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The recently introduced path-star task is a minimal task designed to exemplify limitations to the abilities of language models (Bachmann and Nagarajan, 2024). It involves a path-star graph where multiple arms radiate from a single starting node and each node is unique. Given the start node and a specified target node that ends an arm, the task is to generate the arm containing that target node. This is straightforward for a human but surprisingly difficult for language models, which did not outperform the random baseline. The authors hypothesized this is due to a deficiency in teacher-forcing and the next-token prediction paradigm. 

We demonstrate the task is learnable using teacher-forcing in alternative settings and that the issue is partially due to representation. We introduce a regularization method using structured samples of the same graph but with differing target nodes, improving results across a variety of model types. We provide RASP proofs showing the task is theoretically solvable. Finally, we find settings where an encoder-only model can consistently solve the task.

EMNLP 2024

The Mystery of the Pathological Path-star Task for Language Models

model bias/unfairness mitigation

bias/toxicity

model bias/fairness evaluation

ethical considerations in nlp applications

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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Accurate text summarization is one of the most common and important tasks performed by Large Language Models, where the costs of human review for an entire document may be high, but the costs of errors in summarization may be even greater. We propose Detecting Errors through Ensembling Prompts (DEEP) - an end-to-end large language model framework for detecting factual errors in text summarization. Our framework uses a diverse set of LLM prompts to identify factual inconsistencies, treating their outputs as binary features, which are then fed into ensembling models. We then calibrate the ensembled models to produce empirically accurate probabilities that a text is factually consistent or free of hallucination. We demonstrate that prior models for detecting factual errors in summaries perform significantly worse without optimizing the thresholds on subsets of the evaluated dataset. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) balanced accuracy on the AggreFact-XSUM FTSOTA, TofuEval Summary-Level, and HaluEval Summarization benchmarks in detecting factual errors within transformer-generated text summaries. It does so without any fine-tuning of the language model or reliance on thresholding techniques not available in practical settings.

Detecting Errors through Ensembling Prompts (DEEP): An End-to-End LLM Framework for Detecting Factual Errors

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. However, such a paradigm fails to comprehensively differentiate the fine-grained language and cognitive skills, rendering the lack of sufficient interpretation to LLMs' capabilities. In this paper, we present FAC$^2$E, a framework for Fine-grAined and Cognition-grounded LLMs' Capability Evaluation. Specifically, we formulate LLMs' evaluation in a multi-dimensional and explainable manner by dissociating the language-related capabilities and the cognition-related ones. Besides, through extracting the intermediate reasoning from LLMs, we further break down the process of applying a specific capability into three sub-steps: recalling relevant knowledge, utilizing knowledge, and solving problems. Finally, FAC$^2$E evaluates each sub-step of each fine-grained capability, providing a two-faceted diagnosis for LLMs. Utilizing FAC$^2$E, we identify a common shortfall in knowledge utilization among models and propose a straightforward, knowledge-enhanced method to mitigate this issue. Our results not only showcase promising performance enhancements but also highlight a direction for future LLM advancements.

FAC$^2$E: Better Understanding Large Language Model Capabilities by Dissociating Language and Cognition

Automated red teaming is an effective method for identifying misaligned behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches, however, often focus primarily on improving attack success rates while overlooking the need for comprehensive test case coverage. Additionally, most of these methods are limited to single-turn red teaming, failing to capture the multi-turn dynamics of real-world human-machine interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose **HARM** (**H**olistic **A**utomated **R**ed tea**M**ing), which scales up the diversity of test cases using a top-down approach based on an extensible, fine-grained risk taxonomy. Our method also leverages a novel fine-tuning strategy and reinforcement learning techniques to facilitate multi-turn adversarial probing in a human-like manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables a more systematic understanding of model vulnerabilities and offers more targeted guidance for the alignment process.

Holistic Automated Red Teaming for Large Language Models through Top-Down Test Case Generation and Multi-turn Interaction

In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated excellent performance across various downstream NLP tasks, especially when synergized with powerful large language models (LLMs). 
Existing studies evaluate ICL methods primarily based on downstream task performance. This evaluation protocol overlooks the significant cost associated with the demonstration configuration process, i.e., tuning the demonstration as the ICL prompt. However, in this work, we point out that the evaluation protocol leads to unfair comparisons and potentially biased evaluation, because we surprisingly find the correlation between the configuration costs and task performance. Then we call for a two-dimensional evaluation paradigm that considers both of these aspects, facilitating a fairer comparison.
Finally, based on our empirical finding that the optimized demonstration on one language model generalizes across language models of different sizes, we introduce a simple yet efficient strategy that can be applied to any ICL method as a plugin, yielding a better trade-off between the two dimensions according to the proposed evaluation paradigm.

Rethinking the Evaluation of In-Context Learning for LLMs

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven considerable interest in fine-tuning them with domain-specific data to create specialized language models. Nevertheless, such domain-specific fine-tuning data often contains contextually sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Direct fine-tuning LLMs on this data without privacy protection poses a risk of data leakage of sensitive PII during inference time. To address this challenge, we introduce Contextual Privacy Protection Language Models (CPPLM), a novel paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. Our work offers a theoretical analysis for model design and delves into various techniques such as corpus curation, penalty-based unlikelihood in training loss, and instruction-based tuning, etc. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. In particular, instruction tuning with both positive and negative examples, stands out as a promising method, effectively protecting private data while enhancing the model’s knowledge. Our work underscores the potential for Large Language Models as robust contextual privacy protection learners.

Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners

Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification ($e.g.$, using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling ($e.g.$, using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, $i.e.$, the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a $multi-granularity integration$ framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graph-aware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues. Codes are available at https://github.com/wykk00/GraphBridge.

Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs

Most works on gender bias focus on intrinsic bias --- removing traces of information about a protected group from the model's internal representation. However, these works are often disconnected from the impact of such debiasing on downstream applications, which is the main motivation for debiasing in the first place. In this work, we systematically test how methods for intrinsic debiasing affect neural machine translation models, by measuring the extrinsic bias of such systems under different design choices. We highlight three challenges and mismatches between the debiasing techniques and their end-goal usage, including the choice of embeddings to debias, the mismatch between words and sub-word tokens debiasing, and the effect on different target languages. We find that these considerations have a significant impact on downstream performance and the success of debiasing.

Applying Intrinsic Debiasing on Downstream Tasks: Challenges and Considerations for Machine Translation

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a crucial approach to aligning language models with human values and intentions. A fundamental challenge in this method lies in ensuring that the reward model accurately understands and evaluates human preferences. Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach the reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions. To address this issue, we introduce contrastive learning into the reward modeling process. In addition to supervised ranking loss, we introduce an unsupervised contrastive loss to enable the reward model to fully capture the distinctions in contrastive data. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed contrastive learning-based reward modeling method effectively enhances the generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences.

Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning

Although language model scores are often treated as probabilities, their reliability as probability estimators has mainly been studied through calibration, overlooking other aspects. In particular, it is unclear whether language models produce the same value for different ways of assigning joint probabilities to word spans. Our work introduces a novel framework, ConTestS (Consistency Testing over Spans), involving statistical tests to assess score consistency across interchangeable completion and conditioning orders. We conduct experiments on post-release real and synthetic data to eliminate training effects. Our findings reveal that both Masked Language Models (MLMs) and autoregressive models exhibit inconsistent predictions, with autoregressive models showing larger discrepancies. Larger MLMs tend to produce more consistent predictions, while autoregressive models show the opposite trend. Moreover, for both model types, prediction entropies offer insights into the true word span likelihood and therefore can aid in selecting optimal decoding strategies. The inconsistencies revealed by our analysis, as well their connection to prediction entropies and differences between model types, can serve as useful guides for future research on addressing these limitations.

CONTESTS: a Framework for Consistency Testing of Span Probabilities in Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a powerful ability for text generation. However, achieving optimal results with a given prompt or instruction can be challenging, especially for billion-sized models. Additionally, undesired behaviors such as toxicity or hallucinations can manifest. While much larger models (e.g., ChatGPT) may demonstrate strength in mitigating these issues, there is still no guarantee of complete prevention. In this work, we propose formalizing text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. The estimation of future constraint satisfaction, accomplished using LLMs, guides the text generation process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach across three distinct text generation tasks: keyword-constrained generation (Lin et al., 2020), toxicity reduction (Gehman et al., 2020), and factual correctness in question-answering (Gao et al., 2023).

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Next from EMNLP 2024

Detecting Errors through Ensembling Prompts (DEEP): An End-to-End LLM Framework for Detecting Factual Errors

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