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Existing research on Domain Robustness (DR) suffers from disparate setups, limited task variety, and scarce research on recent capabilities such as in-context learning. Furthermore, the common practice of measuring DR might not be fully accurate. Current research focuses on challenge sets and relies solely on the Source Drop (SD): Using the source in-domain performance as a reference point for degradation. However, we argue that the Target Drop (TD), which measures degradation from the target in-domain performance, should be used as a complementary point of view. To address these issues, we first curated a DR benchmark comprised of 7 diverse NLP tasks, which enabled us to measure both the SD and the TD. We then conducted a comprehensive large-scale DR study involving over 14,000 domain shifts across 21 fine-tuned models and few-shot LLMs. We found that both model types suffer from drops upon domain shifts. While fine-tuned models excel in-domain, few-shot LLMs often surpass them cross-domain, showing better robustness. In addition, we found that a large SD can often be explained by shifting to a harder domain rather than by a genuine DR challenge, and this highlights the importance of TD as a complementary metric. We hope our study will shed light on the current DR state of NLP models and promote improved evaluation practices toward more robust models.

EMNLP 2024

Measuring the Robustness of NLP Models to Domain Shifts

less-resourced languages

multilingual representations

multilingualism

## 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.

poster

RL-based techniques can be employed to search for prompts that, when fed into a target language model, maximize a set of user-specified reward functions. However, in many target applications, the natural reward functions are in tension with one another -- for example, content preservation vs. style matching in style transfer tasks. Current techniques focus on maximizing the average of reward functions, which does not necessarily lead to prompts that achieve balance across rewards -- an issue that has been well-studied in the multi-objective and robust optimization literature. In this paper, we conduct an empirical comparison of several existing multi-objective optimization techniques adapted to this new setting: RL-based discrete prompt optimization. We compare two methods optimizing the volume of the Pareto reward surface and one method that chooses an update direction that benefits all rewards simultaneously. We evaluate performance on two NLP tasks: style transfer and machine translation, each using three competing reward functions. Our experiments demonstrate that multi-objective methods that directly optimize the volume of the Pareto reward surface perform better and achieve a better balance of all rewards than those that attempt to find monotonic update directions.

MORL-Prompt: An Empirical Analysis of Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Prompt Optimization

As large language models (LLMs) gain widespread adoption, ensuring they cater to diverse user needs has become increasingly important. While many researchers have studied LLM personalization and role-playing, they primarily use LLM-as-a-Judge for evaluation without thoroughly examining its validity. This paper investigates the reliability of LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge—asking LLMs to judge user preferences based on persona. Our results suggest that LLM-as-a-Personalized-Judge is less reliable for personalization than previously believed, showing low agreement with human ground truth. We observed that the personas provided to the LLM often have limited predictive power for the tasks, leading us to introduce verbal uncertainty estimation. We find that powerful LLMs are aware of the certainty of their prediction and can achieve high agreement with ground truth on high-certainty samples, indicating a promising approach for building reliable and scalable proxies for evaluating LLM personalization. Our human annotation reveals that third-person crowd worker evaluations of personalized preferences are even worse than LLM predictions, highlighting the challenges of evaluating LLM personalization.

Can LLM be a Personalized Judge?

In recent years, the rapid increase in scientific papers has overwhelmed traditional review mechanisms, resulting in varying quality of publications. Although existing methods have explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated scientific reviewing, their generated contents are often generic or partial. To address the issues above, we introduce an automated paper reviewing framework SEA. It comprises of three modules: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis, which are represented by models SEA-S, SEA-E, and SEA-A, respectively. Initially, SEA-S distills data standardization capabilities of GPT-4 for integrating multiple reviews for a paper. Then, SEA-E utilizes standardized data for fine-tuning, enabling it to generate constructive reviews. Finally, SEA-A introduces a new evaluation metric called mismatch score to assess the consistency between paper contents and reviews. Moreover, we design a self-correction strategy to enhance the consistency. Extensive experimental results on datasets collected from eight venues show that SEA can generate valuable insights for authors to improve their papers.

Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis

Table reasoning tasks have shown remarkable progress with the development of large language models (LLMs), which involve interpreting and drawing conclusions from tabular data based on natural language (NL) questions. Existing solutions mainly tested on smaller tables face scalability issues and struggle with complex queries due to incomplete or dispersed data across different table sections. To alleviate these challenges, we propose TAP4LLM as a versatile pre-processor suite for leveraging LLMs in table-based tasks effectively. It covers several distinct components: (1) table sampling to decompose large tables into manageable sub-tables based on query semantics, (2) table augmentation to enhance tables with additional knowledge from external sources or models, and (3) table packing \& serialization to convert tables into various formats suitable for LLMs' understanding. In each module, we design and compare several common methods for usage in various scenarios, aiming to shed light on the best practices for leveraging LLMs for table-reasoning tasks. Our experiments show that our method improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities in various tabular tasks and enhances the interaction between LLMs and tabular data by employing effective pre-processing.

TAP4LLM: Table Provider on Sampling, Augmenting, and Packing Semi-structured Data for Large Language Model Reasoning

In visual speech processing, context modeling capability is one of the most important requirements due to the ambiguous nature of lip movements. For example, homophenes, words that share identical lip movements but produce different sounds, can be distinguished by considering the context. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely Visual Speech Processing incorporated with LLMs (VSP-LLM), to maximize the context modeling ability by bringing the overwhelming power of LLMs. Specifically, VSP-LLM is designed to perform multi-tasks of visual speech recognition and translation, where the given instructions control the type of task. The input video is mapped to the input latent space of an LLM by employing a self-supervised visual speech model. Focused on the fact that there is redundant information in input frames, we propose a novel deduplication method that reduces the embedded visual features by employing visual speech units. Through the proposed deduplication and low rank adaptation, VSP-LLM can be trained in a computationally efficient manner. In the translation dataset, the MuAViC benchmark, we demonstrate that VSP-LLM trained on just 30 hours of labeled data can more effectively translate compared to the recent model trained with 433 hours of data.

Where Visual Speech Meets Language: VSP-LLM Framework for Efficient and Context-Aware Visual Speech Processing

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to simulate human-like decision-making, yet the impact of psychological pressures on their decision-making processes remains underexplored. To understand how psychological pressures influence decision-making in LLMs, we tested LLMs on various high-level tasks, using both explicit and implicit pressure prompts. Moreover, we examined LLM responses under different personas to compare with human behavior under pressure. Our findings show that pressures significantly affect LLMs' decision-making, varying across tasks and models. Persona-based analysis suggests some models exhibit human-like sensitivity to pressure, though with some variability. Furthermore, by analyzing both the responses and reasoning patterns, we identified the values LLMs prioritize under specific social pressures. These insights deepen our understanding of LLM behavior and demonstrate the potential for more realistic social simulation experiments.

Will LLMs Sink or Swim? Exploring Decision-Making Under Pressure

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being employed by end-users for various tasks, including sensitive ones such as health counseling, disregarding potential safety concerns. It is thus necessary to understand how adequately LLMs perform in such domains. We conduct a case study on ChatGPT in nutrition counseling, a popular use-case where the model supports a user with their dietary struggles. We crowd-source real-world diet-related struggles, then work with nutrition experts to generate supportive text using ChatGPT. Finally, experts evaluate the safety and text quality of ChatGPT's output. The result is the HAI-coaching dataset, containing ~2.4K crowdsourced dietary struggles and ~97K corresponding ChatGPT-generated and expert-annotated supportive texts. We analyse ChatGPT's performance, discovering potentially harmful behaviours, especially for sensitive topics like mental health. Finally, we use HAI-coaching to test open LLMs on various downstream tasks, showing that even the latest models struggle to achieve good performance. HAI-coaching is available at https://github.com/uccollab/\\hai-coaching/

Ask the experts: sourcing a high-quality nutrition counseling dataset through Human-AI collaboration

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved almost human-like performance on various tasks. While some LLMs have been trained on multilingual data, most of the training data is in English; hence, their performance in English greatly exceeds other languages. To our knowledge, we are the first to collect and translate a large collection of texts, instructions, and benchmarks and train, evaluate, and release open-source LLMs tailored for Romanian. We evaluate our methods on four different categories, including academic benchmarks, MT-Bench (manually translated), and a professionally built historical, cultural, and social benchmark adapted to Romanian. We argue for the usefulness and high performance of RoLLMs by obtaining state-of-the-art results across the board. We publicly release all resources (i.e., data, training and evaluation code, models) with the goal of supporting and encouraging research on Romanian LLMs while concurrently creating a generalizable recipe adequate for other low or less-resourced languages.

Vorbești Românește? A Recipe to Train Powerful Romanian LLMs with English Instructions

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system is important in domains such as e-commerce, which has many long-tail entities and frequently updated information. Most existing works adopt separate modules for retrieval and generation, which may be suboptimal since the retrieval task and the generation task cannot benefit from each other to improve performance. We propose a novel Backbone Shared RAG framework (BSharedRAG). It first uses a domain-specific corpus to continually pre-train a base model as a domain-specific backbone model and then trains two plug-and-play Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules based on the shared backbone to minimize retrieval and generation losses respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed BSharedRAG outperforms baseline models by 5% and 13% in Hit@3 upon two datasets in retrieval evaluation and by 23% in terms of BLEU-3 in generation evaluation. Our codes, models, and dataset are available at https://bsharedrag.github.io.

BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain

Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user’s background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various instances of this problem, there lacks a unified framework to study this behavior. This work systematically studies IP through a rigorous mathematical formulation, a multi-perspective moral reasoning framework, and a set of case studies. Our theoretical foundation for IP relies on a structural causal model and introduces a novel method, indirect intervention, to estimate the causal effect of a mediator variable that cannot be directly intervened upon. Beyond the technical approach, we also introduce a set of moral reasoning principles based on three schools of moral philosophy to study when IP may or may not be ethically appropriate. Equipped with both mathematical and ethical insights, we present three diverse case studies illustrating the varied nature of the IP problem and offer recommendations for future research.

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MORL-Prompt: An Empirical Analysis of Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Discrete Prompt Optimization

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Measuring the Robustness of NLP Models to Domain Shifts