"Confidently Nonsensical?'': A Critical Survey on the Perspectives and Challenges of 'Hallucinations' in NLP

We investigate how hallucination in large language models (LLM) is characterized in peer-reviewed literature using a critical examination of 103 publications across NLP research. Through a comprehensive review of sociological and technological literature, we identify a lack of agreement with the term `hallucination.' Additionally, we conduct a survey with 171 practitioners from the field of NLP and AI to capture varying perspectives on hallucination. Our analysis underscores the necessity for explicit definitions and frameworks outlining hallucination within NLP, highlighting potential challenges, and our survey inputs provide a thematic understanding of the influence and ramifications of hallucination in society.

Social Media Ready Caption Generation for Brands

Social media advertisements are key for brand marketing, aiming to attract consumers with captivating captions and pictures or logos. While previous research has focused on generating captions for general images, incorporating brand personalities into social media captioning remains unexplored. Brand personalities are shown to be affecting consumers' behaviours and social interactions and thus are proven to be a key aspect of marketing strategies. Current open-source multimodal LLMs are not directly suited for this task. Hence, we propose a pipeline solution to assist brands in creating engaging social media captions that align with the image and the brand personalities. Our architecture is based on two parts: a the first part contains an image captioning model that takes in an image that the brand wants to post online and gives a plain English caption; b the second part takes in the generated caption along with the target brand personality and outputs a catchy personality-aligned social media caption. Along with brand personality, our system also gives users the flexibility to provide hashtags, Instagram handles, URLs, and named entities they want the caption to contain, making the captions more semantically related to the social media handles. Comparative evaluations against various baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Drilling Down into the Discourse Structure with LLMs for Long Document Question Answering

We address the task of evidence retrieval for long document question answering, which involves locating relevant paragraphs within a document to answer a question. We aim to assess the applicability of large language models (LLMs) in the task of zero-shot long document evidence retrieval, owing to their unprecedented performance across various NLP tasks. However, currently the LLMs can consume limited context lengths as input, thus providing document chunks as inputs might overlook the global context while missing out on capturing the inter-segment dependencies. Moreover, directly feeding the large input sets can incur significant computational costs, particularly when processing the entire document (and potentially incurring monetary expenses with enterprise APIs like OpenAI's GPT variants). To address these challenges, we propose a suite of techniques that exploit the discourse structure commonly found in documents. By utilizing this structure, we create a condensed representation of the document, enabling a more comprehensive understanding and analysis of relationships between different parts. We retain $99.6\%$ of the best zero-shot approach's performance, while processing only $26\%$ of the total tokens used by the best approach in the information seeking evidence retrieval setup. We also show how our approach can be combined with \textit{self-ask} reasoning agent to achieve best zero-shot performance in complex multi-hop question answering, just $\approx 4\%$ short of zero-shot performance using gold evidence.

Weakly-supervised Deep Cognate Detection Framework for Low-Resourced Languages Using Morphological Knowledge of Closely-Related Languages

Exploiting cognates for transfer learning in under-resourced languages is an exciting opportunity for language understanding tasks, including unsupervised machine translation, named entity recognition and information retrieval. Previous approaches mainly focused on supervised cognate detection tasks based on orthographic, phonetic or state-of-the-art contextual language models, which under-perform for most under-resourced languages. This paper proposes a novel language-agnostic weakly-supervised deep cognate detection framework for under-resourced languages using morphological knowledge from closely related languages. We train an encoder to gain morphological knowledge of a language and transfer the knowledge to perform unsupervised and weakly-supervised cognate detection tasks with and without the pivot language for the closely-related languages. While unsupervised, it overcomes the need for hand-crafted annotation of cognates. We performed experiments on different published cognate detection datasets across language families and observed not only significant improvement over the state-of-the-art but also our method outperformed the state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods. Our model can be extended to a wide range of languages from any language family as it overcomes the requirement of the annotation of the cognate pairs for training. The code and dataset building scripts can be found at https://github.com/koustavagoswami/Weakly_supervised-Cognate_Detection

Iterative Multi-granular Image Editing using Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-guided image synthesis has dramatically changed how creative professionals generate artistic and aesthetically pleasing visual assets. To fully support such creative endeavors, the process should possess the ability to: 1) iteratively edit the generations and 2) control the spatial reach of desired changes (global, local or anything in between). We formalize this pragmatic problem setting as Iterative Multi-granular Editing. While there has been substantial progress with diffusion-based models for image synthesis and editing, they are all one shot (i.e., no iterative editing capabilities) and do not naturally yield multi-granular control (i.e., covering the full spectrum of local-to-global edits). To overcome these drawbacks, we propose EMILIE: Iterative Multi-granular Image Editor. EMILIE introduces a novel latent iteration strategy, which re-purposes a pre-trained diffusion model to facilitate iterative editing. This is complemented by a gradient control operation for multi-granular control. We introduce a new benchmark dataset to evaluate our newly proposed setting. We conduct exhaustive quantitatively and qualitatively evaluation against recent state-of-the-art approaches adapted to our task, to being out the mettle of EMILIE. We hope our work would attract attention to this newly identified, pragmatic problem setting.

Contextual Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Understanding

Recent advances in multimodal learning has resulted in powerful vision-language models, whose representations are generalizable across a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, their generalizability has been further extended by incorporating trainable prompts, borrowed from the natural language processing literature. While such prompt learning techniques have shown impressive results, we identify that these prompts are trained based on global image features which limits itself in two aspects: First, by using global features, these prompts could be focusing less on the discriminative foreground image, resulting in poor generalization to various out-of-distribution test cases. Second, existing work weights all prompts equally whereas our intuition is that these prompts are more specific to the type of the image. We address these issues with as part of our proposed Contextual Prompt Learning (CoPL) framework, capable of aligning the prompts to the localized features of the image. Our key innovations over earlier works include using local image features as part of the prompt learning process, and more crucially, learning to weight these prompts based on local features that are appropriate for the task at hand. This gives us dynamic prompts that are both aligned to local image features as well as aware of local contextual relationships. Our extensive set of experiments on a variety of standard and few-shot datasets show that our method produces substantially improved performance when compared to the current state of the art methods. We also demonstrate both few-shot and out-of-distribution performance to establish the utility of learning dynamic prompts that are aligned to local image features.

A-STAR: Test-time Attention Segregation and Retention for Text-to-image Synthesis

While recent developments in text-to-image generative models have led to a suite of high-performing methods capable of producing creative imagery from free-form text, there are several limitations. By analyzing the cross-attention representations of these models, we notice two key issues. First, for text prompts that contain multiple concepts, there is a significant amount of pixel-space overlap (i.e., same spatial regions) among pairs of different concepts. This eventually leads to the model being unable to distinguish between the two concepts and one of them being ignored in the final generation. Next, while these models attempt to capture all such concepts during the beginning of denoising (e.g., first few steps) as evidenced by cross-attention maps, this knowledge is not retained by the end of denoising (e.g., last few steps). Such loss of knowledge eventually leads to inaccurate generation outputs. To address these issues, our key innovations include two test-time attention-based loss functions that substantially improve the performance of pretrained baseline text-to-image diffusion models. First, our attention segregation loss reduces the cross-attention overlap between attention maps of different concepts in the text prompt, thereby reducing the confusion/conflict among various concepts and the eventual capture of all concepts in the generated output. Next, our attention retention loss explicitly forces text-to-image diffusion models to retain cross-attention information for all concepts across all denoising time steps, thereby leading to reduced information loss and the preservation of all concepts in the generated output.

SwitchPrompt: Learning Domain-Specific Gated Soft Prompts for Classification in Low-Resource Domains

Prompting pre-trained language models leads to promising results across natural language processing tasks but is less effective when applied in low-resource domains, due to the domain gap between the pre-training data and the downstream task. In this work, we bridge this gap with a novel and lightweight prompting methodology called SwitchPrompt for the adaptation of language models trained on datasets from the general domain to diverse low-resource domains. Using domain-specific keywords with a trainable gated prompt, SwitchPrompt offers domain-oriented prompting, that is, effective guidance on the target domains for general-domain language models. Our few-shot experiments on three text classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the general-domain pre-trained language models when used with SwitchPrompt. They often even outperform their domain-specific counterparts trained with baseline state-of-the-art prompting methods by up to 10.7% performance increase in accuracy. This result indicates that SwitchPrompt effectively reduces the need for domain-specific language model pre-training.

ULD@NUIG at SemEval-2020 Task 9: Generative Morphemes with an Attention Model for Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Text

Code mixing is a common phenomena in multilingual societies where people switch from one language to another for various reasons. Recent advances in public communication over different social media sites have led to an increase in the frequency of code-mixed usage in written language. In this paper, we present the Generative Morphemes with Attention (GenMA) Model sentiment analysis system contributed to SemEval 2020 Task 9 SentiMix. The system aims to predict the sentiments of the given English-Hindi code-mixed tweets without using word-level language tags instead inferring this automatically using a morphological model. The system is based on a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, which has outperformed the baseline F1-score on the test data-set as well as the validation data-set. Our results can be found under the user name "koustava" on the "Sentimix Hindi English" page