On Retrieval Augmentation and the Limitations of Language Model Training

Augmenting a language model (LM) with $k$-nearest neighbors (kNN) retrieval on its training data alone can decrease its perplexity, though the underlying reasons for this remains elusive. In this work, we first rule out one previously posited possibility -- the "softmax bottleneck." We further identify the MLP hurdle phenomenon, where the final MLP layer in LMs may impede LM optimization early on. We explore memorization and generalization in language models with two new datasets, where advanced model like GPT-3.5-turbo find generalizing to irrelevant information in the training data challenging. However, incorporating kNN retrieval to vanilla GPT-2 117M can consistently improve performance in this setting.

SCORE: A framework for Self-Contradictory Reasoning Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning ability in various language-based tasks. Despite many proposed reasoning methods aimed at enhancing performance in downstream tasks, two fundamental questions persist: Does reasoning genuinely support predictions, and how reliable is the quality of reasoning? In this paper, we propose a framework \textsc{SCORE} to analyze how well LLMs can reason. Specifically, we focus on self-contradictory reasoning, where reasoning does not support the prediction. We find that LLMs often contradict themselves when performing reasoning tasks that involve contextual information and commonsense. The model may miss evidence or use shortcuts, thereby exhibiting self-contradictory behaviors. We also employ the Point-of-View (POV) method, which probes models to generate reasoning from multiple perspectives, as a diagnostic tool for further analysis. We find that though LLMs may appear to perform well in one-perspective settings, they fail to stabilize such behavior in multi-perspectives settings. Even for correct predictions, the reasoning may be messy and incomplete, and LLMs can easily be led astray from good reasoning. \textsc{SCORE}'s results underscore the lack of robustness required for trustworthy reasoning and the urgency for further research to establish best practices for a comprehensive evaluation of reasoning beyond accuracy-based metrics.

GupShup: An Annotated Corpus for Abstractive Summarization of Open-Domain Code-Switched Conversations

Code-switching is the communication phenomenon where speakers switch between different languages during a conversation. With the widespread adoption of conversational agents and chat platforms, code-switching has become an integral part of written conversations in many multi-lingual communities worldwide. This makes it essential to develop techniques for summarizing and understanding these conversations. Towards this objective, we introduce abstractive summarization of Hindi-English code-switched conversations and develop the first code-switched conversation summarization dataset - GupShup, which contains over 6,831 conversations in Hindi-English and their corresponding human-annotated summaries in English and Hindi-English. We present a detailed account of the entire data collection and annotation processes. We analyze the dataset using various code-switching statistics. We train state-of-the-art abstractive summarization models and report their performances using both automated metrics and human evaluation. Our results show that multi-lingual mBART and multi-view seq2seq models obtain the best performances on the new dataset