Learning to Plan and Generate Text with Citations

The increasing demand for the deployment of LLMs in information-seeking scenarios has spurred efforts in creating verifiable systems, which generate responses to queries along with supporting evidence. In this paper, we explore the attribution capabilities of plan-based models which have been recently shown to improve the faithfulness, grounding, and controllability of generated text. We conceptualize plans as a sequence of questions which serve as blueprints of the generated content and its organization. We propose two attribution models that utilize different variants of blueprints, an abstractive model where questions are generated from scratch, and an extractive model where questions are copied from the input. Experiments on long-form question-answering show that planning consistently improves attribution quality. Moreover, the citations generated by blueprint models are more accurate compared to those obtained from LLM-based pipelines lacking a planning component.

Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.

Language and Task Arithmetic with Parameter-Efficient Layers for Zero-Shot Summarization

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) using labeled task data can significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on the downstream task. However, there are 7000 languages in the world and many of these languages lack labeled data for real-world language generation tasks. In this paper, we propose to improve zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by composing language or task specialized parameters. Our method composes language and task PEFT modules via element-wise arithmetic operations to leverage unlabeled data and English labeled data. We extend our approach to cases where labeled data from more languages is available and propose to arithmetically compose PEFT modules trained on languages related to the target. Empirical results on summarization demonstrate that our method is an effective strategy that obtains consistent gains using minimal training of PEFT modules.

Calibrating Likelihoods towards Consistency in Summarization Models

Despite the recent advances in abstractive text summarization, current summarization models still suffer from generating factually inconsistent summaries, reducing their utility for real-world application. We argue that the main reason for such behavior is that the summarization models trained with maximum likelihood objective assign high probability to plausible sequences given the context, but they often do not accurately rank sequences by their consistency. In this work, we solve this problem by calibrating the likelihood of model generated sequences to better align with a consistency metric measured by natural language inference (NLI) models. The human evaluation study and automatic metrics show that the calibrated models generate more consistent and higher-quality summaries. We also show that the models trained using our method return probabilities that are better aligned with the NLI scores, which significantly increase reliability of summarization models.

Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Conditional Generation

Pre-trained large language models (PLMs) underlie most new developments in natural language processing. They have shifted the field from application-specific model pipelines to a single model that is adapted to a wide range of tasks. Autoregressive PLMs like GPT-3 or PaLM, alongside techniques like few-shot learning, have additionally shifted the output modality to generation instead of classification or regression. Despite their ubiquitous use, the generation quality of language models is rarely evaluated when these models are introduced. Additionally, it is unclear how existing generation tasks--while they can be used to compare systems at a high level--relate to the real world use cases for which people have been adopting them. In this work, we discuss how to adapt existing application-specific generation benchmarks to PLMs and provide an in-depth, empirical study of the limitations and capabilities of PLMs in natural language generation tasks along dimensions such as scale, architecture, input and output language. Our results show that PLMs differ in their applicability to different data regimes and their generalization to multiple languages and inform which PLMs to use for a given generation task setup. We share best practices to be taken into consideration when benchmarking generation capabilities during the development of upcoming PLMs.

$μ$PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge

Cross-lingual summarization consists of generating a summary in one language given an input document in a different language, allowing for the dissemination of relevant content across speakers of other languages. However, this task remains challenging, mainly because of the need for cross-lingual datasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing and translating. This work presents $\mu$PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities that captures the conceptualization of the summary, i.e. identifying the salient content and expressing in which order to present the information, separate from the surface form. Using a multilingual knowledge base, we align the entities to their canonical designation across languages. $\mu$PLAN models first learn to generate the plan and then continue generating the summary conditioned on the plan and the input. We evaluate our methodology on the XWikis dataset on cross-lingual pairs across four languages and demonstrate that this planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of ROUGE and faithfulness scores. Moreover, this planning approach improves the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairs compared to non-planning baselines.

SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation

Reliable automatic evaluation of summarization systems is challenging due to the multifaceted and subjective nature of the task. This is especially the case for languages other than English, where human evaluations are scarce. In this work, we introduce SEAHORSE, a dataset for multilingual, multifaceted summarization evaluation. SEAHORSE consists of 96K summaries with human ratings along 6 quality dimensions: comprehensibility, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness, covering 6 languages, 9 systems and 4 datasets. As a result of its size and scope, SEAHORSE can serve both as a benchmark to evaluate learnt metrics, as well as a large-scale resource for training such metrics. We show that metrics trained with SEAHORSE achieve strong performance on the out-of-domain meta-evaluation benchmarks TRUE (Honovich et al., 2022) and mFACE (Aharoni et al., 2022). We make SEAHORSE publicly available for future research on multilingual and multifaceted summarization evaluation.

PaLM 2 Technical Report

We introduce PaLM 2, a new state-of-the-art language model that has better multilingual and reasoning capabilities and is more compute-efficient than its predecessor PaLM. PaLM 2 is a Transformer-based model trained using a mixture of objectives. Through extensive evaluations on English and multilingual language, and reasoning tasks, we demonstrate that PaLM 2 has significantly improved quality on downstream tasks across different model sizes, while simultaneously exhibiting faster and more efficient inference compared to PaLM. This improved efficiency enables broader deployment while also allowing the model to respond faster, for a more natural pace of interaction. PaLM 2 demonstrates robust reasoning capabilities exemplified by large improvements over PaLM on BIG-Bench and other reasoning tasks. PaLM 2 exhibits stable performance on a suite of responsible AI evaluations, and enables inference-time control over toxicity without additional overhead or impact on other capabilities. Overall, PaLM 2 achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of tasks and capabilities. When discussing the PaLM 2 family, it is important to distinguish between pre-trained models (of various sizes), fine-tuned variants of these models, and the user-facing products that use these models. In particular, user-facing products typically include additional pre- and post-processing steps. Additionally, the underlying models may evolve over time. Therefore, one should not expect the performance of user-facing products to exactly match the results reported in this report.

Text-Blueprint: An Interactive Platform for Plan-based Conditional Generation

While conditional generation models can now generate natural language well enough to create fluent text, it is still difficult to control the generation process, leading to irrelevant, repetitive, and hallucinated content. Recent work shows that planning can be a useful intermediate step to render conditional generation less opaque and more grounded. We present a web browser-based demonstration for query-focused summarization that uses a sequence of question-answer pairs, as a blueprint plan for guiding text generation (i.e., what to say and in what order). We illustrate how users may interact with the generated text and associated plan visualizations, e.g., by editing and modifying the blueprint in order to improve or control the generated output. A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://goo.gle/text-blueprint-demo.

On Uncertainty Calibration and Selective Generation in Probabilistic Neural Summarization: A Benchmark Study

Modern deep models for summarization attains impressive benchmark performance, but they are prone to generating miscalibrated predictive uncertainty. This means that they assign high confidence to low-quality predictions, leading to compromised reliability and trustworthiness in real-world applications. Probabilistic deep learning methods are common solutions to the miscalibration problem. However, their relative effectiveness in complex autoregressive summarization tasks are not well-understood. In this work, we thoroughly investigate different state-of-the-art probabilistic methods' effectiveness in improving the uncertainty quality of the neural summarization models, across three large-scale benchmarks with varying difficulty. We show that the probabilistic methods consistently improve the model's generation and uncertainty quality, leading to improved selective generation performance (i.e., abstaining from low-quality summaries) in practice. We also reveal notable failure patterns of probabilistic methods widely-adopted in NLP community (e.g., Deep Ensemble and Monte Carlo Dropout), cautioning the importance of choosing appropriate method for the data setting.