Evaluating Language Models as Synthetic Data Generators

Given the increasing use of synthetic data in language model (LM) post-training, an LM's ability to generate high-quality data has become nearly as crucial as its ability to solve problems directly. While prior works have focused on developing effective data generation methods, they lack systematic comparison of different LMs as data generators in a unified setting. To address this gap, we propose AgoraBench, a benchmark that provides standardized settings and metrics to evaluate LMs' data generation abilities. Through synthesizing 1.26 million training instances using 6 LMs and training 99 student models, we uncover key insights about LMs' data generation capabilities. First, we observe that LMs exhibit distinct strengths. For instance, GPT-4o excels at generating new problems, while Claude-3.5-Sonnet performs better at enhancing existing ones. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that an LM's data generation ability doesn't necessarily correlate with its problem-solving ability. Instead, multiple intrinsic features of data quality-including response quality, perplexity, and instruction difficulty-collectively serve as better indicators. Finally, we demonstrate that strategic choices in output format and cost-conscious model selection significantly impact data generation effectiveness.

AgentQuest: A Modular Benchmark Framework to Measure Progress and Improve LLM Agents

The advances made by Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the pursuit of LLM agents that can solve intricate, multi-step reasoning tasks. As with any research pursuit, benchmarking and evaluation are key corner stones to efficient and reliable progress. However, existing benchmarks are often narrow and simply compute overall task success. To face these issues, we propose AgentQuest -- a framework where (i) both benchmarks and metrics are modular and easily extensible through well documented and easy-to-use APIs; (ii) we offer two new evaluation metrics that can reliably track LLM agent progress while solving a task. We exemplify the utility of the metrics on two use cases wherein we identify common failure points and refine the agent architecture to obtain a significant performance increase. Together with the research community, we hope to extend AgentQuest further and therefore we make it available under https://github.com/nec-research/agentquest.

Walking a Tightrope -- Evaluating Large Language Models in High-Risk Domains

High-risk domains pose unique challenges that require language models to provide accurate and safe responses. Despite the great success of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and its variants, their performance in high-risk domains remains unclear. Our study delves into an in-depth analysis of the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs, focusing on factual accuracy and safety adherence. To comprehensively assess the capabilities of LLMs, we conduct experiments on six NLP datasets including question answering and summarization tasks within two high-risk domains: legal and medical. Further qualitative analysis highlights the existing limitations inherent in current LLMs when evaluating in high-risk domains. This underscores the essential nature of not only improving LLM capabilities but also prioritizing the refinement of domain-specific metrics, and embracing a more human-centric approach to enhance safety and factual reliability. Our findings advance the field toward the concerns of properly evaluating LLMs in high-risk domains, aiming to steer the adaptability of LLMs in fulfilling societal obligations and aligning with forthcoming regulations, such as the EU AI Act.

Linking Surface Facts to Large-Scale Knowledge Graphs

Open Information Extraction (OIE) methods extract facts from natural language text in the form of ("subject"; "relation"; "object") triples. These facts are, however, merely surface forms, the ambiguity of which impedes their downstream usage; e.g., the surface phrase "Michael Jordan" may refer to either the former basketball player or the university professor. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the other hand, contain facts in a canonical (i.e., unambiguous) form, but their coverage is limited by a static schema (i.e., a fixed set of entities and predicates). To bridge this gap, we need the best of both worlds: (i) high coverage of free-text OIEs, and (ii) semantic precision (i.e., monosemy) of KGs. In order to achieve this goal, we propose a new benchmark with novel evaluation protocols that can, for example, measure fact linking performance on a granular triple slot level, while also measuring if a system has the ability to recognize that a surface form has no match in the existing KG. Our extensive evaluation of several baselines show that detection of out-of-KG entities and predicates is more difficult than accurate linking to existing ones, thus calling for more research efforts on this difficult task. We publicly release all resources (data, benchmark and code) on https://github.com/nec-research/fact-linking.

Large Language Models Enable Few-Shot Clustering

Unlike traditional unsupervised clustering, semi-supervised clustering allows users to provide meaningful structure to the data, which helps the clustering algorithm to match the user's intent. Existing approaches to semi-supervised clustering require a significant amount of feedback from an expert to improve the clusters. In this paper, we ask whether a large language model can amplify an expert's guidance to enable query-efficient, few-shot semi-supervised text clustering. We show that LLMs are surprisingly effective at improving clustering. We explore three stages where LLMs can be incorporated into clustering: before clustering (improving input features), during clustering (by providing constraints to the clusterer), and after clustering (using LLMs post-correction). We find incorporating LLMs in the first two stages can routinely provide significant improvements in cluster quality, and that LLMs enable a user to make trade-offs between cost and accuracy to produce desired clusters. We release our code and LLM prompts for the public to use.

Uncertainty Propagation in Node Classification

Quantifying predictive uncertainty of neural networks has recently attracted increasing attention. In this work, we focus on measuring uncertainty of graph neural networks (GNNs) for the task of node classification. Most existing GNNs model message passing among nodes. The messages are often deterministic. Questions naturally arise: Does there exist uncertainty in the messages? How could we propagate such uncertainty over a graph together with messages? To address these issues, we propose a Bayesian uncertainty propagation (BUP) method, which embeds GNNs in a Bayesian modeling framework, and models predictive uncertainty of node classification with Bayesian confidence of predictive probability and uncertainty of messages. Our method proposes a novel uncertainty propagation mechanism inspired by Gaussian models. Moreover, we present an uncertainty oriented loss for node classification that allows the GNNs to clearly integrate predictive uncertainty in learning procedure. Consequently, the training examples with large predictive uncertainty will be penalized. We demonstrate the BUP with respect to prediction reliability and out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions. The learned uncertainty is also analyzed in depth. The relations between uncertainty and graph topology, as well as predictive uncertainty in the OOD cases are investigated with extensive experiments. The empirical results with popular benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

State-Regularized Recurrent Neural Networks to Extract Automata and Explain Predictions

Recurrent neural networks are a widely used class of neural architectures. They have, however, two shortcomings. First, they are often treated as black-box models and as such it is difficult to understand what exactly they learn as well as how they arrive at a particular prediction. Second, they tend to work poorly on sequences requiring long-term memorization, despite having this capacity in principle. We aim to address both shortcomings with a class of recurrent networks that use a stochastic state transition mechanism between cell applications. This mechanism, which we term state-regularization, makes RNNs transition between a finite set of learnable states. We evaluate state-regularized RNNs on (1) regular languages for the purpose of automata extraction; (2) non-regular languages such as balanced parentheses and palindromes where external memory is required; and (3) real-word sequence learning tasks for sentiment analysis, visual object recognition and text categorisation. We show that state-regularization (a) simplifies the extraction of finite state automata that display an RNN's state transition dynamic; (b) forces RNNs to operate more like automata with external memory and less like finite state machines, which potentiality leads to a more structural memory; (c) leads to better interpretability and explainability of RNNs by leveraging the probabilistic finite state transition mechanism over time steps.

Multi-Source Survival Domain Adaptation

Survival analysis is the branch of statistics that studies the relation between the characteristics of living entities and their respective survival times, taking into account the partial information held by censored cases. A good analysis can, for example, determine whether one medical treatment for a group of patients is better than another. With the rise of machine learning, survival analysis can be modeled as learning a function that maps studied patients to their survival times. To succeed with that, there are three crucial issues to be tackled. First, some patient data is censored: we do not know the true survival times for all patients. Second, data is scarce, which led past research to treat different illness types as domains in a multi-task setup. Third, there is the need for adaptation to new or extremely rare illness types, where little or no labels are available. In contrast to previous multi-task setups, we want to investigate how to efficiently adapt to a new survival target domain from multiple survival source domains. For this, we introduce a new survival metric and the corresponding discrepancy measure between survival distributions. These allow us to define domain adaptation for survival analysis while incorporating censored data, which would otherwise have to be dropped. Our experiments on two cancer data sets reveal a superb performance on target domains, a better treatment recommendation, and a weight matrix with a plausible explanation.

KGxBoard: Explainable and Interactive Leaderboard for Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Completion Models

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) store information in the form of (head, predicate, tail)-triples. To augment KGs with new knowledge, researchers proposed models for KG Completion (KGC) tasks such as link prediction; i.e., answering (h; p; ?) or (?; p; t) queries. Such models are usually evaluated with averaged metrics on a held-out test set. While useful for tracking progress, averaged single-score metrics cannot reveal what exactly a model has learned -- or failed to learn. To address this issue, we propose KGxBoard: an interactive framework for performing fine-grained evaluation on meaningful subsets of the data, each of which tests individual and interpretable capabilities of a KGC model. In our experiments, we highlight the findings that we discovered with the use of KGxBoard, which would have been impossible to detect with standard averaged single-score metrics.

Human-Centric Research for NLP: Towards a Definition and Guiding Questions

With Human-Centric Research (HCR) we can steer research activities so that the research outcome is beneficial for human stakeholders, such as end users. But what exactly makes research human-centric? We address this question by providing a working definition and define how a research pipeline can be split into different stages in which human-centric components can be added. Additionally, we discuss existing NLP with HCR components and define a series of guiding questions, which can serve as starting points for researchers interested in exploring human-centric research approaches. We hope that this work would inspire researchers to refine the proposed definition and to pose other questions that might be meaningful for achieving HCR.