United States

Large language models demonstrate impressive reasoning abilities but struggle to provide personalized content due to their lack of individual user preference information. Existing methods, such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, fall short in capturing the complexity of human preferences, especially given the small, personal datasets individuals possess. In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing small parameter models as preference agents to generate natural language rules that guide a larger, pre-trained model, enabling efficient personalization. Our method involves a small, local &quot;steering wheel&quot; model that directs the outputs of a much larger foundation model, producing content tailored to an individual&#39;s preferences while leveraging the extensive knowledge and capabilities of the large model. Importantly, this personalization is achieved without the need to fine-tune the large model. Experimental results on email and article datasets, demonstrate that our technique significantly outperforms baseline personalization methods. By allowing foundation models to adapt to individual preferences in a data and compute-efficient manner, our approach paves the way for highly personalized language model applications.

EMNLP 2024

Unsupervised Human Preference Learning

counterargument generation

counterspeech generation

safety

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

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AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

Large language models demonstrate impressive reasoning abilities but struggle to provide personalized content due to their lack of individual user preference information. Existing methods, such as in-context learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning, fall short in capturing the complexity of human preferences, especially given the small, personal datasets individuals possess. In this paper, we propose a novel approach utilizing small parameter models as preference agents to generate natural language rules that guide a larger, pre-trained model, enabling efficient personalization. Our method involves a small, local "steering wheel" model that directs the outputs of a much larger foundation model, producing content tailored to an individual's preferences while leveraging the extensive knowledge and capabilities of the large model. Importantly, this personalization is achieved without the need to fine-tune the large model. Experimental results on email and article datasets, demonstrate that our technique significantly outperforms baseline personalization methods. By allowing foundation models to adapt to individual preferences in a data and compute-efficient manner, our approach paves the way for highly personalized language model applications.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

With the proliferation of large language models, Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) method, which freeze pre-trained parameters and only fine-tune a few task-specific parameters, are playing an increasingly important role. However, previous work primarily applied uniform operations across all layers of the model, overlooking the fact that different layers in a transformer store different information. In the process of exploration, We find that there is a significant differences in fine-tuning strategies between different layers, and fine-tuning only a subset of layers can even achieve comparable performance. Based on this, we propose the Hybrid LoRA-Prefix Tuning(HLPT) method, which uses enhanced LoRA and Prefix-tuning methods with learnable adaptive mechanism separately for the bottom and top layers, and the Half Hybrid LoRA-Prefix Tuning($H^2$LPT) method, which goes a step further, reducing the parameter count to nearly half by omitting fine-tuning in the middle layers. Extensive experiments with large language models on various downstream tasks provide strong evidence for the potential of PEFT focusing on different layers' interactions and the effectiveness of our methods. Furthermore, we validate the robustness of these methods and their advantages in speeding up training convergence, reducing inference time requirements.

From Bottom to Top: Extending the Potential of Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M$^2$PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M$^2$PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.

MPT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning

In multi-person communications, conflicts often arise. Each individual may have their own perspective, which can differ. Additionally, commonly referenced offensive datasets frequently neglect contextual information and are primarily constructed with a focus on intended offenses. This study suggests that conflicts are pivotal in revealing a broader range of human interactions, including instances of unintended offensive language. This paper proposes a conflict-based data collection method to utilize inter-conflict cues in multi-person communications. By focusing on specific cue posts within conversation threads, our proposed approach effectively identifies relevant instances for analysis. Detailed analyses are provided to showcase the proposed approach efficiently gathers data on subtly offensive content. The experimental results indicate that incorporating elements of conflict into data collection significantly enhances the comprehensiveness and accuracy of detecting offensive language but also enriches our understanding of conflict dynamics in digital communication.

Leveraging Conflicts in Social Media Posts: Unintended Offense Dataset

Numerous recent works target to extend effective context length for language models and various methods, tasks and benchmarks exist to measure model's effective memory length. However, through thorough investigations, we find limitations for currently existing evaluations on model's memory. We provide an extensive survey for limitations in this work and propose a new method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. We show that forgetting curve has the advantage of being robust to the tested corpus and the experimental settings, of not relying on prompt and can be applied to any model size. We apply our forgetting curve to a large variety of models involving both transformer and RNN/SSM based architectures. Our measurement provides empirical evidence for the effectiveness of transformer extension techniques while raises questions for the effective length of RNN/SSM based models. We also examine the difference between our measurement and existing benchmarks as well as popular metrics for various models.

Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-Context Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show the potential of using LLMs as evaluators for assessing the quality of text generations from LLMs. However, applying LLM evaluators naively to compare different systems can lead to unreliable results due to the inaccuracy and intrinsic bias of LLM evaluators. In order to mitigate this problem, we propose two calibration methods, Bayesian Win-Rate Sampling (BWRS) and Bayesian Dawid-Skene, both of which leverage Bayesian inference to more accurately infer the true win rate of generative language models. We empirically validate our methods on six datasets covering story generation, summarization, and instruction following tasks. We show that both our methods are effective in improving the accuracy of win rate estimation using LLMs as evaluators, offering a promising direction for reliable automatic text quality evaluation.

Bayesian Calibration of Win Rate Estimation with LLM Evaluators

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in a variety of NLP tasks. However, LLMs are also prone to generate nonfactual content. Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) is pivotal in enhancing our understanding of a model's confidence on its generation, thereby aiding in the mitigation of nonfactual outputs. Existing research on UQ predominantly targets short text generation, typically yielding brief, word-limited responses. However, real-world applications frequently necessitate much longer responses. Our study first highlights the limitations of current UQ methods in handling long text generation. We then introduce \textsc{Luq} and its two variations, a series of novel sampling-based UQ approaches specifically designed for long text. Our findings reveal that \textsc{Luq} outperforms existing baseline methods in correlating with the model's factuality scores (negative coefficient of -0.85 observed for Gemini Pro). To further improve the factuality of LLM responses, we propose \textsc{Luq-Ensemble}, a method that ensembles responses from multiple models and selects the response with the lowest uncertainty. The ensembling method greatly improves the response factuality upon the best standalone LLM.

LUQ: Long-text Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs

Private data, being larger and quality-higher than public data, can greatly improve large language models (LLM). However, due to privacy concerns, this data is often dispersed in multiple silos, making its secure utilization for LLM training a challenge. Federated learning (FL) is an ideal solution for training models with distributed private data, but traditional frameworks like FedAvg are unsuitable for LLM due to their high computational demands on clients. An alternative, split learning, offloads most training parameters to the server while training embedding and output layers locally, making it more suitable for LLM. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges in security and efficiency. Firstly, the gradients of embeddings are prone to attacks, leading to potential reverse engineering of private data. Furthermore, the server's limitation of handling only one client's training request at a time hinders parallel training, severely impacting training efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Federated Learning framework for LLM, named FL-GLM, which prevents data leakage caused by both server-side and peer-client attacks while improving training efficiency. Specifically, we first place the input block and output block on local client to prevent embedding gradient attacks from server. Secondly, we employ key-encryption during client-server communication to prevent reverse engineering attacks from peer-clients. Lastly, we employ optimization methods like client-batching or server-hierarchical, adopting different acceleration methods based on the actual computational capabilities of the server. Experimental results on NLU and generation tasks demonstrate that FL-GLM achieves comparable metrics to centralized chatGLM model, validating the effectiveness of our federated learning framework.

Safely Learning with Private Data: A Federated Learning Framework for Large Language Model

Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text generation framework grounded in pragmatics. RSA-Control directs the generation process by recursively reasoning between imaginary speakers and listeners, enhancing the likelihood that target attributes are correctly interpreted by listeners amidst distractors. Additionally, we introduce a self-adjustable rationality parameter, which allows for automatic adjustment of control strength based on context. Our experiments, conducted with two task types and two types of language models, demonstrate that RSA-Control achieves strong attribute control while maintaining language fluency and content consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/RSA-Control.

RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework

Social science research has shown that candidates with names indicative of certain races or genders often face discrimination in employment practices. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated racial and gender biases in various applications. In this study, we utilize GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama 3-70B-Instruct to simulate hiring decisions and salary recommendations for candidates with 320 first names that strongly signal their race and gender, across over 750,000 prompts. Our empirical results indicate a preference among these models for hiring candidates with White female-sounding names over other demographic groups across 40 occupations. Additionally, even among candidates with identical qualifications, salary recommendations vary by as much as 5% between different subgroups. A comparison with real-world labor data reveals inconsistent alignment with U.S. labor market characteristics, underscoring the necessity of risk investigation of LLM-powered systems.

You Gotta be a Doctor, Lin : An Investigation of Name-Based Bias of Large Language Models in Employment Recommendations

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language tasks, yet understanding their reasoning processes remains a significant challenge. We address this by introducing XplainLLM, a dataset accompanying an explanation framework designed to enhance LLM transparency and reliability. Our dataset comprises 24,204 instances where each instance interprets the LLM's reasoning behavior using knowledge graphs (KGs) and graph attention networks (GAT), and includes explanations of LLMs such as the decoder-only Llama-3 and the encoder-only RoBERTa. XplainLLM also features a framework for generating grounded explanations and the \textit{debugger-scores} for multidimensional quality analysis. Our explanations include \textit{why-choose} and \textit{why-not-choose} components, \textit{reason-elements}, and \textit{debugger-scores} that collectively illuminate the LLM's reasoning behavior. Our evaluations demonstrate XplainLLM's potential to reduce hallucinations and improve grounded explanation generation in LLMs. XplainLLM is a resource for researchers and practitioners to build trust and verify the reliability of LLM outputs. Our code and dataset are publicly available\footnote{\url{https://lmexplainer.github.io/xplainllm}}.

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From Bottom to Top: Extending the Potential of Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning

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Preference Descriptions for Dynamic Personalization of Large Language Models