Chen-Yu Lee
Chen-Yu Lee is a research scientist at Google, where he works on machine learning and its real-world applications across various tasks and modalities. Previously, he spent two years at Apple, where he published the Technology Development Group's inaugural research paper at CVPR and launched several key features in ARKit (now Vision Pro). He received his PhD from UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Zhuowen Tu.
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Chain-of-Table: Evolves Tables in the LLM Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding
Zilong Wang
Hao Zhang
Chun-Liang Li
Jingbo Shang
ICLR (2024)
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Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction to tackle many table understanding tasks, such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Compared with generic reasoning, table-based reasoning requires the extraction of underlying semantics from both free-form questions and semi-structured tabular data. Chain-of-Thought and its similar approaches incorporate the reasoning chain in the form of textual context, but it is still an open question how to effectively leverage tabular data in the reasoning chain. We propose the Chain-of-Table framework, where tabular data is explicitly used in the reasoning chain as a proxy for intermediate thoughts. Specifically, we guide LLMs using in-context learning to iteratively generate operations and update the table to represent a tabular reasoning chain. LLMs can therefore dynamically plan the next operation based on the results of the previous ones. This continuous evolution of the table forms a chain, showing the reasoning process for a given tabular problem. The chain carries structured information of the intermediate results, enabling more accurate and reliable predictions. Chain-of-Table achieves new state-of-the-art performance on WikiTQ, FeTaQA, and TabFact benchmarks across multiple LLM choices.
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LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction And Localization
Kai Kang
Florian Luisier
Xiaoyu Sun
Ramya Sree Boppana
Zilong Wang
Jiaqi Mu
Hao Zhang
Nan Hua
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, Association for Computational Linguistics, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting, pp. 15140-15168
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Large Language Models (LLM) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP), improving state-of-the-art and exhibiting emergent capabilities across various tasks. However, their application in extracting information from visually rich documents, which is at the core of many document processing workflows and involving the extraction of key entities from semi-structured documents, has not yet been successful. The main obstacles to adopting LLMs for this task include the absence of layout encoding within LLMs, which is critical for high quality extraction, and the lack of a grounding mechanism to localize the predicted entities within the document. In this paper, we introduce Language Model-based Document Information EXtraction and Localization (LMDX), a methodology to reframe the document information extraction task for a LLM. LMDX enables extraction of singular, repeated, and hierarchical entities, both with and without training data, while providing grounding guarantees and localizing the entities within the document. Finally, we apply LMDX to the PaLM 2-S and Gemini Pro LLMs and evaluate it on VRDU and CORD benchmarks, setting a new state-of-the-art and showing how LMDX enables the creation of high quality, data-efficient parsers.
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CodecLM: Aligning Language Models with Tailored Synthetic Data
Chun-Liang Li
Jin Miao
NAACL 2024
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Instruction tuning has emerged as the key in aligning large language models (LLMs) with specific task instructions, thereby mitigating the discrepancy between the next-token prediction objective and users' actual goals. To reduce the labor and time cost to collect or annotate data by humans, researchers start to explore the use of LLMs to generate instruction-aligned synthetic data. Recent works focus on generating diverse instructions and applying LLM to increase instruction complexity, often neglecting downstream use cases. It remains unclear how to tailor high-quality data to elicit better instruction-following abilities in different target instruction distributions and LLMs. To this end, we introduce CodecLM, a general framework for adaptively generating high-quality synthetic data for LLM alignment with different downstream instruction distributions and LLMs. Drawing on the Encode-Decode principles, we use LLMs as codecs to guide the data generation process. We first encode seed instructions into metadata, which are concise keywords generated on-the-fly to capture the target instruction distribution, and then decode metadata to create tailored instructions. We also introduce Self-Rubrics and Contrastive Filtering during decoding to tailor data-efficient samples. Extensive experiments on four open-domain instruction following benchmarks validate the effectiveness of CodecLM over the current state-of-the-arts.
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Found in the middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization
Cheng-Yu Hsieh
Yung-Sung Chuang
Chun-Liang Li
Abhishek Kumar
James Glass
Alexander Ratner
Ranjay Krishna
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Large language models (LLMs), even when specifically trained to process long input contexts, struggle to capture relevant information located in the middle of their input. This phenomenon has been known as the lost-in-the-middle problem. In this work, we make three contributions. First, we set out to understand the factors that cause this phenomenon. In doing so, we establish a connection between lost-in-the-middle to LLMs' intrinsic attention bias: LLMs exhibit a U-shaped attention bias where the tokens at the beginning and at the end of its input receive higher attention, regardless of their relevance. Second, we mitigate this positional bias through a calibration mechanism, found-in-the-middle, that allows the model to attend to contexts faithfully according to their relevance, even though when they are in the middle. Third, we show found-in-the-middle not only achieves better performance in locating relevant information within a long context, but also eventually leads to improved retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) performance across various tasks, outperforming existing methods by up to 15 percentage points. These findings open up future directions in understanding LLM attention bias and its potential consequences.
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Grounded generation aims to equip language models (LMs) with the ability to produce more credible and accountable responses by accurately citing verifiable sources. However, existing methods, by either feeding LMs with raw or preprocessed materials, remain prone to errors. To address this, we introduce CaLM, a novel verification framework. CaLM leverages the insight that a robust grounded response should be consistent with information derived solely from its cited sources. Our framework empowers smaller LMs, which rely less on parametric memory and excel at processing relevant information given a query, to validate the output of larger LMs. Larger LM responses that closely align with the smaller LMs' output, which relies exclusively on cited documents, are verified. Responses showing discrepancies are iteratively refined through a feedback loop. Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets demonstrate significant performance gains of 1.5% to 7% absolute average without any required model fine-tuning.
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Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
Cheng-Yu Hsieh
Chun-Liang Li
Alexander Ratner
Ranjay Krishna
ACL 2023
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Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction, researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that (a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for small models within a multi-task training framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training examples. Second, compared to LLMs, we achieve better performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our 770M T5 model outperforms the 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark task.
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FormNetV2: Inductive Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction
Chun-Liang Li
Hao Zhang
Xiang Zhang
Kihyuk Sohn
Nikolai Glushnev
Joshua Ainslie
Nan Hua
ACL (2023)
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The recent advent of self-supervised pre-training techniques has led to a surge in the use of multimodal learning in form document understanding. However, existing approaches that extend the mask language modeling to other modalities require careful multi-task tuning, complex reconstruction target designs, or additional pre-training data. In FormNetV2, we introduce a centralized multimodal graph contrastive learning strategy to unify self-supervised pre-training for all modalities in one loss. The graph contrastive objective maximizes the agreement of multimodal representations, providing a natural interplay for all modalities without special customization. In addition, we extract image features within the bounding box that joins a pair of tokens connected by a graph edge, capturing more targeted visual cues without loading a sophisticated and separately pre-trained image embedder. FormNetV2 establishes new state-of-the-art performance on FUNSD, CORD, SROIE and Payment benchmarks with a more compact model size.
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QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework
Jacob Devlin
Hao Zhang
Jennifer Dy
ACL (2023)
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Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6%~10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2%~9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.
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Accurate estimation of output quantiles is crucial in many use cases, where it is desired to model the range of possibility. Modeling target distribution at arbitrary quantile levels and at arbitrary input attribute levels are important to offer a comprehensive picture of the data, and requires the quantile function to be expressive enough. The quantile function describing the target distribution using quantile levels is critical for quantile regression. Althought various parametric forms for the distributions (that the quantile function specifies) can be adopted, an everlasting problem is selecting the most appropriate one that can properly approximate the data distributions. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric and data-driven approach, Neural Spline Search (NSS), to represent the observed data distribution without parametric assumptions. NSS is flexible and expressive for modeling data distributions by transforming the inputs with a series of monotonic spline regressions guided by symbolic operators. We demonstrate that NSS outperforms previous methods on synthetic, real-world regression and time-series forecasting tasks.
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In this paper, we tackle two challenges in multimodal learning for visual recognition: 1) when missing-modality occurs either during training or testing in real-world situations; and 2) when the computation resources are not available to finetune on heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose to utilize prompt learning and mitigate the above two challenges together. Specifically, our modality-missing-aware prompts can be plugged into multimodal transformers to handle general missing-modality cases, while only requiring less than $1\%$ learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. We further explore the effect of different prompt configurations and analyze the robustness to missing modality. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our prompt learning framework that improves the performance under various missing-modality cases, while alleviating the requirement of heavy model re-training
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