark datasets that test the requisite Korean cultural and linguistic knowledge. Because many existing Korean benchmark datasets are derived from the English counterparts through translation, they often overlook the different cultural contexts. For the few benchmark datasets that are sourced from Korean data capturing cultural knowledge, only narrow tasks such as bias and hate speech detection are offered. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark of Cultural and Linguistic Intelligence in Korean (CLIcK), a dataset comprising 1,995 QA pairs. CLIcK sources its data from official Korean exams and textbooks, partitioning the questions into eleven categories under the two main categories of language and culture. For each instance in CLIcK, we provide fine-grained annotation of which cultural and linguistic knowledge is required to answer the question correctly. Using CLIcK, we test 13 language models to assess their performance. Our evaluation uncovers insights into their performances across the categories, as well as the diverse factors affecting their comprehension. CLIcK offers the first large-scale comprehensive Korean-centric analysis of LLMs' proficiency in Korean culture and language.
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various evaluation benchmarks. However, concerns are raised about potential data contamination in their considerable volume of training corpus. Moreover, the static nature and fixed complexity of current benchmarks may inadequately gauge the advancing capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce DyVal, a general and flexible protocol for dynamic evaluation of LLMs. Based on our framework, we build graph-informed DyVal by leveraging the structural advantage of directed acyclic graphs to dynamically generate evaluation samples with controllable complexities. DyVal generates challenging evaluation sets on reasoning tasks including mathematics, logical reasoning, and algorithm problems. We evaluate various LLMs ranging from Flan-T5-large to GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4. Experiments show that LLMs perform worse in DyVal-generated evaluation samples with different complexities, highlighting the significance of dynamic evaluation. We also analyze the failure cases and results of different prompting methods. Moreover, DyVal-generated samples are not only evaluation sets, but also helpful data for fine-tuning to improve the performance of LLMs on existing benchmarks. We hope that DyVal can shed light on future evaluation research of LLMs. Code is available at: //github.com/microsoft/promptbench.
Large language models are playing an increasingly significant role in molecular research, yet existing models often generate erroneous information, posing challenges to accurate molecular comprehension. Traditional evaluation metrics for generated content fail to assess a model's accuracy in molecular understanding. To rectify the absence of factual evaluation, we present MoleculeQA, a novel question answering (QA) dataset which possesses 62K QA pairs over 23K molecules. Each QA pair, composed of a manual question, a positive option and three negative options, has consistent semantics with a molecular description from authoritative molecular corpus. MoleculeQA is not only the first benchmark for molecular factual bias evaluation but also the largest QA dataset for molecular research. A comprehensive evaluation on MoleculeQA for existing molecular LLMs exposes their deficiencies in specific areas and pinpoints several particularly crucial factors for molecular understanding.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront, revolutionizing how we interact with our data. However, the computational intensity and memory consumption of deploying these models present substantial challenges in terms of serving efficiency, particularly in scenarios demanding low latency and high throughput. This survey addresses the imperative need for efficient LLM serving methodologies from a machine learning system (MLSys) research perspective, standing at the crux of advanced AI innovations and practical system optimizations. We provide in-depth analysis, covering a spectrum of solutions, ranging from cutting-edge algorithmic modifications to groundbreaking changes in system designs. The survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions in efficient LLM serving, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in overcoming the barriers of effective LLM deployment, thereby reshaping the future of AI.
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a ``chatbot'', and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively-increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.