Xiangliang Zhang


2024

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1+1>2: Can Large Language Models Serve as Cross-Lingual Knowledge Aggregators?
Yue Huang | Chenrui Fan | Yuan Li | Siyuan Wu | Tianyi Zhou | Xiangliang Zhang | Lichao Sun
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention due to their remarkable ability to process information across various languages. Despite their capabilities, they exhibit inconsistencies in handling identical queries in different languages, presenting challenges for further advancement. This paper introduces a method to enhance the multilingual performance of LLMs by aggregating knowledge from diverse languages. This approach incorporates a low-resource knowledge detector specific to a language, a strategic language selection process, and mechanisms for answer replacement and integration. Our extensive experiments demonstrate notable performance improvements, particularly in reducing the performance disparity across languages. An ablation study confirms that each component of our method significantly contributes to these enhancements. This research highlights the inherent potential of LLMs to harmonize multilingual capabilities and offers valuable insights for further exploration.

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Defending Jailbreak Prompts via In-Context Adversarial Game
Yujun Zhou | Yufei Han | Haomin Zhuang | Kehan Guo | Zhenwen Liang | Hongyan Bao | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across diverse applications. However, concerns regarding their security, particularly the vulnerability to jailbreak attacks, persist. Drawing inspiration from adversarial training in deep learning and LLM agent learning processes, we introduce the In-Context Adversarial Game (ICAG) for defending against jailbreaks without the need for fine-tuning. ICAG leverages agent learning to conduct an adversarial game, aiming to dynamically extend knowledge to defend against jailbreaks. Unlike traditional methods that rely on static datasets, ICAG employs an iterative process to enhance both the defense and attack agents. This continuous improvement process strengthens defenses against newly generated jailbreak prompts. Our empirical studies affirm ICAG’s efficacy, where LLMs safeguarded by ICAG exhibit significantly reduced jailbreak success rates across various attack scenarios. Moreover, ICAG demonstrates remarkable transferability to other LLMs, indicating its potential as a versatile defense mechanism. The code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/In-Context-Adversarial-Game.

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RAt: Injecting Implicit Bias for Text-To-Image Prompt Refinement Models
Ziyi Kou | Shichao Pei | Meng Jiang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text-to-image prompt refinement (T2I-Refine) aims to rephrase or extend an input prompt with more descriptive details that can be leveraged to generate images with higher quality. In this paper, we study an adversarial prompt attacking problem for T2I-Refine, where to goal is to implicitly inject specific concept bias to the input prompts during the refinement process so that the generated images, still with higher quality, are explicitly biased to the target group. Our study is motivated by the limitation of current T2I-Refine research that lacks of explorations on the potential capacity of T2I-Refine models to provide prompt refinement service in a biased or advertising manner. To address the limitations, we develop RAt, a prompt refinement and attacking framework that attacks input prompts with intentionally selected adversarial replacements by optimizing a token distribution matrix based on the text-to-image finetuning strategy with a token-level bias obfuscation loss as regularization. We evaluate RAt on a large-scale text-to-image dataset with various concepts as target in both in-domain and transfer-domain scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate that, compared to other T2I-Refine schemes, RAt is well capable of implicitly attacking input prompts to generate images with higher quality and explicit visual bias towards specific concept group.

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SaSR-Net: Source-Aware Semantic Representation Network for Enhancing Audio-Visual Question Answering
Tianyu Yang | Yiyang Nan | Lisen Dai | Zhenwen Liang | Yapeng Tian | Xiangliang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a challenging task that involves answering questions based on both auditory and visual information in videos. A significant challenge is interpreting complex multi-modal scenes, which include both visual objects and sound sources, and connecting them to the given question. In this paper, we introduce the Source-aware Semantic Representation Network (SaSR-Net), a novel model designed for AVQA. SaSR-Net utilizes source-wise learnable tokens to efficiently capture and align audio-visual elements with the corresponding question. It streamlines the fusion of audio and visual information using spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to identify answers in multi-modal scenes. Extensive experiments on the Music-AVQA and AVQA-Yang datasets show that SaSR-Net outperforms state-of-the-art AVQA methods. We will release our source code and pre-trained models.

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SceMQA: A Scientific College Entrance Level Multimodal Question Answering Benchmark
Zhenwen Liang | Kehan Guo | Gang Liu | Taicheng Guo | Yujun Zhou | Tianyu Yang | Jiajun Jiao | Renjie Pi | Jipeng Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models’ abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models.

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MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning
Zhenwen Liang | Dian Yu | Xiaoman Pan | Wenlin Yao | Qingkai Zeng | Xiangliang Zhang | Dong Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Reasoning in mathematical domains remains a significant challenge for relatively small language models (LMs). Many current methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely heavily on distilling knowledge from powerful yet inefficient large LMs (LLMs). In this work, we explore a new direction that avoids over-reliance on LLM teachers, introducing a multi-view fine-tuning method that efficiently exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. Our approach uniquely considers the various annotation formats as different “views” that may help each other and leverage them in training the model. By postpending distinct instructions to input questions, models can learn to generate solutions in diverse formats in a flexible manner. Experimental results show that our strategy enables relatively small LMs to outperform prior approaches that heavily rely on knowledge distillation, as well as carefully established baselines. Additionally, the proposed method grants the models promising generalization ability across various views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete noisy data. We hope our multi-view training paradigm could inspire future studies in other machine reasoning domains.

2023

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Improving the Robustness of Summarization Systems with Dual Augmentation
Xiuying Chen | Guodong Long | Chongyang Tao | Mingzhe Li | Xin Gao | Chengqi Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

A robust summarization system should be able to capture the gist of the document, regardless of the specific word choices or noise in the input. In this work, we first explore the summarization models’ robustness against perturbations including word-level synonym substitution and noise. To create semantic-consistent substitutes, we propose a SummAttacker, which is an efficient approach to generating adversarial samples based on pre-trained language models. Experimental results show that state-of-the-art summarization models have a significant decrease in performance on adversarial and noisy test sets. Next, we analyze the vulnerability of the summarization systems and explore improving the robustness by data augmentation. Specifically, the first vulnerability factor we found is the low diversity of the training inputs. Correspondingly, we expose the encoder to more diverse cases created by SummAttacker in the input space. The second factor is the vulnerability of the decoder, and we propose an augmentation in the latent space of the decoder to improve its robustness. Concretely, we create virtual cases by manifold softmixing two decoder hidden states of similar semantic meanings. Experimental results on Gigaword and CNN/DM datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves significant improvements over strong baselines and exhibits higher robustness on noisy, attacked, and clean datasets

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Few-shot Low-resource Knowledge Graph Completion with Reinforced Task Generation
Shichao Pei | Qiannan Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Despite becoming a prevailing paradigm for organizing knowledge, most knowledge graphs (KGs) suffer from the low-resource issue due to the deficiency of data sources. The enrichment of KGs by automatic knowledge graph completion is impeded by the intrinsic long-tail property of KGs. In spite of their prosperity, existing few-shot learning-based models have difficulty alleviating the impact of the long-tail issue on low-resource KGs because of the lack of training tasks. To tackle the challenging long-tail issue on low-resource KG completion, in this paper, we propose a novel few-shot low-resource knowledge graph completion framework, which is composed of three components, i.e., few-shot learner, task generator, and task selector. The key idea is to generate and then select the beneficial few-shot tasks that complement the current tasks and enable the optimization of the few-shot learner using the selected few-shot tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on several real-world knowledge graphs validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

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Compositional Mathematical Encoding for Math Word Problems
Zhenwen Liang | Jipeng Zhang | Kehan Guo | Xiaodong Wu | Jie Shao | Xiangliang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Solving math word problem (MWP) remains a challenging task, as it requires to understand both the semantic meanings of the text and the mathematical logic among quantities, i.e., for both semantics modal and quantity modal learning. Current MWP encoders work in a uni-modal setting and map the given problem description to a latent representation, then for decoding. The generalizability of these MWP encoders is thus limited because some problems are semantics-demanding and others are quantity-demanding. To address this problem, we propose a Compositional Math Word Problem Solver (C-MWP) which works in a bi-modal setting encoding in an interactive way. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of C-MWP and show its superiority over state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks.

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UniMath: A Foundational and Multimodal Mathematical Reasoner
Zhenwen Liang | Tianyu Yang | Jipeng Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While significant progress has been made in natural language processing (NLP), existing methods exhibit limitations in effectively interpreting and processing diverse mathematical modalities. Therefore, we introduce UniMath, a versatile and unified system designed for multimodal mathematical reasoning tasks. Tackling complex problem-solving in arithmetic, geometry, and table-based math, UniMath utilizes a fine-tuned T5 model augmented with a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based image tokenizer. By jointly training and evaluating the model on three diverse datasets - SVAMP, GeoQA, and TableMWP, UniMath achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model’s generalization ability is further demonstrated via fine-tuning on two additional datasets, MathQA and Geo-Proving. Through comprehensive evaluations, we showcase that joint training across diverse math tasks improves overall model performance and enhances its ability to generalize across different mathematical reasoning tasks. This pioneering approach provides a blueprint and inspires further efforts on unified mathematical reasoning with deep learning systems.

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Let GPT be a Math Tutor: Teaching Math Word Problem Solvers with Customized Exercise Generation
Zhenwen Liang | Wenhao Yu | Tanmay Rajpurohit | Peter Clark | Xiangliang Zhang | Ashwin Kalyan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In this paper, we present a novel approach for distilling math word problem solving capabilities from large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient student models. Our approach is designed to consider the student model’s weaknesses and foster a tailored learning experience by generating targeted exercises aligned with educational science principles, such as knowledge tracing and personalized learning. Concretely, we let GPT-3 be a math tutor and run two steps iteratively: 1) assessing the student model’s current learning status on a GPT-generated exercise book, and 2) improving the student model by training it with tailored exercise samples generated by GPT-3. Experimental results reveal that our approach outperforms LLMs (e.g., GPT-3 and PaLM) in accuracy across three distinct benchmarks while employing significantly fewer parameters. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the various components within our methodology to substantiate their efficacy.

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Don’t be Blind to Questions: Question-Oriented Math Word Problem Solving
Zhenwen Liang | Jipeng Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2022

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Unsupervised Mitigating Gender Bias by Character Components: A Case Study of Chinese Word Embedding
Xiuying Chen | Mingzhe Li | Rui Yan | Xin Gao | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

Word embeddings learned from massive text collections have demonstrated significant levels of discriminative biases. However, debias on the Chinese language, one of the most spoken languages, has been less explored. Meanwhile, existing literature relies on manually created supplementary data, which is time- and energy-consuming. In this work, we propose the first Chinese Gender-neutral word Embedding model (CGE) based on Word2vec, which learns gender-neutral word embeddings without any labeled data. Concretely, CGE utilizes and emphasizes the rich feminine and masculine information contained in radicals, i.e., a kind of component in Chinese characters, during the training procedure. This consequently alleviates discriminative gender biases. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets show that our unsupervised method outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised debiased word embedding models without sacrificing the functionality of the embedding model.

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Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs
Xiuying Chen | Mingzhe Li | Shen Gao | Rui Yan | Xin Gao | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information.In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings.We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task.MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks.Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information.Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework.Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarizationmodel (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available.Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation.Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

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ArtELingo: A Million Emotion Annotations of WikiArt with Emphasis on Diversity over Language and Culture
Youssef Mohamed | Mohamed Abdelfattah | Shyma Alhuwaider | Feifan Li | Xiangliang Zhang | Kenneth Church | Mohamed Elhoseiny
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper introduces ArtELingo, a new benchmark and dataset, designed to encourage work on diversity across languages and cultures. Following ArtEmis, a collection of 80k artworks from WikiArt with 0.45M emotion labels and English-only captions, ArtELingo adds another 0.79M annotations in Arabic and Chinese, plus 4.8K in Spanish to evaluate “cultural-transfer” performance. 51K artworks have 5 annotations or more in 3 languages. This diversity makes it possible to study similarities and differences across languages and cultures. Further, we investigate captioning tasks, and find diversity improves the performance of baseline models. ArtELingo is publicly available at ‘www.artelingo.org‘ with standard splits and baseline models. We hope our work will help ease future research on multilinguality and culturally-aware AI.

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Analogical Math Word Problems Solving with Enhanced Problem-Solution Association
Zhenwen Liang | Jipeng Zhang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Math word problem (MWP) solving is an important task in question answering which requires human-like reasoning ability. Analogical reasoning has long been used in mathematical education, as it enables students to apply common relational structures of mathematical situations to solve new problems. In this paper, we propose to build a novel MWP solver by leveraging analogical MWPs, which advance the solver’s generalization ability across different kinds of MWPs. The key idea, named analogy identification, is to associate the analogical MWP pairs in a latent space, i.e., encoding an MWP close to another analogical MWP, while leaving away from the non-analogical ones. Moreover, a solution discriminator is integrated into the MWP solver to enhance the association between an MWP and its true solution. The evaluation results verify that our proposed analogical learning strategy promotes the performance of MWP-BERT on Math23k over the state-of-the-art model Generate2Rank, with 5 times fewer parameters in the encoder. We also find that our model has a stronger generalization ability in solving difficult MWPs due to the analogical learning from easy MWPs.

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MWP-BERT: Numeracy-Augmented Pre-training for Math Word Problem Solving
Zhenwen Liang | Jipeng Zhang | Lei Wang | Wei Qin | Yunshi Lan | Jie Shao | Xiangliang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Math word problem (MWP) solving faces a dilemma in number representation learning. In order to avoid the number representation issue and reduce the search space of feasible solutions, existing works striving for MWP solving usually replace real numbers with symbolic placeholders to focus on logic reasoning. However, different from common symbolic reasoning tasks like program synthesis and knowledge graph reasoning, MWP solving has extra requirements in numerical reasoning. In other words, instead of the number value itself, it is the reusable numerical property that matters more in numerical reasoning. Therefore, we argue that injecting numerical properties into symbolic placeholders with contextualized representation learning schema can provide a way out of the dilemma in the number representation issue here. In this work, we introduce this idea to the popular pre-training language model (PLM) techniques and build MWP-BERT, an effective contextual number representation PLM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our MWP-BERT on MWP solving and several MWP-specific understanding tasks on both English and Chinese benchmarks.

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ArMATH: a Dataset for Solving Arabic Math Word Problems
Reem Alghamdi | Zhenwen Liang | Xiangliang Zhang
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper studies solving Arabic Math Word Problems by deep learning. A Math Word Problem (MWP) is a text description of a mathematical problem that can be solved by deriving a math equation to reach the answer. Effective models have been developed for solving MWPs in English and Chinese. However, Arabic MWPs are rarely studied. This paper contributes the first large-scale dataset for Arabic MWPs, which contains 6,000 samples of primary-school math problems, written in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Arabic MWP solvers are then built with deep learning models and evaluated on this dataset. In addition, a transfer learning model is built to let the high-resource Chinese MWP solver promote the performance of the low-resource Arabic MWP solver. This work is the first to use deep learning methods to solve Arabic MWP and the first to use transfer learning to solve MWP across different languages. The transfer learning enhanced solver has an accuracy of 74.15%, which is 3% higher than the solver without using transfer learning. We make the dataset and solvers available in public for encouraging more research of Arabic MWPs: https://github.com/reem-codes/ArMATH

2021

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Capturing Relations between Scientific Papers: An Abstractive Model for Related Work Section Generation
Xiuying Chen | Hind Alamro | Mingzhe Li | Shen Gao | Xiangliang Zhang | Dongyan Zhao | Rui Yan
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Given a set of related publications, related work section generation aims to provide researchers with an overview of the specific research area by summarizing these works and introducing them in a logical order. Most of existing related work generation models follow the inflexible extractive style, which directly extract sentences from multiple original papers to form a related work discussion. Hence, in this paper, we propose a Relation-aware Related work Generator (RRG), which generates an abstractive related work from the given multiple scientific papers in the same research area. Concretely, we propose a relation-aware multi-document encoder that relates one document to another according to their content dependency in a relation graph. The relation graph and the document representation are interacted and polished iteratively, complementing each other in the training process. We also contribute two public datasets composed of related work sections and their corresponding papers. Extensive experiments on the two datasets show that the proposed model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. We hope that this work will promote advances in related work generation task.

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Data-Efficient Language Shaped Few-shot Image Classification
Zhenwen Liang | Xiangliang Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Many existing works have demonstrated that language is a helpful guider for image understanding by neural networks. We focus on a language-shaped learning problem in a few-shot setting, i.e., using language to improve few-shot image classification when language descriptions are only available during training. We propose a data-efficient method that can make the best usage of the few-shot images and the language available only in training. Experimental results on dataset ShapeWorld and Birds show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines in language-shaped few-shot learning area, especially when training data is more severely limited. Therefore, we call our approach data-efficient language-shaped learning (DF-LSL).