Tracing the Roots of Facts in Multilingual Language Models: Independent, Shared, and Transferred Knowledge

Acquiring factual knowledge for language models (LMs) in low-resource languages poses a serious challenge, thus resorting to cross-lingual transfer in multilingual LMs (ML-LMs). In this study, we ask how ML-LMs acquire and represent factual knowledge. Using the multilingual factual knowledge probing dataset, mLAMA, we first conducted a neuron investigation of ML-LMs (specifically, multilingual BERT). We then traced the roots of facts back to the knowledge source (Wikipedia) to identify the ways in which ML-LMs acquire specific facts. We finally identified three patterns of acquiring and representing facts in ML-LMs: language-independent, cross-lingual shared and transferred, and devised methods for differentiating them. Our findings highlight the challenge of maintaining consistent factual knowledge across languages, underscoring the need for better fact representation learning in ML-LMs.

PerPLM: Personalized Fine-tuning of Pretrained Language Models via Writer-specific Intermediate Learning and Prompts

The meanings of words and phrases depend not only on where they are used (contexts) but also on who use them (writers). Pretrained language models (PLMs) are powerful tools for capturing context, but they are typically pretrained and fine-tuned for universal use across different writers. This study aims to improve the accuracy of text understanding tasks by personalizing the fine-tuning of PLMs for specific writers. We focus on a general setting where only the plain text from target writers are available for personalization. To avoid the cost of fine-tuning and storing multiple copies of PLMs for different users, we exhaustively explore using writer-specific prompts to personalize a unified PLM. Since the design and evaluation of these prompts is an underdeveloped area, we introduce and compare different types of prompts that are possible in our setting. To maximize the potential of prompt-based personalized fine-tuning, we propose a personalized intermediate learning based on masked language modeling to extract task-independent traits of writers' text. Our experiments, using multiple tasks, datasets, and PLMs, reveal the nature of different prompts and the effectiveness of our intermediate learning approach.

In-Contextual Bias Suppression for Large Language Models

Despite their impressive performance in a wide range of NLP tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to encode worrying-levels of gender bias. Prior work has proposed debiasing methods that require human labelled examples, data augmentation and fine-tuning of the LLMs, which are computationally costly. Moreover, one might not even have access to the internal parameters for performing debiasing such as in the case of commercially available LLMs such as GPT-4. To address this challenge we propose bias suppression, a novel alternative to debiasing that does not require access to model parameters. We show that text-based preambles, generated from manually designed templates covering counterfactual statements, can accurately suppress gender biases in LLMs. Moreover, we find that descriptive sentences for occupations can further suppress gender biases. Interestingly, we find that bias suppression has a minimal adverse effect on downstream task performance, while effectively mitigating the gender biases.

Dynamic Data Augmentation with Gating Networks

Data augmentation is a technique to improve the generalization ability of machine learning methods by increasing the size of the dataset. However, since every augmentation method is not equally effective for every dataset, you need to carefully select the best method. We propose a neural network that dynamically selects the best combination using a mutually beneficial gating network and a feature consistency loss. The gating network is able to control how much of each data augmentation is used for the representation within the network. The feature consistency loss, on the other hand, gives a constraint that augmented features from the same input should be in similar. In experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the 12 largest time-series datasets from 2018 UCR Time Series Archive and reveal the relationships between the data augmentation methods through analysis of the proposed method.