Jimin Hong

Taehee Kim, ChaeHun Park, Jimin Hong et al.

Semantically meaningful sentence embeddings are important for numerous tasks in natural language processing. To obtain such embeddings, recent studies explored the idea of utilizing synthetically generated data from pretrained language models (PLMs) as a training corpus. However, PLMs often generate sentences much different from the ones written by human. We hypothesize that treating all these synthetic examples equally for training deep neural networks can have an adverse effect on learning semantically meaningful embeddings. To analyze this, we first train a classifier that identifies machine-written sentences, and observe that the linguistic features of the sentences identified as written by a machine are significantly different from those of human-written sentences. Based on this, we propose a novel approach that first trains the classifier to measure the importance of each sentence. The distilled information from the classifier is then used to train a reliable sentence embedding model. Through extensive evaluation on four real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our model trained on synthetic data generalizes well and outperforms the existing baselines. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/ddehun/coling2022_reweighting_sts.

Jimin Hong, ChaeHun Park, Jaegul Choo

Neural language models often fail to generate diverse and informative texts, limiting their applicability in real-world problems. While previous approaches have proposed to address these issues by identifying and penalizing undesirable behaviors (e.g., repetition, overuse of frequent words) from language models, we propose an alternative approach based on an observation: models primarily learn attributes within examples that are likely to cause degeneration problems. Based on this observation, we propose a new approach to prevent degeneration problems by training two models. Specifically, we first train a model that is designed to amplify undesirable patterns. We then enhance the diversity of the second model by focusing on patterns that the first model fails to learn. Extensive experiments on two tasks, namely language modeling and dialogue generation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Zhihao Chen, Jiahui Wang, Yizhou Chen et al.

PET theranostics is transforming precision oncology, yet treatment response varies substantially; many patients receiving 177Lu-PSMA radioligand therapy (RLT) for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) fail to respond, demanding reliable pre-therapy prediction. While LLM-based agents have shown remarkable potential in complex medical diagnosis, their application to PET theranostic outcome prediction remains unexplored, which faces three key challenges: (1) data and knowledge scarcity: RLT was only FDA-approved in 2022, yielding few training cases and insufficient domain knowledge in general LLMs; (2) heterogeneous information integration: robust prediction hinges on structured knowledge extraction from PET/CT, laboratory tests, and free-text clinical documentation; (3) evidence-grounded reasoning: clinical decisions must be anchored in trial evidence rather than LLM hallucinations. In this paper, we present TheraAgent, to our knowledge, the first agentic framework for PET theranostics, with three core innovations: (1) Multi-Expert Feature Extraction with Confidence-Weighted Consensus, where three specialized experts process heterogeneous inputs with uncertainty quantification; (2) Self-Evolving Agentic Memory (SEA-Mem), which learns prognostic patterns from accumulated cases, enabling case-based reasoning from limited data; (3) Evidence-Calibrated Reasoning, integrating a curated theranostics knowledge base to ground predictions in VISION/TheraP trial evidence. Evaluated on 35 real patients and 400 synthetic cases, TheraAgent achieves 75.7% overall accuracy on real patients and 87.0% on synthetic cases, outperforming MDAgents and MedAgent-Pro by over 20%. These results highlight a promising blueprint for trustworthy AI agents in PET theranostics, enabling trial-calibrated, multi-source decision support. Code will be released upon acceptance.

Jimin Hong, Jungsoo Park, Daeyoung Kim et al.

With contrastive pre-training, sentence encoders are generally optimized to locate semantically similar samples closer to each other in their embedding spaces. In this work, we focus on the potential of their embedding spaces to be readily adapted to zero-shot text classification, as semantically distinct samples are already well-separated. Our framework, RaLP (Retrieval augmented Label Prompts for sentence encoder), encodes prompted label candidates with a sentence encoder, then assigns the label whose prompt embedding has the highest similarity with the input text embedding. In order to compensate for the potentially poorly descriptive labels in their original format, RaLP retrieves sentences that are semantically similar to the original label prompt from external corpora and use them as additional pseudo-label prompts. RaLP achieves competitive or stronger performance than much larger baselines on various closed-set classification and multiple-choice QA datasets under zero-shot settings. We show that the retrieval component plays a pivotal role in RaLP's success, and its results are robustly attained regardless of verbalizer variations.

Hawon Jeong, ChaeHun Park, Jimin Hong et al.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators for natural language generation tasks, ensuring unbiased assessments is essential. However, LLM evaluators often display biased preferences, such as favoring verbosity and authoritative tones. Our empirical analysis reveals that these biases are exacerbated in pairwise evaluation, where LLMs directly compare two outputs and easily prioritize superficial attributes. In contrast, pointwise evaluation, which assesses outputs independently, is less susceptible to such bias because each output is judged in isolation. To address the limitations of the pairwise evaluation, we introduce a novel evaluation method, PRePair, which integrates pointwise reasoning within a pairwise framework. PRePair effectively alleviates biased preference, improving performance on the adversarial benchmark (LLMBar) while outperforming pointwise evaluation on the standard benchmark (MT-Bench).

Jimin Hong, Gibbeum Lee, Jaewoong Cho

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have remarkably enhanced performances on a variety of tasks in multiple languages. However, tokenizers in LLMs trained primarily on English-centric corpora often overly fragment a text into character or Unicode-level tokens in non-Roman alphabetic languages, leading to inefficient text generation. We introduce a simple yet effective framework to accelerate text generation in such languages. Our approach involves employing a new language model head with a vocabulary set tailored to a specific target language for a pre-trained LLM. This is followed by fine-tuning the new head while incorporating a verification step to ensure the model's performance is preserved. We show that this targeted fine-tuning, while freezing other model parameters, effectively reduces token fragmentation for the target language. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework increases the generation speed by a factor of 1.7 while maintaining the performance of pre-trained multilingual models on target monolingual tasks.

Jimin Hong, Taehee Kim, Hyesu Lim et al.

During the fine-tuning phase of transfer learning, the pretrained vocabulary remains unchanged, while model parameters are updated. The vocabulary generated based on the pretrained data is suboptimal for downstream data when domain discrepancy exists. We propose to consider the vocabulary as an optimizable parameter, allowing us to update the vocabulary by expanding it with domain-specific vocabulary based on a tokenization statistic. Furthermore, we preserve the embeddings of the added words from overfitting to downstream data by utilizing knowledge learned from a pretrained language model with a regularization term. Our method achieved consistent performance improvements on diverse domains (i.e., biomedical, computer science, news, and reviews).

Jeonghoon Park, Jimin Hong, Radhika Dua et al.

Despite the impressive performance of deep networks in vision, language, and healthcare, unpredictable behaviors on samples from the distribution different than the training distribution cause severe problems in deployment. For better reliability of neural-network-based classifiers, we define a new task, natural attribute-based shift (NAS) detection, to detect the samples shifted from the training distribution by some natural attribute such as age of subjects or brightness of images. Using the natural attributes present in existing datasets, we introduce benchmark datasets in vision, language, and medical for NAS detection. Further, we conduct an extensive evaluation of prior representative out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods on NAS datasets and observe an inconsistency in their performance. To understand this, we provide an analysis on the relationship between the location of NAS samples in the feature space and the performance of distance- and confidence-based OOD detection methods. Based on the analysis, we split NAS samples into three categories and further suggest a simple modification to the training objective to obtain an improved OOD detection method that is capable of detecting samples from all NAS categories.

Jeonghoon Park, Kyungmin Jo, Daehoon Gwak et al.

We evaluate the out-of-distribution (OOD) detection performance of self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques with a new evaluation framework. Unlike the previous evaluation methods, the proposed framework adjusts the distance of OOD samples from the in-distribution samples. We evaluate an extensive combination of OOD detection algorithms on three different implementations of the proposed framework using simulated samples, images, and text. SSL methods consistently demonstrated the improved OOD detection performance in all evaluation settings.

Byung-Ju Choi, Jimin Hong, David Keetae Park et al.

Despite recent advances in neural text generation, encoding the rich diversity in human language remains elusive. We argue that the sub-optimal text generation is mainly attributable to the imbalanced token distribution, which particularly misdirects the learning model when trained with the maximum-likelihood objective. As a simple yet effective remedy, we propose two novel methods, F^2-Softmax and MefMax, for a balanced training even with the skewed frequency distribution. MefMax assigns tokens uniquely to frequency classes, trying to group tokens with similar frequencies and equalize frequency mass between the classes. F^2-Softmax then decomposes a probability distribution of the target token into a product of two conditional probabilities of (i) frequency class, and (ii) token from the target frequency class. Models learn more uniform probability distributions because they are confined to subsets of vocabularies. Significant performance gains on seven relevant metrics suggest the supremacy of our approach in improving not only the diversity but also the quality of generated texts.