Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction

Xin Miao, Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Tieyun Qian


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved satisfactory performance in counterfactual generation. However, confined by the stochastic generation process of LLMs, there often are misalignments between LLMs and humans which hinder LLMs from handling complex tasks like relation extraction. As a result, LLMs may generate commonsense-violated counterfactuals like ‘eggs were produced by a box’. To bridge this gap, we propose to mimick the episodic memory retrieval, the working mechanism of human hippocampus, to align LLMs’ generation process with that of humans. In this way, LLMs can derive experience from their extensive memory, which keeps in line with the way humans gain commonsense. We then implement two central functions in the hippocampus, i.e., pattern separation and pattern completion, to retrieve the episodic memory from LLMs and generate commonsense counterfactuals for relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate the improvements of our framework over existing methods in terms of the quality of counterfactuals.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.146
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2489–2511
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.146
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.146
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xin Miao, Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, and Tieyun Qian. 2024. Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 2489–2511, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction (Miao et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/autopr/2024.findings-acl.146.pdf