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Joseph Cotnareanu

PhD - McGill University
Supervisor
Mark Coates
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Natural Language Processing

Publications

InnerThoughts: Disentangling Representations and Predictions in Large Language Models
Didier Chételat
Joseph Cotnareanu
Rylee Thompson
Yingxue Zhang
Mark Coates
Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts.… (see more) Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying representations of the problem within its hidden states. Ultimately, however, only the hidden state corresponding to the final layer and token position is used to predict the answer label. In this work, we propose instead to learn a small separate neural network predictor module on a collection of training questions, that take the hidden states from all the layers at the last temporal position as input and outputs predictions. In effect, such a framework disentangles the representational abilities of LLMs from their predictive abilities. On a collection of hard benchmarks, our method achieves considerable improvements in performance, sometimes comparable to supervised fine-tuning procedures, but at a fraction of the computational cost.
2025-01-22
aistats.org/AISTATS/2025/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
InnerThoughts: Disentangling Representations and Predictions in Large Language Models
Didier Chételat
Joseph Cotnareanu
Rylee Thompson
Yingxue Zhang
Mark Coates
Large language models (LLMs) contain substantial factual knowledge which is commonly elicited by multiple-choice question-answering prompts.… (see more) Internally, such models process the prompt through multiple transformer layers, building varying representations of the problem within its hidden states. Ultimately, however, only the hidden state corresponding to the final layer and token position is used to predict the answer label. In this work, we propose instead to learn a small separate neural network predictor module on a collection of training questions, that take the hidden states from all the layers at the last temporal position as input and outputs predictions. In effect, such a framework disentangles the representational abilities of LLMs from their predictive abilities. On a collection of hard benchmarks, our method achieves considerable improvements in performance, sometimes comparable to supervised fine-tuning procedures, but at a fraction of the computational cost.
2025-01-22
aistats.org/AISTATS/2025/Conference (poster)
proceedings.mlr.press
openreview.net
HardCore Generation: Generating Hard UNSAT Problems for Data Augmentation
Joseph Cotnareanu
Zhanguang Zhang
Hui-Ling Zhen
Yingxue Zhang
Mark Coates
Efficiently determining the satisfiability of a boolean equation --- known as the SAT problem for brevity --- is crucial in various industri… (see more)al problems. Recently, the advent of deep learning methods has introduced significant potential for enhancing SAT solving. However, a major barrier to the advancement of this field has been the scarcity of large, realistic datasets. The majority of current public datasets are either randomly generated or extremely limited, containing only a few examples from unrelated problem families. These datasets are inadequate for meaningful training of deep learning methods. In light of this, researchers have started exploring generative techniques to create data that more accurately reflect SAT problems encountered in practical situations. These methods have so far suffered from either the inability to produce challenging SAT problems or time-scalability obstacles. In this paper we address both by identifying and manipulating the key contributors to a problem's ``hardness'', known as cores. Although some previous work has addressed cores, the time costs are unacceptably high due to the expense of traditional heuristic core detection techniques. We introduce a fast core detection procedure that uses a graph neural network. Our empirical results demonstrate that we can efficiently generate problems that remain hard to solve and retain key attributes of the original example problems. We show via experiment that the generated synthetic SAT problems can be used in a data augmentation setting to provide improved prediction of solver runtimes.
2024-09-25
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Substituting Data Annotation with Balanced Neighbourhoods and Collective Loss in Multi-label Text Classification
Muberra Ozmen
Joseph Cotnareanu
Mark Coates
Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is the task of assigning multiple labels to a given text, and has a wide range of application domains… (see more). Most existing approaches require an enormous amount of annotated data to learn a classifier and/or a set of well-defined constraints on the label space structure, such as hierarchical relations which may be complicated to provide as the number of labels increases. In this paper, we study the MLTC problem in annotation-free and scarce-annotation settings in which the magnitude of available supervision signals is linear to the number of labels. Our method follows three steps, (1) mapping input text into a set of preliminary label likelihoods by natural language inference using a pre-trained language model, (2) calculating a signed label dependency graph by label descriptions, and (3) updating the preliminary label likelihoods with message passing along the label dependency graph, driven with a collective loss function that injects the information of expected label frequency and average multi-label cardinality of predictions. The experiments show that the proposed framework achieves effective performance under low supervision settings with almost imperceptible computational and memory overheads added to the usage of pre-trained language model outperforming its initial performance by 70% in terms of example-based F1 score.
2023-11-20
Proceedings of The 2nd Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
Substituting Data Annotation with Balanced Updates and Collective Loss in Multi-label Text Classification
Muberra Ozmen
Joseph Cotnareanu
Mark Coates
Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is the task of assigning multiple labels to a given text, and has a wide range of application domains… (see more). Most existing approaches require an enormous amount of annotated data to learn a classifier and/or a set of well-defined constraints on the label space structure, such as hierarchical relations which may be complicated to provide as the number of labels increases. In this paper, we study the MLTC problem in annotation-free and scarce-annotation settings in which the magnitude of available supervision signals is linear to the number of labels. Our method follows three steps, (1) mapping input text into a set of preliminary label likelihoods by natural language inference using a pre-trained language model, (2) calculating a signed label dependency graph by label descriptions, and (3) updating the preliminary label likelihoods with message passing along the label dependency graph, driven with a collective loss function that injects the information of expected label frequency and average multi-label cardinality of predictions. The experiments show that the proposed framework achieves effective performance under low supervision settings with almost imperceptible computational and memory overheads added to the usage of pre-trained language model outperforming its initial performance by 70\% in terms of example-based F1 score.
2023-09-24
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org