Daniele Bonadiman

Han He, Song Feng, Daniele Bonadiman et al.

DataFlow has been emerging as a new paradigm for building task-oriented chatbots due to its expressive semantic representations of the dialogue tasks. Despite the availability of a large dataset SMCalFlow and a simplified syntax, the development and evaluation of DataFlow-based chatbots remain challenging due to the system complexity and the lack of downstream toolchains. In this demonstration, we present DFEE, an interactive DataFlow Execution and Evaluation toolkit that supports execution, visualization and benchmarking of semantic parsers given dialogue input and backend database. We demonstrate the system via a complex dialog task: event scheduling that involves temporal reasoning. It also supports diagnosing the parsing results via a friendly interface that allows developers to examine dynamic DataFlow and the corresponding execution results. To illustrate how to benchmark SoTA models, we propose a novel benchmark that covers more sophisticated event scheduling scenarios and a new metric on task success evaluation. The codes of DFEE have been released on https://github.com/amazonscience/dataflow-evaluation-toolkit.

Denis Emelin, Daniele Bonadiman, Sawsan Alqahtani et al.

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have advanced the state-of-the-art across NLP applications, but lack domain-specific knowledge that does not naturally occur in pre-training data. Previous studies augmented PLMs with symbolic knowledge for different downstream NLP tasks. However, knowledge bases (KBs) utilized in these studies are usually large-scale and static, in contrast to small, domain-specific, and modifiable knowledge bases that are prominent in real-world task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of injecting domain-specific knowledge prior to fine-tuning on TOD tasks. To this end, we utilize light-weight adapters that can be easily integrated with PLMs and serve as a repository for facts learned from different KBs. To measure the efficacy of proposed knowledge injection methods, we introduce Knowledge Probing using Response Selection (KPRS) -- a probe designed specifically for TOD models. Experiments on KPRS and the response generation task show improvements of knowledge injection with adapters over strong baselines.

James Y. Huang, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are nowadays expected to generate content aligned with human preferences. Current work focuses on alignment at model training time, through techniques such as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). However, it is unclear if such methods are an effective choice to teach alignment objectives to the model. First, the inability to incorporate multiple, custom rewards and reliance on a model developer's view of universal and static principles are key limitations. Second, the reliability of such approaches is also questionable (e.g. susceptibility to jailbreaking even after safety training). To address these issues, we propose DeAL, a framework that allows the user to customize reward functions and enables Decoding-time Alignment of LLMs (DeAL). At its core, we view decoding as a heuristic-guided search process and facilitate the use of a wide variety of alignment objectives. Our experiments with programmatic constraints such as keyword and length constraints, and abstract objectives such as harmlessness and helpfulness, show that we can DeAL with fine-grained trade-offs and improve adherence to alignment objectives. Lastly, we demonstrate that DeAL is largely complementary to existing alignment strategies, and can be effectively paired with RLHF and prompting techniques to achieve better alignment.

Shamik Roy, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman et al.

Planning is a crucial task for agents in task oriented dialogs (TODs). Human agents typically resolve user issues by following predefined workflows, decomposing workflow steps into actionable items, and performing actions by executing APIs in order; all of which require reasoning and planning. With the recent advances in LLMs, there have been increasing attempts to use them for task planning and API usage. However, the faithfulness of the plans to predefined workflows and API dependencies, is not guaranteed with LLMs. Moreover, workflows in real life are often custom-defined and prone to changes; hence, adaptation is desirable. To study this, we propose the problem of faithful planning in TODs that needs to resolve user intents by following predefined flows and preserving API dependencies. To solve this problem, we propose FLAP, a Flow-Adhering Planning algorithm based on constrained decoding with lookahead heuristic for LLMs. Our algorithm alleviates the need for finetuning LLMs using domain specific (plan/dependency) data, enables quick adaptation to predefined flows, and outperforms other decoding and prompting-based baselines. Further, our algorithm empowers smaller LLMs (7B) to perform at par larger LLMs (30B-40B).

Bryan Li, Tamer Alkhouli, Daniele Bonadiman et al.

The development of large language models (LLM) has shown progress on reasoning, though studies have largely considered either English or simple reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce a multilingual structured reasoning and explanation dataset, termed xSTREET, that covers four tasks across six languages. xSTREET exposes a gap in base LLM performance between English and non-English reasoning tasks. We then propose two methods to remedy this gap, building on the insight that LLMs trained on code are better reasoners. First, at training time, we augment a code dataset with multilingual comments using machine translation while keeping program code as-is. Second, at inference time, we bridge the gap between training and inference by employing a prompt structure that incorporates step-by-step code primitives to derive new facts and find a solution. Our methods show improved multilingual performance on xSTREET, most notably on the scientific commonsense reasoning subtask. Furthermore, the models show no regression on non-reasoning tasks, thus demonstrating our techniques maintain general-purpose abilities.

Young Min Cho, Daniele Bonadiman, Divya Bhargavi et al.

Training large foundation models for agentic tasks is increasingly impractical due to the high computational costs, long iteration cycles, and rapid obsolescence as new models are continuously released. Instead of post-training massive models for every new task or domain, we propose Supplement Generation Training (SGT), a more efficient and sustainable strategy. SGT trains a smaller LLM to generate useful supplemental text that, when appended to the original input, helps the larger LLM solve the task more effectively. These lightweight models can dynamically adapt supplements to task requirements, improving performance without modifying the underlying large models. This approach decouples task-specific optimization from large foundation models and enables more flexible, cost-effective deployment of LLM-powered agents in real-world applications.

Karthikeyan K, Michelle Yuan, Elman Mansimov et al.

Recent works have demonstrated that incorporating search during inference can significantly improve reasoning capabilities of language agents. Some approaches may make use of the ground truth or rely on model's own generated feedback. The search algorithm uses this feedback to then produce values that will update its criterion for exploring and exploiting various reasoning paths. In this study, we investigate how search and model's self-feedback can be leveraged for reasoning tasks. First, we explore differences in ground-truth feedback and self-feedback during search for math reasoning. Second, we observe limitations in applying search techniques to more complex tasks like tool-calling and design domain-specific approaches to address these gaps. Our experiments reveal challenges related to generalization when solely relying on self-feedback during search. For search to work effectively, either access to the ground-truth is needed or feedback mechanisms need to be carefully designed for the specific task.

Daniele Bonadiman, Alessandro Moschitti

An essential task of most Question Answering (QA) systems is to re-rank the set of answer candidates, i.e., Answer Sentence Selection (A2S). These candidates are typically sentences either extracted from one or more documents preserving their natural order or retrieved by a search engine. Most state-of-the-art approaches to the task use huge neural models, such as BERT, or complex attentive architectures. In this paper, we argue that by exploiting the intrinsic structure of the original rank together with an effective word-relatedness encoder, we can achieve competitive results with respect to the state of the art while retaining high efficiency. Our model takes 9.5 seconds to train on the WikiQA dataset, i.e., very fast in comparison with the $\sim 18$ minutes required by a standard BERT-base fine-tuning.

Daniele Bonadiman, Anjishnu Kumar, Arpit Mittal

The goal of a Question Paraphrase Retrieval (QPR) system is to retrieve equivalent questions that result in the same answer as the original question. Such a system can be used to understand and answer rare and noisy reformulations of common questions by mapping them to a set of canonical forms. This has large-scale applications for community Question Answering (cQA) and open-domain spoken language question answering systems. In this paper we describe a new QPR system implemented as a Neural Information Retrieval (NIR) system consisting of a neural network sentence encoder and an approximate k-Nearest Neighbour index for efficient vector retrieval. We also describe our mechanism to generate an annotated dataset for question paraphrase retrieval experiments automatically from question-answer logs via distant supervision. We show that the standard loss function in NIR, triplet loss, does not perform well with noisy labels. We propose smoothed deep metric loss (SDML) and with our experiments on two QPR datasets we show that it significantly outperforms triplet loss in the noisy label setting.

Antonio Uva, Daniele Bonadiman, Alessandro Moschitti

Effectively using full syntactic parsing information in Neural Networks (NNs) to solve relational tasks, e.g., question similarity, is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose to inject structural representations in NNs by (i) learning an SVM model using Tree Kernels (TKs) on relatively few pairs of questions (few thousands) as gold standard (GS) training data is typically scarce, (ii) predicting labels on a very large corpus of question pairs, and (iii) pre-training NNs on such large corpus. The results on Quora and SemEval question similarity datasets show that NNs trained with our approach can learn more accurate models, especially after fine tuning on GS.

Daniele Bonadiman, Antonio Uva, Alessandro Moschitti

In this paper, we developed a deep neural network (DNN) that learns to solve simultaneously the three tasks of the cQA challenge proposed by the SemEval-2016 Task 3, i.e., question-comment similarity, question-question similarity and new question-comment similarity. The latter is the main task, which can exploit the previous two for achieving better results. Our DNN is trained jointly on all the three cQA tasks and learns to encode questions and comments into a single vector representation shared across the multiple tasks. The results on the official challenge test set show that our approach produces higher accuracy and faster convergence rates than the individual neural networks. Additionally, our method, which does not use any manual feature engineering, approaches the state of the art established with methods that make heavy use of it.