GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Stanceformer: Target-Aware Transformer for Stance Detection
Authors: Krishna Garg; Cornelia Caragea
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The task of Stance Detection involves discerning the stance expressed in a text towards a specific subject or target. Prior works have relied on existing transformer models that lack the capability to prioritize targets effectively. Consequently, these models yield similar performance regardless of whether we utilize or disregard target information, undermining the task’s significance. To address this challenge, we introduce Stanceformer, a target-aware transformer model that incorporates enhanced attention towards the targets during both training and inference. Specifically, we design a Target Awareness matrix that increases the self-attention scores assigned to the targets. We demonstrate the efficacy of the Stanceformer with various BERT-based models, including state-of-the-art models and Large Language Models (LLMs), and evaluate its performance across three stance detection datasets, alongside a zero-shot dataset. Our approach Stanceformer not only provides superior performance but also generalizes even to other domains, such as Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. We make the code publicly available.
Learning Autonomous Driving Tasks via Human Feedbacks with Large Language Models
Authors: Yunsheng Ma; Xu Cao; Wenqian Ye; Can Cui; Kai Mei; Ziran Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Traditional autonomous driving systems have mainly focused on making driving decisions without human interaction, overlooking human-like decision-making and human preference required in complex traffic scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for learning human-centered driving decisions from diverse simulation scenarios and environments that incorporate human feedback. Our contributions include a GPT-4-based programming planner that integrates seamlessly with the existing CARLA simulator to understand traffic scenes and react to human instructions. Specifically, we build a human-guided learning pipeline that incorporates human driver feedback directly into the learning process and stores optimal driving programming policy using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Impressively, our programming planner, with only 50 saved code snippets, can match the performance of baseline extensively trained reinforcement learning (RL) models. Our paper highlights the potential of an LLM-powered shared-autonomy system, pushing the frontier of autonomous driving system development to be more interactive and intuitive.
CultureBank: An Online Community-Driven Knowledge Base Towards Culturally Aware Language Technologies
Authors: Weiyan Shi; Ryan Li; Yutong Zhang; Caleb Ziems; Sunny Yu; Raya Horesh; Rogério Abreu De Paula; Diyi Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: To enhance language models’ cultural awareness, we design a generalizable pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online communities on a massive scale. With the pipeline, we construct CultureBank, a knowledge base built upon users’ self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. Unlike previous cultural knowledge resources, CultureBank contains diverse views on cultural descriptors to allow flexible interpretation of cultural knowledge, and contextualized cultural scenarios to help grounded evaluation. With CultureBank, we evaluate different LLMs’ cultural awareness, and identify areas for improvement. We also fine-tune a language model on CultureBank: experiments show that it achieves better performances on two downstream cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. Finally, we offer recommendations for future culturally aware language technologies. We release the CultureBank dataset, code and models at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CultureBank. Our project page is at culturebank.github.io
TOOLVERIFIER: Generalization to New Tools via Self-Verification
Authors: Dheeraj Mekala; Jason E Weston; Jack Lanchantin; Roberta Raileanu; Maria Lomeli; Jingbo Shang; Jane Dwivedi-Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Teaching language models to use tools is an important milestone towards building general assistants, but remains an open problem. While there has been significant progress on learning to use specific tools via fine-tuning, language models still struggle with learning how to robustly use new tools from only a few demonstrations. In this work we introduce a self-verification method which distinguishes between close candidates by self-asking contrastive questions during (1) tool selection; and parameter generation. We construct synthetic, high-quality, self-generated data for this goal using Llama-2 70B, which we intend to release publicly. Extensive experiments on 4 tasks from the ToolBench benchmark, consisting of 17 unseen tools, demonstrate an average improvement of 22% over few-shot baselines, even in scenarios where the distinctions between candidate tools are finely nuanced.
FaithScore: Fine-grained Evaluations of Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Liqiang Jing; Ruosen Li; Yunmo Chen; Xinya Du
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: We introduce FaithScore (Faithfulness to Atomic Image Facts Score), a reference-free and fine-grained evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of the generated free-form answers from large vision-language models (LVLMs). The FaithScore evaluation first identifies sub-sentences containing descriptive statements that need to be verified, then extracts a comprehensive list of atomic facts from these sub-sentences, and finally conducts consistency verification between fine-grained atomic facts and the input image. Meta-evaluation demonstrates that our metric highly correlates with human judgments of faithfulness. We collect two benchmark datasets (i.e. LLaVA-1k and MSCOCO-Cap) for evaluating LVLMs instruction-following hallucinations. We measure hallucinations in state-of-the-art LVLMs with FaithScore on the datasets. Results reveal that current systems are prone to generate hallucinated content unfaithful to the image, which leaves room for future improvements. We hope our metric FaithScore can help evaluate future LVLMs in terms of faithfulness and provide insightful advice for enhancing LVLMs’ faithfulness.
Learning to Ask Informative Questions: Enhancing LLMs with Preference Optimization and Expected Information Gain
Authors: Davide Mazzaccara; Alberto Testoni; Raffaella Bernardi
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Questions are essential tools for acquiring the necessary information to complete information-seeking tasks. However, large language models (LLMs), especially open-source models, often perform poorly in generating informative questions, as measured by expected information gain (EIG). In this paper, we propose a method to enhance the informativeness of LLM-generated questions in 20-question game dialogues. We sample multiple questions from the same model (LLaMA 2-Chat 7B) for each game and create pairs of low-EIG and high-EIG questions to apply a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm. Our results show that this method produces more effective questions (in terms of EIG), even in domains different from those used to train the DPO model.
Adversarial Math Word Problem Generation
Authors: Roy Xie; Chengxuan Huang; Junlin Wang; Bhuwan Dhingra
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed the educational landscape. As current plagiarism detection tools struggle to keep pace with LLMs’ rapid advancements, the educational community faces the challenge of assessing students’ true problem-solving abilities in the presence of LLMs. In this work, we explore a new paradigm for ensuring fair evaluation—generating adversarial examples which preserve the structure and difficulty of the original questions aimed for assessment, but are unsolvable by LLMs. Focusing on the domain of math word problems, we leverage abstract syntax trees to structurally generate adversarial examples that cause LLMs to produce incorrect answers by simply editing the numeric values in the problems. We conduct experiments on various open- and closed-source LLMs, quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrating that our method significantly degrades their math problem-solving ability. We identify shared vulnerabilities among LLMs and propose a cost-effective approach to attack high-cost models. Additionally, we conduct automatic analysis to investigate the cause of failure, providing further insights into the limitations of LLMs.
Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreak Attacks via Layer-specific Editing
Authors: Wei Zhao; Zhe Li; Yige Li; Ye Zhang; Jun Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adopted in a wide range of real-world applications. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to deliberately crafted adversarial prompts even when aligned via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or supervised fine-tuning. While existing defense methods focus on either detecting harmful prompts or reducing the likelihood of harmful responses through various means, defending LLMs against jailbreak attacks based on the inner mechanisms of LLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate how LLMs respond to harmful prompts and propose a novel defense method termed Layer-specific Editing (LED) to enhance the resilience of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Through LED, we reveal that several critical safety layers exist among the early layers of LLMs. We then show that realigning these safety layers (and some selected additional layers) with the decoded safe response from identified toxic layers can significantly improve the alignment of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Extensive experiments across various LLMs (e.g., Llama2, Mistral) show the effectiveness of LED, which effectively defends against jailbreak attacks while maintaining performance on benign prompts. Our code is available at https://github.com/ledllm/ledllm.
Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness
Authors: Gauri Kambhatla; Matthew Lease; Ashwin Rajadesingan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: To promote constructive discussion of controversial topics online, we propose automatic reframing of disagreeing responses to signal receptiveness to a preceding comment. Drawing on research from psychology, communications, and linguistics, we identify six strategies for reframing. We automatically reframe replies to comments according to each strategy, using a Reddit dataset. Through human-centered experiments, we find that the replies generated with our framework are perceived to be significantly more receptive than the original replies and a generic receptiveness baseline. We illustrate how transforming receptiveness, a particular social science construct, into a computational framework, can make LLM generations more aligned with human perceptions. We analyze and discuss the implications of our results, and highlight how a tool based on our framework might be used for more teachable and creative content moderation.
A Simple but Effective Approach to Improve Structured Language Model Output for Information Extraction
Authors: Yinghao Li; Rampi Ramprasad; Chao Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating unstructured natural language according to instructions. However, their performance can be inconsistent when tasked with producing text that adheres to specific structured formats, which is crucial in applications like named entity recognition (NER) or relation extraction (RE). To address this issue, this paper introduces an efficient method, G&O, to enhance their structured text generation capabilities. It breaks the generation into a two-step pipeline: initially, LLMs generate answers in natural language as intermediate responses. Subsequently, LLMs are asked to organize the output into the desired structure, using the intermediate responses as context. G&O effectively separates the generation of content from the structuring process, reducing the pressure of completing two orthogonal tasks simultaneously. Tested on zero-shot NER and RE, the results indicate a significant improvement in LLM performance with minimal additional efforts. This straightforward and adaptable prompting technique can also be combined with other strategies, like self-consistency, to further elevate LLM capabilities in various structured text generation tasks.
Rater Cohesion and Quality from a Vicarious Perspective
Authors: Deepak Pandita; Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya; Sujan Dutta; Sarah K. Luger; Tharindu Ranasinghe; Ashiqur R. KhudaBukhsh; Marcos Zampieri; Christopher M. Homan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Human feedback is essential for building human-centered AI systems across domains where disagreement is prevalent, such as AI safety, content moderation, or sentiment analysis. Many disagreements, particularly in politically charged settings, arise because raters have opposing values or beliefs. Vicarious annotation is a method for breaking down disagreement by asking raters how they think others would annotate the data. In this paper, we explore the use of vicarious annotation with analytical methods for moderating rater disagreement. We employ rater cohesion metrics to study the potential influence of political affiliations and demographic backgrounds on raters’ perceptions of offense. Additionally, we utilize CrowdTruth’s rater quality metrics, which consider the demographics of the raters, to score the raters and their annotations. We study how the rater quality metrics influence the in-group and cross-group rater cohesion across the personal and vicarious levels.
Shall We Team Up: Exploring Spontaneous Cooperation of Competing LLM Agents
Authors: Zengqing Wu; Run Peng; Shuyuan Zheng; Qianying Liu; Xu Han; Brian I. Kwon; Makoto Onizuka; Shaojie Tang; Chuan Xiao
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly been utilized in social simulations, where they are often guided by carefully crafted instructions to stably exhibit human-like behaviors during simulations. Nevertheless, we doubt the necessity of shaping agents’ behaviors for accurate social simulations. Instead, this paper emphasizes the importance of spontaneous phenomena, wherein agents deeply engage in contexts and make adaptive decisions without explicit directions. We explored spontaneous cooperation across three competitive scenarios and successfully simulated the gradual emergence of cooperation, findings that align closely with human behavioral data. This approach not only aids the computational social science community in bridging the gap between simulations and real-world dynamics but also offers the AI community a novel method to assess LLMs’ capability of deliberate reasoning.Our source code is available at https://github.com/wuzengqing001225/SABM_ShallWeTeamUp
Normalized Narrow Jump To Conclusions: Normalized Narrow Shortcuts for Parameter Efficient Early Exit Transformer Prediction
Authors: Amrit Diggavi Seshadri
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: With the size and cost of large transformer-based language models growing, recently, there has been interest in shortcut casting of early transformer hidden-representations to final-representations for cheaper model inference. In particular, shortcutting pre-trained transformers with linear transformations over early layers has been shown to improve precision in early inference. However, for large language models, even this becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we propose Narrow Jump to Conclusions (NJTC) and Normalized Narrow Jump to Conclusions (N-NJTC) - parameter efficient alternatives to standard linear shortcutting that reduces shortcut parameter count by over 97%. We show that N-NJTC reliably outperforms Identity shortcuts at early stages and offers stable precision from all transformer block levels for GPT-2-XL, Phi3-Mini and Llama2-7B transformer models, demonstrating the viability of more parameter efficient short-cutting approaches.
From Test-Taking to Test-Making: Examining LLM Authoring of Commonsense Assessment Items
Authors: Melissa Roemmele; Andrew Gordon
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: LLMs can now perform a variety of complex writing tasks. They also excel in answering questions pertaining to natural language inference and commonsense reasoning. Composing these questions is itself a skilled writing task, so in this paper we consider LLMs as authors of commonsense assessment items. We prompt LLMs to generate items in the style of a prominent benchmark for commonsense reasoning, the Choice of Plausible Alternatives (COPA). We examine the outcome according to analyses facilitated by the LLMs and human annotation. We find that LLMs that succeed in answering the original COPA benchmark are also more successful in authoring their own items.
”I Never Said That”: A dataset, taxonomy and baselines on response clarity classification
Authors: Konstantinos Thomas; Giorgos Filandrianos; Maria Lymperaiou; Chrysoula Zerva; Giorgos Stamou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Equivocation and ambiguity in public speech are well-studied discourse phenomena, especially in political science and analysis of political interviews. Inspired by the well-grounded theory on equivocation, we aim to resolve the closely related problem of response clarity in questions extracted from political interviews, leveraging the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and human expertise. To this end, we introduce a novel taxonomy that frames the task of detecting and classifying response clarity and a corresponding clarity classification dataset which consists of question-answer (QA) pairs drawn from political interviews and annotated accordingly. Our proposed two-level taxonomy addresses the clarity of a response in terms of the information provided for a given question (high-level) and also provides a fine-grained taxonomy of evasion techniques that relate to unclear, ambiguous responses (lower-level). We combine ChatGPT and human annotators to collect, validate and annotate discrete QA pairs from political interviews, to be used for our newly introduced response clarity task. We provide a detailed analysis and conduct several experiments with different model architectures, sizes and adaptation methods to gain insights and establish new baselines over the proposed dataset and task.
Immunization against harmful fine-tuning attacks
Authors: Domenic Rosati; Jan Wehner; Kai Williams; Lukasz Bartoszcze; Hassan Sajjad; Frank Rudzicz
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are often trained with safety guards intended to prevent harmful text generation. However, such safety training can be removed by fine-tuning the LLM on harmful datasets. While this emerging threat (harmful fine-tuning attacks) has been characterized by previous work, there is little understanding of how we should proceed in constructing and validating defenses against these attacks especially in the case where defenders would not have control of the fine-tuning process. We introduce a formal framework based on the training budget of an attacker which we call “Immunization” conditions. Using a formal characterisation of the harmful fine-tuning problem, we provide a thorough description of what a successful defense must comprise of and establish a set of guidelines on how rigorous defense research that gives us confidence should proceed.
UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause
Authors: Guimin Hu; Zhihong Zhu; Daniel Hershcovich; Lijie Hu; Hasti Seifi; Jiayuan Xie
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) and multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) have recently garnered significant attention. Emotions are the expression of affect or feelings; responses to specific events, or situations – known as emotion causes. Both collectively explain the causality between human emotion and intents. However, existing works treat emotion recognition and emotion cause extraction as two individual problems, ignoring their natural causality. In this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Emotion recognition and Emotion-Cause analysis framework (UniMEEC) to explore the causality between emotion and emotion cause. Concretely, UniMEEC reformulates the MERC and MECPE tasks as mask prediction problems and unifies them with a causal prompt template. To differentiate the modal effects, UniMEEC proposes a multimodal causal prompt to probe the pre-trained knowledge specified to modality and implements cross-task and cross-modality interactions under task-oriented settings. Experiment results on four public benchmark datasets verify the model performance on MERC and MECPE tasks and achieve consistent improvements compared with the previous state-of-the-art methods.
CodeFort: Robust Training for Code Generation Models
Authors: Yuhao Zhang; Shiqi Wang; Haifeng Qian; Zijian Wang; Mingyue Shang; Linbo Liu; Sanjay Krishna Gouda; Baishakhi Ray; Murali Krishna Ramanathan; Xiaofei Ma; Anoop Deoras
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Code generation models are not robust to small perturbations, which often lead to incorrect generations and significantly degrade the performance of these models. Although improving the robustness of code generation models is crucial to enhancing user experience in real-world applications, existing research efforts do not address this issue. To fill this gap, we propose CodeFort, a framework to improve the robustness of code generation models, generalizing a large variety of code perturbations to enrich the training data and enabling various robust training strategies, mixing data augmentation, batch augmentation, adversarial logits pairing, and contrastive learning, all carefully designed to support high-throughput training. Extensive evaluations show that we increase the average robust pass rates of baseline CodeGen models from 14.79 to 21.74. We notably decrease the robustness drop rate from 95.02% to 54.95% against code-syntax perturbations.