Haochen Shi


2024

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MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding
Baixuan Xu | Weiqi Wang | Haochen Shi | Wenxuan Ding | Huihao Jing | Tianqing Fang | Jiaxin Bai | Xin Liu | Changlong Yu | Zheng Li | Chen Luo | Qingyu Yin | Bing Yin | Long Chen | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Improving user experience and providing personalized search results in E-commerce platforms heavily rely on understanding purchase intention. However, existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions bank on distilling large language models with human annotation for verification. Such an approach tends to generate product-centric intentions, overlook valuable visual information from product images, and incurs high costs for scalability. To address these issues, we introduce MIND, a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. Using Amazon Review data, we apply MIND and create a multimodal intention knowledge base, which contains 1,264,441 intentions derived from 126,142 co-buy shopping records across 107,215 products. Extensive human evaluations demonstrate the high plausibility and typicality of our obtained intentions and validate the effectiveness of our distillation framework and filtering mechanism. Further experiments reveal the positive downstream benefits that MIND brings to intention comprehension tasks and highlight the importance of multimodal generation and role-aware filtering. Additionally, MIND shows robustness to different prompts and superior generation quality compared to previous methods.

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ActPlan-1K: Benchmarking the Procedural Planning Ability of Visual Language Models in Household Activities
Ying Su | Zhan Ling | Haochen Shi | Cheng Jiayang | Yauwai Yim | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large language models(LLMs) have been adopted to process textual task description and accomplish procedural planning in embodied AI tasks because of their powerful reasoning ability. However, there is still lack of study on how vision language models(VLMs) behave when multi-modal task inputs are considered. Counterfactual planning that evaluates the model’s reasoning ability over alternative task situations are also under exploited. In order to evaluate the planning ability of both multi-modal and counterfactual aspects, we propose ActPlan-1K. ActPlan-1K is a multi-modal planning benchmark constructed based on ChatGPT and household activity simulator iGibson2. The benchmark consists of 153 activities and 1,187 instances. Each instance describing one activity has a natural language task description and multiple environment images from the simulator. The gold plan of each instance is action sequences over the objects in provided scenes. Both the correctness and commonsense satisfaction are evaluated on typical VLMs. It turns out that current VLMs are still struggling at generating human-level procedural plans for both normal activities and counterfactual activities. We further provide automatic evaluation metrics by finetuning over BLEURT model to facilitate future research on our benchmark.

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AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph
Zhaowei Wang | Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Hongming Zhang | Sehyun Choi | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Cognitive research indicates that abstraction ability is essential in human intelligence, which remains under-explored in language models. In this paper, we present AbsPyramid, a unified entailment graph of 221K textual descriptions of abstraction knowledge. While existing resources only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains, AbsPyramid collects abstract knowledge for three components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models in the open domain. Experimental results demonstrate that current LLMs face challenges comprehending abstraction knowledge in zero-shot and few-shot settings. By training on our rich abstraction knowledge, we find LLMs can acquire basic abstraction abilities and generalize to unseen events. In the meantime, we empirically show that our benchmark is comprehensive to enhance LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks.

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Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games
Dekun Wu | Haochen Shi | Zhiyuan Sun | Bang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. We introduce the first dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster AI agent development in this complex narrative environment. Our work also presents a unique multi-agent interaction framework using LLMs, allowing AI agents to autonomously engage in Jubensha games. To evaluate the gaming performance of these AI agents, we developed novel methods measuring their mastery of case information and reasoning skills. Furthermore, we incorporated the latest advancements in prompting engineering to enhance the agents’ performance in information gathering, murderer identification, and logical reasoning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. This work aims to offer a novel perspective on understanding LLM capabilities and establish a new benchmark for evaluating large language model-based agents.

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Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling
Zhiyuan Sun | Haochen Shi | Marc-Alexandre Côté | Glen Berseth | Xingdi Yuan | Bang Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast amounts of internet data, have developed a broad understanding of the world, enhancing the decision-making capabilities of embodied agents. This success is largely due to the comprehensive and in-depth domain knowledge within their training datasets. However, the extent of this knowledge can vary across different domains, and existing methods often assume that LLMs have a complete understanding of their environment, overlooking potential gaps in their grasp of actual world dynamics. To address this gap, we introduce Discover, Verify, and Evolve (DiVE), a framework that discovers world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, verifies the correctness of these dynamics, and evolves new, advanced dynamics tailored to the current situation. Through extensive evaluations, we analyze the impact of each component on performance and compare the automatically generated dynamics from with human-annotated world dynamics. Our results demonstrate that LLMs guided by can make better decisions, achieving rewards comparable to human players in the Crafter environment.

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GProofT: A Multi-dimension Multi-round Fact Checking Framework Based on Claim Fact Extraction
Jiayu Liu | Junhao Tang | Hanwen Wang | Baixuan Xu | Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the Seventh Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)

In the information era, the vast proliferation of online content poses significant challenges, particularly concerning the trustworthiness of these digital statements, which can have profound societal implications. Although it is possible to manually annotate and verify the authenticity of such content, the sheer volume and rapid pace of information generation render this approach impractical, both in terms of time and cost. Therefore, it is imperative to develop automated systems capable of validating online claims, ensuring that users can use the wealth of information available on the Internet effectively and reliably. Using primarily ChatGPT and the Google search API, GProofT fact checking framework generates question-answer pairs to systematically extract and verify the facts within claims. Based on the outcomes of these QA pairs, claims are subsequently labeled as Supported, Conflicted Evidence/Cherry-Picking, or Refuted. Shown by extensive experiments, GProofT Retrieval generally performs effectively in fact-checking and makes a substantial contribution to the task. Our code is released on https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/GProofT.

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OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following
Haochen Shi | Zhiyuan Sun | Xingdi Yuan | Marc-Alexandre Côté | Bang Liu
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framework-centric approach to enhance performance in embodied learning tasks, including EIF. Despite these efforts, there exists a lack of a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components—ranging from visual perception to action execution—on task performance. To address this gap, we introduce OPEx, a comprehensive framework that delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks: Observer, Planner, and Executor. Through extensive evaluations, we provide a deep analysis of how each component influences EIF task performance. Furthermore, we innovate within this space by integrating a multi-agent design into the Planner component of our LLM-centric architecture, further enhancing task performance. Our findings reveal that LLM-centric design markedly improves EIF outcomes, identify visual perception and low-level action execution as critical bottlenecks, and demonstrate that augmenting LLMs with a multi-agent framework further elevates performance.

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CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning
Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Chunyang Li | Haochen Shi | Wenxuan Ding | Baixuan Xu | Zhaowei Wang | Jiaxin Bai | Xin Liu | Cheng Jiayang | Chunkit Chan | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavilyrely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE (ConceptuAlizationand INstantiation Distillation from Large Language ModEls), a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC (Sap et al., 2019a), we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. Our data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.

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KnowComp at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Conceptualization-Augmented Prompting with Large Language Models for Lateral Reasoning
Weiqi Wang | Baixuan Xu | Haochen Shi | Jiaxin Bai | Qi Hu | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

Lateral thinking is essential in breaking away from conventional thought patterns and finding innovative solutions to problems. Despite this, language models often struggle with reasoning tasks that require lateral thinking. In this paper, we present our system for SemEval-2024 Task 9’s BrainTeaser challenge, which requires language models to answer brain teaser questions that typically involve lateral reasoning scenarios. Our framework is based on large language models and incorporates a zero-shot prompting method that integrates conceptualizations of automatically detected instances in the question. We also transform the task of question answering into a declarative format to enhance the discriminatory ability of large language models. Our zero-shot evaluation results with ChatGPT indicate that our approach outperforms baselines, including zero-shot and few-shot prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning. Additionally, our system ranks ninth on the official leaderboard, demonstrating its strong performance.

2023

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Reasoning Makes Good Annotators : An Automatic Task-specific Rules Distilling Framework for Low-resource Relation Extraction
Yilin Lu | Juncheng Li | Xiaoqiang Wang | Haochen Shi | Tao Chen | Siliang Tang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Relation extraction is often challenged by insufficient labeled data. Previous methods exploit knowledge from unlabeled data by generating pseudo labels in a self-training pipeline, which suffers a gradual drift problem. Logic rules, a transferable and explainable form of expert knowledge, have achieved promising success by improving the model with weak labels. But manually writing comprehensive rules set is challenging and tedious. To alleviate the human labor of writing high-quality rules, in this work, we propose ARIA, an Automatic task-specific Rules distilling framework. Specifically, we guide the pre-trained language model to reason rules as experts and compose them into robust compound rules for data labeling. Besides, ARIA could continuously enrich the rules set to power the labeling ability by discovering reliable model-labeled data for distinguishable rules generation. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ARIA in a low-resource scenario.

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QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering
Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Tianqing Fang | Baixuan Xu | Wenxuan Ding | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.

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TILFA: A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining
Qing Zong | Zhaowei Wang | Baixuan Xu | Tianshi Zheng | Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Yangqiu Song | Ginny Wong | Simon See
Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining

A main goal of Argument Mining (AM) is to analyze an author’s stance. Unlike previous AM datasets focusing only on text, the shared task at the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining introduces a dataset including both texts and images. Importantly, these images contain both visual elements and optical characters. Our new framework, TILFA (A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining), is designed to handle this mixed data. It excels at not only understanding text but also detecting optical characters and recognizing layout details in images. Our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, earning our team, KnowComp, the 1st place in the leaderboard of Argumentative Stance Classification subtask in this shared task.

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KnowComp Submission for WMT23 Sign Language Translation Task
Baixuan Xu | Haochen Shi | Tianshi Zheng | Qing Zong | Weiqi Wang | Zhaowei Wang | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is a complex task that involves accurately interpreting sign language gestures and translating them into spoken or written language and vice versa. Its primary objective is to facilitate communication between individuals with hearing difficulties using deep learning systems. Existing approaches leverage gloss annotations of sign language gestures to assist the model in capturing the movement and differentiating various gestures. However, constructing a large-scale gloss-annotated dataset is both expensive and impractical to cover multiple languages, and pre-trained generative models cannot be efficiently used due to the lack of textual source context in SLT. To address these challenges, we propose a gloss-free framework for the WMT23 SLT task. Our system primarily consists of a visual extractor for extracting video embeddings and a generator responsible for producing the translated text. We also employ an embedding alignment block that is trained to align the embedding space of the visual extractor with that of the generator. Despite undergoing extensive training and validation, our system consistently falls short of meeting the baseline performance. Further analysis shows that our model’s poor projection rate prevents it from learning diverse visual embeddings. Our codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/SLT.

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KnowComp Submission for WMT23 Word-Level AutoCompletion Task
Yi Wu | Haochen Shi | Weiqi Wang | Yangqiu Song
Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Machine Translation

The NLP community has recently witnessed the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the potential of LLMs for word-level auto-completion in a multilingual context has not been thoroughly explored yet. To address this gap and benchmark the performance of LLMs, we propose an LLM-based system for the WMT23 Word-Level Auto-Completion (WLAC) task. Our system utilizes ChatGPT to represent LLMs and evaluates its performance in three translation directions: Chinese-English, German-English, and English-German. We also study the task under zero-shot and few-shot settings to assess the potential benefits of incorporating exemplars from the training set in guiding the LLM to perform the task. The results of our experiments show that, on average, our system attains a 29.8% accuracy on the test set. Further analyses reveal that LLMs struggle with WLAC in the zero-shot setting, but performance significantly improves with the help of additional exemplars, though some common errors still appear frequently. These findings have important implications for incorporating LLMs into computer-aided translation systems, as they can potentially enhance the quality of translations. Our codes for evaluation are available at https://github.com/ethanyiwu/WLAC.