United States

Decoding methods play an indispensable role in converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. Prior research on decoding methods, primarily focusing on task-specific models, may not extend to the current era of general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Moreover, the recent influx of decoding strategies has further complicated this landscape. This paper provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of various decoding methods within the context of LLMs, evaluating their performance, robustness to hyperparameter changes, and decoding speeds across a wide range of tasks, models, and deployment environments. Our findings reveal that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent and influenced by factors such as alignment, model size, and quantization. Intriguingly, sensitivity analysis exposes that certain methods achieve superior performance at the cost of extensive hyperparameter tuning, highlighting the trade-off between attaining optimal results and the practicality of implementation in varying contexts.

EMNLP 2024

A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs

nested named entity recognition

large language models

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

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.
### [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.

Please register!

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.

An open challenge in recent machine learning is about how to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) in a black-box setting, i.e., without access to detailed information such as output token probabilities. Existing approaches either rely on accessibility (which is often unrealistic) or involve significantly increased train- and inference-time costs. This paper addresses those limitations or shortcomings by proposing a novel approach, namely CoBB (Correct for improving QA reasoning of Black-Box LLMs). It uses a trained adaptation model to perform a seq2seq mapping from the often-imperfect reasonings of the original black-box LLM to the correct or improved reasonings. Specifically, the adaptation model is initialized with a relatively small open-source LLM and adapted over a collection of sub-sampled training pairs. To select the representative pairs of correct and incorrect reasonings, we formulated the dataset construction as an optimization problem that minimizes the statistical divergence between the sampled subset and the entire collection, and solved it via a genetic algorithm. We then train the adaptation model over the sampled pairs by contrasting the likelihoods of correct and incorrect reasonings. Our experimental results demonstrate that CoBB significantly improves reasoning accuracy across various QA benchmarks, compared to the best-performing adaptation baselines.

Learning to Correct for QA Reasoning with Black-box LLMs

The most effective techniques to detect LLM-generated text rely on inserting a detectable signature---or watermark---during the model's decoding process. Most existing watermarking methods require access to the underlying LLM's logits, which LLM API providers are loath to share due to fears of model distillation. As such, these watermarks must be implemented independently by each LLM provider. In this paper, we develop PostMark, a modular post-hoc watermarking procedure in which an input-dependent set of words (determined via a semantic embedding) is inserted into the text after the decoding process has completed. Critically, PostMark does not require logit access, which means it can be implemented by a third party. We also show that PostMark is more robust to paraphrasing attacks than existing watermarking methods: our experiments cover eight baseline algorithms, five base LLMs, and three datasets. Finally, we evaluate the impact of PostMark on text quality using both automated and human assessments, highlighting the trade-off between quality and robustness to paraphrasing. We release our code, outputs, and annotations at https://github.com/lilakk/PostMark.

PostMark: A Robust Blackbox Watermark for Large Language Models

Retrieval-augmented generation has gained popularity as a framework to enhance large language models with external knowledge. However, its effectiveness hinges on the retrieval robustness of the model. If the model lacks retrieval robustness, its performance is constrained by the accuracy of the retriever, resulting in significant compromises when the retrieved context is irrelevant. In this paper, we evaluate the ``implicit'' retrieval robustness of various large language models, instructing them to directly output the final answer without explicitly judging the relevance of the retrieved context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning on a mix of gold and distracting context significantly enhances the model's robustness to retrieval inaccuracies, while still maintaining its ability to extract correct answers when retrieval is accurate. This suggests that large language models can implicitly handle relevant or irrelevant retrieved context by learning solely from the supervision of the final answer in an end-to-end manner. Introducing an additional process for explicit relevance judgment can be unnecessary and disrupts the end-to-end approach.

Assessing “Implicit” Retrieval Robustness of Large Language Models

High-quality distractors are crucial to both the assessment and pedagogical value of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where manually crafting ones that anticipate knowledge deficiencies or misconceptions among real students is difficult. Meanwhile, automated distractor generation, even with the help of large language models (LLMs), remains challenging for subjects like math. It is crucial to not only identify plausible distractors but also understand the error behind them. In this paper, we introduce DiVERT (Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text), a novel variational approach that learns an interpretable representation of errors behind distractors in math MCQs. Through experiments on a real-world math MCQ dataset with 1,434 questions used by hundreds of thousands of students, we show that DiVERT, despite using a base open-source LLM with 7B parameters, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches using GPT-4o on downstream distractor generation. We also conduct a human evaluation with math educators and find that DiVERT leads to error labels that are of comparable quality to human-authored ones.

DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice Questions

Prompt-based ``diversity interventions'' are commonly adopted to improve the diversity of Text-to-Image (T2I) models depicting individuals with various racial or gender traits. However, will this strategy result in nonfactual demographic distribution, especially when generating real historical figures? In this work, we propose **DemOgraphic FActualIty Representation (DoFaiR)**, a benchmark to systematically quantify the trade-off between using diversity interventions and preserving demographic factuality in T2I models. DoFaiR consists of 756 meticulously fact-checked test instances to reveal the factuality tax of various diversity prompts through an automated evidence-supported evaluation pipeline. Experiments on DoFaiR unveil that diversity-oriented instructions increase the number of different gender and racial groups in DALLE-3's generations at the cost of historically inaccurate demographic distributions. To resolve this issue, we propose **Fact-Augmented Intervention** (FAI), which instructs a Large Language Model (LLM) to reflect on verbalized or retrieved factual information about gender and racial compositions of generation subjects in history, and incorporate it into the generation context of T2I models. By orienting model generations using the reflected historical truths, FAI significantly improves the demographic factuality under diversity interventions while preserving diversity.

The Factuality Tax of Diversity-Intervened Text-to-Image Generation: Benchmark and Fact-Augmented Intervention

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in generation tasks has enabled practitioners to leverage publicly available models to power custom applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants. However, the data used to train or fine-tune these LLMs is often undisclosed, allowing an attacker to compromise the data and inject backdoors into the models. In this paper, we develop a novel inference time defense, named CleanGen, to mitigate backdoor attacks for generation tasks in LLMs. CleanGen is a lightweight and effective decoding strategy that is compatible with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. Our insight behind CleanGen is that compared to other LLMs, backdoored LLMs assign significantly higher probabilities to tokens representing the attacker-desired contents. These discrepancies in token probabilities enable CleanGen to identify suspicious tokens favored by the attacker and replace them with tokens generated by another LLM that is not compromised by the same attacker, thereby avoiding generation of attacker-desired content. We evaluate CleanGen against five SOTA backdoor attacks. Our results show that CleanGen achieves lower attack success rates (ASR) compared to five SOTA baseline defenses for all five backdoor attacks. Moreover, LLMs deploying CleanGen maintain helpfulness in their responses when serving benign user queries with minimal added computational overhead.

CleanGen: Mitigating Backdoor Attacks for Generation Tasks in Large Language Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward for an entire output. This sparsity of rewards can lead to inefficient and unstable learning. To address this challenge, our paper introduces an novel framework that utilizes the critique capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce intermediate-step rewards during RL training. Our method involves coupling a policy model with a critic language model, which is responsible for providing comprehensive feedback of each part of the output. This feedback is then translated into token or span-level rewards that can be used to guide the RL training process. We investigate this approach under two different settings: one where the policy model is smaller and is paired with a more powerful critic model, and another where a single language model fulfills both roles. We assess our approach on three text generation tasks: sentiment control, language model detoxification, and summarization. Experimental results show that incorporating artificial intrinsic rewards significantly improve both sample efficiency and the overall performance of the policy model, supported by both automatic and human evaluation.

Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Intrinsic Rewards from Language Model Critique

Compositionality is a core property of natural language, and compositional behavior (CB) is a crucial goal for modern NLP systems. The research literature, however, includes conflicting perspectives on how CB should be defined, evaluated, and achieved. We propose a conceptual framework to address these questions and survey researchers active in this area.

We find consensus on several key points. Researchers broadly accept our proposed definition of CB, agree that it is not solved by current models, and doubt that scale alone will achieve the target behavior. In other areas, we find the field is split on how to move forward, identifying diverse opportunities for future research.

Toward Compositional Behavior in Neural Models: A Survey of Current Views

Numerous previous studies have sought to determine to what extent language models, pretrained on natural language text, can serve as useful models of human cognition.
In this paper, we are interested in the opposite question: whether we can directly optimize a language model to be a useful cognitive model by aligning it to human psychometric data.
To achieve this, we introduce a novel alignment technique in which we fine-tune a language model to implicitly optimize the parameters of a linear regressor that directly predicts humans' reading times of in-context linguistic units, e.g., phonemes, morphemes, or words, using surprisal estimates derived from the language model. 
Using words as a test case, we evaluate our technique across multiple model sizes and datasets and find that it improves language models' psychometric predictive power.
However, we find an inverse relationship between psychometric power and a model's performance on downstream NLP tasks as well as its perplexity on held-out test data.
While this latter trend has been observed before (Oh et al., 2022; Shain et al., 2024), we are the first to induce it by manipulating a model's alignment to psychometric data.

Reverse-Engineering the Reader

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) have shown strong performance and wide applicability in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, there are significant trustworthiness concerns as RALMs are prone to generating unfaithful outputs, including baseless information or contradictions with the retrieved context. This paper proposes SynCheck, a lightweight monitor that leverages fine-grained decoding dynamics including sequence likelihood, uncertainty quantification, context influence, and semantic alignment to synchronously detect unfaithful sentences. By integrating efficiently measurable and complementary signals, SynCheck enables accurate and immediate feedback and intervention. Experiments show that SynCheck significantly outperforms existing faithfulness detection baselines, achieving over 0.85 AUROC across a suite of six long-form retrieval-augmented generation tasks. Leveraging SynCheck, we further introduce FOD, a faithfulness-oriented decoding algorithm guided by beam search for long-form retrieval-augmented generation. Empirical results demonstrate that FOD outperforms traditional strategies such as abstention, reranking, or contrastive decoding significantly in terms of faithfulness, achieving over 10% improvement across six datasets.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Learning to Correct for QA Reasoning with Black-box LLMs

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