Junlin Wang


2024

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NeuroComparatives: Neuro-Symbolic Distillation of Comparative Knowledge
Phillip Howard | Junlin Wang | Vasudev Lal | Gadi Singer | Yejin Choi | Swabha Swayamdipta
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we harvest the dramatic improvements in knowledge capabilities of language models into a large-scale comparative knowledge base. While the ease of acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much higher from extreme-scale models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge?We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and LLaMA, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources in terms of validity (up to 32% absolute improvement). Our acquired NeuroComparatives leads to performance improvements on five downstream tasks.We find that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offers complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation.

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Raccoon: Prompt Extraction Benchmark of LLM-Integrated Applications
Junlin Wang | Tianyi Yang | Roy Xie | Bhuwan Dhingra
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

With the proliferation of LLM-integrated applications such as GPT-s, millions are deployed, offering valuable services through proprietary instruction prompts. These systems, however, are prone to prompt extraction attacks through meticulously designed queries. To help mitigate this problem, we introduce the Raccoon benchmark which comprehensively evaluates a model’s susceptibility to prompt extraction attacks. Our novel evaluation method assesses models under both defenseless and defended scenarios, employing a dual approach to evaluate the effectiveness of existing defenses and the resilience of the models. The benchmark encompasses 14 categories of prompt extraction attacks, with additional compounded attacks that closely mimic the strategies of potential attackers, alongside a diverse collection of defense templates. This array is, to our knowledge, the most extensive compilation of prompt theft attacks and defense mechanisms to date. Our findings highlight universal susceptibility to prompt theft in the absence of defenses, with OpenAI models demonstrating notable resilience when protected. This paper aims to establish a more systematic benchmark for assessing LLM robustness against prompt extraction attacks, offering insights into their causes and potential countermeasures.

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Utilizing an Ensemble Model with Anomalous Label Smoothing to Detect Generated Scientific Papers
Yuan Zhao | Junruo Gao | Junlin Wang | Gang Luo | Liang Tang
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024)

Generative AI, as it becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, has brought convenience, though some concerns have arisen regarding its potential impact on the rigor and authenticity of scientific research. To encourage the development of robust and reliable automatically-generated scientific text detection systems, the “DAGPap24: Detecting Automatically Generated Scientific Papers” competition was held and shared the same task with the 4th Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024) to be held at ACL 2024. In the DAGPap24 competition, participants were tasked with constructing a generative text detection model that could accurately distinguish between the human written fragment, the synonym replacement fragment, the ChatGPT rewrite fragment, and the generated summary fragment of a paper. In this competition, we first conducted a comprehensive analysis of the training set to build a generative paper detection model. Then we tried various language models, including SciBERT, ALBERT, DeBERTa, RoBERTa, etc. After that, we introduced an Anomalous Label Smoothing (ALS) method and a majority voting method to improve the final results. Finally, we achieved 0.9948 and 0.9944 F1 scores during the development and testing phases respectively, and we achieved second place in the competition.

2023

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GAP-Gen: Guided Automatic Python Code Generation
Junchen Zhao | Yurun Song | Junlin Wang | Ian Harris
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Automatic code generation from natural language descriptions can be highly beneficial during the process of software development. In this work, we propose GAP-Gen, a Guided Automatic Python Code Generation method based on Python syntactic constraints and semantic constraints. We first introduce Python syntactic constraints in the form of Syntax-Flow, which is a simplified version of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) reducing the size and high complexity of Abstract Syntax Tree but maintaining crucial syntactic information of Python code. In addition to Syntax-Flow, we introduce Variable-Flow which abstracts variable and function names consistently through out the code. In our work, rather than pretraining, we focus on modifying the finetuning process which reduces computational requirements but retains high generation performance on automatic Python code generation task. GAP-Gen fine-tunes the transformer based language models T5 and CodeT5 using the Code-to-Docstring datasets CodeSearchNet, CodeSearchNet AdvTest and Code-Docstring Corpus from EdinburghNLP. Our experiments show that GAP-Gen achieves better results on automatic Python code generation task than previous works

2020

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Gradient-based Analysis of NLP Models is Manipulable
Junlin Wang | Jens Tuyls | Eric Wallace | Sameer Singh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Gradient-based analysis methods, such as saliency map visualizations and adversarial input perturbations, have found widespread use in interpreting neural NLP models due to their simplicity, flexibility, and most importantly, the fact that they directly reflect the model internals. In this paper, however, we demonstrate that the gradients of a model are easily manipulable, and thus bring into question the reliability of gradient-based analyses. In particular, we merge the layers of a target model with a Facade Model that overwhelms the gradients without affecting the predictions. This Facade Model can be trained to have gradients that are misleading and irrelevant to the task, such as focusing only on the stop words in the input. On a variety of NLP tasks (sentiment analysis, NLI, and QA), we show that the merged model effectively fools different analysis tools: saliency maps differ significantly from the original model’s, input reduction keeps more irrelevant input tokens, and adversarial perturbations identify unimportant tokens as being highly important.

2019

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AllenNLP Interpret: A Framework for Explaining Predictions of NLP Models
Eric Wallace | Jens Tuyls | Junlin Wang | Sanjay Subramanian | Matt Gardner | Sameer Singh
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP): System Demonstrations

Neural NLP models are increasingly accurate but are imperfect and opaque—they break in counterintuitive ways and leave end users puzzled at their behavior. Model interpretation methods ameliorate this opacity by providing explanations for specific model predictions. Unfortunately, existing interpretation codebases make it difficult to apply these methods to new models and tasks, which hinders adoption for practitioners and burdens interpretability researchers. We introduce AllenNLP Interpret, a flexible framework for interpreting NLP models. The toolkit provides interpretation primitives (e.g., input gradients) for any AllenNLP model and task, a suite of built-in interpretation methods, and a library of front-end visualization components. We demonstrate the toolkit’s flexibility and utility by implementing live demos for five interpretation methods (e.g., saliency maps and adversarial attacks) on a variety of models and tasks (e.g., masked language modeling using BERT and reading comprehension using BiDAF). These demos, alongside our code and tutorials, are available at https://allennlp.org/interpret.