Vijay K. Gurbani

Amirreza Payandeh, Dan Pluth, Jordan Hosier et al.

This paper investigates the rational thinking capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multi-round argumentative debates by exploring the impact of fallacious arguments on their logical reasoning performance. More specifically, we present Logic Competence Measurement Benchmark (LOGICOM), a diagnostic benchmark to assess the robustness of LLMs against logical fallacies. LOGICOM involves two agents: a persuader and a debater engaging in a multi-round debate on a controversial topic, where the persuader tries to convince the debater of the correctness of its claim. First, LOGICOM assesses the potential of LLMs to change their opinions through reasoning. Then, it evaluates the debater's performance in logical reasoning by contrasting the scenario where the persuader employs logical fallacies against one where logical reasoning is used. We use this benchmark to evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 using a dataset containing controversial topics, claims, and reasons supporting them. Our findings indicate that both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 can adjust their opinion through reasoning. However, when presented with logical fallacies, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are erroneously convinced 41% and 69% more often, respectively, compared to when logical reasoning is used. Finally, we introduce a new dataset containing over 5k pairs of logical vs. fallacious arguments. The source code and dataset of this work are made publicly available.

Dan Pluth, Zachary Nicholas Houghton, Yu Zhou et al.

Understanding the internal machinations of deep Transformer-based NLP models is more crucial than ever as these models see widespread use in various domains that affect the public at large, such as industry, academia, finance, health. While these models have advanced rapidly, their internal mechanisms remain largely a mystery. Techniques such as Sparse Autoencoders (SAE) have emerged to understand these mechanisms by projecting dense representations into a sparse vector. While existing research has demonstrated the viability of the SAE in interpreting text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), there are no equivalent studies that demonstrate the application of a SAE to audio processing models like Automatic Speech Recognizers (ASRs). In this work, a SAE is applied to Whisper, a Transformer-based ASR, training a high-dimensional sparse latent space on frame-level embeddings extracted from the Whisper encoder. Our work uncovers diverse monosemantic features across linguistic and non-linguistic boundaries, and demonstrates cross-lingual feature steering. This work establishes the viability of a SAE model and demonstrates that Whisper encodes a rich amount of linguistic information.

Chirag Chhablani, Nikhita Sharma, Jordan Hosier et al.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are used in the financial domain to enhance the caller experience by enabling natural language understanding and facilitating efficient and intuitive interactions. Increasing use of ASR systems requires that such systems exhibit very low error rates. The predominant ASR models to collect numeric data are large, general-purpose commercial models -- Google Speech-to-text (STT), or Amazon Transcribe -- or open source (OpenAI's Whisper). Such ASR models are trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of audio data and require considerable resources to run. Despite recent progress large speech recognition models, we highlight the potential of smaller, specialized "micro" models. Such light models can be trained perform well on number recognition specific tasks, competing with general models like Whisper or Google STT while using less than 80 minutes of training time and occupying at least an order of less memory resources. Also, unlike larger speech recognition models, micro-models are trained on carefully selected and curated datasets, which makes them highly accurate, agile, and easy to retrain, while using low compute resources. We present our work on creating micro models for multi-digit number recognition that handle diverse speaking styles reflecting real-world pronunciation patterns. Our work contributes to domain-specific ASR models, improving digit recognition accuracy, and privacy of data. An added advantage, their low resource consumption allows them to be hosted on-premise, keeping private data local instead uploading to an external cloud. Our results indicate that our micro-model makes less errors than the best-of-breed commercial or open-source ASRs in recognizing digits (1.8% error rate of our best micro-model versus 5.8% error rate of Whisper), and has a low memory footprint (0.66 GB VRAM for our model versus 11 GB VRAM for Whisper).

Daniel Pluth, Yu Zhou, Vijay K. Gurbani

Recent advances in explainable machine learning have highlighted the potential of sparse autoencoders in uncovering mono-semantic features in densely encoded embeddings. While most research has focused on Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings, the applicability of this technique to other domains remains largely unexplored. This study applies sparse autoencoders to speaker embeddings generated from a Titanet model, demonstrating the effectiveness of this technique in extracting mono-semantic features from non-textual embedded data. The results show that the extracted features exhibit characteristics similar to those found in LLM embeddings, including feature splitting and steering. The analysis reveals that the autoencoder can identify and manipulate features such as language and music, which are not evident in the original embedding. The findings suggest that sparse autoencoders can be a valuable tool for understanding and interpreting embedded data in many domains, including audio-based speaker recognition.