Jiaqi Li

Jiaqi Li, Mengmeng Wang, Zilong Zheng et al.

Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance in various language tasks, are typically limited to processing texts within context-window size. This limitation has spurred significant research efforts to enhance LLMs' long-context understanding with high-quality long-sequence benchmarks. However, prior datasets in this regard suffer from shortcomings, such as short context length compared to the context window of modern LLMs; outdated documents that have data leakage problems; and an emphasis on short dependency tasks rather than long dependency tasks. In this paper, we present LooGLE, a Long Context Generic Language Evaluation benchmark for LLMs' long context understanding. LooGLE features relatively new documents post-2022, with over 24,000 tokens per document and 6,000 newly generated questions spanning diverse domains. Human annotators meticulously crafted more than 1,100 high-quality question-answer pairs to meet the long dependency requirements. These pairs underwent thorough cross-validation, yielding the most precise assessment of LLMs' long dependency capabilities. The evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs on LooGLE revealed key findings: (i) commercial models outperformed open-sourced models; (ii) LLMs excelled in short dependency tasks like short question-answering and cloze tasks but struggled with more intricate long dependency tasks; (iii) in-context learning and chaining thoughts offered only marginal improvements; (iv) retrieval-based techniques demonstrated substantial benefits for short question-answering, while strategies for extending context window length had limited impact on long context understanding. As such, LooGLE not only provides a systematic and comprehensive evaluation schema on long-context LLMs, but also sheds light on future development of enhanced models towards "true long-context understanding".

Meihuizi Jia, Lei Shen, Xin Shen et al.

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) is a critical step in information extraction, which aims to detect entity spans and classify them to corresponding entity types given a sentence-image pair. Existing methods either (1) obtain named entities with coarse-grained visual clues from attention mechanisms, or (2) first detect fine-grained visual regions with toolkits and then recognize named entities. However, they suffer from improper alignment between entity types and visual regions or error propagation in the two-stage manner, which finally imports irrelevant visual information into texts. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named MNER-QG that can simultaneously perform MRC-based multimodal named entity recognition and query grounding. Specifically, with the assistance of queries, MNER-QG can provide prior knowledge of entity types and visual regions, and further enhance representations of both texts and images. To conduct the query grounding task, we provide manual annotations and weak supervisions that are obtained via training a highly flexible visual grounding model with transfer learning. We conduct extensive experiments on two public MNER datasets, Twitter2015 and Twitter2017. Experimental results show that MNER-QG outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the MNER task, and also improves the query grounding performance.

Xiaojuan Tang, Zilong Zheng, Jiaqi Li et al.

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such in-context capabilities still remains unclear. In this work, we hypothesize that the learned \textit{semantics} of language tokens do the most heavy lifting during the reasoning process. Different from human's symbolic reasoning process, the semantic representations of LLMs could create strong connections among tokens, thus composing a superficial logical chain. To test our hypothesis, we decouple semantics from the language reasoning process and evaluate three kinds of reasoning abilities, i.e., deduction, induction and abduction. Our findings reveal that semantics play a vital role in LLMs' in-context reasoning -- LLMs perform significantly better when semantics are consistent with commonsense but struggle to solve symbolic or counter-commonsense reasoning tasks by leveraging in-context new knowledge. The surprising observations question whether modern LLMs have mastered the inductive, deductive and abductive reasoning abilities as in human intelligence, and motivate research on unveiling the magic existing within the black-box LLMs. On the whole, our analysis provides a novel perspective on the role of semantics in developing and evaluating language models' reasoning abilities. Code is available at {\url{https://github.com/XiaojuanTang/ICSR}}.

Yang Liu, Jiaqi Li, Zilong Zheng

Rule-based reasoning has been acknowledged as one of the fundamental problems in reasoning, while deviations in rule formats, types, and complexity in real-world applications pose severe challenges. Recent studies have shown that large reasoning models (LRMs) have remarkable reasoning capabilities, and their performance is substantially enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL). However, it remains an open question whether small reasoning models (SRMs) can learn rule-based reasoning effectively with robust generalization across diverse tasks and domains. To address this, we introduce Reinforced Rule-based Reasoning, a.k.a. RuleReasoner, a simple yet effective method to conduct rule-based reasoning via a wide collection of curated tasks and a novel domain-aware dynamic sampling approach. Specifically, RuleReasoner resamples each training batch by updating the sampling weights of different domains based on historical rewards. This facilitates domain augmentation and flexible online learning schedules for RL, obviating the need for pre-hoc human-engineered mix-training recipes used in existing methods. Empirical evaluations on in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks reveal that RuleReasoner outperforms frontier LRMs by a significant margin ($Δ$4.1% average points on eight ID tasks and $Δ$10.4% average points on three OOD tasks over OpenAI-o1). Notably, our approach also exhibits higher computational efficiency compared to prior dynamic sampling methods for RL.

Jiaqi Li, Ming Liu, Zihao Zheng et al.

Multiparty Dialogue Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) differs from traditional MRC as models must handle the complex dialogue discourse structure, previously unconsidered in traditional MRC. To fully exploit such discourse structure in multiparty dialogue, we present a discourse-aware dialogue graph neural network, DADgraph, which explicitly constructs the dialogue graph using discourse dependency links and discourse relations. To validate our model, we perform experiments on the Molweni corpus, a large-scale MRC dataset built over multiparty dialogue annotated with discourse structure. Experiments on Molweni show that our discourse-aware model achieves statistically significant improvements compared against strong neural network MRC baselines.

Yuan Chen, Jiaqi Li, Guorui Xu et al.

Since its debut, SGX has been used in many applications, e.g., secure data processing. However, previous systems usually assume a trusted enclave and ignore the security issues caused by an untrusted enclave. For instance, a vulnerable (or even malicious) third-party enclave can be exploited to attack the host application and the rest of the system. In this paper, we propose an efficient mechanism to confine an untrusted enclave's behaviors. The threats of an untrusted enclave come from the enclave-host asymmetries. They can be abused to access arbitrary memory regions of its host application, jump to any code location after leaving the enclave and forge the stack register to manipulate the saved context. Our solution breaks such asymmetries and establishes mutual distrust between the host application and the enclave. It leverages Intel MPK for efficient memory isolation and the x86 single-step debugging mechanism to capture the event when an enclave is existing. It then performs the integrity check for the jump target and the stack pointer. We have solved two practical challenges and implemented a prototype system. The evaluation with multiple micro-benchmarks and representative real-world applications demonstrated the efficiency of our system, with less than 4% performance overhead.

Jiaqi Li, Ming Liu, Min-Yen Kan et al.

Research into the area of multiparty dialog has grown considerably over recent years. We present the Molweni dataset, a machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset with discourse structure built over multiparty dialog. Molweni's source samples from the Ubuntu Chat Corpus, including 10,000 dialogs comprising 88,303 utterances. We annotate 30,066 questions on this corpus, including both answerable and unanswerable questions. Molweni also uniquely contributes discourse dependency annotations in a modified Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT; Asher et al., 2016) style for all of its multiparty dialogs, contributing large-scale (78,245 annotated discourse relations) data to bear on the task of multiparty dialog discourse parsing. Our experiments show that Molweni is a challenging dataset for current MRC models: BERT-wwm, a current, strong SQuAD 2.0 performer, achieves only 67.7% F1 on Molweni's questions, a 20+% significant drop as compared against its SQuAD 2.0 performance.

Jiaqi Li, Ming Liu, Bing Qin et al.

In this paper, we propose the scheme for annotating large-scale multi-party chat dialogues for discourse parsing and machine comprehension. The main goal of this project is to help understand multi-party dialogues. Our dataset is based on the Ubuntu Chat Corpus. For each multi-party dialogue, we annotate the discourse structure and question-answer pairs for dialogues. As we know, this is the first large scale corpus for multi-party dialogues discourse parsing, and we firstly propose the task for multi-party dialogues machine reading comprehension.