arXiv subjects

Badr AlKhamissi

Publications and source records attributed to Badr AlKhamissi.

33 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models

The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions -- firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.

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arXiv2024

Brain-Like Language Processing via a Shallow Untrained Multihead Attention Network

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective models of the human language system, with some models predicting most explainable variance of brain activity in current datasets. Even in untrained models, the representations induced by architectural priors can exhibit reasonable alignment to brain data. In this work, we investigate the key architectural components driving the surprising alignment of untrained models. To estimate LLM-to-brain similarity, we first select language-selective units within an LLM, similar to how neuroscientists identify the language network in the human brain. We then benchmark the brain alignment of these LLM units across five different brain recording datasets. By isolating critical components of the Transformer architecture, we identify tokenization strategy and multihead attention as the two major components driving brain alignment. A simple form of recurrence further improves alignment. We further demonstrate this quantitative brain alignment of our model by reproducing landmark studies in the language neuroscience field, showing that localized model units -- just like language voxels measured empirically in the human brain -- discriminate more reliably between lexical than syntactic differences, and exhibit similar response profiles under the same experimental conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our model's representations for language modeling, achieving improved sample and parameter efficiency over comparable architectures. Our model's estimates of surprisal sets a new state-of-the-art in the behavioral alignment to human reading times. Taken together, we propose a highly brain- and behaviorally-aligned model that conceptualizes the human language system as an untrained shallow feature encoder, with structural priors, combined with a trained decoder to achieve efficient and performant language processing.

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arXiv2024

Depth-Wise Attention (DWAtt): A Layer Fusion Method for Data-Efficient Classification

Language Models pretrained on large textual data have been shown to encode different types of knowledge simultaneously. Traditionally, only the features from the last layer are used when adapting to new tasks or data. We put forward that, when using or finetuning deep pretrained models, intermediate layer features that may be relevant to the downstream task are buried too deep to be used efficiently in terms of needed samples or steps. To test this, we propose a new layer fusion method: Depth-Wise Attention (DWAtt), to help re-surface signals from non-final layers. We compare DWAtt to a basic concatenation-based layer fusion method (Concat), and compare both to a deeper model baseline -- all kept within a similar parameter budget. Our findings show that DWAtt and Concat are more step- and sample-efficient than the baseline, especially in the few-shot setting. DWAtt outperforms Concat on larger data sizes. On CoNLL-03 NER, layer fusion shows 3.68--9.73% F1 gain at different few-shot sizes. The layer fusion models presented significantly outperform the baseline in various training scenarios with different data sizes, architectures, and training constraints.

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arXiv2024

Rosetta Stone at KSAA-RD Shared Task: A Hop From Language Modeling To Word--Definition Alignment

A Reverse Dictionary is a tool enabling users to discover a word based on its provided definition, meaning, or description. Such a technique proves valuable in various scenarios, aiding language learners who possess a description of a word without its identity, and benefiting writers seeking precise terminology. These scenarios often encapsulate what is referred to as the "Tip-of-the-Tongue" (TOT) phenomena. In this work, we present our winning solution for the Arabic Reverse Dictionary shared task. This task focuses on deriving a vector representation of an Arabic word from its accompanying description. The shared task encompasses two distinct subtasks: the first involves an Arabic definition as input, while the second employs an English definition. For the first subtask, our approach relies on an ensemble of finetuned Arabic BERT-based models, predicting the word embedding for a given definition. The final representation is obtained through averaging the output embeddings from each model within the ensemble. In contrast, the most effective solution for the second subtask involves translating the English test definitions into Arabic and applying them to the finetuned models originally trained for the first subtask. This straightforward method achieves the highest score across both subtasks.

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arXiv2023

OPT-R: Exploring the Role of Explanations in Finetuning and Prompting for Reasoning Skills of Large Language Models

In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), focusing specifically on the Open Pretrained Transformers (OPT) models as a representative of such models. Our study entails finetuning three different sizes of OPT on a carefully curated reasoning corpus, resulting in two sets of finetuned models: OPT-R, finetuned without explanations, and OPT-RE, finetuned with explanations. We then evaluate all models on 57 out-of-domain tasks drawn from the SUPER-NATURALINSTRUCTIONS benchmark, covering 26 distinct reasoning skills, utilizing three prompting techniques. Through a comprehensive grid of 27 configurations and 6,156 test evaluations, we investigate the dimensions of finetuning, prompting, and scale to understand the role of explanations on different reasoning skills. Our findings reveal that having explanations in the fewshot exemplar has no significant impact on the model's performance when the model is finetuned, while positively affecting the non-finetuned counterpart. Moreover, we observe a slight yet consistent increase in classification accuracy as we incorporate explanations during prompting and finetuning, respectively. Finally, we offer insights on which skills benefit the most from incorporating explanations during finetuning and prompting, such as Numerical (+20.4%) and Analogical (+13.9%) reasoning, as well as skills that exhibit negligible or negative effects.

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arXiv2023

ALERT: Adapting Language Models to Reasoning Tasks

Current large language models can perform reasonably well on complex tasks that require step-by-step reasoning with few-shot learning. Are these models applying reasoning skills they have learnt during pre-training and reason outside of their training context, or are they simply memorizing their training corpus at finer granularity and have learnt to better understand their context? To tease apart these possibilities, we introduce ALERT, a benchmark and suite of analyses for assessing language models' reasoning ability comparing pre-trained and finetuned models on complex tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. ALERT provides a test bed to asses any language model on fine-grained reasoning skills, which spans over 20 datasets and covers 10 different reasoning skills. We leverage ALERT to further investigate the role of finetuning. With extensive empirical analysis we find that language models learn more reasoning skills such as textual entailment, abductive reasoning, and analogical reasoning during finetuning stage compared to pretraining state. We also find that when language models are finetuned they tend to overfit to the prompt template, which hurts the robustness of models causing generalization problems.

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arXiv2023

Taqyim: Evaluating Arabic NLP Tasks Using ChatGPT Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on various downstream tasks without requiring fine-tuning, including ChatGPT, a chat-based model built on top of LLMs such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Despite having a lower training proportion compared to English, these models also exhibit remarkable capabilities in other languages. In this study, we assess the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models on seven distinct Arabic NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, translation, transliteration, paraphrasing, part of speech tagging, summarization, and diacritization. Our findings reveal that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5 on five out of the seven tasks. Furthermore, we conduct an extensive analysis of the sentiment analysis task, providing insights into how LLMs achieve exceptional results on a challenging dialectal dataset. Additionally, we introduce a new Python interface https://github.com/ARBML/Taqyim that facilitates the evaluation of these tasks effortlessly.

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arXiv2023

ToKen: Task Decomposition and Knowledge Infusion for Few-Shot Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech detection is complex; it relies on commonsense reasoning, knowledge of stereotypes, and an understanding of social nuance that differs from one culture to the next. It is also difficult to collect a large-scale hate speech annotated dataset. In this work, we frame this problem as a few-shot learning task, and show significant gains with decomposing the task into its "constituent" parts. In addition, we see that infusing knowledge from reasoning datasets (e.g. Atomic2020) improves the performance even further. Moreover, we observe that the trained models generalize to out-of-distribution datasets, showing the superiority of task decomposition and knowledge infusion compared to previously used methods. Concretely, our method outperforms the baseline by 17.83% absolute gain in the 16-shot case.

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arXiv2022

How to Learn and Represent Abstractions: An Investigation using Symbolic Alchemy

Alchemy is a new meta-learning environment rich enough to contain interesting abstractions, yet simple enough to make fine-grained analysis tractable. Further, Alchemy provides an optional symbolic interface that enables meta-RL research without a large compute budget. In this work, we take the first steps toward using Symbolic Alchemy to identify design choices that enable deep-RL agents to learn various types of abstraction. Then, using a variety of behavioral and introspective analyses we investigate how our trained agents use and represent abstract task variables, and find intriguing connections to the neuroscience of abstraction. We conclude by discussing the next steps for using meta-RL and Alchemy to better understand the representation of abstract variables in the brain.

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arXiv2022

Meta AI at Arabic Hate Speech 2022: MultiTask Learning with Self-Correction for Hate Speech Classification

In this paper, we tackle the Arabic Fine-Grained Hate Speech Detection shared task and demonstrate significant improvements over reported baselines for its three subtasks. The tasks are to predict if a tweet contains (1) Offensive language; and whether it is considered (2) Hate Speech or not and if so, then predict the (3) Fine-Grained Hate Speech label from one of six categories. Our final solution is an ensemble of models that employs multitask learning and a self-consistency correction method yielding 82.7% on the hate speech subtask -- reflecting a 3.4% relative improvement compared to previous work.

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arXiv2022

A Review on Language Models as Knowledge Bases

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the NLP community on the use of pretrained Language Models (LMs) as Knowledge Bases (KBs). Researchers have shown that LMs trained on a sufficiently large (web) corpus will encode a significant amount of knowledge implicitly in its parameters. The resulting LM can be probed for different kinds of knowledge and thus acting as a KB. This has a major advantage over traditional KBs in that this method requires no human supervision. In this paper, we present a set of aspects that we deem a LM should have to fully act as a KB, and review the recent literature with respect to those aspects.

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arXiv2021

Deep Spiking Neural Networks with Resonate-and-Fire Neurons

In this work, we explore a new Spiking Neural Network (SNN) formulation with Resonate-and-Fire (RAF) neurons (Izhikevich, 2001) trained with gradient descent via back-propagation. The RAF-SNN, while more biologically plausible, achieves performance comparable to or higher than conventional models in the Machine Learning literature across different network configurations, using similar or fewer parameters. Strikingly, the RAF-SNN proves robust against noise induced at testing/training time, under both static and dynamic conditions. Against CNN on MNIST, we show 25% higher absolute accuracy with N(0, 0.2) induced noise at testing time. Against LSTM on N-MNIST, we show 70% higher absolute accuracy with 20% induced noise at training time.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2021

The Emergence of Abstract and Episodic Neurons in Episodic Meta-RL

In this work, we analyze the reinstatement mechanism introduced by Ritter et al. (2018) to reveal two classes of neurons that emerge in the agent's working memory (an epLSTM cell) when trained using episodic meta-RL on an episodic variant of the Harlow visual fixation task. Specifically, Abstract neurons encode knowledge shared across tasks, while Episodic neurons carry information relevant for a specific episode's task.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Adapting MARBERT for Improved Arabic Dialect Identification: Submission to the NADI 2021 Shared Task

In this paper, we tackle the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task (Abdul-Mageed et al., 2021) and demonstrate state-of-the-art results on all of its four subtasks. Tasks are to identify the geographic origin of short Dialectal (DA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) utterances at the levels of both country and province. Our final model is an ensemble of variants built on top of MARBERT that achieves an F1-score of 34.03% for DA at the country-level development set -- an improvement of 7.63% from previous work.

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arXiv2020

Deep Diacritization: Efficient Hierarchical Recurrence for Improved Arabic Diacritization

We propose a novel architecture for labelling character sequences that achieves state-of-the-art results on the Tashkeela Arabic diacritization benchmark. The core is a two-level recurrence hierarchy that operates on the word and character levels separately---enabling faster training and inference than comparable traditional models. A cross-level attention module further connects the two, and opens the door for network interpretability. The task module is a softmax classifier that enumerates valid combinations of diacritics. This architecture can be extended with a recurrent decoder that optionally accepts priors from partially diacritized text, which improves results. We employ extra tricks such as sentence dropout and majority voting to further boost the final result. Our best model achieves a WER of 5.34%, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art with a 30.56% relative error reduction.

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