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With the growing integration of AI in daily life, ensuring the robustness of systems to inference-time attacks is crucial. Among the approaches for certifying robustness to such adversarial examples, randomized smoothing has emerged as highly promising due to its nature as a wrapper around arbitrary black-box models. Previous work on randomized smoothing in natural language processing has primarily focused on specific subsets of edit distance operations, such as synonym substitution or word insertion, without exploring the certification of all edit operations. In this paper, we adapt Randomized Deletion (Huang et al., 2023) and propose, CERTified Edit Distance defense (CERT-ED) for natural language classification. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that CERT-ED outperforms the existing Hamming distance method RanMASK (Zeng et al., 2023) in 4 out of 5 datasets in terms of both accuracy and the cardinality of the certificate. By covering various threat models, including 5 direct and 5 transfer attacks, our method improves empirical robustness in 38 out of 50 settings.

EMNLP 2024

CERT-ED: Certifiably Robust Text Classification for Edit Distance

language agents

asking clarification questions

dialogue and interactive systems

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

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.
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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.

Test suites assess natural language processing models' performance on specific functionalities: cases of interest involving model robustness, fairness, or particular linguistic capabilities. This paper introduces specification instructions: text descriptions specifying fine-grained task-specific behaviors. For each functionality in a suite, we generate an instruction that describes it. We combine the specification instructions to create specification-augmented prompts, which we feed to language models pre-trained on natural instruction data.

We conduct experiments to measure how optimizing for some functionalities may negatively impact functionalities that are not covered by the specification set. Our analyses across four tasks and models of diverse sizes and families show that smaller models struggle to follow specification instructions. However, larger models (>~3B params.) can benefit from specifications and---surprisingly---even generalize certain desirable behaviors across functionalities.

Functionality learning through specification instructions

While fine-tuning of pre-trained language models generally helps to overcome the lack of labelled training samples, it also displays model performance instability. This instability mainly originates from randomness in initialisation or data shuffling. To address this, researchers either modify the training process or augment the available samples, which typically results in increased computational costs. We propose a new mitigation strategy, called **Delayed Ensemble with Noisy Interpolation (DENI)**, that leverages the strengths of ensembling, noise regularisation and model interpolation, while retaining computational efficiency. We compare DENI with 9 representative mitigation strategies across 3 models, 4 tuning strategies and 7 text classification datasets. We show that: 1) DENI outperforms the best performing mitigation strategy (Ensemble), while using only a fraction of its cost; 2) the mitigation strategies are beneficial for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, outperforming full fine-tuning in specific cases; and 3) combining DENI with data augmentation often leads to even more effective instability mitigation.

Fighting Randomness with Randomness: Mitigating Optimisation Instability of Fine-Tuning using Delayed Ensemble and Noisy Interpolation

In the Minecraft Collaborative Building Task, two players collaborate: an Architect (A) provides instructions to a Builder (B) to assemble a specified structure using 3D blocks. In this work, we investigate the use of large language models (LLMs) to predict the sequence of actions taken by the Builder. Leveraging LLMs’ in-context learning abilities, we use few-shot prompting techniques, that significantly improve performance over baseline methods. Additionally, we present a detailed analysis of the gaps in performance for future work.

Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation for Situated Action Generation: A Case Study on Minecraft

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have been shown to encode binary gender information of text authors, raising the risk of skewed representations and downstream harms. This effect is yet to be examined for transgender and non-binary identities, whose frequent marginalization may exacerbate harmful system behaviors. Addressing this gap, we first create TRANsCRIPT, a corpus of YouTube transcripts from transgender, cisgender, and non-binary speakers. Using this dataset, we probe various PLMs to assess if they encode the gender identity information, examining both frozen and fine-tuned representations as well as representations for inputs with author-specific words removed. Our findings reveal that PLM representations encode information for all gender identities but to different extents. The divergence is most pronounced for cis women and non-binary individuals, underscoring the critical need for gender-inclusive approaches to NLP systems.

Gender Identity in Pretrained Language Models: An Inclusive Approach to Data Creation and Probing

Easy Read text is one of the main forms of access to information for people with reading difficulties. One of the key characteristics of this type of text is the requirement to split sentences into smaller grammatical segments, to facilitate reading. Automated segmentation methods could foster the creation of Easy Read content, but their viability has yet to be addressed. In this work, we study novel methods for the task, leveraging masked and generative language models, along with constituent parsing. We conduct comprehensive automatic and human evaluations in three languages, analysing the strengths and weaknesses of the proposed alternatives, under scarce resource limitations. Our results highlight the viability of automated Easy Read segmentation and remaining deficiencies compared to expert-driven human segmentation.

Automating Easy Read Text Segmentation

This position paper proposes a data-centric viewpoint of AI research, focusing on large language models (LLMs). We start by making a key observation that data is instrumental in the developmental (e.g., pretraining and fine-tuning) and inferential stages (e.g., in-context learning) of LLMs, and advocate that data-centric research should receive more attention from the community. We identify four specific scenarios centered around data, covering data-centric benchmarks and data curation, data attribution, knowledge transfer, and inference contextualization. In each scenario, we underscore the importance of data, highlight promising research directions, and articulate the potential impacts on the research community and, where applicable, the society as a whole. For instance, we advocate for a suite of data-centric benchmarks tailored to the scale and complexity of data for LLMs. These benchmarks can be used to develop new data curation methods and document research efforts and results, which can help promote openness and transparency in AI and LLM research.

Position Paper: Data-Centric AI in the Age of Large Language Models

Combining large language models during training or at inference time has shown substantial performance gain over component LLMs. This paper presents LLM-TOPLA, a diversity-optimized LLM ensemble method with three unique properties: (i) We introduce the focal diversity metric to capture the diversity-performance correlation among component LLMs of an ensemble. (ii) We develop a diversity-optimized ensemble pruning algorithm to select the top-k sub-ensembles from a pool of $N$ base LLMs. Our pruning method recommends top-performing LLM subensembles of size $S$, often much smaller than $N$. (iii) We generate new output for each prompt query by utilizing a learn-to-ensemble approach, which learns to detect and resolve the output inconsistency among all component LLMs of an ensemble. Extensive evaluation on four different benchmarks shows good performance gain over the best LLM ensemble methods: (i) In constrained solution set problems, LLM-TOPLA outperforms the best-performing ensemble (Mixtral) by 2.2\% in accuracy on MMLU and the best-performing LLM ensemble (MoreAgent) on GSM8k by 2.1\%. 
(ii) In generative tasks, LLM-TOPLA outperforms the top-2 performers (Llama70b/Mixtral) on SearchQA by $3.9\mathrm{x}$ in F1, and on XSum by more than $38$ in ROUGE-1. Our code and dataset, which contains outputs of 8 modern LLMs on 4 benchmarks is available at \url{https://github.com/git-disl/llm-topla}

LLM-TOPLA: Efficient LLM Ensemble by Maximising Diversity

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks. However, current training approaches combine standard cross-entropy loss with extensive data, human feedback, or ad hoc methods to enhance performance. These solutions are often not scalable or feasible due to their associated costs, complexity, or resource requirements. This study investigates the use of established semantic segmentation loss functions in natural language generation to create a versatile, practical, and scalable solution for fine-tuning different architectures. We evaluate their effectiveness in solving Math Word Problems and question answering across different models of varying sizes. For the analyzed tasks, we found that the traditional Cross-Entropy loss represents a sub-optimal choice, while models trained to minimize alternative (task-dependent) losses, such as Focal or Lovász, achieve a mean improvement of +36% on exact match without requiring additional data or human feedback. These findings suggest a promising pathway for more efficient and accessible training processes.

Beyond Accuracy Optimization: Computer Vision Losses for Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be a great success in a wide range of applications ranging from regular NLP-based use cases to AI agents. LLMs have been trained on a vast corpus of texts from various sources; despite the best efforts during the data pre-processing stage while training the LLMs, they may pick some undesirable information such as personally identifiable information (PII). Consequently, in recent times research in the area of Machine Unlearning (MUL) has become active, the main idea is to force LLMs to forget (unlearn) certain information (e.g., PII) without suffering from performance loss on regular tasks. In this work, we examine the robustness of the existing MUL techniques for their ability to enable leakage-proof forgetting in LLMs. In particular, we examine the effect of data transformation on forgetting, i.e., is an unlearned LLM able to recall forgotten information if there is a change in the format of the input? Our findings on the TOFU dataset highlight the necessity of using diverse data formats to quantify unlearning in LLMs more reliably.

Towards Robust Evaluation of Unlearning in LLMs via Data Transformations

News recommendation is a challenging task that involves personalization based on the interaction history and preferences of each user. Recent works have leveraged the power of pretrained language models (PLMs) to directly rank news items by using inference approaches that predominately fall into three categories: pointwise, pairwise, and listwise learning-to-rank. While pointwise methods offer linear inference complexity, they fail to capture crucial comparative information between items that is more effective for ranking tasks. Conversely, pairwise and listwise approaches excel at incorporating these comparisons but suffer from practical limitations: pairwise approaches are either computationally expensive or lack theoretical guarantees and listwise methods often perform poorly in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for PLM-based news recommendation that integrates both pointwise relevance prediction and pairwise comparisons in a scalable manner. We present a rigorous theoretical analysis of our framework, establishing conditions under which our approach guarantees improved performance. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the MIND and Adressa news recommendation datasets.

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Functionality learning through specification instructions

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ertified Robustness to Text Adversarial Attacks by Randomized [MASK]