Yibo Wang


2024

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DA3: A Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack against Language Models
Yibo Wang | Xiangjue Dong | James Caverlee | Philip S. Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Language models can be manipulated by adversarial attacks, which introduce subtle perturbations to input data. While recent attack methods can achieve a relatively high attack success rate (ASR), we’ve observed that the generated adversarial examples have a different data distribution compared with the original examples. Specifically, these adversarial examples exhibit reduced confidence levels and greater divergence from the training data distribution. Consequently, they are easy to detect using straightforward detection methods, diminishing the efficacy of such attacks. To address this issue, we propose a Distribution-Aware Adversarial Attack (DA3) method. DA3 considers the distribution shifts of adversarial examples to improve attacks’ effectiveness under detection methods. We further design a novel evaluation metric, the Non-detectable Attack Success Rate (NASR), which integrates both ASR and detectability for the attack task. We conduct experiments on four widely used datasets to validate the attack effectiveness and transferability of adversarial examples generated by DA3 against both the white-box BERT-base and RoBERTa-base models and the black-box LLaMA2-7b model.

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LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing
Jiangshu Du | Yibo Wang | Wenting Zhao | Zhongfen Deng | Shuaiqi Liu | Renze Lou | Henry Peng Zou | Pranav Narayanan Venkit | Nan Zhang | Mukund Srinath | Haoran Ranran Zhang | Vipul Gupta | Yinghui Li | Tao Li | Fei Wang | Qin Liu | Tianlin Liu | Pengzhi Gao | Congying Xia | Chen Xing | Cheng Jiayang | Zhaowei Wang | Ying Su | Raj Sanjay Shah | Ruohao Guo | Jing Gu | Haoran Li | Kangda Wei | Zihao Wang | Lu Cheng | Surangika Ranathunga | Meng Fang | Jie Fu | Fei Liu | Ruihong Huang | Eduardo Blanco | Yixin Cao | Rui Zhang | Philip S. Yu | Wenpeng Yin
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Claim: This work is not advocating the use of LLMs for paper (meta-)reviewing. Instead, wepresent a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. Two research goals: i) Enable better recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities; ii) Increase community awareness that LLMs, and AI in general, are currently inadequate for performing tasks that require a high level of expertise and nuanced judgment.This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload?This study focuses on the topic of LLMs as NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLMs in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with “deficiency” labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) “LLMs as Reviewers”, how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) “LLMs as Metareviewers”, how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

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kNN-ICL: Compositional Task-Oriented Parsing Generalization with Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning
Wenting Zhao | Ye Liu | Yao Wan | Yibo Wang | Qingyang Wu | Zhongfen Deng | Jiangshu Du | Shuaiqi Liu | Yunlong Xu | Philip Yu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Task-Oriented Parsing (TOP) enables conversational assistants to interpret user commands expressed in natural language, transforming them into structured outputs that combine elements of both natural language and intent/slot tags. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in synthesizing computer programs based on a natural-language prompt, mitigating the gap between natural language and structured programs. Our paper focuses on harnessing the capabilities of LLMs for semantic parsing tasks, addressing the following three key research questions: 1) How can LLMs be effectively utilized for semantic parsing tasks? 2) What defines an effective prompt? and 3) How can LLM overcome the length constraint and streamline prompt design by including all examples as prompts? We introduce k Nearest Neighbor In-Context Learning (kNN-ICL), which simplifies prompt engineering by allowing it to be built on top of any design strategy while providing access to all demo examples. Extensive experiments show that: 1) Simple ICL without kNN search can achieve a comparable performance with strong supervised models on the TOP tasks, and 2) kNN-ICL significantly improves the comprehension of complex requests by seamlessly integrating ICL with a nearest-neighbor approach. Notably, this enhancement is achieved without the need for additional data or specialized prompts.

2023

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Localize, Retrieve and Fuse: A Generalized Framework for Free-Form Question Answering over Tables
Wenting Zhao | Ye Liu | Yao Wan | Yibo Wang | Zhongfen Deng | Philip S. Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (Findings)

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Named Entity Recognition via Machine Reading Comprehension: A Multi-Task Learning Approach
Yibo Wang | Wenting Zhao | Yao Wan | Zhongfen Deng | Philip Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (Findings)