Most research about natural language generation (NLG) relies on evaluation benchmarks with limited references for a sample, which may result in poor correlations with human judgements. The underlying reason is that one semantic meaning can actually be expressed in different forms, and the evaluation with a single or few references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model's hypotheses. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel method, named Para-Ref, to enhance existing evaluation benchmarks by enriching the number of references. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to paraphrase a single reference into multiple high-quality ones in diverse expressions. Experimental results on representative NLG tasks of machine translation, text summarization, and image caption demonstrate that our method can effectively improve the correlation with human evaluation for sixteen automatic evaluation metrics by +7.82% in ratio. We release the code and data at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Para-Ref.
We present Dolphin, a novel benchmark that addresses the need for an evaluation framework for the wide collection of Arabic languages and varieties. The proposed benchmark encompasses a broad range of 13 different NLG tasks, including text summarization, machine translation, question answering, and dialogue generation, among others. Dolphin comprises a substantial corpus of 40 diverse and representative public datasets across 50 test splits, carefully curated to reflect real-world scenarios and the linguistic richness of Arabic. It sets a new standard for evaluating the performance and generalization capabilities of Arabic and multilingual models, promising to enable researchers to push the boundaries of current methodologies. We provide an extensive analysis of Dolphin, highlighting its diversity and identifying gaps in current Arabic NLG research. We also evaluate several Arabic and multilingual models on our benchmark, allowing us to set strong baselines against which researchers can compare.
While several previous studies have analyzed gender bias in research, we are still missing a comprehensive analysis of gender differences in the AI community, covering diverse topics and different development trends. Using the AI Scholar dataset of 78K researchers in the field of AI, we identify several gender differences: (1) Although female researchers tend to have fewer overall citations than males, this citation difference does not hold for all academic-age groups; (2) There exist large gender homophily in co-authorship on AI papers; (3) Female first-authored papers show distinct linguistic styles, such as longer text, more positive emotion words, and more catchy titles than male first-authored papers. Our analysis provides a window into the current demographic trends in our AI community, and encourages more gender equality and diversity in the future. Our code and data are at https://github.com/causalNLP/ai-scholar-gender.
Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct erroneous characters in Chinese texts. Although efforts have been made to introduce phonetic information (Hanyu Pinyin) in this task, they typically merge phonetic representations with character representations, which tends to weaken the representation effect of normal texts. In this work, we propose to disentangle the two types of features to allow for direct interaction between textual and phonetic information. To learn useful phonetic representations, we introduce a pinyin-to-character objective to ask the model to predict the correct characters based solely on phonetic information, where a separation mask is imposed to disable attention from phonetic input to text. To avoid overfitting the phonetics, we further design a self-distillation module to ensure that semantic information plays a major role in the prediction. Extensive experiments on three CSC benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method in using phonetic information.
Tabular representation learning has recently gained a lot of attention. However, existing approaches only learn a representation from a single table, and thus ignore the potential to learn from the full structure of relational databases, including neighboring tables that can contain important information for a contextualized representation. Moreover, current models are significantly limited in scale, which prevents that they learn from large databases. In this paper, we thus introduce our vision of relational representation learning, that can not only learn from the full relational structure, but also can scale to larger database sizes that are commonly found in real-world. Moreover, we also discuss opportunities and challenges we see along the way to enable this vision and present initial very promising results. Overall, we argue that this direction can lead to foundation models for relational databases that are today only available for text and images.
This paper introduces Deceptive-NeRF, a new method for enhancing the quality of reconstructed NeRF models using synthetically generated pseudo-observations, capable of handling sparse input and removing floater artifacts. Our proposed method involves three key steps: 1) reconstruct a coarse NeRF model from sparse inputs; 2) generate pseudo-observations based on the coarse model; 3) refine the NeRF model using pseudo-observations to produce a high-quality reconstruction. To generate photo-realistic pseudo-observations that faithfully preserve the identity of the reconstructed scene while remaining consistent with the sparse inputs, we develop a rectification latent diffusion model that generates images conditional on a coarse RGB image and depth map, which are derived from the coarse NeRF and latent text embedding from input images. Extensive experiments show that our method is effective and can generate perceptually high-quality NeRF even with very sparse inputs.
Multimodal image-text models have shown remarkable performance in the past few years. However, evaluating their robustness against distribution shifts is crucial before adopting them in real-world applications. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of 9 popular open-sourced image-text models under common perturbations on five tasks (image-text retrieval, visual reasoning, visual entailment, image captioning, and text-to-image generation). In particular, we propose several new multimodal robustness benchmarks by applying 17 image perturbation and 16 text perturbation techniques on top of existing datasets. We observe that multimodal models are not robust to image and text perturbations, especially to image perturbations. Among the tested perturbation methods, character-level perturbations constitute the most severe distribution shift for text, and zoom blur is the most severe shift for image data. We also introduce two new robustness metrics (MMI and MOR) for proper evaluations of multimodal models. We hope our extensive study sheds light on new directions for the development of robust multimodal models.
Large language models (LLMs) providing generative AI have become popular to support software engineers in creating, summarizing, optimizing, and documenting source code. It is still unknown how LLMs can support control engineers using typical control programming languages in programming tasks. Researchers have explored GitHub CoPilot or DeepMind AlphaCode for source code generation but did not yet tackle control logic programming. The contribution of this paper is an exploratory study, for which we created 100 LLM prompts in 10 representative categories to analyze control logic generation for of PLCs and DCS from natural language. We tested the prompts by generating answers with ChatGPT using the GPT-4 LLM. It generated syntactically correct IEC 61131-3 Structured Text code in many cases and demonstrated useful reasoning skills that could boost control engineer productivity. Our prompt collection is the basis for a more formal LLM benchmark to test and compare such models for control logic generation.
Sparse annotation poses persistent challenges to training dense retrieval models, such as the problem of false negatives, i.e. unlabeled relevant documents that are spuriously used as negatives in contrastive learning, distorting the training signal. To alleviate this problem, we introduce evidence-based label smoothing, a computationally efficient method that prevents penalizing the model for assigning high relevance to false negatives. To compute the target relevance distribution over candidate documents within the ranking context of a given query, candidates most similar to the ground truth are assigned a non-zero relevance probability based on the degree of their similarity to the ground-truth document(s). As a relevance estimate we leverage an improved similarity metric based on reciprocal nearest neighbors, which can also be used independently to rerank candidates in post-processing. Through extensive experiments on two large-scale ad hoc text retrieval datasets we demonstrate that both methods can improve the ranking effectiveness of dense retrieval models.
Clinical notes in healthcare facilities are tagged with the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code; a list of classification codes for medical diagnoses and procedures. ICD coding is a challenging multilabel text classification problem due to noisy clinical document inputs and long-tailed label distribution. Recent automated ICD coding efforts improve performance by encoding medical notes and codes with additional data and knowledge bases. However, most of them do not reflect how human coders generate the code: first, the coders select general code categories and then look for specific subcategories that are relevant to a patient's condition. Inspired by this, we propose a two-stage decoding mechanism to predict ICD codes. Our model uses the hierarchical properties of the codes to split the prediction into two steps: At first, we predict the parent code and then predict the child code based on the previous prediction. Experiments on the public MIMIC-III data set show that our model performs well in single-model settings without external data or knowledge.