Current foundation models exhibit impressive capabilities when prompted either with text only or with both image and text inputs. But do their capabilities change depending on the input modality? In this work, we propose $\textbf{IsoBench}$, a benchmark dataset containing problems from four major areas: math, science, algorithms, and games. Each example is presented with multiple $\textbf{isomorphic representations}$ of inputs, such as visual, textual, and mathematical presentations. IsoBench provides fine-grained feedback to diagnose performance gaps caused by the form of the representation. Across various foundation models, we observe that on the same problem, models have a consistent preference towards textual representations. Most prominently, when evaluated on all IsoBench problems, Claude-3 Opus performs 28.7 points worse when provided with images instead of text; similarly, GPT-4 Turbo is 18.7 points worse and Gemini Pro is 14.9 points worse. Finally, we present two prompting techniques, $\textit{IsoCombination}$ and $\textit{IsoScratchPad}$, which improve model performance by considering combinations of, and translations between, different input representations.

Recent works in relation extraction (RE) have achieved promising benchmark accuracy; however, our adversarial attack experiments show that these works excessively rely on entities, making their generalization capability questionable. To address this issue, we propose an adversarial training method specifically designed for RE. Our approach introduces both sequence- and token-level perturbations to the sample and uses a separate perturbation vocabulary to improve the search for entity and context perturbations. Furthermore, we introduce a probabilistic strategy for leaving clean tokens in the context during adversarial training. This strategy enables a larger attack budget for entities and coaxes the model to leverage relational patterns embedded in the context. Extensive experiments show that compared to various adversarial training methods, our method significantly improves both the accuracy and robustness of the model. Additionally, experiments on different data availability settings highlight the effectiveness of our method in low-resource scenarios. We also perform in-depth analyses of our proposed method and provide further hints. We will release our code at https://github.com/David-Li0406/READ.

Data poisoning backdoor attacks can cause undesirable behaviors in large language models (LLMs), and defending against them is of increasing importance. Existing defense mechanisms often assume that only one type of trigger is adopted by the attacker, while defending against multiple simultaneous and independent trigger types necessitates general defense frameworks and is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we propose Nested Product of Experts(NPoE) defense framework, which involves a mixture of experts (MoE) as a trigger-only ensemble within the PoE defense framework to simultaneously defend against multiple trigger types. During NPoE training, the main model is trained in an ensemble with a mixture of smaller expert models that learn the features of backdoor triggers. At inference time, only the main model is used. Experimental results on sentiment analysis, hate speech detection, and question classification tasks demonstrate that NPoE effectively defends against a variety of triggers both separately and in trigger mixtures. Due to the versatility of the MoE structure in NPoE, this framework can be further expanded to defend against other attack settings

Fine-tuning text-to-image models with reward functions trained on human feedback data has proven effective for aligning model behavior with human intent. However, excessive optimization with such reward models, which serve as mere proxy objectives, can compromise the performance of fine-tuned models, a phenomenon known as reward overoptimization. To investigate this issue in depth, we introduce the Text-Image Alignment Assessment (TIA2) benchmark, which comprises a diverse collection of text prompts, images, and human annotations. Our evaluation of several state-of-the-art reward models on this benchmark reveals their frequent misalignment with human assessment. We empirically demonstrate that overoptimization occurs notably when a poorly aligned reward model is used as the fine-tuning objective. To address this, we propose TextNorm, a simple method that enhances alignment based on a measure of reward model confidence estimated across a set of semantically contrastive text prompts. We demonstrate that incorporating the confidence-calibrated rewards in fine-tuning effectively reduces overoptimization, resulting in twice as many wins in human evaluation for text-image alignment compared against the baseline reward models.

The use of words to convey speaker's intent is traditionally distinguished from the `mention' of words for quoting what someone said, or pointing out properties of a word. Here we show that computationally modeling this use-mention distinction is crucial for dealing with counterspeech online. Counterspeech that refutes problematic content often mentions harmful language but is not harmful itself (e.g., calling a vaccine dangerous is not the same as expressing disapproval of someone for calling vaccines dangerous). We show that even recent language models fail at distinguishing use from mention, and that this failure propagates to two key downstream tasks: misinformation and hate speech detection, resulting in censorship of counterspeech. We introduce prompting mitigations that teach the use-mention distinction, and show they reduce these errors. Our work highlights the importance of the use-mention distinction for NLP and CSS and offers ways to address it.

This paper presents our system development for SemEval-2024 Task 3: "The Competition of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations". Effectively capturing emotions in human conversations requires integrating multiple modalities such as text, audio, and video. However, the complexities of these diverse modalities pose challenges for developing an efficient multimodal emotion cause analysis (ECA) system. Our proposed approach addresses these challenges by a two-step framework. We adopt two different approaches in our implementation. In Approach 1, we employ instruction-tuning with two separate Llama 2 models for emotion and cause prediction. In Approach 2, we use GPT-4V for conversation-level video description and employ in-context learning with annotated conversation using GPT 3.5. Our system wins rank 4, and system ablation experiments demonstrate that our proposed solutions achieve significant performance gains. All the experimental codes are available on Github.

Effective processing of financial transactions is essential for banking data analysis. However, in this domain, most methods focus on specialized solutions to stand-alone problems instead of constructing universal representations suitable for many problems. We present a representation learning framework that addresses diverse business challenges. We also suggest novel generative models that account for data specifics, and a way to integrate external information into a client's representation, leveraging insights from other customers' actions. Finally, we offer a benchmark, describing representation quality globally, concerning the entire transaction history; locally, reflecting the client's current state; and dynamically, capturing representation evolution over time. Our generative approach demonstrates superior performance in local tasks, with an increase in ROC-AUC of up to 14\% for the next MCC prediction task and up to 46\% for downstream tasks from existing contrastive baselines. Incorporating external information improves the scores by an additional 20\%.

Zero-shot In-context learning is the phenomenon where models can perform the task simply given the instructions. However, pre-trained large language models are known to be poorly calibrated for this task. One of the most effective approaches to handling this bias is to adopt a contrastive decoding objective, which accounts for the prior probability of generating the next token by conditioning on some context. This work introduces an Anti-Language Model objective with a decay factor designed to address the weaknesses of In-context Machine Translation. We conduct our experiments across 3 model types and sizes, 3 language directions, and for both greedy decoding and beam search ($B=5$). The proposed method outperforms other state-of-art decoding objectives, with up to $20$ BLEU point improvement from the default objective observed in some settings.

Opinion summarization is automatically generating summaries from a variety of subjective information, such as product reviews or political opinions. The challenge of opinions summarization lies in presenting divergent or even conflicting opinions. We conduct an analysis of previous summarization models, which reveals their inclination to amplify the polarity bias, emphasizing the majority opinions while ignoring the minority opinions. To address this issue and make the summarizer express both sides of opinions, we introduce the concept of polarity calibration, which aims to align the polarity of output summary with that of input text. Specifically, we develop a reinforcement training approach for polarity calibration. This approach feeds the polarity distance between output summary and input text as reward into the summarizer, and also balance polarity calibration with content preservation and language naturality. We evaluate our Polarity Calibration model (PoCa) on two types of opinions summarization tasks: summarizing product reviews and political opinions articles. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can mitigate the polarity mismatch between output summary and input text, as well as maintain the content semantic and language quality.

Large language models can solve new tasks without task-specific fine-tuning. This ability, also known as in-context learning (ICL), is considered an emergent ability and is primarily seen in large language models with billions of parameters. This study investigates if such emergent properties are strictly tied to model size or can be demonstrated by smaller models trained on reduced-scale data. To explore this, we simplify pre-training data and pre-train 36 causal language models with parameters varying from 1 million to 165 million parameters. We show that models trained on this simplified pre-training data demonstrate enhanced zero-shot capabilities across various tasks in simplified language, achieving performance comparable to that of pre-trained models six times larger on unrestricted language. This suggests that downscaling the language allows zero-shot learning capabilities to emerge in models with limited size. Additionally, we find that these smaller models pre-trained on simplified data demonstrate a power law relationship between the evaluation loss and the three scaling factors: compute, dataset size, and model size.