Previous benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) have primarily emphasized quantitative metrics, such as data volume. However, this focus may neglect key qualitative data attributes that can significantly impact the final rankings of LLMs, resulting in unreliable leaderboards. In this paper, we investigate whether current LLM benchmarks adequately consider these data attributes. We specifically examine three attributes: diversity, redundancy, and difficulty. To explore these attributes, we propose a framework with three separate modules, each designed to assess one of the attributes. Using a method that progressively incorporates these attributes, we analyze their influence on the benchmark. Our experimental results reveal a meaningful correlation between LLM rankings on the revised benchmark and the original benchmark when these attributes are accounted for. These findings indicate that existing benchmarks often fail to meet all three criteria, highlighting a lack of consideration for multifaceted data attributes in current evaluation datasets.

LLMs are often claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), which is widely regarded as a cornerstone of more complex forms of reasoning. However, recent works show that LLMs still suffer from hallucinations in NLI due to attestation bias, where LLMs overly rely on propositional memory to build shortcuts. To solve the issue, we design an unsupervised framework to construct counterfactual reasoning data and fine-tune LLMs to reduce attestation bias. To measure bias reduction, we build bias-adversarial variants of NLI datasets with randomly replaced predicates in premises while keeping hypotheses unchanged. Extensive evaluations show that our framework can significantly reduce hallucinations from attestation bias. Then, we further evaluate LLMs fine-tuned with our framework on original NLI datasets and their bias-neutralized versions, where original entities are replaced with randomly sampled ones. Extensive results show that our framework consistently improves inferential performance on both original and bias-neutralized NLI datasets.

The performance of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) is often sensitive to nuances in prompt templates, requiring careful prompt engineering, adding costs in terms of computing and human effort. In this study, we present experiments encompassing multiple LLMs variants of varying sizes aimed at probing their preference with different prompts. Through experiments on Question Answering, we show prompt preference consistency across LLMs of different sizes. We also show that this consistency extends to other tasks, such as Natural Language Inference. Utilizing this consistency, we propose a method to use a smaller model to select effective prompt templates for a larger model. We show that our method substantially reduces the cost of prompt engineering while consistently matching performance with optimal prompts among candidates. More importantly, our experiment shows the efficacy of our strategy across fourteen LLMs and its applicability to a broad range of NLP tasks, highlighting its robustness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reported to hold undesirable attestation bias on inference tasks: when asked to predict if a premise P entails a hypothesis H, instead of considering H‘s conditional truthfulness entailed by P, LLMs tend to use the out-of-context truth label of H as a fragile proxy. In this paper, we propose a pipeline that exploits this bias to do explicit inductive inference. Our pipeline uses an LLM to transform a premise into a set of attested alternatives, and then aggregate answers of the derived new entailment inquiries to support the original inference prediction. On a directional predicate entailment benchmark, we demonstrate that by applying this simple pipeline, we can improve the overall performance of LLMs on inference and substantially alleviate the impact of their attestation bias.

The pressing need for digitization of historical documents has led to a strong interest in designing computerised image processing methods for automatic handwritten text recognition. However, not much attention has been paid on studying the handwritten text written in the margins, i.e. marginalia, that also forms an important source of information. Nevertheless, training an accurate and robust recognition system for marginalia calls for data-efficient approaches due to the unavailability of sufficient amounts of annotated multi-writer texts. Therefore, this work presents an end-to-end framework for automatic detection and recognition of handwritten marginalia, and leverages data augmentation and transfer learning to overcome training data scarcity. The detection phase involves investigation of R-CNN and Faster R-CNN networks. The recognition phase includes an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model, with ResNet feature extraction, bidirectional LSTM-based sequence modeling, and attention-based prediction of marginalia. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been empirically evaluated on the data from early book collections found in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. Source code and pre-trained models are available at Github.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), necessary for applied tasks like question answering and summarization. We present a series of behavioral studies on several LLM families (LLaMA, GPT-3.5, and PaLM) which probe their behavior using controlled experiments. We establish two biases originating from pretraining which predict much of their behavior, and show that these are major sources of hallucination in generative LLMs. First, memorization at the level of sentences: we show that, regardless of the premise, models falsely label NLI test samples as entailing when the hypothesis is attested in training data, and that entities are used as “indices’ to access the memorized data. Second, statistical patterns of usage learned at the level of corpora: we further show a similar effect when the premise predicate is less frequent than that of the hypothesis in the training data, a bias following from previous studies. We demonstrate that LLMs perform significantly worse on NLI test samples which do not conform to these biases than those which do, and we offer these as valuable controls for future LLM evaluation.

Answering open-domain questions through unsupervised methods poses challenges for both machine-reading (MR) and language model (LM) -based approaches. The MR-based approach suffers from sparsity issues in extracted knowledge graphs (KGs), while the performance of the LM-based approach significantly depends on the quality of the retrieved context for questions. In this paper, we compare these approaches and propose a novel methodology that leverages directional predicate entailment (inference) to address these limitations. We use entailment graphs (EGs), with natural language predicates as nodes and entailment as edges, to enhance parsed KGs by inferring unseen assertions, effectively mitigating the sparsity problem in the MR-based approach. We also show EGs improve context retrieval for the LM-based approach. Additionally, we present a Boolean QA task, demonstrating that EGs exhibit comparable directional inference capabilities to large language models (LLMs). Our results highlight the importance of inference in open-domain QA and the improvements brought by leveraging EGs.