AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing

| Total: 308

#1 Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Advancing Open-Source LLMs in Hindi and English [PDF31] [Copy] [Kimi10] [REL]

Authors: Avinash Anand, Kritarth Prasad, Chhavi Kirtani, Ashwin R Nair, Manvendra Kumar Nema, Raj Jaiswal, Rajiv Ratn Shah

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in linguistic tasks but struggle with mathematical reasoning, particularly in non- English languages like Hindi. This research aims to en- hance the mathematical reasoning skills of smaller, resource- efficient open-source LLMs in both Hindi and English. We evaluate models like OpenHathi 7B, LLaMA-2 7B, Wizard- Math 7B, Mistral 7B, LLeMMa 7B, MAmmoTH 7B, Gemini Pro, and GPT-4 using zero-shot, few-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) methods, and supervised fine-tuning. Our approach in- corporates curriculum learning, progressively training mod- els on increasingly difficult problems, a novel Decompo- sition Strategy to simplify complex arithmetic operations, and a Structured Solution Design that divides solutions into phases. Our experiments result in notable performance en- hancements. WizardMath 7B exceeds Gemini’s accuracy on English datasets by +6% and matches Gemini’s performance on Hindi datasets. Adopting a bilingual approach that com- bines English and Hindi samples achieves results comparable to individual language models, demonstrating the capability to learn mathematical reasoning in both languages. This re- search highlights the potential for improving mathematical reasoning in open-source LLMs.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#2 LightPROF: A Lightweight Reasoning Framework for Large Language Model on Knowledge Graph [PDF25] [Copy] [Kimi8] [REL]

Authors: Tu Ao, Yanhua Yu, Yuling Wang, Yang Deng, Zirui Guo, Liang Pang, Pinghui Wang, Tat-Seng Chua, Xiao Zhang, Zhen Cai

Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in text understanding and zero-shot reasoning. However, delays in knowledge updates may cause them to reason incorrectly or produce harmful results. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide rich and reliable contextual information for the reasoning process of LLMs by structurally organizing and connecting a wide range of entities and relations. Existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only inject KGs' knowledge into prompts in a textual form, ignoring its structural information. Moreover, they mostly rely on close-source models or open-source models with large parameters, which poses challenges to high resource consumption. To address this, we propose a novel Lightweight and efficient Prompt learning-ReasOning Framework for KGQA (LightPROF), which leverages the full potential of LLMs to tackle complex reasoning tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. Specifically, LightPROF follows a “Retrieve-Embed-Reason” process, first accurately, and stably retrieving the corresponding reasoning graph from the KG through retrieval module. Next, through a Transformer-based Knowledge Adapter, it finely extracts and integrates factual and structural information from the KG, then maps this information to the LLM’s token embedding space, creating an LLM-friendly prompt to be used by the LLM for the final reasoning. Additionally, LightPROF only requires training Knowledge Adapter and can be compatible with any open-source LLM. Extensive experiments on two public KGQA benchmarks demonstrate that LightPROF achieves superior performance with small-scale LLMs. Furthermore, LightPROF shows significant advantages in terms of input token count and reasoning time.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#3 MAGIC: Generating Self-Correction Guideline for In-Context Text-to-SQL [PDF19] [Copy] [Kimi6] [REL]

Authors: Arian Askari, Christian Poelitz, Xinye Tang

Self-correction in text-to-SQL is the process of prompting large language model (LLM) to revise its previously incorrectly generated SQL, and commonly relies on manually crafted self-correction guidelines by human experts that are not only labor-intensive to produce but also limited by the human ability in identifying all potential error patterns in LLM responses. We introduce MAGIC, a novel multi-agent method that automates the creation of the self-correction guideline. MAGIC uses three specialized agents: a manager, a correction, and a feedback agent. These agents collaborate on the failures of an LLM-based method on the training set to iteratively generate and refine a self-correction guideline tailored to LLM mistakes, mirroring human processes but without human involvement. Our extensive experiments show that MAGIC's guideline outperforms expert human's created ones. We empirically find out that the guideline produced by MAGIC enhances the interpretability of the corrections made, providing insights in analyzing the reason behind the failures and successes of LLMs in self-correction.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#4 Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Adaptively Constraining Information Flow [PDF16] [Copy] [Kimi3] [REL]

Authors: Jiaqi Bai, Hongcheng Guo, Zhongyuan Peng, Jian Yang, Zhoujun Li, Mohan Li, Zhihong Tian

Large vision-language models show tremendous potential in understanding visual information through human languages. However, they are prone to suffer from object hallucination, i.e., the generated image descriptions contain objects that do not exist in the image. In this paper, we reveal that object hallucination can be attributed to overconfidence in irrelevant visual features when soft visual tokens map to the LLM's word embedding space. Specifically, by figuring out the semantic similarity between visual tokens and LLM's word embedding, we observe that the smoothness of similarity distribution strongly correlates with the emergence of object hallucinations. To mitigate hallucinations, we propose using the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to alleviate overconfidence by introducing stochastic noise, facilitating the constraining of irrelevant information. Furthermore, we propose an entropy-based noise-controlling strategy to enable the injected noise to be adaptively constrained regarding the smoothness of the similarity distribution. We adapt the proposed AdaVIB across distinct model architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AdaVIB mitigates object hallucinations by effectively alleviating the overconfidence in irrelevant visual features, with consistent improvements on two object hallucination benchmarks.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#5 Enhancing NLU in Large Language Models Using Adversarial Noisy Instruction Tuning [PDF19] [Copy] [Kimi6] [REL]

Authors: Shengyuan Bai, Qibin Li, Zhe Wang, Nai Zhou, Nianmin Yao

Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective approach that notably improves large language models (LLMs) performance, showing particular promise in natural language generation tasks by producing more diverse, coherent, and task-relevant outputs. However, extending instruction tuning to natural language understanding (NLU) tasks presents significant challenges, primarily due to the difficulty in achieving high-precision responses and the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality instruction data necessary for effective tuning. In this work, we introduce Adversarial Noisy Instruction Tuning (ANIT) to improve NLU performance on LLMs. First, we leverage low-resource techniques to construct noisy instruction datasets. Second, we employ semantic distortion-aware techniques to quantify the intensity of noise within these instructions. Last, we devise an adversarial training method that incorporates a noise response strategy to achieve noisy instruction tuning. ANIT enhances LLMs capability to detect and accommodate semantic distortions in noisy instructions, thereby augmenting their comprehension of task objectives and ability to generate more accurate responses. We evaluate our approach across diverse noisy instructions and semantic distortion quantification methods on multiple NLU tasks. Comprehensive empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing approaches across various experimental settings.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#6 MP: Endowing Large Language Models with Lateral Thinking [PDF12] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Tian Bai, Yongwang Cao, Yan Ge, Haitao Yu

The recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) often fall short in tasks demanding creative, lateral thinking due to lacking a clear awareness of their own reasoning processes. To cope with this issue, we propose a novel metacognitive prompting method (titled as MP) by mimicking human metacognition. Through integrating metacognitive principles, MP endows LLMs with lateral thinking ability, thereby enhancing their abilities to strategize, monitor, and reflect on their responses when dealing with creative tasks. The experimental results with five base LLMs across three lateral thinking datasets demonstrate that: All LLMs armed with MP consistently outperform the representative baseline methods. For example, MP demonstrates superior performance over CoT prompting across Sentence Puzzle (+5.00%), Word Puzzle (+10.07%), BiRdQA (+6.48%), and RiddleSense (+2.65%) with GPT-3.5-turbo model. In particular, the deployment of MP with GPT-4 achieves significant performance improvements that even surpass human performance on BRAINTEASER benchmark, demonstrating the transformative potential of MP in enhancing the creative problem-solving abilities of LLMs.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#7 Multilingual LLMs Inherently Reward In-Language Time-Sensitive Semantic Alignment for Low-Resource Languages [PDF11] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Ashutosh Bajpai, Tanmoy Chakraborty

The unwavering disparity in labeled resources between resource-rich languages and those considered low-resource remains a significant impediment for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent strides in cross-lingual in-context learning (X-ICL), mainly through semantically aligned examples retrieved from multilingual pre-trained transformers, have shown promise in mitigating this issue. However, our investigation reveals that LLMs intrinsically reward in-language semantically aligned cross-lingual instances over direct cross-lingual semantic alignments, with a pronounced disparity in handling time–sensitive queries in the X-ICL setup. Such queries demand sound temporal reasoning ability from LLMs, yet the advancements have predominantly focused on English. This study aims to bridge this gap by improving temporal reasoning capabilities in low-resource languages. To this end, we introduce mTEMPREASON, a temporal reasoning dataset aimed at the varied degrees of low-resource languages and propose Cross-Lingual Time-Sensitive Semantic Alignment (CLiTSSA), a novel method to improve temporal reasoning in these contexts. To facilitate this, we construct an extension of mTEMPREASON comprising pairs of parallel cross–language temporal queries along with their anticipated in-language semantic similarity scores. Our empirical evidence underscores the superior performance of CLiTSSA compared to established baselines across three languages -- Romanian, German, and French, encompassing three temporal tasks and including a diverse set of four contemporaneous LLMs. This marks a significant step forward in addressing resource disparity in the context of temporal reasoning across languages.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#8 Text2midi: Generating Symbolic Music from Captions [PDF9] [Copy] [Kimi3] [REL]

Authors: Keshav Bhandari, Abhinaba Roy, Kyra Wang, Geeta Puri, Simon Colton, Dorien Herremans

This paper introduces text2midi, an end-to-end model to generate MIDI files from textual descriptions. Leveraging the growing popularity of multimodal generative approaches, text2midi capitalizes on the extensive availability of textual data and the success of large language models (LLMs). Our end-to-end system harnesses the power of LLMs to generate symbolic music in the form of MIDI files. Specifically, we utilize a pretrained LLM encoder to process captions, which then condition an autoregressive transformer decoder to produce MIDI sequences that accurately reflect the provided descriptions. This intuitive and user-friendly method significantly streamlines the music creation process by allowing users to generate music pieces using text prompts. We conduct comprehensive empirical evaluations, incorporating both automated and human studies, that show our model generates MIDI files of high quality that are indeed controllable by text captions that may include music theory terms such as chords, keys, and tempo.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#9 Leveraging the Dual Capabilities of LLM: LLM-Enhanced Text Mapping Model for Personality Detection [PDF16] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Weihong Bi, Feifei Kou, Lei Shi, Yawen Li, Haisheng Li, Jinpeng Chen, Mingying Xu

Personality detection aims to deduce a user’s personality from their published posts. The goal of this task is to map posts to specific personality types. Existing methods encode post information to obtain user vectors, which are then mapped to personality labels. However, existing methods face two main issues: first, only using small models makes it hard to accurately extract semantic features from multiple long documents. Second, the relationship between user vectors and personality labels is not fully considered. To address the issue of poor user representation, we utilize the text embedding capabilities of LLM. To solve the problem of insufficient consideration of the relationship between user vectors and personality labels, we leverage the text generation capabilities of LLM. Therefore, we propose the LLM-Enhanced Text Mapping Model (ETM) for Personality Detection. The model applies LLM’s text embedding capability to enhance user vector representations. Additionally, it uses LLM’s text generation capability to create multi-perspective interpretations of the labels, which are then used within a contrastive learning framework to strengthen the mapping of these vectors to personality labels. Experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#10 MEDSAGE: Enhancing Robustness of Medical Dialogue Summarization to ASR Errors with LLM-generated Synthetic Dialogues [PDF7] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Kuluhan Binici, Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap, Viktor Schlegel, Andy T. Liu, Vijay Prakash Dwivedi, Thanh-Tung Nguyen, Xiaoxue Gao, Nancy F. Chen, Stefan Winkler

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are pivotal in transcribing speech into text, yet the errors they introduce can significantly degrade the performance of downstream tasks like summarization. This issue is particularly pronounced in clinical dialogue summarization, a low-resource domain where supervised data for fine-tuning is scarce, necessitating the use of ASR models as black-box solutions. Employing conventional data augmentation for enhancing the noise robustness of summarization models is not feasible either due to the unavailability of sufficient medical dialogue audio recordings and corresponding ASR transcripts. To address this challenge, we propose MEDSAGE, an approach for generating synthetic samples for data augmentation using Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we leverage the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs and instruct them to generate ASR-like errors based on a few available medical dialogue examples with audio recordings. Experimental results show that LLMs can effectively model ASR noise, and incorporating this noisy data into the training process significantly improves the robustness and accuracy of medical dialogue summarization systems. This approach addresses the challenges of noisy ASR outputs in critical applications, offering a robust solution to enhance the reliability of clinical dialogue summarization.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#11 Approximated Variational Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Alignment [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi3] [REL]

Authors: Yuang Cai, Yuyu Yuan, Jinsheng Shi, Qinhong Lin

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for generating helpful and harmless content. Existing approaches leverage preference-based human feedback data to learn the reward function and align the LLM with the feedback data. However, these approaches focus on modeling the reward difference between the chosen and rejected demonstrations, rather than directly modeling the true reward from each demonstration. Moreover, these approaches assume that the reward is only obtained at the end of the sentence, which overlooks the modeling of intermediate rewards. These issues lead to insufficient use of training signals in the feedback data, limiting the representation and generalization ability of the reward and potentially resulting in reward hacking. In this paper, we formulate LLM alignment as a Bayesian Inverse Reinforcement Learning (BIRL) problem and propose a novel training objective, Approximated Variational Alignment (AVA), to perform LLM alignment through Approximated Variational Reward Imitation Learning (AVRIL). The BIRL formulation facilitates intermediate reward modeling and direct reward modeling on each individual demonstration, which enhances the utilization of training signals in the feedback data. Experiments show that AVA outperforms existing LLM alignment approaches in reward modeling, RL fine-tuning, and direct optimization.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#12 Enhancing Multi-Hop Fact Verification with Structured Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Models [PDF13] [Copy] [Kimi3] [REL]

Authors: Han Cao, Lingwei Wei, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu

The rapid development of social platforms exacerbates the dissemination of misinformation, which stimulates the research in fact verification. Recent studies tend to leverage semantic features to solve this problem as a single-hop task. However, the process of verifying a claim requires several pieces of evidence with complicated inner logic and relations to verify the given claim in real-world situations. Recent studies attempt to improve both understanding and reasoning abilities to enhance the performance, but they overlook the crucial relations between entities that benefit models to understand better and facilitate the prediction. To emphasize the significance of relations, we resort to Large Language Models (LLMs) considering their excellent understanding ability. Instead of other methods using LLMs as the predictor, we take them as relation extractors, for they do better in understanding rather than reasoning according to the experimental results. Thus, to solve the challenges above, we propose a novel Structured Knowledge-Augmented LLM-based Network (LLM-SKAN) for multi-hop fact verification. Specifically, we utilize an LLM-driven Knowledge Extractor to capture fine-grained information, including entities and their complicated relations. Besides, we leverage a Knowledge-Augmented Relation Graph Fusion module to interact with each node and learn better claim-evidence representations comprehensively. The experimental results on four common-used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#13 SCANS: Mitigating the Exaggerated Safety for LLMs via Safety-Conscious Activation Steering [PDF6] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Zouying Cao, Yifei Yang, Hai Zhao

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large language models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs tend to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue, limiting their helpfulness. In this paper, we propose a Safety-Conscious Activation Steering (SCANS) method to mitigate the exaggerated safety concerns in aligned LLMs. First, SCANS extracts the refusal steering vectors within the activation space and utilizes vocabulary projection to anchor some specific safety-critical layers which influence model refusal behavior. Second, by tracking the hidden state transition, SCANS identifies the steering direction and steers the model behavior accordingly, achieving a balance between exaggerated safety and adequate safety. Experiments show that SCANS achieves new state-of-the-art performance on XSTest and OKTest benchmarks, without impairing their defense capability against harmful queries and maintaining almost unchanged model capability.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#14 Sentence-level Aggregation of Lexical Metrics Correlates Stronger with Human Judgements than Corpus-level Aggregation [PDF5] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Paulo Cavalin, Pedro H. Domingues, Claudio Pinhanez

In this paper we show that corpus-level aggregation hinders considerably the capability of lexical metrics to accurately evaluate machine translation (MT) systems. With empirical experiments we demonstrate that averaging individual segment-level scores can make metrics such as BLEU and chrF correlate much stronger with human judgements and make them behave considerably more similar to neural metrics such as COMET and BLEURT. We show that this difference exists because corpus- and segment-level aggregation differs considerably owing to the classical average of ratio versus ratio of averages Mathematical problem. Moreover, as we also show, such difference affects considerably the statistical robustness of corpus-level aggregation. Considering that neural metrics currently only cover a small set of sufficiently-resourced languages, the results in this paper can help make the evaluation of MT systems for low-resource languages more trustworthy.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#15 CSL-L2M: Controllable Song-Level Lyric-to-Melody Generation Based on Conditional Transformer with Fine-Grained Lyric and Musical Controls [PDF8] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Li Chai, Donglin Wang

Lyric-to-melody generation is a highly challenging task in the field of AI music generation. Due to the difficulty of learning strict yet weak correlations between lyrics and melodies, previous methods have suffered from weak controllability, low-quality and poorly structured generation. To address these challenges, we propose CSL-L2M, a controllable song-level lyric-to-melody generation method based on an in-attention Transformer decoder with fine-grained lyric and musical controls, which is able to generate full-song melodies matched with the given lyrics and user-specified musical attributes. Specifically, we first introduce REMI-Aligned, a novel music representation that incorporates strict syllable- and sentence-level alignments between lyrics and melodies, facilitating precise alignment modeling. Subsequently, sentence-level semantic lyric embeddings independently extracted from a sentence-wise Transformer encoder are combined with word-level part-of-speech embeddings and syllable-level tone embeddings as fine-grained controls to enhance the controllability of lyrics over melody generation. Then we introduce human-labeled musical tags, sentence-level statistical musical attributes, and learned musical features extracted from a pre-trained VQ-VAE as coarse-grained, fine-grained and high-fidelity controls, respectively, to the generation process, thereby enabling user control over melody generation. Finally, an in-attention Transformer decoder technique is leveraged to exert fine-grained control over the full-song melody generation with the aforementioned lyric and musical conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed CSL-L2M outperforms the state-of-the-art models, generating melodies with higher quality, better controllability and enhanced structure.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#16 XCOT: Cross-lingual Instruction Tuning for Cross-lingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning [PDF8] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Tao Sun, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, Tongliang Li, Qiyao Peng, Zhoujun Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a powerful technique to elicit reasoning in large language models and improve a variety of downstream tasks. CoT mainly demonstrates excellent performance in English, but its usage in low-resource languages is constrained due to poor language generalization. To bridge the gap among different languages, we propose a cross-lingual instruction fine-tuning framework (xCoT) to transfer knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. Specifically, the multilingual instruction training data (xCoT-Instruct) is created to encourage the semantic alignment of multiple languages. We introduce cross-lingual in-context few-shot learning (xICL) to accelerate multilingual agreement in instruction tuning, where some fragments of source languages in examples are randomly substituted by their counterpart translations of target languages. During multilingual instruction tuning, we adopt the randomly online CoT strategy to enhance the multilingual reasoning ability of the large language model by first translating the query to another language and then answering in English. To further facilitate the language transfer, we leverage the high-resource CoT to supervise the training of low-resource languages with cross-lingual distillation. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of xCoT in reducing the gap among different languages, highlighting its potential to reduce the cross-lingual gap.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#17 Imitate Before Detect: Aligning Machine Stylistic Preference for Machine-Revised Text Detection [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Jiaqi Chen, Xiaoye Zhu, Tianyang Liu, Ying Chen, Chen Xinhui, Yiwen Yuan, Chak Tou Leong, Zuchao Li, Long Tang, Lei Zhang, Chenyu Yan, Guanghao Mei, Jie Zhang, Lefei Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized text generation, making detecting machine-generated text increasingly challenging. Although past methods have achieved good performance on detecting pure machine-generated text, those detectors have poor performance on distinguishing machine-revised text (rewriting, expansion, and polishing), which can have only minor changes from its original human prompt. As the content of text may originate from human prompts, detecting machine-revised text often involves identifying distinctive machine styles, e.g., worded favored by LLMs. However, existing methods struggle to detect machine-style phrasing hidden within the content contributed by humans. We propose the “Imitate Before Detect” (ImBD) approach, which first imitates the machine-style token distribution, and then compares the distribution of the text to be tested with the machine-style distribution to determine whether the text has been machine-revised. To this end, we introduce Style Preference Optimization (SPO), which aligns a scoring LLM model to the preference of text styles generated by machines. The aligned scoring model is then used to calculate the style-conditional probability curvature (Style-CPC), quantifying the log probability difference between the original and conditionally sampled texts for effective detection. We conduct extensive comparisons across various scenarios, encompassing text revisions by six LLMs, four distinct text domains, and three machine revision types. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, our method yields a 13% increase in AUC for detecting text revised by open-source LLMs, and improves performance by 5% and 19% for detecting GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o revised text, respectively. Notably, our method surpasses the commercially trained GPT-Zero with just 1,000 samples and five minutes of SPO, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#18 Affordances-Oriented Planning Using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation [PDF1] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Jiaqi Chen, Bingqian Lin, Xinmin Liu, Lin Ma, Xiaodan Liang, Kwan-Yee K. Wong

LLM-based agents have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance in vision-language navigation (VLN) task. However, existing LLM-based methods often focus only on solving high-level task planning by selecting nodes in predefined navigation graphs for movements, overlooking low-level control in navigation scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose AO-Planner, a novel Affordances-Oriented Planner for continuous VLN task. Our AO-Planner integrates various foundation models to achieve affordances-oriented low-level motion planning and high-level decision-making, both performed in a zero-shot setting. Specifically, we employ a Visual Affordances Prompting (VAP) approach, where the visible ground is segmented by SAM to provide navigational affordances, based on which the LLM selects potential candidate waypoints and plans low-level paths towards selected waypoints. We further propose a high-level PathAgent which marks planned paths into the image input and reasons the most probable path by comprehending all environmental information. Finally, we convert the selected path into 3D coordinates using camera intrinsic parameters and depth information, avoiding challenging 3D predictions for LLMs. Experiments on the challenging R2R-CE and RxR-CE datasets show that AO-Planner achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance (8.8% improvement on SPL). Our method can also serve as a data annotator to obtain pseudo-labels, distilling its waypoint prediction ability into a learning-based predictor. This new predictor does not require any waypoint data from the simulator and achieves 47% SR competing with supervised methods. We establish an effective connection between LLM and 3D world, presenting novel prospects for employing foundation models in low-level motion control.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#19 Putting People in LLMs’ Shoes: Generating Better Answers via Question Rewriter [PDF11] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Junhao Chen, Bowen Wang, Zhouqiang Jiang, Yuta Nakashima

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA). However, their effectiveness in QA is often undermined by the vagueness of user questions. To address this issue, we introduce single-round instance-level prompt optimization, referred to as question rewriter. By enhancing the intelligibility of human questions for black-box LLMs, our question rewriter improves the quality of generated answers. The rewriter is optimized using direct preference optimization based on feedback collected from automatic criteria for evaluating generated answers; therefore, its training does not require costly human annotations. The experiments across multiple black-box LLMs and long-form question answering (LFQA) datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method. This paper provides a practical framework for training question rewriters and sets a precedent for future explorations in prompt optimization within LFQA tasks.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#20 Enhancing Uncertainty Modeling with Semantic Graph for Hallucination Detection [PDF2] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Kedi Chen, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Xinqi Tao, Bowen Ding, Jingwen Xie, Mingchen Xie, Peilong Li, Zheng Feng

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination with non-factual or unfaithful statements, which undermines the applications in real-world scenarios. Recent researches focus on uncertainty-based hallucination detection, which utilizes the output probability of LLMs for uncertainty calculation and does not rely on external knowledge or frequent sampling from LLMs. Whereas, most approaches merely consider the uncertainty of each independent token, while the intricate semantic relations among tokens and sentences are not well studied, which limits the detection of hallucination that spans over multiple tokens and sentences in the passage. In this paper, we propose a method to enhance uncertainty modeling with semantic graph for hallucination detection. Specifically, we first construct a semantic graph that well captures the relations among entity tokens and sentences. Then, we incorporate the relations between two entities for uncertainty propagation to enhance sentence-level hallucination detection. Given that hallucination occurs due to the conflict between sentences, we further present a graph-based uncertainty calibration method that integrates the contradiction probability of the sentence with its neighbors in the semantic graph for uncertainty calculation. Extensive experiments on two datasets show the great advantages of our proposed approach. In particular, we obtain substantial improvements with 19.78% in passage-level hallucination detection.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#21 Identifying Query-Relevant Neurons in Large Language Models for Long-Form Texts [PDF2] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Lihu Chen, Adam Dejl, Francesca Toni

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess vast amounts of knowledge within their parameters, prompting research into methods for locating and editing this knowledge. Previous work has largely focused on locating entity-related (often single-token) facts in smaller models. However, several key questions remain unanswered: (1) How can we effectively locate query-relevant neurons in contemporary autoregressive LLMs, such as Llama and Mistral? (2) How can we address the challenge of long-form text generation? (3) Are there localized knowledge regions in LLMs? In this study, we introduce Query-Relevant Neuron Cluster Attribution (QRNCA), a novel architecture-agnostic framework capable of identifying query-relevant neurons in LLMs. QRNCA allows for the examination of long-form answers beyond triplet facts by employing the proxy task of multi-choice question answering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our detected neurons, we build two multi-choice QA datasets spanning diverse domains and languages. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods significantly. Further, analysis of neuron distributions reveals the presence of visible localized regions, particularly within different domains. Finally, we show potential applications of our detected neurons in knowledge editing and neuron-based prediction.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#22 Towards Efficient Low-Order Hybrid Optimizer for Language Model Fine-Tuning [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi1] [REL]

Authors: Minping Chen, You-Liang Huang, Zeyi Wen

As the size of language models notably grows, fine-tuning the models becomes more challenging: fine-tuning with first-order optimizers (e.g., SGD and Adam) requires high memory consumption, while fine-tuning with a memory-efficient zeroth-order optimizer (MeZO) has a significant accuracy drop and slower convergence rate. In this work, we propose a Low order Hybrid Optimizer (LoHO) which merges zeroth-order (ZO) and first-order (FO) optimizers for fine-tuning. LoHO is empowered with inter-layer hybrid optimization and intra-layer hybrid optimization, which boosts the accuracy of MeZO while keeping memory usage within a budget. The inter-layer hybrid optimization exploits the FO optimizer in deep layers and the ZO optimizer in shallow ones, therefore avoiding unnecessary gradient propagation to improve memory efficiency. The intra-layer hybrid optimization updates a proportion of parameters in a layer by the ZO optimizer, and the rest by the FO optimizer, taking advantage of gradient sparsity for high efficiency implementation. Our experimental results across common datasets on different pre-trained backbones (i.e., RoBERTa-large, OPT-13B and OPT-30B) demonstrate that LoHO can significantly improve the predictive accuracy and convergence rate of MeZO, while controlling the memory footprint during fine-tuning. Moreover, LoHO can achieve comparable performance with first-order fine-tuning using substantially fewer memory resources.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#23 Practical Offloading for Fine-Tuning LLM on Commodity GPU via Learned Sparse Projectors [PDF3] [Copy] [Kimi2] [REL]

Authors: Siyuan Chen, Zhuofeng Wang, Zelong Guan, Yudong Liu, Phillip B. Gibbons

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) requires significant memory, often exceeding the capacity of a single GPU. A common solution to this memory challenge is offloading compute and data from the GPU to the CPU. However, this approach is hampered by the limited bandwidth of commodity hardware, which constrains communication between the CPU and GPU, and by slower matrix multiplications on the CPU. In this paper, we present an offloading framework, LSP-Offload, that enables near-native speed LLM fine-tuning on commodity hardware through learned sparse projectors. Our data-driven approach involves learning efficient sparse compressors that minimize communication with minimal precision loss. Additionally, we introduce a novel layer-wise communication schedule to maximize parallelism between communication and computation. As a result, our framework can fine-tune a 1.3 billion parameter model on a 4GB laptop GPU and a 6.7 billion parameter model on an NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU with 24GB memory. Compared to state-of-the-art offloading frameworks, our approach reduces end-to-end fine-tuning time by 33.1%-62.5% when converging to the same accuracy.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#24 Small Language Model Makes an Effective Long Text Extractor [PDF9] [Copy] [Kimi4] [REL]

Authors: Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Jie Tang

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental problem in natural language processing (NLP). However, the task of extracting longer entity spans (e.g., awards) from extended texts (e.g., homepages) is barely explored. Current NER methods predominantly fall into two categories: span-based methods and generation-based methods. Span-based methods require the enumeration of all possible token-pair spans, followed by classification on each span, resulting in substantial redundant computations and excessive GPU memory usage. In contrast, generation-based methods involve prompting or fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to downstream NER tasks. However, these methods struggle with the accurate generation of longer spans and often incur significant time costs for effective finetuning. To address these challenges, this paper introduces a lightweight span-based NER method called SeNER, which incorporates a bidirectional arrow attention mechanism coupled with LogN-Scaling on the [CLS] token to embed long texts effectively, and comprises a novel bidirectional sliding-window plus-shaped attention (BiSPA) mechanism to reduce redundant candidate token-pair spans significantly and model interactions between token-pair spans simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art extraction accuracy on three long NER datasets and is capable of extracting entities from long texts in a GPU-memory-friendly manner.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing


#25 Against All Odds: Overcoming Typology, Script, and Language Confusion in Multilingual Embedding Inversion Attacks [PDF4] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Yiyi Chen, Russa Biswas, Heather Lent, Johannes Bjerva

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious influence by cyber attackers through intrusions such as adversarial, backdoor, and embedding inversion attacks. In response, the burgeoning field of LLM Security aims to study and defend against such threats. Thus far, the majority of works in this area have focused on monolingual English models; however, emerging research suggests that multilingual LLMs may be more vulnerable to various attacks than their monolingual counterparts. While previous work has investigated embedding inversion over a small subset of European languages, it is challenging to extrapolate these findings to languages from different linguistic families and with differing scripts. To this end, we explore the security of multilingual LLMs in the context of embedding inversion attacks and investigate cross-lingual and cross-script inversion across 20 languages, spanning over 8 language families and 12 scripts. Our findings indicate that languages written in Arabic and Cyrillic scripts are particularly vulnerable to embedding inversion, as are languages within the Indo-Aryan language family. We further observe that inversion models tend to suffer from language confusion, sometimes significantly reducing the efficacy of an attack. Accordingly, we systematically explore this bottleneck for inversion models, uncovering predictable patterns attackers could leverage. Ultimately, this study aims to further the field's understanding of the outstanding security vulnerabilities facing multilingual LLMs and raise awareness for the languages most at risk of negative impact from these attacks.

Subject: AAAI.2025 - Natural Language Processing