Role-playing agents (RPAs) are garnering increasing interests as a novel form of conversational AI. While previous research has predominantly concentrated on their ability to portray specified characters, we argue from a user-centered perspective that RPAs’ capability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. To bridge this gap, we propose RolePlot, a role-playing framework specifically designed to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of RPAs. RolePlot begins by constructing a plot-progression dataset extended from human-written literary scripts and specially designed synthetic data, followed by narrative theory-driven manual annotation and automated labeling validated through human verification. We then exploit the over-parameterized embedding space of LLMs to detect a “trigger subspace” that identifies dialogue segments catalyzing plot transitions. When user’s inputs align with this subspace, we explicitly prompt RPAs to advance the plot. For evaluation, we simulate User-RPA interactions and track both the conversation longevity (measured in dialogue turns before disengagement) and users’ arousal levels across different stages. Empirically, our method improves RPAs’ capability to time plot developments, and more importantly, yielding a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels, thereby confirming that users experience more immersive engagements.

LoRA has become one of the most widely used parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, numerous studies have shown that LoRA often introduces substantial parameter redundancy, which not only increases the number of trainable parameters but also hinders the effectiveness of fine-tuning. Since identifying redundant parameters in LoRA is inherently difficult, how to eliminate them efficiently and accurately remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose TASO, a redundancy reduction method that leverages importance information from the pretrained model’s weights to mitigate LoRA redundancy. Specifically, we estimate parameter importance on downstream tasks and identify task-specific core regions based on the distribution of importance scores. The location information of these core regions is then used to determine the sparse structure of LoRA modules, enabling redundancy removal before fine-tuning. Our approach significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters required for task adaptation, while providing a novel task-aligned perspective for LoRA redundancy reduction. Experimental results demonstrate that, with a parameter budget comparable to LoRA with rank r = 1, TASO consistently outperforms standard LoRA across multiple tasks, achieving strong fine-tuning performance while effectively eliminating redundant parameters.

Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process lengthy contexts is critical, especially for retrieving query-relevant information embedded within them. We introduce Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs to extract sequential information items (known as needles) from long contexts. The benchmark includes three needle generation pipelines: synthetic-temporal, real-temporal, and real-logical orders, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K, which comprises 14,000 samples (2,000 for testing). To facilitate the evaluation of this benchmark, we trained an evaluation model that assesses the correctness of LLM responses by comparing their completeness and sequential consistency against the ground truth, which provides a more reliable evaluation metric than GPT-4 or Claude. We conducted experiments on six well-known LLMs, revealing that even the best-performing model achieved a maximum accuracy of only 63.50% on test set of this benchmark. Further analysis highlights the growing challenges posed by increasing the context length or the number of needles, underscoring substantial room for improvement of LLMs. Additionally, noise analysis validates the reliability and challenge of the benchmark, making Sequential-NIAH an important reference for advancing research on long text information extraction capabilities of LLMs.

Language models trained with a fixed vocabulary struggle to generalize to novel or out-of-vocabulary words, limiting their flexibility in handling diverse token combinations. Existing dynamic vocabulary approaches attempt to address this limitation but face challenges such as fragmented codebases, lack of support for modern LLMs, and limited inference scalability. To overcome these issues, we introduce DVAGen, a fully open-source, unified framework designed for training, evaluation, and visualization of dynamic vocabulary-augmented language models. Our framework modularizes the pipeline for ease of customization, integrates seamlessly with open-source LLMs, and is the first to provide both CLI and WebUI tools for real-time result inspection. We validate the effectiveness of dynamic vocabulary methods on modern LLMs and demonstrate support for batch inference, significantly improving inference throughput.

Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify the specific videos defined by a certain pre-specified text policy (or constraint), which plays a crucial role in building a healthy and high-quality Web content ecology. Currently, related works typically employ multiple classifiers or similarity-based systems to support VCD. However, these approaches are difficult to manage, lack generalization power, and suffer from low performance. To tackle these problems, this paper presents a new Vision-Language Large Model (VLLM)-driven VCD system called VENUS (the abbreviation of Video contENt UnderStander). Concretely, we first develop an automatic policy-guided sequential annotator (APSA) to generate high-quality, VCD-specific, and reasoning-equipped instruct-tuning data for model training, then extend the VLLM inference to support VCD better. Following that, we construct a real VCD test set called VCD-Bench, which includes a total of 13 policies and 57K videos. Furthermore, to evaluate its practical efficacy, we deploy VENUS in three different real scenarios. Extensive experiments on both the VCD-Bench and public evaluation datasets for various VCD-related tasks demonstrate the superiority of VENUS over existing baselines.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) play a pivotal role in knowledge-intensive tasks across specialized domains, where the acquisition of precise and dependable knowledge is crucial. However, existing KG construction methods heavily rely on human intervention to attain qualified KGs, which severely hinders the practical applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a general KG construction framework, named **SAC-KG**, to exploit large language models (LLMs) as **S**killed **A**utomatic **C**onstructors for domain **K**nowledge **G**raph. SAC-KG effectively involves LLMs as domain experts to generate specialized and precise multi-level KGs. Specifically, SAC-KG consists of three components: Generator, Verifier, and Pruner. For a given entity, Generator produces its relations and tails from raw domain corpora, to construct a specialized single-level KG. Verifier and Pruner then work together to ensure precision by correcting generation errors and determining whether newly produced tails require further iteration for the next-level KG. Experiments demonstrate that SAC-KG automatically constructs a domain KG at the scale of over one million nodes and achieves a precision of 89.32%, leading to a superior performance with over 20% increase in precision rate compared to existing state-of-the-art methods for the KG construction task.

Causal Language Modeling (CLM) and Masked Language Modeling (MLM) are two mainstream learning paradigms based on Transformer networks, specifically the Decoder-only and Encoder-only architectures. The strengths of each paradigm in downstream tasks have shown a mix of advantages and disadvantages. In the past BabyLM Challenge 2023, although the MLM paradigm achieved the best average performance, the CLM paradigm demonstrated significantly faster convergence rates. For the BabyLM Challenge 2024, we propose a novel language modeling paradigm named AntLM, which integrates both CLM and MLM to leverage the advantages of these two classic paradigms. We chose the strict-small track and conducted experiments on two foundation models: BabyLlama, representing CLM, and LTG-BERT, representing MLM. During the training process for specific foundation models, we alternate between applying CLM or MLM training objectives and causal or bidirectional attention masks. Experimental results show that combining the two pretraining objectives leverages their strengths, enhancing overall training performance. Under the same epochs, AntLM_BabyLlama improves Macro-average by 1%, and AntLM_LTG-BERT achieves a 2.2% increase over the baselines.

Speech-to-text (S2T) generation systems frequently face challenges in low-resource scenarios, primarily due to the lack of extensive labeled datasets. One emerging solution is constructing virtual training samples by interpolating inputs and labels, which has notably enhanced system generalization in other domains. Despite its potential, this technique’s application in S2T tasks has remained under-explored. In this paper, we delve into the utility of interpolation augmentation, guided by several pivotal questions. Our findings reveal that employing an appropriate strategy in interpolation augmentation significantly enhances performance across diverse tasks, architectures, and data scales, offering a promising avenue for more robust S2T systems in resource-constrained settings.

Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to overcome the challenge. In this paper, we study the length generalization property of NoPE. We find that although NoPE can extend to longer sequences than the commonly used explicit position encodings, it still has a limited context length. We identify a connection between the failure of NoPE’s generalization and the distraction of attention distributions. We propose a parameter-efficient tuning for searching attention heads’ best temperature hyper-parameters, which substantially expands NoPE’s context size. Experiments on long sequence language modeling, the synthetic passkey retrieval task and real-world long context tasks show that NoPE can achieve competitive performances with state-of-the-art length generalization algorithms. The source code is publicly accessible

This study describes the model built in Task 9: brainteaser in the SemEval-2024 competition, which is a multiple-choice task. As active participants in Task 9, our system strategically employs the decoding-enhanced BERT (DeBERTa) architecture enriched with disentangled attention mechanisms. Additionally, we fine-tuned our model using low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to optimize its performance further. Moreover, we integrate focal loss into our framework to address label imbalance issues. The systematic integration of these techniques has resulted in outstanding performance metrics. Upon evaluation using the provided test dataset, our system showcases commendable results, with a remarkable accuracy score of 0.9 for subtask 1, positioning us fifth among all participants. Similarly, for subtask 2, our system exhibits a substantial accuracy rate of 0.781, securing a commendable seventh-place ranking. The code for this paper is published at: https://github.com/123yunnandaxue/Semveal-2024_task9.

We leverage cross-language data expansion and retraining to enhance neural Event Detection (abbr., ED) on English ACE corpus. Machine translation is utilized for expanding English training set of ED from that of Chinese. However, experimental results illustrate that such strategy actually results in performance degradation. The survey of translations suggests that the mistakenly-aligned triggers in the expanded data negatively influences the retraining process. We refer this phenomenon to “trigger falsification”. To overcome the issue, we apply heuristic rules for regulating the expanded data, fixing the distracting samples that contain the falsified triggers. The supplementary experiments show that the rule-based regulation is beneficial, yielding the improvement of about 1.6% F1-score for ED. We additionally prove that, instead of transfer learning from the translated ED data, the straight data combination by random pouring surprisingly performs better.

This paper describes the NiuTrans neural machine translation systems of the WMT22 General MT constrained task. We participate in four directions, including Chinese→English, English→Croatian, and Livonian↔English. Our models are based on several advanced Transformer variants, e.g., Transformer-ODE, Universal Multiscale Transformer (UMST). The main workflow consists of data filtering, large-scale data augmentation (i.e., iterative back-translation, iterative knowledge distillation), and specific-domain fine-tuning. Moreover, we try several multi-domain methods, such as a multi-domain model structure and a multi-domain data clustering method, to rise to this year’s newly proposed multi-domain test set challenge. For low-resource scenarios, we build a multi-language translation model to enhance the performance, and try to use the pre-trained language model (mBERT) to initialize the translation model.