Moontae Lee


2023

pdf
Knowledge Unlearning for Mitigating Privacy Risks in Language Models
Joel Jang | Dongkeun Yoon | Sohee Yang | Sungmin Cha | Moontae Lee | Lajanugen Logeswaran | Minjoon Seo
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pretrained Language Models (LMs) memorize a vast amount of knowledge during initial pretraining, including information that may violate the privacy of personal lives and identities. Previous work addressing privacy issues for LMs has mostly focused on data preprocessing and differential privacy methods, both requiring re-training the underlying LM. We propose knowledge unlearning as an alternative method to reduce privacy risks for LMs post hoc. We show that simply performing gradient ascent on target token sequences is effective at forgetting them with little to no degradation of general language modeling performances for larger-sized LMs. We also find that sequential unlearning is better than trying to unlearn all the data at once and that unlearning is highly dependent on which kind of data (domain) is forgotten. By showing comparisons with previous methods known to mitigate privacy risks for LMs, we show that our approach can give a stronger empirical privacy guarantee in scenarios where the data vulnerable to extraction attacks are known a priori while being much more efficient and robust.

pdf
Few-shot Reranking for Multi-hop QA via Language Model Prompting
Muhammad Khalifa | Lajanugen Logeswaran | Moontae Lee | Honglak Lee | Lu Wang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We study few-shot reranking for multi-hop QA (MQA) with open-domain questions. To alleviate the need for a large number of labeled question-document pairs for retriever training, we propose PromptRank, which relies on language model prompting for multi-hop path reranking. PromptRank first constructs an instruction-based prompt that includes a candidate document path and then computes the relevance score between a given question and the path based on the conditional likelihood of the question given the path prompt according to a language model. PromptRank yields strong retrieval performance on HotpotQA with only 128 training examples compared to state-of-the-art methods trained on thousands of examples — 73.6 recall@10 by PromptRank vs. 77.8 by PathRetriever and 77.5 by multi-hop dense retrieval.

pdf
Unsupervised Task Graph Generation from Instructional Video Transcripts
Lajanugen Logeswaran | Sungryull Sohn | Yunseok Jang | Moontae Lee | Honglak Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

This work explores the problem of generating task graphs of real-world activities. Different from prior formulations, we consider a setting where text transcripts of instructional videos performing a real-world activity (e.g., making coffee) are provided and the goal is to identify the key steps relevant to the task as well as the dependency relationship between these key steps. We propose a novel task graph generation approach that combines the reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned language models along with clustering and ranking components to generate accurate task graphs in a completely unsupervised manner. We show that the proposed approach generates more accurate task graphs compared to a supervised learning approach on tasks from the ProceL and CrossTask datasets.

pdf
When to Read Documents or QA History: On Unified and Selective Open-domain QA
Kyungjae Lee | Sang-eun Han | Seung-won Hwang | Moontae Lee
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly precise when the paraphrase of given question q was seen and answered during training, often posed as a retrieval problem, while the latter generalizes better for unseen questions. A natural follow-up is thus leveraging both models, while a naive pipelining or integration approaches have failed to bring additional gains over either model alone. Our distinction is interpreting the problem as calibration, which estimates the confidence of predicted answers as an indicator to decide when to use a document or QA-pair corpus. The effectiveness of our method was validated on widely adopted benchmarks such as Natural Questions and TriviaQA.

2022

pdf
Few-shot Subgoal Planning with Language Models
Lajanugen Logeswaran | Yao Fu | Moontae Lee | Honglak Lee
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Pre-trained language models have shown successful progress in many text understanding benchmarks. This work explores the capability of these models to predict actionable plans in real-world environments. Given a text instruction, we show that language priors encoded in pre-trained models allow us to infer fine-grained subgoal sequences. In contrast to recent methods which make strong assumptions about subgoal supervision, our experiments show that language models can infer detailed subgoal sequences from few training sequences without any fine-tuning. We further propose a simple strategy to re-rank language model predictions based on interaction and feedback from the environment. Combined with pre-trained navigation and visual reasoning components, our approach demonstrates competitive performance on subgoal prediction and task completion in the ALFRED benchmark compared to prior methods that assume more subgoal supervision.

2019

pdf
Practical Correlated Topic Modeling and Analysis via the Rectified Anchor Word Algorithm
Moontae Lee | Sungjun Cho | David Bindel | David Mimno
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Despite great scalability on large data and their ability to understand correlations between topics, spectral topic models have not been widely used due to the absence of reliability in real data and lack of practical implementations. This paper aims to solidify the foundations of spectral topic inference and provide a practical implementation for anchor-based topic modeling. Beginning with vocabulary curation, we scrutinize every single inference step with other viable options. We also evaluate our matrix-based approach against popular alternatives including a tensor-based spectral method as well as probabilistic algorithms. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the power of Rectified Anchor Word algorithm in various real datasets, providing a complete guide to practical correlated topic modeling.

2014

pdf
Low-dimensional Embeddings for Interpretable Anchor-based Topic Inference
David Mimno | Moontae Lee
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)