[Call for Papers] The 2nd BabyLM Challenge: Sample-efficient pretraining on a developmentally plausible corpus

After last year's successful BabyLM Challenge, the competition will be hosted again in 2024/2025. The overarching goals of the challenge remain the same; however, some of the competition rules will be different. The big changes for this year's competition are as follows: First, we replace the loose track with a paper track, which allows (for example) non-model-based submissions, novel cognitively-inspired benchmarks, or analysis techniques. Second, we are relaxing the rules around pretraining data, and will now allow participants to construct their own datasets provided they stay within the 100M-word or 10M-word budget. Third, we introduce a multimodal vision-and-language track, and will release a corpus of 50% text-only and 50% image-text multimodal data as a starting point for LM model training. The purpose of this CfP is to provide rules for this year's challenge, explain these rule changes and their rationale in greater detail, give a timeline of this year's competition, and provide answers to frequently asked questions from last year's challenge.

Context versus Prior Knowledge in Language Models

To answer a question, language models often need to integrate prior knowledge learned during pretraining and new information presented in context. We hypothesize that models perform this integration in a predictable way across different questions and contexts: models will rely more on prior knowledge for questions about entities (e.g., persons, places, etc.) that they are more familiar with due to higher exposure in the training corpus, and be more easily persuaded by some contexts than others. To formalize this problem, we propose two mutual information-based metrics to measure a model's dependency on a context and on its prior about an entity: first, the persuasion score of a given context represents how much a model depends on the context in its decision, and second, the susceptibility score of a given entity represents how much the model can be swayed away from its original answer distribution about an entity. Following well-established measurement modeling methods, we empirically test for the validity and reliability of these metrics. Finally, we explore and find a relationship between the scores and the model's expected familiarity with an entity, and provide two use cases to illustrate their benefits.

Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models

Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand their decisions. In the case of common law, legal practitioners reason towards the outcome of a case by referring to past case law, known as precedent. We contend that precedent is, therefore, a natural way of facilitating explainability for legal NLP models. In this paper, we contribute a novel method for identifying the precedent employed by legal outcome prediction models. Furthermore, by developing a taxonomy of legal precedent, we are able to compare human judges and our models with respect to the different types of precedent they rely on. We find that while the models learn to predict outcomes reasonably well, their use of precedent is unlike that of human judges.

The Role of $n$-gram Smoothing in the Age of Neural Networks

For nearly three decades, language models derived from the $n$-gram assumption held the state of the art on the task. The key to their success lay in the application of various smoothing techniques that served to combat overfitting. However, when neural language models toppled $n$-gram models as the best performers, $n$-gram smoothing techniques became less relevant. Indeed, it would hardly be an understatement to suggest that the line of inquiry into $n$-gram smoothing techniques became dormant. This paper re-opens the role classical $n$-gram smoothing techniques may play in the age of neural language models. First, we draw a formal equivalence between label smoothing, a popular regularization technique for neural language models, and add-$\lambda$ smoothing. Second, we derive a generalized framework for converting \emph{any} $n$-gram smoothing technique into a regularizer compatible with neural language models. Our empirical results find that our novel regularizers are comparable to and, indeed, sometimes outperform label smoothing on language modeling and machine translation.

NARRATE: Versatile Language Architecture for Optimal Control in Robotics

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to various efforts to enable robots to be controlled through natural language instructions, opening exciting possibilities for human-robot interaction The goal is for the motor-control task to be performed accurately, efficiently and safely while also enjoying the flexibility imparted by LLMs to specify and adjust the task through natural language. In this work, we demonstrate how a careful layering of an LLM in combination with a Model Predictive Control (MPC) formulation allows for accurate and flexible robotic control via natural language while taking into consideration safety constraints. In particular, we rely on the LLM to effectively frame constraints and objective functions as mathematical expressions, which are later used in the motor-control module via MPC. The transparency of the optimization formulation allows for interpretability of the task and enables adjustments through human feedback. We demonstrate the validity of our method through extensive experiments on long-horizon reasoning, contact-rich, and multi-object interaction tasks. Our evaluations show that NARRATE outperforms current existing methods on these benchmarks and effectively transfers to the real world on two different embodiments. Videos, Code and Prompts at narrate-mpc.github.io

On the Challenges and Opportunities in Generative AI

The field of deep generative modeling has grown rapidly and consistently over the years. With the availability of massive amounts of training data coupled with advances in scalable unsupervised learning paradigms, recent large-scale generative models show tremendous promise in synthesizing high-resolution images and text, as well as structured data such as videos and molecules. However, we argue that current large-scale generative AI models do not sufficiently address several fundamental issues that hinder their widespread adoption across domains. In this work, we aim to identify key unresolved challenges in modern generative AI paradigms that should be tackled to further enhance their capabilities, versatility, and reliability. By identifying these challenges, we aim to provide researchers with valuable insights for exploring fruitful research directions, thereby fostering the development of more robust and accessible generative AI solutions.

A Theoretical Result on the Inductive Bias of RNN Language Models

Recent work by Hewitt et al. (2020) provides a possible interpretation of the empirical success of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as language models (LMs). It shows that RNNs can efficiently represent bounded hierarchical structures that are prevalent in human language. This suggests that RNNs' success might be linked to their ability to model hierarchy. However, a closer inspection of Hewitt et al.'s (2020) construction shows that it is not limited to hierarchical LMs, posing the question of what \emph{other classes} of LMs can be efficiently represented by RNNs. To this end, we generalize their construction to show that RNNs can efficiently represent a larger class of LMs: Those that can be represented by a pushdown automaton with a bounded stack and a generalized stack update function. This is analogous to an automaton that keeps a memory of a fixed number of symbols and updates the memory with a simple update mechanism. Altogether, the efficiency in representing a diverse class of non-hierarchical LMs posits a lack of concrete cognitive and human-language-centered inductive biases in RNNs.

What Changed? Converting Representational Interventions to Natural Language

Interventions targeting the representation space of language models (LMs) have emerged as effective means to influence model behavior. These methods are employed, for example, to eliminate or alter the encoding of demographic information such as gender within the model's representations, creating a counterfactual representation. However, since the intervention operates within the representation space, understanding precisely which features it modifies poses a challenge. We show that representation-space counterfactuals can be converted into natural language counterfactuals. We demonstrate that this approach enables us to analyze the linguistic alterations corresponding to a given representation-space intervention and to interpret the features utilized for encoding a specific concept. Moreover, the resulting counterfactuals can be used to mitigate bias in classification.

Direct Preference Optimization with an Offset

Direct preference optimization (DPO) is a successful fine-tuning strategy for aligning large language models with human preferences without the need to train a reward model or employ reinforcement learning. DPO, as originally formulated, relies on binary preference data and fine-tunes a language model to increase the likelihood of a preferred response over a dispreferred response. However, not all preference pairs are equal: while in some cases the preferred response is only slightly better than the dispreferred response, there can be a stronger preference for one response when, for example, the other response includes harmful or toxic content. In this paper, we propose a generalization of DPO, termed DPO with an offset (ODPO), that does not treat every preference pair equally during fine-tuning. Intuitively, ODPO requires the difference between the likelihood of the preferred and dispreferred response to be greater than an offset value. The offset is determined based on the extent to which one response is preferred over another. Our experiments on various tasks suggest that ODPO significantly outperforms DPO in aligning language models, especially when the number of preference pairs is limited.

MiMiC: Minimally Modified Counterfactuals in the Representation Space

Language models often exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as gender bias or toxic language. Interventions in the representation space were shown effective in mitigating such issues by altering the LM behavior. We first show that two prominent intervention techniques, Linear Erasure and Steering Vectors, do not enable a high degree of control and are limited in expressivity. We then propose a novel intervention methodology for generating expressive counterfactuals in the representation space, aiming to make representations of a source class (e.g., "toxic") resemble those of a target class (e.g., "non-toxic"). This approach, generalizing previous linear intervention techniques, utilizes a closed-form solution for the Earth Mover's problem under Gaussian assumptions and provides theoretical guarantees on the representation space's geometric organization. We further build on this technique and derive a nonlinear intervention that enables controlled generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in mitigating bias in multiclass classification and in reducing the generation of toxic language, outperforming strong baselines.