27 accepted papers
At the forefront of state-of-the-art human alignment methods are preference optimization methods (*PO). Prior research has often concentrated on identifying the best-performing method, typically involving a grid search over hyperparameters, which can be impractical for general practitioners. In this…
Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and, at its core, reward modeling have become a crucial part of training powerful large language models (LLMs). One commonly overlooked factor in training high-quality reward models (RMs) is the effect of the base model, which is becoming more challe
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has unlocked diverse opportunities across domains and applications but has also raised concerns about their tendency to generate harmful responses under jailbreak attacks. However, most existing jailbreak strategies are single-turn with explicit…
The efficacy of neural “retrieve and generate” systems is well established for question answering (QA) over unstructured text. Recent efforts seek to extend this approach to knowledge graph (KG) QA by converting structured triples to unstructured text. However, the relevance of KG triples retrieved…
High-quality conversational datasets are essential for developing AI models that can communicate with users.One way to foster deeper interactions between a chatbot and its user is through *personas*, aspects of the user’s character that provide insights into their personality, motivations, and behav…
According to WWF, 1.1 billion people lack access to water, and 2.7 billion experience water scarcity at least one month a year. By 2025, two-thirds of the world's population may be facing water shortages. This highlights the urgency of managing water usage efficiently, especially in water-intensive…
While multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have shown significant progress across popular visual reasoning benchmarks, whether they possess abstract visual reasoning abilities remains an open question. Similar to the Sudoku puzzles, abstract visual reasoning (AVR) problems require finding high-…
One of the prominent issues stifling the current generation of large language models is their limited context length. Recent proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude 2 have introduced longer context lengths, 8k/32k and 100k, respectively; however, despite the efforts in the community, most common…
We introduce SELF-DISCOVER, a general framework for LLMs to self-discover the task-intrinsic reasoning structures to tackle complex reasoning problems that are challenging for typical prompting methods. Core to the framework is a self-discovery process where LLMs select multiple atomic reasoning mod…
Toxic language, such as hate speech, can deter users from participating in online communities and enjoying popular platforms. Previous approaches to detecting toxic language and norm violations have been primarily concerned with conversations from online forums and social media, such as Reddit and T…
We propose a novel task, G4C, to study teacher-student natural language interactions in a goal-driven and grounded environment. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a role-playing game, provides an ideal setting to investigate such interactions. Here, the Dungeon Master (DM), i.e., the teacher, guides the ac…
Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the limitations of such a tokenization strategy, particularly for do…
Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in NLP significantly, deploying them for downstream applications is still challenging due to cost, responsiveness, control, or concerns around privacy and security. As such, trainable models are still the preferred option in so…
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) forecasting benchmarks challenge models to predict future facts using knowledge of past facts. In this paper, we develop an approach to use in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) for TKG forecasting. Our extensive evaluation compares diverse baseli…
Task transfer, transferring knowledge contained in related tasks, holds the promise of reducing the quantity of labeled data required to fine-tune language models. Dialogue understanding encompasses many diverse tasks, yet task transfer has not been thoroughly studied in conversational AI. This work…
Recent advances in prompt-based learning have shown strong results on few-shot text classification by using cloze-style templates. Similar attempts have been made on named entity recognition (NER) which manually design templates to predict entity types for every text span in a sentence. However, suc…
Pre-trained language models are still far from human performance in tasks that need understanding of properties (e.g. appearance, measurable quantity) and affordances of everyday objects in the real world since the text lacks such information due to reporting bias. In this work, we study whether int…
Human communication relies on common ground (CG), the mutual knowledge and beliefs shared by participants, to produce coherent and interesting conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate that current response generation (RG) models produce generic and dull responses in dialogues because they act re…
Implicit knowledge, such as common sense, is key to fluid human conversations. Current neural response generation (RG) models are trained to generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. In this paper, we present Think-Before-Speaking (TBS), a generative approach to first extern…
Tables of data are used to record vast amounts of socioeconomic, scientific, and governmental information. Although humans create tables using underlying organizational principles, unfortunately AI systems struggle to understand the contents of these tables. This paper introduces an end-to-end syste…
Warning: this paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting. Commonsense knowledge bases (CSKB) are increasingly used for various natural language processing tasks. Since CSKBs are mostly human-generated and may reflect societal biases, it is important to ensure that such biases are not…
Specialized number representations in NLP have shown improvements on numerical reasoning tasks like arithmetic word problems and masked number prediction. But humans also use numeracy to make better sense of world concepts, e.g., you can seat 5 people in your ‘room’ but not 500. Does a better grasp…
Humans use commonsense reasoning (CSR) implicitly to produce natural and coherent responses in conversations. Aiming to close the gap between current response generation (RG) models and human communication abilities, we want to understand why RG models respond as they do by probing RG model’s unders…
Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved impressive performance on commonsense inference benchmarks, but their ability to employ commonsense to make robust inferences, which is crucial for effective communications with humans, is debated. In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communica…
NLP systems rarely give special consideration to numbers found in text. This starkly contrasts with the consensus in neuroscience that, in the brain, numbers are represented differently from words. We arrange recent NLP work on numeracy into a comprehensive taxonomy of tasks and methods. We break do…
Error detection is one of the most important steps in data cleaning and usually requires extensive human interaction to ensure quality. Existing supervised methods in error detection require a significant amount of training data while unsupervised methods rely on fixed inductive biases, which are us…
Tables provide valuable knowledge that can be used to verify textual statements. While a number of works have considered table-based fact verification, direct alignments of tabular data with tokens in textual statements are rarely available. Moreover, training a generalized fact verification model r…