Daily Papers

Keyword spotting--or wakeword detection--is an essential feature for hands-free operation of modern voice-controlled devices. With such devices becoming ubiquitous, users might want to choose a personalized custom wakeword. In this work, we present DONUT, a CTC-based algorithm for online query-by-example keyword spotting that enables custom wakeword detection. The algorithm works by recording a small number of training examples from the user, generating a set of label sequence hypotheses from these training examples, and detecting the wakeword by aggregating the scores of all the hypotheses given a new audio recording. Our method combines the generalization and interpretability of CTC-based keyword spotting with the user-adaptation and convenience of a conventional query-by-example system. DONUT has low computational requirements and is well-suited for both learning and inference on embedded systems without requiring private user data to be uploaded to the cloud.

Large-scale datasets for natural language inference are created by presenting crowd workers with a sentence (premise), and asking them to generate three new sentences (hypotheses) that it entails, contradicts, or is logically neutral with respect to. We show that, in a significant portion of such data, this protocol leaves clues that make it possible to identify the label by looking only at the hypothesis, without observing the premise. Specifically, we show that a simple text categorization model can correctly classify the hypothesis alone in about 67% of SNLI (Bowman et. al, 2015) and 53% of MultiNLI (Williams et. al, 2017). Our analysis reveals that specific linguistic phenomena such as negation and vagueness are highly correlated with certain inference classes. Our findings suggest that the success of natural language inference models to date has been overestimated, and that the task remains a hard open problem.

We consider higher-order linear-chain conditional random fields (HO-LC-CRFs) for sequence modelling, and use sum-product networks (SPNs) for representing higher-order input- and output-dependent factors. SPNs are a recently introduced class of deep models for which exact and efficient inference can be performed. By combining HO-LC-CRFs with SPNs, expressive models over both the output labels and the hidden variables are instantiated while still enabling efficient exact inference. Furthermore, the use of higher-order factors allows us to capture relations of multiple input segments and multiple output labels as often present in real-world data. These relations can not be modelled by the commonly used first-order models and higher-order models with local factors including only a single output label. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models for sequence labeling. In extensive experiments, we outperform other state-of-the-art methods in optical character recognition and achieve competitive results in phone classification.

Sequences have become first class citizens in supervised learning thanks to the resurgence of recurrent neural networks. Many complex tasks that require mapping from or to a sequence of observations can now be formulated with the sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) framework which employs the chain rule to efficiently represent the joint probability of sequences. In many cases, however, variable sized inputs and/or outputs might not be naturally expressed as sequences. For instance, it is not clear how to input a set of numbers into a model where the task is to sort them; similarly, we do not know how to organize outputs when they correspond to random variables and the task is to model their unknown joint probability. In this paper, we first show using various examples that the order in which we organize input and/or output data matters significantly when learning an underlying model. We then discuss an extension of the seq2seq framework that goes beyond sequences and handles input sets in a principled way. In addition, we propose a loss which, by searching over possible orders during training, deals with the lack of structure of output sets. We show empirical evidence of our claims regarding ordering, and on the modifications to the seq2seq framework on benchmark language modeling and parsing tasks, as well as two artificial tasks -- sorting numbers and estimating the joint probability of unknown graphical models.

The incremental sequence labeling task involves continuously learning new classes over time while retaining knowledge of the previous ones. Our investigation identifies two significant semantic shifts: E2O (where the model mislabels an old entity as a non-entity) and O2E (where the model labels a non-entity or old entity as a new entity). Previous research has predominantly focused on addressing the E2O problem, neglecting the O2E issue. This negligence results in a model bias towards classifying new data samples as belonging to the new class during the learning process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, Incremental Sequential Labeling without Semantic Shifts (IS3). Motivated by the identified semantic shifts (E2O and O2E), IS3 aims to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in models. As for the E2O problem, we use knowledge distillation to maintain the model's discriminative ability for old entities. Simultaneously, to tackle the O2E problem, we alleviate the model's bias towards new entities through debiased loss and optimization levels. Our experimental evaluation, conducted on three datasets with various incremental settings, demonstrates the superior performance of IS3 compared to the previous state-of-the-art method by a significant margin.The data, code, and scripts are publicly available at https://github.com/zzz47zzz/codebase-for-incremental-learning-with-llm.

Human label variation (Plank 2022), or annotation disagreement, exists in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To be robust and trusted, NLP models need to identify such variation and be able to explain it. To this end, we created the first ecologically valid explanation dataset with diverse reasoning, LiveNLI. LiveNLI contains annotators' highlights and free-text explanations for the label(s) of their choice for 122 English Natural Language Inference items, each with at least 10 annotations. We used its explanations for chain-of-thought prompting, and found there is still room for improvement in GPT-3's ability to predict label distribution with in-context learning.

Ordinal regression refers to classifying object instances into ordinal categories. It has been widely studied in many scenarios, such as medical disease grading, movie rating, etc. Known methods focused only on learning inter-class ordinal relationships, but still incur limitations in distinguishing adjacent categories thus far. In this paper, we propose a simple sequence prediction framework for ordinal regression called Ord2Seq, which, for the first time, transforms each ordinal category label into a special label sequence and thus regards an ordinal regression task as a sequence prediction process. In this way, we decompose an ordinal regression task into a series of recursive binary classification steps, so as to subtly distinguish adjacent categories. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of distinguishing adjacent categories for performance improvement and our new approach exceeds state-of-the-art performances in four different scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/wjh892521292/Ord2Seq.

This paper introduces a novel model for semantic role labeling that makes use of neural sequence modeling techniques. Our approach is motivated by the observation that complex syntactic structures and related phenomena, such as nested subordinations and nominal predicates, are not handled well by existing models. Our model treats such instances as sub-sequences of lexicalized dependency paths and learns suitable embedding representations. We experimentally demonstrate that such embeddings can improve results over previous state-of-the-art semantic role labelers, and showcase qualitative improvements obtained by our method.

Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) is the task of finding the most relevant subset labels from an extremely large-scale label collection. Recently, some deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art results in XMTC tasks. These models commonly predict scores for all labels by a fully connected layer as the last layer of the model. However, such models can't predict a relatively complete and variable-length label subset for each document, because they select positive labels relevant to the document by a fixed threshold or take top k labels in descending order of scores. A less popular type of deep learning models called sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) focus on predicting variable-length positive labels in sequence style. However, the labels in XMTC tasks are essentially an unordered set rather than an ordered sequence, the default order of labels restrains Seq2Seq models in training. To address this limitation in Seq2Seq, we propose an autoregressive sequence-to-set model for XMTC tasks named OTSeq2Set. Our model generates predictions in student-forcing scheme and is trained by a loss function based on bipartite matching which enables permutation-invariance. Meanwhile, we use the optimal transport distance as a measurement to force the model to focus on the closest labels in semantic label space. Experiments show that OTSeq2Set outperforms other competitive baselines on 4 benchmark datasets. Especially, on the Wikipedia dataset with 31k labels, it outperforms the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq method by 16.34% in micro-F1 score. The code is available at https://github.com/caojie54/OTSeq2Set.

Hypothesis generation is a fundamental step in scientific discovery, yet it is increasingly challenged by information overload and disciplinary fragmentation. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in their potential to enhance and automate this process. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of hypothesis generation with LLMs by (i) reviewing existing methods, from simple prompting techniques to more complex frameworks, and proposing a taxonomy that categorizes these approaches; (ii) analyzing techniques for improving hypothesis quality, such as novelty boosting and structured reasoning; (iii) providing an overview of evaluation strategies; and (iv) discussing key challenges and future directions, including multimodal integration and human-AI collaboration. Our survey aims to serve as a reference for researchers exploring LLMs for hypothesis generation.

The recent phenomenal success of language models has reinvigorated machine learning research, and large sequence models such as transformers are being applied to a variety of domains. One important problem class that has remained relatively elusive however is purposeful adaptive behavior. Currently there is a common perception that sequence models "lack the understanding of the cause and effect of their actions" leading them to draw incorrect inferences due to auto-suggestive delusions. In this report we explain where this mismatch originates, and show that it can be resolved by treating actions as causal interventions. Finally, we show that in supervised learning, one can teach a system to condition or intervene on data by training with factual and counterfactual error signals respectively.

Weak supervision (WS) frameworks are a popular way to bypass hand-labeling large datasets for training data-hungry models. These approaches synthesize multiple noisy but cheaply-acquired estimates of labels into a set of high-quality pseudolabels for downstream training. However, the synthesis technique is specific to a particular kind of label, such as binary labels or sequences, and each new label type requires manually designing a new synthesis algorithm. Instead, we propose a universal technique that enables weak supervision over any label type while still offering desirable properties, including practical flexibility, computational efficiency, and theoretical guarantees. We apply this technique to important problems previously not tackled by WS frameworks including learning to rank, regression, and learning in hyperbolic space. Theoretically, our synthesis approach produces a consistent estimators for learning some challenging but important generalizations of the exponential family model. Experimentally, we validate our framework and show improvement over baselines in diverse settings including real-world learning-to-rank and regression problems along with learning on hyperbolic manifolds.

We present a novel approach to feature labeling using gradient descent in token-space. While existing methods typically use language models to generate hypotheses about feature meanings, our method directly optimizes label representations by using a language model as a discriminator to predict feature activations. We formulate this as a multi-objective optimization problem in token-space, balancing prediction accuracy, entropy minimization, and linguistic naturalness. Our proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate successful convergence to interpretable single-token labels across diverse domains, including features for detecting animals, mammals, Chinese text, and numbers. Although our current implementation is constrained to single-token labels and relatively simple features, the results suggest that token-space gradient descent could become a valuable addition to the interpretability researcher's toolkit.

Prevalent models based on artificial neural network (ANN) for sentence classification often classify sentences in isolation without considering the context in which sentences appear. This hampers the traditional sentence classification approaches to the problem of sequential sentence classification, where structured prediction is needed for better overall classification performance. In this work, we present a hierarchical sequential labeling network to make use of the contextual information within surrounding sentences to help classify the current sentence. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art results by 2%-3% on two benchmarking datasets for sequential sentence classification in medical scientific abstracts.

Data of sequential nature arise in many application domains in forms of, e.g. textual data, DNA sequences, and software execution traces. Different research disciplines have developed methods to learn sequence models from such datasets: (i) in the machine learning field methods such as (hidden) Markov models and recurrent neural networks have been developed and successfully applied to a wide-range of tasks, (ii) in process mining process discovery techniques aim to generate human-interpretable descriptive models, and (iii) in the grammar inference field the focus is on finding descriptive models in the form of formal grammars. Despite their different focuses, these fields share a common goal - learning a model that accurately describes the behavior in the underlying data. Those sequence models are generative, i.e, they can predict what elements are likely to occur after a given unfinished sequence. So far, these fields have developed mainly in isolation from each other and no comparison exists. This paper presents an interdisciplinary experimental evaluation that compares sequence modeling techniques on the task of next-element prediction on four real-life sequence datasets. The results indicate that machine learning techniques that generally have no aim at interpretability in terms of accuracy outperform techniques from the process mining and grammar inference fields that aim to yield interpretable models.

We present PubMed 200k RCT, a new dataset based on PubMed for sequential sentence classification. The dataset consists of approximately 200,000 abstracts of randomized controlled trials, totaling 2.3 million sentences. Each sentence of each abstract is labeled with their role in the abstract using one of the following classes: background, objective, method, result, or conclusion. The purpose of releasing this dataset is twofold. First, the majority of datasets for sequential short-text classification (i.e., classification of short texts that appear in sequences) are small: we hope that releasing a new large dataset will help develop more accurate algorithms for this task. Second, from an application perspective, researchers need better tools to efficiently skim through the literature. Automatically classifying each sentence in an abstract would help researchers read abstracts more efficiently, especially in fields where abstracts may be long, such as the medical field.

The extreme multi-label classification (XMC) task aims at tagging content with a subset of labels from an extremely large label set. The label vocabulary is typically defined in advance by domain experts and assumed to capture all necessary tags. However in real world scenarios this label set, although large, is often incomplete and experts frequently need to refine it. To develop systems that simplify this process, we introduce the task of open vocabulary XMC (OXMC): given a piece of content, predict a set of labels, some of which may be outside of the known tag set. Hence, in addition to not having training data for some labels - as is the case in zero-shot classification - models need to invent some labels on-the-fly. We propose GROOV, a fine-tuned seq2seq model for OXMC that generates the set of labels as a flat sequence and is trained using a novel loss independent of predicted label order. We show the efficacy of the approach, experimenting with popular XMC datasets for which GROOV is able to predict meaningful labels outside the given vocabulary while performing on par with state-of-the-art solutions for known labels.

Recently, the usefulness of self-supervised representation learning (SSRL) methods has been confirmed in various downstream tasks. Many of these models, as exemplified by HuBERT and WavLM, use pseudo-labels generated from spectral features or the model's own representation features. From previous studies, it is known that the pseudo-labels contain semantic information. However, the masked prediction task, the learning criterion of HuBERT, focuses on local contextual information and may not make effective use of global semantic information such as speaker, theme of speech, and so on. In this paper, we propose a new approach to enrich the semantic representation of HuBERT. We apply topic model to pseudo-labels to generate a topic label for each utterance. An auxiliary topic classification task is added to HuBERT by using topic labels as teachers. This allows additional global semantic information to be incorporated in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable or better performance than the baseline in most tasks, including automatic speech recognition and five out of the eight SUPERB tasks. Moreover, we find that topic labels include various information about utterance, such as gender, speaker, and its theme. This highlights the effectiveness of our approach in capturing multifaceted semantic nuances.

Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose "document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts", a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as "Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.") and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is "entailed by", "contradicting to" or "not mentioned by" (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying "evidence" for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (1) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (2) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.

The assumption that response and predictor belong to the same statistical unit may be violated in practice. Unbiased estimation and recovery of true label ordering based on unlabeled data are challenging tasks and have attracted increasing attentions in the recent literature. In this paper, we present a relatively complete analysis of label permutation problem for the generalized linear model with multivariate responses. The theory is established under different scenarios, with knowledge of true parameters, with partial knowledge of underlying label permutation matrix and without any knowledge. Our results remove the stringent conditions required by the current literature and are further extended to the missing observation setting which has never been considered in the field of label permutation problem. On computational side, we propose two methods, "maximum likelihood estimation" algorithm and "two-step estimation" algorithm, to accommodate for different settings. When the proportion of permuted labels is moderate, both methods work effectively. Multiple numerical experiments are provided and corroborate our theoretical findings.

The iMet 2020 dataset is a valuable resource in the space of fine-grained art attribution recognition, but we believe it has yet to reach its true potential. We document the unique properties of the dataset and observe that many of the attribute labels are noisy, more than is implied by the dataset description. Oftentimes, there are also semantic relationships between the labels (e.g., identical, mutual exclusion, subsumption, overlap with uncertainty) which we believe are underutilized. We propose an approach to cleaning and structuring the iMet 2020 labels, and discuss the implications and value of doing so. Further, we demonstrate the benefits of our proposed approach through several experiments. Our code and cleaned labels are available at https://github.com/sunniesuhyoung/iMet2020cleaned.

Recent research on sequence labelling has been exploring different strategies to mitigate the lack of manually annotated data for the large majority of the world languages. Among others, the most successful approaches have been based on (i) the cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models (model-transfer), (ii) data translation and label projection (data-transfer) and (iii), prompt-based learning by reusing the mask objective to exploit the few-shot capabilities of pre-trained language models (few-shot). Previous work seems to conclude that model-transfer outperforms data-transfer methods and that few-shot techniques based on prompting are superior to updating the model's weights via fine-tuning. In this paper, we empirically demonstrate that, for Argument Mining, a sequence labelling task which requires the detection of long and complex discourse structures, previous insights on cross-lingual transfer or few-shot learning do not apply. Contrary to previous work, we show that for Argument Mining data transfer obtains better results than model-transfer and that fine-tuning outperforms few-shot methods. Regarding the former, the domain of the dataset used for data-transfer seems to be a deciding factor, while, for few-shot, the type of task (length and complexity of the sequence spans) and sampling method prove to be crucial.

Sequence labeling remains a significant challenge in low-resource, domain-specific scenarios, particularly for character-dense languages like Chinese. Existing methods primarily focus on enhancing model comprehension and improving data diversity to boost performance. However, these approaches still struggle with inadequate model applicability and semantic distribution biases in domain-specific contexts. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework that combines an LLM-based knowledge enhancement workflow with a span-based Knowledge Fusion for Rich and Efficient Extraction (KnowFREE) model. Our workflow employs explanation prompts to generate precise contextual interpretations of target entities, effectively mitigating semantic biases and enriching the model's contextual understanding. The KnowFREE model further integrates extension label features, enabling efficient nested entity extraction without relying on external knowledge during inference. Experiments on multiple Chinese domain-specific sequence labeling datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively addressing the challenges posed by low-resource settings.

In this paper, we study the problem of inference in high-order structured prediction tasks. In the context of Markov random fields, the goal of a high-order inference task is to maximize a score function on the space of labels, and the score function can be decomposed into sum of unary and high-order potentials. We apply a generative model approach to study the problem of high-order inference, and provide a two-stage convex optimization algorithm for exact label recovery. We also provide a new class of hypergraph structural properties related to hyperedge expansion that drives the success in general high-order inference problems. Finally, we connect the performance of our algorithm and the hyperedge expansion property using a novel hypergraph Cheeger-type inequality.

Labeling training data has become one of the major roadblocks to using machine learning. Among various weak supervision paradigms, programmatic weak supervision (PWS) has achieved remarkable success in easing the manual labeling bottleneck by programmatically synthesizing training labels from multiple potentially noisy supervision sources. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of recent advances in PWS. In particular, we give a brief introduction of the PWS learning paradigm, and review representative approaches for each component within PWS's learning workflow. In addition, we discuss complementary learning paradigms for tackling limited labeled data scenarios and how these related approaches can be used in conjunction with PWS. Finally, we identify several critical challenges that remain under-explored in the area to hopefully inspire future research directions in the field.

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) detects named entities within text using only a few annotated examples. One promising line of research is to leverage natural language descriptions of each entity type: the common label PER might, for example, be verbalized as ''person entity.'' In an initial label interpretation learning phase, the model learns to interpret such verbalized descriptions of entity types. In a subsequent few-shot tagset extension phase, this model is then given a description of a previously unseen entity type (such as ''music album'') and optionally a few training examples to perform few-shot NER for this type. In this paper, we systematically explore the impact of a strong semantic prior to interpret verbalizations of new entity types by massively scaling up the number and granularity of entity types used for label interpretation learning. To this end, we leverage an entity linking benchmark to create a dataset with orders of magnitude of more distinct entity types and descriptions as currently used datasets. We find that this increased signal yields strong results in zero- and few-shot NER in in-domain, cross-domain, and even cross-lingual settings. Our findings indicate significant potential for improving few-shot NER through heuristical data-based optimization.

Generating novel and creative scientific hypotheses is a cornerstone in achieving Artificial General Intelligence. Large language and reasoning models have the potential to aid in the systematic creation, selection, and validation of scientifically informed hypotheses. However, current foundation models often struggle to produce scientific ideas that are both novel and feasible. One reason is the lack of a dedicated dataset that frames Scientific Hypothesis Generation (SHG) as a Natural Language Generation (NLG) task. In this paper, we introduce HypoGen, the first dataset of approximately 5500 structured problem-hypothesis pairs extracted from top-tier computer science conferences structured with a Bit-Flip-Spark schema, where the Bit is the conventional assumption, the Spark is the key insight or conceptual leap, and the Flip is the resulting counterproposal. HypoGen uniquely integrates an explicit Chain-of-Reasoning component that reflects the intellectual process from Bit to Flip. We demonstrate that framing hypothesis generation as conditional language modelling, with the model fine-tuned on Bit-Flip-Spark and the Chain-of-Reasoning (and where, at inference, we only provide the Bit), leads to improvements in the overall quality of the hypotheses. Our evaluation employs automated metrics and LLM judge rankings for overall quality assessment. We show that by fine-tuning on our HypoGen dataset we improve the novelty, feasibility, and overall quality of the generated hypotheses. The HypoGen dataset is publicly available at huggingface.co/datasets/UniverseTBD/hypogen-dr1.

Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs), in which named entity recognition (NER) is treated as a sequence-labeling task of predicting the BIO entity tags for tokens, following the typical setting of NLP. However, BIO-tagging scheme relies on the correct order of model inputs, which is not guaranteed in real-world NER on scanned VrDs where text are recognized and arranged by OCR systems. Such reading order issue hinders the accurate marking of entities by BIO-tagging scheme, making it impossible for sequence-labeling methods to predict correct named entities. To address the reading order issue, we introduce Token Path Prediction (TPP), a simple prediction head to predict entity mentions as token sequences within documents. Alternative to token classification, TPP models the document layout as a complete directed graph of tokens, and predicts token paths within the graph as entities. For better evaluation of VrD-NER systems, we also propose two revised benchmark datasets of NER on scanned documents which can reflect real-world scenarios. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and suggest its potential to be a universal solution to various information extraction tasks on documents.

Transforming unstructured text into structured and meaningful forms, organized by useful category labels, is a fundamental step in text mining for downstream analysis and application. However, most existing methods for producing label taxonomies and building text-based label classifiers still rely heavily on domain expertise and manual curation, making the process expensive and time-consuming. This is particularly challenging when the label space is under-specified and large-scale data annotations are unavailable. In this paper, we address these challenges with Large Language Models (LLMs), whose prompt-based interface facilitates the induction and use of large-scale pseudo labels. We propose TnT-LLM, a two-phase framework that employs LLMs to automate the process of end-to-end label generation and assignment with minimal human effort for any given use-case. In the first phase, we introduce a zero-shot, multi-stage reasoning approach which enables LLMs to produce and refine a label taxonomy iteratively. In the second phase, LLMs are used as data labelers that yield training samples so that lightweight supervised classifiers can be reliably built, deployed, and served at scale. We apply TnT-LLM to the analysis of user intent and conversational domain for Bing Copilot (formerly Bing Chat), an open-domain chat-based search engine. Extensive experiments using both human and automatic evaluation metrics demonstrate that TnT-LLM generates more accurate and relevant label taxonomies when compared against state-of-the-art baselines, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for classification at scale. We also share our practical experiences and insights on the challenges and opportunities of using LLMs for large-scale text mining in real-world applications.

A common approach for sequence tagging tasks based on contextual word representations is to train a machine learning classifier directly on these embedding vectors. This approach has two shortcomings. First, such methods consider single input sequences in isolation and are unable to put an individual embedding vector in relation to vectors outside the current local context of use. Second, the high performance of these models relies on fine-tuning the embedding model in conjunction with the classifier, which may not always be feasible due to the size or inaccessibility of the underlying feature-generation model. It is thus desirable, given a collection of embedding vectors of a corpus, i.e., a datastore, to find features of each vector that describe its relation to other, similar vectors in the datastore. With this in mind, we introduce complexity measures of the local topology of the latent space of a contextual language model with respect to a given datastore. The effectiveness of our features is demonstrated through their application to dialogue term extraction. Our work continues a line of research that explores the manifold hypothesis for word embeddings, demonstrating that local structure in the space carved out by word embeddings can be exploited to infer semantic properties.

Most positive and unlabeled data is subject to selection biases. The labeled examples can, for example, be selected from the positive set because they are easier to obtain or more obviously positive. This paper investigates how learning can be ena BHbled in this setting. We propose and theoretically analyze an empirical-risk-based method for incorporating the labeling mechanism. Additionally, we investigate under which assumptions learning is possible when the labeling mechanism is not fully understood and propose a practical method to enable this. Our empirical analysis supports the theoretical results and shows that taking into account the possibility of a selection bias, even when the labeling mechanism is unknown, improves the trained classifiers.

Language models have recently been shown capable of performing regression tasks wherein numeric predictions are represented as decoded strings. In this work, we provide theoretical grounds for this capability and furthermore investigate the utility of causal auto-regressive sequence models when they are applied to any feature representation. We find that, despite being trained in the usual way - for next-token prediction via cross-entropy loss - decoding-based regression is as performant as traditional approaches for tabular regression tasks, while being flexible enough to capture arbitrary distributions, such as in the task of density estimation.

In this paper, we explore strategies to detect and evaluate counterfactual sentences. We describe our system for SemEval-2020 Task 5: Modeling Causal Reasoning in Language: Detecting Counterfactuals. We use a BERT base model for the classification task and build a hybrid BERT Multi-Layer Perceptron system to handle the sequence identification task. Our experiments show that while introducing syntactic and semantic features does little in improving the system in the classification task, using these types of features as cascaded linear inputs to fine-tune the sequence-delimiting ability of the model ensures it outperforms other similar-purpose complex systems like BiLSTM-CRF in the second task. Our system achieves an F1 score of 85.00% in Task 1 and 83.90% in Task 2.

Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing, identifying the span and category of entities in unstructured texts. The traditional sequence labeling methodology ignores the nested entities, i.e. entities included in other entity mentions. Many approaches attempt to address this scenario, most of which rely on complex structures or have high computation complexity. The representation learning of the heterogeneous star graph containing text nodes and type nodes is investigated in this paper. In addition, we revise the graph attention mechanism into a hybrid form to address its unreasonableness in specific topologies. The model performs the type-supervised sequence labeling after updating nodes in the graph. The annotation scheme is an extension of the single-layer sequence labeling and is able to cope with the vast majority of nested entities. Extensive experiments on public NER datasets reveal the effectiveness of our model in extracting both flat and nested entities. The method achieved state-of-the-art performance on both flat and nested datasets. The significant improvement in accuracy reflects the superiority of the multi-layer labeling strategy.

This system paper presents the DeMeVa team's approaches to the third edition of the Learning with Disagreements shared task (LeWiDi 2025; Leonardelli et al., 2025). We explore two directions: in-context learning (ICL) with large language models, where we compare example sampling strategies; and label distribution learning (LDL) methods with RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019b), where we evaluate several fine-tuning methods. Our contributions are twofold: (1) we show that ICL can effectively predict annotator-specific annotations (perspectivist annotations), and that aggregating these predictions into soft labels yields competitive performance; and (2) we argue that LDL methods are promising for soft label predictions and merit further exploration by the perspectivist community.

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.

Hypothesis ranking is a crucial component of automated scientific discovery, particularly in natural sciences where wet-lab experiments are costly and throughput-limited. Existing approaches focus on pre-experiment ranking, relying solely on large language model's internal reasoning without incorporating empirical outcomes from experiments. We introduce the task of experiment-guided ranking, which aims to prioritize candidate hypotheses based on the results of previously tested ones. However, developing such strategies is challenging due to the impracticality of repeatedly conducting real experiments in natural science domains. To address this, we propose a simulator grounded in three domain-informed assumptions, modeling hypothesis performance as a function of similarity to a known ground truth hypothesis, perturbed by noise. We curate a dataset of 124 chemistry hypotheses with experimentally reported outcomes to validate the simulator. Building on this simulator, we develop a pseudo experiment-guided ranking method that clusters hypotheses by shared functional characteristics and prioritizes candidates based on insights derived from simulated experimental feedback. Experiments show that our method outperforms pre-experiment baselines and strong ablations.

We present an elegant and effective approach for addressing limitations in existing multi-label classification models by incorporating interaction matching, a concept shown to be useful for ad-hoc search result ranking. By performing soft n-gram interaction matching, we match labels with natural language descriptions (which are common to have in most multi-labeling tasks). Our approach can be used to enhance existing multi-label classification approaches, which are biased toward frequently-occurring labels. We evaluate our approach on two challenging tasks: automatic medical coding of clinical notes and automatic labeling of entities from software tutorial text. Our results show that our method can yield up to an 11% relative improvement in macro performance, with most of the gains stemming labels that appear infrequently in the training set (i.e., the long tail of labels).

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in scientific disciplines such as biomedicine, particularly in hypothesis generation, where they can analyze vast literature, identify patterns, and suggest research directions. However, a key challenge lies in evaluating the truthfulness of generated hypotheses, as verifying their accuracy often requires substantial time and resources. Additionally, the hallucination problem in LLMs can lead to the generation of hypotheses that appear plausible but are ultimately incorrect, undermining their reliability. To facilitate the systematic study of these challenges, we introduce TruthHypo, a benchmark for assessing the capabilities of LLMs in generating truthful biomedical hypotheses, and KnowHD, a knowledge-based hallucination detector to evaluate how well hypotheses are grounded in existing knowledge. Our results show that LLMs struggle to generate truthful hypotheses. By analyzing hallucinations in reasoning steps, we demonstrate that the groundedness scores provided by KnowHD serve as an effective metric for filtering truthful hypotheses from the diverse outputs of LLMs. Human evaluations further validate the utility of KnowHD in identifying truthful hypotheses and accelerating scientific discovery. Our data and source code are available at https://github.com/Teddy-XiongGZ/TruthHypo.

Textual label names (descriptions) are typically semantically rich in many natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. In this paper, we incorporate the prompting methodology, which is widely used to enrich model input, into the label side for the first time. Specifically, we propose a Mask Matching method, which equips an input with a prompt and its label with another, and then makes predictions by matching their mask representations. We evaluate our method extensively on 8 NLU tasks with 14 datasets. The experimental results show that Mask Matching significantly outperforms its counterparts of fine-tuning and conventional prompt-tuning, setting up state-of-the-art performances in several datasets. Mask Matching is particularly good at handling NLU tasks with large label counts and informative label names. As pioneering efforts that investigate the label-side prompt, we also discuss open issues for future study.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 35K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.

There is growing interest in hypothesis generation with large language models (LLMs). However, fundamental questions remain: what makes a good hypothesis, and how can we systematically evaluate methods for hypothesis generation? To address this, we introduce HypoBench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs and hypothesis generation methods across multiple aspects, including practical utility, generalizability, and hypothesis discovery rate. HypoBench includes 7 real-world tasks and 5 synthetic tasks with 194 distinct datasets. We evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs combined with six existing hypothesis-generation methods. Overall, our results suggest that existing methods are capable of discovering valid and novel patterns in the data. However, the results from synthetic datasets indicate that there is still significant room for improvement, as current hypothesis generation methods do not fully uncover all relevant or meaningful patterns. Specifically, in synthetic settings, as task difficulty increases, performance significantly drops, with best models and methods only recovering 38.8% of the ground-truth hypotheses. These findings highlight challenges in hypothesis generation and demonstrate that HypoBench serves as a valuable resource for improving AI systems designed to assist scientific discovery.

State-of-the-art sequence labeling systems traditionally require large amounts of task-specific knowledge in the form of hand-crafted features and data pre-processing. In this paper, we introduce a novel neutral network architecture that benefits from both word- and character-level representations automatically, by using combination of bidirectional LSTM, CNN and CRF. Our system is truly end-to-end, requiring no feature engineering or data pre-processing, thus making it applicable to a wide range of sequence labeling tasks. We evaluate our system on two data sets for two sequence labeling tasks --- Penn Treebank WSJ corpus for part-of-speech (POS) tagging and CoNLL 2003 corpus for named entity recognition (NER). We obtain state-of-the-art performance on both the two data --- 97.55\% accuracy for POS tagging and 91.21\% F1 for NER.

Recent works have argued that high-level semantic concepts are encoded "linearly" in the representation space of large language models. In this work, we study the origins of such linear representations. To that end, we introduce a simple latent variable model to abstract and formalize the concept dynamics of the next token prediction. We use this formalism to show that the next token prediction objective (softmax with cross-entropy) and the implicit bias of gradient descent together promote the linear representation of concepts. Experiments show that linear representations emerge when learning from data matching the latent variable model, confirming that this simple structure already suffices to yield linear representations. We additionally confirm some predictions of the theory using the LLaMA-2 large language model, giving evidence that the simplified model yields generalizable insights.

In this note (work in progress towards a full-length paper) we show that a family of sequence models based on recurrent linear layers~(including S4, S5, and the LRU) interleaved with position-wise multi-layer perceptrons~(MLPs) can approximate arbitrarily well any sufficiently regular non-linear sequence-to-sequence map. The main idea behind our result is to see recurrent layers as compression algorithms that can faithfully store information about the input sequence into an inner state, before it is processed by the highly expressive MLP.

Interpretability is a key challenge in fostering trust for Large Language Models (LLMs), which stems from the complexity of extracting reasoning from model's parameters. We present the Frame Representation Hypothesis, a theoretically robust framework grounded in the Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH) to interpret and control LLMs by modeling multi-token words. Prior research explored LRH to connect LLM representations with linguistic concepts, but was limited to single token analysis. As most words are composed of several tokens, we extend LRH to multi-token words, thereby enabling usage on any textual data with thousands of concepts. To this end, we propose words can be interpreted as frames, ordered sequences of vectors that better capture token-word relationships. Then, concepts can be represented as the average of word frames sharing a common concept. We showcase these tools through Top-k Concept-Guided Decoding, which can intuitively steer text generation using concepts of choice. We verify said ideas on Llama 3.1, Gemma 2, and Phi 3 families, demonstrating gender and language biases, exposing harmful content, but also potential to remediate them, leading to safer and more transparent LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/phvv-me/frame-representation-hypothesis.git

Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) aims to discover new scientific knowledge by mining papers and generating hypotheses. Standard LBD is limited to predicting pairwise relations between discrete concepts (e.g., drug-disease links), and ignores critical contexts like experimental settings (e.g., a specific patient population where a drug is evaluated) and background motivations (e.g., to find drugs without specific side effects). We address these limitations with a novel formulation of contextualized-LBD (C-LBD): generating scientific hypotheses in natural language, while grounding them in a context that controls the hypothesis search space. We present a modeling framework using retrieval of ``inspirations'' from past scientific papers. Our evaluations reveal that GPT-4 tends to generate ideas with overall low technical depth and novelty, while our inspiration prompting approaches partially mitigate this issue. Our work represents a first step toward building language models that generate new ideas derived from scientific literature.

Recent sequence modeling approaches using selective state space sequence models, referred to as Mamba models, have seen a surge of interest. These models allow efficient processing of long sequences in linear time and are rapidly being adopted in a wide range of applications such as language modeling, demonstrating promising performance. To foster their reliable use in real-world scenarios, it is crucial to augment their transparency. Our work bridges this critical gap by bringing explainability, particularly Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), to the Mamba architecture. Guided by the axiom of relevance conservation, we identify specific components in the Mamba architecture, which cause unfaithful explanations. To remedy this issue, we propose MambaLRP, a novel algorithm within the LRP framework, which ensures a more stable and reliable relevance propagation through these components. Our proposed method is theoretically sound and excels in achieving state-of-the-art explanation performance across a diverse range of models and datasets. Moreover, MambaLRP facilitates a deeper inspection of Mamba architectures, uncovering various biases and evaluating their significance. It also enables the analysis of previous speculations regarding the long-range capabilities of Mamba models.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is the task of assigning labels to a text within a structured space organized as a hierarchy. Recent works treat HTC as a conventional multilabel classification problem, therefore evaluating it as such. We instead propose to evaluate models based on specifically designed hierarchical metrics and we demonstrate the intricacy of metric choice and prediction inference method. We introduce a new challenging dataset and we evaluate fairly, recent sophisticated models, comparing them with a range of simple but strong baselines, including a new theoretically motivated loss. Finally, we show that those baselines are very often competitive with the latest models. This highlights the importance of carefully considering the evaluation methodology when proposing new methods for HTC. Code implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/RomanPlaud/revisitingHTC.

Attention mechanisms have improved the performance of NLP tasks while allowing models to remain explainable. Self-attention is currently widely used, however interpretability is difficult due to the numerous attention distributions. Recent work has shown that model representations can benefit from label-specific information, while facilitating interpretation of predictions. We introduce the Label Attention Layer: a new form of self-attention where attention heads represent labels. We test our novel layer by running constituency and dependency parsing experiments and show our new model obtains new state-of-the-art results for both tasks on both the Penn Treebank (PTB) and Chinese Treebank. Additionally, our model requires fewer self-attention layers compared to existing work. Finally, we find that the Label Attention heads learn relations between syntactic categories and show pathways to analyze errors.

Dialogue Act recognition associate dialogue acts (i.e., semantic labels) to utterances in a conversation. The problem of associating semantic labels to utterances can be treated as a sequence labeling problem. In this work, we build a hierarchical recurrent neural network using bidirectional LSTM as a base unit and the conditional random field (CRF) as the top layer to classify each utterance into its corresponding dialogue act. The hierarchical network learns representations at multiple levels, i.e., word level, utterance level, and conversation level. The conversation level representations are input to the CRF layer, which takes into account not only all previous utterances but also their dialogue acts, thus modeling the dependency among both, labels and utterances, an important consideration of natural dialogue. We validate our approach on two different benchmark data sets, Switchboard and Meeting Recorder Dialogue Act, and show performance improvement over the state-of-the-art methods by 2.2% and 4.1% absolute points, respectively. It is worth noting that the inter-annotator agreement on Switchboard data set is 84%, and our method is able to achieve the accuracy of about 79% despite being trained on the noisy data.

The spread of misinformation is a prominent problem in today's society, and many researchers in academia and industry are trying to combat it. Due to the vast amount of misinformation that is created every day, it is unrealistic to leave this task to human fact-checkers. Data scientists and researchers have been working on automated misinformation detection for years, and it is still a challenging problem today. The goal of our research is to add a new level to automated misinformation detection; classifying segments of text with persuasive writing techniques in order to produce interpretable reasoning for why an article can be marked as misinformation. To accomplish this, we present a novel annotation scheme containing many common persuasive writing tactics, along with a dataset with human annotations accordingly. For this task, we make use of a RoBERTa model for text classification, due to its high performance in NLP. We develop several language model-based baselines and present the results of our persuasive strategy label predictions as well as the improvements these intermediate labels make in detecting misinformation and producing interpretable results.

We introduce MorphNLI, a modular step-by-step approach to natural language inference (NLI). When classifying the premise-hypothesis pairs into {entailment, contradiction, neutral}, we use a language model to generate the necessary edits to incrementally transform (i.e., morph) the premise into the hypothesis. Then, using an off-the-shelf NLI model we track how the entailment progresses with these atomic changes, aggregating these intermediate labels into a final output. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed method particularly in realistic cross-domain settings, where our method always outperforms strong baselines with improvements up to 12.6% (relative). Further, our proposed approach is explainable as the atomic edits can be used to understand the overall NLI label.

Neural sequence models can generate highly fluent sentences, but recent studies have also shown that they are also prone to hallucinate additional content not supported by the input. These variety of fluent but wrong outputs are particularly problematic, as it will not be possible for users to tell they are being presented incorrect content. To detect these errors, we propose a task to predict whether each token in the output sequence is hallucinated (not contained in the input) and collect new manually annotated evaluation sets for this task. We also introduce a method for learning to detect hallucinations using pretrained language models fine tuned on synthetic data that includes automatically inserted hallucinations Experiments on machine translation (MT) and abstractive summarization demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines on all benchmark datasets. We further demonstrate how to use the token-level hallucination labels to define a fine-grained loss over the target sequence in low-resource MT and achieve significant improvements over strong baseline methods. We also apply our method to word-level quality estimation for MT and show its effectiveness in both supervised and unsupervised settings. Codes and data available at https://github.com/violet-zct/fairseq-detect-hallucination.

Pretrained Transformer encoders are the dominant approach to sequence labeling. While some alternative architectures-such as xLSTMs, structured state-space models, diffusion models, and adversarial learning-have shown promise in language modeling, few have been applied to sequence labeling, and mostly on flat or simplified tasks. We study how these architectures adapt across tagging tasks that vary in structural complexity, label space, and token dependencies, with evaluation spanning multiple languages. We find that the strong performance previously observed in simpler settings does not always generalize well across languages or datasets, nor does it extend to more complex structured tasks.

Large language models are now routinely used in high-stakes applications where hallucinations can cause serious harm, such as medical consultations or legal advice. Existing hallucination detection methods, however, are impractical for real-world use, as they are either limited to short factual queries or require costly external verification. We present a cheap, scalable method for real-time identification of hallucinated tokens in long-form generations, and scale it effectively to 70B parameter models. Our approach targets entity-level hallucinations -- e.g., fabricated names, dates, citations -- rather than claim-level, thereby naturally mapping to token-level labels and enabling streaming detection. We develop an annotation methodology that leverages web search to annotate model responses with grounded labels indicating which tokens correspond to fabricated entities. This dataset enables us to train effective hallucination classifiers with simple and efficient methods such as linear probes. Evaluating across four model families, our classifiers consistently outperform baselines on long-form responses, including more expensive methods such as semantic entropy (e.g., AUC 0.90 vs 0.71 for Llama-3.3-70B), and are also an improvement in short-form question-answering settings. Moreover, despite being trained only with entity-level labels, our probes effectively detect incorrect answers in mathematical reasoning tasks, indicating generalization beyond entities. While our annotation methodology is expensive, we find that annotated responses from one model can be used to train effective classifiers on other models; accordingly, we publicly release our datasets to facilitate reuse. Overall, our work suggests a promising new approach for scalable, real-world hallucination detection.

Informally, the 'linear representation hypothesis' is the idea that high-level concepts are represented linearly as directions in some representation space. In this paper, we address two closely related questions: What does "linear representation" actually mean? And, how do we make sense of geometric notions (e.g., cosine similarity or projection) in the representation space? To answer these, we use the language of counterfactuals to give two formalizations of "linear representation", one in the output (word) representation space, and one in the input (sentence) space. We then prove these connect to linear probing and model steering, respectively. To make sense of geometric notions, we use the formalization to identify a particular (non-Euclidean) inner product that respects language structure in a sense we make precise. Using this causal inner product, we show how to unify all notions of linear representation. In particular, this allows the construction of probes and steering vectors using counterfactual pairs. Experiments with LLaMA-2 demonstrate the existence of linear representations of concepts, the connection to interpretation and control, and the fundamental role of the choice of inner product.

Given the clinical notes written in electronic health records (EHRs), it is challenging to predict the diagnostic codes which is formulated as a multi-label classification task. The large set of labels, the hierarchical dependency, and the imbalanced data make this prediction task extremely hard. Most existing work built a binary prediction for each label independently, ignoring the dependencies between labels. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage framework to improve automatic ICD coding by capturing the label correlation. Specifically, we train a label set distribution estimator to rescore the probability of each label set candidate generated by a base predictor. This paper is the first attempt at learning the label set distribution as a reranking module for medical code prediction. In the experiments, our proposed framework is able to improve upon best-performing predictors on the benchmark MIMIC datasets. The source code of this project is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/ICD-Correlation.

Understanding how semantic meaning is encoded in the representation spaces of large language models is a fundamental problem in interpretability. In this paper, we study the two foundational questions in this area. First, how are categorical concepts, such as {'mammal', 'bird', 'reptile', 'fish'}, represented? Second, how are hierarchical relations between concepts encoded? For example, how is the fact that 'dog' is a kind of 'mammal' encoded? We show how to extend the linear representation hypothesis to answer these questions. We find a remarkably simple structure: simple categorical concepts are represented as simplices, hierarchically related concepts are orthogonal in a sense we make precise, and (in consequence) complex concepts are represented as polytopes constructed from direct sums of simplices, reflecting the hierarchical structure. We validate these theoretical results on the Gemma large language model, estimating representations for 957 hierarchically related concepts using data from WordNet.

An algorithm to estimate the evolution of learning curves on the whole of a training data base, based on the results obtained from a portion and using a functional strategy, is introduced. We approximate iteratively the sought value at the desired time, independently of the learning technique used and once a point in the process, called prediction level, has been passed. The proposal proves to be formally correct with respect to our working hypotheses and includes a reliable proximity condition. This allows the user to fix a convergence threshold with respect to the accuracy finally achievable, which extends the concept of stopping criterion and seems to be effective even in the presence of distorting observations. Our aim is to evaluate the training effort, supporting decision making in order to reduce the need for both human and computational resources during the learning process. The proposal is of interest in at least three operational procedures. The first is the anticipation of accuracy gain, with the purpose of measuring how much work is needed to achieve a certain degree of performance. The second relates the comparison of efficiency between systems at training time, with the objective of completing this task only for the one that best suits our requirements. The prediction of accuracy is also a valuable item of information for customizing systems, since we can estimate in advance the impact of settings on both the performance and the development costs. Using the generation of part-of-speech taggers as an example application, the experimental results are consistent with our expectations.

Novel Class Discovery (NCD) is a growing field where we are given during training a labeled set of known classes and an unlabeled set of different classes that must be discovered. In recent years, many methods have been proposed to address this problem, and the field has begun to mature. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art NCD methods. We start by formally defining the NCD problem and introducing important notions. We then give an overview of the different families of approaches, organized by the way they transfer knowledge from the labeled set to the unlabeled set. We find that they either learn in two stages, by first extracting knowledge from the labeled data only and then applying it to the unlabeled data, or in one stage by conjointly learning on both sets. For each family, we describe their general principle and detail a few representative methods. Then, we briefly introduce some new related tasks inspired by the increasing number of NCD works. We also present some common tools and techniques used in NCD, such as pseudo labeling, self-supervised learning and contrastive learning. Finally, to help readers unfamiliar with the NCD problem differentiate it from other closely related domains, we summarize some of the closest areas of research and discuss their main differences.

In multi-label classification, each example in a dataset may be annotated as belonging to one or more classes (or none of the classes). Example applications include image (or document) tagging where each possible tag either applies to a particular image (or document) or not. With many possible classes to consider, data annotators are likely to make errors when labeling such data in practice. Here we consider algorithms for finding mislabeled examples in multi-label classification datasets. We propose an extension of the Confident Learning framework to this setting, as well as a label quality score that ranks examples with label errors much higher than those which are correctly labeled. Both approaches can utilize any trained classifier. After demonstrating that our methodology empirically outperforms other algorithms for label error detection, we apply our approach to discover many label errors in the CelebA image tagging dataset.

Suppose Alice trains an open-weight language model and Bob uses a blackbox derivative of Alice's model to produce text. Can Alice prove that Bob is using her model, either by querying Bob's derivative model (query setting) or from the text alone (observational setting)? We formulate this question as an independence testing problem--in which the null hypothesis is that Bob's model or text is independent of Alice's randomized training run--and investigate it through the lens of palimpsestic memorization in language models: models are more likely to memorize data seen later in training, so we can test whether Bob is using Alice's model using test statistics that capture correlation between Bob's model or text and the ordering of training examples in Alice's training run. If Alice has randomly shuffled her training data, then any significant correlation amounts to exactly quantifiable statistical evidence against the null hypothesis, regardless of the composition of Alice's training data. In the query setting, we directly estimate (via prompting) the likelihood Bob's model gives to Alice's training examples and order; we correlate the likelihoods of over 40 fine-tunes of various Pythia and OLMo base models ranging from 1B to 12B parameters with the base model's training data order, achieving a p-value on the order of at most 1e-8 in all but six cases. In the observational setting, we try two approaches based on estimating 1) the likelihood of Bob's text overlapping with spans of Alice's training examples and 2) the likelihood of Bob's text with respect to different versions of Alice's model we obtain by repeating the last phase (e.g., 1%) of her training run on reshuffled data. The second approach can reliably distinguish Bob's text from as little as a few hundred tokens; the first does not involve any retraining but requires many more tokens (several hundred thousand) to achieve high power.

Conditional language models are predominantly trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), giving probability mass to sparsely observed target sequences. While MLE trained models assign high probability to plausible sequences given the context, the model probabilities often do not accurately rank-order generated sequences by quality. This has been empirically observed in beam search decoding as output quality degrading with large beam sizes, and decoding strategies benefiting from heuristics such as length normalization and repetition-blocking. In this work, we introduce sequence likelihood calibration (SLiC) where the likelihood of model generated sequences are calibrated to better align with reference sequences in the model's latent space. With SLiC, decoding heuristics become unnecessary and decoding candidates' quality significantly improves regardless of the decoding method. Furthermore, SLiC shows no sign of diminishing returns with model scale, and presents alternative ways to improve quality with limited training and inference budgets. With SLiC, we exceed or match SOTA results on a wide range of generation tasks spanning abstractive summarization, question generation, abstractive question answering and data-to-text generation, even with modest-sized models.

The predictions of Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks often improve significantly when including examples of the input--label relationship in the context. However, there is currently no consensus about how this in-context learning (ICL) ability of LLMs works. For example, while Xie et al. (2021) liken ICL to a general-purpose learning algorithm, Min et al. (2022) argue ICL does not even learn label relationships from in-context examples. In this paper, we provide novel insights into how ICL leverages label information, revealing both capabilities and limitations. To ensure we obtain a comprehensive picture of ICL behavior, we study probabilistic aspects of ICL predictions and thoroughly examine the dynamics of ICL as more examples are provided. Our experiments show that ICL predictions almost always depend on in-context labels and that ICL can learn truly novel tasks in-context. However, we also find that ICL struggles to fully overcome prediction preferences acquired from pre-training data and, further, that ICL does not consider all in-context information equally.

Memorization in language models is typically treated as a homogenous phenomenon, neglecting the specifics of the memorized data. We instead model memorization as the effect of a set of complex factors that describe each sample and relate it to the model and corpus. To build intuition around these factors, we break memorization down into a taxonomy: recitation of highly duplicated sequences, reconstruction of inherently predictable sequences, and recollection of sequences that are neither. We demonstrate the usefulness of our taxonomy by using it to construct a predictive model for memorization. By analyzing dependencies and inspecting the weights of the predictive model, we find that different factors influence the likelihood of memorization differently depending on the taxonomic category.

Neural models have achieved great success on machine reading comprehension (MRC), many of which typically consist of two components: an evidence extractor and an answer predictor. The former seeks the most relevant information from a reference text, while the latter is to locate or generate answers from the extracted evidence. Despite the importance of evidence labels for training the evidence extractor, they are not cheaply accessible, particularly in many non-extractive MRC tasks such as YES/NO question answering and multi-choice MRC. To address this problem, we present a Self-Training method (STM), which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. At each iteration, a base MRC model is trained with golden answers and noisy evidence labels. The trained model will predict pseudo evidence labels as extra supervision in the next iteration. We evaluate STM on seven datasets over three MRC tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the improvement on existing MRC models, and we also analyze how and why such a self-training method works in MRC. The source code can be obtained from https://github.com/SparkJiao/Self-Training-MRC

We introduce a new dataset named WikiVitals which contains a large graph of 48k mutually referred Wikipedia articles classified into 32 categories and connected by 2.3M edges. Our aim is to rigorously evaluate the contributions of three distinct sources of information to the label prediction in a semi-supervised node classification setting, namely the content of the articles, their connections with each other and the correlations among their labels. We perform this evaluation using a Graph Markov Neural Network which provides a theoretically principled model for this task and we conduct a detailed evaluation of the contributions of each sources of information using a clear separation of model selection and model assessment. One interesting observation is that including the effect of label dependencies is more relevant for sparse train sets than it is for dense train sets.

Sequence-to-sequence models are commonly trained via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). However, standard MLE training considers a word-level objective, predicting the next word given the previous ground-truth partial sentence. This procedure focuses on modeling local syntactic patterns, and may fail to capture long-range semantic structure. We present a novel solution to alleviate these issues. Our approach imposes global sequence-level guidance via new supervision based on optimal transport, enabling the overall characterization and preservation of semantic features. We further show that this method can be understood as a Wasserstein gradient flow trying to match our model to the ground truth sequence distribution. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the utility of the proposed approach, showing consistent improvements over a wide variety of NLP tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, and image captioning.

Large language models (LLMs) have become the cornerstone of modern AI. However, the existing paradigm of next-token prediction fundamentally limits their ability to form coherent, high-level concepts, making it a critical barrier to human-like understanding and reasoning. Take the phrase "ribonucleic acid" as an example: an LLM will first decompose it into tokens, i.e., artificial text fragments ("rib", "on", ...), then learn each token sequentially, rather than grasping the phrase as a unified, coherent semantic entity. This fragmented representation hinders deeper conceptual understanding and, ultimately, the development of truly intelligent systems. In response, we introduce Concept-Aware Fine-Tuning (CAFT), a novel multi-token training method that redefines how LLMs are fine-tuned. By enabling the learning of sequences that span multiple tokens, this method fosters stronger concept-aware learning. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements compared to conventional next-token finetuning methods across diverse tasks, including traditional applications like text summarization and domain-specific ones like de novo protein design. Multi-token prediction was previously only possible in the prohibitively expensive pretraining phase; CAFT, to our knowledge, is the first to bring the multi-token setting to the post-training phase, thus effectively democratizing its benefits for the broader community of practitioners and researchers. Finally, the unexpected effectiveness of our proposed method suggests wider implications for the machine learning research community. All code and data are available at https://github.com/michaelchen-lab/caft-llm

The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table's content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model's ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model's confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15%.

The Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH) states that neural networks learn to encode concepts as directions in activation space, and a strong version of the LRH states that models learn only such encodings. In this paper, we present a counterexample to this strong LRH: when trained to repeat an input token sequence, gated recurrent neural networks (RNNs) learn to represent the token at each position with a particular order of magnitude, rather than a direction. These representations have layered features that are impossible to locate in distinct linear subspaces. To show this, we train interventions to predict and manipulate tokens by learning the scaling factor corresponding to each sequence position. These interventions indicate that the smallest RNNs find only this magnitude-based solution, while larger RNNs have linear representations. These findings strongly indicate that interpretability research should not be confined by the LRH.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has seen remarkable advances in recent years, particularly with the emergence of Large Language Models that have achieved unprecedented performance across many tasks. However, these developments have mainly benefited a small number of high-resource languages such as English. The majority of languages still face significant challenges due to the scarcity of training data and computational resources. To address this issue, this thesis focuses on cross-lingual transfer learning, a research area aimed at leveraging data and models from high-resource languages to improve NLP performance for low-resource languages. Specifically, we focus on Sequence Labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition, Opinion Target Extraction, and Argument Mining. The research is structured around three main objectives: (1) advancing data-based cross-lingual transfer learning methods through improved translation and annotation projection techniques, (2) developing enhanced model-based transfer learning approaches utilizing state-of-the-art multilingual models, and (3) applying these methods to real-world problems while creating open-source resources that facilitate future research in low-resource NLP. More specifically, this thesis presents a new method to improve data-based transfer with T-Projection, a state-of-the-art annotation projection method that leverages text-to-text multilingual models and machine translation systems. T-Projection significantly outperforms previous annotation projection methods by a wide margin. For model-based transfer, we introduce a constrained decoding algorithm that enhances cross-lingual Sequence Labeling in zero-shot settings using text-to-text models. Finally, we develop Medical mT5, the first multilingual text-to-text medical model, demonstrating the practical impact of our research on real-world applications.

We study the effectiveness of neural sequence models for premise selection in automated theorem proving, one of the main bottlenecks in the formalization of mathematics. We propose a two stage approach for this task that yields good results for the premise selection task on the Mizar corpus while avoiding the hand-engineered features of existing state-of-the-art models. To our knowledge, this is the first time deep learning has been applied to theorem proving on a large scale.

Due to the expensive costs of collecting labels in multi-label classification datasets, partially annotated multi-label classification has become an emerging field in computer vision. One baseline approach to this task is to assume unobserved labels as negative labels, but this assumption induces label noise as a form of false negative. To understand the negative impact caused by false negative labels, we study how these labels affect the model's explanation. We observe that the explanation of two models, trained with full and partial labels each, highlights similar regions but with different scaling, where the latter tends to have lower attribution scores. Based on these findings, we propose to boost the attribution scores of the model trained with partial labels to make its explanation resemble that of the model trained with full labels. Even with the conceptually simple approach, the multi-label classification performance improves by a large margin in three different datasets on a single positive label setting and one on a large-scale partial label setting. Code is available at https://github.com/youngwk/BridgeGapExplanationPAMC.

We show that existing unsupervised methods on large language model (LLM) activations do not discover knowledge -- instead they seem to discover whatever feature of the activations is most prominent. The idea behind unsupervised knowledge elicitation is that knowledge satisfies a consistency structure, which can be used to discover knowledge. We first prove theoretically that arbitrary features (not just knowledge) satisfy the consistency structure of a particular leading unsupervised knowledge-elicitation method, contrast-consistent search (Burns et al. - arXiv:2212.03827). We then present a series of experiments showing settings in which unsupervised methods result in classifiers that do not predict knowledge, but instead predict a different prominent feature. We conclude that existing unsupervised methods for discovering latent knowledge are insufficient, and we contribute sanity checks to apply to evaluating future knowledge elicitation methods. Conceptually, we hypothesise that the identification issues explored here, e.g. distinguishing a model's knowledge from that of a simulated character's, will persist for future unsupervised methods.

A critical component of a successful language generation pipeline is the decoding algorithm. However, the general principles that should guide the choice of decoding algorithm remain unclear. Previous works only compare decoding algorithms in narrow scenarios and their findings do not generalize across tasks. To better structure the discussion, we introduce a taxonomy that groups decoding strategies based on their implicit assumptions about how well the model's likelihood is aligned with the task-specific notion of utility. We argue that this taxonomy allows a broader view of the decoding problem and can lead to generalizable statements because it is grounded on the interplay between the decoding algorithms and the likelihood-utility misalignment. Specifically, by analyzing the correlation between the likelihood and the utility of predictions across a diverse set of tasks, we provide the first empirical evidence supporting the proposed taxonomy, and a set of principles to structure reasoning when choosing a decoding algorithm. Crucially, our analysis is the first one to relate likelihood-based decoding strategies with strategies that rely on external information such as value-guided methods and prompting, and covers the most diverse set of tasks up-to-date.

In-context learning (ICL) emerges as a promising capability of large language models (LLMs) by providing them with demonstration examples to perform diverse tasks. However, the underlying mechanism of how LLMs learn from the provided context remains under-explored. In this paper, we investigate the working mechanism of ICL through an information flow lens. Our findings reveal that label words in the demonstration examples function as anchors: (1) semantic information aggregates into label word representations during the shallow computation layers' processing; (2) the consolidated information in label words serves as a reference for LLMs' final predictions. Based on these insights, we introduce an anchor re-weighting method to improve ICL performance, a demonstration compression technique to expedite inference, and an analysis framework for diagnosing ICL errors in GPT2-XL. The promising applications of our findings again validate the uncovered ICL working mechanism and pave the way for future studies.

Supervised learning usually requires a large amount of labelled data. However, attaining ground-truth labels is costly for many tasks. Alternatively, weakly supervised methods learn with cheap weak signals that only approximately label some data. Many existing weakly supervised learning methods learn a deterministic function that estimates labels given the input data and weak signals. In this paper, we develop label learning flows (LLF), a general framework for weakly supervised learning problems. Our method is a generative model based on normalizing flows. The main idea of LLF is to optimize the conditional likelihoods of all possible labelings of the data within a constrained space defined by weak signals. We develop a training method for LLF that trains the conditional flow inversely and avoids estimating the labels. Once a model is trained, we can make predictions with a sampling algorithm. We apply LLF to three weakly supervised learning problems. Experiment results show that our method outperforms many baselines we compare against.

We address a challenging and practical task of labeling questions in speech in real time during telephone calls to emergency medical services in English, which embeds within a broader decision support system for emergency call-takers. We propose a novel multimodal approach to real-time sequence labeling in speech. Our model treats speech and its own textual representation as two separate modalities or views, as it jointly learns from streamed audio and its noisy transcription into text via automatic speech recognition. Our results show significant gains of jointly learning from the two modalities when compared to text or audio only, under adverse noise and limited volume of training data. The results generalize to medical symptoms detection where we observe a similar pattern of improvements with multimodal learning.

Machine learning models are routinely used to support decisions that affect individuals -- be it to screen a patient for a serious illness or to gauge their response to treatment. In these tasks, we are limited to learning models from datasets with noisy labels. In this paper, we study the instance-level impact of learning under label noise. We introduce a notion of regret for this regime, which measures the number of unforeseen mistakes due to noisy labels. We show that standard approaches to learning under label noise can return models that perform well at a population-level while subjecting individuals to a lottery of mistakes. We present a versatile approach to estimate the likelihood of mistakes at the individual-level from a noisy dataset by training models over plausible realizations of datasets without label noise. This is supported by a comprehensive empirical study of label noise in clinical prediction tasks. Our results reveal how failure to anticipate mistakes can compromise model reliability and adoption -- we demonstrate how we can address these challenges by anticipating and avoiding regretful decisions.

Due to the difficulty of collecting exhaustive multi-label annotations, multi-label datasets often contain partial labels. We consider an extreme of this weakly supervised learning problem, called single positive multi-label learning (SPML), where each multi-label training image has only one positive label. Traditionally, all unannotated labels are assumed as negative labels in SPML, which introduces false negative labels and causes model training to be dominated by assumed negative labels. In this work, we choose to treat all unannotated labels from an alternative perspective, i.e. acknowledging they are unknown. Hence, we propose entropy-maximization (EM) loss to attain a special gradient regime for providing proper supervision signals. Moreover, we propose asymmetric pseudo-labeling (APL), which adopts asymmetric-tolerance strategies and a self-paced procedure, to cooperate with EM loss and then provide more precise supervision. Experiments show that our method significantly improves performance and achieves state-of-the-art results on all four benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/SPML-AckTheUnknown.

Tasking machines with understanding receipts can have important applications such as enabling detailed analytics on purchases, enforcing expense policies, and inferring patterns of purchase behavior on large collections of receipts. In this paper, we focus on the task of Named Entity Linking (NEL) of scanned receipt line items; specifically, the task entails associating shorthand text from OCR'd receipts with a knowledge base (KB) of grocery products. For example, the scanned item "STO BABY SPINACH" should be linked to the catalog item labeled "Simple Truth Organic Baby Spinach". Experiments that employ a variety of Information Retrieval techniques in combination with statistical phrase detection shows promise for effective understanding of scanned receipt data.

Several recent works have suggested to represent semantic relations with questions and answers, decomposing textual information into separate interrogative natural language statements. In this paper, we consider three QA-based semantic tasks - namely, QA-SRL, QANom and QADiscourse, each targeting a certain type of predication - and propose to regard them as jointly providing a comprehensive representation of textual information. To promote this goal, we investigate how to best utilize the power of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models, within the unique setup of semi-structured outputs, consisting of an unordered set of question-answer pairs. We examine different input and output linearization strategies, and assess the effect of multitask learning and of simple data augmentation techniques in the setting of imbalanced training data. Consequently, we release the first unified QASem parsing tool, practical for downstream applications who can benefit from an explicit, QA-based account of information units in a text.

Recent advances in Hierarchical Multi-label Classification (HMC), particularly neurosymbolic-based approaches, have demonstrated improved consistency and accuracy by enforcing constraints on a neural model during training. However, such work assumes the existence of such constraints a-priori. In this paper, we relax this strong assumption and present an approach based on Error Detection Rules (EDR) that allow for learning explainable rules about the failure modes of machine learning models. We show that these rules are not only effective in detecting when a machine learning classifier has made an error but also can be leveraged as constraints for HMC, thereby allowing the recovery of explainable constraints even if they are not provided. We show that our approach is effective in detecting machine learning errors and recovering constraints, is noise tolerant, and can function as a source of knowledge for neurosymbolic models on multiple datasets, including a newly introduced military vehicle recognition dataset.

Large-scale sequence-to-sequence models have shown to be adept at both multiple-choice and open-domain commonsense reasoning tasks. However, the current systems do not provide the ability to control the various attributes of the reasoning chain. To enable better controllability, we propose to study the commonsense reasoning as a template filling task (TemplateCSR) -- where the language models fills reasoning templates with the given constraints as control factors. As an approach to TemplateCSR, we (i) propose a dataset of commonsense reasoning template-expansion pairs and (ii) introduce POTTER, a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model using prompts to perform commonsense reasoning across concepts. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms baselines both in generation metrics and factuality metrics. We also present a detailed error analysis on our approach's ability to reliably perform commonsense reasoning.

Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC) aims to assign the most relevant labels to each given text. Existing methods demonstrate that label dependency can help to improve the model's performance. However, the introduction of label dependency may cause the model to suffer from unwanted prediction bias. In this study, we attribute the bias to the model's misuse of label dependency, i.e., the model tends to utilize the correlation shortcut in label dependency rather than fusing text information and label dependency for prediction. Motivated by causal inference, we propose a CounterFactual Text Classifier (CFTC) to eliminate the correlation bias, and make causality-based predictions. Specifically, our CFTC first adopts the predict-then-modify backbone to extract precise label information embedded in label dependency, then blocks the correlation shortcut through the counterfactual de-bias technique with the help of the human causal graph. Experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our CFTC significantly outperforms the baselines and effectively eliminates the correlation bias in datasets.

The Russian Drug Reaction Corpus (RuDReC) is a new partially annotated corpus of consumer reviews in Russian about pharmaceutical products for the detection of health-related named entities and the effectiveness of pharmaceutical products. The corpus itself consists of two parts, the raw one and the labelled one. The raw part includes 1.4 million health-related user-generated texts collected from various Internet sources, including social media. The labelled part contains 500 consumer reviews about drug therapy with drug- and disease-related information. Labels for sentences include health-related issues or their absence. The sentences with one are additionally labelled at the expression level for identification of fine-grained subtypes such as drug classes and drug forms, drug indications, and drug reactions. Further, we present a baseline model for named entity recognition (NER) and multi-label sentence classification tasks on this corpus. The macro F1 score of 74.85% in the NER task was achieved by our RuDR-BERT model. For the sentence classification task, our model achieves the macro F1 score of 68.82% gaining 7.47% over the score of BERT model trained on Russian data. We make the RuDReC corpus and pretrained weights of domain-specific BERT models freely available at https://github.com/cimm-kzn/RuDReC

Lately, instruction-based techniques have made significant strides in improving performance in few-shot learning scenarios. They achieve this by bridging the gap between pre-trained language models and fine-tuning for specific downstream tasks. Despite these advancements, the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in information extraction tasks like Named Entity Recognition (NER), using prompts or instructions, still falls short of supervised baselines. The reason for this performance gap can be attributed to the fundamental disparity between NER and LLMs. NER is inherently a sequence labeling task, where the model must assign entity-type labels to individual tokens within a sentence. In contrast, LLMs are designed as a text generation task. This distinction between semantic labeling and text generation leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we transform the NER task into a text-generation task that can be readily adapted by LLMs. This involves enhancing source sentences with task-specific instructions and answer choices, allowing for the identification of entities and their types within natural language. We harness the strength of LLMs by integrating supervised learning within them. The goal of this combined strategy is to boost the performance of LLMs in extraction tasks like NER while simultaneously addressing hallucination issues often observed in LLM-generated content. A novel corpus Contract NER comprising seven frequently observed contract categories, encompassing named entities associated with 18 distinct legal entity types is released along with our baseline models. Our models and dataset are available to the community for future research * .

This work proposes a novel adaptation of a pretrained sequence-to-sequence model to the task of document ranking. Our approach is fundamentally different from a commonly-adopted classification-based formulation of ranking, based on encoder-only pretrained transformer architectures such as BERT. We show how a sequence-to-sequence model can be trained to generate relevance labels as "target words", and how the underlying logits of these target words can be interpreted as relevance probabilities for ranking. On the popular MS MARCO passage ranking task, experimental results show that our approach is at least on par with previous classification-based models and can surpass them with larger, more-recent models. On the test collection from the TREC 2004 Robust Track, we demonstrate a zero-shot transfer-based approach that outperforms previous state-of-the-art models requiring in-dataset cross-validation. Furthermore, we find that our approach significantly outperforms an encoder-only model in a data-poor regime (i.e., with few training examples). We investigate this observation further by varying target words to probe the model's use of latent knowledge.

Invoices and receipts submitted by employees are visually rich documents (VRDs) with textual, visual and layout information. To protect against the risk of fraud and abuse, it is crucial for organizations to efficiently extract desired information from submitted receipts. This helps in the assessment of key factors such as appropriateness of the expense claim, adherence to spending and transaction policies, the validity of the receipt, as well as downstream anomaly detection at various levels. These documents are heterogeneous, with multiple formats and languages, uploaded with different image qualities, and often do not contain ground truth labels for the efficient training of models. In this paper we propose Task Aware Instruction-based Labelling (TAIL), a method for synthetic label generation in VRD corpuses without labels, and fine-tune a multimodal Visually Rich Document Understanding Model (VRDU) on TAIL labels using response-based knowledge distillation without using the teacher model's weights or training dataset to conditionally generate annotations in the appropriate format. Using a benchmark external dataset where ground truth labels are available, we demonstrate conditions under which our approach performs at par with Claude 3 Sonnet through empirical studies. We then show that the resulting model performs at par or better on the internal expense documents of a large multinational organization than state-of-the-art LMM (large multimodal model) Claude 3 Sonnet while being 85% less costly and ~5X faster, and outperforms layout-aware baselines by more than 10% in Average Normalized Levenshtein Similarity (ANLS) scores due to its ability to reason and extract information from rare formats. Finally, we illustrate the usage of our approach in overpayment prevention.

In-context learning (ICL) has revolutionized the capabilities of transformer models in NLP. In our project, we extend the understanding of the mechanisms underpinning ICL by exploring whether transformers can learn from sequential, non-textual function class data distributions. We introduce a novel sliding window sequential function class and employ toy-sized transformers with a GPT-2 architecture to conduct our experiments. Our analysis indicates that these models can indeed leverage ICL when trained on non-textual sequential function classes. Additionally, our experiments with randomized y-label sequences highlights that transformers retain some ICL capabilities even when the label associations are obfuscated. We provide evidence that transformers can reason with and understand sequentiality encoded within function classes, as reflected by the effective learning of our proposed tasks. Our results also show that the performance deteriorated with increasing randomness in the labels, though not to the extent one might expect, implying a potential robustness of learned sequentiality against label noise. Future research may want to look into how previous explanations of transformers, such as induction heads and task vectors, relate to sequentiality in ICL in these toy examples. Our investigation lays the groundwork for further research into how transformers process and perceive sequential data.

Language Models (LMs) are being proposed for mental health applications where the heightened risk of adverse outcomes means predictive performance may not be a sufficient litmus test of a model's utility in clinical practice. A model that can be trusted for practice should have a correspondence between explanation and clinical determination, yet no prior research has examined the attention fidelity of these models and their effect on ground truth explanations. We introduce an evaluation design that focuses on the robustness and explainability of LMs in identifying Wellness Dimensions (WDs). We focus on two existing mental health and well-being datasets: (a) Multi-label Classification-based MultiWD, and (b) WellXplain for evaluating attention mechanism veracity against expert-labeled explanations. The labels are based on Halbert Dunn's theory of wellness, which gives grounding to our evaluation. We reveal four surprising results about LMs/LLMs: (1) Despite their human-like capabilities, GPT-3.5/4 lag behind RoBERTa, and MedAlpaca, a fine-tuned LLM on WellXplain fails to deliver any remarkable improvements in performance or explanations. (2) Re-examining LMs' predictions based on a confidence-oriented loss function reveals a significant performance drop. (3) Across all LMs/LLMs, the alignment between attention and explanations remains low, with LLMs scoring a dismal 0.0. (4) Most mental health-specific LMs/LLMs overlook domain-specific knowledge and undervalue explanations, causing these discrepancies. This study highlights the need for further research into their consistency and explanations in mental health and well-being.

Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical probability levels to WEP. For example, highly likely corresponds to a median chance of 0.90+-0.08 in Fagen-Ulmschneider (2015)'s survey. In this work, we measure the ability of neural language processing models to capture the consensual probability level associated to each WEP. Firstly, we use the UNLI dataset (Chen et al., 2020) which associates premises and hypotheses with their perceived joint probability p, to construct prompts, e.g. "[PREMISE]. [WEP], [HYPOTHESIS]." and assess whether language models can predict whether the WEP consensual probability level is close to p. Secondly, we construct a dataset of WEP-based probabilistic reasoning, to test whether language models can reason with WEP compositions. When prompted "[EVENTA] is likely. [EVENTB] is impossible.", a causal language model should not express that [EVENTA&B] is likely. We show that both tasks are unsolved by off-the-shelf English language models, but that fine-tuning leads to transferable improvement.

Integer sequences are of central importance to the modeling of concepts admitting complete finitary descriptions. We introduce a novel view on the learning of such concepts and lay down a set of benchmarking tasks aimed at conceptual understanding by machine learning models. These tasks indirectly assess model ability to abstract, and challenge them to reason both interpolatively and extrapolatively from the knowledge gained by observing representative examples. To further aid research in knowledge representation and reasoning, we present FACT, the Finitary Abstraction Comprehension Toolkit. The toolkit surrounds a large dataset of integer sequences comprising both organic and synthetic entries, a library for data pre-processing and generation, a set of model performance evaluation tools, and a collection of baseline model implementations, enabling the making of the future advancements with ease.

In this paper, we introduce a multi-label lazy learning approach to deal with automatic semantic indexing in large document collections in the presence of complex and structured label vocabularies with high inter-label correlation. The proposed method is an evolution of the traditional k-Nearest Neighbors algorithm which uses a large autoencoder trained to map the large label space to a reduced size latent space and to regenerate the predicted labels from this latent space. We have evaluated our proposal in a large portion of the MEDLINE biomedical document collection which uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus as a controlled vocabulary. In our experiments we propose and evaluate several document representation approaches and different label autoencoder configurations.

Labeling neural network submodules with human-legible descriptions is useful for many downstream tasks: such descriptions can surface failures, guide interventions, and perhaps even explain important model behaviors. To date, most mechanistic descriptions of trained networks have involved small models, narrowly delimited phenomena, and large amounts of human labor. Labeling all human-interpretable sub-computations in models of increasing size and complexity will almost certainly require tools that can generate and validate descriptions automatically. Recently, techniques that use learned models in-the-loop for labeling have begun to gain traction, but methods for evaluating their efficacy are limited and ad-hoc. How should we validate and compare open-ended labeling tools? This paper introduces FIND (Function INterpretation and Description), a benchmark suite for evaluating the building blocks of automated interpretability methods. FIND contains functions that resemble components of trained neural networks, and accompanying descriptions of the kind we seek to generate. The functions are procedurally constructed across textual and numeric domains, and involve a range of real-world complexities, including noise, composition, approximation, and bias. We evaluate new and existing methods that use language models (LMs) to produce code-based and language descriptions of function behavior. We find that an off-the-shelf LM augmented with only black-box access to functions can sometimes infer their structure, acting as a scientist by forming hypotheses, proposing experiments, and updating descriptions in light of new data. However, LM-based descriptions tend to capture global function behavior and miss local corruptions. These results show that FIND will be useful for characterizing the performance of more sophisticated interpretability methods before they are applied to real-world models.

Language models (LMs) can make a correct prediction based on many possible signals in a prompt, not all corresponding to recall of factual associations. However, current interpretations of LMs fail to take this into account. For example, given the query "Astrid Lindgren was born in" with the corresponding completion "Sweden", no difference is made between whether the prediction was based on knowing where the author was born or assuming that a person with a Swedish-sounding name was born in Sweden. In this paper, we present a model-specific recipe - PrISM - for constructing datasets with examples of four different prediction scenarios: generic language modeling, guesswork, heuristics recall and exact fact recall. We apply two popular interpretability methods to the scenarios: causal tracing (CT) and information flow analysis. We find that both yield distinct results for each scenario. Results for exact fact recall and generic language modeling scenarios confirm previous conclusions about the importance of mid-range MLP sublayers for fact recall, while results for guesswork and heuristics indicate a critical role of late last token position MLP sublayers. In summary, we contribute resources for a more extensive and granular study of fact completion in LMs, together with analyses that provide a more nuanced understanding of how LMs process fact-related queries.

Automatic phenotype concept recognition from unstructured text remains a challenging task in biomedical text mining research. Previous works that address the task typically use dictionary-based matching methods, which can achieve high precision but suffer from lower recall. Recently, machine learning-based methods have been proposed to identify biomedical concepts, which can recognize more unseen concept synonyms by automatic feature learning. However, most methods require large corpora of manually annotated data for model training, which is difficult to obtain due to the high cost of human annotation. In this paper, we propose PhenoTagger, a hybrid method that combines both dictionary and machine learning-based methods to recognize Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) concepts in unstructured biomedical text. We first use all concepts and synonyms in HPO to construct a dictionary, which is then used to automatically build a distantly supervised training dataset for machine learning. Next, a cutting-edge deep learning model is trained to classify each candidate phrase (n-gram from input sentence) into a corresponding concept label. Finally, the dictionary and machine learning-based prediction results are combined for improved performance. Our method is validated with two HPO corpora, and the results show that PhenoTagger compares favorably to previous methods. In addition, to demonstrate the generalizability of our method, we retrained PhenoTagger using the disease ontology MEDIC for disease concept recognition to investigate the effect of training on different ontologies. Experimental results on the NCBI disease corpus show that PhenoTagger without requiring manually annotated training data achieves competitive performance as compared with state-of-the-art supervised methods.

A machine learning system can score well on a given test set by relying on heuristics that are effective for frequent example types but break down in more challenging cases. We study this issue within natural language inference (NLI), the task of determining whether one sentence entails another. We hypothesize that statistical NLI models may adopt three fallible syntactic heuristics: the lexical overlap heuristic, the subsequence heuristic, and the constituent heuristic. To determine whether models have adopted these heuristics, we introduce a controlled evaluation set called HANS (Heuristic Analysis for NLI Systems), which contains many examples where the heuristics fail. We find that models trained on MNLI, including BERT, a state-of-the-art model, perform very poorly on HANS, suggesting that they have indeed adopted these heuristics. We conclude that there is substantial room for improvement in NLI systems, and that the HANS dataset can motivate and measure progress in this area

In this paper, we introduce the NER dataset from CLUE organization (CLUENER2020), a well-defined fine-grained dataset for named entity recognition in Chinese. CLUENER2020 contains 10 categories. Apart from common labels like person, organization, and location, it contains more diverse categories. It is more challenging than current other Chinese NER datasets and could better reflect real-world applications. For comparison, we implement several state-of-the-art baselines as sequence labeling tasks and report human performance, as well as its analysis. To facilitate future work on fine-grained NER for Chinese, we release our dataset, baselines, and leader-board.

Machine learning, notably deep learning, has significantly propelled molecular investigations within the biochemical sphere. Traditionally, modeling for such research has centered around a handful of paradigms. For instance, the prediction paradigm is frequently deployed for tasks such as molecular property prediction. To enhance the generation and decipherability of purely data-driven models, scholars have integrated biochemical domain knowledge into these molecular study models. This integration has sparked a surge in paradigm transfer, which is solving one molecular learning task by reformulating it as another one. With the emergence of Large Language Models, these paradigms have demonstrated an escalating trend towards harmonized unification. In this work, we delineate a literature survey focused on knowledge-informed molecular learning from the perspective of paradigm transfer. We classify the paradigms, scrutinize their methodologies, and dissect the contribution of domain knowledge. Moreover, we encapsulate prevailing trends and identify intriguing avenues for future exploration in molecular learning.

The capability of the traditional semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods is far from real-world application due to severely biased pseudo-labels caused by (1) class imbalance and (2) class distribution mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data. This paper addresses such a relatively under-explored problem. First, we propose a general pseudo-labeling framework that class-adaptively blends the semantic pseudo-label from a similarity-based classifier to the linear one from the linear classifier, after making the observation that both types of pseudo-labels have complementary properties in terms of bias. We further introduce a novel semantic alignment loss to establish balanced feature representation to reduce the biased predictions from the classifier. We term the whole framework as Distribution-Aware Semantics-Oriented (DASO) Pseudo-label. We conduct extensive experiments in a wide range of imbalanced benchmarks: CIFAR10/100-LT, STL10-LT, and large-scale long-tailed Semi-Aves with open-set class, and demonstrate that, the proposed DASO framework reliably improves SSL learners with unlabeled data especially when both (1) class imbalance and (2) distribution mismatch dominate.

In this work, we propose sequence-level certainty as a common theme over hallucination in Knowledge Grounded Dialogue Generation (KGDG). We explore the correlation between the level of hallucination and two types of sequence-level certainty: probabilistic certainty and semantic certainty. Empirical results reveal that a higher level of both types of sequence-level certainty in model responses is correlated with a lower level of hallucination. We further propose Certainty-based Response Ranking (CRR), a decoding-time hallucination mitigation method that ranks response candidates based on their sequence-level certainty and outputs the answer with the highest certainty level. Aligning with our definitions of sequence-level certainty, we design 2 types of CRR approaches: Probabilistic CRR (P-CRR) and Semantic CRR (S-CRR). P-CRR ranks individually sampled model responses using the arithmetic mean log-probability of the entire sequence. S-CRR approaches certainty estimation from meaning-space, and ranks model response candidates based on their semantic certainty level as measured by an entailment-based Agreement Score (AS). Through extensive experiments across 3 KGDG datasets, 3 decoding methods, and 4 different models, we validate the effectiveness of the CRR methods in reducing model hallucination.

Recently, prompt-tuning has achieved promising results for specific few-shot classification tasks. The core idea of prompt-tuning is to insert text pieces (i.e., templates) into the input and transform a classification task into a masked language modeling problem. However, for relation extraction, determining an appropriate prompt template requires domain expertise, and it is cumbersome and time-consuming to obtain a suitable label word. Furthermore, there exists abundant semantic and prior knowledge among the relation labels that cannot be ignored. To this end, we focus on incorporating knowledge among relation labels into prompt-tuning for relation extraction and propose a Knowledge-aware Prompt-tuning approach with synergistic optimization (KnowPrompt). Specifically, we inject latent knowledge contained in relation labels into prompt construction with learnable virtual type words and answer words. Then, we synergistically optimize their representation with structured constraints. Extensive experimental results on five datasets with standard and low-resource settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowPrompt for reproducibility.

In this paper, we study semantic role labelling (SRL), a subtask of semantic parsing of natural language sentences and its application for the Vietnamese language. We present our effort in building Vietnamese PropBank, the first Vietnamese SRL corpus and a software system for labelling semantic roles of Vietnamese texts. In particular, we present a novel constituent extraction algorithm in the argument candidate identification step which is more suitable and more accurate than the common node-mapping method. In the machine learning part, our system integrates distributed word features produced by two recent unsupervised learning models in two learned statistical classifiers and makes use of integer linear programming inference procedure to improve the accuracy. The system is evaluated in a series of experiments and achieves a good result, an F_1 score of 74.77%. Our system, including corpus and software, is available as an open source project for free research and we believe that it is a good baseline for the development of future Vietnamese SRL systems.

Do state-of-the-art natural language understanding models care about word order - one of the most important characteristics of a sequence? Not always! We found 75% to 90% of the correct predictions of BERT-based classifiers, trained on many GLUE tasks, remain constant after input words are randomly shuffled. Despite BERT embeddings are famously contextual, the contribution of each individual word to downstream tasks is almost unchanged even after the word's context is shuffled. BERT-based models are able to exploit superficial cues (e.g. the sentiment of keywords in sentiment analysis; or the word-wise similarity between sequence-pair inputs in natural language inference) to make correct decisions when tokens are arranged in random orders. Encouraging classifiers to capture word order information improves the performance on most GLUE tasks, SQuAD 2.0 and out-of-samples. Our work suggests that many GLUE tasks are not challenging machines to understand the meaning of a sentence.

Protein modeling is an increasingly popular area of machine learning research. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an important paradigm in protein modeling due to the high cost of acquiring supervised protein labels, but the current literature is fragmented when it comes to datasets and standardized evaluation techniques. To facilitate progress in this field, we introduce the Tasks Assessing Protein Embeddings (TAPE), a set of five biologically relevant semi-supervised learning tasks spread across different domains of protein biology. We curate tasks into specific training, validation, and test splits to ensure that each task tests biologically relevant generalization that transfers to real-life scenarios. We benchmark a range of approaches to semi-supervised protein representation learning, which span recent work as well as canonical sequence learning techniques. We find that self-supervised pretraining is helpful for almost all models on all tasks, more than doubling performance in some cases. Despite this increase, in several cases features learned by self-supervised pretraining still lag behind features extracted by state-of-the-art non-neural techniques. This gap in performance suggests a huge opportunity for innovative architecture design and improved modeling paradigms that better capture the signal in biological sequences. TAPE will help the machine learning community focus effort on scientifically relevant problems. Toward this end, all data and code used to run these experiments are available at https://github.com/songlab-cal/tape.

Despite the effectiveness of recurrent neural network language models, their maximum likelihood estimation suffers from two limitations. It treats all sentences that do not match the ground truth as equally poor, ignoring the structure of the output space. Second, it suffers from "exposure bias": during training tokens are predicted given ground-truth sequences, while at test time prediction is conditioned on generated output sequences. To overcome these limitations we build upon the recent reward augmented maximum likelihood approach \ie sequence-level smoothing that encourages the model to predict sentences close to the ground truth according to a given performance metric. We extend this approach to token-level loss smoothing, and propose improvements to the sequence-level smoothing approach. Our experiments on two different tasks, image captioning and machine translation, show that token-level and sequence-level loss smoothing are complementary, and significantly improve results.

Recent large-scale neural autoregressive sequence models have shown impressive performances on a variety of natural language generation tasks. However, their generated sequences often exhibit degenerate properties such as non-termination, undesirable repetition, and premature termination, when generated with decoding algorithms such as greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, and nucleus sampling. In this paper, we focus on the problem of non-terminating sequences resulting from an incomplete decoding algorithm. We first define an incomplete probable decoding algorithm which includes greedy search, top-k sampling, and nucleus sampling, beyond the incomplete decoding algorithm originally put forward by Welleck et al. (2020). We then propose a non-monotonic self-terminating language model, which significantly relaxes the constraint of monotonically increasing termination probability in the originally proposed self-terminating language model by Welleck et al. (2020), to address the issue of non-terminating sequences when using incomplete probable decoding algorithms. We prove that our proposed model prevents non-terminating sequences when using not only incomplete probable decoding algorithms but also beam search. We empirically validate our model on sequence completion tasks with various architectures.

Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) is fragile in scenarios with insufficient labeled samples. A vanilla extension of ERM to unlabeled samples is Entropy Minimization (EntMin), which employs the soft-labels of unlabeled samples to guide their learning. However, EntMin emphasizes prediction discriminability while neglecting prediction diversity. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we rethink the guidance information to utilize unlabeled samples. By analyzing the learning objective of ERM, we find that the guidance information for labeled samples in a specific category is the corresponding label encoding. Inspired by this finding, we propose a Label-Encoding Risk Minimization (LERM). It first estimates the label encodings through prediction means of unlabeled samples and then aligns them with their corresponding ground-truth label encodings. As a result, the LERM ensures both prediction discriminability and diversity, and it can be integrated into existing methods as a plugin. Theoretically, we analyze the relationships between LERM and ERM as well as EntMin. Empirically, we verify the superiority of the LERM under several label insufficient scenarios. The codes are available at https://github.com/zhangyl660/LERM.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential for data annotation, markedly reducing the labor costs associated with downstream applications. However, existing methods mostly adopt an aggressive strategy by prompting LLM to determine a single gold label for each unlabeled sample. Due to the inherent uncertainty within LLMs, they often produce incorrect labels for difficult samples, severely compromising the data quality for downstream applications. Motivated by ambiguity aversion in human behaviors, we propose a novel candidate annotation paradigm wherein large language models are encouraged to output all possible labels when incurring uncertainty. To ensure unique labels are provided for downstream tasks, we develop a teacher-student framework CanDist that distills candidate annotations with a Small Language Model (SLM). We further provide a rigorous justification demonstrating that distilling candidate annotations from the teacher LLM offers superior theoretical guarantees compared to directly using single annotations. Extensive experiments across six text classification tasks validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/MingxuanXia/CanDist.

In this paper, we propose a variety of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based models for sequence tagging. These models include LSTM networks, bidirectional LSTM (BI-LSTM) networks, LSTM with a Conditional Random Field (CRF) layer (LSTM-CRF) and bidirectional LSTM with a CRF layer (BI-LSTM-CRF). Our work is the first to apply a bidirectional LSTM CRF (denoted as BI-LSTM-CRF) model to NLP benchmark sequence tagging data sets. We show that the BI-LSTM-CRF model can efficiently use both past and future input features thanks to a bidirectional LSTM component. It can also use sentence level tag information thanks to a CRF layer. The BI-LSTM-CRF model can produce state of the art (or close to) accuracy on POS, chunking and NER data sets. In addition, it is robust and has less dependence on word embedding as compared to previous observations.

In-context learning (ICL) i.e. showing LLMs only a few task-specific demonstrations has led to downstream gains with no task-specific fine-tuning required. However, LLMs are sensitive to the choice of prompts, and therefore a crucial research question is how to select good demonstrations for ICL. One effective strategy is leveraging semantic similarity between the ICL demonstrations and test inputs by using a text retriever, which however is sub-optimal as that does not consider the LLM's existing knowledge about that task. From prior work (Min et al., 2022), we already know that labels paired with the demonstrations bias the model predictions. This leads us to our hypothesis whether considering LLM's existing knowledge about the task, especially with respect to the output label space can help in a better demonstration selection strategy. Through extensive experimentation on three text classification tasks, we find that it is beneficial to not only choose semantically similar ICL demonstrations but also to choose those demonstrations that help resolve the inherent label ambiguity surrounding the test example. Interestingly, we find that including demonstrations that the LLM previously mis-classified and also fall on the test example's decision boundary, brings the most performance gain.

Learning from Label Proportions (LLP) is a learning problem where only aggregate level labels are available for groups of instances, called bags, during training, and the aim is to get the best performance at the instance-level on the test data. This setting arises in domains like advertising and medicine due to privacy considerations. We propose a novel algorithmic framework for this problem that iteratively performs two main steps. For the first step (Pseudo Labeling) in every iteration, we define a Gibbs distribution over binary instance labels that incorporates a) covariate information through the constraint that instances with similar covariates should have similar labels and b) the bag level aggregated label. We then use Belief Propagation (BP) to marginalize the Gibbs distribution to obtain pseudo labels. In the second step (Embedding Refinement), we use the pseudo labels to provide supervision for a learner that yields a better embedding. Further, we iterate on the two steps again by using the second step's embeddings as new covariates for the next iteration. In the final iteration, a classifier is trained using the pseudo labels. Our algorithm displays strong gains against several SOTA baselines (up to 15%) for the LLP Binary Classification problem on various dataset types - tabular and Image. We achieve these improvements with minimal computational overhead above standard supervised learning due to Belief Propagation, for large bag sizes, even for a million samples.

Given an input sequence (or prefix), modern language models often assign high probabilities to output sequences that are repetitive, incoherent, or irrelevant to the prefix; as such, model-generated text also contains such artifacts. To address these issues we present RankGen, a 1.2B parameter encoder model for English that scores model generations given a prefix. RankGen can be flexibly incorporated as a scoring function in beam search and used to decode from any pretrained language model. We train RankGen using large-scale contrastive learning to map a prefix close to the ground-truth sequence that follows it and far away from two types of negatives: (1) random sequences from the same document as the prefix, and (2) sequences generated from a large language model conditioned on the prefix. Experiments across four different language models (345M-11B parameters) and two domains show that RankGen significantly outperforms decoding algorithms like nucleus, top-k, and typical sampling, as well as contrastive decoding and search, on both automatic metrics (85.0 vs 77.3 MAUVE over nucleus) as well as human evaluations with English writers (74.5% human preference over nucleus sampling). Analysis reveals that RankGen outputs are more relevant to the prefix and improve continuity and coherence compared to baselines. We release our model checkpoints, code, and human preference data with explanations to facilitate future research.

Mining data streams with multi-label outputs poses significant challenges due to evolving distributions, high-dimensional label spaces, sparse label occurrences, and complex label dependencies. Moreover, concept drift affects not only input distributions but also label correlations and imbalance ratios over time, complicating model adaptation. To address these challenges, structured learners are categorized into local and global methods. Local methods break down the task into simpler components, while global methods adapt the algorithm to the full output space, potentially yielding better predictions by exploiting label correlations. This work introduces iHOMER (Incremental Hierarchy Of Multi-label Classifiers), an online multi-label learning framework that incrementally partitions the label space into disjoint, correlated clusters without relying on predefined hierarchies. iHOMER leverages online divisive-agglomerative clustering based on Jaccard similarity and a global tree-based learner driven by a multivariate Bernoulli process to guide instance partitioning. To address non-stationarity, it integrates drift detection mechanisms at both global and local levels, enabling dynamic restructuring of label partitions and subtrees. Experiments across 23 real-world datasets show iHOMER outperforms 5 state-of-the-art global baselines, such as MLHAT, MLHT of Pruned Sets and iSOUPT, by 23\%, and 12 local baselines, such as binary relevance transformations of kNN, EFDT, ARF, and ADWIN bagging/boosting ensembles, by 32\%, establishing its robustness for online multi-label classification.

We explore the Iterative Inference Hypothesis (IIH) within the context of transformer-based language models, aiming to understand how a model's latent representations are progressively refined and whether observable differences are present between correct and incorrect generations. Our findings provide empirical support for the IIH, showing that the nth token embedding in the residual stream follows a trajectory of decreasing loss. Additionally, we observe that the rate at which residual embeddings converge to a stable output representation reflects uncertainty in the token generation process. Finally, we introduce a method utilizing cross-entropy to detect this uncertainty and demonstrate its potential to distinguish between correct and incorrect token generations on a dataset of idioms.

In the absence of readily available labeled data for a given sequence labeling task and language, annotation projection has been proposed as one of the possible strategies to automatically generate annotated data. Annotation projection has often been formulated as the task of transporting, on parallel corpora, the labels pertaining to a given span in the source language into its corresponding span in the target language. In this paper we present T-Projection, a novel approach for annotation projection that leverages large pretrained text-to-text language models and state-of-the-art machine translation technology. T-Projection decomposes the label projection task into two subtasks: (i) A candidate generation step, in which a set of projection candidates using a multilingual T5 model is generated and, (ii) a candidate selection step, in which the generated candidates are ranked based on translation probabilities. We conducted experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic tasks in 5 Indo-European and 8 low-resource African languages. We demostrate that T-projection outperforms previous annotation projection methods by a wide margin. We believe that T-Projection can help to automatically alleviate the lack of high-quality training data for sequence labeling tasks. Code and data are publicly available.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) makes it important to recognize their strengths and limitations. We argue that in order to develop a holistic understanding of these systems we need to consider the problem that they were trained to solve: next-word prediction over Internet text. By recognizing the pressures that this task exerts we can make predictions about the strategies that LLMs will adopt, allowing us to reason about when they will succeed or fail. This approach - which we call the teleological approach - leads us to identify three factors that we hypothesize will influence LLM accuracy: the probability of the task to be performed, the probability of the target output, and the probability of the provided input. We predict that LLMs will achieve higher accuracy when these probabilities are high than when they are low - even in deterministic settings where probability should not matter. To test our predictions, we evaluate two LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on eleven tasks, and we find robust evidence that LLMs are influenced by probability in the ways that we have hypothesized. In many cases, the experiments reveal surprising failure modes. For instance, GPT-4's accuracy at decoding a simple cipher is 51% when the output is a high-probability word sequence but only 13% when it is low-probability. These results show that AI practitioners should be careful about using LLMs in low-probability situations. More broadly, we conclude that we should not evaluate LLMs as if they are humans but should instead treat them as a distinct type of system - one that has been shaped by its own particular set of pressures.

Multi-label classification problems with thousands of classes are hard to solve with in-context learning alone, as language models (LMs) might lack prior knowledge about the precise classes or how to assign them, and it is generally infeasible to demonstrate every class in a prompt. We propose a general program, Infer--Retrieve--Rank, that defines multi-step interactions between LMs and retrievers to efficiently tackle such problems. We implement this program using the DSPy programming model, which specifies in-context systems in a declarative manner, and use DSPy optimizers to tune it towards specific datasets by bootstrapping only tens of few-shot examples. Our primary extreme classification program, optimized separately for each task, attains state-of-the-art results across three benchmarks (HOUSE, TECH, TECHWOLF). We apply the same program to a benchmark with vastly different characteristics and attain competitive performance as well (BioDEX). Unlike prior work, our proposed solution requires no finetuning, is easily applicable to new tasks, alleviates prompt engineering, and requires only tens of labeled examples. Our code is public at https://github.com/KarelDO/xmc.dspy.

In the field of language modeling, models augmented with retrieval components have emerged as a promising solution to address several challenges faced in the natural language processing (NLP) field, including knowledge grounding, interpretability, and scalability. Despite the primary focus on NLP, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology. Therefore, this work introduces a formal framework of this paradigm, Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations which is missing from the current literature. Also, we found that while a number of studies employ retrieval components to augment their models, there is a lack of integration with foundational Information Retrieval (IR) research. We bridge this gap between the seminal IR research and contemporary REML studies by investigating each component that comprises the REML framework. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to equip researchers across various disciplines with a comprehensive, formally structured framework of retrieval-enhanced models, thereby fostering interdisciplinary future research.

Open vocabulary models (e.g. CLIP) have shown strong performance on zero-shot classification through their ability generate embeddings for each class based on their (natural language) names. Prior work has focused on improving the accuracy of these models through prompt engineering or by incorporating a small amount of labeled downstream data (via finetuning). However, there has been little focus on improving the richness of the class names themselves, which can pose issues when class labels are coarsely-defined and are uninformative. We propose Classification with Hierarchical Label Sets (or CHiLS), an alternative strategy for zero-shot classification specifically designed for datasets with implicit semantic hierarchies. CHiLS proceeds in three steps: (i) for each class, produce a set of subclasses, using either existing label hierarchies or by querying GPT-3; (ii) perform the standard zero-shot CLIP procedure as though these subclasses were the labels of interest; (iii) map the predicted subclass back to its parent to produce the final prediction. Across numerous datasets with underlying hierarchical structure, CHiLS leads to improved accuracy in situations both with and without ground-truth hierarchical information. CHiLS is simple to implement within existing zero-shot pipelines and requires no additional training cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/acmi-lab/CHILS.

Conventional multi-label recognition methods often focus on label confidence, frequently overlooking the pivotal role of partial order relations consistent with human preference. To resolve these issues, we introduce a novel method for multimodal label relevance ranking, named Label Relevance Ranking with Proximal Policy Optimization (LR2PPO), which effectively discerns partial order relations among labels. LR2PPO first utilizes partial order pairs in the target domain to train a reward model, which aims to capture human preference intrinsic to the specific scenario. Furthermore, we meticulously design state representation and a policy loss tailored for ranking tasks, enabling LR2PPO to boost the performance of label relevance ranking model and largely reduce the requirement of partial order annotation for transferring to new scenes. To assist in the evaluation of our approach and similar methods, we further propose a novel benchmark dataset, LRMovieNet, featuring multimodal labels and their corresponding partial order data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LR2PPO algorithm achieves state-of-the-art performance, proving its effectiveness in addressing the multimodal label relevance ranking problem. Codes and the proposed LRMovieNet dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/ChazzyGordon/LR2PPO.

We introduce Explanatory Learning (EL), a framework to let machines use existing knowledge buried in symbolic sequences -- e.g. explanations written in hieroglyphic -- by autonomously learning to interpret them. In EL, the burden of interpreting symbols is not left to humans or rigid human-coded compilers, as done in Program Synthesis. Rather, EL calls for a learned interpreter, built upon a limited collection of symbolic sequences paired with observations of several phenomena. This interpreter can be used to make predictions on a novel phenomenon given its explanation, and even to find that explanation using only a handful of observations, like human scientists do. We formulate the EL problem as a simple binary classification task, so that common end-to-end approaches aligned with the dominant empiricist view of machine learning could, in principle, solve it. To these models, we oppose Critical Rationalist Networks (CRNs), which instead embrace a rationalist view on the acquisition of knowledge. CRNs express several desired properties by construction, they are truly explainable, can adjust their processing at test-time for harder inferences, and can offer strong confidence guarantees on their predictions. As a final contribution, we introduce Odeen, a basic EL environment that simulates a small flatland-style universe full of phenomena to explain. Using Odeen as a testbed, we show how CRNs outperform empiricist end-to-end approaches of similar size and architecture (Transformers) in discovering explanations for novel phenomena.

We propose a new strategy for applying large pre-trained language models to novel tasks when labeled training data is limited. Rather than apply the model in a typical zero-shot or few-shot fashion, we treat the model as the basis for labeling functions in a weak supervision framework. To create a classifier, we first prompt the model to answer multiple distinct queries about an example and define how the possible responses should be mapped to votes for labels and abstentions. We then denoise these noisy label sources using the Snorkel system and train an end classifier with the resulting training data. Our experimental evaluation shows that prompting large language models within a weak supervision framework can provide significant gains in accuracy. On the WRENCH weak supervision benchmark, this approach can significantly improve over zero-shot performance, an average 19.5% reduction in errors. We also find that this approach produces classifiers with comparable or superior accuracy to those trained from hand-engineered rules.

This paper presents a neural architecture for Vietnamese sequence labeling tasks including part-of-speech (POS) tagging and named entity recognition (NER). We applied the model described in lample-EtAl:2016:N16-1 that is a combination of bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory and Conditional Random Fields, which rely on two sources of information about words: character-based word representations learned from the supervised corpus and pre-trained word embeddings learned from other unannotated corpora. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that this work achieves state-of-the-art performances on both tasks - 93.52\% accuracy for POS tagging and 94.88\% F1 for NER. Our sourcecode is available at here.

Language models contain ranking-based knowledge and are powerful solvers of in-context ranking tasks. For instance, they may have parametric knowledge about the ordering of countries by size or may be able to rank reviews by sentiment. Recent work focuses on pairwise, pointwise, and listwise prompting techniques to elicit a language model's ranking knowledge. However, we find that even with careful calibration and constrained decoding, prompting-based techniques may not always be self-consistent in the rankings they produce. This motivates us to explore an alternative approach that is inspired by an unsupervised probing method called Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS). The idea is to train a probing model guided by a logical constraint: a model's representation of a statement and its negation must be mapped to contrastive true-false poles consistently across multiple statements. We hypothesize that similar constraints apply to ranking tasks where all items are related via consistent pairwise or listwise comparisons. To this end, we extend the binary CCS method to Contrast-Consistent Ranking (CCR) by adapting existing ranking methods such as the Max-Margin Loss, Triplet Loss, and Ordinal Regression objective. Our results confirm that, for the same language model, CCR probing outperforms prompting and even performs on a par with prompting much larger language models.

Hypothetical induction is recognized as the main reasoning type when scientists make observations about the world and try to propose hypotheses to explain those observations. Past research on hypothetical induction is under a constrained setting: (1) the observation annotations in the dataset are carefully manually handpicked sentences (resulting in a close-domain setting); and (2) the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge, making the task less challenging. In this work, we tackle these problems by proposing the first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery, with the final goal to create systems that automatically generate valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, given only a pile of raw web corpus. Unlike previous settings, the new dataset requires (1) using open-domain data (raw web corpus) as observations; and (2) proposing hypotheses even new to humanity. A multi-module framework is developed for the task, including three different feedback mechanisms to boost performance, which exhibits superior performance in terms of both GPT-4 based and expert-based evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work showing that LLMs are able to generate novel (''not existing in literature'') and valid (''reflecting reality'') scientific hypotheses.

Quantifying uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) is important for safety-critical applications because it helps spot incorrect answers, known as hallucinations. One major trend of uncertainty quantification methods is based on estimating the entropy of the distribution of the LLM's potential output sequences. This estimation is based on a set of output sequences and associated probabilities obtained by querying the LLM several times. In this paper, we advocate and experimentally show that the probability of unobserved sequences plays a crucial role, and we recommend future research to integrate it to enhance such LLM uncertainty quantification methods.

We present evidence that language models can learn meaning despite being trained only to perform next token prediction on text, specifically a corpus of programs. Each program is preceded by a specification in the form of (textual) input-output examples. Working with programs enables us to precisely define concepts relevant to meaning in language (e.g., correctness and semantics), making program synthesis well-suited as an intermediate testbed for characterizing the presence (or absence) of meaning in language models. We first train a Transformer model on the corpus of programs, then probe the trained model's hidden states as it completes a program given a specification. Despite providing no inductive bias toward learning the semantics of the language, we find that a linear probe is able to extract abstractions of both current and future program states from the model states. Moreover, there is a strong, statistically significant correlation between the accuracy of the probe and the model's ability to generate a program that implements the specification. To evaluate whether the semantics are represented in the model states rather than learned by the probe, we design a novel experimental procedure that intervenes on the semantics of the language while preserving the lexicon and syntax. We also demonstrate that the model learns to generate correct programs that are, on average, shorter than those in the training set, which is evidence that language model outputs may differ from the training distribution in semantically meaningful ways. In summary, this paper does not propose any new techniques for training language models, but develops an experimental framework for and provides insights into the acquisition and representation of (formal) meaning in language models.

The noise transition matrix plays a central role in the problem of learning with noisy labels. Among many other reasons, a large number of existing solutions rely on access to it. Identifying and estimating the transition matrix without ground truth labels is a critical and challenging task. When label noise transition depends on each instance, the problem of identifying the instance-dependent noise transition matrix becomes substantially more challenging. Despite recent works proposing solutions for learning from instance-dependent noisy labels, the field lacks a unified understanding of when such a problem remains identifiable. The goal of this paper is to characterize the identifiability of the label noise transition matrix. Building on Kruskal's identifiability results, we are able to show the necessity of multiple noisy labels in identifying the noise transition matrix for the generic case at the instance level. We further instantiate the results to explain the successes of the state-of-the-art solutions and how additional assumptions alleviated the requirement of multiple noisy labels. Our result also reveals that disentangled features are helpful in the above identification task and we provide empirical evidence.

Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they face the challenge of generating unreliable content. Recent works aim to reduce misinformation and hallucinations by resorting to attribution as a means to provide evidence (i.e., citations). However, current attribution methods usually focus on the retrieval stage and automatic evaluation that neglect mirroring the citation mechanisms in human scholarly writing to bolster credibility. In this paper, we address these challenges by modelling the attribution task as preference learning and introducing an Automatic Preference Optimization (APO) framework. First, we create a curated collection for post-training with 6,330 examples by collecting and filtering from existing datasets. Second, considering the high cost of labelling preference data, we further propose an automatic method to synthesize attribution preference data resulting in 95,263 pairs. Moreover, inspired by the human citation process, we further propose a progressive preference optimization method by leveraging fine-grained information. Extensive experiments on three datasets (i.e., ASQA, StrategyQA, and ELI5) demonstrate that APO achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality.

Large language models (LMs) are able to in-context learn -- perform a new task via inference alone by conditioning on a few input-label pairs (demonstrations) and making predictions for new inputs. However, there has been little understanding of how the model learns and which aspects of the demonstrations contribute to end task performance. In this paper, we show that ground truth demonstrations are in fact not required -- randomly replacing labels in the demonstrations barely hurts performance on a range of classification and multi-choce tasks, consistently over 12 different models including GPT-3. Instead, we find that other aspects of the demonstrations are the key drivers of end task performance, including the fact that they provide a few examples of (1) the label space, (2) the distribution of the input text, and (3) the overall format of the sequence. Together, our analysis provides a new way of understanding how and why in-context learning works, while opening up new questions about how much can be learned from large language models through inference alone.

The parallels between protein sequences and natural language in their sequential structures have inspired the application of large language models (LLMs) to protein understanding. Despite the success of LLMs in NLP, their effectiveness in comprehending protein sequences remains an open question, largely due to the absence of datasets linking protein sequences to descriptive text. Researchers have then attempted to adapt LLMs for protein understanding by integrating a protein sequence encoder with a pre-trained LLM. However, this adaptation raises a fundamental question: "Can LLMs, originally designed for NLP, effectively comprehend protein sequences as a form of language?" Current datasets fall short in addressing this question due to the lack of a direct correlation between protein sequences and corresponding text descriptions, limiting the ability to train and evaluate LLMs for protein understanding effectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce ProteinLMDataset, a dataset specifically designed for further self-supervised pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of LLMs to enhance their capability for protein sequence comprehension. Specifically, ProteinLMDataset includes 17.46 billion tokens for pretraining and 893,000 instructions for SFT. Additionally, we present ProteinLMBench, the first benchmark dataset consisting of 944 manually verified multiple-choice questions for assessing the protein understanding capabilities of LLMs. ProteinLMBench incorporates protein-related details and sequences in multiple languages, establishing a new standard for evaluating LLMs' abilities in protein comprehension. The large language model InternLM2-7B, pretrained and fine-tuned on the ProteinLMDataset, outperforms GPT-4 on ProteinLMBench, achieving the highest accuracy score. The dataset and the benchmark are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/tsynbio/ProteinLMBench.

Generation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) texts in important works has become a common practice that can be used to misuse and abuse AI at various levels. Traditional AI detectors often rely on document-level classification, which struggles to identify AI content in hybrid or slightly edited texts designed to avoid detection, leading to concerns about the model's efficiency, which makes it hard to distinguish between human-written and AI-generated texts. A sentence-level sequence labeling model proposed to detect transitions between human- and AI-generated text, leveraging nuanced linguistic signals overlooked by document-level classifiers. By this method, detecting and segmenting AI and human-written text within a single document at the token-level granularity is achieved. Our model combines the state-of-the-art pre-trained Transformer models, incorporating Neural Networks (NN) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs). This approach extends the power of transformers to extract semantic and syntactic patterns, and the neural network component to capture enhanced sequence-level representations, thereby improving the boundary predictions by the CRF layer, which enhances sequence recognition and further identification of the partition between Human- and AI-generated texts. The evaluation is performed on two publicly available benchmark datasets containing collaborative human and AI-generated texts. Our experimental comparisons are with zero-shot detectors and the existing state-of-the-art models, along with rigorous ablation studies to justify that this approach, in particular, can accurately detect the spans of AI texts in a completely collaborative text. All our source code and the processed datasets are available in our GitHub repository.

Recent works have extended notions of feature importance to semantic concepts that are inherently interpretable to the users interacting with a black-box predictive model. Yet, precise statistical guarantees, such as false positive rate control, are needed to communicate findings transparently and to avoid unintended consequences in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we formalize the global (i.e., over a population) and local (i.e., for a sample) statistical importance of semantic concepts for the predictions of opaque models, by means of conditional independence, which allows for rigorous testing. We use recent ideas of sequential kernelized testing (SKIT) to induce a rank of importance across concepts, and showcase the effectiveness and flexibility of our framework on synthetic datasets as well as on image classification tasks using vision-language models such as CLIP.

Complex chemical structures, like drugs, are usually defined by SMILES strings as a sequence of molecules and bonds. These SMILES strings are used in different complex machine learning-based drug-related research and representation works. Escaping from complex representation, in this work, we pose a single question: What if we treat drug SMILES as conventional sentences and engage in text classification for drug classification? Our experiments affirm the possibility with very competitive scores. The study explores the notion of viewing each atom and bond as sentence components, employing basic NLP methods to categorize drug types, proving that complex problems can also be solved with simpler perspectives. The data and code are available here: https://github.com/azminewasi/Drug-Classification-NLP.

We report a peculiar observation that LLMs can assign hidden meanings to sequences that seem visually incomprehensible to humans: for example, a nonsensical phrase consisting of Byzantine musical symbols is recognized by gpt-4o as "say abracadabra". Moreover, some models can communicate using these sequences. Some of these meanings are hypothesized to partly originate in the massive spurious correlations due to BPE tokenization. We systematically evaluate the presence of such abilities in a wide range of models: Claude-3.5 Haiku, Claude-3.5 Sonnet (New and Old), Claude-3.7 Sonnet, gpt-4o mini, gpt-4o, o1-mini, Llama-3.3 70B, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Lllama 70B, Qwen2.5 1.5B, Qwen2.5 32B, Phi-3.5 mini, GigaChat-Max, Vikhr-Llama-3.2 1B. We argue that this observation might have far-reaching consequences for both safety and security of the modern and future LLMs and systems that employ them. As an illustration, we show that applying this method in combination with simple templates is sufficient to jailbreak previous generation models, with ASR = 0.4 on gpt-4o mini. Our code and data artifacts are available at https://github.com/L3G5/llm-hidden-meanings

The development of Natural Language Processing (NLI) datasets and models has been inspired by innovations in annotation design. With the rapid development of machine learning models today, the performance of existing machine learning models has quickly reached state-of-the-art results on a variety of tasks related to natural language processing, including natural language inference tasks. By using a pre-trained model during the annotation process, it is possible to challenge current NLI models by having humans produce premise-hypothesis combinations that the machine model cannot correctly predict. To remain attractive and challenging in the research of natural language inference for Vietnamese, in this paper, we introduce the adversarial NLI dataset to the NLP research community with the name ViANLI. This data set contains more than 10K premise-hypothesis pairs and is built by a continuously adjusting process to obtain the most out of the patterns generated by the annotators. ViANLI dataset has brought many difficulties to many current SOTA models when the accuracy of the most powerful model on the test set only reached 48.4%. Additionally, the experimental results show that the models trained on our dataset have significantly improved the results on other Vietnamese NLI datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) frequently generate non-factual content, known as hallucinations. Existing retrieval-augmented-based hallucination detection approaches typically address this by framing it as a classification task, evaluating hallucinations based on their consistency with retrieved evidence. However, this approach usually lacks detailed explanations for these evaluations and does not assess the reliability of these explanations. Furthermore, deficiencies in retrieval systems can lead to irrelevant or partially relevant evidence retrieval, impairing the detection process. Moreover, while real-world hallucination detection requires analyzing multiple pieces of evidence, current systems usually treat all evidence uniformly without considering its relevance to the content. To address these challenges, we introduce Halu-J, a critique-based hallucination judge with 7 billion parameters. Halu-J enhances hallucination detection by selecting pertinent evidence and providing detailed critiques. Our experiments indicate that Halu-J outperforms GPT-4o in multiple-evidence hallucination detection and matches its capability in critique generation and evidence selection. We also introduce ME-FEVER, a new dataset designed for multiple-evidence hallucination detection. Our code and dataset can be found in https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/factool .

As a step toward better document-level understanding, we explore classification of a sequence of sentences into their corresponding categories, a task that requires understanding sentences in context of the document. Recent successful models for this task have used hierarchical models to contextualize sentence representations, and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to incorporate dependencies between subsequent labels. In this work, we show that pretrained language models, BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) in particular, can be used for this task to capture contextual dependencies without the need for hierarchical encoding nor a CRF. Specifically, we construct a joint sentence representation that allows BERT Transformer layers to directly utilize contextual information from all words in all sentences. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on four datasets, including a new dataset of structured scientific abstracts.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), necessary for applied tasks like question answering and summarization. We present a series of behavioral studies on several LLM families (LLaMA, GPT-3.5, and PaLM) which probe their behavior using controlled experiments. We establish two biases originating from pretraining which predict much of their behavior, and show that these are major sources of hallucination in generative LLMs. First, memorization at the level of sentences: we show that, regardless of the premise, models falsely label NLI test samples as entailing when the hypothesis is attested in training data, and that entities are used as ``indices'' to access the memorized data. Second, statistical patterns of usage learned at the level of corpora: we further show a similar effect when the premise predicate is less frequent than that of the hypothesis in the training data, a bias following from previous studies. We demonstrate that LLMs perform significantly worse on NLI test samples which do not conform to these biases than those which do, and we offer these as valuable controls for future LLM evaluation.

Automatically classifying electronic health records (EHRs) into diagnostic codes has been challenging to the NLP community. State-of-the-art methods treated this problem as a multilabel classification problem and proposed various architectures to model this problem. However, these systems did not leverage the superb performance of pretrained language models, which achieved superb performance on natural language understanding tasks. Prior work has shown that pretrained language models underperformed on this task with the regular finetuning scheme. Therefore, this paper aims at analyzing the causes of the underperformance and developing a framework for automatic ICD coding with pretrained language models. We spotted three main issues through the experiments: 1) large label space, 2) long input sequences, and 3) domain mismatch between pretraining and fine-tuning. We propose PLMICD, a framework that tackles the challenges with various strategies. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can overcome the challenges and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of multiple metrics on the benchmark MIMIC data. The source code is available at https://github.com/MiuLab/PLM-ICD

We introduce a new visual-interactive tool: Explainable Labeling Assistant (XLabel) that takes an explainable machine learning approach to data labeling. The main component of XLabel is the Explainable Boosting Machine (EBM), a predictive model that can calculate the contribution of each input feature towards the final prediction. As a case study, we use XLabel to predict the labels of four non-communicable diseases (NCDs): diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, and dyslipidemia. We demonstrate that EBM is an excellent choice of predictive model by comparing it against a rule-based and four other machine learning models. By performing 5-fold cross-validation on 427 medical records, EBM's prediction accuracy, precision, and F1-score are greater than 0.95 in all four NCDs. It performed as well as two black-box models and outperformed the other models in these metrics. In an additional experiment, when 40% of the records were intentionally mislabeled, EBM could recall the correct labels of more than 90% of these records.

We extend our previous work on Inductive Conformal Prediction (ICP) for multi-label text classification and present a novel approach for addressing the computational inefficiency of the Label Powerset (LP) ICP, arrising when dealing with a high number of unique labels. We present experimental results using the original and the proposed efficient LP-ICP on two English and one Czech language data-sets. Specifically, we apply the LP-ICP on three deep Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifiers of two types: one based on contextualised (bert) and two on non-contextualised (word2vec) word-embeddings. In the LP-ICP setting we assign nonconformity scores to label-sets from which the corresponding p-values and prediction-sets are determined. Our approach deals with the increased computational burden of LP by eliminating from consideration a significant number of label-sets that will surely have p-values below the specified significance level. This reduces dramatically the computational complexity of the approach while fully respecting the standard CP guarantees. Our experimental results show that the contextualised-based classifier surpasses the non-contextualised-based ones and obtains state-of-the-art performance for all data-sets examined. The good performance of the underlying classifiers is carried on to their ICP counterparts without any significant accuracy loss, but with the added benefits of ICP, i.e. the confidence information encapsulated in the prediction sets. We experimentally demonstrate that the resulting prediction sets can be tight enough to be practically useful even though the set of all possible label-sets contains more than 1e+16 combinations. Additionally, the empirical error rates of the obtained prediction-sets confirm that our outputs are well-calibrated.

Recent advancements in recommender systems have focused on leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve user preference modeling, yielding promising outcomes. However, current LLM-based approaches struggle to fully leverage user behavior sequences, resulting in suboptimal preference modeling for personalized recommendations. In this study, we propose a novel Counterfactual Fine-Tuning (CFT) method to address this issue by explicitly emphasizing the role of behavior sequences when generating recommendations. Specifically, we employ counterfactual reasoning to identify the causal effects of behavior sequences on model output and introduce a task that directly fits the ground-truth labels based on these effects, achieving the goal of explicit emphasis. Additionally, we develop a token-level weighting mechanism to adjust the emphasis strength for different item tokens, reflecting the diminishing influence of behavior sequences from earlier to later tokens during predicting an item. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CFT effectively improves behavior sequence modeling. Our codes are available at https://github.com/itsmeyjt/CFT.

The problem of Novel Class Discovery (NCD) consists in extracting knowledge from a labeled set of known classes to accurately partition an unlabeled set of novel classes. While NCD has recently received a lot of attention from the community, it is often solved on computer vision problems and under unrealistic conditions. In particular, the number of novel classes is usually assumed to be known in advance, and their labels are sometimes used to tune hyperparameters. Methods that rely on these assumptions are not applicable in real-world scenarios. In this work, we focus on solving NCD in tabular data when no prior knowledge of the novel classes is available. To this end, we propose to tune the hyperparameters of NCD methods by adapting the k-fold cross-validation process and hiding some of the known classes in each fold. Since we have found that methods with too many hyperparameters are likely to overfit these hidden classes, we define a simple deep NCD model. This method is composed of only the essential elements necessary for the NCD problem and performs impressively well under realistic conditions. Furthermore, we find that the latent space of this method can be used to reliably estimate the number of novel classes. Additionally, we adapt two unsupervised clustering algorithms (k-means and Spectral Clustering) to leverage the knowledge of the known classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on 7 tabular datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and hyperparameter tuning process, and show that the NCD problem can be solved without relying on knowledge from the novel classes.

Prompting language models to provide step-by-step answers (e.g., "Chain-of-Thought") is the prominent approach for complex reasoning tasks, where more accurate reasoning chains typically improve downstream task performance. Recent literature discusses automatic methods to verify reasoning steps to evaluate and improve their correctness. However, no fine-grained step-level datasets are available to enable thorough evaluation of such verification methods, hindering progress in this direction. We introduce Reveal: Reasoning Verification Evaluation, a new dataset to benchmark automatic verifiers of complex Chain-of-Thought reasoning in open-domain question answering settings. Reveal includes comprehensive labels for the relevance, attribution to evidence passages, and logical correctness of each reasoning step in a language model's answer, across a wide variety of datasets and state-of-the-art language models.

Sequence models are a critical component of modern NLP systems, but their predictions are difficult to explain. We consider model explanations though rationales, subsets of context that can explain individual model predictions. We find sequential rationales by solving a combinatorial optimization: the best rationale is the smallest subset of input tokens that would predict the same output as the full sequence. Enumerating all subsets is intractable, so we propose an efficient greedy algorithm to approximate this objective. The algorithm, which is called greedy rationalization, applies to any model. For this approach to be effective, the model should form compatible conditional distributions when making predictions on incomplete subsets of the context. This condition can be enforced with a short fine-tuning step. We study greedy rationalization on language modeling and machine translation. Compared to existing baselines, greedy rationalization is best at optimizing the combinatorial objective and provides the most faithful rationales. On a new dataset of annotated sequential rationales, greedy rationales are most similar to human rationales.

Open-weights reasoning language models generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) before producing a final response, which improves performance but introduces additional alignment risks, with harmful content often appearing in both the CoTs and the final outputs. In this work, we investigate if we can use CoTs to predict final response misalignment. We evaluate a range of monitoring approaches, including humans, highly-capable large language models, and text classifiers, using either CoT text or activations. First, we find that a simple linear probe trained on CoT activations can significantly outperform all text-based methods in predicting whether a final response will be safe or unsafe. CoT texts are often unfaithful and can mislead humans and classifiers, while model latents (i.e., CoT activations) offer a more reliable predictive signal. Second, the probe makes accurate predictions before reasoning completes, achieving strong performance even when applied to early CoT segments. These findings generalize across model sizes, families, and safety benchmarks, suggesting that lightweight probes could enable real-time safety monitoring and early intervention during generation.

This report is a reproducibility study of the paper "CDUL: CLIP-Driven Unsupervised Learning for Multi-Label Image Classification" (Abdelfattah et al, ICCV 2023). Our report makes the following contributions: (1) We provide a reproducible, well commented and open-sourced code implementation for the entire method specified in the original paper. (2) We try to verify the effectiveness of the novel aggregation strategy which uses the CLIP model to initialize the pseudo labels for the subsequent unsupervised multi-label image classification task. (3) We try to verify the effectiveness of the gradient-alignment training method specified in the original paper, which is used to update the network parameters and pseudo labels. The code can be found at https://github.com/cs-mshah/CDUL

Partial label learning (PLL) aims to train multiclass classifiers from the examples each annotated with a set of candidate labels where a fixed but unknown candidate label is correct. In the last few years, the instance-independent generation process of candidate labels has been extensively studied, on the basis of which many theoretical advances have been made in PLL. Nevertheless, the candidate labels are always instance-dependent in practice and there is no theoretical guarantee that the model trained on the instance-dependent PLL examples can converge to an ideal one. In this paper, a theoretically grounded and practically effective approach named POP, i.e. PrOgressive Purification for instance-dependent partial label learning, is proposed. Specifically, POP updates the learning model and purifies each candidate label set progressively in every epoch. Theoretically, we prove that POP enlarges the region appropriately fast where the model is reliable, and eventually approximates the Bayes optimal classifier with mild assumptions. Technically, POP is flexible with arbitrary PLL losses and could improve the performance of the previous PLL losses in the instance-dependent case. Experiments on the benchmark datasets and the real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Questions of fair use of copyright-protected content to train Large Language Models (LLMs) are being very actively debated. Document-level inference has been proposed as a new task: inferring from black-box access to the trained model whether a piece of content has been seen during training. SOTA methods however rely on naturally occurring memorization of (part of) the content. While very effective against models that memorize a lot, we hypothesize--and later confirm--that they will not work against models that do not naturally memorize, e.g. medium-size 1B models. We here propose to use copyright traps, the inclusion of fictitious entries in original content, to detect the use of copyrighted materials in LLMs with a focus on models where memorization does not naturally occur. We carefully design an experimental setup, randomly inserting traps into original content (books) and train a 1.3B LLM. We first validate that the use of content in our target model would be undetectable using existing methods. We then show, contrary to intuition, that even medium-length trap sentences repeated a significant number of times (100) are not detectable using existing methods. However, we show that longer sequences repeated a large number of times can be reliably detected (AUC=0.75) and used as copyright traps. We further improve these results by studying how the number of times a sequence is seen improves detectability, how sequences with higher perplexity tend to be memorized more, and how taking context into account further improves detectability.

Although the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) has received some attention, research on this highly pathological phenomenon lacks solid ground. Previous work has been limited in several ways: it often resorts to artificial settings where the problem is amplified, it disregards some (common) types of hallucinations, and it does not validate adequacy of detection heuristics. In this paper, we set foundations for the study of NMT hallucinations. First, we work in a natural setting, i.e., in-domain data without artificial noise neither in training nor in inference. Next, we annotate a dataset of over 3.4k sentences indicating different kinds of critical errors and hallucinations. Then, we turn to detection methods and both revisit methods used previously and propose using glass-box uncertainty-based detectors. Overall, we show that for preventive settings, (i) previously used methods are largely inadequate, (ii) sequence log-probability works best and performs on par with reference-based methods. Finally, we propose DeHallucinator, a simple method for alleviating hallucinations at test time that significantly reduces the hallucinatory rate. To ease future research, we release our annotated dataset for WMT18 German-English data, along with the model, training data, and code.

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have recently gained attention for their potential as an alternative to (or proxy for) explicit knowledge bases (KBs). In this position paper, we examine this hypothesis, identify strengths and limitations of both LMs and KBs, and discuss the complementary nature of the two paradigms. In particular, we offer qualitative arguments that latent LMs are not suitable as a substitute for explicit KBs, but could play a major role for augmenting and curating KBs.

Sequence labelling tasks like Dialog Act and Emotion/Sentiment identification are a key component of spoken dialog systems. In this work, we propose a new approach to learn generic representations adapted to spoken dialog, which we evaluate on a new benchmark we call Sequence labellIng evaLuatIon benChmark fOr spoken laNguagE benchmark (SILICONE). SILICONE is model-agnostic and contains 10 different datasets of various sizes. We obtain our representations with a hierarchical encoder based on transformer architectures, for which we extend two well-known pre-training objectives. Pre-training is performed on OpenSubtitles: a large corpus of spoken dialog containing over 2.3 billion of tokens. We demonstrate how hierarchical encoders achieve competitive results with consistently fewer parameters compared to state-of-the-art models and we show their importance for both pre-training and fine-tuning.

We investigate whether the success of a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process can be predicted before completion. We discover that a probing classifier, based on LLM representations, performs well even before a single token is generated, suggesting that crucial information about the reasoning process is already present in the initial steps representations. In contrast, a strong BERT-based baseline, which relies solely on the generated tokens, performs worse, likely because it depends on shallow linguistic cues rather than deeper reasoning dynamics. Surprisingly, using later reasoning steps does not always improve classification. When additional context is unhelpful, earlier representations resemble later ones more, suggesting LLMs encode key information early. This implies reasoning can often stop early without loss. To test this, we conduct early stopping experiments, showing that truncating CoT reasoning still improves performance over not using CoT at all, though a gap remains compared to full reasoning. However, approaches like supervised learning or reinforcement learning designed to shorten CoT chains could leverage our classifier's guidance to identify when early stopping is effective. Our findings provide insights that may support such methods, helping to optimize CoT's efficiency while preserving its benefits.

Neural sequence models are widely used to model time-series data. Equally ubiquitous is the usage of beam search (BS) as an approximate inference algorithm to decode output sequences from these models. BS explores the search space in a greedy left-right fashion retaining only the top-B candidates - resulting in sequences that differ only slightly from each other. Producing lists of nearly identical sequences is not only computationally wasteful but also typically fails to capture the inherent ambiguity of complex AI tasks. To overcome this problem, we propose Diverse Beam Search (DBS), an alternative to BS that decodes a list of diverse outputs by optimizing for a diversity-augmented objective. We observe that our method finds better top-1 solutions by controlling for the exploration and exploitation of the search space - implying that DBS is a better search algorithm. Moreover, these gains are achieved with minimal computational or memory over- head as compared to beam search. To demonstrate the broad applicability of our method, we present results on image captioning, machine translation and visual question generation using both standard quantitative metrics and qualitative human studies. Further, we study the role of diversity for image-grounded language generation tasks as the complexity of the image changes. We observe that our method consistently outperforms BS and previously proposed techniques for diverse decoding from neural sequence models.

Playlists have become a significant part of our listening experience because of the digital cloud-based services such as Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music. Owing to the meteoric rise in the usage of playlists, recommending playlists is crucial to music services today. Although there has been a lot of work done in playlist prediction, the area of playlist representation hasn't received that level of attention. Over the last few years, sequence-to-sequence models, especially in the field of natural language processing, have shown the effectiveness of learned embeddings in capturing the semantic characteristics of sequences. We can apply similar concepts to music to learn fixed length representations for playlists and use those representations for downstream tasks such as playlist discovery, browsing, and recommendation. In this work, we formulate the problem of learning a fixed-length playlist representation in an unsupervised manner, using Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2seq) models, interpreting playlists as sentences and songs as words. We compare our model with two other encoding architectures for baseline comparison. We evaluate our work using the suite of tasks commonly used for assessing sentence embeddings, along with a few additional tasks pertaining to music, and a recommendation task to study the traits captured by the playlist embeddings and their effectiveness for the purpose of music recommendation.

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that characteristics internal to the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached" from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results.

Multimodal language models can exhibit hallucinations in their outputs, which limits their reliability. The ability to automatically detect these errors is important for mitigating them, but has been less explored and existing efforts do not localize hallucinations, instead framing this as a classification task. In this work, we first pose multimodal hallucination detection as a sequence labeling task where models must localize hallucinated text spans and present a strong baseline model. Given the high cost of human annotations for this task, we propose an approach to improve the sample efficiency of these models by creating corrupted grounding data, which we use for pre-training. Leveraging phrase grounding data, we generate hallucinations to replace grounded spans and create hallucinated text. Experiments show that pre-training on this data improves sample efficiency when fine-tuning, and that the learning signal from the grounding data plays an important role in these improvements.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in NLP towards using pretrained language models ({PLM}) for a wide range of tasks. However, there are many difficult design decisions to represent structures (e.g. tagged text, coreference chains) in a way such that they can be captured by PLMs. Prior work on structured prediction with PLMs typically flattens the structured output into a sequence, which limits the quality of structural information being learned and leads to inferior performance compared to classic discriminative models. In this work, we describe an approach to model structures as sequences of actions in an autoregressive manner with PLMs, allowing in-structure dependencies to be learned without any loss. Our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on all the structured prediction tasks we looked at, namely, named entity recognition, end-to-end relation extraction, and coreference resolution.

Recently, sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models with the Transformer architecture have achieved remarkable performance on various conditional text generation tasks, such as machine translation. However, most of them are trained with teacher forcing with the ground truth label given at each time step, without being exposed to incorrectly generated tokens during training, which hurts its generalization to unseen inputs, that is known as the "exposure bias" problem. In this work, we propose to mitigate the conditional text generation problem by contrasting positive pairs with negative pairs, such that the model is exposed to various valid or incorrect perturbations of the inputs, for improved generalization. However, training the model with naive contrastive learning framework using random non-target sequences as negative examples is suboptimal, since they are easily distinguishable from the correct output, especially so with models pretrained with large text corpora. Also, generating positive examples requires domain-specific augmentation heuristics which may not generalize over diverse domains. To tackle this problem, we propose a principled method to generate positive and negative samples for contrastive learning of seq2seq models. Specifically, we generate negative examples by adding small perturbations to the input sequence to minimize its conditional likelihood, and positive examples by adding large perturbations while enforcing it to have a high conditional likelihood. Such "hard" positive and negative pairs generated using our method guides the model to better distinguish correct outputs from incorrect ones. We empirically show that our proposed method significantly improves the generalization of the seq2seq on three text generation tasks - machine translation, text summarization, and question generation.

Masked language models (MLM) do not explicitly define a distribution over language, i.e., they are not language models per se. However, recent work has implicitly treated them as such for the purposes of generation and scoring. This paper studies methods for deriving explicit joint distributions from MLMs, focusing on distributions over two tokens, which makes it possible to calculate exact distributional properties. We find that an approach based on identifying joints whose conditionals are closest to those of the MLM works well and outperforms existing Markov random field-based approaches. We further find that this derived model's conditionals can even occasionally outperform the original MLM's conditionals.

When deploying large language models (LLMs), it is important to ensure that these models are not only capable, but also reliable. Many benchmarks have been created to track LLMs' growing capabilities, however there has been no similar focus on measuring their reliability. To understand the potential ramifications of this gap, we investigate how well current benchmarks quantify model reliability. We find that pervasive label errors can compromise these evaluations, obscuring lingering model failures and hiding unreliable behavior. Motivated by this gap in the evaluation of reliability, we then propose the concept of so-called platinum benchmarks, i.e., benchmarks carefully curated to minimize label errors and ambiguity. As a first attempt at constructing such benchmarks, we revise examples from fifteen existing popular benchmarks. We evaluate a wide range of models on these platinum benchmarks and find that, indeed, frontier LLMs still exhibit failures on simple tasks such as elementary-level math word problems. Analyzing these failures further reveals previously unidentified patterns of problems on which frontier models consistently struggle. We provide code at https://github.com/MadryLab/platinum-benchmarks

We present an approach for assessing how multilingual large language models (LLMs) learn syntax in terms of multi-formalism syntactic structures. We aim to recover constituent and dependency structures by casting parsing as sequence labeling. To do so, we select a few LLMs and study them on 13 diverse UD treebanks for dependency parsing and 10 treebanks for constituent parsing. Our results show that: (i) the framework is consistent across encodings, (ii) pre-trained word vectors do not favor constituency representations of syntax over dependencies, (iii) sub-word tokenization is needed to represent syntax, in contrast to character-based models, and (iv) occurrence of a language in the pretraining data is more important than the amount of task data when recovering syntax from the word vectors.

We study how in-context learning (ICL) in language models is affected by semantic priors versus input-label mappings. We investigate two setups-ICL with flipped labels and ICL with semantically-unrelated labels-across various model families (GPT-3, InstructGPT, Codex, PaLM, and Flan-PaLM). First, experiments on ICL with flipped labels show that overriding semantic priors is an emergent ability of model scale. While small language models ignore flipped labels presented in-context and thus rely primarily on semantic priors from pretraining, large models can override semantic priors when presented with in-context exemplars that contradict priors, despite the stronger semantic priors that larger models may hold. We next study semantically-unrelated label ICL (SUL-ICL), in which labels are semantically unrelated to their inputs (e.g., foo/bar instead of negative/positive), thereby forcing language models to learn the input-label mappings shown in in-context exemplars in order to perform the task. The ability to do SUL-ICL also emerges primarily with scale, and large-enough language models can even perform linear classification in a SUL-ICL setting. Finally, we evaluate instruction-tuned models and find that instruction tuning strengthens both the use of semantic priors and the capacity to learn input-label mappings, but more of the former.

We propose to extract meaning representations from autoregressive language models by considering the distribution of all possible trajectories extending an input text. This strategy is prompt-free, does not require fine-tuning, and is applicable to any pre-trained autoregressive model. Moreover, unlike vector-based representations, distribution-based representations can also model asymmetric relations (e.g., direction of logical entailment, hypernym/hyponym relations) by using algebraic operations between likelihood functions. These ideas are grounded in distributional perspectives on semantics and are connected to standard constructions in automata theory, but to our knowledge they have not been applied to modern language models. We empirically show that the representations obtained from large models align well with human annotations, outperform other zero-shot and prompt-free methods on semantic similarity tasks, and can be used to solve more complex entailment and containment tasks that standard embeddings cannot handle. Finally, we extend our method to represent data from different modalities (e.g., image and text) using multimodal autoregressive models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/tianyu139/meaning-as-trajectories

Real-world data often exhibits long-tailed distributions with heavy class imbalance, posing great challenges for deep recognition models. We identify a persisting dilemma on the value of labels in the context of imbalanced learning: on the one hand, supervision from labels typically leads to better results than its unsupervised counterparts; on the other hand, heavily imbalanced data naturally incurs "label bias" in the classifier, where the decision boundary can be drastically altered by the majority classes. In this work, we systematically investigate these two facets of labels. We demonstrate, theoretically and empirically, that class-imbalanced learning can significantly benefit in both semi-supervised and self-supervised manners. Specifically, we confirm that (1) positively, imbalanced labels are valuable: given more unlabeled data, the original labels can be leveraged with the extra data to reduce label bias in a semi-supervised manner, which greatly improves the final classifier; (2) negatively however, we argue that imbalanced labels are not useful always: classifiers that are first pre-trained in a self-supervised manner consistently outperform their corresponding baselines. Extensive experiments on large-scale imbalanced datasets verify our theoretically grounded strategies, showing superior performance over previous state-of-the-arts. Our intriguing findings highlight the need to rethink the usage of imbalanced labels in realistic long-tailed tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/YyzHarry/imbalanced-semi-self.

We study the problem of classification with a reject option for a fixed predictor, applicable in natural language processing. We introduce a new problem formulation for this scenario, and an algorithm minimizing a new surrogate loss function. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of the surrogate loss function with a strong H-consistency guarantee. For evaluation, we choose the decontextualization task, and provide a manually-labelled dataset of 2mathord,000 examples. Our algorithm significantly outperforms the baselines considered, with a sim!!25% improvement in coverage when halving the error rate, which is only sim!! 3 % away from the theoretical limit.

In this paper, we tackle the important yet under-investigated problem of making long-horizon prediction of event sequences. Existing state-of-the-art models do not perform well at this task due to their autoregressive structure. We propose HYPRO, a hybridly normalized probabilistic model that naturally fits this task: its first part is an autoregressive base model that learns to propose predictions; its second part is an energy function that learns to reweight the proposals such that more realistic predictions end up with higher probabilities. We also propose efficient training and inference algorithms for this model. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed HYPRO model can significantly outperform previous models at making long-horizon predictions of future events. We also conduct a range of ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of each component of our proposed methods.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) contain domain knowledge that can be used for many digital library tasks, such as analyzing citation networks and predicting research trends. Automatic metadata extraction is important to build scalable digital library search engines. Most existing methods are designed for born-digital documents, so they often fail to extract metadata from scanned documents such as for ETDs. Traditional sequence tagging methods mainly rely on text-based features. In this paper, we propose a conditional random field (CRF) model that combines text-based and visual features. To verify the robustness of our model, we extended an existing corpus and created a new ground truth corpus consisting of 500 ETD cover pages with human validated metadata. Our experiments show that CRF with visual features outperformed both a heuristic and a CRF model with only text-based features. The proposed model achieved 81.3%-96% F1 measure on seven metadata fields. The data and source code are publicly available on Google Drive (https://tinyurl.com/y8kxzwrp) and a GitHub repository (https://github.com/lamps-lab/ETDMiner/tree/master/etd_crf), respectively.

We present significant extensions to diffusion-based sequence generation models, blurring the line with autoregressive language models. We introduce hyperschedules, which assign distinct noise schedules to individual token positions, generalizing both autoregressive models (e.g., GPT) and conventional diffusion models (e.g., SEDD, MDLM) as special cases. Second, we propose two hybrid token-wise noising processes that interpolate between absorbing and uniform processes, enabling the model to fix past mistakes, and we introduce a novel inference algorithm that leverages this new feature in a simplified context inspired from MDLM. To support efficient training and inference, we design attention masks compatible with KV-caching. Our methods achieve state-of-the-art perplexity and generate diverse, high-quality sequences across standard benchmarks, suggesting a promising path for autoregressive diffusion-based sequence generation.

As structured data are often insufficient, labels need to be extracted from free text in electronic health records when developing models for clinical information retrieval and decision support systems. One of the most important contextual properties in clinical text is negation, which indicates the absence of findings. We aimed to improve large scale extraction of labels by comparing three methods for negation detection in Dutch clinical notes. We used the Erasmus Medical Center Dutch Clinical Corpus to compare a rule-based method based on ContextD, a biLSTM model using MedCAT and (finetuned) RoBERTa-based models. We found that both the biLSTM and RoBERTa models consistently outperform the rule-based model in terms of F1 score, precision and recall. In addition, we systematically categorized the classification errors for each model, which can be used to further improve model performance in particular applications. Combining the three models naively was not beneficial in terms of performance. We conclude that the biLSTM and RoBERTa-based models in particular are highly accurate accurate in detecting clinical negations, but that ultimately all three approaches can be viable depending on the use case at hand.

The rapid growth of biomedical knowledge has outpaced our ability to efficiently extract insights and generate novel hypotheses. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising tool to revolutionize knowledge interaction and potentially accelerate biomedical discovery. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of LLMs as biomedical hypothesis generators. We construct a dataset of background-hypothesis pairs from biomedical literature, carefully partitioned into training, seen, and unseen test sets based on publication date to mitigate data contamination. Using this dataset, we assess the hypothesis generation capabilities of top-tier instructed models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. To enhance the exploration of uncertainty, a crucial aspect of scientific discovery, we incorporate tool use and multi-agent interactions in our evaluation framework. Furthermore, we propose four novel metrics grounded in extensive literature review to evaluate the quality of generated hypotheses, considering both LLM-based and human assessments. Our experiments yield two key findings: 1) LLMs can generate novel and validated hypotheses, even when tested on literature unseen during training, and 2) Increasing uncertainty through multi-agent interactions and tool use can facilitate diverse candidate generation and improve zero-shot hypothesis generation performance. However, we also observe that the integration of additional knowledge through few-shot learning and tool use may not always lead to performance gains, highlighting the need for careful consideration of the type and scope of external knowledge incorporated. These findings underscore the potential of LLMs as powerful aids in biomedical hypothesis generation and provide valuable insights to guide further research in this area.

While contrastive learning is proven to be an effective training strategy in computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is only recently adopting it as a self-supervised alternative to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) for improving sequence representations. This paper introduces SupCL-Seq, which extends the supervised contrastive learning from computer vision to the optimization of sequence representations in NLP. By altering the dropout mask probability in standard Transformer architectures, for every representation (anchor), we generate augmented altered views. A supervised contrastive loss is then utilized to maximize the system's capability of pulling together similar samples (e.g., anchors and their altered views) and pushing apart the samples belonging to the other classes. Despite its simplicity, SupCLSeq leads to large gains in many sequence classification tasks on the GLUE benchmark compared to a standard BERTbase, including 6% absolute improvement on CoLA, 5.4% on MRPC, 4.7% on RTE and 2.6% on STSB. We also show consistent gains over self supervised contrastively learned representations, especially in non-semantic tasks. Finally we show that these gains are not solely due to augmentation, but rather to a downstream optimized sequence representation. Code: https://github.com/hooman650/SupCL-Seq

Language model based pre-trained models such as BERT have provided significant gains across different NLP tasks. In this paper, we study different types of transformer based pre-trained models such as auto-regressive models (GPT-2), auto-encoder models (BERT), and seq2seq models (BART) for conditional data augmentation. We show that prepending the class labels to text sequences provides a simple yet effective way to condition the pre-trained models for data augmentation. Additionally, on three classification benchmarks, pre-trained Seq2Seq model outperforms other data augmentation methods in a low-resource setting. Further, we explore how different pre-trained model based data augmentation differs in-terms of data diversity, and how well such methods preserve the class-label information.

In their recent Nature Human Behaviour paper, "Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models," (Webb, Holyoak, and Lu, 2023) the authors argue that "large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems." In this response, we provide counterexamples of the letter string analogies. In our tests, GPT-3 fails to solve even the easiest variants of the problems presented in the original paper. Zero-shot reasoning is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. We do not see that evidence in our experiments. To strengthen claims of humanlike reasoning such as zero-shot reasoning, it is important that the field develop approaches that rule out data memorization.

Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts from a few keywords has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as 'counterfeit consciousness' instead of 'artificial intelligence.' We combed the literature for tortured phrases and study one reputable journal where these concentrated en masse. Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles of this journal and on several control sets. The pairwise comparisons reveal a concentration of abstracts flagged as 'synthetic' in the journal. We also highlight irregularities in its operation, such as abrupt changes in editorial timelines. We substantiate our call for investigation by analysing several individual dubious articles, stressing questionable features: tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, and unacknowledged image reuse. Surprisingly, some websites offer to rewrite texts for free, generating gobbledegook full of tortured phrases. We believe some authors used rewritten texts to pad their manuscripts. We wish to raise the awareness on publications containing such questionable AI-generated or rewritten texts that passed (poor) peer review. Deception with synthetic texts threatens the integrity of the scientific literature.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been a widely adopted prompting method, eliciting impressive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by the sequential thought structure of CoT, a number of Chain-of-X (CoX) methods have been developed to address various challenges across diverse domains and tasks involving LLMs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of Chain-of-X methods for LLMs in different contexts. Specifically, we categorize them by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. We also discuss the findings and implications of existing CoX methods, as well as potential future directions. Our survey aims to serve as a detailed and up-to-date resource for researchers seeking to apply the idea of CoT to broader scenarios.

Prompt-based classifiers are an attractive approach for zero-shot classification. However, the precise choice of the prompt template and label words can largely influence performance, with semantically equivalent settings often showing notable performance difference. This discrepancy can be partly attributed to word biases, where the classifier may be biased towards classes. To address this problem, it is possible to optimise classification thresholds on a labelled data set, however, this mitigates some of the advantages of prompt-based classifiers. This paper instead approaches this problem by examining the expected marginal probabilities of the classes. Here, probabilities are reweighted to have a uniform prior over classes, in an unsupervised fashion. Further, we draw a theoretical connection between the class priors and the language models' word prior, and offer the ability to set a threshold in a zero-resource fashion. We show that matching class priors correlates strongly with the oracle upper bound performance and demonstrate large consistent performance gains for prompt settings over a range of NLP tasks.

Conversational data is essential in psychology because it can help researchers understand individuals cognitive processes, emotions, and behaviors. Utterance labelling is a common strategy for analyzing this type of data. The development of NLP algorithms allows researchers to automate this task. However, psychological conversational data present some challenges to NLP researchers, including multilabel classification, a large number of classes, and limited available data. This study explored how automated labels generated by NLP methods are comparable to human labels in the context of conversations on adulthood transition. We proposed strategies to handle three common challenges raised in psychological studies. Our findings showed that the deep learning method with domain adaptation (RoBERTa-CON) outperformed all other machine learning methods; and the hierarchical labelling system that we proposed was shown to help researchers strategically analyze conversational data. Our Python code and NLP model are available at https://github.com/mlaricheva/automated_labeling.

Existing methods, such as concept bottleneck models (CBMs), have been successful in providing concept-based interpretations for black-box deep learning models. They typically work by predicting concepts given the input and then predicting the final class label given the predicted concepts. However, (1) they often fail to capture the high-order, nonlinear interaction between concepts, e.g., correcting a predicted concept (e.g., "yellow breast") does not help correct highly correlated concepts (e.g., "yellow belly"), leading to suboptimal final accuracy; (2) they cannot naturally quantify the complex conditional dependencies between different concepts and class labels (e.g., for an image with the class label "Kentucky Warbler" and a concept "black bill", what is the probability that the model correctly predicts another concept "black crown"), therefore failing to provide deeper insight into how a black-box model works. In response to these limitations, we propose Energy-based Concept Bottleneck Models (ECBMs). Our ECBMs use a set of neural networks to define the joint energy of candidate (input, concept, class) tuples. With such a unified interface, prediction, concept correction, and conditional dependency quantification are then represented as conditional probabilities, which are generated by composing different energy functions. Our ECBMs address both limitations of existing CBMs, providing higher accuracy and richer concept interpretations. Empirical results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on real-world datasets.

We are born with the ability to learn concepts by comparing diverse observations. This helps us to understand the new world in a compositional manner and facilitates extrapolation, as objects naturally consist of multiple concepts. In this work, we argue that the cognitive mechanism of comparison, fundamental to human learning, is also vital for machines to recover true concepts underlying the data. This offers correctness guarantees for the field of concept learning, which, despite its impressive empirical successes, still lacks general theoretical support. Specifically, we aim to develop a theoretical framework for the identifiability of concepts with multiple classes of observations. We show that with sufficient diversity across classes, hidden concepts can be identified without assuming specific concept types, functional relations, or parametric generative models. Interestingly, even when conditions are not globally satisfied, we can still provide alternative guarantees for as many concepts as possible based on local comparisons, thereby extending the applicability of our theory to more flexible scenarios. Moreover, the hidden structure between classes and concepts can also be identified nonparametrically. We validate our theoretical results in both synthetic and real-world settings.

In this paper we address the challenge of extracting scientific references from patents. We approach the problem as a sequence labelling task and investigate the merits of BERT models to the extraction of these long sequences. References in patents to scientific literature are relevant to study the connection between science and industry. Most prior work only uses the front-page citations for this analysis, which are provided in the metadata of patent archives. In this paper we build on prior work using Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and Flair for reference extraction. We improve the quality of the training data and train three BERT-based models on the labelled data (BERT, bioBERT, sciBERT). We find that the improved training data leads to a large improvement in the quality of the trained models. In addition, the BERT models beat CRF and Flair, with recall scores around 97% obtained with cross validation. With the best model we label a large collection of 33 thousand patents, extract the citations, and match them to publications in the Web of Science database. We extract 50% more references than with the old training data and methods: 735 thousand references in total. With these patent-publication links, follow-up research will further analyze which types of scientific work lead to inventions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly studied as neural knowledge bases for supporting knowledge-intensive applications such as question answering and fact checking. However, the structural organization of their knowledge remains unexplored. Inspired by cognitive neuroscience findings, such as semantic clustering and priming, where knowing one fact increases the likelihood of recalling related facts, we investigate an analogous knowledge homophily pattern in LLMs. To this end, we map LLM knowledge into a graph representation through knowledge checking at both the triplet and entity levels. After that, we analyze the knowledgeability relationship between an entity and its neighbors, discovering that LLMs tend to possess a similar level of knowledge about entities positioned closer in the graph. Motivated by this homophily principle, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) regression model to estimate entity-level knowledgeability scores for triplets by leveraging their neighborhood scores. The predicted knowledgeability enables us to prioritize checking less well-known triplets, thereby maximizing knowledge coverage under the same labeling budget. This not only improves the efficiency of active labeling for fine-tuning to inject knowledge into LLMs but also enhances multi-hop path retrieval in reasoning-intensive question answering.

One of the common traits of past and present approaches for Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is that they rely upon discrete labels drawn from a predefined linguistic inventory to classify predicate senses and their arguments. However, we argue this need not be the case. In this paper, we present an approach that leverages Definition Modeling to introduce a generalized formulation of SRL as the task of describing predicate-argument structures using natural language definitions instead of discrete labels. Our novel formulation takes a first step towards placing interpretability and flexibility foremost, and yet our experiments and analyses on PropBank-style and FrameNet-style, dependency-based and span-based SRL also demonstrate that a flexible model with an interpretable output does not necessarily come at the expense of performance. We release our software for research purposes at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/dsrl.

The remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) for in-context learning (ICL) needs to be activated by demonstration examples. Prior work has extensively explored the selection of examples for ICL, predominantly following the "select then organize" paradigm, such approaches often neglect the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between the training and inference. In this paper, we formulate the problem as a sequential selection problem and introduce Se^2, a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM's feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples, significantly enriching the contextuality and relevance of ICL prompts. Meanwhile, we utilize beam search to seek and construct example sequences, enhancing both quality and diversity. Extensive experiments across 23 NLP tasks from 8 distinct categories illustrate that Se^2 markedly surpasses competitive baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. Further in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of proposed strategies, highlighting Se^2's exceptional stability and adaptability across various scenarios. Our code will be released to facilitate future research.

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as hallucinations and sequence repetitions. We propose to view these behaviors as fallbacks that models exhibit under uncertainty, and investigate the connection between them. We categorize fallback behaviors -- sequence repetitions, degenerate text, and hallucinations -- and extensively analyze them in models from the same family that differ by the amount of pretraining tokens, parameter count, or the inclusion of instruction-following training. Our experiments reveal a clear and consistent ordering of fallback behaviors, across all these axes: the more advanced an LLM is (i.e., trained on more tokens, has more parameters, or instruction-tuned), its fallback behavior shifts from sequence repetitions, to degenerate text, and then to hallucinations. Moreover, the same ordering is observed throughout a single generation, even for the best-performing models; as uncertainty increases, models shift from generating hallucinations to producing degenerate text and then sequence repetitions. Lastly, we demonstrate that while common decoding techniques, such as random sampling, might alleviate some unwanted behaviors like sequence repetitions, they increase harder-to-detect hallucinations.

In this paper, we describe our shared task submissions for Subtask 2 in CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. The challenge focused on the automatic detection of all cause-effect-signal spans present in the sentence from news-media. We detect cause-effect-signal spans in a sentence using T5 -- a pre-trained autoregressive language model. We iteratively identify all cause-effect-signal span triplets, always conditioning the prediction of the next triplet on the previously predicted ones. To predict the triplet itself, we consider different causal relationships such as causerightarroweffectrightarrowsignal. Each triplet component is generated via a language model conditioned on the sentence, the previous parts of the current triplet, and previously predicted triplets. Despite training on an extremely small dataset of 160 samples, our approach achieved competitive performance, being placed second in the competition. Furthermore, we show that assuming either causerightarroweffect or effectrightarrowcause order achieves similar results.

Many methods now exist for conditioning model outputs on task instructions, retrieved documents, and user-provided explanations and feedback. Rather than relying solely on examples of task inputs and outputs, these approaches use valuable additional data for improving model correctness and aligning learned models with human priors. Meanwhile, a growing body of evidence suggests that some language models can (1) store a large amount of knowledge in their parameters, and (2) perform inference over tasks in textual inputs at test time. These results raise the possibility that, for some tasks, humans cannot explain to a model any more about the task than it already knows or could infer on its own. In this paper, we study the circumstances under which explanations of individual data points can (or cannot) improve modeling performance. In order to carefully control important properties of the data and explanations, we introduce a synthetic dataset for experiments, and we also make use of three existing datasets with explanations: e-SNLI, TACRED, and SemEval. We first give a formal framework for the available modeling approaches, in which explanation data can be used as model inputs, as targets, or as a prior. After arguing that the most promising role for explanation data is as model inputs, we propose to use a retrieval-based method and show that it solves our synthetic task with accuracies upwards of 95%, while baselines without explanation data achieve below 65% accuracy. We then identify properties of datasets for which retrieval-based modeling fails. With the three existing datasets, we find no improvements from explanation retrieval. Drawing on findings from our synthetic task, we suggest that at least one of six preconditions for successful modeling fails to hold with these datasets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/peterbhase/ExplanationRoles

During times of increasing antibiotic resistance and the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19, it is important to classify genes related to antibiotic resistance. As natural language processing has advanced with transformer-based language models, many language models that learn characteristics of nucleotide sequences have also emerged. These models show good performance in classifying various features of nucleotide sequences. When classifying nucleotide sequences, not only the sequence itself, but also various background knowledge is utilized. In this study, we use not only a nucleotide sequence-based language model but also a text language model based on PubMed articles to reflect more biological background knowledge in the model. We propose a method to fine-tune the nucleotide sequence language model and the text language model based on various databases of antibiotic resistance genes. We also propose an LLM-based augmentation technique to supplement the data and an ensemble method to effectively combine the two models. We also propose a benchmark for evaluating the model. Our method achieved better performance than the nucleotide sequence language model in the drug resistance class prediction.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. This fact has sparked the interest of the community in quantifying the amount of factual knowledge present in PLMs, as this explains their performance on downstream tasks, and potentially justifies their use as knowledge bases. In this work, we survey methods and datasets that are used to probe PLMs for factual knowledge. Our contributions are: (1) We propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods that is based on how their inputs, outputs and the probed PLMs are adapted; (2) We provide an overview of the datasets used for factual probing; (3) We synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyze obstacles to adopting PLMs as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work.

We present the Charles University system for the MRL~2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The goal of the shared task was to develop systems for named entity recognition and question answering in several under-represented languages. Our solutions to both subtasks rely on the translate-test approach. We first translate the unlabeled examples into English using a multilingual machine translation model. Then, we run inference on the translated data using a strong task-specific model. Finally, we project the labeled data back into the original language. To keep the inferred tags on the correct positions in the original language, we propose a method based on scoring the candidate positions using a label-sensitive translation model. In both settings, we experiment with finetuning the classification models on the translated data. However, due to a domain mismatch between the development data and the shared task validation and test sets, the finetuned models could not outperform our baselines.

This paper presents a method to interpret the success of knowledge distillation by quantifying and analyzing task-relevant and task-irrelevant visual concepts that are encoded in intermediate layers of a deep neural network (DNN). More specifically, three hypotheses are proposed as follows. 1. Knowledge distillation makes the DNN learn more visual concepts than learning from raw data. 2. Knowledge distillation ensures that the DNN is prone to learning various visual concepts simultaneously. Whereas, in the scenario of learning from raw data, the DNN learns visual concepts sequentially. 3. Knowledge distillation yields more stable optimization directions than learning from raw data. Accordingly, we design three types of mathematical metrics to evaluate feature representations of the DNN. In experiments, we diagnosed various DNNs, and above hypotheses were verified.

Modern sequence models (e.g., Transformers, linear RNNs, etc.) emerged as dominant backbones of recent deep learning frameworks, mainly due to their efficiency, representational power, and/or ability to capture long-range dependencies. Adopting these sequence models for graph-structured data has recently gained popularity as the alternative to Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs). There is, however, a lack of a common foundation about what constitutes a good graph sequence model, and a mathematical description of the benefits and deficiencies in adopting different sequence models for learning on graphs. To this end, we first present Graph Sequence Model (GSM), a unifying framework for adopting sequence models for graphs, consisting of three main steps: (1) Tokenization, which translates the graph into a set of sequences; (2) Local Encoding, which encodes local neighborhoods around each node; and (3) Global Encoding, which employs a scalable sequence model to capture long-range dependencies within the sequences. This framework allows us to understand, evaluate, and compare the power of different sequence model backbones in graph tasks. Our theoretical evaluations of the representation power of Transformers and modern recurrent models through the lens of global and local graph tasks show that there are both negative and positive sides for both types of models. Building on this observation, we present GSM++, a fast hybrid model that uses the Hierarchical Affinity Clustering (HAC) algorithm to tokenize the graph into hierarchical sequences, and then employs a hybrid architecture of Transformer to encode these sequences. Our theoretical and experimental results support the design of GSM++, showing that GSM++ outperforms baselines in most benchmark evaluations.

Fine-tuning of pre-trained transformer models has become the standard approach for solving common NLP tasks. Most of the existing approaches rely on a randomly initialized classifier on top of such networks. We argue that this fine-tuning procedure is sub-optimal as the pre-trained model has no prior on the specific classifier labels, while it might have already learned an intrinsic textual representation of the task. In this paper, we introduce a new scoring method that casts a plausibility ranking task in a full-text format and leverages the masked language modeling head tuned during the pre-training phase. We study commonsense reasoning tasks where the model must rank a set of hypotheses given a premise, focusing on the COPA, Swag, HellaSwag and CommonsenseQA datasets. By exploiting our scoring method without fine-tuning, we are able to produce strong baselines (e.g. 80% test accuracy on COPA) that are comparable to supervised approaches. Moreover, when fine-tuning directly on the proposed scoring function, we show that our method provides a much more stable training phase across random restarts (e.g times 10 standard deviation reduction on COPA test accuracy) and requires less annotated data than the standard classifier approach to reach equivalent performances.

Understanding and manipulating the causal generation mechanisms in language models is essential for controlling their behavior. Previous work has primarily relied on techniques such as representation surgery -- e.g., model ablations or manipulation of linear subspaces tied to specific concepts -- to intervene on these models. To understand the impact of interventions precisely, it is useful to examine counterfactuals -- e.g., how a given sentence would have appeared had it been generated by the model following a specific intervention. We highlight that counterfactual reasoning is conceptually distinct from interventions, as articulated in Pearl's causal hierarchy. Based on this observation, we propose a framework for generating true string counterfactuals by reformulating language models as Generalized Structural-equation. Models using the Gumbel-max trick. This allows us to model the joint distribution over original strings and their counterfactuals resulting from the same instantiation of the sampling noise. We develop an algorithm based on hindsight Gumbel sampling that allows us to infer the latent noise variables and generate counterfactuals of observed strings. Our experiments demonstrate that the approach produces meaningful counterfactuals while at the same time showing that commonly used intervention techniques have considerable undesired side effects.

We demonstrate that LLMs may learn indicators of document usefulness and modulate their updates accordingly. We introduce random strings ("tags") as indicators of usefulness in a synthetic fine-tuning dataset. Fine-tuning on this dataset leads to implicit meta-learning (IML): in further fine-tuning, the model updates to make more use of text that is tagged as useful. We perform a thorough empirical investigation of this phenomenon, finding (among other things) that (i) it occurs in both pretrained LLMs and those trained from scratch, as well as on a vision task, and (ii) larger models and smaller batch sizes tend to give more IML. We also use probing to examine how IML changes the way models store knowledge in their parameters. Finally, we reflect on what our results might imply about capabilities, risks, and controllability of future AI systems. Our code can be found at https://github.com/krasheninnikov/internalization.

Recent work has proposed the linear representation hypothesis: that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts ("features") in activation space. In contrast, we explore whether some language model representations may be inherently multi-dimensional. We begin by developing a rigorous definition of irreducible multi-dimensional features based on whether they can be decomposed into either independent or non-co-occurring lower-dimensional features. Motivated by these definitions, we design a scalable method that uses sparse autoencoders to automatically find multi-dimensional features in GPT-2 and Mistral 7B. These auto-discovered features include strikingly interpretable examples, e.g. circular features representing days of the week and months of the year. We identify tasks where these exact circles are used to solve computational problems involving modular arithmetic in days of the week and months of the year. Finally, we provide evidence that these circular features are indeed the fundamental unit of computation in these tasks with intervention experiments on Mistral 7B and Llama 3 8B, and we find further circular representations by breaking down the hidden states for these tasks into interpretable components.