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Chitta Baral

Publications and source records attributed to Chitta Baral.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Investigating and Addressing Hallucinations of LLMs in Tasks Involving Negation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of natural language tasks. However, they have been shown to suffer from a critical limitation pertinent to 'hallucination' in their output. Recent research has focused on investigating and addressing this problem for a variety of tasks such as biography generation, question answering, abstractive summarization, and dialogue generation. However, the crucial aspect pertaining to 'negation' has remained considerably underexplored. Negation is important because it adds depth and nuance to the understanding of language and is also crucial for logical reasoning and inference. In this work, we address the above limitation and particularly focus on studying the impact of negation in LLM hallucinations. Specifically, we study four tasks with negation: 'false premise completion', 'constrained fact generation', 'multiple choice question answering', and 'fact generation'. We show that open-source state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMA-2-chat, Vicuna, and Orca-2 hallucinate considerably on all these tasks involving negation which underlines a critical shortcoming of these models. Addressing this problem, we further study numerous strategies to mitigate these hallucinations and demonstrate their impact.

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LogicBench: Towards Systematic Evaluation of Logical Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models

Recently developed large language models (LLMs) have been shown to perform remarkably well on a wide range of language understanding tasks. But, can they really "reason" over the natural language? This question has been receiving significant research attention and many reasoning skills such as commonsense, numerical, and qualitative have been studied. However, the crucial skill pertaining to 'logical reasoning' has remained underexplored. Existing work investigating this reasoning ability of LLMs has focused only on a couple of inference rules (such as modus ponens and modus tollens) of propositional and first-order logic. Addressing the above limitation, we comprehensively evaluate the logical reasoning ability of LLMs on 25 different reasoning patterns spanning over propositional, first-order, and non-monotonic logics. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce LogicBench, a natural language question-answering dataset focusing on the use of a single inference rule. We conduct detailed analysis with a range of LLMs such as GPT-4, ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama-2, and Mistral using chain-of-thought prompting. Experimental results show that existing LLMs do not fare well on LogicBench; especially, they struggle with instances involving complex reasoning and negations. Furthermore, they sometimes overlook contextual information necessary for reasoning to arrive at the correct conclusion. We believe that our work and findings facilitate future research for evaluating and enhancing the logical reasoning ability of LLMs. Data and code are available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/LogicBench.

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Grounding Stylistic Domain Generalization with Quantitative Domain Shift Measures and Synthetic Scene Images

Domain Generalization (DG) is a challenging task in machine learning that requires a coherent ability to comprehend shifts across various domains through extraction of domain-invariant features. DG performance is typically evaluated by performing image classification in domains of various image styles. However, current methodology lacks quantitative understanding about shifts in stylistic domain, and relies on a vast amount of pre-training data, such as ImageNet1K, which are predominantly in photo-realistic style with weakly supervised class labels. Such a data-driven practice could potentially result in spurious correlation and inflated performance on DG benchmarks. In this paper, we introduce a new DG paradigm to address these risks. We first introduce two new quantitative measures ICV and IDD to describe domain shifts in terms of consistency of classes within one domain and similarity between two stylistic domains. We then present SuperMarioDomains (SMD), a novel synthetic multi-domain dataset sampled from video game scenes with more consistent classes and sufficient dissimilarity compared to ImageNet1K. We demonstrate our DG method SMOS. SMOS first uses SMD to train a precursor model, which is then used to ground the training on a DG benchmark. We observe that SMOS contributes to state-of-the-art performance across five DG benchmarks, gaining large improvements to performances on abstract domains along with on-par or slight improvements to those on photo-realistic domains. Our qualitative analysis suggests that these improvements can be attributed to reduced distributional divergence between originally distant domains. Our data are available at https://github.com/fpsluozi/SMD-SMOS .

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On the Robustness of Language Guidance for Low-Level Vision Tasks: Findings from Depth Estimation

Recent advances in monocular depth estimation have been made by incorporating natural language as additional guidance. Although yielding impressive results, the impact of the language prior, particularly in terms of generalization and robustness, remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by quantifying the impact of this prior and introduce methods to benchmark its effectiveness across various settings. We generate "low-level" sentences that convey object-centric, three-dimensional spatial relationships, incorporate them as additional language priors and evaluate their downstream impact on depth estimation. Our key finding is that current language-guided depth estimators perform optimally only with scene-level descriptions and counter-intuitively fare worse with low level descriptions. Despite leveraging additional data, these methods are not robust to directed adversarial attacks and decline in performance with an increase in distribution shift. Finally, to provide a foundation for future research, we identify points of failures and offer insights to better understand these shortcomings. With an increasing number of methods using language for depth estimation, our findings highlight the opportunities and pitfalls that require careful consideration for effective deployment in real-world settings

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$λ$-ECLIPSE: Multi-Concept Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models by Leveraging CLIP Latent Space

Despite the recent advances in personalized text-to-image (P-T2I) generative models, it remains challenging to perform finetuning-free multi-subject-driven T2I in a resource-efficient manner. Predominantly, contemporary approaches, involving the training of Hypernetworks and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), require heavy computing resources that range from 600 to 12300 GPU hours of training. These subject-driven T2I methods hinge on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), which facilitate T2I mapping through cross-attention layers. While LDMs offer distinct advantages, P-T2I methods' reliance on the latent space of these diffusion models significantly escalates resource demands, leading to inconsistent results and necessitating numerous iterations for a single desired image. In this paper, we present $λ$-ECLIPSE, an alternative prior-training strategy that works in the latent space of a pre-trained CLIP model without relying on the diffusion UNet models. $λ$-ECLIPSE leverages the image-text interleaved pre-training for fast and effective multi-subject-driven P-T2I. Through extensive experiments, we establish that $λ$-ECLIPSE surpasses existing baselines in composition alignment while preserving concept alignment performance, even with significantly lower resource utilization. $λ$-ECLIPSE performs multi-subject driven P-T2I with just 34M parameters and is trained on a mere 74 GPU hours. Additionally, $λ$-ECLIPSE demonstrates the unique ability to perform multi-concept interpolations.

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Towards LogiGLUE: A Brief Survey and A Benchmark for Analyzing Logical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

Logical reasoning is fundamental for humans yet presents a substantial challenge in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Initially, researchers used Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) systems that did not scale and required non-trivial manual effort. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to overcome various limitations of formal Knowledge Representation (KR) systems. Consequently, there's a growing interest in using LLMs for logical reasoning via natural language. This work strives to understand the proficiency of LLMs in logical reasoning by offering a brief review of the latest progress in this area; with a focus on the logical reasoning datasets, tasks, and the methods adopted to utilize LLMs for reasoning. To offer a thorough analysis, we have compiled a benchmark titled LogiGLUE. This includes 24 varied datasets encompassing deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. Utilizing LogiGLUE as a foundation, we have trained an instruction fine-tuned language model, resulting in LogiT5. We study single-task training, multi-task training, and "chain-of-thought" knowledge distillation fine-tuning technique to assess the performance of model across the different logical reasoning categories. We also assess various LLMs using LogiGLUE, and the findings indicate that LLMs excel most in abductive reasoning, followed by deductive reasoning, while they are least effective at inductive reasoning. We aim to shed light on the capabilities and potential pathways for enhancing logical reasoning proficiency in LLMs, paving the way for more advanced and nuanced developments in this critical field.

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Don't Blame the Annotator: Bias Already Starts in the Annotation Instructions

In recent years, progress in NLU has been driven by benchmarks. These benchmarks are typically collected by crowdsourcing, where annotators write examples based on annotation instructions crafted by dataset creators. In this work, we hypothesize that annotators pick up on patterns in the crowdsourcing instructions, which bias them to write many similar examples that are then over-represented in the collected data. We study this form of bias, termed instruction bias, in 14 recent NLU benchmarks, showing that instruction examples often exhibit concrete patterns, which are propagated by crowdworkers to the collected data. This extends previous work (Geva et al., 2019) and raises a new concern of whether we are modeling the dataset creator's instructions, rather than the task. Through a series of experiments, we show that, indeed, instruction bias can lead to overestimation of model performance, and that models struggle to generalize beyond biases originating in the crowdsourcing instructions. We further analyze the influence of instruction bias in terms of pattern frequency and model size, and derive concrete recommendations for creating future NLU benchmarks.

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Lost in Translation? Translation Errors and Challenges for Fair Assessment of Text-to-Image Models on Multilingual Concepts

Benchmarks of the multilingual capabilities of text-to-image (T2I) models compare generated images prompted in a test language to an expected image distribution over a concept set. One such benchmark, "Conceptual Coverage Across Languages" (CoCo-CroLa), assesses the tangible noun inventory of T2I models by prompting them to generate pictures from a concept list translated to seven languages and comparing the output image populations. Unfortunately, we find that this benchmark contains translation errors of varying severity in Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. We provide corrections for these errors and analyze how impactful they are on the utility and validity of CoCo-CroLa as a benchmark. We reassess multiple baseline T2I models with the revisions, compare the outputs elicited under the new translations to those conditioned on the old, and show that a correction's impactfulness on the image-domain benchmark results can be predicted in the text domain with similarity scores. Our findings will guide the future development of T2I multilinguality metrics by providing analytical tools for practical translation decisions.

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ConceptBed: Evaluating Concept Learning Abilities of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

The ability to understand visual concepts and replicate and compose these concepts from images is a central goal for computer vision. Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) models have lead to high definition and realistic image quality generation by learning from large databases of images and their descriptions. However, the evaluation of T2I models has focused on photorealism and limited qualitative measures of visual understanding. To quantify the ability of T2I models in learning and synthesizing novel visual concepts (a.k.a. personalized T2I), we introduce ConceptBed, a large-scale dataset that consists of 284 unique visual concepts, and 33K composite text prompts. Along with the dataset, we propose an evaluation metric, Concept Confidence Deviation (CCD), that uses the confidence of oracle concept classifiers to measure the alignment between concepts generated by T2I generators and concepts contained in target images. We evaluate visual concepts that are either objects, attributes, or styles, and also evaluate four dimensions of compositionality: counting, attributes, relations, and actions. Our human study shows that CCD is highly correlated with human understanding of concepts. Our results point to a trade-off between learning the concepts and preserving the compositionality which existing approaches struggle to overcome. The data, code, and interactive demo is available at: https://conceptbed.github.io/

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The Art of Defending: A Systematic Evaluation and Analysis of LLM Defense Strategies on Safety and Over-Defensiveness

As Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly pivotal role in natural language processing applications, their safety concerns become critical areas of NLP research. This paper presents Safety and Over-Defensiveness Evaluation (SODE) benchmark: a collection of diverse safe and unsafe prompts with carefully designed evaluation methods that facilitate systematic evaluation, comparison, and analysis over 'safety' and 'over-defensiveness.' With SODE, we study a variety of LLM defense strategies over multiple state-of-the-art LLMs, which reveals several interesting and important findings, such as (a) the widely popular 'self-checking' techniques indeed improve the safety against unsafe inputs, but this comes at the cost of extreme over-defensiveness on the safe inputs, (b) providing a safety instruction along with in-context exemplars (of both safe and unsafe inputs) consistently improves safety and also mitigates undue over-defensiveness of the models, (c) providing contextual knowledge easily breaks the safety guardrails and makes the models more vulnerable to generating unsafe responses. Overall, our work reveals numerous such critical findings that we believe will pave the way and facilitate further research in improving the safety of LLMs.

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ECLIPSE: A Resource-Efficient Text-to-Image Prior for Image Generations

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, notably the unCLIP models (e.g., DALL-E-2), achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on various compositional T2I benchmarks, at the cost of significant computational resources. The unCLIP stack comprises T2I prior and diffusion image decoder. The T2I prior model alone adds a billion parameters compared to the Latent Diffusion Models, which increases the computational and high-quality data requirements. We introduce ECLIPSE, a novel contrastive learning method that is both parameter and data-efficient. ECLIPSE leverages pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) to distill the knowledge into the prior model. We demonstrate that the ECLIPSE trained prior, with only 3.3% of the parameters and trained on a mere 2.8% of the data, surpasses the baseline T2I priors with an average of 71.6% preference score under resource-limited setting. It also attains performance on par with SOTA big models, achieving an average of 63.36% preference score in terms of the ability to follow the text compositions. Extensive experiments on two unCLIP diffusion image decoders, Karlo and Kandinsky, affirm that ECLIPSE priors consistently deliver high performance while significantly reducing resource dependency.

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LongBoX: Evaluating Transformers on Long-Sequence Clinical Tasks

Many large language models (LLMs) for medicine have largely been evaluated on short texts, and their ability to handle longer sequences such as a complete electronic health record (EHR) has not been systematically explored. Assessing these models on long sequences is crucial since prior work in the general domain has demonstrated performance degradation of LLMs on longer texts. Motivated by this, we introduce LongBoX, a collection of seven medical datasets in text-to-text format, designed to investigate model performance on long sequences. Preliminary experiments reveal that both medical LLMs (e.g., BioGPT) and strong general domain LLMs (e.g., FLAN-T5) struggle on this benchmark. We further evaluate two techniques designed for long-sequence handling: (i) local-global attention, and (ii) Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD). Our results demonstrate mixed results with long-sequence handling - while scores on some datasets increase, there is substantial room for improvement. We hope that LongBoX facilitates the development of more effective long-sequence techniques for the medical domain. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/LongBoX.

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InstructABSA: Instruction Learning for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis

We introduce InstructABSA, an instruction learning paradigm for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) subtasks. Our method introduces positive, negative, and neutral examples to each training sample, and instruction tune the model (Tk-Instruct) for ABSA subtasks, yielding significant performance improvements. Experimental results on the Sem Eval 2014, 15, and 16 datasets demonstrate that InstructABSA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on Term Extraction (ATE), Sentiment Classification(ATSC) and Sentiment Pair Extraction (ASPE) subtasks. In particular, InstructABSA outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the Rest14 ATE subtask by 5.69% points, the Rest15 ATSC subtask by 9.59% points, and the Lapt14 AOPE subtask by 3.37% points, surpassing 7x larger models. We also get competitive results on AOOE, AOPE, and AOSTE subtasks indicating strong generalization ability to all subtasks. Exploring sample efficiency reveals that just 50% train data is required to get competitive results with other instruction tuning approaches. Lastly, we assess the quality of instructions and observe that InstructABSA's performance experiences a decline of ~10% when adding misleading examples.

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Accelerating LLaMA Inference by Enabling Intermediate Layer Decoding via Instruction Tuning with LITE

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of natural language tasks; however, their large size makes their inference slow and computationally expensive. Focusing on this problem, we propose to instruction tune LLMs with additional explicit losses from the intermediate layers (LITE) and show that it enables these layers to acquire 'good' generation ability without affecting the generation ability of the final layer. We perform 'dynamic confidence-based early exiting' at token level from the intermediate layers which improves the efficiency of text generation without compromising the quality of the generation. We conduct comprehensive experiments by instruction tuning LLaMA-2 models on the Alpaca dataset and holistically evaluate on four different human-instruction test sets. We show that dynamic early exiting achieves consistent and considerable inference computation cost improvements (37.86% for 7B and 46.35% for 13B model) while maintaining the generation quality of the responses. We further conduct a thorough analysis of the results over several important aspects, such as comparing the semantic similarity of the outputs and dissecting the efficiency improvements by comparing the number of tokens generated in the output. In summary, our work contributes to improving the efficiency of LLM inference while maintaining the generation quality, a crucial step en route to enabling their widespread adoption.

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Benchmarking Spatial Relationships in Text-to-Image Generation

Spatial understanding is a fundamental aspect of computer vision and integral for human-level reasoning about images, making it an important component for grounded language understanding. While recent text-to-image synthesis (T2I) models have shown unprecedented improvements in photorealism, it is unclear whether they have reliable spatial understanding capabilities. We investigate the ability of T2I models to generate correct spatial relationships among objects and present VISOR, an evaluation metric that captures how accurately the spatial relationship described in text is generated in the image. To benchmark existing models, we introduce a dataset, $\mathrm{SR}_{2D}$, that contains sentences describing two or more objects and the spatial relationships between them. We construct an automated evaluation pipeline to recognize objects and their spatial relationships, and employ it in a large-scale evaluation of T2I models. Our experiments reveal a surprising finding that, although state-of-the-art T2I models exhibit high image quality, they are severely limited in their ability to generate multiple objects or the specified spatial relations between them. Our analyses demonstrate several biases and artifacts of T2I models such as the difficulty with generating multiple objects, a bias towards generating the first object mentioned, spatially inconsistent outputs for equivalent relationships, and a correlation between object co-occurrence and spatial understanding capabilities. We conduct a human study that shows the alignment between VISOR and human judgement about spatial understanding. We offer the $\mathrm{SR}_{2D}$ dataset and the VISOR metric to the community in support of T2I reasoning research.

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InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel

With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the 'Automate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.

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Can NLP Models 'Identify', 'Distinguish', and 'Justify' Questions that Don't have a Definitive Answer?

Though state-of-the-art (SOTA) NLP systems have achieved remarkable performance on a variety of language understanding tasks, they primarily focus on questions that have a correct and a definitive answer. However, in real-world applications, users often ask questions that don't have a definitive answer. Incorrectly answering such questions certainly hampers a system's reliability and trustworthiness. Can SOTA models accurately identify such questions and provide a reasonable response? To investigate the above question, we introduce QnotA, a dataset consisting of five different categories of questions that don't have definitive answers. Furthermore, for each QnotA instance, we also provide a corresponding QA instance i.e. an alternate question that ''can be'' answered. With this data, we formulate three evaluation tasks that test a system's ability to 'identify', 'distinguish', and 'justify' QnotA questions. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that even SOTA models including GPT-3 and Flan T5 do not fare well on these tasks and lack considerably behind the human performance baseline. We conduct a thorough analysis which further leads to several interesting findings. Overall, we believe our work and findings will encourage and facilitate further research in this important area and help develop more robust models.

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Language-Conditioned Change-point Detection to Identify Sub-Tasks in Robotics Domains

In this work, we present an approach to identify sub-tasks within a demonstrated robot trajectory using language instructions. We identify these sub-tasks using language provided during demonstrations as guidance to identify sub-segments of a longer robot trajectory. Given a sequence of natural language instructions and a long trajectory consisting of image frames and discrete actions, we want to map an instruction to a smaller fragment of the trajectory. Unlike previous instruction following works which directly learn the mapping from language to a policy, we propose a language-conditioned change-point detection method to identify sub-tasks in a problem. Our approach learns the relationship between constituent segments of a long language command and corresponding constituent segments of a trajectory. These constituent trajectory segments can be used to learn subtasks or sub-goals for planning or options as demonstrated by previous related work. Our insight in this work is that the language-conditioned robot change-point detection problem is similar to the existing video moment retrieval works used to identify sub-segments within online videos. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate a $1.78_{\pm 0.82}\%$ improvement over a baseline approach in accurately identifying sub-tasks within a trajectory using our proposed method. Moreover, we present a comprehensive study investigating sample complexity requirements on learning this mapping, between language and trajectory sub-segments, to understand if the video retrieval-based methods are realistic in real robot scenarios.

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