Fine-grainedly Synthesize Streaming Data Based On Large Language Models With Graph Structure Understanding For Data Sparsity

Due to the sparsity of user data, sentiment analysis on user reviews in e-commerce platforms often suffers from poor performance, especially when faced with extremely sparse user data or long-tail labels. Recently, the emergence of LLMs has introduced new solutions to such problems by leveraging graph structures to generate supplementary user profiles. However, previous approaches have not fully utilized the graph understanding capabilities of LLMs and have struggled to adapt to complex streaming data environments. In this work, we propose a fine-grained streaming data synthesis framework that categorizes sparse users into three categories: Mid-tail, Long-tail, and Extreme. Specifically, we design LLMs to comprehensively understand three key graph elements in streaming data, including Local-global Graph Understanding, Second-Order Relationship Extraction, and Product Attribute Understanding, which enables the generation of high-quality synthetic data to effectively address sparsity across different categories. Experimental results on three real datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements, with synthesized data contributing to MSE reductions of 45.85%, 3.16%, and 62.21%, respectively.

Causal Prompting: Debiasing Large Language Model Prompting based on Front-Door Adjustment

Despite the significant achievements of existing prompting methods such as in-context learning and chain-of-thought for large language models (LLMs), they still face challenges of various biases. Traditional debiasing methods primarily focus on the model training stage, including data augmentation-based and reweight-based approaches, with the limitations of addressing the complex biases of LLMs. To address such limitations, the causal relationship behind the prompting methods is uncovered using a structural causal model, and a novel causal prompting method based on front-door adjustment is proposed to effectively mitigate the bias of LLMs. In specific, causal intervention is implemented by designing the prompts without accessing the parameters and logits of LLMs.The chain-of-thoughts generated by LLMs are employed as the mediator variable and the causal effect between the input prompt and the output answers is calculated through front-door adjustment to mitigate model biases. Moreover, to obtain the representation of the samples precisely and estimate the causal effect more accurately, contrastive learning is used to fine-tune the encoder of the samples by aligning the space of the encoder with the LLM. Experimental results show that the proposed causal prompting approach achieves excellent performance on 3 natural language processing datasets on both open-source and closed-source LLMs.

Causal Walk: Debiasing Multi-Hop Fact Verification with Front-Door Adjustment

Conventional multi-hop fact verification models are prone to rely on spurious correlations from the annotation artifacts, leading to an obvious performance decline on unbiased datasets. Among the various debiasing works, the causal inference-based methods become popular by performing theoretically guaranteed debiasing such as casual intervention or counterfactual reasoning. However, existing causal inference-based debiasing methods, which mainly formulate fact verification as a single-hop reasoning task to tackle shallow bias patterns, cannot deal with the complicated bias patterns hidden in multiple hops of evidence. To address the challenge, we propose Causal Walk, a novel method for debiasing multi-hop fact verification from a causal perspective with front-door adjustment. Specifically, in the structural causal model, the reasoning path between the treatment (the input claim-evidence graph) and the outcome (the veracity label) is introduced as the mediator to block the confounder. With the front-door adjustment, the causal effect between the treatment and the outcome is decomposed into the causal effect between the treatment and the mediator, which is estimated by applying the idea of random walk, and the causal effect between the mediator and the outcome, which is estimated with normalized weighted geometric mean approximation. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method, an adversarial multi-hop fact verification dataset and a symmetric multi-hop fact verification dataset are proposed with the help of the large language model. Experimental results show that Causal Walk outperforms some previous debiasing methods on both existing datasets and the newly constructed datasets. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/zcccccz/CausalWalk.

DINER: Debiasing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Multi-variable Causal Inference

Though notable progress has been made, neural-based aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) models are prone to learn spurious correlations from annotation biases, resulting in poor robustness on adversarial data transformations. Among the debiasing solutions, causal inference-based methods have attracted much research attention, which can be mainly categorized into causal intervention methods and counterfactual reasoning methods. However, most of the present debiasing methods focus on single-variable causal inference, which is not suitable for ABSA with two input variables (the target aspect and the review). In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on multi-variable causal inference for debiasing ABSA. In this framework, different types of biases are tackled based on different causal intervention methods. For the review branch, the bias is modeled as indirect confounding from context, where backdoor adjustment intervention is employed for debiasing. For the aspect branch, the bias is described as a direct correlation with labels, where counterfactual reasoning is adopted for debiasing. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to various baselines on the two widely used real-world aspect robustness test set datasets.

STAR: Constraint LoRA with Dynamic Active Learning for Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Though Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the powerful capabilities of few-shot learning through prompting methods, supervised training is still necessary for complex reasoning tasks. Because of their extensive parameters and memory consumption, both Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods and Memory-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods have been proposed for LLMs. Nevertheless, the issue of large annotated data consumption, the aim of Data-Efficient Fine-Tuning, remains unexplored. One obvious way is to combine the PEFT method with active learning. However, the experimental results show that such a combination is not trivial and yields inferior results. Through probe experiments, such observation might be explained by two main reasons: uncertainty gap and poor model calibration. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to effectively integrate uncertainty-based active learning and LoRA. Specifically, for the uncertainty gap, we introduce a dynamic uncertainty measurement that combines the uncertainty of the base model and the uncertainty of the full model during the iteration of active learning. For poor model calibration, we incorporate the regularization method during LoRA training to keep the model from being over-confident, and the Monte-Carlo dropout mechanism is employed to enhance the uncertainty estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing baseline models on three complex reasoning tasks.

SEE-Few: Seed, Expand and Entail for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims at identifying named entities based on only few labeled instances. Current few-shot NER methods focus on leveraging existing datasets in the rich-resource domains which might fail in a training-from-scratch setting where no source-domain data is used. To tackle training-from-scratch setting, it is crucial to make full use of the annotation information (the boundaries and entity types). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-task (Seed, Expand and Entail) learning framework, SEE-Few, for Few-shot NER without using source domain data. The seeding and expanding modules are responsible for providing as accurate candidate spans as possible for the entailing module. The entailing module reformulates span classification as a textual entailment task, leveraging both the contextual clues and entity type information. All the three modules share the same text encoder and are jointly learned. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets under the training-from-scratch setting show that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art few-shot NER methods with a large margin. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/unveiled-the-red-hat/SEE-Few}.