How did the discussion go: Discourse act classification in social media conversations

We propose a novel attention based hierarchical LSTM model to classify discourse act sequences in social media conversations, aimed at mining data from online discussion using textual meanings beyond sentence level. The very uniqueness of the task is the complete categorization of possible pragmatic roles in informal textual discussions, contrary to extraction of question-answers, stance detection or sarcasm identification which are very much role specific tasks. Early attempt was made on a Reddit discussion dataset. We train our model on the same data, and present test results on two different datasets, one from Reddit and one from Facebook. Our proposed model outperformed the previous one in terms of domain independence; without using platform-dependent structural features, our hierarchical LSTM with word relevance attention mechanism achieved F1-scores of 71\% and 66\% respectively to predict discourse roles of comments in Reddit and Facebook discussions. Efficiency of recurrent and convolutional architectures in order to learn discursive representation on the same task has been presented and analyzed, with different word and comment embedding schemes. Our attention mechanism enables us to inquire into relevance ordering of text segments according to their roles in discourse. We present a human annotator experiment to unveil important observations about modeling and data annotation. Equipped with our text-based discourse identification model, we inquire into how heterogeneous non-textual features like location, time, leaning of information etc. play their roles in charaterizing online discussions on Facebook

LM2\texttt{LM}^\texttt{2}: A Simple Society of Language Models Solves Complex Reasoning

Despite demonstrating emergent reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMS) often lose track of complex, multi-step reasoning. Existing studies show that providing guidance via decomposing the original question into multiple subproblems elicits more robustness in LLM reasoning -- a decomposer generates the subproblems, and a solver solves each of these subproblems. However, these techniques fail to accommodate coordination between the decomposer and the solver modules (either in a single model or different specialized ones) -- the decomposer does not keep track of the ability of the solver to follow the decomposed reasoning. In this paper, we propose LM2 to address these challenges. LM2 modularizes the decomposition, solution, and verification into three different language models. The decomposer module identifies the key concepts necessary to solve the problem and generates step-by-step subquestions according to the reasoning requirement. The solver model generates the solution to the subproblems that are then checked by the verifier module; depending upon the feedback from the verifier, the reasoning context is constructed using the subproblems and the solutions. These models are trained to coordinate using policy learning. Exhaustive experimentation suggests the superiority of LM2 over existing methods on in- and out-domain reasoning problems, outperforming the best baselines by $8.1\%$ on MATH, $7.71\%$ on JEEBench, and $9.7\%$ on MedQA problems (code available at https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/Language_Model_Multiplex)

Language Models can Exploit Cross-Task In-context Learning for Data-Scarce Novel Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed NLP with their remarkable In-context Learning (ICL) capabilities. Automated assistants based on LLMs are gaining popularity; however, adapting them to novel tasks is still challenging. While colossal models excel in zero-shot performance, their computational demands limit widespread use, and smaller language models struggle without context. This paper investigates whether LLMs can generalize from labeled examples of predefined tasks to novel tasks. Drawing inspiration from biological neurons and the mechanistic interpretation of the Transformer architecture, we explore the potential for information sharing across tasks. We design a cross-task prompting setup with three LLMs and show that LLMs achieve significant performance improvements despite no examples from the target task in the context. Cross-task prompting leads to a remarkable performance boost of 107% for LLaMA-2 7B, 18.6% for LLaMA-2 13B, and 3.2% for GPT 3.5 on average over zero-shot prompting, and performs comparable to standard in-context learning. The effectiveness of generating pseudo-labels for in-task examples is demonstrated, and our analyses reveal a strong correlation between the effect of cross-task examples and model activation similarities in source and target input tokens. This paper offers a first-of-its-kind exploration of LLMs' ability to solve novel tasks based on contextual signals from different task examples.Comment: Accepted at ACL 2024 Mai

Prospective observational study of vancomycin injection in SLED patient of ethnic Indians

As the Vancomycin is itself a nephrotoxic antibiotics, so it is sometime recommended to the Slow-low Efficiency Dialysis (SLED) patients against highly resisted infection. In this case, the dose monitoring is strictly maintained after Intravenous injection. The collected blood was analyzed for its concentration in HPLC for 11 patients and the half life was evaluated to study Therapeutic drug monitoring. The T1/2 of evaluated vancomycin is 39.12+ 6.81 hrs. The mean of the systemic clearance is 16.91+6.99 and mean Vd is 0.57+ 0.147. Comparatively the reported study of Mean + SD of half-life, volume of distribution, and systemic clearance were 43.1 + 21.6 hours, 0.84 L/kg + 0.17 L/kg, and 24.3 mL/min + 8.39 mL/min respectively. Thus the t-test of the means was 0.5828, degree of freedom (df) was 20, standard error of difference was 6.829 and so, the two-tailed P value is 0.5665 i.e. P > 0.5. In ethnic Indian SLED patients, T1/2 of mean + SD of 39.12 + 6.81 hrs was compared to the Caucasian patients i.e, 43.1 + 21.6 hrs. And the t-test and P-value is 0.5828 & 0.5665 respectively. Thus it was concluded that the half-life of ethnic Indian patients is less in compare to Caucasians but this difference is not so significant. The half-life of ethnic 8 patients is less than 40 out of 11 patients.Keywords: Vancomycin assay; Slow-low efficiency dialysis; Pharmacokinetic analysis; Ethnic indian

How to think step-by-step: A mechanistic understanding of chain-of-thought reasoning

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work investigates the neural sub-structures within LLMs that manifest CoT reasoning from a mechanistic point of view. From an analysis of Llama-2 7B applied to multistep reasoning over fictional ontologies, we demonstrate that LLMs deploy multiple parallel pathways of answer generation for step-by-step reasoning. These parallel pathways provide sequential answers from the input question context as well as the generated CoT. We observe a functional rift in the middle layers of the LLM. Token representations in the initial half remain strongly biased towards the pretraining prior, with the in-context prior taking over in the later half. This internal phase shift manifests in different functional components: attention heads that write the answer token appear in the later half, attention heads that move information along ontological relationships appear in the initial half, and so on. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt towards mechanistic investigation of CoT reasoning in LLMs

(1,j)(1,j)-set problem in graphs

A subset $D \subseteq V$of a graph $G = (V, E)$ is a $(1, j)$-set if every vertex $v \in V \setminus D$ is adjacent to at least $1$ but not more than $j$ vertices in D. The cardinality of a minimum $(1, j)$-set of $G$, denoted as $\gamma_{(1,j)} (G)$, is called the $(1, j)$-domination number of $G$. Given a graph $G = (V, E)$ and an integer $k$, the decision version of the $(1, j)$-set problem is to decide whether $G$ has a $(1, j)$-set of cardinality at most $k$. In this paper, we first obtain an upper bound on $\gamma_{(1,j)} (G)$ using probabilistic methods, for bounded minimum and maximum degree graphs. Our bound is constructive, by the randomized algorithm of Moser and Tardos [MT10], We also show that the $(1, j)$- set problem is NP-complete for chordal graphs. Finally, we design two algorithms for finding $\gamma_{(1,j)} (G)$ of a tree and a split graph, for any fixed $j$, which answers an open question posed in [CHHM13]