Africa
On Bias and Fairness in NLP: How to have a fairer text classification?
Elsafoury, Fatma, Katsigiannis, Stamos, Ramzan, Naeem
After that, to answer RQ1 and to understand the Recent research has shown that natural language impact of upstream bias and its removal on the processing (NLP) models are biased and systematically fairness of the task of text classification ( 5), we discriminate between people based on factors measure upstream bias, remove it and measure its like ethnicity, gender, and others (Nangia et al., impact before and after removal on the fairness of 2020; Elsafoury et al., 2022). The literature suggests the task of text classification. After that, we investigate four main sources of bias that have an impact downstream bias and its impact on the on the fairness of NLP models: Label bias, models' fairness ( 6) to answer RQ2. We then use Representation bias, sample bias, and Overamplification different methods to remove the downstream bias bias (Shah et al., 2020; Hovy and Prabhumoye, ( 7) and investigate the impact of these debiasing 2021). In the NLP literature, these sources methods ( 7.3) on the models' fairness to answer of bias are typically categorized as Upstream bias, RQ3. Then, we analyse our results 7.4 to find out which includes representation bias, and Downstream the most effective bias removal technique to answer bias, which includes Label, Sample and RQ4 and to ensure the fairness of the task of text Overampflication bias.
QUEST: A Retrieval Dataset of Entity-Seeking Queries with Implicit Set Operations
Malaviya, Chaitanya, Shaw, Peter, Chang, Ming-Wei, Lee, Kenton, Toutanova, Kristina
Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for "shorebirds that are not sandpipers" or "science-fiction films shot in England". To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.
Task-Optimized Adapters for an End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue System
Bang, Namo, Lee, Jeehyun, Koo, Myoung-Wan
Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are designed to carry out specific tasks by tracking dialogue states and generating appropriate responses to help users achieve defined goals. Recently, end-to-end dialogue models pre-trained based on large datasets have shown promising performance in the conversational system. However, they share the same parameters to train tasks of the dialogue system (NLU, DST, NLG), so debugging each task is challenging. Also, they require a lot of effort to fine-tune large parameters to create a task-oriented chatbot, making it difficult for non-experts to handle. Therefore, we intend to train relatively lightweight and fast models compared to PLM. In this paper, we propose an End-to-end TOD system with Task-Optimized Adapters which learn independently per task, adding only small number of parameters after fixed layers of pre-trained network. We also enhance the performance of the DST and NLG modules through reinforcement learning, overcoming the learning curve that has lacked at the adapter learning and enabling the natural and consistent response generation that is appropriate for the goal. Our method is a model-agnostic approach and does not require prompt-tuning as only input data without a prompt. As results of the experiment, our method shows competitive performance on the MultiWOZ benchmark compared to the existing end-to-end models. In particular, we attain state-of-the-art performance on the DST task of 2.2 dataset.
Bridging the Gap: A Survey on Integrating (Human) Feedback for Natural Language Generation
Fernandes, Patrick, Madaan, Aman, Liu, Emmy, Farinhas, Antรณnio, Martins, Pedro Henrique, Bertsch, Amanda, de Souza, Josรฉ G. C., Zhou, Shuyan, Wu, Tongshuang, Neubig, Graham, Martins, Andrรฉ F. T.
Many recent advances in natural language generation have been fueled by training large language models on internet-scale data. However, this paradigm can lead to models that generate toxic, inaccurate, and unhelpful content, and automatic evaluation metrics often fail to identify these behaviors. As models become more capable, human feedback is an invaluable signal for evaluating and improving models. This survey aims to provide an overview of the recent research that has leveraged human feedback to improve natural language generation. First, we introduce an encompassing formalization of feedback, and identify and organize existing research into a taxonomy following this formalization. Next, we discuss how feedback can be described by its format and objective, and cover the two approaches proposed to use feedback (either for training or decoding): directly using the feedback or training feedback models. We also discuss existing datasets for human-feedback data collection, and concerns surrounding feedback collection. Finally, we provide an overview of the nascent field of AI feedback, which exploits large language models to make judgments based on a set of principles and minimize the need for human intervention.
IB-RAR: Information Bottleneck as Regularizer for Adversarial Robustness
Xu, Xiaoyun, Perin, Guilherme, Picek, Stjepan
In this paper, we propose a novel method, IB-RAR, which uses Information Bottleneck (IB) to strengthen adversarial robustness for both adversarial training and non-adversarial-trained methods. We first use the IB theory to build regularizers as learning objectives in the loss function. Then, we filter out unnecessary features of intermediate representation according to their mutual information (MI) with labels, as the network trained with IB provides easily distinguishable MI for its features. Experimental results show that our method can be naturally combined with adversarial training and provides consistently better accuracy on new adversarial examples. Our method improves the accuracy by an average of 3.07% against five adversarial attacks for the VGG16 network, trained with three adversarial training benchmarks and the CIFAR-10 dataset. In addition, our method also provides good robustness for undefended methods, such as training with cross-entropy loss only. Finally, in the absence of adversarial training, the VGG16 network trained using our method and the CIFAR-10 dataset reaches an accuracy of 35.86% against PGD examples, while using all layers reaches 25.61% accuracy.
Emergent Linguistic Structures in Neural Networks are Fragile
La Malfa, Emanuele, Wicker, Matthew, Kwiatkowska, Marta
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to have strong performance on natural language processing tasks. However, performance metrics such as accuracy do not measure the quality of the model in terms of its ability to robustly represent complex linguistic structures. In this paper, focusing on the ability of language models to represent syntax, we propose a framework to assess the consistency and robustness of linguistic representations. To this end, we introduce measures of robustness of neural network models that leverage recent advances in extracting linguistic constructs from LLMs via probing tasks, i.e., simple tasks used to extract meaningful information about a single facet of a language model, such as syntax reconstruction and root identification. Empirically, we study the performance of four LLMs across six different corpora on the proposed robustness measures by analysing their performance and robustness with respect to syntax-preserving perturbations. We provide evidence that context-free representation (e.g., GloVe) are in some cases competitive with context-dependent representations from modern LLMs (e.g., BERT), yet equally brittle to syntax-preserving perturbations. Our key observation is that emergent syntactic representations in neural networks are brittle. We make the code, trained models and logs available to the community as a contribution to the debate about the capabilities of LLMs.
RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models
Gao, Luyu, Dai, Zhuyun, Pasupat, Panupong, Chen, Anthony, Chaganty, Arun Tejasvi, Fan, Yicheng, Zhao, Vincent Y., Lao, Ni, Lee, Hongrae, Juan, Da-Cheng, Guu, Kelvin
Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as few-shot learning, question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.
AIhub monthly digest: May 2023 โ mitigating biases, ICLR invited talks, and Eurovision fun
Welcome to our May 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we learn how to mitigate biases in machine learning, explore tradeoffs in school redistricting, and find out how machine learning algorithms fared in predicting the winner of this year's Eurovision Song Contest. In this blogpost, Max Springer examines the notion of fairness in hierarchical clustering. Max and colleagues demonstrate that it's possible to incorporate fairness constraints or demographic information into the optimization process to reduce biases in ML models without significantly sacrificing performance. Joar Skalse and Alessandro Abate won the AAAI 2023 outstanding paper award for their work, Misspecification in Inverse Reinforcement Learning, in which they study the question of how robust the inverse reinforcement learning problem is to misspecification of the underlying behavioural model.
Likelihood-Based Diffusion Language Models
Gulrajani, Ishaan, Hashimoto, Tatsunori B.
Despite a growing interest in diffusion-based language models, existing work has not shown that these models can attain nontrivial likelihoods on standard language modeling benchmarks. In this work, we take the first steps towards closing the likelihood gap between autoregressive and diffusion-based language models, with the goal of building and releasing a diffusion model which outperforms a small but widely-known autoregressive model. We pursue this goal through algorithmic improvements, scaling laws, and increased compute. On the algorithmic front, we introduce several methodological improvements for the maximum-likelihood training of diffusion language models. We then study scaling laws for our diffusion models and find compute-optimal training regimes which differ substantially from autoregressive models. Using our methods and scaling analysis, we train and release Plaid 1B, a large diffusion language model which outperforms GPT-2 124M in likelihood on benchmark datasets and generates fluent samples in unconditional and zero-shot control settings.
Do Question Answering Modeling Improvements Hold Across Benchmarks?
Liu, Nelson F., Lee, Tony, Jia, Robin, Liang, Percy
Do question answering (QA) modeling improvements (e.g., choice of architecture and training procedure) hold consistently across the diverse landscape of QA benchmarks? To study this question, we introduce the notion of concurrence -- two benchmarks have high concurrence on a set of modeling approaches if they rank the modeling approaches similarly. We measure the concurrence between 32 QA benchmarks on a set of 20 diverse modeling approaches and find that human-constructed benchmarks have high concurrence amongst themselves, even if their passage and question distributions are very different. Surprisingly, even downsampled human-constructed benchmarks (i.e., collecting less data) and programmatically-generated benchmarks (e.g., cloze-formatted examples) have high concurrence with human-constructed benchmarks. These results indicate that, despite years of intense community focus on a small number of benchmarks, the modeling improvements studied hold broadly.