24 accepted papers
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of processing long inputs and locating specific information within them, as evidenced by their performance on the Needle in a Haystack (NIAH) test. However, while models excel at recalling surprising information, they still struggle to identify c…
Humor is prevalent in online communications and it often relies on more than one modality (e.g., cartoons and memes).Interpreting humor in multimodal settings requires drawing on diverse types of knowledge, including metaphorical, sociocultural, and commonsense knowledge. However, identifying the mo…
We present Impossible Distillation, a novel framework for paraphrasing and sentence summarization, that distills a high-quality dataset and model from a low-quality teacher that itself cannot perform these tasks. Unlike prior works that rely on an extreme-scale teacher model (e.g., GPT3) or task-spe…
The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would challenge or exceed the capabilities even of expert humans. At the s…
Human values are crucial to human decision-making. Value pluralism is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering lying to a friend to protect their feelings, how does one balance honesty with friendship?). As statistical learners, AI systems…
Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This begs the question: Are these errors incidental, or do they si…
Sequence generation applications require satisfying semantic constraints, such as ensuring that programs are correct, using certain keywords, or avoiding undesirable content. Language models, whether fine-tuned or prompted with few-shot demonstrations, frequently violate these constraints, and lack…
Commonsense capabilities of pre-trained language models dramatically improve with scale, leading many to believe that scale is the only winning recipe. But is it? Here, we investigate an alternative that a priori seems impossible: can smaller language models (e.g., GPT-2) win over models that are or…
While extreme-scale language models have demonstrated exceptional performance on a variety of language tasks, the degree of control over these language models through pure prompting can often be limited. Directly fine-tuning such language models can be effective for tailoring them, but it can be eit…
Instruction following vision-language (VL) models offer a flexible interface that supports a broad range of multimodal tasks in a zero-shot fashion. However, interfaces that operate on full images do not directly enable the user to “point to" and access specific regions within images. This capabilit…
Theory of Mind (ToM)—the ability to reason about the mental states of other people—is a key element of our social intelligence. Yet, despite their ever more impressive performance, large-scale neural language models still lack basic theory of mind capabilities out-of-the-box. We posit that simply sc…
We present NovaCOMET, an open commonsense knowledge model, that combines the best aspects of knowledge and general task models. Compared to previous knowledge models, NovaCOMET allows open-format relations enabling direct application to reasoning tasks; compared to general task models like Flan-T5,…
Data scarcity has been a long standing issue in the field of open-domain social dialogue. To quench this thirst, we present SODA: the first publicly available, million-scale high-quality social dialogue dataset. By contextualizing social commonsense knowledge from a knowledge graph, we are able to d…
Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language models are increasingly employed as dialogue interfaces and wr…
It remains an open question whether incorporating external knowledge benefits commonsense reasoning while maintaining the flexibility of pretrained sequence models. To investigate this question, we develop generated knowledge prompting, which consists of generating knowledge from a language model, t…
The dominant paradigm for neural text generation is left-to-right decoding from autoregressive language models. Constrained or controllable generation under complex lexical constraints, however, requires foresight to plan ahead feasible future paths. Drawing inspiration from the A* search algorithm,…
Despite recent success, large neural models often generate factually incorrect text. Compounding this is the lack of a standard automatic evaluation for factuality–it cannot be meaningfully improved if it cannot be measured. Grounded generation promises a path to solving both of these problems: mode…
Large-scale language models often learn behaviors that are misaligned with user expectations. Generated text may contain offensive or toxic language, contain significant repetition, or be of a different sentiment than desired by the user. We consider the task of unlearning these misalignments by fin…
We present Referee, a novel framework for sentence summarization that can be trained reference-free (i.e., requiring no gold summaries for supervision), while allowing direct control for compression ratio. Our work is the first to demonstrate that reference-free, controlled sentence summarization is…
Neural sequence models trained with maximum likelihood estimation have led to breakthroughs in many tasks, where success is defined by the gap between training and test performance. However, their ability to achieve stronger forms of generalization remains unclear. We consider the problem of symboli…
The common practice for training commonsense models has gone from–human–to–corpus–to–machine: humans author commonsense knowledge graphs in order to train commonsense models. In this work, we investigate an alternative, from–machine–to–corpus–to–machine: general language models author these commonse…
Conditional text generation often requires lexical constraints, i.e., which words should or shouldn’t be included in the output text. While the dominant recipe for conditional text generation has been large-scale pretrained language models that are finetuned on the task-specific training data, such…
Publicly available, large pretrained Language Models (LMs) generate text with remarkable quality, but only sequentially from left to right. As a result, they are not immediately applicable to generation tasks that break the unidirectional assumption, such as paraphrasing or text-infilling, necessita…
Large language models have shown promising results in zero-shot settings. For example, they can perform multiple choice tasks simply by conditioning on a question and selecting the answer with the highest probability. However, ranking by string probability can be problematic due to surface form comp…