Thailand

Contemporary practices in instruction tuning often hinge on enlarging data scaling without a clear strategy for ensuring data quality, inadvertently introducing noise that may compromise model performance. To address this challenge, we introduce Nuggets, a novel and efficient methodology that leverages one-shot learning to discern and select high-quality instruction data from extensive datasets. Nuggets assesses the potential of individual instruction examples to act as effective one-shot learning instances, thereby identifying those that can significantly improve performance across diverse tasks. Nuggets utilizes a scoring system based on the impact of candidate examples on the perplexity of a diverse anchor set, facilitating the selection of the most advantageous data for instruction tuning. Through rigorous evaluations on two benchmarks, namely MT-Bench and Alpaca-Eval, our study illustrates that instruction tuning with the top 1\% of examples curated by Nuggets substantially outperforms conventional methods employing the entire dataset.

ACL 2024

One-Shot Learning as Instruction Data Prospector for Large Language Models

instruction tuning

data quality

large language model

## 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.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

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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.

While (large) language models have significantly improved over the last years, they still struggle to sensibly process long sequences found, e.g., in books, due to the quadratic scaling of the underlying attention mechanism. To address this, we propose NextLevelBERT, a Masked Language Model operating not on tokens, but on higher-level semantic representations in the form of text embeddings. We pretrain NextLevelBERT to predict the vector representation of entire masked text chunks and evaluate the effectiveness of the resulting document vectors on three types of tasks: 1) Semantic Textual Similarity via zero-shot document embeddings, 2) Long document classification, 3) Multiple-choice question answering. We find that next-level Masked Language Modeling is an effective technique to tackle long-document use cases and can outperform much larger embedding models as long as the required level of detail of semantic information is not too fine. Our models and code are publicly available online.

NextLevelBERT: Masked Language Modeling with Higher-Level Representations for Long Documents

Inferring contextually-relevant and diverse commonsense to understand narratives remains challenging for knowledge models. In this work, we develop a series of knowledge models, DiffuCOMET, that leverage diffusion to learn to reconstruct the implicit semantic connections between narrative contexts and relevant commonsense knowledge. Across multiple diffusion steps, our method progressively refines a representation of commonsense facts that is anchored to a narrative, producing contextually-relevant and diverse commonsense inferences for an input context. To evaluate DiffuCOMET, we introduce new metrics for commonsense inference that more closely measure knowledge diversity and contextual relevance. Our results on two different benchmarks, ComFact and WebNLG+, show that knowledge generated by DiffuCOMET achieves a better trade-off between commonsense diversity, contextual relevance and alignment to known gold references, compared to baseline knowledge models.

DiffuCOMET: Contextual Commonsense Knowledge Diffusion

In this study, we address the challenge of enhancing temporal knowledge reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs often struggle with this task, leading to the generation of inaccurate or misleading responses. This issue mainly arises from their limited ability to handle evolving factual knowledge and complex temporal logic. To overcome these limitations, we propose Abstract Reasoning Induction (ARI) framework, which divides temporal reasoning into two distinct phases: Knowledge agnostic and Knowledge-based. This framework offers factual knowledge support to LLMs while minimizing the incorporation of extraneous noisy data. Concurrently, informed by the principles of constructivism, ARI provides LLMs the capability to engage in proactive, self-directed learning from both correct and incorrect historical reasoning samples. By teaching LLMs to actively construct knowledge and methods, it can significantly boosting their temporal reasoning abilities. Our approach achieves significant improvements, with relative gains of 29.7% and 9.27% on two temporal QA datasets, underscoring its efficacy in advancing temporal reasoning in LLMs. The code can be found at https: //github.com/czy1999/ARI-QA.

Temporal Knowledge Question Answering via Abstract Reasoning Induction

A practical large language model (LLM) service may involve a long system prompt, which specifies the instructions, examples, and knowledge documents of the task and is reused across requests. However, the long system prompt causes throughput/latency bottlenecks as the cost of generating the next token grows w.r.t the sequence length. This paper aims to improve the efficiency of LLM services that involve long system prompts. Our key observation is that handling these system prompts requires heavily redundant memory accesses in existing causal attention computation algorithms. Specifically, for batched requests, the cached hidden states (i.e., key-value pairs) of system prompts are transferred from off-chip DRAM to on-chip SRAM multiple times, each corresponding to an individual request. To eliminate such a redundancy, we propose RelayAttention, an attention algorithm that allows reading these hidden states from DRAM exactly once for a batch of input tokens. RelayAttention is a free lunch: it maintains the generation quality while requiring no model retraining, as it is based on a mathematical reformulation of causal attention. We have observed significant performance improvements to a production-level system, vLLM, through integration with RelayAttention. The improvements are even more profound with longer system prompts.

RelayAttention for Efficient Large Language Model Serving with Long System Prompts

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising results in language generation and instruction following but frequently "hallucinate", making their outputs less reliable. Despite Uncertainty Quantification's (UQ) potential solutions, implementing it accurately within LLMs is challenging. Our research introduces a simple heuristic: not all tokens in auto-regressive LLM text equally represent the underlying meaning, as "linguistic redundancy" often allows a few keywords to convey the essence of long sentences. However, current methods underestimate this inequality when assessing uncertainty, causing tokens with limited semantics to be equally or excessively weighted in UQ. To correct this, we propose Shifting Attention to more Relevant (SAR) components at both token- and sentence-levels for better UQ. We conduct extensive experiments involving a range of popular "off-the-shelf" LLMs, such as Vicuna, WizardLM, and LLaMA-2-chat, with model sizes extending up to 33B parameters. We evaluate various free-form question-answering tasks, encompassing domains such as reading comprehension, science Q&A, and medical Q&A. Our experimental results, coupled with a comprehensive demographic analysis, demonstrate the superior performance of SAR. The code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/SAR.

Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Models

Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors---human or AI---to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large language models' (LLMs') intention understanding by examining their responses to non-literal utterances. Ideally, an LLM should respond in line with the true intention of a non-literal utterance, not its literal interpretation. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to generate contextually relevant responses to non-literal language. We also find that providing oracle intentions substantially improves response appropriateness, but using chain-of-thought to make models spell out intentions before responding improves much less. These findings suggest that LLMs are not yet pragmatic interlocutors, and that explicitly modeling intention could improve LLM responses to non-literal language.

Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs

With the advent of large language models (LLM), the line between human-crafted and machine-generated texts has become increasingly blurred. This paper delves into the inquiry of identifying discernible and unique linguistic properties in texts that were written by humans, particularly uncovering the underlying discourse structures of texts beyond their surface structures. Introducing a novel methodology, we leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to unveil distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. Empirical findings demonstrate that, although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. Notably, incorporating hierarchical discourse features enhances binary classifiers' overall performance in distinguishing between human-written and machine-generated texts, even on out-of-distribution and paraphrased samples. This underscores the significance of incorporating hierarchical discourse features in the analysis of text patterns. The code and dataset will be available at [TBA].

Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs

This work introduces an original and practical paradigm for narrative comprehension, stemming from the characteristics that individual passages within narratives tend to be more cohesively related than isolated.
Complementary to the common end-to-end paradigm, we propose a fine-grained modeling of narrative context, by formulating a graph dubbed NarCo, which explicitly depicts task-agnostic coherence dependencies that are ready to be consumed by various downstream tasks. In particular, edges in NarCo encompass free-form retrospective questions between context snippets, inspired by human cognitive perception that constantly reinstates relevant events from prior context. Importantly, our graph formalism is practically instantiated by LLMs without human annotations, through our designed two-stage prompting scheme.
To examine the graph properties and its utility, we conduct three studies in narratives, each from a unique angle: edge relation efficacy, local context enrichment, and broader application in QA. All tasks could benefit from the explicit coherence captured by NarCo.

Fine-Grained Modeling of Narrative Context: A Coherence Perspective via Retrospective Questions

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has enabled the efficient optimization of cumbersome language models in real-world settings. However, as datasets in such environments often contain noisy labels that adversely affect performance, PEFT methods are inevitably exposed to noisy labels. Despite this challenge, the adaptability of PEFT to noisy environments remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we investigate various PEFT methods under noisy labels. Interestingly, our findings reveal that PEFT has difficulty in memorizing noisy labels due to its inherently limited capacity, resulting in robustness. However, we also find that such limited capacity simultaneously makes PEFT more vulnerable to interference of noisy labels, impeding the learning of clean samples. To address this issue, we propose Clean Routing (CleaR), a novel routing-based PEFT approach that adaptively activates PEFT modules. In CleaR, PEFT modules are preferentially exposed to clean data while bypassing the noisy ones, thereby minimizing the noisy influence. To verify the efficacy of CleaR, we perform extensive experiments on diverse configurations of noisy labels. The results convincingly demonstrate that CleaR leads to substantially improved performance in noisy environments

Towards Robust and Generalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Noisy Label Learning

Transformers have become the de-facto standard for natural language processing. However, dense information flows within transformers pose significant challenges for real-time and resource-constrained devices, as computational complexity grows quadratically with sequence length. To counteract such dense information flows, we propose SparseFlow, a novel efficient method designed to sparsify the dense pathways of token representations across all transformer blocks. To this end, SparseFlow parameterizes the information flows linking token representations to transformer blocks. These parameterized information flows are optimized to be sparse, allowing only the salient information to pass through into the blocks. To validate the efficacy of SparseFlow, we conduct comprehensive experiments across diverse benchmarks (understanding and generation), scales (ranging from millions to billions), architectures (including encoders, decoders, and seq-to-seq models), and modalities (such as language-only and vision-language). The results convincingly demonstrate that sparsifying the dense information flows leads to substantial speedup gains without compromising task accuracy. For instance, SparseFlow reduces computational costs by half on average, without a significant loss in accuracy.

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NextLevelBERT: Masked Language Modeling with Higher-Level Representations for Long Documents

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