United States

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.

EMNLP 2024

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

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### 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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ACL 2024

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.

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## 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.
### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WPROgxjLAC96AJL7Ugy0tEnYm7dkrbHt/view?usp=sharing)

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.emnlp.org/registration/).** The EMNLP 2024 event page on Underline will be open to public one week prior to the event.

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.

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}}.

XplainLLM: A Knowledge-Augmented Dataset for Reliable Grounded Explanations in LLMs

The success of large language models (LLMs) facilitate many parties to fine-tune LLMs on their own private data. However, this practice raises privacy concerns due to the memorization of LLMs. 
Existing solutions, such as utilizing synthetic data for substitution, struggle to simultaneously improve performance and preserve privacy.
They either rely on a local model for generation, resulting in a performance decline, or take advantage of APIs, directly exposing the data to API servers. 
To address this issue, we propose \textit{KnowledgeSG}, a novel client-server framework which enhances synthetic data quality and improves model performance while ensuring privacy. We achieve this by learning local knowledge from the private data with differential privacy (DP) and distilling professional knowledge from the server. Additionally, inspired by federated learning, we transmit models rather than data between the client and server to prevent privacy leakage.
Extensive experiments in medical and financial domains demonstrate the effectiveness of *KnowledgeSG*. Our code is now publicly available at https://github.com/wwh0411/KnowledgeSG.

KnowledgeSG: Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Text Generation With Knowledge Distillation From Server

Data are crucial element in large language model (LLM) alignment. Recent studies have explored using LLMs for efficient data collection. However, LLM-generated data often suffers from quality issues, with underrepresented or absent aspects and low-quality datapoints. To address these problems, we propose Data Advisor, an enhanced LLM-based method for generating data that takes into account the characteristics of the desired dataset. Starting from a set of pre-defined principles in hand, Data Advisor monitors the status of the generated data, identifies weaknesses in the current dataset, and advises the next iteration of data generation accordingly. Data Advisor can be easily integrated into existing data generation methods to enhance data quality and coverage. Experiments on safety alignment of three representative LLMs (i.e., Mistral, Llama2, and Falcon) demonstrate the effectiveness of Data Advisor in enhancing model safety against various fine-grained safety issues without sacrificing model utility.

Data Advisor: Data Curation with Foresight for Safety Alignment of Large Language Models

Scaling model size significantly challenges the deployment and inference of Large Language Models (LLMs). 
Due to the redundancy in LLM weights, recent research has focused on pushing weight-only quantization to extremely low-bit (even down to 2 bits). 
It reduces memory requirements, optimizes storage costs, and decreases memory bandwidth needs during inference. 
However, due to numerical representation limitations, traditional scalar-based weight quantization struggles to achieve such extreme low-bit.
Recent research on Vector Quantization (VQ) for LLMs has demonstrated the potential for extremely low-bit model quantization by compressing vectors into indices using lookup tables. 

In this paper, we introduce **Vector Post-Training Quantization (VPTQ)** for extremely low-bit quantization of LLMs. 
We use Second-Order Optimization to formulate the LLM VQ problem and guide our quantization algorithm design by solving the optimization.
We further refine the weights using Channel-Independent Second-Order Optimization for a granular VQ.
In addition, by decomposing the optimization problem, we propose a brief and effective codebook initialization algorithm. 
We also extend VPTQ to support residual and outlier quantization, which enhances model accuracy and further compresses the model.
Our experimental results show that VPTQ reduces model quantization perplexity by $0.01$-$0.34$ on LLaMA-2, $0.38$-$0.68$ on Mistral-7B, $4.41$-$7.34$ on LLaMA-3 over SOTA at 2-bit, with an average accuracy improvement of $0.79$-$1.5\%$ on LLaMA-2, $1\%$ on Mistral-7B, $11$-$22\%$ on LLaMA-3 on QA tasks on average. 
We only utilize $10.4$-$18.6\%$ of the quantization algorithm execution time, resulting in a $1.6$-$1.8\times$ increase in inference throughput compared to SOTA.

VPTQ: Extreme Low-bit Vector Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models

We tackle societal bias in image-text datasets by removing spurious correlations between protected groups and image attributes. Traditional methods only target labeled attributes, ignoring biases from unlabeled ones. Using text-guided inpainting models, our approach ensures protected group independence from all attributes and mitigates inpainting biases through data filtering. Evaluations on multi-label image classification and image captioning tasks show our method effectively reduces bias without compromising performance across various models. Specifically, we achieve an average societal bias reduction of 46.1\% in leakage-based bias metrics for multi-label classification and 74.8\% for image captioning.

Resampled Datasets Are Not Enough: Mitigating Societal Bias Beyond Single Attributes

Modular AI systems can be developed using LLM-prompts-based modules to minimize deployment time even for complex tasks. However, these systems do not always perform well and improving them using the data traces collected from a deployment remains an open challenge. The data traces contain LLM inputs and outputs, but the annotations from LLMs are noisy. We hypothesize that Active Label Correction (ALC) can be use on the collected data to train smaller task-specific improved models that can replace LLM-based modules. In this paper, we study the noise in three GPT-3.5-annotated datasets and their denoising with human feedback. We also propose a novel method ALC3 that iteratively applies three updates to the training dataset: auto-correction, correction using human feedback and filtering. Our results show that ALC3 can lead to oracle performance with feedback on 17-24% fewer examples than the number of noisy examples in the dataset across three different NLP tasks.

Can Active Label Correction Improve LLM-based Modular AI Systems?

With recent advances, neural models can achieve human-level performance on various natural language tasks. However, there are no guarantees that any explanations from these models are faithful, i.e. that they reflect the inner workings of the model. Atomic inference overcomes this issue, providing interpretable and faithful model decisions. This approach involves making predictions for different components (or atoms) of an instance, before using interpretable and deterministic rules to derive the overall prediction based on the individual atom-level predictions. We investigate the effectiveness of using LLM-generated facts as atoms, decomposing Natural Language Inference premises into lists of facts. While directly using generated facts in atomic inference systems can result in worse performance, with 1) a multi-stage fact generation process, and 2) a training regime that incorporates the facts, our fact-based method outperforms other approaches.

Atomic Inference for NLI with Generated Facts as Atoms

This paper explores an intriguing observation: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with responses generated by a LLM often yields better results than using responses generated by humans, particularly in reasoning tasks. We conduct an in-depth investigation to understand why this occurs. Contrary to the common belief that these instances is due to the more detailed nature of LLM-generated content, our study identifies another contributing factor: an LLM is inherently more "familiar" with LLM generated responses. This familiarity is evidenced by lower perplexity before fine-tuning. We design a series of experiments to understand the impact of the "familiarity" and our conclusion reveals that this "familiarity" significantly impacts learning performance. Training with LLM-generated responses not only enhances performance but also helps maintain the model's capabilities in other reasoning tasks after fine-tuning on a specific task.

I Learn Better If You Speak My Language: Understanding the Superior Performance of Fine-Tuning Large Language Models with LLM-Generated Responses

Calibrating language models (LMs) aligns their generation confidence with the actual likelihood of answer correctness, which can inform users about LMs’ reliability and mitigate hallucinated content. However, prior calibration methods, such as self-consistency-based and logit-based approaches, are either limited in inference-time efficiency or fall short of providing informative signals. Moreover, simply filtering out low-confidence responses reduces the LM’s helpfulness when the answers are correct. Therefore, effectively using calibration techniques to enhance an LM’s factuality remains an unsolved challenge. In this paper, we first propose an activation-based calibration method, ActCab, which trains a linear layer on top of the LM’s last-layer activations that can better capture the representations of knowledge. Built on top of ActCab, we further propose CoDec, a confidence-guided decoding strategy to elicit truthful answers with high confidence from LMs. By evaluating on five popular QA benchmarks, ActCab achieves superior calibration performance than all competitive baselines, e.g., by reducing the average expected calibration error (ECE) score by up to 39%. Further experiments on CoDec show consistent improvements in several LMs’ factuality on challenging QA datasets, such as TruthfulQA, highlighting the value of confidence signals in enhancing the factuality.

Enhancing Language Model Factuality via Activation-Based Confidence Calibration and Guided Decoding

This study is the first to explore whether multi-modal large language models (LLMs) can align their behaviors with visual personas, addressing a significant gap in the literature that predominantly focuses on text-based personas. We developed a novel dataset of 5K fictional avatar images for assignment as visual personas to LLMs, and analyzed their negotiation behaviors based on the visual traits depicted in these images, with a particular focus on aggressiveness. The results indicate that LLMs assess the aggressiveness of images in a manner similar to humans and output more aggressive negotiation behaviors when prompted with an aggressive visual persona. Interestingly, the LLM exhibited more aggressive negotiation behaviors when the opponent’s image appeared less aggressive than their own, and less aggressive behaviors when the opponent’s image appeared more aggressive.

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XplainLLM: A Knowledge-Augmented Dataset for Reliable Grounded Explanations in LLMs

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Do Large Language Models Discriminate in Hiring Decisions on the Basis of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender?