uTeBC-NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Can LLMs be Lateral Thinkers?

Inspired by human cognition, Jiang et al.(2023c) create a benchmark for assessing LLMs' lateral thinking-thinking outside the box. Building upon this benchmark, we investigate how different prompting methods enhance LLMs' performance on this task to reveal their inherent power for outside-the-box thinking ability. Through participating in SemEval-2024, task 9, Sentence Puzzle sub-task, we explore prompt engineering methods: chain of thoughts (CoT) and direct prompting, enhancing with informative descriptions, and employing contextualizing prompts using a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Our experiments involve three LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Zephyr-7B-beta. We generate a dataset of thinking paths between riddles and options using GPT-4, validated by humans for quality. Findings indicate that compressed informative prompts enhance performance. Dynamic in-context learning enhances model performance significantly. Furthermore, fine-tuning Zephyr on our dataset enhances performance across other commonsense datasets, underscoring the value of innovative thinking.

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Persian: A Preliminary Study Focusing on ChatGPT

This paper explores the efficacy of large language models (LLMs) for Persian. While ChatGPT and consequent LLMs have shown remarkable performance in English, their efficiency for more low-resource languages remains an open question. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking study of LLMs across diverse Persian language tasks. Our primary focus is on GPT-3.5-turbo, but we also include GPT-4 and OpenChat-3.5 to provide a more holistic evaluation. Our assessment encompasses a diverse set of tasks categorized into classic, reasoning, and knowledge-based domains. To enable a thorough comparison, we evaluate LLMs against existing task-specific fine-tuned models. Given the limited availability of Persian datasets for reasoning tasks, we introduce two new benchmarks: one based on elementary school math questions and another derived from the entrance exams for 7th and 10th grades. Our findings reveal that while LLMs, especially GPT-4, excel in tasks requiring reasoning abilities and a broad understanding of general knowledge, they often lag behind smaller pre-trained models fine-tuned specifically for particular tasks. Additionally, we observe improved performance when test sets are translated to English before inputting them into GPT-3.5. These results highlight the significant potential for enhancing LLM performance in the Persian language. This is particularly noteworthy due to the unique attributes of Persian, including its distinct alphabet and writing styles.

Harnessing Dataset Cartography for Improved Compositional Generalization in Transformers

Neural networks have revolutionized language modeling and excelled in various downstream tasks. However, the extent to which these models achieve compositional generalization comparable to human cognitive abilities remains a topic of debate. While existing approaches in the field have mainly focused on novel architectures and alternative learning paradigms, we introduce a pioneering method harnessing the power of dataset cartography (Swayamdipta et al., 2020). By strategically identifying a subset of compositional generalization data using this approach, we achieve a remarkable improvement in model accuracy, yielding enhancements of up to 10% on CFQ and COGS datasets. Notably, our technique incorporates dataset cartography as a curriculum learning criterion, eliminating the need for hyperparameter tuning while consistently achieving superior performance. Our findings highlight the untapped potential of dataset cartography in unleashing the full capabilities of compositional generalization within Transformer models. Our code is available at https://github.com/cyberiada/cartography-for-compositionality.

LM-CPPF: Paraphrasing-Guided Data Augmentation for Contrastive Prompt-Based Few-Shot Fine-Tuning

In recent years, there has been significant progress in developing pre-trained language models for NLP. However, these models often struggle when fine-tuned on small datasets. To address this issue, researchers have proposed various adaptation approaches. Prompt-based tuning is arguably the most common way, especially for larger models. Previous research shows that adding contrastive learning to prompt-based fine-tuning is effective as it helps the model generate embeddings that are more distinguishable between classes, and it can also be more sample-efficient as the model learns from positive and negative examples simultaneously. One of the most important components of contrastive learning is data augmentation, but unlike computer vision, effective data augmentation for NLP is still challenging. This paper proposes LM-CPPF, Contrastive Paraphrasing-guided Prompt-based Fine-tuning of Language Models, which leverages prompt-based few-shot paraphrasing using generative language models, especially large language models such as GPT-3 and OPT-175B, for data augmentation. Our experiments on multiple text classification benchmarks show that this augmentation method outperforms other methods, such as easy data augmentation, back translation, and multiple templates.

DecompX: Explaining Transformers Decisions by Propagating Token Decomposition

An emerging solution for explaining Transformer-based models is to use vector-based analysis on how the representations are formed. However, providing a faithful vector-based explanation for a multi-layer model could be challenging in three aspects: (1) Incorporating all components into the analysis, (2) Aggregating the layer dynamics to determine the information flow and mixture throughout the entire model, and (3) Identifying the connection between the vector-based analysis and the model's predictions. In this paper, we present DecompX to tackle these challenges. DecompX is based on the construction of decomposed token representations and their successive propagation throughout the model without mixing them in between layers. Additionally, our proposal provides multiple advantages over existing solutions for its inclusion of all encoder components (especially nonlinear feed-forward networks) and the classification head. The former allows acquiring precise vectors while the latter transforms the decomposition into meaningful prediction-based values, eliminating the need for norm- or summation-based vector aggregation. According to the standard faithfulness evaluations, DecompX consistently outperforms existing gradient-based and vector-based approaches on various datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/mohsenfayyaz/DecompX.

PEACH: Pre-Training Sequence-to-Sequence Multilingual Models for Translation with Semi-Supervised Pseudo-Parallel Document Generation

Multilingual pre-training significantly improves many multilingual NLP tasks, including machine translation. Most existing methods are based on some variants of masked language modeling and text-denoising objectives on monolingual data. Multilingual pre-training on monolingual data ignores the availability of parallel data in many language pairs. Also, some other works integrate the available human-generated parallel translation data in their pre-training. This kind of parallel data is definitely helpful, but it is limited even in high-resource language pairs. This paper introduces a novel semi-supervised method, SPDG, that generates high-quality pseudo-parallel data for multilingual pre-training. First, a denoising model is pre-trained on monolingual data to reorder, add, remove, and substitute words, enhancing the pre-training documents' quality. Then, we generate different pseudo-translations for each pre-training document using dictionaries for word-by-word translation and applying the pre-trained denoising model. The resulting pseudo-parallel data is then used to pre-train our multilingual sequence-to-sequence model, PEACH. Our experiments show that PEACH outperforms existing approaches used in training mT5 and mBART on various translation tasks, including supervised, zero- and few-shot scenarios. Moreover, PEACH's ability to transfer knowledge between similar languages makes it particularly useful for low-resource languages. Our results demonstrate that with high-quality dictionaries for generating accurate pseudo-parallel, PEACH can be valuable for low-resource languages.

BERT on a Data Diet: Finding Important Examples by Gradient-Based Pruning

Current pre-trained language models rely on large datasets for achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, past research has shown that not all examples in a dataset are equally important during training. In fact, it is sometimes possible to prune a considerable fraction of the training set while maintaining the test performance. Established on standard vision benchmarks, two gradient-based scoring metrics for finding important examples are GraNd and its estimated version, EL2N. In this work, we employ these two metrics for the first time in NLP. We demonstrate that these metrics need to be computed after at least one epoch of fine-tuning and they are not reliable in early steps. Furthermore, we show that by pruning a small portion of the examples with the highest GraNd/EL2N scores, we can not only preserve the test accuracy, but also surpass it. This paper details adjustments and implementation choices which enable GraNd and EL2N to be applied to NLP.

Looking at the Overlooked: An Analysis on the Word-Overlap Bias in Natural Language Inference

It has been shown that NLI models are usually biased with respect to the word-overlap between premise and hypothesis; they take this feature as a primary cue for predicting the entailment label. In this paper, we focus on an overlooked aspect of the overlap bias in NLI models: the reverse word-overlap bias. Our experimental results demonstrate that current NLI models are highly biased towards the non-entailment label on instances with low overlap, and the existing debiasing methods, which are reportedly successful on existing challenge datasets, are generally ineffective in addressing this category of bias. We investigate the reasons for the emergence of the overlap bias and the role of minority examples in its mitigation. For the former, we find that the word-overlap bias does not stem from pre-training, and for the latter, we observe that in contrast to the accepted assumption, eliminating minority examples does not affect the generalizability of debiasing methods with respect to the overlap bias.

Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.