Ahmed H. Awadallah

Yixin Liu, Budhaditya Deb, Milagro Teruel et al. · microsoft-research

Despite the recent progress in language generation models, their outputs may not always meet user expectations. In this work, we study whether informational feedback in natural language can be leveraged to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. To this end, we consider factual consistency in summarization, the quality that the summary should only contain information supported by the input documents, as the user-expected preference. We collect a high-quality dataset, DeFacto, containing human demonstrations and informational natural language feedback consisting of corrective instructions, edited summaries, and explanations with respect to the factual consistency of the summary. Using our dataset, we study three natural language generation tasks: (1) editing a summary by following the human feedback, (2) generating human feedback for editing the original summary, and (3) revising the initial summary to correct factual errors by generating both the human feedback and edited summary. We show that DeFacto can provide factually consistent human-edited summaries and further insights into summarization factual consistency thanks to its informational natural language feedback. We further demonstrate that fine-tuned language models can leverage our dataset to improve the summary factual consistency, while large language models lack the zero-shot learning ability in our proposed tasks that require controllable text generation.

Jieyu Zhang, Ranjay Krishna, Ahmed H. Awadallah et al. · uw

Today, users ask Large language models (LLMs) as assistants to answer queries that require external knowledge; they ask about the weather in a specific city, about stock prices, and even about where specific locations are within their neighborhood. These queries require the LLM to produce code that invokes external APIs to answer the user's question, yet LLMs rarely produce correct code on the first try, requiring iterative code refinement upon execution results. In addition, using LLM assistants to support high query volumes can be expensive. In this work, we contribute a framework, EcoAssistant, that enables LLMs to answer code-driven queries more affordably and accurately. EcoAssistant contains three components. First, it allows the LLM assistants to converse with an automatic code executor to iteratively refine code or to produce answers based on the execution results. Second, we use a hierarchy of LLM assistants, which attempts to answer the query with weaker, cheaper LLMs before backing off to stronger, expensive ones. Third, we retrieve solutions from past successful queries as in-context demonstrations to help subsequent queries. Empirically, we show that EcoAssistant offers distinct advantages for affordability and accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 by 10 points of success rate with less than 50% of GPT-4's cost.

Shashank Gupta, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Krishan Subudhi et al.

Traditional multi-task learning (MTL) methods use dense networks that use the same set of shared weights across several different tasks. This often creates interference where two or more tasks compete to pull model parameters in different directions. In this work, we study whether sparsely activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) improve multi-task learning by specializing some weights for learning shared representations and using the others for learning task-specific information. To this end, we devise task-aware gating functions to route examples from different tasks to specialized experts which share subsets of network weights conditioned on the task. This results in a sparsely activated multi-task model with a large number of parameters, but with the same computational cost as that of a dense model. We demonstrate such sparse networks to improve multi-task learning along three key dimensions: (i) transfer to low-resource tasks from related tasks in the training mixture; (ii) sample-efficient generalization to tasks not seen during training by making use of task-aware routing from seen related tasks; (iii) robustness to the addition of unrelated tasks by avoiding catastrophic forgetting of existing tasks.

Yixin Liu, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan et al.

Neural attention models have achieved significant improvements on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic memory complexity of the self-attention module with respect to the input length hinders their applications in long text summarization. Instead of designing more efficient attention modules, we approach this problem by investigating if models with a restricted context can have competitive performance compared with the memory-efficient attention models that maintain a global context by treating the input as a single sequence. Our model is applied to individual pages which contain parts of inputs grouped by the principle of locality during both encoding and decoding. We empirically investigated three kinds of locality in text summarization at different levels of granularity, ranging from sentences to documents. Our experimental results show that our model has a better performance compared with strong baselines with efficient attention modules, and our analysis provides further insights into our locality-aware modeling strategy.

Chi Wang, Susan Xueqing Liu, Ahmed H. Awadallah

Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked significant interest in their generative capabilities, leading to the development of various commercial applications. The high cost of using the models drives application builders to maximize the value of generation under a limited inference budget. This paper presents a study of optimizing inference hyperparameters such as the number of responses, temperature and max tokens, which significantly affects the utility/cost of text generation. We design a framework named EcoOptiGen which leverages economical hyperparameter optimization and cost-based pruning. Experiments with the GPT-3.5/GPT-4 models on a variety of tasks verify its effectiveness. EcoOptiGen is implemented in the `autogen' package of the FLAML library: \url{https://aka.ms/autogen}.

Yusen Zhang, Ansong Ni, Ziming Mao et al.

Text summarization helps readers capture salient information from documents, news, interviews, and meetings. However, most state-of-the-art pretrained language models (LM) are unable to efficiently process long text for many summarization tasks. In this paper, we propose Summ$^N$, a simple, flexible, and effective multi-stage framework for input texts that are longer than the maximum context length of typical pretrained LMs. Summ$^N$ first splits the data samples and generates a coarse summary in multiple stages and then produces the final fine-grained summary based on it. Our framework can process input text of arbitrary length by adjusting the number of stages while keeping the LM input size fixed. Moreover, it can deal with both single-source documents and dialogues, and it can be used on top of different backbone abstractive summarization models. To the best of our knowledge, Summ$^N$ is the first multi-stage split-then-summarize framework for long input summarization. Our experiments demonstrate that Summ$^N$ outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by improving ROUGE scores on three long meeting summarization datasets AMI, ICSI, and QMSum, two long TV series datasets from SummScreen, and a long document summarization dataset GovReport. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/Summ-N.

Ziming Mao, Chen Henry Wu, Ansong Ni et al.

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on short-input summarization. However, they still struggle with summarizing longer text. In this paper, we present DYLE, a novel dynamic latent extraction approach for abstractive long-input summarization. DYLE jointly trains an extractor and a generator and treats the extracted text snippets as the latent variable, allowing dynamic snippet-level attention weights during decoding. To provide adequate supervision, we propose simple yet effective heuristics for oracle extraction as well as a consistency loss term, which encourages the extractor to approximate the averaged dynamic weights predicted by the generator. We evaluate our method on different long-document and long-dialogue summarization tasks: GovReport, QMSum, and arXiv. Experiment results show that DYLE outperforms all existing methods on GovReport and QMSum, with gains up to 6.1 ROUGE, while yielding strong results on arXiv. Further analysis shows that the proposed dynamic weights provide interpretability of our generation process.