Thailand

The task of model editing becomes popular for correcting inaccurate or outdated parametric knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there are major limitations of state of the art (SOTA) model editing methods, including the excessive memorization issue caused by the direct editing methods, as well as the error propagation and knowledge conflict issues from the memory enhancement methods, resulting in hindering models&#39; *portability*, e.g., the ability to transfer the new knowledge to related one-hop or multi-hop content. To address these issues, we propose the InstructEd method, the idea of which is to insert soft instructions into the attention module so as to facilitate interactions between instructions and questions and to understand and utilize new facts. Our main findings are: (i) InstructEd has achieved SOTA performance on three datasets for one-hop/multi-hop evaluation with LLaMAs and GPT2, achieving 10\% (5\%) improvement in one-hop (multi-hop) model editing.(ii) Different from earlier methods on editing parameters in FFN, we show that editing attention can also help. (iii) Model editing is highly related to retrieval augmented methods, which can help improve the locality of model editing while slightly decrease the editing performance with hops.

ACL 2024

InstructEd: Soft-Instruction Tuning for Model Editing with Hops

instruction-tuning

knowledge editing

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

The task of model editing becomes popular for correcting inaccurate or outdated parametric knowledge in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there are major limitations of state of the art (SOTA) model editing methods, including the excessive memorization issue caused by the direct editing methods, as well as the error propagation and knowledge conflict issues from the memory enhancement methods, resulting in hindering models' *portability*, e.g., the ability to transfer the new knowledge to related one-hop or multi-hop content. To address these issues, we propose the InstructEd method, the idea of which is to insert soft instructions into the attention module so as to facilitate interactions between instructions and questions and to understand and utilize new facts. Our main findings are: (i) InstructEd has achieved SOTA performance on three datasets for one-hop/multi-hop evaluation with LLaMAs and GPT2, achieving 10\% (5\%) improvement in one-hop (multi-hop) model editing.(ii) Different from earlier methods on editing parameters in FFN, we show that editing attention can also help. (iii) Model editing is highly related to retrieval augmented methods, which can help improve the locality of model editing while slightly decrease the editing performance with hops.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

The democratization of pre-trained language models through open-source initiatives has rapidly advanced innovation and expanded access to cutting-edge technologies. However, this openness also brings significant security risks, including backdoor attacks, where hidden malicious behaviors are triggered by specific inputs, compromising natural language processing (NLP) system integrity and reliability. This paper suggests that merging a backdoored model with other homogeneous models can significantly remediate backdoor vulnerabilities even if such models are not entirely secure. In our experiments, we verify our hypothesis on various models (BERT-Base, RoBERTa-Large, Llama2-7B, and Mistral-7B) and datasets (SST-2, OLID, AG News, and QNLI). Compared to multiple advanced defensive approaches, our method offers an effective and efficient inference-stage defense against backdoor attacks on classification and instruction-tuned tasks without additional resources or specific knowledge. Our approach consistently outperforms recent advanced baselines, leading to an average of about 75\% reduction in the attack success rate. Since model merging has been an established approach for improving model performance, the extra advantage it provides regarding defense can be seen as a cost-free bonus.

Here’s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge

Automatic text simplification focuses on transforming texts into a more comprehensible version without sacrificing their precision. However, automatic methods usually require (paired) datasets that can be rather scarce in languages other than English. This paper presents a new approach to automatic sentence simplification that leverages paraphrases, context, and linguistic attributes to overcome the absence of paired texts in Portuguese.
We frame the simplification problem as a textual style transfer task and learn a style representation using the sentences around the target sentence in the document and its linguistic attributes. 
Moreover, unlike most unsupervised approaches that require style-labeled training data, we fine-tune strong pre-trained models using sentence-level paraphrases instead of annotated data. 
Our experiments show that our model achieves remarkable results, surpassing the current state-of-the-art (BART+ACCESS) while competitively matching a Large Language Model.

Enhancing Sentence Simplification in Portuguese: Leveraging Paraphrases, Context, and Linguistic Features

This paper presents a groundbreaking multimodal, multi-task, multi-teacher joint-grained knowledge distillation model for visually-rich form document understanding. The model is designed to leverage insights from both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels by facilitating a nuanced correlation between token and entity representations, addressing the complexities inherent in form documents. Additionally, we introduce new inter-grained and cross-grained loss functions to further refine diverse multi-teacher knowledge distillation transfer process, presenting distribution gaps and a harmonised understanding of form documents. Through a comprehensive evaluation across publicly available form document understanding datasets, our proposed model consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its efficacy in handling the intricate structures and content of visually complex form documents.

3MVRD: Multimodal Multi-task Multi-teacher Visually-Rich Form Document Understanding

The proliferation of fake news has emerged as a severe societal problem, raising significant interest from industry and academia. While existing deep-learning based methods have made progress in detecting fake news accurately, their reliability may be compromised caused by the non-transparent reasoning processes, poor generalization abilities and inherent risks of integration with large language models (LLMs). To address this challenge, we propose TELLER, a novel framework for trustworthy fake news detection that prioritizes explainability, generalizability and controllability of models. This is achieved via a dual-system framework that integrates cognition and decision systems, adhering to the principles above. The cognition system harnesses human expertise to generate logical predicates, which guide LLMs in generating human-readable logic atoms. Meanwhile, the decision system deduces generalizable logic rules to aggregate these atoms, enabling the identification of the truthfulness of the input news across diverse domains and enhancing transparency in the decision-making process. Finally, we present comprehensive evaluation results on four datasets, demonstrating the feasibility and trustworthiness of our proposed framework.

TELLER: A Trustworthy Framework for Explainable, Generalizable and Controllable Fake News Detection

Verifiable generation requires large language models (LLMs) to cite source documents supporting their outputs, thereby improve output transparency and trustworthiness. Yet, previous work mainly targets the generation of sentence-level citations, lacking specificity about which parts of a sentence are backed by the cited sources. This work studies verifiable generation with subsentence-level fine-grained citations for more precise location of generated content supported by the cited sources. We first present a dataset, SCiFi, comprising 10K Wikipedia paragraphs with subsentence-level citations. Each paragraph is paired with a set of candidate source documents for citation and a query that triggers the generation of the paragraph content. On SCiFi, we evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs and strategies for processing long documents designed for these models. Our experiment results reveals key factors that could enhance the quality of citations, including the expansion of the source documents' context accessible to the models and the implementation of specialized model tuning.

Verifiable Generation with Subsentence-Level Fine-Grained Citations

How-to procedures, such as how to plant a garden, are now used by millions of users, but sometimes need customizing to meet a user's specific needs, e.g., planting a garden without pesticides. Our goal is to measure and improve an LLM's ability to perform such customization. Our approach is to test several simple multi-LLM-agent architectures for customization, as well as an end-to-end LLM, using a new evaluation set, called CustomPlans, of over 200 WikiHow procedures each with a customization need. We find that a simple architecture with two LLM agents used sequentially performs best, one that edits a generic how-to procedure and one that verifies its executability, significantly outperforming (10.5% absolute) an end-to-end prompted LLM. This suggests that LLMs can be configured reasonably effectively for procedure customization. This also suggests that multi-agent editing architectures may be worth exploring further for other customization applications (e.g. coding, creative writing) in the future.

Tailoring with Targeted Precision: Edit-Based Agents for Open-Domain Procedure Customization

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to their widespread adoption in various domains. However, these advancements have also introduced additional safety risks and raised concerns regarding their detrimental impact on already marginalized populations.
Despite growing mitigation efforts to develop safety safeguards, such as supervised safety-oriented fine-tuning and leveraging safe reinforcement learning from human feedback, multiple concerns regarding the safety and ingrained biases in these models remain. 
Furthermore, previous work has demonstrated that models optimized for safety often display exaggerated safety behaviors, such as a tendency to refrain from responding to certain requests as a precautionary measure. As such, a clear trade-off between the helpfulness and safety of these models has been documented in the literature. In this paper, we further investigate the effectiveness of safety measures by evaluating models on already mitigated biases. Using the case of Llama 2 as an example, we illustrate how LLMs' safety responses can still encode harmful assumptions. To do so, we create a set of non-toxic prompts, which we then use to evaluate Llama models. Through our new taxonomy of LLMs responses to users, we observe that the safety/helpfulness trade-offs are more pronounced for certain demographic groups which can lead to different kinds of harms such as quality-of-service harms for marginalized populations.

From Representational Harms to Quality-of-Service Harms: A Case Study on Llama 2 Safety Safeguards

Generative models, widely utilized in various applications, can often struggle with prompts corresponding to partial tokens. This struggle stems from tokenization, where partial tokens fall out of distribution during inference, leading to incorrect or nonsensical outputs. This paper examines a technique to alleviate the tokenization artifact on text completion in generative models, maintaining performance even in regular non-subword cases. The method, termed token alignment, involves backtracking to the last complete tokens and ensuring the model's generation aligns with the prompt. This approach showcases marked improvement across many partial token scenarios, including nuanced cases like space-prefix and partial indentation, with only a minor time increase. The technique and analysis detailed in this paper contribute to the continuous advancement of generative models in handling partial inputs, bearing relevance for applications like code completion and text.

Token Alignment via Character Matching for Subword Completion

Social networks have become ideal vehicles for news dissemination because posted content is easily able to reach users beyond a news outlet's direct audience. Understanding how information is transmitted among communities of users is a critical step towards understanding the impact social networks have on real-world events. Two significant barriers in this vein of work are identifying user clusters and meaningfully characterizing these communities. Thus, we propose the PGNSC benchmark, which builds information pathways based on the audiences of influential news sources and uses their content to characterize the communities. We present methods of aggregating these news-source-centric communities and for constructing the community feature representations that are used sequentially to construct information pathway prediction pipelines. Lastly, we perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the performance of baseline pipeline constructions and to highlight the possibilities for future work.

The PGNSC Benchmark: How Do We Predict Where Information Spreads?

Although language models (LMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities on various tasks, they are potentially vulnerable to extraction attacks, which represent a significant privacy risk.
To mitigate the privacy concerns of LMs, machine unlearning has emerged as an important research area, which is utilized to induce the LM to selectively forget about some of its training data.
While completely retraining the model will guarantee successful unlearning and privacy assurance, it is impractical for LMs, as it would be time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Prior works efficiently unlearn the target token sequences, but upon subsequent iterations, the LM displays significant degradation in performance.
In this work, we propose $\textbf{P}$rivacy Protection via $\textbf{O}$ptimal $\textbf{P}$arameters (POP), a novel unlearning method that effectively forgets the target token sequences from the pretrained LM by applying optimal gradient updates to the parameters.
Inspired by the gradient derivation of complete retraining, we approximate the optimal training objective that successfully unlearns the target sequence while retaining the knowledge from the rest of the training data.
Experimental results demonstrate that POP exhibits remarkable retention performance post-unlearning across 9 classification and 4 dialogue benchmarks, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a large margin.
Furthermore, we introduce Remnant Memorization Accuracy that quantifies privacy risks based on token likelihood and validate its effectiveness through both qualitative and quantitative analyses.

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Next from ACL 2024

Here’s a Free Lunch: Sanitizing Backdoored Models with Model Merge

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