Bingning Wang


2024

pdf bib
MetaGPT: Merging Large Language Models Using Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic
Yuyan Zhou | Liang Song | Bingning Wang | Weipeng Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 has catalyzed the exploration of multi-task learning (MTL), in which a single model demonstrates proficiency across diverse tasks. Task arithmetic has emerged as a cost-effective approach for MTL. It enables performance enhancement across multiple tasks by adding their corresponding task vectors to a pre-trained model. However, the current lack of a method that can simultaneously achieve optimal performance, computational efficiency, and data privacy limits their application to LLMs. In this paper, we propose Model Exclusive Task Arithmetic for merging GPT-scale models (MetaGPT) which formalizes the objective of model merging into a multi-task learning framework, aiming to minimize the average loss difference between the merged model and each individual task model. Since data privacy limits the use of multi-task training data, we leverage LLMs’ local linearity and task vectors’ orthogonality to separate the data term and scaling coefficients term and derive a model-exclusive task arithmetic method. Our proposed MetaGPT is data-agnostic and bypasses the heavy search process, making it cost-effective and easy to implement for LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MetaGPT leads to improvement of task arithmetic and achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple tasks.

pdf bib
Unveiling the Flaws: Exploring Imperfections in Synthetic Data and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models
Jie Chen | Yupeng Zhang | Bingning Wang | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen | Weipeng Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on downstream benchmarks. However, despite its potential benefits, our analysis suggests that there may be inherent flaws in synthetic data. The uniform format of synthetic data can lead to pattern overfitting and cause significant shifts in the output distribution, thereby reducing the model’s instruction-following capabilities. Our work delves into these specific flaws associated with question-answer (Q-A) pairs, a prevalent type of synthetic data, and presents a method based on unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. The empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can reverse the instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. Our work has yielded key insights into the effective use of synthetic data, aiming to promote more robust and efficient LLM training.

2021

pdf bib
Multi-Lingual Question Generation with Language Agnostic Language Model
Bingning Wang | Ting Yao | Weipeng Chen | Jingfang Xu | Xiaochuan Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

2020

pdf bib
Tasty Burgers, Soggy Fries: Probing Aspect Robustness in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Xiaoyu Xing | Zhijing Jin | Di Jin | Bingning Wang | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment towards a specific aspect in the text. However, existing ABSA test sets cannot be used to probe whether a model can distinguish the sentiment of the target aspect from the non-target aspects. To solve this problem, we develop a simple but effective approach to enrich ABSA test sets. Specifically, we generate new examples to disentangle the confounding sentiments of the non-target aspects from the target aspect’s sentiment. Based on the SemEval 2014 dataset, we construct the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS) as a comprehensive probe of the aspect robustness of ABSA models. Over 92% data of ARTS show high fluency and desired sentiment on all aspects by human evaluation. Using ARTS, we analyze the robustness of nine ABSA models, and observe, surprisingly, that their accuracy drops by up to 69.73%. We explore several ways to improve aspect robustness, and find that adversarial training can improve models’ performance on ARTS by up to 32.85%. Our code and new test set are available at https://github.com/zhijing-jin/ARTS_TestSet

2016

pdf bib
Inner Attention based Recurrent Neural Networks for Answer Selection
Bingning Wang | Kang Liu | Jun Zhao
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)