United States

This paper introduces MalAlgoQA, a novel dataset designed to evaluate the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a pedagogical approach. The dataset comprises mathematics and reading comprehension questions, each accompanied by four answer choices and their corresponding rationales. At the heart of MalAlgoQA are ``malgorithms&#39;&#39; - rationales behind incorrect answer choices that represent flawed yet logically coherent reasoning paths. These malgorithms serve as counterfactual scenarios, allowing us to assess an LLM&#39;s ability to identify and analyze flawed reasoning patterns. We propose the Malgorithm Identification task, where LLMs are assessed based on their ability to identify corresponding malgorithm given an incorrect answer choice. 
To evaluate the model performance, we introduce two metrics: Algorithm Identification Accuracy (AIA) for correct answer rationale identification, and Malgorithm Identification Accuracy (MIA) for incorrect answer rationale identification. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant performance drops in MIA compared to AIA, highlighting the challenges in counterfactual reasoning.
Surprisingly, we find that the chain-of-thought prompting technique not only fails to consistently enhance MIA but can sometimes lead to underperformance compared to simple prompting. These findings have important implications for developing LLMs with improved counterfactual reasoning, particularly relevant for AI-powered tutoring systems, where identifying and addressing student misconceptions is essential. 
MalAlgoQA dataset is available \href{https://github.com/luffycodes/MalAlgoQA-Dataset}{here}.

EMNLP 2024

MalAlgoQA: A Pedagogical Approach for Evaluating Counterfactual Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models

model merging

instruction tuning

post-training

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-26 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

To access this event page, you need to log in with the **email address you registered with**. Access credentials will be sent to your email from Underline - subject line "Welcome to AAAI 2026". Please be sure to check your spam email folder if you do not see an email confirmation right away.

Please log in

To access this event page, you are required to register.
Please complete your registration to continue.

We recommend reading [**the registration information**](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-26/registration/) first.

**Online Registration Form**: https://aaai.getregistered.net/conference-2026 

Registration Required

AAAI 2026

We are pleased to announce the Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26), which will be held in Singapore EXPO from January 20 to January 27, 2026.

This paper introduces MalAlgoQA, a novel dataset designed to evaluate the counterfactual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through a pedagogical approach. The dataset comprises mathematics and reading comprehension questions, each accompanied by four answer choices and their corresponding rationales. At the heart of MalAlgoQA are ``malgorithms'' - rationales behind incorrect answer choices that represent flawed yet logically coherent reasoning paths. These malgorithms serve as counterfactual scenarios, allowing us to assess an LLM's ability to identify and analyze flawed reasoning patterns. We propose the Malgorithm Identification task, where LLMs are assessed based on their ability to identify corresponding malgorithm given an incorrect answer choice. 
To evaluate the model performance, we introduce two metrics: Algorithm Identification Accuracy (AIA) for correct answer rationale identification, and Malgorithm Identification Accuracy (MIA) for incorrect answer rationale identification. Our experiments reveal that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant performance drops in MIA compared to AIA, highlighting the challenges in counterfactual reasoning.
Surprisingly, we find that the chain-of-thought prompting technique not only fails to consistently enhance MIA but can sometimes lead to underperformance compared to simple prompting. These findings have important implications for developing LLMs with improved counterfactual reasoning, particularly relevant for AI-powered tutoring systems, where identifying and addressing student misconceptions is essential. 
MalAlgoQA dataset is available \href{https://github.com/luffycodes/MalAlgoQA-Dataset}{here}.

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.

Graph generation is the process of generating novel graphs with similar attributes to real world graphs. The explicit and precise control of granular structural attributes, such as node centrality and graph density, is crucial for effective graph generation. This paper introduces a controllable multi-objective translation model for text-attributed graphs, titled Controlled Graph Translator (CGT). It is designed to effectively and efficiently translate a given source graph to a target graph, while satisfying multiple desired graph attributes at granular level. Designed with an encoder-decoder architecture, CGT develops fusion and graph attribute predictor neural networks for controlled graph translation. We validate the effectiveness of CGT through extensive experiments on different genres of datasets. In addition, we illustrate the application of CGT in data augmentation and taxonomy creation, particularly in low resource settings.

Controlled Transformation of Text-Attributed Graphs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a multitude of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are still not immune to limitations such as social biases, especially gender bias. This work investigates whether current closed and open-source LLMs possess gender bias, especially when asked to give moral opinions. To evaluate these models, we curate and introduce a new dataset GenMO (Gender-bias in Morality Opinions) comprising parallel short stories featuring male and female characters respectively. Specifically, we test models from the GPT family (GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct, GPT-4-turbo), Llama 3 and 3.1 families (8B/70B), Mistral-7B and Claude 3 families (Sonnet and Opus). Surprisingly, despite employing safety checks, all production-standard models we tested display significant gender bias with GPT-3.5-turbo giving biased opinions in 24% of the samples. Additionally, all models consistently favour female characters, with GPT showing bias in 68-85% of cases and Llama 3 in around 81-85% instances. Additionally, our study investigates the impact of model parameters on gender bias and explores real-world situations where LLMs reveal biases in moral decision-making.

Evaluating Gender Bias of LLMs in Making Morality Judgements

The growing size of large language models (LLMs) requires parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods for their adaptation to new tasks. Existing methods, such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), typically involve model adaptation by training the PEFT parameters. One open problem required to be solved to effectively employ these methods is the identification of PEFT parameters. More precisely, related works identify PEFT parameters by projecting high dimensional parameters of LLMs onto low dimensional parameter manifolds with predefined projections, or identifying PEFT parameters as projections themselves. To study this problem, we propose a new approach called Learning to Efficiently Fine-tune (LEFT) where we aim to learn spaces of PEFT parameters from data. In order to learn how to generate the PEFT parameters on a learned parameter space while fine-tuning the LLMs, we propose the Parameter Generation (PG) method. In the experimental analyses, we examine the effectiveness of our solutions exploring accuracy of fine-tuned LLMs and characteristics of PEFT parameters on benchmark GLUE tasks.

A Study of Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning by Learning to Efficiently Fine-Tune

Quantization techniques are widely used to improve inference speed and deployment of large language models. While a wide body of work examines the impact of quantization on LLMs in English, none have evaluated across languages. We conduct a thorough analysis of quantized multilingual LLMs, focusing on performance across languages and at varying scales. We use automatic benchmarks, LLM-as-a-Judge, and human evaluation, finding that (1) harmful effects of quantization are apparent in human evaluation, which automatic metrics severely underestimate: a 1.7% average drop in Japanese across automatic tasks corresponds to a 16.0% drop reported by human evaluators on realistic prompts; (2) languages are disparately affected by quantization, with non-Latin script languages impacted worst; and (3) challenging tasks like mathematical reasoning degrade fastest. As the ability to serve low-compute models is critical for wide global adoption of NLP technologies, our results urge consideration of multilingual performance as a key evaluation criterion for efficient models.

How Does Quantization Affect Multilingual LLMs?

Automatically generating a presentation from the text of a long document is a challenging and useful problem. In contrast to a flat summary, a presentation needs to have a better and non-linear narrative, i.e., the content of a slide can come from different and non-contiguous parts of the given document. However, it is difficult to incorporate such non-linear mapping of content to slides and ensure that the content is faithful to the document. LLMs are prone to hallucination and their performance degrades with the length of the input document. Towards this, we propose a novel graph based solution where we learn a graph from the input document and use a combination of graph neural network and LLM to generate a presentation with attribution of content for each slide. We conduct thorough experiments to show the merit of our approach compared to directly using LLMs for this task.

Presentations are not always linear! GNN meets LLM for Document-to-Presentation Transformation with Attribution

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning.
Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values.
Reinforcement learning from human feedback is a successful technique that can mitigate such issues, however, the collection of human feedback can be laborious.
Recent works have solicited feedback from pre-trained large language models rather than humans to reduce or eliminate human effort, however, these approaches yield poor performance in the presence of hallucination and other errors.
This paper studies the advantages and limitations of reinforcement learning from large language model feedback and proposes a simple yet effective method for soliciting and applying feedback as a potential-based shaping function.
We theoretically show that inconsistent rankings – which approximate ranking errors – lead to uninformative rewards with our approach. Our method empirically improves convergence speed and policy returns over commonly used baselines even with significant ranking errors, and eliminates the need for complex post-processing of reward functions.

Navigating Noisy Feedback: Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Error-Prone Language Models

Writing has long been considered a hallmark of human intelligence and remains a pinnacle task for artificial intelligence (AI) due to the intricate cognitive processes involved. Recently, rapid advancements in generative AI, particularly through the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly transformed the landscape of writing assistance. However, underrepresented languages like Arabic encounter significant challenges in the development of advanced AI writing tools, largely due to the limited availability of data. This scarcity constrains the training of effective models, impeding the creation of sophisticated writing assistance technologies. To address these issues, we present *Gazelle*, a comprehensive dataset for Arabic writing assistance. In addition, we offer an evaluation framework designed to enhance Arabic writing assistance tools. Our human evaluation of leading LLMs, including GPT-**4**, GPT-**4o**, Cohere Command R+, and Gemini **1.5** Pro, highlights their respective strengths and limitations in addressing the challenges of Arabic writing. Our findings underscore the need for continuous model training and dataset enrichment to manage the complexities of Arabic language processing, paving the way for more effective AI-powered Arabic writing tools

Gazelle: An Instruction Dataset for Arabic Writing Assistance

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on web-scale text corpora have been shown to capture world knowledge in their parameters. However, the mechanism by which language models store different types of knowledge is poorly understood. In this work, we examine two types of knowledge relating to temporally sensitive entities and demonstrate that each type is localized to different sets of parameters within the LLMs. We hypothesize that the lack of consideration of the locality of knowledge in existing continual learning methods contributes to both: the failed uptake of new information, and catastrophic forgetting of previously learned information. We observe that sequences containing references to updated and newly mentioned entities exhibit larger gradient norms in a subset of layers. We demonstrate that targeting parameter updates to these relevant layers can improve the performance of continually pretraining on language containing temporal drift.

Gradient Localization Improves Lifelong Pretraining of Language Models

Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales, which are not sufficient for properly assessing model's capabilities. We present \textit{P-FOLIO}, a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. P-FOLIO is collected with an annotation protocol that facilitates humans to annotate well-structured natural language proofs for first-order logic reasoning problems in a step-by-step manner. The number of reasoning steps in P-FOLIO span from 0 to 20. We further use P-FOLIO to evaluate and improve large-language-model (LLM) reasoning capabilities. We evaluate LLM reasoning capabilities at a fine granularity via single-step inference rule classification, with more diverse inference rules of more diverse and higher levels of complexities than previous works. Given that a single model-generated reasoning chain could take a completely different path than the human-annotated one, we sample multiple reasoning chains from a model and use pass@k metrics for evaluating the quality of model-generated reasoning chains. We show that human-written reasoning chains significantly boost the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs via many-shot prompting and fine-tuning. Furthermore, fine-tuning Llam3-7B on P-FOLIO improves the model performance by 10% or more on three other out-of-domain logical reasoning datasets.

P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains

Large Language Models have demonstrates remarkable performance in solving math problems, a hallmark of human intelligence.
Despite high success rates on current benchmarks, however, these often feature simple problems with only one or two unknowns, which do not sufficiently challenge their reasoning capacities. This paper introduces a novel benchmark, BeyondX, designed to address these limitations by incorporating problems with multiple unknowns. Recognizing the challenges in proposing multi-unknown problems from scratch, we developed BeyondX using an innovative automated pipeline that progressively increases complexity by expanding the number of unknowns in simpler problems. Empirical study on BeyondX reveals that the performance of existing LLMs, even those fine-tuned specifically on math tasks, significantly decreases as the number of unknowns increases - with a performance drop of up to 70% observed in GPT-4. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Formulate-and-Solve strategy, a generalized prompting approach that effectively handles problems with an arbitrary number of unknowns. Our findings reveal that this strategy not only enhances LLM performance on the BeyondX benchmark but also provides deeper insights into the computational limits of LLMs when faced with more complex mathematical challenges.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Controlled Transformation of Text-Attributed Graphs

Similar lecture

CounterBench: Evaluating and Improving Counterfactual Reasoning in Large Language Models