Subhajit Chaudhury


2024

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EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning
Kinjal Basu | Keerthiram Murugesan | Subhajit Chaudhury | Murray Campbell | Kartik Talamadupula | Tim Klinger
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as an important collection of NLP tasks, requiring reinforcement learning (RL) agents to combine natural language understanding with reasoning. A key challenge for agents attempting to solve such tasks is to generalize across multiple games and demonstrate good performance on both seen and unseen objects. Purely deep-RL-based approaches may perform well on seen objects; however, they fail to showcase the same performance on unseen objects. Commonsense-infused deep-RL agents may work better on unseen data; unfortunately, their policies are often not interpretable or easily transferable. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present EXPLORER which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning. EXPLORER is neuro-symbolic in nature, as it relies on a neural module for exploration and a symbolic module for exploitation. It can also learn generalized symbolic policies and perform well over unseen data. Our experiments show that EXPLORER outperforms the baseline agents on Text-World cooking (TW-Cooking) and Text-World Commonsense (TWC) games.

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A Grounded Preference Model for LLM Alignment
Tahira Naseem | Guangxuan Xu | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Asaf Yehudai | Subhajit Chaudhury | Radu Florian | Ramón Astudillo | Asim Munawar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Despite LLMs’ recent advancements, they still suffer from factual inconsistency and hallucination. An often-opted remedy is retrieval-augmented generation – however, there is no guarantee that the model will strictly adhere to retrieved grounding. Fundamentally, LLMs need to be aligned to be more faithful to grounding, which will require high-quality preference annotations. This paper investigates whether we can create high-quality grounded preference data for model alignment without using annotations from humans or large proprietary models. We experimented with existing entailment data and proposed approaches to generate synthetic grounded preference data, with which we train a Grounded Preference Model(GPM). We demonstrate through Proximal Policy Optimization(PPO) training of Mistral-7B-Instruct that our GPM model can successfully align powerful LLMs to generate much better grounded responses as judged by GPT4. Moreover, we show that our GPM is also a great faithfulness classifier, achieving SoTA in dialogue sub-tasks of the TRUE faithfulness Benchmark. We will release our GPM under the Apache 2.0 license.

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API-BLEND: A Comprehensive Corpora for Training and Benchmarking API LLMs
Kinjal Basu | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Subhajit Chaudhury | Soham Dan | Maxwell Crouse | Asim Munawar | Vernon Austel | Sadhana Kumaravel | Vinod Muthusamy | Pavan Kapanipathi | Luis Lastras
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

There is a growing need for Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively use tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to plan and complete tasks. As such, there is tremendous interest in methods that can acquire sufficient quantities of train and test data that involve calls to tools / APIs. Two lines of research have emerged as the predominant strategies for addressing this challenge. The first has focused on synthetic data generation techniques, while the second has involved curating task-adjacent datasets which can be transformed into API / Tool-based tasks. In this paper, we focus on the task of identifying, curating, and transforming existing datasets and, in turn, introduce API-BLEND, a large corpora for training and systematic testing of tool-augmented LLMs. The datasets mimic real-world scenarios involving API-tasks such as API / tool detection, slot filling, and sequencing of the detected APIs. We demonstrate the utility of the API-BLEND dataset for both training and benchmarking purposes.

2023

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MISMATCH: Fine-grained Evaluation of Machine-generated Text with Mismatch Error Types
Keerthiram Murugesan | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Soham Dan | Subhajit Chaudhury | Chulaka Gunasekara | Maxwell Crouse | Diwakar Mahajan | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Achille Fokoue | Pavan Kapanipathi | Salim Roukos | Alexander Gray
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

With the growing interest in large language models, the need for evaluating the quality of machine text compared to reference (typically human-generated) text has become focal attention. Most recent works focus either on task-specific evaluation metrics or study the properties of machine-generated text captured by the existing metrics. In this work, we propose a new evaluation scheme to model human judgments in 7 NLP tasks, based on the fine-grained mismatches between a pair of texts. Inspired by the recent efforts in several NLP tasks for fine-grained evaluation, we introduce a set of 13 mismatch error types such as spatial/geographic errors, entity errors, etc, to guide the model for better prediction of human judgments. We propose a neural framework for evaluating machine texts that uses these mismatch error types as auxiliary tasks and re-purposes the existing single-number evaluation metrics as additional scalar features, in addition to textual features extracted from the machine and reference texts. Our experiments reveal key insights about the existing metrics via the mismatch errors. We show that the mismatch errors between the sentence pairs on the held-out datasets from 7 NLP tasks align well with the human evaluation.

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Self-Supervised Rule Learning to Link Text Segments to Relational Elements of Structured Knowledge
Shajith Ikbal | Udit Sharma | Hima Karanam | Sumit Neelam | Ronny Luss | Dheeraj Sreedhar | Pavan Kapanipathi | Naweed Khan | Kyle Erwin | Ndivhuwo Makondo | Ibrahim Abdelaziz | Achille Fokoue | Alexander Gray | Maxwell Crouse | Subhajit Chaudhury | Chitra Subramanian
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

We present a neuro-symbolic approach to self-learn rules that serve as interpretable knowledge to perform relation linking in knowledge base question answering systems. These rules define natural language text predicates as a weighted mixture of knowledge base paths. The weights learned during training effectively serve the mapping needed to perform relation linking. We use popular masked training strategy to self-learn the rules. A key distinguishing aspect of our work is that the masked training operate over logical forms of the sentence instead of their natural language text form. This offers opportunity to extract extended context information from the structured knowledge source and use that to build robust and human readable rules. We evaluate accuracy and usefulness of such learned rules by utilizing them for prediction of missing kinship relation in CLUTRR dataset and relation linking in a KBQA system using SWQ-WD dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach - its generalizability, interpretability and ability to achieve an average performance gain of 17% on CLUTRR dataset.

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Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning
Subhajit Chaudhury | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Daiki Kimura | Prithviraj Sen | Keerthiram Murugesan | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Michiaki Tatsubori | Achille Fokoue | Pavan Kapanipathi | Asim Munawar | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text-based reinforcement learning agents have predominantly been neural network-based models with embeddings-based representation, learning uninterpretable policies that often do not generalize well to unseen games. On the other hand, neuro-symbolic methods, specifically those that leverage an intermediate formal representation, are gaining significant attention in language understanding tasks. This is because of their advantages ranging from inherent interpretability, the lesser requirement of training data, and being generalizable in scenarios with unseen data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a modular, NEuro-Symbolic Textual Agent (NESTA) that combines a generic semantic parser with a rule induction system to learn abstract interpretable rules as policies. Our experiments on established text-based game benchmarks show that the proposed NESTA method outperforms deep reinforcement learning-based techniques by achieving better generalization to unseen test games and learning from fewer training interactions.

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Laziness Is a Virtue When It Comes to Compositionality in Neural Semantic Parsing
Maxwell Crouse | Pavan Kapanipathi | Subhajit Chaudhury | Tahira Naseem | Ramon Fernandez Astudillo | Achille Fokoue | Tim Klinger
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Nearly all general-purpose neural semantic parsers generate logical forms in a strictly top-down autoregressive fashion. Though such systems have achieved impressive results across a variety of datasets and domains, recent works have called into question whether they are ultimately limited in their ability to compositionally generalize. In this work, we approach semantic parsing from, quite literally, the opposite direction; that is, we introduce a neural semantic parsing generation method that constructs logical forms from the bottom up, beginning from the logical form’s leaves. The system we introduce is lazy in that it incrementally builds up a set of potential semantic parses, but only expands and processes the most promising candidate parses at each generation step. Such a parsimonious expansion scheme allows the system to maintain an arbitrarily large set of parse hypotheses that are never realized and thus incur minimal computational overhead. We evaluate our approach on compositional generalization; specifically, on the challenging CFQ dataset and two other Text-to-SQL datasets where we show that our novel, bottom-up semantic parsing technique outperforms general-purpose semantic parsers while also being competitive with semantic parsers that have been tailored to each task.

2022

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X-FACTOR: A Cross-metric Evaluation of Factual Correctness in Abstractive Summarization
Subhajit Chaudhury | Sarathkrishna Swaminathan | Chulaka Gunasekara | Maxwell Crouse | Srinivas Ravishankar | Daiki Kimura | Keerthiram Murugesan | Ramón Fernandez Astudillo | Tahira Naseem | Pavan Kapanipathi | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Abstractive summarization models often produce factually inconsistent summaries that are not supported by the original article. Recently, a number of fact-consistent evaluation techniques have been proposed to address this issue; however, a detailed analysis of how these metrics agree with one another has yet to be conducted. In this paper, we present X-FACTOR, a cross-evaluation of three high-performing fact-aware abstractive summarization methods. First, we show that summarization models are often fine-tuned on datasets that contain factually inconsistent summaries and propose a fact-aware filtering mechanism that improves the quality of training data and, consequently, the factuality of these models. Second, we propose a corrector module that can be used to improve the factual consistency of generated summaries. Third, we present a re-ranking technique that samples summary instances from the output distribution of a summarization model and re-ranks the sampled instances based on their factuality. Finally, we provide a detailed cross-metric agreement analysis that shows how tuning a model to output summaries based on a particular factuality metric influences factuality as determined by the other metrics. Our goal in this work is to facilitate research that improves the factuality and faithfulness of abstractive summarization models.

2021

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Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Text-Based Policy Learning
Subhajit Chaudhury | Prithviraj Sen | Masaki Ono | Daiki Kimura | Michiaki Tatsubori | Asim Munawar
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Text-Based Games (TBGs) have emerged as important testbeds for reinforcement learning (RL) in the natural language domain. Previous methods using LSTM-based action policies are uninterpretable and often overfit the training games showing poor performance to unseen test games. We present SymboLic Action policy for Textual Environments (SLATE), that learns interpretable action policy rules from symbolic abstractions of textual observations for improved generalization. We outline a method for end-to-end differentiable symbolic rule learning and show that such symbolic policies outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in text-based RL for the coin collector environment from 5-10x fewer training games. Additionally, our method provides human-understandable policy rules that can be readily verified for their logical consistency and can be easily debugged.

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Neuro-Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with First-Order Logic
Daiki Kimura | Masaki Ono | Subhajit Chaudhury | Ryosuke Kohita | Akifumi Wachi | Don Joven Agravante | Michiaki Tatsubori | Asim Munawar | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we propose a novel RL method for text-based games with a recent neuro-symbolic framework called Logical Neural Network, which can learn symbolic and interpretable rules in their differentiable network. The method is first to extract first-order logical facts from text observation and external word meaning network (ConceptNet), then train a policy in the network with directly interpretable logical operators. Our experimental results show RL training with the proposed method converges significantly faster than other state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic methods in a TextWorld benchmark.

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Language-based General Action Template for Reinforcement Learning Agents
Ryosuke Kohita | Akifumi Wachi | Daiki Kimura | Subhajit Chaudhury | Michiaki Tatsubori | Asim Munawar
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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LOA: Logical Optimal Actions for Text-based Interaction Games
Daiki Kimura | Subhajit Chaudhury | Masaki Ono | Michiaki Tatsubori | Don Joven Agravante | Asim Munawar | Akifumi Wachi | Ryosuke Kohita | Alexander Gray
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present Logical Optimal Actions (LOA), an action decision architecture of reinforcement learning applications with a neuro-symbolic framework which is a combination of neural network and symbolic knowledge acquisition approach for natural language interaction games. The demonstration for LOA experiments consists of a web-based interactive platform for text-based games and visualization for acquired knowledge for improving interpretability for trained rules. This demonstration also provides a comparison module with other neuro-symbolic approaches as well as non-symbolic state-of-the-art agent models on the same text-based games. Our LOA also provides open-sourced implementation in Python for the reinforcement learning environment to facilitate an experiment for studying neuro-symbolic agents. Demo site: https://ibm.biz/acl21-loa, Code: https://github.com/ibm/loa

2020

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Bootstrapped Q-learning with Context Relevant Observation Pruning to Generalize in Text-based Games
Subhajit Chaudhury | Daiki Kimura | Kartik Talamadupula | Michiaki Tatsubori | Asim Munawar | Ryuki Tachibana
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We show that Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for solving Text-Based Games (TBGs) often fail to generalize on unseen games, especially in small data regimes. To address this issue, we propose Context Relevant Episodic State Truncation (CREST) for irrelevant token removal in observation text for improved generalization. Our method first trains a base model using Q-learning, which typically overfits the training games. The base model’s action token distribution is used to perform observation pruning that removes irrelevant tokens. A second bootstrapped model is then retrained on the pruned observation text. Our bootstrapped agent shows improved generalization in solving unseen TextWorld games, using 10x-20x fewer training games compared to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods despite requiring fewer number of training episodes.