Natural Language Processing

Questo intervento sarà mirato a demistificare il funzionamento dei modelli del linguaggio (Large Language Models), ed evidenziare come lo studio di questi sistemi come 'artefatti cognitivi' possa contribuire a una migliore comprensione dei meccanismi di ragionamento (umani e non), e dei bias nella società che ci circonda.

Oral presentation at CLiC-it 2024

In this presentation, I will provide an overview of the interpretability research landscape and describe various promising methods for exploring and controlling the inner mechanisms of generative language models. I will focus specifically on post-hoc attribution technique and their usage to identify relevant input and model components, showcasing their usage with our Inseq open-source toolkit. A practical application of attribution techniques will be presented with the PECoRe data-driven framework for context usage attribution and its adaptation to produce internals-based citations for model answers in retrieval-augmented generation settings (MIRAGE).

We evaluate the rebus-solving capabilities of large language models on a new Italian dataset.

This presentation focuses on applying post-hoc interpretability techniques to analyze how language models (LMs) use input information throughout the generation process. We briefly introduce Inseq, our open-source toolkit designed to simplify advanced feature attribution analyses for LMs. Then, our Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe) interpretability framework is introduced to conduct data-driven analyses of context usage in LMs. In conclusion, we showcase how PECoRe can easily be adapted to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) settings to produce internals-based citations for model answers. Our proposed Model Internals for RAG Explanations (MIRAGE) method achieves citation quality comparable to supervised answer validators with no additional training, producing citations that are faithful to actual context usage during generation.

We propose Dynamic Activation Composition, an adaptive approach for multi-property activation steering of LLMs

MIRAGE uses model internals for faithful answer attribution in retrieval-augmented generation applications.

This talk discusses the challenges and opportunities in conducting interpretability analyses of generative language models. We begin by presenting Inseq, an open-source toolkit for advanced feature attribution analyses of language models. The usage of Inseq is illustrated through examples of state-of-the-art approaches contrastive attribution, input dependence and locating factual knowledge in intermediate model representations. Then, we introduce Plausibility Evaluation of Context Reliance (PECoRe), an end-to-end interpretability framework using model internals to detect context-dependent spans in model generations and trace their prediction back to salient tokens in the available context. The usage of PECoRe is showcased on various generative tasks, including machine translation, story generation and retrieval-augmented question answering.

IT5s are the first encoder-decoder transformers pretrained on more than 40 billion Italian words.

This talk presents the PECoRe framework for quantifying the plausibility of context reliance in neural machine translation. The framework is applied to a case study on the impact of context on the translation of gendered pronouns and other contextual phenomena in English-to-French translation. Finally, the online demo allowing users to try PECoRe with any generative language model is presented.