Xinyu Zhao

Xinyu Zhao, Fangcong Yin, Greg Durrett

Long-context LLMs are increasingly in demand for applications such as retrieval-augmented generation. To defray the cost of pretraining LLMs over long contexts, recent work takes an approach of synthetic context extension: fine-tuning LLMs with synthetically generated long-context data in a post-training stage. However, it remains unclear how and why this synthetic context extension imparts abilities for downstream long-context tasks. In this paper, we investigate fine-tuning on synthetic data for three long-context tasks that require retrieval and reasoning. We vary the realism of "needle" concepts to be retrieved and diversity of the surrounding "haystack" context, from using LLMs to construct synthetic documents to using templated relations and creating symbolic datasets. We find that models trained on synthetic data fall short of the real data, but surprisingly, the mismatch can be interpreted and even predicted in terms of a special set of attention heads that are responsible for retrieval over long context, retrieval heads (Wu et al., 2024). The retrieval heads learned on synthetic data have high overlap with retrieval heads learned on real data, and there is a strong correlation between the recall of heads learned and the downstream performance of a model. Furthermore, with attention knockout and activation patching, we mechanistically show that retrieval heads are necessary and explain model performance, although they are not totally sufficient. Our results shed light on how to interpret synthetic data fine-tuning performance and how to approach creating better data for learning real-world capabilities over long contexts.

Xinyu Zhao, Hao Yan, Yongming Liu

A large volume of accident reports is recorded in the aviation domain, which greatly values improving aviation safety. To better use those reports, we need to understand the most important events or impact factors according to the accident reports. However, the increasing number of accident reports requires large efforts from domain experts to label those reports. In order to make the labeling process more efficient, many researchers have started developing algorithms to identify the underlying events from accident reports automatically. This article argues that we can identify the events more accurately by leveraging the event taxonomy. More specifically, we consider the problem a hierarchical classification task where we first identify the coarse-level information and then predict the fine-level information. We achieve this hierarchical classification process by incorporating a novel hierarchical attention module into BERT. To further utilize the information from event taxonomy, we regularize the proposed model according to the relationship and distribution among labels. The effectiveness of our framework is evaluated with the data collected by National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It has been shown that fine-level prediction accuracy is highly improved, and the regularization term can be beneficial to the rare event identification problem.

Mingliang Bai, Xinyu Zhao, Zhenhua Long et al.

Solar energy is a clean and renewable energy. Photovoltaic (PV) power is an important way to utilize solar energy. Accurate PV power forecast is crucial to the large-scale application of PV power and the stability of electricity grid. This paper proposes a novel method for short-term photovoltaic power forecast using deep convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) network and kernel density estimation (KDE). In the proposed method, ConvLSTM is used to forecast the future photovoltaic power and KDE is used for estimating the joint probabilistic density function and giving the probabilistic confidence interval. Experiments in an actual photovoltaic power station verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparison experiments with convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory network (LSTM)shows that ConvLSTM can combine the advantages of both CNN and LSTM and significantly outperform CNN and LSTM in terms of forecast accuracy. Through further comparison with other five conventional methods including multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector regression (SVR), extreme learning machine (ELM), classification and regression tree (CART) and gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), ConvLSTM can significantly improve the forecast accuracy by more than 20% for most of the five methods and the superiorities of ConvLSTM are further verified.

Kaj Bostrom, Xinyu Zhao, Swarat Chaudhuri et al.

An interpretable system for open-domain reasoning needs to express its reasoning process in a transparent form. Natural language is an attractive representation for this purpose -- it is both highly expressive and easy for humans to understand. However, manipulating natural language statements in logically consistent ways is hard: models must cope with variation in how meaning is expressed while remaining precise. In this paper, we describe ParaPattern, a method for building models to generate deductive inferences from diverse natural language inputs without direct human supervision. We train BART-based models (Lewis et al., 2020) to generate the result of applying a particular logical operation to one or more premise statements. Crucially, we develop a largely automated pipeline for constructing suitable training examples from Wikipedia. We evaluate our models using out-of-domain sentence compositions from the QASC (Khot et al., 2020) and EntailmentBank (Dalvi et al., 2021) datasets as well as targeted perturbation sets. Our results show that our models are substantially more accurate and flexible than baseline systems. ParaPattern achieves 85% validity on examples of the 'substitution' operation from EntailmentBank without the use of any in-domain training data, matching the performance of a model fine-tuned for EntailmentBank. The full source code for our method is publicly available.

Xinyu Zhao, Shih-ting Lin, Greg Durrett

A principal barrier to training temporal relation extraction models in new domains is the lack of varied, high quality examples and the challenge of collecting more. We present a method of automatically collecting distantly-supervised examples of temporal relations. We scrape and automatically label event pairs where the temporal relations are made explicit in text, then mask out those explicit cues, forcing a model trained on this data to learn other signals. We demonstrate that a pre-trained Transformer model is able to transfer from the weakly labeled examples to human-annotated benchmarks in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, and that the masking scheme is important in improving generalization.