United States

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks, yet it demands more and more memory as model sizes keep growing. To address this issue, the recently proposed Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO) methods attempt to fine-tune LLMs using only forward passes, thereby avoiding the need for a backpropagation graph. However, significant performance drops and a high risk of divergence have limited their widespread adoption. In this paper, we propose the Adaptive Zeroth-order Tensor-Train Adaption (AdaZeta) framework, specifically designed to improve the performance and convergence of the ZO methods. To enhance dimension-dependent ZO estimation accuracy, we introduce a fast-forward, low-parameter tensorized adapter. To tackle the frequently observed divergence issue in large-scale ZO fine-tuning tasks, we propose an adaptive query number schedule that guarantees convergence. Detailed theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on Roberta-Large and Llama-2-7B models substantiate the efficacy of our AdaZeta framework in terms of accuracy, memory efficiency, and convergence speed.

EMNLP 2024

AdaZeta: Adaptive Zeroth-Order Tensor-Train Adaption for Memory-Efficient Large Language Models Fine-Tuning

sparse model

knowledge editing

parameter-efficient fine-tuning

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

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## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a prominent algorithm for the direct and robust alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, offering a more straightforward alternative to the complex Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Despite its promising efficacy, DPO faces a notable drawback: "verbosity", a common over-optimization phenomenon also observed in RLHF. While previous studies mainly attributed verbosity to biased labels within the data, we propose that the issue also stems from an inherent algorithmic length reliance in DPO. Specifically, we suggest that the discrepancy between sequence-level Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergences between chosen and rejected sequences, used in DPO, results in overestimated or underestimated rewards due to varying token lengths. Empirically, we utilize datasets with different label lengths to demonstrate the presence of biased rewards. We then introduce an effective downsampling approach, named SamPO, to eliminate potential length reliance. Our experimental evaluations, conducted across three LLMs of varying scales and a diverse array of conditional and open-ended benchmarks, highlight the efficacy of SamPO in mitigating verbosity, achieving improvements of 5% to 12% over DPO through debaised rewards. Our code can be accessed at: https://github.com/LuJunru/SamPO/.

Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence

This work suggests fundamentally rethinking the current practice of pruning large language models (LLMs). The way it is done is by divide and conquer: split the model into submodels, sequentially prune them, and reconstruct predictions of the dense counterparts on small calibration data one at a time; the final model is obtained simply by putting the resulting sparse submodels together. While this approach enables pruning under memory constraints, it generates high reconstruction errors. In this work, we first present an array of reconstruction techniques that can significantly reduce this error by more than $90$%. Unwittingly, however, we discover that minimizing reconstruction error is not always ideal and can overfit the given calibration data, resulting in rather increased language perplexity and poor performance at downstream tasks. We find out that a strategy of self-generating calibration data can mitigate this trade-off between reconstruction and generalization, suggesting new directions in the presence of both benefits and pitfalls of reconstruction for pruning LLMs.

Rethinking Pruning Large Language Models: Benefits and Pitfalls of Reconstruction Error Minimization

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing high quality information at unprecedented rates. As these models continue to entrench themselves in society, the content they produce will become increasingly pervasive in databases that are, in turn, incorporated into the pre-training data, fine-tuning data, retrieval data, etc. of other language models. In this paper we formalize the idea of a communication network of LLMs and introduce a method for representing the perspective of individual models within a collection of LLMs. Given these tools we systematically study information diffusion in the communication network of LLMs in various simulated settings.

Tracking the perspectives of interacting language models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but still suffer from inconsistency issues (e.g. LLMs can react differently to disturbances like rephrasing or inconsequential order change). In addition to these inconsistencies, we also observe that LLMs, while capable of solving hard problems, can paradoxically fail at easier ones. To evaluate this hard-to-easy inconsistency, we develop the ConsisEval benchmark, where each entry comprises a pair of questions with a strict order of difficulty. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of consistency score to quantitatively measure this inconsistency and analyze the potential for improvement in consistency by relative consistency score. Based on comprehensive experiments across a variety of existing models, we find: (1) GPT-4 achieves the highest consistency score of 92.2% but is still inconsistent to specific questions due to distraction by redundant information, misinterpretation of questions, etc.; (2) models with stronger capabilities typically exhibit higher consistency, but exceptions also exist; (3) hard data enhances consistency for both fine-tuning and in-context learning. Our data and code will be publicly available on GitHub.

Can Large Language Models Always Solve Easy Problems if They Can Solve Harder Ones?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities but still suffer from the issue of hallucinations. A significant type of this issue is the false premise hallucination, which we define as the phenomenon when LLMs generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of the false premise hallucination and elucidate its internal working mechanism: a small subset of attention heads (which we designate as false premise heads) disturb the knowledge extraction process, leading to the occurrence of false premise hallucination. Based on our analysis, we propose \textbf{FAITH} (\textbf{F}alse premise \textbf{A}ttention head constra\textbf{I}ining for mi\textbf{T}igating \textbf{H}allucinations), a novel and effective method to mitigate false premise hallucinations. It constrains the false premise attention heads during the model inference process. Impressively, extensive experiments demonstrate that constraining only approximately 1%
of the attention heads in the model yields a notable increase of nearly 20%
of model performance.

Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) aims to co-extract the sentiment triplets in a given corpus. Existing approaches within the pretraining-finetuning paradigm tend to either meticulously craft complex tagging schemes and classification heads, or incorporate external semantic augmentation to enhance performance. In this study, we, for the first time, re-evaluate the redundancy in tagging schemes and the internal enhancement in pretrained representations. We propose a method to improve and utilize pretrained representations by integrating a minimalist tagging scheme and a novel token-level contrastive learning strategy. The proposed approach demonstrates comparable or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques while featuring a more compact design and reduced computational overhead. Additionally, we are the first to formally evaluate GPT-4's performance in few-shot learning and Chain-of-Thought scenarios for this task. The results demonstrate that the pretraining-finetuning paradigm remains highly effective even in the era of large language models.

MiniConGTS: A Near Ultimate Minimalist Contrastive Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs) undergo extensive evaluation against various benchmarks collected in established leaderboards to assess their performance across multiple tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive studies evaluating these models' linguistic abilities independent of specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation methodology designed to test LLMs' sentence generation abilities under specific linguistic constraints. Drawing on the `linguistic profiling' approach, we rigorously investigate the extent to which five LLMs of varying sizes, tested in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, effectively adhere to (morpho)syntactic constraints. Our findings shed light on the linguistic proficiency of LLMs, revealing both their capabilities and limitations in generating linguistically-constrained sentences.

Evaluating Large Language Models via Linguistic Profiling

Program induction (PI) has become a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models (LLMs) answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. Nonetheless, PI typically relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs to make the LLM aware of the schema of a given KB, and is thus challenging for many low-resourced KBs that lack annotated data. To this end, we propose KB-Plugin, a plug-and-play framework that enables LLMs to induce programs over any low-resourced KB. Firstly, KB-Plugin adopts self-supervised learning to encode the detailed schema information of a given KB into a pluggable module, namely schema plugin. Secondly, KB-Plugin utilizes abundant annotated data from a rich-resourced KB to train another pluggable module, namely PI plugin, which can help the LLM extract question-relevant schema information from the schema plugin of any KB and utilize the information to induce programs over this KB. Experiments show that KB-Plugin outperforms SoTA low-resourced PI methods with 25x smaller backbone LLM on both large-scale and domain-specific KBs, and even approaches the performance of supervised methods.

KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases

Capturing inter-modal incongruities within the text-image pair is a critical challenge in multi-modal sarcasm detection (MSD). Fortunately, graph neural networks (GNNs) have made promising advancements in MSD, which show advantages in explicitly capturing data relationships. Nevertheless, current GNN-based MSD methods do not effectively address some of the inherent limitations of GNNs, which include: 1) neglecting high-order relationships, and 2) underestimating high-frequency messages. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{D}$ual $\textbf{G}$raph-based $\textbf{L}$earning $\textbf{F}$ramework ($\textbf{DGLF}$) to address the above two issues. Specifically, we construct a hypergraph to perform high-order aware propagation and a vanilla graph to perform high-frequency enhanced propagation, respectively. We empower GNNs to 1) better capture the inherent and complicated relationships based on the hypergraph and 2) deliver sufficient modeling through high-frequency enhanced messages on the vanilla graph. Besides, we introduce multi-modal fusion information bottleneck to effectively fuse the two learned graph features. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

DGLF: A Dual Graph-based Learning Framework for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection

High-quality data is crucial for the pre-training performance of large language models. Unfortunately, existing quality filtering methods rely on a known high-quality dataset as reference, which can introduce potential bias and compromise diversity. In this paper, we propose ScalingFilter, a novel approach that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data, thereby eliminating the influence of the reference dataset in the filtering process. An theoretical analysis shows that ScalingFilter is equivalent to an inverse utilization of scaling laws. Through training models with 1.3B parameters on the same data source processed by various quality filters, we find ScalingFilter can improve zero-shot performance of pre-trained models in downstream tasks. To assess the bias introduced by quality filtering, we introduce semantic diversity, a metric of utilizing text embedding models for semantic representations. Extensive experiments reveal that semantic diversity is a reliable indicator of dataset diversity, and ScalingFilter achieves an optimal balance between downstream performance and semantic diversity.

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Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence

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