United States

We propose a new method, instruction back-and-forth translation, to improve the quality of instruction-tuning data used for aligning large language models (LLMs). Given preprocessed texts from an initial web corpus (e.g. Dolma (Soldaini et al., 2024)), we generate synthetic instructions using the backtranslation approach proposed by Li et al., (2023), filter the generated data and rewrite the responses to improve their quality further based on the initial texts. Given similar quantities of instructions, fine-tuning Llama-2 on our (synthetic instruction, rewritten response) pairs yields better AlpacaEval win rates than using other common instruction datasets such as Humpback, ShareGPT, Open Orca, Alpaca-GPT4 and Self-instruct, at both 7B and 70B parameter scales. We also demonstrate that rewriting the responses with an LLM is different from direct distillation: the former process yields better win rate at 70B scale, and the two text distributions exhibit significant distinction in the embedding space. Besides, we provide analyses showing that our backtranslated instructions are of higher quality than other sources of synthetic instructions, while our responses are more diverse and complex than what can be obtained from distillation. Overall we find that instruction back-and-forth translation combines the best of both worlds---making use of the information diversity and quantity found on the web, while ensuring the quality of the responses which is necessary for effective alignment.

EMNLP 2024

Better Alignment with Instruction Back-and-Forth Translation

rgat

layout understanding

visually rich forms

vrfu

vrdu

document ai

graph learning

document processing

gnns

information extraction

graph generation

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

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.

The goal of text style transfer is to transform the style of texts while preserving their original meaning, often with only a few examples of the target style. Existing style transfer methods generally rely on the few-shot capabilities of large language models or on complex controllable text generation approaches that are inefficient and underperform on fluency metrics. We introduce TinyStyler, a lightweight but effective approach, which leverages a small language model (800M params) and pre-trained authorship embeddings to perform efficient, few-shot text style transfer. We evaluate on the challenging task of authorship style transfer and find TinyStyler outperforms strong approaches such as GPT-4. We also evaluate TinyStyler's ability to perform text attribute style transfer (formal $\leftrightarrow$ informal) with automatic and human evaluations and find that the approach outperforms recent controllable text generation methods.

TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings

To enhance Large Language Models' (LLMs) reliability, calibration is essential---the model's confidence scores should align with the likelihood of its responses being correct. However, traditional calibration methods typically rely on a binary true/false assessment of response correctness, unsuitable for long-form generations where an answer can be partially correct. Addressing this gap, we introduce a unified calibration framework, in which both the correctness of the LLMs' responses and their associated confidence levels are treated as distributions across a range of scores. We develop three metrics for assessing LLM calibration and propose confidence elicitation methods based on self-consistency and self-evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that larger models don't necessarily guarantee better calibration, that various calibration metrics complement each other, and that self-consistency methods excel in factoid datasets. We also find that calibration can be enhanced through techniques such as fine-tuning, scaling the temperature. Finally, we illustrate one application of long-form calibration through selective answering in long-form responses, optimizing correctness within a constrained API budget.

Calibrating Long-form Generations From Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been instrumental in developing some of the most capable AI systems to date. Despite their success, existing methods typically rely on simple binary labels, such as those indicating preferred outputs in pairwise preferences, which fail to capture the subtle differences in relative quality between pairs. To address this limitation, we introduce an approach called Margin Matching Preference Optimization (MMPO), which incorporates relative quality margins into optimization, leading to improved LLM policies and reward models. Specifically, given quality margins in pairwise preferences, we design soft target probabilities based on the Bradley-Terry model, which are then used to train models with the standard cross-entropy objective. Experiments with both human and AI feedback data demonstrate that MMPO consistently outperforms baseline methods, often by a substantial margin, on popular benchmarks including MT-bench and RewardBench. Notably, the 7B model trained with MMPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on RewardBench as of June 2024, outperforming other models of the same scale. Our analysis also shows that MMPO is more robust to overfitting, leading to better-calibrated models.

Margin Matching Preference Optimization: Enhanced Model Alignment with Granular Feedback

Large Language Models (LLMs) need to be aligned with human expectations to ensure their safety and utility in most applications. Alignment is challenging, costly, and needs to be repeated for every LLM and alignment criterion. We propose to decouple LLMs and alignment by training *aligner* models that can be used to align any LLM for a given criteria on an as-needed basis, thus also reducing the potential negative impacts of alignment on performance. Our recipe for training the aligner models solely relies on synthetic data generated with a (prompted) LLM and can be easily adjusted for a variety of alignment criteria. We use the same synthetic data to train *inspectors*, binary miss-alignment classification models to guide a *squad* of multiple aligners. Our empirical results demonstrate consistent improvements when applying aligner squad to various LLMs, including chat-aligned models, across several instruction-following and red-teaming datasets.

Aligners: Decoupling LLMs and Alignment

Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex human-written instructions is essential for their deployment in real-world applications. While benchmarks like Chatbot Arena use human judges to assess model performance, they are resource-intensive and time-consuming. Alternative methods using LLMs as judges, such as AlpacaEval, MT Bench, WildBench, and InFoBench offer improvements but still do not capture that certain complex instruction aspects are more important than others to follow.

To address this gap, we propose a novel evaluation metric, \textsc{TOWER}, that incorporates human-judged importance into the assessment of complex instruction following. We show that human annotators agree with tree-based representations of these complex instructions nearly as much as they agree with other human annotators. We release tree-based annotations of the InFoBench dataset and the corresponding evaluation code to facilitate future research.

TOWER: Tree Organized Weighting for Evaluating Complex Instructions

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science

Watermarking involves implanting an imperceptible signal into generated text that can later be detected via statistical tests. A prominent family of watermarking strategies for LLMs embeds this signal by upsampling a (pseudorandomly-chosen) subset of tokens at every generation step. However, such signals alter the model's output distribution and can have unintended effects on its downstream performance. In this work, we evaluate the performance of LLMs watermarked using three different strategies over a diverse suite of tasks including those cast as k-class classification (CLS), multiple choice question answering (MCQ), short-form generation (e.g., open-ended question answering) and long-form generation (e.g., translation) tasks. We find that watermarks (under realistic hyperparameters) can cause significant drops in LLMs' effective utility across all tasks. We observe drops of 10 to 20% in CLS tasks in the average case, which shoot up to 100% in the worst case. We notice degradations of about 7% in MCQ tasks, 10-15% in short-form generation, and 5-15% in long-form generation tasks. Our findings highlight the trade-offs that users should be cognizant of when using watermarked models.

Performance Trade-offs of a Family of Text Watermarks

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has been shown to enhance the factual accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing external evidence, but existing methods often suffer from limited reasoning capabilities (e.g., multi-hop complexities) in effectively using such evidence, particularly when using open-source LLMs. To mitigate this gap, in this paper, we introduce a novel framework, **Open-RAG**, designed to enhance reasoning capabilities in RAG with open-source LLMs. Our framework transforms an arbitrary dense LLM into a parameter-efficient sparse mixture of experts (MoE) model capable of handling complex reasoning tasks, including both single- and multi-hop queries. Open-RAG uniquely trains the model to navigate challenging distractors that appear relevant but are misleading. By combining the constructive learning and architectural transformation, Open-RAG leverages latent learning, dynamically selecting relevant experts and integrating external knowledge effectively for more accurate and contextually relevant responses. Additionally, we propose a hybrid adaptive retrieval method to determine retrieval necessity and balance the trade-off between performance gain and inference speed. Experimental results show that Open-RAG outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs and RAG models in various knowledge-intensive tasks. Our method based on Llama2-7B sets new benchmarks, surpassing ChatGPT-RAG and Self-RAG. For example, in multi-hop HotpotQA, it achieves an EM score of 63.3, compared to RAG 2.0's 54 and Command R+'s 60.

Open-RAG: Enhanced Retrieval Augmented Reasoning with Open-Source Large Language Models

Knowledge-intensive language understanding tasks require Language Models (LMs) to integrate relevant context, mitigating their inherent weaknesses, such as incomplete or outdated knowledge. However, conflicting knowledge can be present in the LM’s parameters, termed intra-memory conflict, which can affect a model’s propensity to accept contextual knowledge. To study the effect of intra-memory conflict on LM’s ability to accept the relevant context, we utilise two knowledge conflict measures and a novel dataset containing inherently conflicting data, DYNAMICQA. This dataset includes facts with a temporal dynamic nature where facts can change over time and disputable dynamic facts, which can change depending on the viewpoint. DYNAMICQA is the first to include real-world knowledge conflicts and provide context to study the link between the different types of knowledge conflicts. We also evaluate several measures on their ability to reflect the presence of intra-memory conflict: semantic entropy and a novel coherent persuasion score. With our extensive experiments, we verify that LMs show a greater degree of intra-memory conflict with dynamic facts compared to facts that have a single truth value. Further, we reveal that facts with intra-memory conflict are harder to update with context, suggesting that retrieval-augmented generation will struggle with the most commonly adapted facts

From Internal Conflict to Contextual Adaptation of Language Models

To combat the misuse of Large Language Models (LLMs), many recent studies have presented LLM-generated-text detectors with promising performance. When users instruct LLMs to generate texts, the instruction can include different constraints depending on the user's need. However, most recent studies do not cover such diverse instruction patterns when creating datasets for LLM detection. In this paper, we reveal that even task-oriented constraints --- constraints that would naturally be included in an instruction and are not related to detection-evasion --- cause existing powerful detectors to have a large variance in detection performance. We focus on student essay writing as a realistic domain and manually create task-oriented constraints based on several factors for essay quality. Our experiments show that the standard deviation (SD) of current detector performance on texts generated by an instruction with such a constraint is significantly larger (up to an SD of 14.4 F1-score) than that by generating texts multiple times or paraphrasing the instruction. We also observe an overall trend where the constraints can make LLM detection more challenging than without them. Finally, our analysis indicates that the high instruction-following ability of LLMs fosters the large impact of such constraints on detection performance.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings

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MAIN: Mutual Alignment Is Necessary for instruction tuning