United States

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.

EMNLP 2024

Margin Matching Preference Optimization: Enhanced Model Alignment with Granular Feedback

instruction tuning

topic classification

low-resource languages

multilinguality

language modeling

sentiment analysis

natural language processing

named entity recognition

question answering

machine translation

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)* 

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EACL 2026

Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 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.
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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.

How You Prompt Matters! Even Task-Oriented Constraints in Instructions Affect LLM-Generated Text Detection

Generating ironic content is challenging: it requires a nuanced understanding of context and implicit references and balancing seriousness and playfulness. Moreover, irony is highly subjective and can depend on various factors, such as social, cultural, or generational aspects. 
This paper explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can learn to generate ironic responses to social media posts. To do so, we fine-tune two models to generate ironic and non-ironic content and deeply analyze their outputs' linguistic characteristics, their connection to the original post, and their similarity to the human-written replies. We also conduct a large-scale human evaluation of the outputs. 
Additionally, we investigate whether LLMs can learn a form of irony tied to a generational perspective, with mixed results.

I'm sure you're a real scholar yourself: Exploring Ironic Content Generation by Large Language Models

Prompt compression condenses contexts while maintaining their informativeness for different usage scenarios. It not only shortens the inference time and reduces computational costs during the usage of large language models, but also lowers expenses when using closed-source models. In a preliminary study, we discover that when instructing language models to compress prompts, different compression styles (e.g., extractive or abstractive) impact performance of compressed prompts on downstream tasks. Building on this insight, we propose Style-Compress, a lightweight framework that adapts a smaller language model to compress prompts for a larger model on a new task without additional training. Our approach iteratively generates and selects effective compressed prompts as task-specific demonstrations through style variation and in-context learning, enabling smaller models to act as efficient compressors with task-specific examples. Style-Compress outperforms two baseline compression models in four tasks: original prompt reconstruction, text summarization, multi-hop QA, and CoT reasoning. In addition, with only 10 samples and 100 queries for adaptation, prompts compressed by Style-Compress achieve performance on par with or better than original prompts at a compression ratio of 0.25 or 0.5.

Style-Compress: An LLM-Based Prompt Compression Framework Considering Task-Specific Styles

Text generation, a component in applications such as dialogue systems, relies heavily on decoding algorithms that sample strings from a language model distribution. Traditional methods like top-$k$ and top-$\pi$ decoding locally normalise the model's output, which can significantly distort the original distribution. In this paper, we investigate the effects of such distortions by introducing globally-normalised versions of these decoding methods. Further, we propose an independent Metropolis-Hastings (IMH) algorithm to approximate sampling from these globally-normalised distributions without explicitly computing them. Our empirical analyses compare the performance of local and global decoding across two algorithms (top-$k$ and top-$\pi$) with various hyperparameters, using the Pythia language models. Results show that in most configuration, global decoding performs worse than the local decoding versions of the same algorithms, despite preserving the distribution's integrity. Our results thus suggest that distortion might be an important feature of local decoding algorithms.

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