mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Wenhao Shi, Zhiqiang Hu, Yi Bin, Junhua Liu, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Lidong Bing, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly in textual mathematical problem-solving. However, existing open-source image instruction fine-tuning datasets, containing limited question-answer pairs per image, do not fully exploit visual information to enhance the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To bridge this gap, we address the lack of high-quality, diverse multimodal mathematical datasets by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs, creating the MathV360K dataset, which enhances both the breadth and depth of multimodal mathematical questions. We introduce Math-LLaVA, a LLaVA-1.5-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K. This novel approach significantly improves the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5, achieving a 19-point increase and comparable performance to GPT-4V on MathVista`s minitest split, and yielding leading performance on Math-V and MathVerse. Furthermore, Math-LLaVA demonstrates enhanced generalizability, showing substantial improvements on the MMMU benchmark. Our research highlights the importance of dataset diversity and synthesis in advancing MLLMs' mathematical reasoning abilities. The code and data are available at: r̆lhttps://github.com/HZQ950419/Math-LLaVA.
Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation
Authors: Zehao Wang, Minye Wu, Yixin Cao, Yubo Ma, Meiqi Chen, Tinne Tuytelaars
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This study presents a novel evaluation framework for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task. It aims to diagnose current models for various instruction categories at a finer-grained level. The framework is structured around the context-free grammar (CFG) of the task. The CFG serves as the basis for the problem decomposition and the core premise of the instruction categories design. We propose a semi-automatic method for CFG construction with the help of Large-Language Models (LLMs). Then, we induct and generate data spanning five principal instruction categories (i.e. direction change, landmark recognition, region recognition, vertical movement, and numerical comprehension). Our analysis of different models reveals notable performance discrepancies and recurrent issues. The stagnation of numerical comprehension, heavy selective biases over directional concepts, and other interesting findings contribute to the development of future language-guided navigation systems. The project is now available at https://zehao-wang.github.io/navnuances.
Re-Invoke: Tool Invocation Rewriting for Zero-Shot Tool Retrieval
Authors: Yanfei Chen, Jinsung Yoon, Devendra Singh Sachan, Qingze Wang, Vincent Cohen-Addad, Mohammadhossein Bateni, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled autonomous agents with complex reasoning and task-fulfillment capabilities using a wide range of tools. However, effectively identifying the most relevant tools for a given task becomes a key bottleneck as the toolset size grows, hindering reliable tool utilization. To address this, we introduce Re-Invoke, an unsupervised tool retrieval method designed to scale effectively to large toolsets without training. Specifically, we first generate a diverse set of synthetic queries that comprehensively cover different aspects of the query space associated with each tool document during the tool indexing phase. Second, we leverage LLM`s query understanding capabilities to extract key tool-related context and underlying intents from user queries during the inference phase. Finally, we employ a novel multi-view similarity ranking strategy based on intents to pinpoint the most relevant tools for each query. Our evaluation demonstrates that Re-Invoke significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives in both single-tool and multi-tool scenarios, all within a fully unsupervised setting. Notably, on the ToolE datasets, we achieve a 20% relative improvement in nDCG@5 for single-tool retrieval and a 39% improvement for multi-tool retrieval.
Rethinking Evaluation Methods for Machine Unlearning
Authors: Leon Wichert, Sandipan Sikdar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Machine *unlearning* refers to methods for deleting information about specific training instances from a trained machine learning model. This enables models to delete user information and comply with privacy regulations. While retraining the model from scratch on the training set excluding the instances to be “*forgotten*” would result in a desired unlearned model, owing to the size of datasets and models, it is infeasible. Hence, unlearning algorithms have been developed, where the goal is to obtain an unlearned model that behaves as closely as possible to the retrained model. Consequently, evaluating an unlearning method involves - (i) randomly selecting a *forget* set (i.e., the training instances to be unlearned), (ii) obtaining an unlearned and a retrained model, and (iii) comparing the performance of the unlearned and the retrained model on the test and forget set. However, when the forget set is randomly selected, the unlearned model is almost often similar to the original (i.e., prior to unlearning) model. Hence, it is unclear if the model did really unlearn or simply copied the weights from the original model. For a more robust evaluation, we instead propose to consider training instances with significant influence on the trained model. When such influential instances are considered in the forget set, we observe that the unlearned model deviates significantly from the retrained model. Such deviations are also observed when the size of the forget set is increased. Lastly, choice of dataset for evaluation could also lead to misleading interpretation of results.
Evaluating Moral Beliefs across LLMs through a Pluralistic Framework
Authors: Xuelin Liu, Yanfei Zhu, Shucheng Zhu, Pengyuan Liu, Ying Liu, Dong Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Proper moral beliefs are fundamental for language models, yet assessing these beliefs poses a significant challenge. This study introduces a novel three-module framework to evaluate the moral beliefs of four prominent large language models. Initially, we constructed a dataset containing 472 moral choice scenarios in Chinese, derived from moral words. The decision-making process of the models in these scenarios reveals their moral principle preferences. By ranking these moral choices, we discern the varying moral beliefs held by different language models. Additionally, through moral debates, we investigate the firmness of these models to their moral choices. Our findings indicate that English language models, namely ChatGPT and Gemini, closely mirror moral decisions of the sample of Chinese university students, demonstrating strong adherence to their choices and a preference for individualistic moral beliefs. In contrast, Chinese models such as Ernie and ChatGLM lean towards collectivist moral beliefs, exhibiting ambiguity in their moral choices and debates. This study also uncovers gender bias embedded within the moral beliefs of all examined language models. Our methodology offers an innovative means to assess moral beliefs in both artificial and human intelligence, facilitating a comparison of moral values across different cultures.
Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Adapted Direct Preference Optimization
Authors: Amit Rozner, Barak Battash, Lior Wolf, Ofir Lindenbaum
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can become outdated over time as they may lack updated world knowledge, leading to factual knowledge errors and gaps. Knowledge Editing (KE) aims to overcome this challenge using weight updates that do not require expensive retraining. We propose treating KE as an LLM alignment problem. Toward this goal, we introduce Knowledge Direct Preference Optimization (KDPO), a variation of the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that is more effective for knowledge modifications. Our method is based on an online approach that continually updates the knowledge stored in the model. We use the current knowledge as a negative sample and the new knowledge we want to introduce as a positive sample in a process called DPO. We also use teacher-forcing for negative sample generation and optimize using the positive sample, which helps maintain localized changes. We tested our KE method on various datasets and models, comparing it to several cutting-edge methods, with 100 and 500 sequential edits. Additionally, we conducted an ablation study comparing our method to the standard DPO approach. Our experimental results show that our modified DPO method allows for more refined KE, achieving similar or better performance compared to previous methods.
Disentangling Questions from Query Generation for Task-Adaptive Retrieval
Authors: Yoonsang Lee, Minsoo Kim, Seung-won Hwang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of information retrieval, to adapt to unseen tasks. Existing work generates synthetic queries from domain-specific documents to jointly train the retriever. However, the conventional query generator assumes the query as a question, thus failing to accommodate general search intents. A more lenient approach incorporates task-adaptive elements, such as few-shot learning with an 137B LLM. In this paper, we challenge a trend equating query and question, and instead conceptualize query generation task as a “compilation” of high-level intent into task-adaptive query. Specifically, we propose EGG, a query generator that better adapts to wide search intents expressed in the BeIR benchmark. Our method outperforms baselines and existing models on four tasks with underexplored intents, while utilizing a query generator 47 times smaller than the previous state-of-the-art. Our findings reveal that instructing the LM with explicit search intent is a key aspect of modeling an effective query generator.
Reap the Wild Wind: Detecting Media Storms in Large-Scale News Corpora
Authors: Dror Kris Markus, Effi Levi, Tamir Sheafer, Shaul Rafael Shenhav
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Media storms, dramatic outbursts of attention to a story, are central components of media dynamics and the attention landscape. Despite their importance, there has been little systematic and empirical research on this concept due to issues of measurement and operationalization. We introduce an iterative human-in-the-loop method to identify media storms in a large-scale corpus of news articles. The text is first transformed into signals of dispersion based on several textual characteristics. In each iteration, we apply unsupervised anomaly detection to these signals; each anomaly is then validated by an expert to confirm the presence of a storm, and those results are then used to tune the anomaly detection in the next iteration. We make available the resulting media storm dataset. Both the method and dataset provide a basis for comprehensive empirical study of media storms.
A Survey on Natural Language Counterfactual Generation
Authors: Yongjie Wang, Xiaoqi Qiu, Yu Yue, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Yuhong Feng, Zhiqi Shen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Natural language counterfactual generation aims to minimally modify a given text such that the modified text will be classified into a different class. The generated counterfactuals provide insight into the reasoning behind a model`s predictions by highlighting which words significantly influence the outcomes. Additionally, they can be used to detect model fairness issues and augment the training data to enhance the model`s robustness. A substantial amount of research has been conducted to generate counterfactuals for various NLP tasks, employing different models and methodologies. With the rapid growth of studies in this field, a systematic review is crucial to guide future researchers and developers. To bridge this gap, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of textual counterfactual generation methods, particularly those based on Large Language Models. We propose a new taxonomy that systematically categorizes the generation methods into four groups and summarizes the metrics for evaluating the generation quality. Finally, we discuss ongoing research challenges and outline promising directions for future work.
Geneverse: A Collection of Open-source Multimodal Large Language Models for Genomic and Proteomic Research
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Yijia Xiao, Xiao Luo, Hua Xu, Wenjin Zheng, Hongyu Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The applications of large language models (LLMs) are promising for biomedical and healthcare research. Despite the availability of open-source LLMs trained using a wide range of biomedical data, current research on the applications of LLMs to genomics and proteomics is still limited. To fill this gap, we propose a collection of finetuned LLMs and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), known as Geneverse, for three novel tasks in genomic and proteomic research. The models in Geneverse are trained and evaluated based on domain-specific datasets, and we use advanced parameter-efficient finetuning techniques to achieve the model adaptation for tasks including the generation of descriptions for gene functions, protein function inference from its structure, and marker gene selection from spatial transcriptomic data. We demonstrate that adapted LLMs and MLLMs perform well for these tasks and may outperform closed-source large-scale models based on our evaluations focusing on both truthfulness and structural correctness. All of the training strategies and base models we used are freely accessible. Our codes can be found at r̆lhttps://github.com/HelloWorldLTY/Geneverse.
QRMeM: Unleash the Length Limitation through Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism
Authors: Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Yixin Cao, Jiahao Ying, Wei Tang, Chong Feng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: While LLMs have made notable advancements in natural language processing, they continue to struggle with processing extensive text. Memory mechanisms offer a flexible solution for managing long contexts, utilizing techniques such as compression, summarization, and structuring to facilitate nuanced and efficient handling of large volumes of text. However, existing techniques face challenges with static knowledge integration, leading to insufficient adaptation to task-specific needs and missing multi-segmentation relationships, which hinders the dynamic reorganization and logical combination of relevant segments during the response process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel strategy, Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism (QRMeM), which incorporates a dual-structured memory pool. This pool synergizes static textual content with structured graph guidance, fostering a reflective trial-and-error approach for navigating and identifying relevant segments. Our evaluation across multiple-choice questions (MCQ) and multi-document question answering (Multi-doc QA) benchmarks showcases QRMeM`s enhanced performance compared to existing approaches.
$LONG^2RAG$: Evaluating Long-Context & Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Key Point Recall
Authors: Zehan Qi, Rongwu Xu, Zhijiang Guo, Cunxiang Wang, Hao Zhang, Wei Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024
IndoCL: Benchmarking Indonesian Language Development Assessment
Authors: Nankai Lin, Hongyan Wu, Weixiong Zheng, Xingming Liao, Shengyi Jiang, Aimin Yang, Lixian Xiao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, the field of language acquisition (LA) has significantly benefited from natural language processing technologies. A crucial task in LA involves tracking the evolution of language learners' competence, namely language development assessment (LDA). However, the majority of LDA research focuses on high-resource languages, with limited attention directed toward low-resource languages. Moreover, existing methodologies primarily depend on linguistic rules and language characteristics, with a limited exploration of exploiting pre-trained language models (PLMs) for LDA. In this paper, we construct the IndoCL corpus (Indonesian Corpus of L2 Learners), which comprises compositions written by undergraduate students majoring in Indonesian language. Moreover, we propose a model for LDA tasks, which automatically extracts language-independent features, relieving laborious computation and reliance on specific language. The proposed model uses sequential information attention and similarity representation learning to capture the differences and common information from the first-written and second-written essays, respectively. It has demonstrated remarkable performance on both our self-constructed corpus and publicly available corpora. Our work could serve as a novel benchmark for Indonesian LDA tasks. We also explore the feasibility of using existing large-scale language models (LLMs) for LDA tasks. The results show significant potential for improving LLM performance in LDA tasks.
Context-Driven Index Trimming: A Data Quality Perspective to Enhancing Precision of RALMs
Authors: Kexin Ma, Ruochun Jin, Wang Haotian, Wang Xi, Huan Chen, Yuhua Tang, Qian Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models(RALMs) have made significant strides in enhancing the accuracy of generated responses. However, existing research often overlooks the data quality issues within retrieval results, often caused by inaccurate existing vector-distance-based retrieval methods. We propose to boost the precision of RALMs' answers from a data quality perspective through the Context-Driven Index Trimming (CDIT) framework, where Context Matching Dependencies (CMDs) are employed as logical data quality rules to capture and regulate the consistency between retrieved contexts. Based on the semantic comprehension capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), CDIT can effectively identify and discard retrieval results that are inconsistent with the query context and further modify indexes in the database, thereby improving answer quality. Experiments demonstrate average improvement of 3.75% in accuracy on challenging open-domain question-answering tasks. Also, the flexibility of CDIT is verified through its compatibility with various language models and indexing methods, which offers a promising approach to bolster RALMs' data quality and retrieval precision jointly.
Counter Turing Test ($CT^2$): Investigating AI-Generated Text Detection for Hindi - Ranking LLMs based on Hindi AI Detectability Index ($ADI_hi$)
Authors: Ishan Kavathekar, Anku Rani, Ashmit Chamoli, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Amit P. Sheth, Amitava Das
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024
In Defense of Structural Sparse Adapters for Concurrent LLM Serving
Authors: Junda Su, Zirui Liu, Zeju Qiu, Weiyang Liu, Zhaozhuo Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Adapting large language models (LLMs) to specific tasks remains challenging due to the extensive retraining required, prompting the need for efficient adapter techniques. Despite this, the concurrent serving of multiple adapters, each with unique matrix shapes, poses significant system-level challenges. To address these issues, we identify an opportunity in structurally sparse adapters, which, unlike low-rank adapters, maintain consistent matrix shapes while varying in sparsity patterns. Leveraging this characteristic, we introduce SpartanServe, a system designed for efficient concurrent serving of LLMs using multiple structurally sparse adapters. SpartanServe employs a unified matrix multiplication operation and a novel memory management technique to enable effective batching. Furthermore, the incorporation of Triton kernels enhances the acceleration of matrix multiplication in the serving process. Experimental results demonstrate that SpartanServe achieves 2.12× speedup over S-LoRA when serving 96 adapters using a single NVIDIA A100 GPU (40GB), showcasing its efficacy in concurrent LLM serving.
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Zhiwei Zha, Xiangru Zhu, Yuanyi Xu, Chenghua Huang, Jingping Liu, Zhixu Li, Xuwu Wang, Yanghua Xiao, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promising results in various tasks, but their ability to perceive the visual world with deep, hierarchical understanding similar to humans remains uncertain. To address this gap, we introduce CONSTRUCTURE, a novel concept-level benchmark to assess MLLMs' hierarchical concept understanding and reasoning abilities. Our goal is to evaluate MLLMs across four key aspects: 1) Understanding atomic concepts at different levels of abstraction; 2) Performing upward abstraction reasoning across concepts; 3) Achieving downward concretization reasoning across concepts; and 4) Conducting multi-hop reasoning between sibling or common ancestor concepts. Our findings indicate that even state-of-the-art multimodal models struggle with concept structure reasoning (e.g., GPT-4o averages a score of 62.1%). We summarize key findings of MLLMs in concept structure reasoning evaluation. Morever, we provide key insights from experiments using CoT prompting and fine-tuning to enhance their abilities.
Stanceformer: Target-Aware Transformer for Stance Detection
Authors: Krishna Garg, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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 \textitTarget 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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 \textbfLayer-specific \textbfEditing (LED) to enhance the resilience of LLMs against jailbreak attacks. Through LED, we reveal that several critical \textitsafety 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 \textittoxic 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 r̆lhttps://github.com/ledllm/ledllm.
Promoting Constructive Deliberation: Reframing for Receptiveness
Authors: Gauri Kambhatla, Matthew Lease, Ashwin Rajadesingan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
From Test-Taking to Test-Making: Examining LLM Authoring of Commonsense Assessment Items
Authors: Melissa Roemmele, Andrew Gordon
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 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.
MP-RNA: Unleashing Multi-species RNA Foundation Model via Calibrated Secondary Structure Prediction
Authors: Heng Yang, Ke Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: RNA foundation models (FMs) have been extensively used to interpret genomic sequences and address a wide range of in-silico genomic tasks. However, current RNA FMs often overlook the incorporation of secondary structures in the pretraining of FMs, which impedes the effectiveness in various genomic tasks. To address this problem, we leverage filtered high-fidelity structure annotations for structure pretraining to enhance the modeling ability of FMs in single nucleotide resolution tasks. Experimental evaluations across four comprehensive genomic benchmarks demonstrate that our RNA FM consistently outperforms existing RNA FMs, achieving a 40% improvement in RNA secondary structure prediction and obtaining top-tier results on DNA genomic benchmarks even though it has not been pretrained on any DNA genome. We release the code and models to encourage further research to bridge the gap between in-silico predictions and biological reality.
“Any Other Thoughts, Hedgehog?” Linking Deliberation Chains in Collaborative Dialogues
Authors: Abhijnan Nath, Videep Venkatesha, Mariah Bradford, Avyakta Chelle, Austin C. Youngren, Carlos Mabrey, Nathaniel Blanchard, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Question-asking in collaborative dialogue has long been established as key to knowledge construction, both in internal and collaborative problem solving. In this work, we examine probing questions in collaborative dialogues: questions that explicitly elicit responses from the speaker`s interlocutors. Specifically, we focus on modeling the causal relations that lead directly from utterances earlier in the dialogue to the emergence of the probing question. We model these relations using a novel graph-based framework of *deliberation chains*, and realize the problem of constructing such chains as a coreference-style clustering problem. Our framework jointly models probing and causal utterances and the links between them, and we evaluate on two challenging collaborative task datasets: the Weights Task and DeliData. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretically-grounded approach compared to both baselines and stronger coreference approaches, and establish a standard of performance in this novel task.