Sangryul Kim

Sangryul Kim, Donghee Han, Sehyun Kim

Recently, deep learning-based language models have significantly enhanced text-to-SQL tasks, with promising applications in retrieving patient records within the medical domain. One notable challenge in such applications is discerning unanswerable queries. Through fine-tuning model, we demonstrate the feasibility of converting medical record inquiries into SQL queries. Additionally, we introduce an entropy-based method to identify and filter out unanswerable results. We further enhance result quality by filtering low-confidence SQL through log probability-based distribution, while grammatical and schema errors are mitigated by executing queries on the actual database. We experimentally verified that our method can filter unanswerable questions, which can be widely utilized even when the parameters of the model are not accessible, and that it can be effectively utilized in practice.

Eunki Kim, Sangryul Kim, James Thorne

To enhance reasoning capabilities, previous works have explored incorporating special-purpose tokens into the training process. These strategies strengthen the learning mechanism of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Building on prior research, in which inserting dummy tokens consecutively just before reasoning steps can enhance effectiveness, we introduce a novel approach termed Dynamic Inserting Tokens Training (DIT). Our method identifies positions within sequences where model confidence is lowest according to token log-likelihood. Strategically inserting [PAUSE] tokens on these positions bolsters the model's predictive capabilities for subsequent tokens. Experimental results across diverse datasets and models, from the 2.7B model to the 8B model, demonstrate that DIT consistently outperforms traditional fine-tuning and previous token insertion methods. With this simple yet effective method, we achieve accuracy gains of up to 4.7%p on GSM8K, 3.23%p on AQUA-RAT, and pass@1 improvements of up to 3.4%p on MBPP datasets. Our work shows a model-based, dynamic approach rather than a heuristic one, thereby broadening the scope of research in reasoning.

Wan Ju Kang, Eunki Kim, Na Min An et al.

Often, the needs and visual abilities differ between the annotator group and the end user group. Generating detailed diagram descriptions for blind and low-vision (BLV) users is one such challenging domain. Sighted annotators could describe visuals with ease, but existing studies have shown that direct generations by them are costly, bias-prone, and somewhat lacking by BLV standards. In this study, we ask sighted individuals to assess -- rather than produce -- diagram descriptions generated by vision-language models (VLM) that have been guided with latent supervision via a multi-pass inference. The sighted assessments prove effective and useful to professional educators who are themselves BLV and teach visually impaired learners. We release Sightation, a collection of diagram description datasets spanning 5k diagrams and 137k samples for completion, preference, retrieval, question answering, and reasoning training purposes and demonstrate their fine-tuning potential in various downstream tasks.

Na Min An, Eunki Kim, Wan Ju Kang et al.

For individuals with blindness or low vision (BLV), navigating complex environments can pose serious risks. Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) show promise for generating scene descriptions, but their effectiveness for BLV users remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a user study with eight BLV participants to systematically evaluate preferences for six types of LVLM descriptions. While they helped to reduce fear and improve actionability, user ratings showed wide variation in sufficiency and conciseness. Furthermore, GPT-4o--despite its strong potential to refine descriptions--was not consistently preferred by participants. We use the insights obtained from the user study to build training data for building our new automatic evaluation metric that can capture BLV preferences effectively. Our findings underscore the urgent need for BLV-centered evaluation metrics and human-in-the-loop feedback to advance LVLM description quality for accessibility.

Sangryul Kim, James Thorne

Question Answering (QA) in NLP is the task of finding answers to a query within a relevant context retrieved by a retrieval system. Yet, the mix of relevant and irrelevant information in these contexts can hinder performance enhancements in QA tasks. To address this, we introduce a context filtering approach that removes non-essential details, summarizing crucial content through Reward Modeling. This method emphasizes keeping vital data while omitting the extraneous during summarization model training. We offer a framework for developing efficient QA models by discerning useful information from dataset pairs, bypassing the need for costly human evaluation. Furthermore, we show that our approach can significantly outperform the baseline, as evidenced by a 6.8-fold increase in the EM Per Token (EPT) metric, which we propose as a measure of token efficiency, indicating a notable token-efficiency boost for low-resource settings.

Minsu Kim, Sangryul Kim, James Thorne

This paper investigates the knowledge of language models from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology. We explore how language models adjust their confidence and responses when presented with evidence with varying levels of informativeness and reliability. To study these properties, we create a dataset with various types of evidence and analyze language models' responses and confidence using verbalized confidence, token probability, and sampling. We observed that language models do not consistently follow Bayesian epistemology: language models follow the Bayesian confirmation assumption well with true evidence but fail to adhere to other Bayesian assumptions when encountering different evidence types. Also, we demonstrated that language models can exhibit high confidence when given strong evidence, but this does not always guarantee high accuracy. Our analysis also reveals that language models are biased toward golden evidence and show varying performance depending on the degree of irrelevance, helping explain why they deviate from Bayesian assumptions.

EuiYul Song, Philhoon Oh, Sangryul Kim et al.

Modern deterministic retrieval pipelines prioritize achieving state-of-the-art performance but often lack interpretability in decision-making. These models face challenges in assessing uncertainty, leading to overconfident predictions. To overcome these limitations, we integrate uncertainty calibration and interpretability into a retrieval pipeline. Specifically, we introduce Bayesian methodologies and multi-perspective retrieval to calibrate uncertainty within a retrieval pipeline. We incorporate techniques such as LIME and SHAP to analyze the behavior of a black-box reranker model. The importance scores derived from these explanation methodologies serve as supplementary relevance scores to enhance the base reranker model. We evaluate the resulting performance enhancements achieved through uncertainty calibration and interpretable reranking on Question Answering and Fact Checking tasks. Our methods demonstrate substantial performance improvements across three KILT datasets.