Large Language Model
Step-by-step Instructions and a Simple Tabular Output Format Improve the Dependency Parsing Accuracy of LLMs
Matsuda, Hiroshi, Ma, Chunpeng, Asahara, Masayuki
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled impressive performance in various tasks. However, standard prompting often struggles to produce structurally valid and accurate outputs, especially in dependency parsing. We propose a novel step-by-step instruction strategy, where universal part-of-speech tagging precedes the prediction of syntactic heads and dependency labels, and a simplified CoNLL-U like output format, our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on Universal Dependencies datasets across 17 languages without hallucination or contamination. We further show that multilingual fine-tuning simultaneously improves cross-language generalization performance. Our results highlight the effectiveness of explicit reasoning steps in LLM-based parsing and offer a scalable, format-consistent alternative to bracket-based approaches.
When Detection Fails: The Power of Fine-Tuned Models to Generate Human-Like Social Media Text
Dawkins, Hillary, Fraser, Kathleen C., Kiritchenko, Svetlana
Detecting AI-generated text is a difficult problem to begin with; detecting AI-generated text on social media is made even more difficult due to the short text length and informal, idiosyncratic language of the internet. It is nonetheless important to tackle this problem, as social media represents a significant attack vector in online influence campaigns, which may be bolstered through the use of mass-produced AI-generated posts supporting (or opposing) particular policies, decisions, or events. We approach this problem with the mindset and resources of a reasonably sophisticated threat actor, and create a dataset of 505,159 AI-generated social media posts from a combination of open-source, closed-source, and fine-tuned LLMs, covering 11 different controversial topics. We show that while the posts can be detected under typical research assumptions about knowledge of and access to the generating models, under the more realistic assumption that an attacker will not release their fine-tuned model to the public, detectability drops dramatically. This result is confirmed with a human study. Ablation experiments highlight the vulnerability of various detection algorithms to fine-tuned LLMs. This result has implications across all detection domains, since fine-tuning is a generally applicable and realistic LLM use case.
Metritocracy: Representative Metrics for Lite Benchmarks
Procaccia, Ariel, Schiffer, Benjamin, Wang, Serena, Zhang, Shirley
A common problem in LLM evaluation is how to choose a subset of metrics from a full suite of possible metrics. Subset selection is usually done for efficiency or interpretability reasons, and the goal is often to select a ``representative'' subset of metrics. However, ``representative'' is rarely clearly defined. In this work, we use ideas from social choice theory to formalize two notions of representation for the selection of a subset of evaluation metrics. We first introduce positional representation, which guarantees every alternative is sufficiently represented at every position cutoff. We then introduce positional proportionality, which guarantees no alternative is proportionally over- or under-represented by more than a small error at any position. We prove upper and lower bounds on the smallest number of metrics needed to guarantee either of these properties in the worst case. We also study a generalized form of each property that allows for additional input on groups of metrics that must be represented. Finally, we tie theory to practice through real-world case studies on both LLM evaluation and hospital quality evaluation.
Team Anotheroption at SemEval-2025 Task 8: Bridging the Gap Between Open-Source and Proprietary LLMs in Table QA
Evkarpidi, Nikolas, Tutubalina, Elena
This paper presents a system developed for SemEval 2025 Task 8: Question Answering (QA) over tabular data. Our approach integrates several key components: text-to-SQL and text-to-code generation modules, a self-correction mechanism, and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Additionally, it includes an end-to-end (E2E) module, all orchestrated by a large language model (LLM). Through ablation studies, we analyzed the effects of different parts of our pipeline and identified the challenges that are still present in this field. During the evaluation phase of the competition, our solution achieved an accuracy of 80%, resulting in a top-13 ranking among the 38 participating teams. Our pipeline demonstrates a significant improvement in accuracy for open-source models and achieves a performance comparable to proprietary LLMs in QA tasks over tables. The code is available at GitHub repository.
Latent Multi-Head Attention for Small Language Models
Mehta, Sushant, Dandekar, Raj, Dandekar, Rajat, Panat, Sreedath
We present the first comprehensive study of latent multi-head attention (MLA) for small language models, revealing interesting efficiency-quality trade-offs. Training 30M-parameter GPT models on 100,000 synthetic stories, we benchmark three architectural variants: standard multi-head attention (MHA), MLA, and MLA with rotary positional embeddings (MLA+RoPE). Our key finding is that MLA+RoPE with half-rank latent dimensions (r = d/2) achieves a 45% KV-cache memory reduction while incurring only a 0.3% increase in validation loss (essentially matching MHA quality)- a Pareto improvement for memory constrained deployment. We further show that RoPE is crucial for MLA in small models: without it, MLA underperforms vanilla attention by 3-5%, but with RoPE, it surpasses vanilla by 2%. Inference benchmarks on NVIDIA A100 GPUs reveal that MLA with r=d/2 achieves a 1.4 times speedup over full-rank MLA while maintaining the memory savings. GPT-4 evaluations corroborate perplexity results, with ours achieving the highest quality scores (7.4/10) across grammar, creativity, and consistency metrics. Code and models will be released upon acceptance.
DRAGged into Conflicts: Detecting and Addressing Conflicting Sources in Search-Augmented LLMs
Cattan, Arie, Jacovi, Alon, Ram, Ori, Herzig, Jonathan, Aharoni, Roee, Goldshtein, Sasha, Ofek, Eran, Szpektor, Idan, Caciularu, Avi
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a commonly used approach for enhancing large language models (LLMs) with relevant and up-to-date information. However, the retrieved sources can often contain conflicting information and it remains unclear how models should address such discrepancies. In this work, we first propose a novel taxonomy of knowledge conflict types in RAG, along with the desired model behavior for each type. We then introduce CONFLICTS, a high-quality benchmark with expert annotations of conflict types in a realistic RAG setting. CONFLICTS is the first benchmark that enables tracking progress on how models address a wide range of knowledge conflicts. We conduct extensive experiments on this benchmark, showing that LLMs often struggle to appropriately resolve conflicts between sources. While prompting LLMs to explicitly reason about the potential conflict in the retrieved documents significantly improves the quality and appropriateness of their responses, substantial room for improvement in future research remains.
A Comprehensive Study of Decoder-Only LLMs for Text-to-Image Generation
Wang, Andrew Z., Ge, Songwei, Karras, Tero, Liu, Ming-Yu, Balaji, Yogesh
Both text-to-image generation and large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements. However, many text-to-image models still employ the somewhat outdated T5 and CLIP as their text encoders. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of using modern decoder-only LLMs as text encoders for text-to-image diffusion models. W e build a standardized training and evaluation pipeline that allows us to isolate and evaluate the effect of different text embeddings. W e train a total of 27 text-to-image models with 12 different text encoders to analyze the critical aspects of LLMs that could impact text-to-image generation, including the approaches to extract embeddings, different LLMs variants, and model sizes. Our experiments reveal that the de facto way of using last-layer embeddings as conditioning leads to inferior performance. Instead, we explore embeddings from various layers and find that using layer-normalized averaging across all layers significantly improves alignment with complex prompts. Most LLMs with this conditioning outperform the baseline T5 model, showing enhanced performance in advanced visio-linguistic reasoning skills.
Unifying Uniform and Binary-coding Quantization for Accurate Compression of Large Language Models
Park, Seungcheol, Bae, Jeongin, Kwon, Beomseok, Kim, Minjun, Kim, Byeongwook, Kwon, Se Jung, Kang, U, Lee, Dongsoo
How can we quantize large language models while preserving accuracy? Quantization is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) efficiently. Binary-coding quantization (BCQ) and uniform quantization (UQ) are promising quantization schemes that have strong expressiveness and optimizability, respectively. However, neither scheme leverages both advantages. In this paper, we propose UniQuanF (Unified Quantization with Flexible Mapping), an accurate quantization method for LLMs. UniQuanF harnesses both strong expressiveness and optimizability by unifying the flexible mapping technique in UQ and non-uniform quantization levels of BCQ. We propose unified initialization, and local and periodic mapping techniques to optimize the parameters in UniQuanF precisely. After optimization, our unification theorem removes computational and memory overhead, allowing us to utilize the superior accuracy of UniQuanF without extra deployment costs induced by the unification. Experimental results demonstrate that UniQuanF outperforms existing UQ and BCQ methods, achieving up to 4.60% higher accuracy on GSM8K benchmark.
Disentangling Codemixing in Chats: The NUS ABC Codemixed Corpus
Churina, Svetlana, Gupta, Akshat, Mujtahid, Insyirah, Jaidka, Kokil
Code-mixing involves the seamless integration of linguistic elements from multiple languages within a single discourse, reflecting natural multilingual communication patterns. Despite its prominence in informal interactions such as social media, chat messages and instant - messaging exchanges, there has been a lack of publicly available corpora that are author - labeled and suitable for modeling human conversations and relationships. This study intro - duces the first labeled and general-purpose corpus for understanding code - mixing in context while maintaining rigorous privacy and ethi - cal standards. Our live project will continu - ously gather, verify, and integrate code - mixed messages into a structured dataset released in JSON format, accompanied by detailed metadata and linguistic statistics. To date, it includes over 355,641 messages spanning various code - mixing patterns, with a primary focus on English, Mandarin, and other languages. We expect the Codemix Corpus to serve as a foun - dational dataset for research in computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, and NLP applica - tions. Code and dataset sample can be found here.
Bayesian Neural Scaling Law Extrapolation with Prior-Data Fitted Networks
Lee, Dongwoo, Lee, Dong Bok, Adriaensen, Steven, Lee, Juho, Hwang, Sung Ju, Hutter, Frank, Kim, Seon Joo, Lee, Hae Beom
Scaling has been a major driver of recent advancements in deep learning. Numerous empirical studies have found that scaling laws often follow the power-law and proposed several variants of power-law functions to predict the scaling behavior at larger scales. However, existing methods mostly rely on point estimation and do not quantify uncertainty, which is crucial for real-world applications involving decision-making problems such as determining the expected performance improvements achievable by investing additional computational resources. In this work, we explore a Bayesian framework based on Prior-data Fitted Networks (PFNs) for neural scaling law extrapolation. Specifically, we design a prior distribution that enables the sampling of infinitely many synthetic functions resembling real-world neural scaling laws, allowing our PFN to meta-learn the extrapolation. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on real-world neural scaling laws, comparing it against both the existing point estimation methods and Bayesian approaches. Our method demonstrates superior performance, particularly in data-limited scenarios such as Bayesian active learning, underscoring its potential for reliable, uncertainty-aware extrapolation in practical applications.