Large Language Model
Unilogit: Robust Machine Unlearning for LLMs Using Uniform-Target Self-Distillation
Vasilev, Stefan, Herold, Christian, Liao, Baohao, Hashemi, Seyyed Hadi, Khadivi, Shahram, Monz, Christof
This paper introduces Unilogit, a novel self-distillation method for machine unlearning in Large Language Models. Unilogit addresses the challenge of selectively forgetting specific information while maintaining overall model utility, a critical task in compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR. Unlike prior methods that rely on static hyperparameters or starting model outputs, Unilogit dynamically adjusts target logits to achieve a uniform probability for the target token, leveraging the current model's outputs for more accurate self-distillation targets. This approach not only eliminates the need for additional hy-perparameters but also enhances the model's ability to approximate the golden targets. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and an in-house e-commerce dataset demonstrate Unilogit's superior performance in balancing forget and retain objectives, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as NPO and Un-DIAL. Our analysis further reveals Unilogit's robustness across various scenarios, highlighting its practical applicability and effectiveness in achieving efficacious machine unlearning.
Exploring the Feasibility of Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction with a Single LLM up to 9B parameters: A Comparative Study of 17 Models
Wisniewski, Dawid, Solarski, Antoni, Nowakowski, Artur
Recent language models can successfully solve various language-related tasks, and many understand inputs stated in different languages. In this paper, we explore the performance of 17 popular models used to correct grammatical issues in texts stated in English, German, Italian, and Swedish when using a single model to correct texts in all those languages. We analyze the outputs generated by these models, focusing on decreasing the number of grammatical errors while keeping the changes small. The conclusions drawn help us understand what problems occur among those models and which models can be recommended for multilingual grammatical error correction tasks. We list six models that improve grammatical correctness in all four languages and show that Gemma 9B is currently the best performing one for the languages considered.
Towards Developmentally Plausible Rewards: Communicative Success as a Learning Signal for Interactive Language Models
Stรถpler, Lennart, Asadli, Rufat, Nikolaus, Mitja, Cotterell, Ryan, Warstadt, Alex
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a reward if communicative success is achieved. Unlike earlier related work using image--caption data for interactive reference games, we operationalize communicative success in a more abstract language-only question--answering setting. First, we present a feasibility study demonstrating that our reward provides an indirect signal about grammaticality. Second, we conduct experiments using reinforcement learning to fine-tune language models. We observe that cognitively plausible constraints on the communication channel lead to interpretable changes in speaker behavior. However, we do not yet see improvements on linguistic evaluations from our training regime. We outline potential modifications to the task design and training configuration that could better position future work to use our methodology to observe the benefits of interaction on language learning in computational cognitive models.
NeoQA: Evidence-based Question Answering with Generated News Events
Glockner, Max, Jiang, Xiang, Ribeiro, Leonardo F. R., Gurevych, Iryna, Dreyer, Markus
Evaluating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in large language models (LLMs) is challenging because benchmarks can quickly become stale. Questions initially requiring retrieval may become answerable from pretraining knowledge as newer models incorporate more recent information during pretraining, making it difficult to distinguish evidence-based reasoning from recall. We introduce NeoQA (News Events for Out-of-training Question Answering), a benchmark designed to address this issue. To construct NeoQA, we generated timelines and knowledge bases of fictional news events and entities along with news articles and Q\&A pairs to prevent LLMs from leveraging pretraining knowledge, ensuring that no prior evidence exists in their training data. We propose our dataset as a new platform for evaluating evidence-based question answering, as it requires LLMs to generate responses exclusively from retrieved evidence and only when sufficient evidence is available. NeoQA enables controlled evaluation across various evidence scenarios, including cases with missing or misleading details. Our findings indicate that LLMs struggle to distinguish subtle mismatches between questions and evidence, and suffer from short-cut reasoning when key information required to answer a question is missing from the evidence, underscoring key limitations in evidence-based reasoning.
Summarisation of German Judgments in conjunction with a Class-based Evaluation
Steffes, Bianca, Wiedemann, Nils Torben, Gratz, Alexander, Hochreither, Pamela, Meyer, Jana Elina, Schilke, Katharina Luise
The automated summarisation of long legal documents can be a great aid for legal experts in their daily work. We automatically create summaries (guiding principles) of German judgments by fine-tuning a decoder-based large language model. We enrich the judgments with information about legal entities before the training. For the evaluation of the created summaries, we define a set of evaluation classes which allows us to measure their language, pertinence, completeness and correctness. Our results show that employing legal entities helps the generative model to find the relevant content, but the quality of the created summaries is not yet sufficient for a use in practice.
Symbol-based entity marker highlighting for enhanced text mining in materials science with generative AI
Lee, Junhyeong, Yuk, Jong Min, Lee, Chan-Woo
The construction of experimental datasets is essential for expanding the scope of data-driven scientific discovery. Recent adva nces in natural language pro cessing (NLP) have facilitated automatic extraction of structured data from uns tructured scientific literature. While existing approaches--multi-step and direct methods--offer va luable capabilities, they also come with limitations when applied independently. He re, we propose a novel hybrid text-mining framework that integrates the advantages of both methods to convert unstructured scientific text into structured data. Our approach first tran sforms raw text into entity-recognized text, and subsequently into structured form. Furthermore, beyond the overall data structuring framework, we also enhance entity recogniti on performance by introducing an entity marker--a simple yet effective technique that uses sym bolic annotations to highlight target entities. Specifically, our entity marker-based hybrid approach not onl y consistently outperforms previous entity recognition approaches across three benchmark datasets (MatScholar, SOFC, and SOFC slot NER) but also improve the quality of final st ructured data--yielding up to a 58% improvement in entity-level F1 score and up to 83% improveme nt in relation-level F1 score compared to direct approach.
Evolutionary ecology of words
We propose a model for the evolutionary ecology of words as one attempt to extend evolutionary game theory and agent-based models by utilizing the rich linguistic expressions of Large Language Models (LLMs). Our model enables the emergence and evolution of diverse and infinite options for interactions among agents. Within the population, each agent possesses a short word (or phrase) generated by an LLM and moves within a spatial environment. When agents become adjacent, the outcome of their interaction is determined by the LLM based on the relationship between their words, with the loser's word being replaced by the winner's. Word mutations, also based on LLM outputs, may occur. We conducted preliminary experiments assuming that ``strong animal species" would survive. The results showed that from an initial population consisting of well-known species, many species emerged both gradually and in a punctuated equilibrium manner. Each trial demonstrated the unique evolution of diverse populations, with one type of large species becoming dominant, such as terrestrial animals, marine life, or extinct species, which were ecologically specialized and adapted ones across diverse extreme habitats. We also conducted a long-term experiment with a large population, demonstrating the emergence and coexistence of diverse species.
Augmented Body Communicator: Enhancing daily body expression for people with upper limb limitations through LLM and a robotic arm
Zhou, Songchen, Armstrong, Mark, Barbareschi, Giulia, Ajioka, Toshihiro, Hu, Zheng, Ando, Ryoichi, Yoshifuji, Kentaro, Muto, Masatane, Minamizawa, Kouta
Individuals with upper limb movement limitations face challenges in interacting with others. Although robotic arms are currently used primarily for functional tasks, there is considerable potential to explore ways to enhance users' body language capabilities during social interactions. This paper introduces an Augmented Body Communicator system that integrates robotic arms and a large language model. Through the incorporation of kinetic memory, disabled users and their supporters can collaboratively design actions for the robot arm. The LLM system then provides suggestions on the most suitable action based on contextual cues during interactions. The system underwent thorough user testing with six participants who have conditions affecting upper limb mobility. Results indicate that the system improves users' ability to express themselves. Based on our findings, we offer recommendations for developing robotic arms that support disabled individuals with body language capabilities and functional tasks.
An empathic GPT-based chatbot to talk about mental disorders with Spanish teenagers
Mรกrmol-Romero, Alba Marรญa, Garcรญa-Vega, Manuel, Garcรญa-Cumbreras, Miguel รngel, Montejo-Rรกez, Arturo
This paper presents a chatbot-based system to engage young Spanish people in the awareness of certain mental disorders through a self-disclosure technique. The study was carried out in a population of teenagers aged between 12 and 18 years. The dialogue engine mixes closed and open conversations, so certain controlled messages are sent to focus the chat on a specific disorder, which will change over time. Once a set of trial questions is answered, the system can initiate the conversation on the disorder under the focus according to the user's sensibility to that disorder, in an attempt to establish a more empathetic communication. Then, an open conversation based on the GPT-3 language model is initiated, allowing the user to express themselves with more freedom. The results show that these systems are of interest to young people and could help them become aware of certain mental disorders.
3D CAVLA: Leveraging Depth and 3D Context to Generalize Vision Language Action Models for Unseen Tasks
Bhat, Vineet, Lan, Yu-Hsiang, Krishnamurthy, Prashanth, Karri, Ramesh, Khorrami, Farshad
Robotic manipulation in 3D requires learning an $N$ degree-of-freedom joint space trajectory of a robot manipulator. Robots must possess semantic and visual perception abilities to transform real-world mappings of their workspace into the low-level control necessary for object manipulation. Recent work has demonstrated the capabilities of fine-tuning large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to learn the mapping between RGB images, language instructions, and joint space control. These models typically take as input RGB images of the workspace and language instructions, and are trained on large datasets of teleoperated robot demonstrations. In this work, we explore methods to improve the scene context awareness of a popular recent Vision-Language-Action model by integrating chain-of-thought reasoning, depth perception, and task-oriented region of interest detection. Our experiments in the LIBERO simulation environment show that our proposed model, 3D-CAVLA, improves the success rate across various LIBERO task suites, achieving an average success rate of 98.1$\%$. We also evaluate the zero-shot capabilities of our method, demonstrating that 3D scene awareness leads to robust learning and adaptation for completely unseen tasks. 3D-CAVLA achieves an absolute improvement of 8.8$\%$ on unseen tasks. We will open-source our code and the unseen tasks dataset to promote community-driven research here: https://3d-cavla.github.io