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A quick guide to Amazon’s 50-plus papers at EMNLP 2024

Large language models predominate, both as a research subject themselves and as tools for researching topics of particular interest to Amazon, such as speech, recommendations, and information retrieval.

By Staff writer
November 14, 2024
7 min read
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Large language models (LLMs) have come to dominate the field of natural-language processing, so it’s no surprise that they also dominate the research that Amazon scientists are presenting at this year’s Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural-Language Processing (EMNLP). LLM training is the topic with the greatest number of Amazon papers, followed closely by strategies for mitigating misinformation in LLMs’ outputs — including but not limited to hallucinations. At the same time, a number of papers apply LLMs to topics of traditional interest at Amazon, such as speech, recommender systems, and information retrieval. (Papers marked with asterisks were accepted to Findings of EMNLP.)

AI agents

MARCO: Multi-agent real-time chat orchestration
Anubhav Shrimal, Shervin Malmasi, Kriti Biswas, Swarnalatha Raghuraman, Anish Nediyanchath, Yi Zhang, Promod Yenigalla

Code generation

CodeFort: Robust training for code generation models
Yuhao Zhang, Shiqi Wang, Haifeng Qian, Zijian Wang, Mingyue Shang, Linbo Liu, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Baishakhi Ray, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Xiaofei Ma, Anoop Deoras

Socratic human feedback (SoHF): Expert steering strategies for LLM code generation
Subramanian Chidambaram, Erran Li, Min Bai, Xiaopeng LI, Kaixiang Lin, Xiong Zhou, Alex C. Williams

Structured object language modeling (SoLM): Native structured objects generation conforming to complex schemas with self-supervised denoising
Amir Tavanaei, Kee Kiat Koo, Hayreddin Ceker, Shaobai Jiang, Qi Li, Julien Han, Karim Bouyarmane

Contrastive decoding

Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM
Haw-Shiuan Chang, Nanyun Peng, Mohit Bansal, Anil Ramakrishna, Tagyoung Chung

Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM.png
Given a simple question with clues, contrastive decoding could have an “obvious blindness” (e.g., assigning higher probability to an uncommon answer, such as "invertebrate", than to the most obvious answer, "bees"). In contrast, the asymptotic probability decoding proposed in "Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM" correctly assigns the highest probability to "bees" by leveraging the probabilities from multiple LMs of different sizes.

Data integration

ASTRA: Automatic schema matching using machine translation
Tarang Chugh, Deepak Zambre

Learning from natural language explanations for generalizable entity matching
Somin Wadhwa, Adit Krishnan, Runhui Wang, Byron C. Wallace, Chris (Luyang) Kong

Pretraining and finetuning language models on geospatial networks for accurate address matching
Saket Maheshwary, Arpan Paul, Saurabh Sohoney

Retrieval augmented spelling correction for e-commerce applications
Xuan Guo, Rohit Patki, Dante Everaert, Christopher Potts

Dataset distillation

Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding
Yefan Tao, Chris (Luyang) Kong, Andrey Kan, Laurent Callot

Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding: DaLLME.png
The DaLLME framework proposed in "Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding" begins by using a language model to transform raw textual data into embedding vectors. A set of distilled vectors is then derived in the embedding space, through a process designed to encapsulate maximum informational content. Finally, the vec2text model translates these distilled vectors back into textual form.

Document understanding

DocKD: Knowledge distillation from LLMs for open-world document understanding models
Sungnyun Kim, Haofu Liao, Srikar Appalaraju, Peng Tang, Zhuowen Tu, Ravi Kumar Satzoda, R. Manmatha, Vijay Mahadevan, Stefano Soatto

Information retrieval

Evaluating D-MERIT of partial-annotation on information retrieval
Royi Rassin, Yaron Fairstein, Oren Kalinsky, Guy Kushilevitz, Nachshon Cohen, Alexander Libov, Yoav Goldberg

Identifying high consideration e-commerce search queries
Zhiyu Chen, Jason Choi, Besnik Fetahu, Shervin Malmasi

Learning when to retrieve, what to rewrite, and how to respond in conversational QA*
Nirmal Roy, Leonardo Ribeiro, Rexhina Blloshmi, Kevin Small

Natural-language understanding

Intent detection in the age of LLMs
Gaurav Arora, Shreya Jain, Srujana Merugu

Intent detection in the age of LLMs.png
"Intent detection in the age of LLMs" proposes a methodology for adaptive in-context learning and chain-of-thought-based intent detection using LLMs.

Predicting entity salience in extremely short documents
Ben Bullough, Harrison Lundberg, Chen Hu, Weihang Xiao

LLM evaluation

AXCEL: Automated eXplainable consistency evaluation using LLMs*
P Aditya Sreekar, Sahil Verma, Suransh Chopra, Sarik Ghazarian, Abhishek Persad, Narayanan Sadagopan

Precise model benchmarking with only a few observations
Riccardo Fogliato, Pratik Patil, Nil-Jana Akpinar, Mathew Monfort

LLM fine tuning

AdaZeta: Adaptive zeroth-order tensor-train adaption for memory-efficient large language models fine-tuning
Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ershad Banijamali, Thanasis Mouchtaris, Zheng Zhang

RoseLoRA: Row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation of pre-trained language model for knowledge editing and fine-tuning
Haoyu Wang, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Monica Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao

RoseLoRA.png
The row- and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation (RoseLoRA) framework proposed in "RoseLoRA: Row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation of pre-trained language model for knowledge editing and fine-tuning".

LLMs for speech

Speechworthy instruction-tuned language models
Hyundong Cho, Nicolaas Jedema, Leonardo Ribeiro, Karishma Sharma, Pedro Szekely, Alessandro Moschitti, Ruben Janssen, Jonathan May

LLM misinformation mitigation

ECON: On the detection and resolution of evidence conflicts
Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang

Generative subgraph retrieval for knowledge graph–grounded dialog generation
Jinyoung Park, Minseok Joo, Joo-Kyung Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim

HalluMeasure: Fine-grained hallucination measurement using chain-of-thought reasoning
Shayan Ali Akbar, Md Mosharaf Hossain, Tess Wood, Si-Chi Chin, Erica Salinas, Victor Alvarez, Erwin Cornejo

Knowledge-centric hallucination detection
Xiangkun Hu, Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Tianhang Zhang, Yang Xu, Yun Luo, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang, Yue Zhang

LLM reasoning

Auto-evolve: Enhancing large language model’s performance via self-reasoning framework*
Krishna Aswani, Alex Lu, Pranav Patankar, Priya Dhalwani, Iris Tan, Jayant Ganeshmohan, Simon Lacasse

LLM self-correction

LLM self-correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, critique, and refine for enhanced following of instructions with multiple constraints
Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Kartik Mehta, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Haw-Shiuan Chang, Shereen Oraby, Sijia Liu, Vivek Subramanian, Tagyoung Chung, Mohit Bansal, Nanyun Peng

DeCRIM.png
In the DeCRIM pipeline proposed in "LLM self-correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, critique, and refine for enhanced following of instructions with multiple constraints", an LLM first generates a response to a user request. The Decomposer then breaks down the request into granular constraints, and the Critic model gives feedback on whether the response meets those constraints. If it does, the response is output; if not, the LLM uses the feedback to refine the response.

LLM training

Dancing in chains: Reconciling instruction following and faithfulness in language models
Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, Zhiheng Huang

DEM: Distribution edited model for training with mixed data distributions
Dhananjay Ram, Aditya Rawal, Momchil Hardalov, Nikolaos Pappas, Sheng Zha

DEM: Distribution Edited Model for Training with Mixed Data Distributions
The distribution-edited model (ΘD) described in "DEM: Distribution edited model for training with mixed data distributions" results from fine-tuning a pretrained model (Θ) on n individual data distributions (Di) and combining the resulting models with basic element-wise vector operations. Here, the extracted distribution vectors (∆ΘDi ) are multiplied by weight coefficients, and the weighted sum is added to the base model.

Evolutionary contrastive distillation for language model alignment
Julian Katz-Samuels, Zheng Li, Hyokun Yun, Priyanka Nigam, Yi Xu, Vaclav Petricek, Bing Yin, Trishul Chilimbi

Hop, skip, jump to convergence: Dynamics of learning rate transitions for improved training of large language models
Shreyas Subramanian, Vignesh Ganapathiraman, Corey Barrett

Learning from relevant subgoals in successful dialogs using iterative training for task-oriented dialog systems
Magdalena Kaiser, Patrick Ernst, Gyuri Szarvas

Quality matters: Evaluating synthetic data for tool-using LLMs
Shadi Iskander, Nachshon Cohen, Zohar Karnin, Ori Shapira, Sofia Tolmach

Query autocompletion

AmazonQAC: A large-scale, naturalistic query autocomplete dataset
Dante Everaert, Rohit Patki, Tianqi Zheng, Christopher Potts

DiAL: Diversity aware listwise ranking for query auto-complete
Sonali Singh, Sachin Farfade, Prakash Mandayam Comar

Question answering

RAG-QA arena: Evaluating domain robustness for long-form retrieval-augmented question answering
Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli

Retrieving contextual information for long-form question answering using weak supervision
Philipp Christmann, Svitlana Vakulenko, Ionut Teodor Sorodoc, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert

Recommender systems

Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation
Nithish Kannen Senthilkumar, Yao Ma, Gerrit van den Burg, Jean Baptiste Faddoul

Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation.png
An illustration of the GLIMPSE framework proposed in "Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation". GLIMPSE adopts a multitask approach in which a pretrained language model is fine-tuned on both the relevance prediction task and the pairwise-preference task. During inference, the relevance predictions are used to produce an initial pointwise ranking, which is subsequently improved by one or more right-to-left (RTL) passes using pairwise comparisons.

PEARL: Preference extraction with exemplar augmentation and retrieval with LLM agents
Vijit Malik, Akshay Jagatap, Vinayak Puranik, Anirban Majumder

Sequential LLM framework for fashion recommendation
Han Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Tianlang Chen, Jiapeng Liu, Indu Indu, Henry Peng Zou, Peng Dai, Roberto Fernandez Galan, Mike Porter, Dongmei Jia, Ning Zhang, Lian Xiong

Responsible AI

Attribute controlled fine-tuning for large language models: A case study on detoxification
Tao Meng, Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Anil Ramakrishna, Aram Galstyan, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Rahul Gupta, Charith Peris

FLIRT: Feedback loop in-context red teaming
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Christophe Dupuy, Qian Hu, Shalini Ghosh, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta

Order of magnitude speedups for LLM membership inference
Rongting Zhang, Martin Bertran Lopez, Aaron Roth

Synthetic data generation

CorrSynth: A correlated sampling method for diverse dataset generation from LLMs
Suhas Kowshik, Abhishek Divekar, Vijit Malik

A Correlated Sampling Method for Diverse Dataset Generation from LLMs
"CorrSynth: A correlated sampling method for diverse dataset generation from LLMs" introduces a sampling method that uses anti-correlation between examples rather than few-shot generation.

DATA ADVISOR: Dynamic data curation for safety alignment of large language models
Fei Wang, Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan

Evaluating differentially private synthetic data generation in high-stakes domains
Krithika Ramesh, Nupoor Gandhi, Pulkit Madaan, Lisa Bauer, Charith Peris, Anjalie Field

SYNTHESIZRR: Generating diverse datasets with retrieval augmentation
Abhishek Divekar, Greg Durrett

Abstract depiction of the SYNTHESIZRR procedure
Abstract depiction of the procedure proposed in "SYNTHESIZRR: Generating diverse datasets with retrieval augmentation". The content sourcing stage retrieves K unique documents {r1,...,rK} from a large corpus for each in-context covariate xICL. The task-inversion stage uses a parameterized context refinement prompt, Pτ, which takes parameters Rinv (inversion instruction), rk (a retrieved document), and V(yICL) (the verbalized target label). A generalist teacher LLM autoregressively generates a synthetic covariate. Each in-context example thus produces K unique synthetic examples {x̃1,..., x̃K}, which we include in the dataset with target yICL.

Text classification

Distance-aware calibration for pre-trained language models*
Alberto Gasparin, Gianluca Detommaso

Performance-guided LLM knowledge distillation for efficient text classification at scale

Flavio Di Palo, Prateek Singhi, Bilal Fadlallah

Prompt-tuned muti-task taxonomic transformer (PTMTTaxoFormer)
Rajashekar Vasantha, Nhan Nguyen, Yue Zhang

Text summarization

Salient information prompting to steer content in prompt-based abstractive summarization
Lei Xu, Asad Karim, Saket Dingliwal, Aparna Elangovan

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Applied Scientist II, Amazon B2B Payments and Lending
US, WA, Seattle
Are you passionate about leveraging your applied science skills to deliver actionable insights that impact daily business decisions? Do you like using ML, GenAI, Causal Inference, Reinforcement Learning and Experimentation to answer challenging product and customer behavior questions? Do you want to be a technical leader and build flexible and global solutions for complex financial services/payments, risk, and causal problems? If so, here is a great opportunity to consider! Amazon B2B Payments & Lending is seeking an Applied Scientist II who will combine their technical expertise with business acumen to generate critical insights that will set the strategic direction of the business. You will be a thought leader on the team, help set the team's strategic focus and roadmaps, and design and build systems/solutions that support financial products, working closely with business/product partners and engineers. You will utilize ML/GenAI/Causal Inference/Reinforcement Learning/Experimentation methodologies, data and coding skills, problem solving and analytical skills, and excellent communication to deliver customer value. Amazon offers a full range of benefits that support you and eligible family members, including domestic partners and their children. Benefits can vary by location, the number of regularly scheduled hours you work, length of employment, and job status such as seasonal or temporary employment. The benefits that generally apply to regular, full-time employees include: 1. Medical, Dental, and Vision Coverage 2. Maternity and Parental Leave Options 3. Paid Time Off (PTO) 4. 401(k) Plan. If you are not sure that every qualification on the list above describes you exactly, we'd still love to hear from you! At Amazon, we value people with unique backgrounds, experiences, and skillsets. If you’re passionate about this role and want to make an impact on a global scale, please apply!
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