Sparse Rewards Can Self-Train Dialogue Agents

Recent advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) Large Language Model (LLM) agents, especially in multi-turn dialogue tasks, have been primarily driven by supervised fine-tuning and high-quality human feedback. However, as base LLM models continue to improve, acquiring meaningful human feedback has become increasingly challenging and costly. In certain domains, base LLM agents may eventually exceed human capabilities, making traditional feedback-driven methods impractical. In this paper, we introduce a novel self-improvement paradigm that empowers LLM agents to autonomously enhance their performance without external human feedback. Our method, Juxtaposed Outcomes for Simulation Harvesting (JOSH), is a self-alignment algorithm that leverages a sparse reward simulation environment to extract ideal behaviors and further train the LLM on its own outputs. We present ToolWOZ, a sparse reward tool-calling simulation environment derived from MultiWOZ. We demonstrate that models trained with JOSH, both small and frontier, significantly improve tool-based interactions while preserving general model capabilities across diverse benchmarks. Our code and data are publicly available on GitHub.

Enhancing Hallucination Detection through Perturbation-Based Synthetic Data Generation in System Responses

Detecting hallucinations in large language model (LLM) outputs is pivotal, yet traditional fine-tuning for this classification task is impeded by the expensive and quickly outdated annotation process, especially across numerous vertical domains and in the face of rapid LLM advancements. In this study, we introduce an approach that automatically generates both faithful and hallucinated outputs by rewriting system responses. Experimental findings demonstrate that a T5-base model, fine-tuned on our generated dataset, surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot detectors and existing synthetic generation methods in both accuracy and latency, indicating efficacy of our approach.

DYAD: A Descriptive Yet Abjuring Density efficient approximation to linear neural network layers

We devise, implement and performance-asses DYAD, a layer which can serve as a faster and more memory-efficient approximate replacement for linear layers, (nn.Linear() in Pytorch). These layers appear in common subcomponents, such as in the ff module of Transformers. DYAD is based on a bespoke near-sparse matrix structure which approximates the dense "weight" matrix W that matrix-multiplies the input in the typical realization of such a layer, a.k.a DENSE. Our alternative near-sparse matrix structure is decomposable to a sum of 2 matrices permutable to a block-sparse counterpart. These can be represented as 3D tensors, which in unison allow a faster execution of matrix multiplication with the mini-batched input matrix X compared to DENSE (O(rows(W ) x cols(W )) --> O( rows(W ) x cols(W ) # of blocks )). As the crux of our experiments, we pretrain both DYAD and DENSE variants of 2 sizes of the OPT arch and 1 size of the Pythia arch, including at different token scales of the babyLM benchmark. We find DYAD to be competitive (>= 90%) of DENSE performance on zero-shot (e.g. BLIMP), few-shot (OPENLM) and finetuning (GLUE) benchmarks, while being >=7-15% faster to train on-GPU even at 125m scale, besides surfacing larger speedups at increasing scale and model width.

EUREKA: EUphemism Recognition Enhanced through Knn-based methods and Augmentation

We introduce EUREKA, an ensemble-based approach for performing automatic euphemism detection. We (1) identify and correct potentially mislabelled rows in the dataset, (2) curate an expanded corpus called EuphAug, (3) leverage model representations of Potentially Euphemistic Terms (PETs), and (4) explore using representations of semantically close sentences to aid in classification. Using our augmented dataset and kNN-based methods, EUREKA was able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the public leaderboard of the Euphemism Detection Shared Task, ranking first with a macro F1 score of 0.881. Our code is available at https://github.com/sedrickkeh/EUREKA.

PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation

A personification is a figure of speech that endows inanimate entities with properties and actions typically seen as requiring animacy. In this paper, we explore the task of personification generation. To this end, we propose PINEAPPLE: Personifying INanimate Entities by Acquiring Parallel Personification data for Learning Enhanced generation. We curate a corpus of personifications called PersonifCorp, together with automatically generated de-personified literalizations of these personifications. We demonstrate the usefulness of this parallel corpus by training a seq2seq model to personify a given literal input. Both automatic and human evaluations show that fine-tuning with PersonifCorp leads to significant gains in personification-related qualities such as animacy and interestingness. A detailed qualitative analysis also highlights key strengths and imperfections of PINEAPPLE over baselines, demonstrating a strong ability to generate diverse and creative personifications that enhance the overall appeal of a sentence.

PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically

Tongue twisters are meaningful sentences that are difficult to pronounce. The process of automatically generating tongue twisters is challenging since the generated utterance must satisfy two conditions at once: phonetic difficulty and semantic meaning. Furthermore, phonetic difficulty is itself hard to characterize and is expressed in natural tongue twisters through a heterogeneous mix of phenomena such as alliteration and homophony. In this paper, we propose PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically. We leverage phoneme representations to capture the notion of phonetic difficulty, and we train language models to generate original tongue twisters on two proposed task settings. To do this, we curate a dataset called PANCETTA, consisting of existing English tongue twisters. Through automatic and human evaluation, as well as qualitative analysis, we show that PANCETTA generates novel, phonetically difficult, fluent, and semantically meaningful tongue twisters.

NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of natural language tasks. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using several of its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular natural language models. The infrastructure, datacards and robustness analysis results are available publicly on the NL-Augmenter repository (\url{https://github.com/GEM-benchmark/NL-Augmenter}).

Investigating Robustness of Dialog Models to Popular Figurative Language Constructs

Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor and simile. In this work, we analyze the performance of existing dialog models in situations where the input dialog context exhibits use of figurative language. We observe large gaps in handling of figurative language when evaluating the models on two open domain dialog datasets. When faced with dialog contexts consisting of figurative language, some models show very large drops in performance compared to contexts without figurative language. We encourage future research in dialog modeling to separately analyze and report results on figurative language in order to better test model capabilities relevant to real-world use. Finally, we propose lightweight solutions to help existing models become more robust to figurative language by simply using an external resource to translate figurative language to literal (non-figurative) forms while preserving the meaning to the best extent possible.

Coarse2Fine: Fine-grained Text Classification on Coarsely-grained Annotated Data

Existing text classification methods mainly focus on a fixed label set, whereas many real-world applications require extending to new fine-grained classes as the number of samples per label increases. To accommodate such requirements, we introduce a new problem called coarse-to-fine grained classification, which aims to perform fine-grained classification on coarsely annotated data. Instead of asking for new fine-grained human annotations, we opt to leverage label surface names as the only human guidance and weave in rich pre-trained generative language models into the iterative weak supervision strategy. Specifically, we first propose a label-conditioned finetuning formulation to attune these generators for our task. Furthermore, we devise a regularization objective based on the coarse-fine label constraints derived from our problem setting, giving us even further improvements over the prior formulation. Our framework uses the fine-tuned generative models to sample pseudo-training data for training the classifier, and bootstraps on real unlabeled data for model refinement. Extensive experiments and case studies on two real-world datasets demonstrate superior performance over SOTA zero-shot classification baselines.

Retrieve, Caption, Generate: Visual Grounding for Enhancing Commonsense in Text Generation Models

We investigate the use of multimodal information contained in images as an effective method for enhancing the commonsense of Transformer models for text generation. We perform experiments using BART and T5 on concept-to-text generation, specifically the task of generative commonsense reasoning, or CommonGen. We call our approach VisCTG: Visually Grounded Concept-to-Text Generation. VisCTG involves captioning images representing appropriate everyday scenarios, and using these captions to enrich and steer the generation process. Comprehensive evaluation and analysis demonstrate that VisCTG noticeably improves model performance while successfully addressing several issues of the baseline generations, including poor commonsense, fluency, and specificity.