Ontology-Constrained Generation of Domain-Specific Clinical Summaries

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising solutions for text summarization. However, some domains require specific information to be available in the summaries. Generating these domain-adapted summaries is still an open challenge. Similarly, hallucinations in generated content is a major drawback of current approaches, preventing their deployment. This study proposes a novel approach that leverages ontologies to create domain-adapted summaries both structured and unstructured. We employ an ontology-guided constrained decoding process to reduce hallucinations while improving relevance. When applied to the medical domain, our method shows potential in summarizing Electronic Health Records (EHRs) across different specialties, allowing doctors to focus on the most relevant information to their domain. Evaluation on the MIMIC-III dataset demonstrates improvements in generating domain-adapted summaries of clinical notes and hallucination reduction.

Combining Domain and Alignment Vectors to Achieve Better Knowledge-Safety Trade-offs in LLMs

There is a growing interest in training domain-expert LLMs that excel in specific technical fields compared to their general-purpose instruction-tuned counterparts. However, these expert models often experience a loss in their safety abilities in the process, making them capable of generating harmful content. As a solution, we introduce an efficient and effective merging-based alignment method called \textsc{MergeAlign} that interpolates the domain and alignment vectors, creating safer domain-specific models while preserving their utility. We apply \textsc{MergeAlign} on Llama3 variants that are experts in medicine and finance, obtaining substantial alignment improvements with minimal to no degradation on domain-specific benchmarks. We study the impact of model merging through model similarity metrics and contributions of individual models being merged. We hope our findings open new research avenues and inspire more efficient development of safe expert LLMs.

GeoCoder: Solving Geometry Problems by Generating Modular Code through Vision-Language Models

Geometry problem-solving demands advanced reasoning abilities to process multimodal inputs and employ mathematical knowledge effectively. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in various multimodal tasks. Yet, they still struggle with geometry problems and are significantly limited by their inability to perform mathematical operations not seen during pre-training, such as calculating the cosine of an arbitrary angle, and by difficulties in correctly applying relevant geometry formulas. To overcome these challenges, we present GeoCoder, which leverages modular code-finetuning to generate and execute code using a predefined geometry function library. By executing the code, we achieve accurate and deterministic calculations, contrasting the stochastic nature of autoregressive token prediction, while the function library minimizes errors in formula usage. We also propose a multimodal retrieval-augmented variant of GeoCoder, named RAG-GeoCoder, which incorporates a non-parametric memory module for retrieving functions from the geometry library, thereby reducing reliance on parametric memory. Our modular code-finetuning approach enhances the geometric reasoning capabilities of VLMs, yielding an average improvement of over 16% across various question complexities on the GeomVerse dataset compared to other finetuning methods.

A Deep Dive into the Trade-Offs of Parameter-Efficient Preference Alignment Techniques

Large language models are first pre-trained on trillions of tokens and then instruction-tuned or aligned to specific preferences. While pre-training remains out of reach for most researchers due to the compute required, fine-tuning has become affordable thanks to parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA and QLoRA. Alignment is known to be sensitive to the many factors involved, including the quantity and quality of data, the alignment method, and the adapter rank. However, there has not yet been an extensive study of their effect on downstream performance. To address this gap, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the impact of popular choices for three crucial axes: (i) the alignment dataset (HH-RLHF and BeaverTails), (ii) the alignment technique (SFT and DPO), and (iii) the model (LLaMA-1, Vicuna-v1.3, Mistral-7b, and Mistral-7b-Instruct). Our extensive setup spanning over 300 experiments reveals consistent trends and unexpected findings. We observe how more informative data helps with preference alignment, cases where supervised fine-tuning outperforms preference optimization, and how aligning to a distinct preference boosts performance on downstream tasks. Through our in-depth analyses, we put forward key guidelines to help researchers perform more effective parameter-efficient LLM alignment.

A Comprehensive Evaluation of the Copy Mechanism for Natural Language to SPARQL Query Generation

In recent years, the field of neural machine translation (NMT) for SPARQL query generation has witnessed a significant growth. Recently, the incorporation of the copy mechanism with traditional encoder-decoder architectures and the use of pre-trained encoder-decoders have set new performance benchmarks. This paper presents a large variety of experiments that replicate and expand upon recent NMT-based SPARQL generation studies, comparing pre-trained and non-pre-trained models, question annotation formats, and the use of a copy mechanism for non-pre-trained and pre-trained models. Our results show that either adding the copy mechanism or using a question annotation improves performances for nonpre-trained models and for pre-trained models, setting new baselines for three popular datasets.

A Copy Mechanism for Handling Knowledge Base Elements in SPARQL Neural Machine Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models from English to SPARQL are a promising development for SPARQL query generation. However, current architectures are unable to integrate the knowledge base (KB) schema and handle questions on knowledge resources, classes, and properties unseen during training, rendering them unusable outside the scope of topics covered in the training set. Inspired by the performance gains in natural language processing tasks, we propose to integrate a copy mechanism for neural SPARQL query generation as a way to tackle this issue. We illustrate our proposal by adding a copy layer and a dynamic knowledge base vocabulary to two Seq2Seq architectures (CNNs and Transformers). This layer makes the models copy KB elements directly from the questions, instead of generating them. We evaluate our approach on state-of-the-art datasets, including datasets referencing unknown KB elements and measure the accuracy of the copy-augmented architectures. Our results show a considerable increase in performance on all datasets compared to non-copy architectures.

Local Structure Matters Most in Most Languages

Many recent perturbation studies have found unintuitive results on what does and does not matter when performing Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks in English. Coding properties, such as the order of words, can often be removed through shuffling without impacting downstream performances. Such insight may be used to direct future research into English NLP models. As many improvements in multilingual settings consist of wholesale adaptation of English approaches, it is important to verify whether those studies replicate or not in multilingual settings. In this work, we replicate a study on the importance of local structure, and the relative unimportance of global structure, in a multilingual setting. We find that the phenomenon observed on the English language broadly translates to over 120 languages, with a few caveats.

Detecting Languages Unintelligible to Multilingual Models through Local Structure Probes

Providing better language tools for low-resource and endangered languages is imperative for equitable growth. Recent progress with massively multilingual pretrained models has proven surprisingly effective at performing zero-shot transfer to a wide variety of languages. However, this transfer is not universal, with many languages not currently understood by multilingual approaches. It is estimated that only 72 languages possess a "small set of labeled datasets" on which we could test a model's performance, the vast majority of languages not having the resources available to simply evaluate performances on. In this work, we attempt to clarify which languages do and do not currently benefit from such transfer. To that end, we develop a general approach that requires only unlabelled text to detect which languages are not well understood by a cross-lingual model. Our approach is derived from the hypothesis that if a model's understanding is insensitive to perturbations to text in a language, it is likely to have a limited understanding of that language. We construct a cross-lingual sentence similarity task to evaluate our approach empirically on 350, primarily low-resource, languages.

Demystifying Neural Language Models' Insensitivity to Word-Order

Recent research analyzing the sensitivity of natural language understanding models to word-order perturbations have shown that the state-of-the-art models in several language tasks may have a unique way to understand the text that could seldom be explained with conventional syntax and semantics. In this paper, we investigate the insensitivity of natural language models to word-order by quantifying perturbations and analysing their effect on neural models' performance on language understanding tasks in GLUE benchmark. Towards that end, we propose two metrics - the Direct Neighbour Displacement (DND) and the Index Displacement Count (IDC) - that score the local and global ordering of tokens in the perturbed texts and observe that perturbation functions found in prior literature affect only the global ordering while the local ordering remains relatively unperturbed. We propose perturbations at the granularity of sub-words and characters to study the correlation between DND, IDC and the performance of neural language models on natural language tasks. We find that neural language models - pretrained and non-pretrained Transformers, LSTMs, and Convolutional architectures - require local ordering more so than the global ordering of tokens. The proposed metrics and the suite of perturbations allow a systematic way to study the (in)sensitivity of neural language understanding models to varying degree of perturbations.

MLMLM: Link Prediction with Mean Likelihood Masked Language Model

Knowledge Bases (KBs) are easy to query, verifiable, and interpretable. They however scale with man-hours and high-quality data. Masked Language Models (MLMs), such as BERT, scale with computing power as well as unstructured raw text data. The knowledge contained within those models is however not directly interpretable. We propose to perform link prediction with MLMs to address both the KBs scalability issues and the MLMs interpretability issues. To do that we introduce MLMLM, Mean Likelihood Masked Language Model, an approach comparing the mean likelihood of generating the different entities to perform link prediction in a tractable manner. We obtain State of the Art (SotA) results on the WN18RR dataset and the best non-entity-embedding based results on the FB15k-237 dataset. We also obtain convincing results on link prediction on previously unseen entities, making MLMLM a suitable approach to introducing new entities to a KB.