MAQA: Evaluating Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs Regarding Data Uncertainty

Although large language models (LLMs) are capable of performing various tasks, they still suffer from producing plausible but incorrect responses. To improve the reliability of LLMs, recent research has focused on uncertainty quantification to predict whether a response is correct or not. However, most uncertainty quantification methods have been evaluated on questions requiring a single clear answer, ignoring the existence of data uncertainty that arises from irreducible randomness. Instead, these methods only consider model uncertainty, which arises from a lack of knowledge. In this paper, we investigate previous uncertainty quantification methods under the presence of data uncertainty. Our contributions are two-fold: 1) proposing a new Multi-Answer Question Answering dataset, MAQA, consisting of world knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks to evaluate uncertainty quantification regarding data uncertainty, and 2) assessing 5 uncertainty quantification methods of diverse white- and black-box LLMs. Our findings show that entropy and consistency-based methods estimate the model uncertainty well even under data uncertainty, while other methods for white- and black-box LLMs struggle depending on the tasks. Additionally, methods designed for white-box LLMs suffer from overconfidence in reasoning tasks compared to simple knowledge queries. We believe our observations will pave the way for future work on uncertainty quantification in realistic setting.

CSRT: Evaluation and Analysis of LLMs using Code-Switching Red-Teaming Dataset

Recent studies in large language models (LLMs) shed light on their multilingual ability and safety, beyond conventional tasks in language modeling. Still, current benchmarks reveal their inability to comprehensively evaluate them and are excessively dependent on manual annotations. In this paper, we introduce code-switching red-teaming (CSRT), a simple yet effective red-teaming technique that simultaneously tests multilingual understanding and safety of LLMs. We release the CSRT dataset, which comprises 315 code-switching queries combining up to 10 languages and eliciting a wide range of undesirable behaviors. Through extensive experiments with ten state-of-the-art LLMs, we demonstrate that CSRT significantly outperforms existing multilingual red-teaming techniques, achieving 46.7% more attacks than existing methods in English. We analyze the harmful responses toward the CSRT dataset concerning various aspects under ablation studies with 16K samples, including but not limited to scaling laws, unsafe behavior categories, and input conditions for optimal data generation. Additionally, we validate the extensibility of CSRT, by generating code-switching attack prompts with monolingual data.

Towards Unbiased Evaluation of Detecting Unanswerable Questions in EHRSQL

Incorporating unanswerable questions into EHR QA systems is crucial for testing the trustworthiness of a system, as providing non-existent responses can mislead doctors in their diagnoses. The EHRSQL dataset stands out as a promising benchmark because it is the only dataset that incorporates unanswerable questions in the EHR QA system alongside practical questions. However, in this work, we identify a data bias in these unanswerable questions; they can often be discerned simply by filtering with specific N-gram patterns. Such biases jeopardize the authenticity and reliability of QA system evaluations. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple debiasing method of adjusting the split between the validation and test sets to neutralize the undue influence of N-gram filtering. By experimenting on the MIMIC-III dataset, we demonstrate both the existing data bias in EHRSQL and the effectiveness of our data split strategy in mitigating this bias.

Leveraging Normalization Layer in Adapters With Progressive Learning and Adaptive Distillation for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning

Cross-domain few-shot learning presents a formidable challenge, as models must be trained on base classes and then tested on novel classes from various domains with only a few samples at hand. While prior approaches have primarily focused on parameter-efficient methods of using adapters, they often overlook two critical issues: shifts in batch statistics and noisy sample statistics arising from domain discrepancy variations. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework that leverages normalization layer in adapters with Progressive Learning and Adaptive Distillation (ProLAD), marking two principal contributions. First, our methodology utilizes two separate adapters: one devoid of a normalization layer, which is more effective for similar domains, and another embedded with a normalization layer, designed to leverage the batch statistics of the target domain, thus proving effective for dissimilar domains. Second, to address the pitfalls of noisy statistics, we deploy two strategies: a progressive training of the two adapters and an adaptive distillation technique derived from features determined by the model solely with the adapter devoid of a normalization layer. Through this adaptive distillation, our approach functions as a modulator, controlling the primary adapter for adaptation, based on each domain. Evaluations on standard cross-domain few-shot learning benchmarks confirm that our technique outperforms existing state-of-the-art methodologies.

Improving Adaptability and Generalizability of Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable applicability across a variety of downstream tasks, including zero-shot image classification. Recently, the use of prompts or adapters for efficient transfer learning has gained significant attention for effectively adapting to downstream tasks. However, the roles of vision and text prompts, as well as adapters in terms of generalization and transfer difficulty, have been overlooked, limiting performance on unseen tasks. In this paper, we empirically analyze how VLMs behave when using vision and text prompts, adapters, and a combination of these components, marking a novel exploration by our study. Our observations find that utilizing vision prompts for class separability and text adapters for task adaptation is crucial for adaptability and generalizability. Moreover, to improve generalization across every domain, we propose an adaptive ensemble method that effectively combines the general knowledge of VLMs with task-specific knowledge according to transfer difficulty. Upon experimenting with extensive benchmarks, our method consistently outperforms all baselines, particularly on unseen tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

HARE: Explainable Hate Speech Detection with Step-by-Step Reasoning

With the proliferation of social media, accurate detection of hate speech has become critical to ensure safety online. To combat nuanced forms of hate speech, it is important to identify and thoroughly explain hate speech to help users understand its harmful effects. Recent benchmarks have attempted to tackle this issue by training generative models on free-text annotations of implications in hateful text. However, we find significant reasoning gaps in the existing annotations schemes, which may hinder the supervision of detection models. In this paper, we introduce a hate speech detection framework, HARE, which harnesses the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to fill these gaps in explanations of hate speech, thus enabling effective supervision of detection models. Experiments on SBIC and Implicit Hate benchmarks show that our method, using model-generated data, consistently outperforms baselines, using existing free-text human annotations. Analysis demonstrates that our method enhances the explanation quality of trained models and improves generalization to unseen datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/joonkeekim/hare-hate-speech.git.

Meta-Learning with Adaptive Weighted Loss for Imbalanced Cold-Start Recommendation

Sequential recommenders have made great strides in capturing a user's preferences. Nevertheless, the cold-start recommendation remains a fundamental challenge in which only a few user-item interactions are available for personalization. Gradient-based meta-learning approaches have recently emerged in the sequential recommendation field due to their fast adaptation and easy-to-integrate abilities. The meta-learning algorithms formulate the cold-start recommendation as a few-shot learning problem, where each user is represented as a task to be adapted. However, while meta-learning algorithms generally assume that task-wise samples are evenly distributed over classes or values, user-item interactions are not that way in real-world applications (e.g., watching favorite videos multiple times, leaving only good ratings and no bad ones). As a result, in the real-world, imbalanced user feedback that accounts for most task training data may dominate the user adaptation and prevent meta-learning algorithms from learning meaningful meta-knowledge for personalized recommendations. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a novel sequential recommendation framework based on gradient-based meta-learning that captures the imbalance of each user's rating distribution and accordingly computes adaptive loss for user-specific learning. It is the first work to tackle the impact of imbalanced ratings in cold-start sequential recommendation scenarios. We design adaptive weighted loss and improve the existing meta-learning algorithms for state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.