South America
BioInstruct: Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Tran, Hieu, Yang, Zhichao, Yao, Zonghai, Yu, Hong
To enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP) by introducing a domain-specific instruction dataset and examining its impact when combined with multi-task learning principles. We created the BioInstruct, comprising 25,005 instructions to instruction-tune LLMs(LLaMA 1 & 2, 7B & 13B version). The instructions were created by prompting the GPT-4 language model with three-seed samples randomly drawn from an 80 human curated instructions. We employed Low-Rank Adaptation(LoRA) for parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We then evaluated these instruction-tuned LLMs on several BioNLP tasks, which can be grouped into three major categories: question answering(QA), information extraction(IE), and text generation(GEN). We also examined whether categories(e.g., QA, IE, and generation) of instructions impact model performance. Comparing with LLMs without instruction-tuned, our instruction-tuned LLMs demonstrated marked performance gains: 17.3% in QA, 5.7% in IE, and 96% in Generation tasks. Our 7B-parameter instruction-tuned LLaMA 1 model was competitive or even surpassed other LLMs in the biomedical domain that were also fine-tuned from LLaMA 1 with vast domain-specific data or a variety of tasks. Our results also show that the performance gain is significantly higher when instruction fine-tuning is conducted with closely related tasks. Our findings align with the observations of multi-task learning, suggesting the synergies between two tasks. The BioInstruct dataset serves as a valuable resource and instruction tuned LLMs lead to the best performing BioNLP applications.
ArcheType: A Novel Framework for Open-Source Column Type Annotation using Large Language Models
Feuer, Benjamin, Liu, Yurong, Hegde, Chinmay, Freire, Juliana
Existing deep-learning approaches to semantic column type annotation (CTA) have important shortcomings: they rely on semantic types which are fixed at training time; require a large number of training samples per type and incur large run-time inference costs; and their performance can degrade when evaluated on novel datasets, even when types remain constant. Large language models have exhibited strong zero-shot classification performance on a wide range of tasks and in this paper we explore their use for CTA. We introduce ArcheType, a simple, practical method for context sampling, prompt serialization, model querying, and label remapping, which enables large language models to solve CTA problems in a fully zero-shot manner. We ablate each component of our method separately, and establish that improvements to context sampling and label remapping provide the most consistent gains. ArcheType establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot CTA benchmarks (including three new domain-specific benchmarks which we release along with this paper), and when used in conjunction with classical CTA techniques, it outperforms a SOTA DoDuo model on the fine-tuned SOTAB benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/penfever/ArcheType.
Robust Training for Conversational Question Answering Models with Reinforced Reformulation Generation
Kaiser, Magdalena, Roy, Rishiraj Saha, Weikum, Gerhard
Models for conversational question answering (ConvQA) over knowledge graphs (KGs) are usually trained and tested on benchmarks of gold QA pairs. This implies that training is limited to surface forms seen in the respective datasets, and evaluation is on a small set of held-out questions. Through our proposed framework REIGN, we take several steps to remedy this restricted learning setup. First, we systematically generate reformulations of training questions to increase robustness of models to surface form variations. This is a particularly challenging problem, given the incomplete nature of such questions. Second, we guide ConvQA models towards higher performance by feeding it only those reformulations that help improve their answering quality, using deep reinforcement learning. Third, we demonstrate the viability of training major model components on one benchmark and applying them zero-shot to another. Finally, for a rigorous evaluation of robustness for trained models, we use and release large numbers of diverse reformulations generated by prompting GPT for benchmark test sets (resulting in 20x increase in sizes). Our findings show that ConvQA models with robust training via reformulations, significantly outperform those with standard training from gold QA pairs only.
Feature selection and regression methods for stock price prediction using technical indicators
Moodi, Fatemeh, Jahangard-Rafsanjani, Amir, Zarifzadeh, Sajad
Due to the influence of many factors, including technical indicators on stock price prediction, feature selection is important to choose the best indicators. This study uses technical indicators and features selection and regression methods to solve the problem of closing the stock market price. The aim of this research is to predict the stock market price with the least error. By the proposed method, the data created by the 3-day time window were converted to the appropriate input for regression methods. In this paper, 10 regressor and 123 technical indicators have been examined on data of the last 13 years of Apple Company. The results have been investigated by 5 error-based evaluation criteria. Based on results of the proposed method, MLPSF has 56/47% better performance than MLP. Also, SVRSF has 67/42% improved compared to SVR. LRSF was 76.7 % improved compared to LR. The RISF method also improved 72.82 % of Ridge regression. The DTRSB method had 24.23 % improvement over DTR. KNNSB had 15.52 % improvement over KNN regression. RFSB had a 6 % improvement over RF. GBRSF also improved at 7% over GBR. Finally, ADASF and ADASB also had a 4% improvement over the ADA regression. Also, Ridge and LinearRegression had the best results for stock price prediction. Based on results, the best indicators to predict stock price are: the Squeeze_pro, Percentage Price Oscillator, Thermo, Decay, Archer On-Balance Volume, Bollinger Bands, Squeeze and Ichimoku indicator. According to the results, the use of suitable combination of suggested indicators along with regression methods has resulted in high accuracy in predicting the closing price.
Vulnerabilities in AI Code Generators: Exploring Targeted Data Poisoning Attacks
Cotroneo, Domenico, Improta, Cristina, Liguori, Pietro, Natella, Roberto
AI-based code generators have become pivotal in assisting developers in writing software starting from natural language (NL). However, they are trained on large amounts of data, often collected from unsanitized online sources (e.g., GitHub, HuggingFace). As a consequence, AI models become an easy target for data poisoning, i.e., an attack that injects malicious samples into the training data to generate vulnerable code. To address this threat, we investigate the security of AI code generators by devising a targeted data poisoning strategy. We poison the training data by injecting increasing amounts of code containing security vulnerabilities and assess the attack's success on different state-of-the-art models for code generation. Our study shows that AI code generators are vulnerable to even a small amount of poison. Notably, the attack success strongly depends on the model architecture and poisoning rate, whereas it is not influenced by the type of vulnerabilities. Moreover, since the attack does not impact the correctness of code generated by pre-trained models, it is hard to detect. Lastly, our work offers practical insights into understanding and potentially mitigating this threat.
The Impact of Positional Encoding on Length Generalization in Transformers
Kazemnejad, Amirhossein, Padhi, Inkit, Ramamurthy, Karthikeyan Natesan, Das, Payel, Reddy, Siva
Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the development of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major factor influencing length generalization, but the exact impact of different PE schemes on extrapolation in downstream tasks remains unclear. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study comparing the length generalization performance of decoder-only Transformers with five different position encoding approaches including Absolute Position Embedding (APE), T5's Relative PE, ALiBi, and Rotary, in addition to Transformers without positional encoding (NoPE). Our evaluation encompasses a battery of reasoning and mathematical tasks. Our findings reveal that the most commonly used positional encoding methods, such as ALiBi, Rotary, and APE, are not well suited for length generalization in downstream tasks. More importantly, NoPE outperforms other explicit positional encoding methods while requiring no additional computation. We theoretically demonstrate that NoPE can represent both absolute and relative PEs, but when trained with SGD, it mostly resembles T5's relative PE attention patterns. Finally, we find that scratchpad is not always helpful to solve length generalization and its format highly impacts the model's performance. Overall, our work suggests that explicit position embeddings are not essential for decoder-only Transformers to generalize well to longer sequences.
LIMIT: Language Identification, Misidentification, and Translation using Hierarchical Models in 350+ Languages
Agarwal, Milind, Alam, Md Mahfuz Ibn, Anastasopoulos, Antonios
Knowing the language of an input text/audio is a necessary first step for using almost every NLP tool such as taggers, parsers, or translation systems. Language identification is a well-studied problem, sometimes even considered solved; in reality, due to lack of data and computational challenges, current systems cannot accurately identify most of the world's 7000 languages. To tackle this bottleneck, we first compile a corpus, MCS-350, of 50K multilingual and parallel children's stories in 350+ languages. MCS-350 can serve as a benchmark for language identification of short texts and for 1400+ new translation directions in low-resource Indian and African languages. Second, we propose a novel misprediction-resolution hierarchical model, LIMIt, for language identification that reduces error by 55% (from 0.71 to 0.32) on our compiled children's stories dataset and by 40% (from 0.23 to 0.14) on the FLORES-200 benchmark. Our method can expand language identification coverage into low-resource languages by relying solely on systemic misprediction patterns, bypassing the need to retrain large models from scratch.
Multi-label Classification with High-rank and High-order Label Correlations
Si, Chongjie, Jia, Yuheng, Wang, Ran, Zhang, Min-Ling, Feng, Yanghe, Qu, Chongxiao
Exploiting label correlations is important to multi-label classification. Previous methods capture the high-order label correlations mainly by transforming the label matrix to a latent label space with low-rank matrix factorization. However, the label matrix is generally a full-rank or approximate full-rank matrix, making the low-rank factorization inappropriate. Besides, in the latent space, the label correlations will become implicit. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective method to depict the high-order label correlations explicitly, and at the same time maintain the high-rank of the label matrix. Moreover, we estimate the label correlations and infer model parameters simultaneously via the local geometric structure of the input to achieve mutual enhancement. Comparative studies over twelve benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in multi-label classification. The exploited high-order label correlations are consistent with common sense empirically. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Chongjie-Si/HOMI.
A Post-Quantum Associative Memory
Lami, Ludovico, Goldwater, Daniel, Adesso, Gerardo
Associative memories are devices storing information that can be fully retrieved given partial disclosure of it. We examine a toy model of associative memory and the ultimate limitations it is subjected to within the framework of general probabilistic theories (GPTs), which represent the most general class of physical theories satisfying some basic operational axioms. We ask ourselves how large the dimension of a GPT should be so that it can accommodate $2^m$ states with the property that any $N$ of them are perfectly distinguishable. Call $d(N,m)$ the minimal such dimension. Invoking an old result by Danzer and Gr\"unbaum, we prove that $d(2,m)=m+1$, to be compared with $O(2^m)$ when the GPT is required to be either classical or quantum. This yields an example of a task where GPTs outperform both classical and quantum theory exponentially. More generally, we resolve the case of fixed $N$ and asymptotically large $m$, proving that $d(N,m) \leq m^{1+o_N(1)}$ (as $m\to\infty$) for every $N\geq 2$, which yields again an exponential improvement over classical and quantum theories. Finally, we develop a numerical approach to the general problem of finding the largest $N$-wise mutually distinguishable set for a given GPT, which can be seen as an instance of the maximum clique problem on $N$-regular hypergraphs.
Differentiable Clustering with Perturbed Spanning Forests
Stewart, Lawrence, Bach, Francis S, López, Felipe Llinares, Berthet, Quentin
We introduce a differentiable clustering method based on stochastic perturbations of minimum-weight spanning forests. This allows us to include clustering in end-to-end trainable pipelines, with efficient gradients. We show that our method performs well even in difficult settings, such as data sets with high noise and challenging geometries. We also formulate an ad hoc loss to efficiently learn from partial clustering data using this operation. We demonstrate its performance on several data sets for supervised and semi-supervised tasks.