mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models
Authors: Royson Lee, Łukasz Dudziak, Shell Xu Hu, Sourav Bhattacharya, Timothy Hospedales, Georgios Tzimiropoulos, Brais Martinez Fuwen Tan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20%-50% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.
Do *they* mean \textquoteleftus'? Interpreting Referring Expression variation under Intergroup Bias
Authors: Matianyu Zang, Kyle Mahowald, David Beaver, Junyi Jessy Li Venkata S Govindarajan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The variations between in-group and out-group speech (intergroup bias) are subtle and could underlie many social phenomena like stereotype perpetuation and implicit bias. In this paper, we model intergroup bias as a tagging task on English sports comments from forums dedicated to fandom for NFL teams. We curate a dataset of over 6 million game-time comments from opposing perspectives (the teams in the game), each comment grounded in a non-linguistic description of the events that precipitated these comments (live win probabilities for each team). Expert and crowd annotations justify modeling the bias through tagging of implicit and explicit referring expressions and reveal the rich, contextual understanding of language and the world required for this task. For large-scale analysis of intergroup variation, we use LLMs for automated tagging, and discover that LLMs occasionally perform better when prompted with linguistic descriptions of the win probability at the time of the comment, rather than numerical probability. Further, large-scale tagging of comments using LLMs uncovers linear variations in the form of referent across win probabilities that distinguish in-group and out-group utterances.
A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content
Authors: Liangming Pan, Xuandong Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Linda Ruth Petzold, William Yang Wang, Wei Cheng Xianjun Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The burgeoning capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have led to an increase in synthetic content generation with implications across a variety of sectors, including media, cybersecurity, public discourse, and education. As such, the ability to detect LLMs-generated content has become of paramount importance. We aim to provide a detailed overview of existing detection strategies and benchmarks, scrutinizing their differences and identifying key challenges and prospects in the field, advocating for more adaptable and robust models to enhance detection accuracy. We also posit the necessity for a multi-faceted approach to defend against various attacks to counter the rapidly advancing capabilities of LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first comprehensive survey on the detection in the era of LLMs. We hope it will provide a broad understanding of the current landscape of LLMs-generated content detection, and we have maintained a website to consistently update the latest research as a guiding reference for researchers and practitioners.
Can LLMs Reason in the Wild with Programs?
Authors: Siheng Xiong, Ali Payani, Ehsan Shareghi, Faramarz Fekri Yuan Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary to assess their reasoning abilities in more realistic scenarios where many real-world problems are open-ended with ambiguous scope, and often require multiple formalisms to solve. To investigate this, we introduce the task of reasoning in the wild, where an LLM is tasked to solve a reasoning problem of unknown type by identifying the sub-problems and their corresponding formalisms, and writing a program to solve each sub-problem, guided by a tactic. We create a large tactic-guided trajectory dataset containing detailed solutions to a diverse set of reasoning problems, ranging from well-defined single-form reasoning (e.g., math, logic), to ambiguous and hybrid ones (e.g., commonsense, combined math and logic). This allows us to test various aspects of LLMs reasoning at the fine-grained level such as the selection and execution of tactics, and the tendency to take undesired shortcuts. In experiments, we highlight that existing LLMs fail significantly on problems with ambiguous and mixed scope, revealing critical limitations and overfitting issues (e.g. accuracy on GSM8K drops by at least 50%). We further show the potential of finetuning a local LLM on the tactic-guided trajectories in achieving better performance. Project repo is available at https://github.com/gblackout/Reason-in-the-Wild.
Can Textual Unlearning Solve Cross-Modality Safety Alignment?
Authors: Erfan Shayegani, Zikui Cai, Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh, M. Salman Asif, Yue Dong, Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Chengyu Song Trishna Chakraborty
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent studies reveal that integrating new modalities into large language models (LLMs), such as vision-language models (VLMs), creates a new attack surface that bypasses existing safety training techniques like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). While further SFT and RLHF-based safety training can be conducted in multi-modal settings, collecting multi-modal training datasets poses a significant challenge. Inspired by the structural design of recent multi-modal models, where all input modalities are ultimately fused into the language space, we explore whether unlearning solely in the textual domain can be effective for cross-modality safety alignment. Our empirical evaluation across seven datasets demonstrates promising transferability --- textual unlearning in VLMs significantly reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) to less than 8% and in some cases, even as low as nearly 2% for both text-based and vision-text-based attacks, alongside preserving the utility. Moreover, our experiments show that unlearning with a multi-modal dataset offers no potential benefits but incurs significantly increased computational demands.
VDebugger: Harnessing Execution Feedback for Debugging Visual Programs
Authors: Zongyu Lin, Songyan Zhao, Te-Lin Wu, Pan Lu, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang Xueqing Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems. However, these programs are prone to logic errors, with our preliminary evaluation showing that 58% of the total errors are caused by program logic errors. Debugging complex visual programs remains a major bottleneck for visual reasoning. To address this, we introduce **VDebugger**, a novel critic-refiner framework trained to localize and debug visual programs by tracking execution step by step. VDebugger identifies and corrects program errors leveraging detailed execution feedback, improving interpretability and accuracy. The training data is generated through an automated pipeline that injects errors into correct visual programs using a novel mask-best decoding technique. Evaluations on six datasets demonstrate VDebugger`s effectiveness, showing performance improvements of up to 3.2% in downstream task accuracy. Further studies show VDebugger`s ability to generalize to unseen tasks, bringing a notable improvement of 2.3% on the unseen COVR task.
Monotonic Paraphrasing Improves Generalization of Language Model Prompting
Authors: Fei Wang, Nan Xu, Tianyi Lorena Yan, Tao Meng, Muhao Chen Qin Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Performance of large language models (LLMs) may vary with different prompts or instructions of even the same task. One commonly recognized factor for this phenomenon is the model`s familiarity with the given prompt or instruction, which is typically estimated by its perplexity. However, finding the prompt with the lowest perplexity is challenging, given the enormous space of possible prompting phrases. In this paper, we propose monotonic paraphrasing (MonoPara), an end-to-end decoding strategy that paraphrases given prompts or instructions into their lower perplexity counterparts based on an ensemble of a paraphrase LM for prompt (or instruction) rewriting, and a target LM (i.e. the prompt or instruction executor) that constrains the generation for lower perplexity. The ensemble decoding process can efficiently paraphrase the original prompt without altering its semantic meaning, while monotonically decrease the perplexity of each generation as calculated by the target LM. We explore in detail both greedy and search-based decoding as two alternative decoding schemes of MonoPara. Notably, MonoPara does not require any training and can monotonically lower the perplexity of the paraphrased prompt or instruction, leading to improved performance of zero-shot LM prompting as evaluated on a wide selection of tasks. In addition, MonoPara is also shown to effectively improve LMs' generalization on perturbed and unseen task instructions.
MORL-Prompt: An Empirical Analysis of Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Prompt Optimization
Authors: Dheeraj Mekala, Rose Yu, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick Yasaman Jafari
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: RL-based techniques can be employed to search for prompts that, when fed into a target language model, maximize a set of user-specified reward functions. However, in many target applications, the natural reward functions are in tension with one another -- for example, content preservation vs. style matching in style transfer tasks. Current techniques focus on maximizing the average of reward functions, which does not necessarily lead to prompts that achieve balance across rewards -- an issue that has been well-studied in the multi-objective and robust optimization literature. In this paper, we conduct an empirical comparison of several existing multi-objective optimization techniques adapted to this new setting: RL-based discrete prompt optimization. We compare two methods optimizing the volume of the Pareto reward surface and one method that chooses an update direction that benefits all rewards simultaneously. We evaluate performance on two NLP tasks: style transfer and machine translation, each using three competing reward functions. Our experiments demonstrate that multi-objective methods that directly optimize the volume of the Pareto reward surface perform better and achieve a better balance of all rewards than those that attempt to find monotonic update directions.
Understanding Faithfulness and Reasoning of Large Language Models on Plain Biomedical Summaries
Authors: Xiang Dai, Sarvnaz Karimi Biaoyan Fang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Generating plain biomedical summaries with Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance the accessibility of biomedical knowledge to the public. However, how faithful the generated summaries are remains an open yet critical question. To address this, we propose FaReBio, a benchmark dataset with expert-annotated Faithfulness and Reasoning on plain Biomedical Summaries. This dataset consists of 175 plain summaries (\$,445 sentences) generated by seven different LLMs, paired with source articles. Using our dataset, we identify the performance gap of LLMs in generating faithful plain biomedical summaries and observe a negative correlation between abstractiveness and faithfulness. We also show that current faithfulness evaluation metrics do not work well in the biomedical domain and confirm the over-confident tendency of LLMs as faithfulness evaluators. To better understand the faithfulness judgements, we further benchmark LLMs in retrieving supporting evidence and show the gap of LLMs in reasoning faithfulness evaluation at different abstractiveness levels. Going beyond the binary faithfulness labels, coupled with the annotation of supporting sentences, our dataset could further contribute to the understanding of faithfulness evaluation and reasoning.
Change Is the Only Constant: Dynamic LLM Slicing based on Layer Redundancy
Authors: Paul Ioan Clotan, Vikas Yadav, Darius Peteleaza, Mihai Surdeanu Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel model compression approach through dynamic layer-specific pruning in Large Language Models (LLMs), enhancing the traditional methodology established by SliceGPT. By transitioning from constant to dynamic slicing, our method leverages the newly proposed Layer Redundancy (LR) score, which assesses how much change each layer changes its input by measuring the cosine similarity of the input to the output of the layer. We use this score to prune parts of individual layers based on redundancy in such a way that the average pruned percentage for all layers is a fixed value. We conducted extensive experiments using models like Llama3-8B and Mistral-7B on multiple datasets, evaluating different slicing bases and percentages to determine optimal configurations that balance efficiency and performance. Our findings show that our dynamic slicing approach not only maintains but, in many cases, enhances model performance compared to the baseline established by constant slicing methods. For instance, in several settings, we see performance improvements of up to 5% over the SliceGPT baseline.Additionally, a perplexity decrease by as much as 7% was observed across multiple benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of our method. The code, model weights, and datasets are open-sourced at - https://github.com/RazvanDu/DynamicSlicing
Pruning Multilingual Large Language Models for Multilingual Inference
Authors: Jun Suzuki, Tosho Hirasawa, Mamoru Komachi Hwichan Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multilingual large language models (MLLMs), trained on multilingual balanced data, demonstrate better zero-shot learning performance in non-English languages compared to large language models trained on English-dominant data. However, the disparity in performance between English and non-English languages remains a challenge yet to be fully addressed. This study introduces a promising direction for enhancing non-English performance through a specialized pruning approach. Specifically, we prune MLLMs using bilingual sentence pairs from English and other languages and empirically demonstrate that this pruning strategy can enhance the MLLMs' performance in non-English language.
Video Discourse Parsing and Its Application to Multimodal Summarization: A Dataset and Baseline Approaches
Authors: Naoki Kobayashi, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, Akisato Kimura Tsutomu Hirao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper tackles a new task: discourse parsing for videos, inspired by text discourse parsing based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The task aims to construct an RST tree for a video to represent its storyline and illustrate the event relationships. We first construct a benchmark dataset by identifying events with their time spans, providing corresponding captions, and constructing RST trees with events as leaves. We then evaluate baseline approaches to video RST parsing: the \textquoteleftparsing after captioning' framework and parsing via visual features. The results show that a parser using gold captions performed the best, while parsers relying on generated captions performed the worst; a parser using visual features provided intermediate performance. However, we observed that parsing via visual features could be improved by pre-training it with video captioning designed to produce a coherent video story. Furthermore, we demonstrated that RST trees obtained from videos contribute to multimodal summarization consisting of keyframes with texts.
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding
Authors: Xiachong Feng, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Hongtao Liu, Bing Qin, Ting Liu Liang Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Built upon the Transformer, large language models (LLMs) have captured worldwide attention due to their remarkable abilities. Nevertheless, all Transformer-based models including LLMs suffer from a preset length limit and can hardly generalize from short training sequences to longer inference ones, namely, they can not perform **length extrapolation** to handle long sequences. Thus, numerous methods have emerged to enhance the length extrapolation of Transformers. Despite the great research efforts, a systematic survey is still lacking. To fill this gap, we delve into these advances in a unified notation from the perspective of positional encoding (PE), as it has been considered the primary factor on length extrapolation. Specifically, we begin with extrapolatable PEs that have dominated this research field. Then, we dive into extrapolation methods based on them, covering position interpolation and randomized position methods. Finally, several challenges and future directions in this area are highlighted. Through this survey, We aim to enable the reader to gain a deep understanding of existing methods and provide stimuli for future research.
VPL: Visual Proxy Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Medical Image Diagnosis
Authors: Tianxiang Hu, Huimin Xiong, Jiawei Du, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Zuozhu Liu Jiaxiang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Vision-language models like CLIP, utilizing class proxies derived from class name text features, have shown a notable capability in zero-shot medical image diagnosis which is vital in scenarios with limited disease databases or labeled samples. However, insufficient medical text precision and the modal disparity between text and vision spaces pose challenges for such paradigm. We show analytically and experimentally that enriching medical texts with detailed descriptions can markedly enhance the diagnosis performance, with the granularity and phrasing of these enhancements having a crucial impact on CLIP`s understanding of medical images; and learning proxies within the vision domain can effectively circumvent the modal gap issue. Based on our analysis, we propose a medical visual proxy learning framework comprising two key components: a text refinement module that create high quality medical text descriptions, and a stable Sinkhorn algorithm for an efficient generation of pseudo labels which further guide the visual proxy learning. Our method elevates the Vanilla CLIP inference by supplying meticulously crafted clues to leverage CLIP`s existing interpretive power and using the feature of refined texts to bridge the vision-text gap. The effectiveness and robustness of our method are clearly demonstrated through extensive experiments. Notably, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot medical image diagnosis by a significant margin, ranging from 1.69% to 15.31% on five datasets covering various diseases, confirming its immense potential in zero-shot diagnosis across diverse medical applications.
Word-Conditioned 3D American Sign Language Motion Generation
Authors: Xiao Wang, Ifeoma Nwogu Lu Dong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Sign words are the building blocks of any sign language. In this work, we present wSignGen, a word-conditioned 3D American Sign Language (ASL) generation model dedicated to synthesizing realistic and grammatically accurate motion sequences for sign words. Our approach leverages a transformer-based diffusion model, trained on a curated dataset of 3D motion meshes from word-level ASL videos. By integrating CLIP, wSignGen offers two advantages: image-based generation, which is particularly useful for children learning sign language but not yet able to read, and the ability to generalize to unseen synonyms. Experiments demonstrate that wSignGen significantly outperforms the baseline model in the task of sign word generation. Moreover, human evaluation experiments show that wSignGen can generate high-quality, grammatically correct ASL signs effectively conveyed through 3D avatars.
TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents
Authors: Xianjun Yang, Mingyu Jin, Zelong Li, Wei Cheng, Ruixiang Tang, Yongfeng Zhang Wenyue Hua
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The rise of LLM-based agents shows great potential to revolutionize task planning, capturing significant attention. Given that these agents will be integrated into high-stake domains, ensuring their reliability and safety is crucial. This paper presents an Agent-Constitution-based agent framework, TrustAgent, with a particular focus on improving the LLM-based agent safety. The proposed framework ensures strict adherence to the Agent Constitution through three strategic components: pre-planning strategy which injects safety knowledge to the model before plan generation, in-planning strategy which enhances safety during plan generation, and post-planning strategy which ensures safety by post-planning inspection. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively enhance an LLM agent`s safety across multiple domains by identifying and mitigating potential dangers during the planning. Further analysis reveals that the framework not only improves safety but also enhances the helpfulness of the agent. Additionally, we highlight the importance of the LLM reasoning ability in adhering to the Constitution. This paper sheds light on how to ensure the safe integration of LLM-based agents into human-centric environments. Data and code are available at r̆lhttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/TrustAgent-06DC.
Enabling Cross-Platform Comparison of Online Communities Using Content and Opinion Similarity
Authors: Jeng-Yu Chou, Kevin K. Nam, Brian Levine Prasanna Lakkur Subramanyam
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: With the continuous growth of online communities, understanding their similarities and dissimilarities is more crucial than ever for enhancing digital interactions, maintaining healthy interactions, and improving content recommendation and moderation systems. In this work, we present two novel techniques: BOTS for finding similarity between online communities based on their opinion, and Emb-PSR for finding similarity in the content they post. To facilitate finding the similarity based on opinion, we model the opinions on online communities using upvotes and downvotes as an indicator for community approval. Our results demonstrate that BOTS and Emb-PSR outperform existing techniques at their individual tasks while also being flexible enough to allow for cross-platform comparison of online communities. We demonstrate this novel cross-platform capability by comparing GAB with various subreddits.
CNEQ: Incorporating numbers into Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Authors: Wei Wei, Kaihe Xu, Dangyang Chen Xianshu Peng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Complex logical reasoning over knowledge graphs lies at the heart of many semantic downstream applications and thus has been extensively explored in recent years. However, nearly all of them overlook the rich semantics of numerical entities (e.g., magnitude, unit, and distribution) and are simply treated as common entities, or even directly removed. It may severely hinder the performance of answering queries involving numerical comparison or numerical computation. To address this issue, we propose the \textbfComplex \textbfNumber and \textbfEntity \textbfQuery model (CNEQ), which comprises a Number-Entity Predictor and an Entity Filter. The Number-Entity Predictor can independently learn the structural and semantic features of entities and numerical values, thereby enabling better prediction of entities as well as numerical values. The Entity Filter can compare or calculate numerical values to filter out entities that meet certain numerical constraints. To evaluate our model, we generated a variety of multi-hop complex logical queries including numerical values on three widely-used Knowledge Graphs: FB15K, DB15K, and YAGO15K. Experimental results demonstrate that CNEQ achieves state-of-the-art results.
StraGo: Harnessing Strategic Guidance for Prompt Optimization
Authors: Yan Gao, Bin Benjamin Zhu, Zineng Zhou, Xiaodi Sun, Sheng Yang, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Linjun Yang Yurong Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Prompt engineering is pivotal for harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse applications. While existing prompt optimization methods improve prompt effectiveness, they often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously successful cases while addressing failures. Furthermore, these methods tend to rely heavily on LLMs' intrinsic capabilities for prompt optimization tasks. In this paper, we introduce STRAGO (StrategicGuided Optimization), a novel approach designed to mitigate prompt drifting by leveraging insights from both successful and failed cases to identify critical factors for achieving optimization objectives. STRAGO employs a how-to-do methodology, integrating in-context learning to formulate specific, actionable strategies that provide detailed, step-by-step guidance for prompt optimization. Extensive experiments conducted across a range of tasks, including reasoning, natural language understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and industrial applications, demonstrate STRAGO`s superior performance. It establishes a new stateof-the-art in prompt optimization, showcasing its ability to deliver stable and effective prompt improvements.
Learning to Plan by Updating Natural Language
Authors: Yaobo Liang, Chenfei Wu, Wenshan Wu, Dongyan Zhao, Nan Duan Yiduo Guo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various basic natural language tasks. For completing the complex task, we still need a plan for the task to guide LLMs to generate the specific solutions step by step. LLMs can directly generate task plans, but these plans may still contain factual errors or are incomplete. A high-quality task plan contains correct step-by-step solutions for solving all situations and behavioral instructions for avoiding mistakes. To obtain it, we propose the Learning to Plan method, which involves two phases: (1) In the first learning task plan phase, it iteratively updates the task plan with new step-by-step solutions and behavioral instructions, which are obtained by prompting LLMs to derive from training error feedback. (2) In the subsequent test phase, the LLM uses the learned task plan to guide the inference of LLM on the test set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the five different reasoning type tasks (8 datasets). Further, our analysis experiment shows that the task plan learned by one LLM can directly guide another LLM to improve its performance, which reveals a new transfer learning paradigm.
C-ICL: Contrastive In-context Learning for Information Extraction
Authors: Jiahao Liu, Jian Yang, Qifan Wang, Shun Zhang, Jingang Wang, Zhoujun Li Ying Mo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: There has been increasing interest in exploring the capabilities of advanced large language models (LLMs) in the field of information extraction (IE), specifically focusing on tasks related to named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE). Although researchers are exploring the use of few-shot information extraction through in-context learning with LLMs, they tend to focus only on using correct or positive examples for demonstration, neglecting the potential value of incorporating incorrect or negative examples into the learning process. In this paper, we present C-ICL, a novel few-shot technique that leverages both correct and incorrect sample constructions to create in-context learning demonstrations. This approach enhances the ability of LLMs to extract entities and relations by utilizing prompts that incorporate not only the positive samples but also the reasoning behind them. This method allows for the identification and correction of potential interface errors. Specifically, our proposed method taps into the inherent contextual information and valuable information in hard negative samples and the nearest positive neighbors to the test and then applies the in-context learning demonstrations based on LLMs. Our experiments on various datasets indicate that C-ICL outperforms previous few-shot in-context learning methods, delivering substantial enhancements in performance across a broad spectrum of related tasks. These improvements are noteworthy, showcasing the versatility of our approach in miscellaneous scenarios.
On the Similarity of Circuits across Languages: a Case Study on the Subject-verb Agreement Task
Authors: Marta R. Costa-jussà Javier Ferrando
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Several algorithms implemented by language models have recently been successfully reversed-engineered. However, these findings have been concentrated on specific tasks and models, leaving it unclear how universal circuits are across different settings. In this paper, we study the circuits implemented by Gemma 2B for solving the subject-verb agreement task across two different languages, English and Spanish. We discover that both circuits are highly consistent, being mainly driven by a particular attention head writing a \textquoteleftsubject number' signal to the last residual stream, which is read by a small set of neurons in the final MLPs. Notably, this subject number signal is represented as a direction in the residual stream space, and is language-independent. Finally, we demonstrate this direction has a causal effect on the model predictions, effectively flipping the Spanish predicted verb number by intervening with the direction found in English.
Can LLM be a Personalized Judge?
Authors: Tiancheng Hu, Nigel Collier Yijiang River Dong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) gain widespread adoption, ensuring they cater to diverse user needs has become increasingly important. While many researchers have studied LLM personalization and role-playing, they primarily use LLM-as-a-Judge for evaluation without thoroughly examining its validity. This paper investigates the reliability of LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge---asking LLMs to judge user preferences based on persona. Our results suggest that LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge is less reliable for personalization than previously believed, showing low agreement with human ground truth. We observed that the personas provided to the LLM often have limited predictive power for the tasks, leading us to introduce verbal uncertainty estimation. We find that powerful LLMs are aware of the certainty of their prediction and can achieve high agreement with ground truth on high-certainty samples, indicating a promising approach for building reliable and scalable proxies for evaluating LLM personalization. Our human annotation reveals that third-person crowd worker evaluations of personalized preferences are even worse than LLM predictions, highlighting the challenges of evaluating LLM personalization.
Who`s Who: Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Conflicts in Practice
Authors: Hoang Ngo, Anh Tuan Luu, Dat Quoc Nguyen Quang Hieu Pham
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods are viable solutions for addressing the static memory limits of pre-trained language models. Nevertheless, encountering conflicting sources of information within the retrieval context is an inevitable practical challenge. In such situations, the language models are recommended to transparently inform users about the conflicts rather than autonomously deciding what to present based on their inherent biases. To analyze how current large language models (LLMs) align with our recommendation, we introduce WhoQA, a public benchmark dataset to examine model`s behavior in knowledge conflict situations. We induce conflicts by asking about a common property among entities having the same name, resulting in questions with up to 8 distinctive answers. WhoQA evaluation set includes 5K questions across 13 Wikidata property types and 150K Wikipedia entities. Our experiments show that despite the simplicity of WhoQA questions, knowledge conflicts significantly degrades LLMs' performance in RAG settings.
Unleashing the Potentials of Likelihood Composition for Multi-modal Language Models
Authors: Renrui Zhang, Xu Luo, Yan Wang, Shanghang Zhang, Peng Gao Shitian Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Model fusing has always been an important topic, especially in an era where large language models (LLM) and multi-modal language models (MLM) with different architectures, parameter sizes and training pipelines, are being created all the time. In this work, we propose a post-hoc framework, aiming at fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell, which we call \textitlikelihood composition, and the basic idea is to compose multiple models' likelihood distribution when doing a multi-choice visual-question-answering task. Here the core concept, \textitlikelihood, is actually the log-probability of the candidate answer. In \textitlikelihood composition, we introduce some basic operations: \textitdebias, \textithighlight, \textitmajority-vote and \textitensemble. By combining (composing) these basic elements, we get the mixed composition methods: \textitmix-composition. Through conducting comprehensive experiments on 9 VQA datasets and 10 MLMs, we prove the effectiveness of \textitmix-composition compared with simple \textitensemble or \textitmajority-vote methods. In this framework, people can propose new basic composition methods and combine them to get the new mixed composition methods. We hope our proposed \textitlikelihood composition can provide a new perspective of fusing heterogeneous models and inspire the exploration under this framework.
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis
Authors: Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li Jianxiang Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In recent years, the rapid increase in scientific papers has overwhelmed traditional review mechanisms, resulting in varying quality of publications. Although existing methods have explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated scientific reviewing, their generated contents are often generic or partial. To address the issues above, we introduce an automated paper reviewing framework SEA. It comprises of three modules: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis, which are represented by models SEA-S, SEA-E, and SEA-A, respectively. Initially, SEA-S distills data standardization capabilities of GPT-4 for integrating multiple reviews for a paper. Then, SEA-E utilizes standardized data for fine-tuning, enabling it to generate constructive reviews. Finally, SEA-A introduces a new evaluation metric called mismatch score to assess the consistency between paper contents and reviews. Moreover, we design a self-correction strategy to enhance the consistency. Extensive experimental results on datasets collected from eight venues show that SEA can generate valuable insights for authors to improve their papers.
Knowledge-based Consistency Testing of Large Language Models
Authors: Ezekiel Soremekun, Sudipta Chattopadhyay Sai Sathiesh Rajan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we systematically expose and measure the inconsistency and knowledge gaps of Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose an automated testing framework (called KONTEST) which leverages a knowledge graph to construct test cases. KONTEST probes and measures the inconsistencies in the LLM`s knowledge of the world via a combination of semantically-equivalent queries and test oracles (metamorphic or ontological oracle). KONTEST further mitigates knowledge gaps via a weighted LLM model ensemble. Using four state-of-the-art LLMs (Falcon, Gemini, GPT3.5, and Llama2), we show that KONTEST generates 19.2% error inducing inputs (1917 errors from 9979 test inputs). It also reveals a 16.5% knowledge gap across all tested LLMs. A mitigation method informed by KONTEST`s test suite reduces LLM knowledge gap by 32.48%. Our ablation study further shows that GPT3.5 is not suitable for knowledge-based consistency testing because it is only 60%-68% effective in knowledge construction.
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes
Authors: Yanjun Shao, Zhiyuan Liu, Zijing Liu, Xiangru Tang, Yuan Yao, Yu Li He Cao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific disciplines. These advancements encourage the investigation of molecule-text modeling within synthetic chemistry, a field dedicated to designing and conducting chemical reactions to synthesize new compounds with desired properties and applications. Current approaches, however, often neglect the critical role of multi-molecule graph interaction in understanding chemical reactions, leading to suboptimal performance in synthetic chemistry tasks. This study introduces PRESTO (Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes), a new framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. It progressively improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PRESTO offers competitive results in downstream synthetic chemistry tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/IDEA-XL/PRESTO.
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario
Authors: Yong Jiang, Liwen Zhang, Liuchu Liuchu, Wenjie Li, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang Feiteng Mu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Current research on tool learning primarily focuses on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness, a crucial factor in human problem-solving. In this paper, we address query routing for homogeneous tools by predicting both their performance and the associated cost required to accomplish a given task. We then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher performance at a lower cost compared to strong baseline approaches.
MobileVLM: A Vision-Language Model for Better Intra- and Inter-UI Understanding
Authors: Weikai Xu, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujian Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Shuo Shang Qinzhuo Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, mobile AI agents based on VLMs have been gaining increasing attention. These works typically utilize VLM as a foundation, fine-tuning it with instruction-based mobile datasets. However, these VLMs are typically pre-trained on general-domain data, which often results in a lack of fundamental capabilities specific to the mobile domain. Therefore, they may struggle to recognize specific UI elements and understand intra-UI fine-grained information. In addition, the current fine-tuning task focuses on interacting with the most relevant element for the given instruction. These fine-tuned VLMs may still ignore the relationships between UI pages, neglect the roles of elements in page transitions and lack inter-UI understanding. To address issues, we propose a VLM called MobileVLM, which includes two additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. We defined four UI-based pre-training tasks, enabling the model to better perceive fine-grained elements and capture page transition actions. To address the lack of mobile pre-training data, we built a large Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M from scratch, which contains 3 million UI pages, and real-world transition actions, forming a directed graph structure. Experimental results show MobileVLM excels on both our test set and public mobile benchmarks, outperforming existing VLMs.
Schema-Driven Information Extraction from Heterogeneous Tables
Authors: Junmo Kang, Gabriel Stanovsky, Dayne Freitag, Mark Dredze, Alan Ritter Fan Bai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM`s capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.
Is There a One-Model-Fits-All Approach to Information Extraction? Revisiting Task Definition Biases
Authors: Qianyu He, Zhixu Li, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao Wenhao Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. However, definition bias in information extraction appears not only across datasets from different domains but also within datasets sharing the same domain. We identify two types of definition bias in IE: bias among information extraction datasets and bias between information extraction datasets and instruction tuning datasets. To systematically investigate definition bias, we conduct three probing experiments to quantitatively analyze it and discover the limitations of unified information extraction and large language models in solving definition bias. To mitigate definition bias in information extraction, we propose a multi-stage framework consisting of definition bias measurement, bias-aware fine-tuning, and task-specific bias mitigation. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in addressing definition bias.
PromptIntern: Saving Inference Costs by Internalizing Recurrent Prompt during Large Language Model Fine-tuning
Authors: Mengyu Zhou, Tao Li, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang Jiaru Zou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their usage in domain-specific tasks. Despite the success, fine-tuning continues to rely on repeated and lengthy prompts, which escalate computational expenses, require more resources, and lead to slower inference. In this paper, we present a novel approach, PromptIntern, which internalizes prompt knowledge during model fine-tuning to achieve efficient inference and save costs. Instead of compressing the prompts for a vanilla model, PromptIntern aims to embed the recurrent prompt directly into the model parameters. We design a fine-tuning pipeline that includes instruction template compression, few-shot example absorption, and a progressive internalization strategy, effectively diminishing the need for intricate prompts during inference. Comprehensive experiments on challenging NL2Code tasks demonstrate that our method reduces input tokens by more than 90%, accelerates inference by 4.2 times, and reduces monetary inference costs by 88.3%.