Aligning Large Language Models for Enhancing Psychiatric Interviews through Symptom Delineation and Summarization

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated their usage in various domains. Given the fact that psychiatric interviews are goal-oriented and structured dialogues between the professional interviewer and the interviewee, it is one of the most underexplored areas where LLMs can contribute substantial value. Here, we explore the use of LLMs for enhancing psychiatric interviews, by analyzing counseling data from North Korean defectors with traumatic events and mental health issues. Specifically, we investigate whether LLMs can (1) delineate the part of the conversation that suggests psychiatric symptoms and name the symptoms, and (2) summarize stressors and symptoms, based on the interview dialogue transcript. Here, the transcript data was labeled by mental health experts for training and evaluation of LLMs. Our experimental results show that appropriately prompted LLMs can achieve high performance on both the symptom delineation task and the summarization task. This research contributes to the nascent field of applying LLMs to psychiatric interview and demonstrates their potential effectiveness in aiding mental health practitioners.

ERD: A Framework for Improving LLM Reasoning for Cognitive Distortion Classification

Improving the accessibility of psychotherapy with the aid of Large Language Models (LLMs) is garnering a significant attention in recent years. Recognizing cognitive distortions from the interviewee's utterances can be an essential part of psychotherapy, especially for cognitive behavioral therapy. In this paper, we propose ERD, which improves LLM-based cognitive distortion classification performance with the aid of additional modules of (1) extracting the parts related to cognitive distortion, and (2) debating the reasoning steps by multiple agents. Our experimental results on a public dataset show that ERD improves the multi-class F1 score as well as binary specificity score. Regarding the latter score, it turns out that our method is effective in debiasing the baseline method which has high false positive rate, especially when the summary of multi-agent debate is provided to LLMs.

Re-Ex: Revising after Explanation Reduces the Factual Errors in LLM Responses

Mitigating hallucination issues is one of the main challenges of LLMs we need to overcome, in order to reliably use them in real-world scenarios. Recently, various methods are proposed to check the factual errors in the LLM-generated texts and revise them accordingly, to reduce the hallucination issue. In this paper, we propose Re-Ex, a method of revising LLM-generated texts, which introduces a novel step dubbed as the factual error explanation step. Re-Ex revises the initial response of LLMs using 3-steps: first, external tools are used to get the evidences on the factual errors in the response; second, LLMs are instructed to explain the problematic parts of the response based on the evidences gathered in the first step; finally, LLMs revise the response using the explanation obtained in the second step. In addition to the explanation step, we propose new prompting techniques to reduce the amount of tokens and wall-clock time required for the response revision process. Compared with existing methods including Factool, CoVE, and RARR, Re-Ex provides better revision performance with less time and fewer tokens in multiple benchmarks.

Analysis of Using Sigmoid Loss for Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning has emerged as a prominent branch of self-supervised learning for several years. Especially, CLIP, which applies contrastive learning to large sets of captioned images, has garnered significant attention. Recently, SigLIP, a variant of CLIP, has been proposed, which uses the sigmoid loss instead of the standard InfoNCE loss. SigLIP achieves the performance comparable to CLIP in a more efficient manner by eliminating the need for a global view. However, theoretical understanding of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning is underexplored. In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of using the sigmoid loss in contrastive learning, in the perspective of the geometric structure of learned embeddings. First, we propose the double-Constant Embedding Model (CCEM), a framework for parameterizing various well-known embedding structures by a single variable. Interestingly, the proposed CCEM is proven to contain the optimal embedding with respect to the sigmoid loss. Second, we mathematically analyze the optimal embedding minimizing the sigmoid loss for contrastive learning. The optimal embedding ranges from simplex equiangular-tight-frame to antipodal structure, depending on the temperature parameter used in the sigmoid loss. Third, our experimental results on synthetic datasets coincide with the theoretical results on the optimal embedding structures.

Can Separators Improve Chain-of-Thought Prompting?

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large language models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting exemplars in the input prompt. However, the densely structured prompt exemplars of CoT may cause the cognitive overload of LLMs. Inspired by human cognition, we introduce CoT-Sep, a novel method that strategically employs separators at the end of each exemplar in CoT prompting. These separators are designed to help the LLMs understand their thought processes better while reasoning. It turns out that CoT-Sep significantly improves the LLMs' performances on complex reasoning tasks (e.g., GSM-8K, AQuA, CSQA), compared with the vanilla CoT, which does not use separators. We also study the effects of the type and the location of separators tested on multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4, and LLaMA-2 7B. Interestingly, the type/location of separators should be chosen appropriately to boost the reasoning capability of CoT.

Mini-Batch Optimization of Contrastive Loss

Contrastive learning has gained significant attention as a method for self-supervised learning. The contrastive loss function ensures that embeddings of positive sample pairs (e.g., different samples from the same class or different views of the same object) are similar, while embeddings of negative pairs are dissimilar. Practical constraints such as large memory requirements make it challenging to consider all possible positive and negative pairs, leading to the use of mini-batch optimization. In this paper, we investigate the theoretical aspects of mini-batch optimization in contrastive learning. We show that mini-batch optimization is equivalent to full-batch optimization if and only if all $\binom{N}{B}$ mini-batches are selected, while sub-optimality may arise when examining only a subset. We then demonstrate that utilizing high-loss mini-batches can speed up SGD convergence and propose a spectral clustering-based approach for identifying these high-loss mini-batches. Our experimental results validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms vanilla SGD in practically relevant settings, providing a better understanding of mini-batch optimization in contrastive learning.

Looped Transformers as Programmable Computers

We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop. Our input sequence acts as a punchcard, consisting of instructions and memory for data read/writes. We demonstrate that a constant number of encoder layers can emulate basic computing blocks, including embedding edit operations, non-linear functions, function calls, program counters, and conditional branches. Using these building blocks, we emulate a small instruction-set computer. This allows us to map iterative algorithms to programs that can be executed by a looped, 13-layer transformer. We show how this transformer, instructed by its input, can emulate a basic calculator, a basic linear algebra library, and in-context learning algorithms that employ backpropagation. Our work highlights the versatility of the attention mechanism, and demonstrates that even shallow transformers can execute full-fledged, general-purpose programs.

Can We Find Strong Lottery Tickets in Generative Models?

Yes. In this paper, we investigate strong lottery tickets in generative models, the subnetworks that achieve good generative performance without any weight update. Neural network pruning is considered the main cornerstone of model compression for reducing the costs of computation and memory. Unfortunately, pruning a generative model has not been extensively explored, and all existing pruning algorithms suffer from excessive weight-training costs, performance degradation, limited generalizability, or complicated training. To address these problems, we propose to find a strong lottery ticket via moment-matching scores. Our experimental results show that the discovered subnetwork can perform similarly or better than the trained dense model even when only 10% of the weights remain. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to show the existence of strong lottery tickets in generative models and provide an algorithm to find it stably. Our code and supplementary materials are publicly available.

Equal Improvability: A New Fairness Notion Considering the Long-term Impact

Devising a fair classifier that does not discriminate against different groups is an important problem in machine learning. Although researchers have proposed various ways of defining group fairness, most of them only focused on the immediate fairness, ignoring the long-term impact of a fair classifier under the dynamic scenario where each individual can improve its feature over time. Such dynamic scenarios happen in real world, e.g., college admission and credit loaning, where each rejected sample makes effort to change its features to get accepted afterwards. In this dynamic setting, the long-term fairness should equalize the samples' feature distribution across different groups after the rejected samples make some effort to improve. In order to promote long-term fairness, we propose a new fairness notion called Equal Improvability (EI), which equalizes the potential acceptance rate of the rejected samples across different groups assuming a bounded level of effort will be spent by each rejected sample. We analyze the properties of EI and its connections with existing fairness notions. To find a classifier that satisfies the EI requirement, we propose and study three different approaches that solve EI-regularized optimization problems. Through experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed EI-regularized algorithms encourage us to find a fair classifier in terms of EI. Finally, we provide experimental results on dynamic scenarios which highlight the advantages of our EI metric in achieving the long-term fairness. Codes are available in a GitHub repository, see https://github.com/guldoganozgur/ei_fairness.

LIFT: Language-Interfaced Fine-Tuning for Non-Language Machine Learning Tasks

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (LMs) without making any architectural changes has become a norm for learning various language downstream tasks. However, for non-language downstream tasks, a common practice is to employ task-specific designs for input, output layers, and loss functions. For instance, it is possible to fine-tune an LM into an MNIST classifier by replacing the word embedding layer with an image patch embedding layer, the word token output layer with a 10-way output layer, and the word prediction loss with a 10-way classification loss, respectively. A natural question arises: can LM fine-tuning solve non-language downstream tasks without changing the model architecture or loss function? To answer this, we propose Language-Interfaced Fine-Tuning (LIFT) and study its efficacy and limitations by conducting an extensive empirical study on a suite of non-language classification and regression tasks. LIFT does not make any changes to the model architecture or loss function, and it solely relies on the natural language interface, enabling "no-code machine learning with LMs." We find that LIFT performs relatively well across a wide range of low-dimensional classification and regression tasks, matching the performances of the best baselines in many cases, especially for the classification tasks. We report the experimental results on the fundamental properties of LIFT, including its inductive bias, sample efficiency, ability to extrapolate, robustness to outliers and label noise, and generalization. We also analyze a few properties/techniques specific to LIFT, e.g., context-aware learning via appropriate prompting, quantification of predictive uncertainty, and two-stage fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/UW-Madison-Lee-Lab/LanguageInterfacedFineTuning.