Enhancing Fact Retrieval in PLMs through Truthfulness

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) encode various facts about the world at their pre-training phase as they are trained to predict the next or missing word in a sentence. There has a been an interest in quantifying and improving the amount of facts that can be extracted from PLMs, as they have been envisioned to act as soft knowledge bases, which can be queried in natural language. Different approaches exist to enhance fact retrieval from PLM. Recent work shows that the hidden states of PLMs can be leveraged to determine the truthfulness of the PLMs' inputs. Leveraging this finding to improve factual knowledge retrieval remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the use of a helper model to improve fact retrieval. The helper model assesses the truthfulness of an input based on the corresponding hidden states representations from the PLMs. We evaluate this approach on several masked PLMs and show that it enhances fact retrieval by up to 33\%. Our findings highlight the potential of hidden states representations from PLMs in improving their factual knowledge retrieval.

Can We Reverse In-Context Knowledge Edits?

In-context knowledge editing (IKE) enables efficient modification of large language model (LLM) outputs without parameter changes and at zero-cost. However, it can be misused to manipulate responses opaquely, e.g., insert misinformation or offensive content. Such malicious interventions could be incorporated into high-level wrapped APIs where the final input prompt is not shown to end-users. To address this issue, we investigate the detection and reversal of IKE-edits. First, we demonstrate that IKE-edits can be detected with high accuracy (F1 > 80\%) using only the top-10 output probabilities of the next token, even in a black-box setting, e.g. proprietary LLMs with limited output information. Further, we introduce the novel task of reversing IKE-edits using specially tuned reversal tokens. We explore using both continuous and discrete reversal tokens, achieving over 80\% accuracy in recovering original, unedited outputs across multiple LLMs. Our continuous reversal tokens prove particularly effective, with minimal impact on unedited prompts. Through analysis of output distributions, attention patterns, and token rankings, we provide insights into IKE's effects on LLMs and how reversal tokens mitigate them. This work represents a significant step towards enhancing LLM resilience against potential misuse of in-context editing, improving their transparency and trustworthiness.

Out of spuriousity: Improving robustness to spurious correlations without group annotations

Machine learning models are known to learn spurious correlations, i.e., features having strong relations with class labels but no causal relation. Relying on those correlations leads to poor performance in the data groups without these correlations and poor generalization ability. To improve the robustness of machine learning models to spurious correlations, we propose an approach to extract a subnetwork from a fully trained network that does not rely on spurious correlations. The subnetwork is found by the assumption that data points with the same spurious attribute will be close to each other in the representation space when training with ERM, then we employ supervised contrastive loss in a novel way to force models to unlearn the spurious connections. The increase in the worst-group performance of our approach contributes to strengthening the hypothesis that there exists a subnetwork in a fully trained dense network that is responsible for using only invariant features in classification tasks, therefore erasing the influence of spurious features even in the setup of multi spurious attributes and no prior knowledge of attributes labels.

Patch-based Intuitive Multimodal Prototypes Network (PIMPNet) for Alzheimer's Disease classification

Volumetric neuroimaging examinations like structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) are routinely applied to support the clinical diagnosis of dementia like Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Neuroradiologists examine 3D sMRI to detect and monitor abnormalities in brain morphology due to AD, like global and/or local brain atrophy and shape alteration of characteristic structures. There is a strong research interest in developing diagnostic systems based on Deep Learning (DL) models to analyse sMRI for AD. However, anatomical information extracted from an sMRI examination needs to be interpreted together with patient's age to distinguish AD patterns from the regular alteration due to a normal ageing process. In this context, part-prototype neural networks integrate the computational advantages of DL in an interpretable-by-design architecture and showed promising results in medical imaging applications. We present PIMPNet, the first interpretable multimodal model for 3D images and demographics applied to the binary classification of AD from 3D sMRI and patient's age. Despite age prototypes do not improve predictive performance compared to the single modality model, this lays the foundation for future work in the direction of the model's design and multimodal prototype training process

Detecting Edited Knowledge in Language Models

Knowledge editing techniques (KEs) can update language models' obsolete or inaccurate knowledge learned from pre-training. However, KE also faces potential malicious applications, e.g. inserting misinformation and toxic content. Moreover, in the context of responsible AI, it is instructive for end-users to know whether a generated output is driven by edited knowledge or first-hand knowledge from pre-training. To this end, we study detecting edited knowledge in language models by introducing a novel task: given an edited model and a specific piece of knowledge the model generates, our objective is to classify the knowledge as either "non-edited" (based on the pre-training), or ``edited'' (based on subsequent editing). We initiate the task with two state-of-the-art KEs, two language models, and two datasets. We further propose a simple classifier, RepReg, a logistic regression model that takes hidden state representations as input features. Our results reveal that RepReg establishes a strong baseline, achieving a peak accuracy of 99.81%, and 97.79% in out-of-domain settings. Second, RepReg achieves near-optimal performance with a limited training set (200 training samples), and it maintains its performance even in out-of-domain settings. Last, we find it more challenging to separate edited and non-edited knowledge when they contain the same subject or object.

LLMs for Generating and Evaluating Counterfactuals: A Comprehensive Study

As NLP models become more complex, understanding their decisions becomes more crucial. Counterfactuals (CFs), where minimal changes to inputs flip a model's prediction, offer a way to explain these models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in NLP tasks, their efficacy in generating high-quality CFs remains uncertain. This work fills this gap by investigating how well LLMs generate CFs for two NLU tasks. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of several common LLMs, and evaluate their CFs, assessing both intrinsic metrics, and the impact of these CFs on data augmentation. Moreover, we analyze differences between human and LLM-generated CFs, providing insights for future research directions. Our results show that LLMs generate fluent CFs, but struggle to keep the induced changes minimal. Generating CFs for Sentiment Analysis (SA) is less challenging than NLI where LLMs show weaknesses in generating CFs that flip the original label. This also reflects on the data augmentation performance, where we observe a large gap between augmenting with human and LLMs CFs. Furthermore, we evaluate LLMs' ability to assess CFs in a mislabelled data setting, and show that they have a strong bias towards agreeing with the provided labels. GPT4 is more robust against this bias and its scores correlate well with automatic metrics. Our findings reveal several limitations and point to potential future work directions.

CEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Counterfactual Text Generation

Counterfactual text generation aims to minimally change a text, such that it is classified differently. Judging advancements in method development for counterfactual text generation is hindered by a non-uniform usage of data sets and metrics in related work. We propose CEval, a benchmark for comparing counterfactual text generation methods. CEval unifies counterfactual and text quality metrics, includes common counterfactual datasets with human annotations, standard baselines (MICE, GDBA, CREST) and the open-source language model LLAMA-2. Our experiments found no perfect method for generating counterfactual text. Methods that excel at counterfactual metrics often produce lower-quality text while LLMs with simple prompts generate high-quality text but struggle with counterfactual criteria. By making CEval available as an open-source Python library, we encourage the community to contribute more methods and maintain consistent evaluation in future work.

Comprehensive Study on German Language Models for Clinical and Biomedical Text Understanding

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) can be largely attributed to the advent of pre-trained language models such as BERT and RoBERTa. While these models demonstrate remarkable performance on general datasets, they can struggle in specialized domains such as medicine, where unique domain-specific terminologies, domain-specific abbreviations, and varying document structures are common. This paper explores strategies for adapting these models to domain-specific requirements, primarily through continuous pre-training on domain-specific data. We pre-trained several German medical language models on 2.4B tokens derived from translated public English medical data and 3B tokens of German clinical data. The resulting models were evaluated on various German downstream tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), multi-label classification, and extractive question answering. Our results suggest that models augmented by clinical and translation-based pre-training typically outperform general domain models in medical contexts. We conclude that continuous pre-training has demonstrated the ability to match or even exceed the performance of clinical models trained from scratch. Furthermore, pre-training on clinical data or leveraging translated texts have proven to be reliable methods for domain adaptation in medical NLP tasks.

Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling

Recent trends in natural language processing research and annotation tasks affirm a paradigm shift from the traditional reliance on a single ground truth to a focus on individual perspectives, particularly in subjective tasks. In scenarios where annotation tasks are meant to encompass diversity, models that solely rely on the majority class labels may inadvertently disregard valuable minority perspectives. This oversight could result in the omission of crucial information and, in a broader context, risk disrupting the balance within larger ecosystems. As the landscape of annotator modeling unfolds with diverse representation techniques, it becomes imperative to investigate their effectiveness with the fine-grained features of the datasets in view. This study systematically explores various annotator modeling techniques and compares their performance across seven corpora. From our findings, we show that the commonly used user token model consistently outperforms more complex models. We introduce a composite embedding approach and show distinct differences in which model performs best as a function of the agreement with a given dataset. Our findings shed light on the relationship between corpus statistics and annotator modeling performance, which informs future work on corpus construction and perspectivist NLP.

Prototype-based Interpretable Breast Cancer Prediction Models: Analysis and Challenges

Deep learning models have achieved high performance in medical applications, however, their adoption in clinical practice is hindered due to their black-box nature. Self-explainable models, like prototype-based models, can be especially beneficial as they are interpretable by design. However, if the learnt prototypes are of low quality then the prototype-based models are as good as black-box. Having high quality prototypes is a pre-requisite for a truly interpretable model. In this work, we propose a prototype evaluation framework for coherence (PEF-C) for quantitatively evaluating the quality of the prototypes based on domain knowledge. We show the use of PEF-C in the context of breast cancer prediction using mammography. Existing works on prototype-based models on breast cancer prediction using mammography have focused on improving the classification performance of prototype-based models compared to black-box models and have evaluated prototype quality through anecdotal evidence. We are the first to go beyond anecdotal evidence and evaluate the quality of the mammography prototypes systematically using our PEF-C. Specifically, we apply three state-of-the-art prototype-based models, ProtoPNet, BRAIxProtoPNet++ and PIP-Net on mammography images for breast cancer prediction and evaluate these models w.r.t. i) classification performance, and ii) quality of the prototypes, on three public datasets. Our results show that prototype-based models are competitive with black-box models in terms of classification performance, and achieve a higher score in detecting ROIs. However, the quality of the prototypes are not yet sufficient and can be improved in aspects of relevance, purity and learning a variety of prototypes. We call the XAI community to systematically evaluate the quality of the prototypes to check their true usability in high stake decisions and improve such models further.