Thailand

We introduce EXAMS-V, a new challenging multi-discipline multimodal multilingual exam benchmark for evaluating vision language models. It consists of 20,932 multiple-choice questions across 20 school disciplines covering natural science, social science, and other miscellaneous studies, e.g., religion, fine arts, business, etc. EXAMS-V includes a variety of multimodal features such as text, images, tables, figures, diagrams, maps, scientific symbols, and equations. The questions come in 11 languages from 7 language families. Unlike existing benchmarks, EXAMS-V is uniquely curated by gathering school exam questions from various countries, with a variety of education systems. This distinctive approach calls for intricate reasoning across diverse languages and relies on region-specific knowledge. Solving the problems in the dataset requires advanced perception and joint reasoning over the text and the visual content in the image. Our evaluation results demonstrate that this is a challenging dataset, which is difficult even for advanced vision--text models such as GPT-4V and Gemini; this underscores the inherent complexity of the dataset and its significance as a future benchmark.

ACL 2024

EXAMS-V: A Multi-Discipline Multilingual Multimodal Exam Benchmark for Evaluating Vision Language Models

vision language model

multimodal

benchmark

multilingual

## 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.

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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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.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, building trust and maintaining safety by accurately quantifying a model's confidence in its prediction becomes even more important. However, finding effective ways to calibrate LLMs---especially when the only interface to the models is their generated text---remains a challenge. We propose APRICOT (Auxiliary prediction of confidence targets): A method to set confidence targets and train an additional model that predicts an LLM's confidence based on its textual input and output alone. This approach has several advantages: It is conceptually simple, does not require access to the target model beyond its output, does not interfere with the language generation, and has a multitude of potential usages, for instance by verbalizing the predicted confidence or using it to re-prompting the LLM to accurately reflecting its uncertainty. We show how our approach performs competitively in terms of calibration error for white-box and black-box LLMs on closed-book question-answering to detect incorrect LLM answers.

Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only

Reducing the `$\textit{hallucination}$' problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for their wide applications. 
A comprehensive and fine-grained measurement of the hallucination is the first key step for the governance of this issue but is under-explored in the community.
Thus, we present $\textbf{ANAH}$, a bilingual dataset that offers $\textbf{AN}$alytical $\textbf{A}$nnotation of $\textbf{H}$allucinations in LLMs within Generative Question Answering.
Each answer sentence in our dataset undergoes rigorous annotation, involving the retrieval of a reference fragment, the judgment of the hallucination type, and the correction of hallucinated content. 
ANAH consists of $\sim$12k sentence-level annotations for $\sim$4.3k LLM responses covering over 700 topics, constructed by a human-in-the-loop pipeline.
Thanks to the fine granularity of the hallucination annotations, we can quantitatively confirm that the hallucinations of LLMs progressively accumulate in the answer and use ANAH to train and evaluate hallucination annotators. We conduct extensive experiments on studying generative and discriminative annotators and show that, although current open-source LLMs have difficulties in fine-grained hallucination annotation, the generative annotator trained with ANAH can surpass all open-source LLMs and GPT-3.5, obtain performance competitive with GPT-4, and exhibits better generalization ability on unseen questions.

ANAH: Analytical Annotation of Hallucinations in Large Language Models

For large language models (LLMs) to be effective in the financial domain -- where each decision can have a significant impact -- it is necessary to investigate realistic tasks and data. Financial professionals often interact with documents spanning hundreds of pages, but most financial research datasets only deal with short excerpts from these documents. To address this, we introduce a long-document financial QA task. We augment 7,437 questions from the existing FinQA dataset with full-document context, extending the average context length from under 700 words in FinQA to 123k words in DocFinQA. We conduct extensive experiments over retrieval-based QA pipelines and long-context language models. Based on our experiments, DocFinQA proves a significant challenge for even state-of-the-art systems. 
We also provide a case study on a subset of the longest documents in DocFinQA and find that models particularly struggle with these documents. Addressing these challenges may have a wide-reaching impact across applications where specificity and long-range contexts are critical, like gene sequences and legal document contract analysis. DocFinQA dataset is publicly accessible\footnote{ \scriptsize \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/kensho/DocFinQA}}.

DocFinQA: A Long-Context Financial Reasoning Dataset

Answering questions within business and finance requires reasoning, precision, and a wide-breadth of technical knowledge. Together, these requirements make this domain difficult for large language models (LLMs). We introduce BizBench, a benchmark for evaluating models' ability to reason about realistic financial problems. BizBench comprises eight quantitative reasoning tasks, focusing on question-answering (QA) over financial data via program synthesis. We include three financially-themed code-generation tasks from newly collected and augmented QA data. Additionally, we isolate the reasoning capabilities required for financial QA: reading comprehension of financial text and tables for extracting intermediate values, and understanding financial concepts and formulas needed to calculate complex solutions. Collectively, these tasks evaluate a model's financial background knowledge, ability to parse financial documents, and capacity to solve problems with code. We conduct an in-depth evaluation of open-source and commercial LLMs, comparing and contrasting the behavior of code-focused and language-focused models. We demonstrate that the current bottleneck in performance is due to LLMs' limited business and financial understanding, highlighting the value of a challenging benchmark for quantitative reasoning within this domain.

BizBench: A Quantitative Reasoning Benchmark for Business and Finance

Model selection for a given target task can be costly, as it may entail extensive annotation of the quality of outputs of different models. 
We introduce DiffUse, an efficient method to make an informed decision between candidate text generation models based on preference annotations. DiffUse reduces the required amount of annotations, thus saving valuable time and resources in performing evaluation.
DiffUse intelligently selects instances by clustering embeddings that represent the semantic differences between model outputs. Thus, it is able to identify a subset of examples that are more informative for preference decisions. Our method is model-agnostic, and can be applied to any text generation model for selecting between models, prompts and configurations. Moreover, we propose a practical iterative approach for dynamically determining how many instances to annotate. In a series of experiments over hundreds of model pairs, we demonstrate that DiffUse can dramatically reduce the required number of annotations -- by up to 75\% -- while maintaining high evaluation reliability.

Label-Efficient Model Selection for Text Generation

Watermarking approaches are proposed to identify if text being circulated is human- or large language model- (LLM) generated. The state-of-the-art watermarking strategy of Kirchenbauer et al. (2023a) biases the LLM to generate specific (“green”) tokens. However, determining the robustness of this watermarking method under finite (low) edit budgets is an open problem. Additionally, existing attack methods fail
to evade detection for longer text segments. We overcome these limitations, and propose Self Color Testing-based Substitution (SCTS), the
first “color-aware” attack. SCTS obtains color information by strategically prompting the watermarked LLM and comparing output tokens
frequencies. It uses this information to determine token colors, and substitutes green tokens with non-green ones. In our experiments, SCTS successfully evades watermark detection using fewer number of edits than related work. Additionally, we show both theoretically and empirically that SCTS can remove the watermark for arbitrarily long watermarked text.

Bypassing LLM Watermarks with Color-Aware Substitutions

Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM), machine's ability to understand and keep track of the mental states of others, is pivotal in developing socially intelligent agents. However, prevalent N-ToM benchmarks have several shortcomings, including the presence of ambiguous and artificial narratives, absence of personality traits and preferences, a lack of questions addressing characters' psychological mental states, and limited diversity in the questions posed. In response to these issues, we construct OpenToM, a new benchmark for assessing N-ToM with (1) longer and clearer narrative stories, (2) characters with explicit personality traits, (3) actions that are triggered by character intentions, and (4) questions designed to challenge LLMs' capabilities of modeling characters' mental states of both the physical and psychological world. Using OpenToM, we reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs thrive at modeling certain aspects of mental states in the physical world but fall short when tracking characters' mental states in the psychological world.

OpenToM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Theory-of-Mind Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Fine-grained control over large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge, hindering their adaptability to diverse user needs. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) shows promise in aligning LLMs, its reliance on scalar rewards often limits its ability to capture diverse user preferences in real-world applications. To address this limitation, we introduce the Directional Preference Alignment (DPA) framework. Unlike the scalar-reward RLHF, DPA incorporates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles. Additionally, DPA models user preferences as directions (i.e., unit vectors) in the reward space to achieve user-dependent preference control. Our method involves training a multi-objective reward model and then fine-tuning the LLM with a preference-conditioned variant of Rejection Sampling Finetuning (RSF), an RLHF method adopted by Llama 2. This method enjoys a better performance trade-off across various reward objectives. In comparison with the scalar-reward RLHF, DPA offers users intuitive control over LLM generation: they can arithmetically specify their desired trade-offs (e.g., more helpfulness with less verbosity). We also validate the effectiveness of DPA with real-world alignment experiments on Mistral-7B. Our method provides straightforward arithmetic control over the trade-off between helpfulness and verbosity while maintaining competitive performance with strong baselines such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO).

Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards

Writing assistance aims to improve the correctness and quality of input texts, with character checking being crucial in detecting and correcting wrong characters. In the real world where handwriting occupies the vast majority, characters that humans get wrong include faked characters (i.e., untrue characters created due to writing errors) and misspelled characters (i.e., true characters used incorrectly due to spelling errors). However, existing datasets and related studies only focus on misspelled characters that can be represented by computer text encoding systems, thereby ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult. To break through this dilemma, we present $\textbf{Visual-C}$$^3$, a human-annotated $\textbf{Visual}$ $\textbf{C}$hinese $\textbf{C}$haracter $\textbf{C}$hecking dataset with faked and misspelled Chinese characters. To the best of our knowledge, Visual-C$^3$ is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. Additionally, we also propose and evaluate novel baseline methods on Visual-C$^3$. Extensive empirical results and analyses show that Visual-C$^3$ is high-quality yet challenging. As the first study focusing on Chinese faked characters, the \DatasetName{} dataset and the baseline methods are publicly available at https://github.com/THUKElab/Visual-C3.

Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters

Chart-to-summary generation can help explore data, communicate insights, and help the visually impaired people. Multi-modal generative models have been used to produce fluent summaries, but they can suffer from factual and perceptual errors. In this work we present CHATS-CRITIC, a reference-free chart summarization metric for scoring faithfulness. CHATS-CRITIC is composed of an image-to-text model to recover the table from a chart, and a tabular entailment model applied to score the summary sentence by sentence. We find that CHATS-CRITIC evaluates the summary quality according to human ratings better than reference-based metrics, either learned or n-gram based, and can be further used to fix candidate summaries by removing not supported sentences. We then introduce CHATS-PI, a chart-to-summary pipeline that leverages CHATS-CRITIC during inference to fix and rank sampled candidates from any chart-summarization model. We evaluate CHATS-PI and CHATS-CRITIC using human raters, establishing state-of-the-art results on two popular chart-to-summary datasets.

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Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only

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