Contextualizing Generated Citation Texts

Abstractive citation text generation is usually framed as an infilling task, where a sequence-to-sequence model is trained to generate a citation given a reference paper and the context window around the target; the generated citation should be a brief discussion of the reference paper as it relates to the citing context. However, examining a recent LED-based citation generation system, we find that many of the generated citations are generic summaries of the reference papers main contribution, ignoring the citation contexts focus on a different topic. To address this problem, we propose a simple modification to the citation text generation task: the generation target is not only the citation itself, but the entire context window, including the target citation. This approach can be easily applied to any abstractive citation generation system, and our experimental results show that training in this way is preferred by human readers and allows the generation model to make use of contextual clues about what topic to discuss and what stance to take.

Text classification of column headers with a controlled vocabulary: leveraging LLMs for metadata enrichment

Traditional dataset retrieval systems index on metadata information rather than on the data values. Thus relying primarily on manual annotations and high-quality metadata, processes known to be labour-intensive and challenging to automate. We propose a method to support metadata enrichment with topic annotations of column headers using three Large Language Models (LLMs): ChatGPT-3.5, GoogleBard and GoogleGemini. We investigate the LLMs ability to classify column headers based on domain-specific topics from a controlled vocabulary. We evaluate our approach by assessing the internal consistency of the LLMs, the inter-machine alignment, and the human-machine agreement for the topic classification task. Additionally, we investigate the impact of contextual information (i.e. dataset description) on the classification outcomes. Our results suggest that ChatGPT and GoogleGemini outperform GoogleBard for internal consistency as well as LLM-human-alignment. Interestingly, we found that context had no impact on the LLMs performances. This work proposes a novel approach that leverages LLMs for text classification using a controlled topic vocabulary, which has the potential to facilitate automated metadata enrichment, thereby enhancing dataset retrieval and the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR) of research data on the Web.

Breaking Down the Defenses: A Comparative Survey of Attacks on Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), offering transformative capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. However, with their rising prominence, the security and vulnerability aspects of these models have garnered significant attention. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the various forms of attacks targeting LLMs, discussing the nature and mechanisms of these attacks, their potential impacts, and current defense strategies. We delve into topics such as adversarial attacks that aim to manipulate model outputs, data poisoning that affects model training, and privacy concerns related to training data exploitation. The paper also explores the effectiveness of different attack methodologies, the resilience of LLMs against these attacks, and the implications for model integrity and user trust. By examining the latest research, we provide insights into the current landscape of LLM vulnerabilities and defense mechanisms. Our objective is to offer a nuanced understanding of LLM attacks, foster awareness within the AI community, and inspire robust solutions to mitigate these risks in future developments.

STEntConv: Predicting Disagreement with Stance Detection and a Signed Graph Convolutional Network

The rise of social media platforms has led to an increase in polarised online discussions, especially on political and socio-cultural topics such as elections and climate change. We propose a simple and novel unsupervised method to predict whether the authors of two posts agree or disagree, leveraging user stances about named entities obtained from their posts. We present STEntConv, a model which builds a graph of users and named entities weighted by stance and trains a Signed Graph Convolutional Network (SGCN) to detect disagreement between comment and reply posts. We run experiments and ablation studies and show that including this information improves disagreement detection performance on a dataset of Reddit posts for a range of controversial subreddit topics, without the need for platform-specific features or user history.

UV Gaussians: Joint Learning of Mesh Deformation and Gaussian Textures for Human Avatar Modeling

Reconstructing photo-realistic drivable human avatars from multi-view image sequences has been a popular and challenging topic in the field of computer vision and graphics. While existing NeRF-based methods can achieve high-quality novel view rendering of human models, both training and inference processes are time-consuming. Recent approaches have utilized 3D Gaussians to represent the human body, enabling faster training and rendering. However, they undermine the importance of the mesh guidance and directly predict Gaussians in 3D space with coarse mesh guidance. This hinders the learning procedure of the Gaussians and tends to produce blurry textures. Therefore, we propose UV Gaussians, which models the 3D human body by jointly learning mesh deformations and 2D UV-space Gaussian textures. We utilize the embedding of UV map to learn Gaussian textures in 2D space, leveraging the capabilities of powerful 2D networks to extract features. Additionally, through an independent Mesh network, we optimize pose-dependent geometric deformations, thereby guiding Gaussian rendering and significantly enhancing rendering quality. We collect and process a new dataset of human motion, which includes multi-view images, scanned models, parametric model registration, and corresponding texture maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art synthesis of novel view and novel pose. The code and data will be made available on the homepage https://alex-jyj.github.io/UV-Gaussians/ once the paper is accepted.

Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark

How to better evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the focal point and hot topic in current LLMs research. Previous work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer the latest dynamic questions well. To promote the improvement of Chinese LLMs' ability to answer dynamic questions, in this paper, we introduce CDQA, a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest news on the Chinese Internet. We obtain high-quality data through a pipeline that combines humans and models, and carefully classify the samples according to the frequency of answer changes to facilitate a more fine-grained observation of LLMs' capabilities. We have also evaluated and analyzed mainstream and advanced Chinese LLMs on CDQA. Extensive experiments and valuable insights suggest that our proposed CDQA is challenging and worthy of more further study. We believe that the benchmark we provide will become one of the key data resources for improving LLMs' Chinese question-answering ability in the future.

Fooling Neural Networks for Motion Forecasting via Adversarial Attacks

Human motion prediction is still an open problem, which is extremely important for autonomous driving and safety applications. Although there are great advances in this area, the widely studied topic of adversarial attacks has not been applied to multi-regression models such as GCNs and MLP-based architectures in human motion prediction. This work intends to reduce this gap using extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments in state-of-the-art architectures similar to the initial stages of adversarial attacks in image classification. The results suggest that models are susceptible to attacks even on low levels of perturbation. We also show experiments with 3D transformations that affect the model performance, in particular, we show that most models are sensitive to simple rotations and translations which do not alter joint distances. We conclude that similar to earlier CNN models, motion forecasting tasks are susceptible to small perturbations and simple 3D transformations.

MoralBERT: Detecting Moral Values in Social Discourse

Morality plays a fundamental role in how we perceive information while greatly influencing our decisions and judgements. Controversial topics, including vaccination, abortion, racism, and sexuality, often elicit opinions and attitudes that are not solely based on evidence but rather reflect moral worldviews. Recent advances in natural language processing have demonstrated that moral values can be gauged in human-generated textual content. Here, we design a range of language representation models fine-tuned to capture exactly the moral nuances in text, called MoralBERT. We leverage annotated moral data from three distinct sources: Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook user-generated content covering various socially relevant topics. This approach broadens linguistic diversity and potentially enhances the models' ability to comprehend morality in various contexts. We also explore a domain adaptation technique and compare it to the standard fine-tuned BERT model, using two different frameworks for moral prediction: single-label and multi-label. We compare in-domain approaches with conventional models relying on lexicon-based techniques, as well as a Machine Learning classifier with Word2Vec representation. Our results showed that in-domain prediction models significantly outperformed traditional models. While the single-label setting reaches a higher accuracy than previously achieved for the task when using BERT pretrained models. Experiments in an out-of-domain setting, instead, suggest that further work is needed for existing domain adaptation techniques to generalise between different social media platforms, especially for the multi-label task. The investigations and outcomes from this study pave the way for further exploration, enabling a more profound comprehension of moral narratives about controversial social issues.

Information Screening whilst Exploiting! Multimodal Relation Extraction with Feature Denoising and Multimodal Topic Modeling

Existing research on multimodal relation extraction (MRE) faces two co-existing challenges, internal-information over-utilization and external-information under-exploitation. To combat that, we propose a novel framework that simultaneously implements the idea of internal-information screening and external-information exploiting. First, we represent the fine-grained semantic structures of the input image and text with the visual and textual scene graphs, which are further fused into a unified cross-modal graph (CMG). Based on CMG, we perform structure refinement with the guidance of the graph information bottleneck principle, actively denoising the less-informative features. Next, we perform topic modeling over the input image and text, incorporating latent multimodal topic features to enrich the contexts. On the benchmark MRE dataset, our system outperforms the current best model significantly. With further in-depth analyses, we reveal the great potential of our method for the MRE task. Our codes are open at https://github.com/ChocoWu/MRE-ISE.

Evaluating the Quality of Answers in Political Q&A Sessions with Large Language Models

This paper presents a new approach to evaluating the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We propose to measure an answer's quality based on the degree to which it allows us to infer the initial question accurately. This conception of answer quality inherently reflects their relevance to initial questions. Drawing parallels with semantic search, we argue that this measurement approach can be operationalized by fine-tuning a large language model on the observed corpus of questions and answers without additional labeled data. We showcase our measurement approach within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our approach yields valuable insights into the correlates of the quality of answers in the Question Period. We find that answer quality varies significantly based on the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions and uncover a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the topics of the questions.