Fei Cheng

LLM-jp, Akiko Aizawa, Eiji Aramaki et al.

This paper introduces LLM-jp, a cross-organizational project for the research and development of Japanese large language models (LLMs). LLM-jp aims to develop open-source and strong Japanese LLMs, and as of this writing, more than 1,500 participants from academia and industry are working together for this purpose. This paper presents the background of the establishment of LLM-jp, summaries of its activities, and technical reports on the LLMs developed by LLM-jp. For the latest activities, visit https://llm-jp.nii.ac.jp/en/.

Zhen Wan, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using $k$ nearest neighbors ($k$NN-RE). $k$NN-RE allows the model to consult training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the two issues above. Additionally, we observe that $k$NN-RE serves as an effective way to leverage distant supervision (DS) data for RE. Experimental results show that the proposed $k$NN-RE achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of supervised RE datasets, i.e., ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80, along with outperforming the best model to date on the i2b2 and Wiki80 datasets in the setting of allowing using DS. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/kNN-RE.

Qianying Liu, Zhuo Gong, Zhengdong Yang et al.

Low-resource speech recognition has been long-suffering from insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages neighboring languages to improve low-resource scenario performance, founded on the hypothesis that similar linguistic units in neighboring languages exhibit comparable term frequency distributions, which enables us to construct a Huffman tree for performing multilingual hierarchical Softmax decoding. This hierarchical structure enables cross-lingual knowledge sharing among similar tokens, thereby enhancing low-resource training outcomes. Empirical analyses demonstrate that our method is effective in improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-resource speech recognition.

Yibin Shen, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation. In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets.

Qianying Liu, Wenyu Guan, Jianhao Shen et al.

Previous studies have introduced a weakly-supervised paradigm for solving math word problems requiring only the answer value annotation. While these methods search for correct value equation candidates as pseudo labels, they search among a narrow sub-space of the enormous equation space. To address this problem, we propose a novel search algorithm with combinatorial strategy \textbf{ComSearch}, which can compress the search space by excluding mathematically equivalent equations. The compression allows the searching algorithm to enumerate all possible equations and obtain high-quality data. We investigate the noise in the pseudo labels that hold wrong mathematical logic, which we refer to as the \textit{false-matching} problem, and propose a ranking model to denoise the pseudo labels. Our approach holds a flexible framework to utilize two existing supervised math word problem solvers to train pseudo labels, and both achieve state-of-the-art performance in the weak supervision task.

Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan et al.

Joint entity and relation extraction aims to extract relation triplets from plain text directly. Prior work leverages Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) models for triplet sequence generation. However, Seq2Seq enforces an unnecessary order on the unordered triplets and involves a large decoding length associated with error accumulation. These introduce exposure bias, which may cause the models overfit to the frequent label combination, thus deteriorating the generalization. We propose a novel Sequence-to-Unordered-Multi-Tree (Seq2UMTree) model to minimize the effects of exposure bias by limiting the decoding length to three within a triplet and removing the order among triplets. We evaluate our model on two datasets, DuIE and NYT, and systematically study how exposure bias alters the performance of Seq2Seq models. Experiments show that the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq model overfits to both datasets while Seq2UMTree shows significantly better generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/WindChimeRan/OpenJERE .

Chengzhi Zhong, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu et al.

Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities despite limited exposure to non-English data. Prior studies show that English-centric large language models map multilingual content into English-aligned representations at intermediate layers and then project them back into target-language token spaces in the final layer. From this observation, we hypothesize that this cross-lingual transition is governed by a small and sparse set of dimensions, which occur at consistent indices across the intermediate to final layers. Building on this insight, we introduce a simple, training-free method to identify and manipulate these dimensions, requiring only as few as 50 sentences of either parallel or monolingual data. Experiments on a multilingual generation control task reveal the interpretability of these dimensions, demonstrating that the interventions in these dimensions can switch the output language while preserving semantic content, and that it surpasses the performance of prior neuron-based approaches at a substantially lower cost.

Zhengdong Yang, Qianying Liu, Sheng Li et al.

We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.

Qianying Liu, Dongsheng Yang, Wenjie Zhong et al.

Numerical reasoning over table-and-text hybrid passages, such as financial reports, poses significant challenges and has numerous potential applications. Noise and irrelevant variables in the model input have been a hindrance to its performance. Additionally, coarse-grained supervision of the whole solution program has impeded the model's ability to learn the underlying numerical reasoning process. In this paper, we propose three pretraining tasks that operate at both the whole program and sub-program level: Variable Integrity Ranking, which guides the model to focus on useful variables; Variable Operator Prediction, which decomposes the supervision into fine-grained single operator prediction; and Variable Keyphrase Masking, which encourages the model to identify key evidence that sub-programs are derived from. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, surpassing transformer-based model baselines.

Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

In spite of the potential for ground-breaking achievements offered by large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3), they still lag significantly behind fully-supervised baselines (e.g., fine-tuned BERT) in relation extraction (RE). This is due to the two major shortcomings of LLMs in RE: (1) low relevance regarding entity and relation in retrieved demonstrations for in-context learning; and (2) the strong inclination to wrongly classify NULL examples into other pre-defined labels. In this paper, we propose GPT-RE to bridge the gap between LLMs and fully-supervised baselines. GPT-RE successfully addresses the aforementioned issues by (1) incorporating task-specific entity representations in demonstration retrieval; and (2) enriching the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. We evaluate GPT-RE on four widely-used RE datasets, and observe that GPT-RE achieves improvements over not only existing GPT-3 baselines, but also fully-supervised baselines. Specifically, GPT-RE achieves SOTA performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets, and competitive performances on the TACRED and ACE05 datasets.