United States

Alignment is a crucial step to enhance the instruction-following and conversational abilities of language models. Despite many recent works proposing new algorithms, datasets, and training pipelines, there is a lack of comprehensive studies measuring the impact of various design choices throughout the whole training process. We first conduct a rigorous analysis over a three-stage training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, offline preference learning, and online preference learning. We have found that using techniques like sequence packing, loss masking in SFT, increasing the preference dataset size in DPO, and online DPO training can significantly improve the performance of language models. We then train from Gemma-2b-base and LLama-3-8b-base, and find that our best models exceed the performance of the official instruct models tuned with closed-source data and algorithms. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/Columbia-NLP-Lab/LionAlignment.

EMNLP 2024

LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models

data preprocessing

fine-tuning

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.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

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.

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.

Medical coding, the translation of unstructured clinical text into standardized medical codes, is a crucial but time-consuming healthcare practice. Though large language models (LLM) could automate the coding process and improve the efficiency of such tasks, interpretability remains paramount for maintaining patient trust. Current efforts in interpretability of medical coding applications rely heavily on label attention mechanisms, which often leads to the highlighting of extraneous tokens irrelevant to the ICD code. To facilitate accurate interpretability in medical language models, this paper leverages dictionary learning that can efficiently extract sparsely activated representations from dense language model embeddings in superposition. Compared with common label attention mechanisms, our model goes beyond token-level representations by building an interpretable dictionary which enhances the mechanistic-based explanations for each ICD code prediction, even when the highlighted tokens are medically irrelevant. We show that dictionary features are human interpretable, can elucidate the hidden meanings of upwards of 90% of medically irrelevant tokens, and steer model behavior.

Beyond Label Attention: Transparency in Language Models for Automated Medical Coding via Dictionary Learning

Efficient state space models (SSMs), including linear recurrent neural networks and linear attention variants, have emerged as potential alternative language models to Transformers. While efficient, SSMs struggle with tasks requiring in-context retrieval, such as text copying and associative recall, limiting their usefulness in practical settings. Prior work on how to meet this challenge has focused on the internal model architecture and not investigated the role of the training procedure. This paper proposes a new training procedure that improve the performance of SSMs on retrieval-intensive tasks. This novel pre-training procedure combines a bidirectional processing of the input with dynamic mixtures of pre-training objectives to improve the utilization of the SSM's fixed-size state. Our experimental evaluations show that this procedure significantly improves performance on retrieval-intensive tasks that challenge current SSMs, such as phone book lookup, long paragraph question-answering, and infilling tasks. Our findings offer insights into a new direction to advance the training of SSMs to close the performance gap with Transformers.

Birdie: Advancing State Space Models with a Minimalist Architecture and Novel Pre-training Objectives

Multilingual large language models are designed, claimed, and expected to cater to speakers of varied languages. We hypothesise that the current practices of fine-tuning and evaluating these models may not perfectly align with this objective owing to a heavy reliance on translation, which cannot cover language-specific knowledge but can introduce translation defects. It remains unknown whether the nature of the instruction data has an impact on the model output; conversely, it is questionable whether translated test sets can capture such nuances. Due to the often coupled practices of using translated data in both stages, such imperfections could have been overlooked. This work investigates these issues using controlled native or translated data during the instruction tuning and evaluation stages. We show that native or generation benchmarks reveal a notable difference between native and translated instruction data especially when model performance is high, whereas other types of test sets cannot. The comparison between round-trip and single-pass translations reflects the importance of knowledge from language-native resources. Finally, we demonstrate that regularization is beneficial to bridging this gap on structured but not generative tasks.

Is It Good Data for Multilingual Instruction Tuning or Just Bad Multilingual Evaluation for Large Language Models?

LLMs process text as sequences of tokens that roughly correspond to words, where less common words are represented by multiple tokens. However, individual tokens are often semantically unrelated to the meanings of the words/concepts they comprise. For example, Llama-2-7b's tokenizer splits the word "patrolling" into two tokens, "pat" and "rolling", neither of which correspond to semantically meaningful units like "patrol" or "-ing." Similarly, the overall meanings of named entities like "Neil Young" and multi-word expressions like "break a leg" cannot be directly inferred from their constituent tokens. Mechanistically, how do LLMs convert such arbitrary groups of tokens into useful higher-level representations? In this work, we find that last token representations of named entities and multi-token words exhibit a pronounced "erasure" effect, where information about previous and current tokens is rapidly forgotten in early layers. Using this observation, we propose a method to "read out" the implicit vocabulary of an autoregressive LLM by examining differences in token representations across layers, and present results of this method for Llama-2-7b and Llama-3-8B. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to probe the implicit vocabulary of an LLM.

Token Erasure as a Footprint of Implicit Vocabulary Items in LLMs

Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the learning algorithm, and training data. To test whether theoretical lower bounds imply \emph{learnability} of formal languages, we turn to recent work relating transformers to $n$-gram language models (LMs). We study transformers' ability to learn random $n$-gram LMs of two kinds: ones with arbitrary next-symbol probabilities and ones where those are defined with shared parameters. We find that classic estimation techniques for $n$-gram LMs such as add-$\lambda$ smoothing outperform transformers on the former, while transformers perform better on the latter, outperforming methods specifically designed to learn $n$-gram LMs.

Can Transformer Language Models Learn $n$-gram Language Models?

Finding appropriate prompts for the specific task has become an important issue as the usage of Large Language Models (LLM) have expanded. However, the variety of input-output formats complicate finding the prompts. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising for prompt tuning due to its ability to incrementally produce better results through interaction with the environment. But its inherent training instability and environmental dependency make it difficult to use in practice. In this paper, we propose StablePrompt, a prompt tuning method based on RL. We formulate prompt tuning as RL problem between agent and target LLM, and introduce Adaptive Proximal Policy Optimization (APPO), an modified version of PPO for prompt tuning. APPO introduces an anchor model and updates it adaptively based on the training trajectory. Using this anchor model for the KL divergence term in PPO keeps the search space flexible and ensures training stability. We evaluate StablePrompt on various tasks, including text classification, question answering, and text generation. StablePrompt achieves State-of-The-Art performance across diverse tasks. We demonstrates that StablePrompt performs well across various types and sizes of LLMs. Furthermore, we present TTE-StablePrompt, an extension for generating input-dependent prompts. It outperforms StablePrompt in tasks that are hard to solve with a single prompt. This shows that StablePrompt is an extensible and stable RL framework for LLM.

StablePrompt : Automatic Prompt Tuning using Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model

In-context learning (ICL) greatly improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) on various down-stream tasks, where the improvement highly depends on the quality of demonstrations. In this work, we introduce syntactic knowledge to select better in-context examples for machine translation (MT). We propose a new strategy, namely \textbf{S}yntax-augmented \textbf{CO}verage-based \textbf{I}n-context example selection (SCOI), leveraging the deep syntactic structure beyond conventional word matching. Specifically, we measure the set-level syntactic coverage by computing the coverage of polynomial terms with the help of a simplified tree-to-polynomial algorithm, and lexical coverage using word overlap. Furthermore, we devise an alternate selection approach to combine both coverage measures, taking advantage of syntactic and lexical information. We conduct experiments with two multi-lingual LLMs on six translation directions. Empirical results show that our proposed SCOI obtains the highest average COMET score among all learning-free methods, indicating that combining syntactic and lexical coverage successfully helps to select better in-context examples for MT. Our code is available at https://github.com/JamyDon/SCOI.

SCOI: Syntax-augmented Coverage-based In-context Example Selection for Machine Translation

This paper studies in-context learning by decomposing the output of large language models into the individual contributions of attention heads and MLPs (components). We observe curious components: good-performing ones that individually do well on a classification task, even when the model performs poorly; bad-performing ones that do much worse than chance; and label-biased components that always predict the same label. We find that component accuracies are well-correlated across different demonstration sets and perturbations of prompt templates. Based on our findings, we propose component reweighting, which learns to linearly re-scale the component activations from a few labeled examples. Given 24 labeled examples, our method improves by an average of 6.0% accuracy points over 24-shot ICL across 8 tasks on Llama-2-7B. Overall, this paper both enriches our understanding of ICL and provides a practical method for improvement by examining model internals.

When Parts are Greater Than Sums: Individual LLM Components Can Outperform Full Models

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in numerous natural language generation tasks. For LLMs to be applied reliably, it is essential to have an accurate measure of their confidence. Currently, the most commonly used confidence score function is the likelihood of the generated sequence, which, however, conflates semantic and syntactic components. For instance, in question-answering (QA) tasks, an awkward phrasing of the correct answer might result in a lower probability prediction. Additionally, different tokens should be weighted differently depending on the context. In this work, we propose enhancing the predicted sequence probability by assigning different weights to various tokens using attention values elicited from the base LLM. By employing a validation set, we can identify the relevant attention heads, thereby significantly improving the reliability of the vanilla sequence probability confidence measure. We refer to this new score as the Contextualized Sequence Likelihood (CSL). CSL is easy to implement, fast to compute, and offers considerable potential for further improvement with task-specific prompts. Across several QA datasets and a diverse array of LLMs, CSL has demonstrated significantly higher reliability than state-of-the-art baselines in predicting generation quality, as measured by the AUROC or AUARC.

Contextualized Sequence Likelihood: Enhanced Confidence Scores for Natural Language Generation

To better interpret the intrinsic mechanism of large language models (LLMs), recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units. A monosemantic neuron is dedicated to a single and specific concept, which forms a one-to-one correlation between neurons and concepts. Despite extensive research in monosemanticity probing, it remains unclear whether monosemanticity is beneficial or harmful to model capacity. To explore this question, we revisit monosemanticity from the feature decorrelation perspective and advocate for its encouragement. We experimentally observe that the current conclusion by \citet{wang2024learning}, which suggests that decreasing monosemanticity enhances model performance, does not hold when the model changes. Instead, we demonstrate that monosemanticity consistently exhibits a positive correlation with model capacity, in the preference alignment process. Consequently, we apply feature correlation as a proxy for monosemanticity and incorporate a feature decorrelation regularizer into the dynamic preference optimization process. The experiments show that our method not only enhances representation diversity and activation sparsity but also improves preference alignment performance.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Beyond Label Attention: Transparency in Language Models for Automated Medical Coding via Dictionary Learning

Similar lecture

Pre-DPO: Improving Data Utilization in Direct Preference Optimization Using a Guiding Reference Model