Automated log analysis plays a crucial role in software maintenance as it allows for efficient identification and resolution of issues. However, traditional methods employed in log analysis heavily rely on extensive historical data for training purposes and lack rationales for its predictions. The performance of these traditional methods significantly deteriorates when in-domain logs for training are limited and unseen log data are the majority, particularly in rapidly changing online environments. Additionally, the lack of rationales hampers the interpretability of analysis results and impacts analysts' subsequent decision-making processes. To address these challenges, we proposes LogPrompt, an novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) and advanced prompting techniques to achieve performance improvements in zero-shot scenarios (i.e., no in-domain training). Moreover, LogPrompt has garnered positive evaluations from experienced practitioners in its log interpretation ability. Code available at https://github.com/lunyiliu/LogPrompt.

Automated log analysis is crucial in modern software-intensive systems for facilitating program comprehension throughout software maintenance and engineering life cycles. Existing methods perform tasks such as log parsing and log anomaly detection by providing a single prediction value without interpretation. However, given the increasing volume of system events, the limited interpretability of analysis results hinders analysts' comprehension of program status and their ability to take appropriate actions. Moreover, these methods require substantial in-domain training data, and their performance declines sharply (by up to 62.5%) in online scenarios involving unseen logs from new domains, a common occurrence due to rapid software updates. In this paper, we propose LogPrompt, a novel interpretable log analysis approach for online scenarios. LogPrompt employs large language models (LLMs) to perform online log analysis tasks via a suite of advanced prompt strategies tailored for log tasks, which enhances LLMs' performance by up to 380.7% compared with simple prompts. Experiments on nine publicly available evaluation datasets across two tasks demonstrate that LogPrompt, despite requiring no in-domain training, outperforms existing approaches trained on thousands of logs by up to 55.9%. We also conduct a human evaluation of LogPrompt's interpretability, with six practitioners possessing over 10 years of experience, who highly rated the generated content in terms of usefulness and readability (averagely 4.42/5). LogPrompt also exhibits remarkable compatibility with open-source and smaller-scale LLMs, making it flexible for practical deployment. Code of LogPrompt is available at https://github.com/lunyiliu/LogPrompt.

Short videos turn into an important channel for public sharing, as well as they've become a fertile ground for fake news. Fake news video detection is to judge the veracity of news based on its different modal information, such as video, audio, text, image and social context information. Current detection models tend to learn the multimodal dataset biases within spurious correlations between news modalities and veracity labels as shortcuts, rather than learning how to integrate the multimodal information behind them to reason, resulting in seriously degrading their detection and generalization capabilities. To address this issues, we propose a Multimodal Multi-View Debiasing (MMVD) framework, which makes the first attempt to mitigate various multimodal biases for fake news video detection. Inspired by people's misleading situations by multimodal short videos, we summarize three cognitive biases: static, dynamic and social biases. MMVD put forward a multi-view causal reasoning strategy to learn unbiased dependencies within the cognitive biases, thus enhancing the unbiased prediction of multimodal videos. The extensive experimental results show that the MMVD could improve the detection performance of multimodal fake news video. Studies also confirm that our MMVD can mitigate multiple biases on complex real-world scenarios and improve generalization ability of fake news video detection.

Directly training a document-to-document (Doc2Doc) neural machine translation (NMT) via Transformer from scratch, especially on small datasets, usually fails to converge. Our dedicated probing tasks show that 1) both the absolute position and relative position information gets gradually weakened or even vanished once it reaches the upper encoder layers, and 2) the vanishing of absolute position information in encoder output causes the training failure of Doc2Doc NMT. To alleviate this problem, we propose a position-aware Transformer (P-Transformer) to enhance both the absolute and relative position information in both self-attention and cross-attention. Specifically, we integrate absolute positional information, i.e., position embeddings, into the query-key pairs both in self-attention and cross-attention through a simple yet effective addition operation. Moreover, we also integrate relative position encoding in self-attention. The proposed P-Transformer utilizes sinusoidal position encoding and does not require any task-specified position embedding, segment embedding, or attention mechanism. Through the above methods, we build a Doc2Doc NMT model with P-Transformer, which ingests the source document and completely generates the target document in a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) way. In addition, P-Transformer can be applied to seq2seq-based document-to-sentence (Doc2Sent) and sentence-to-sentence (Sent2Sent) translations. Extensive experimental results of Doc2Doc NMT show that P-Transformer significantly outperforms strong baselines on the widely-used 9 document-level datasets in 7 language pairs, covering small-, middle-, and large-scales, and achieves a new state-of-the-art. Experimentation on discourse phenomena shows that our Doc2Doc NMT models improve the translation quality in both BLEU and discourse coherence. We make our code available on Github.

Yuang Li, Min Zhang, Mengxin Ren, Xiaosong Qiao, Miaomiao Ma, Daimeng Wei, Hao Yang. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

To translate well, machine translation (MT) systems and general-purposed language models (LMs) need a deep understanding of both source and target languages and cultures. Therefore, idioms, with their non-compositional nature, pose particular challenges for Transformer-based systems, as literal translations often miss the intended meaning. Traditional methods, which replace idioms using existing knowledge bases (KBs), often lack scale and context-awareness. Addressing these challenges, our approach prioritizes context-awareness and scalability, allowing for offline storage of idioms in a manageable KB size. This ensures efficient serving with smaller models and provides a more comprehensive understanding of idiomatic expressions. We introduce a multilingual idiom KB (IdiomKB) developed using large LMs to address this. This KB facilitates better translation by smaller models, such as BLOOMZ (7.1B), Alpaca (7B), and InstructGPT (6.7B), by retrieving idioms' figurative meanings. We present a novel, GPT-4-powered metric for human-aligned evaluation, demonstrating that IdiomKB considerably boosts model performance. Human evaluations further validate our KB's quality.