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Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance is highly sensitive to the prompts utilized. This variability poses challenges for accurate assessment and user satisfaction. Current research frequently overlooks instance-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce \textbf{ProSA}, a framework designed to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in LLMs. ProSA incorporates a novel sensitivity metric, \texttt{PromptSensiScore}, and leverages decoding confidence to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our extensive study, spanning multiple tasks, uncovers that prompt sensitivity fluctuates across datasets and models, with larger models exhibiting enhanced robustness. We observe that few-shot examples can alleviate this sensitivity issue, and subjective evaluations are also susceptible to prompt sensitivities, particularly in complex, reasoning-oriented tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that higher model confidence correlates with increased prompt robustness. We believe this work will serve as a helpful tool in studying prompt sensitivity of LLMs. The project is released at: \url{https://github.com/open-compass/ProSA}.

EMNLP 2024

ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs

layer-wise sparse tuning

parameter-memory efficifient fine-tuning

large language models

## 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

Reward-based finetuning is crucial for aligning language policies with intended behaviors (*e.g.*, creativity and safety). A key challenge is to develop steerable language models that trade-off multiple (conflicting) objectives in a flexible and efficient manner. This paper presents Conditional Language Policy (CLP), a general framework for finetuning language models on multiple objectives. Building on techniques from multi-task training and parameter-efficient finetuning, CLP learn steerable models that effectively trade-off conflicting objectives at *inference time*. Notably, this does not require training or maintaining multiple models to achieve different trade-offs between the objectives. Through extensive experiments and ablations on two summarization datasets, we show that CLP learns steerable language models that outperform and Pareto-dominate the existing approaches for multi-objective

Conditioned Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning

In this paper, we introduce EconLogicQA, a rigorous benchmark designed to assess the sequential reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) within the intricate realms of economics, business, and supply chain management. Diverging from traditional benchmarks that predict subsequent events individually, EconLogicQA poses a more challenging task: it requires models to discern and sequence multiple interconnected events, capturing the complexity of economic logics. EconLogicQA comprises an array of multi-event scenarios derived from economic articles, which necessitate an insightful understanding of both temporal and logical event relationships. Through comprehensive evaluations, we exhibit that EconLogicQA effectively gauges a LLM's proficiency in navigating the sequential complexities inherent in economic contexts. We provide a detailed description of EconLogicQA dataset and shows the outcomes from evaluating the benchmark across various leading-edge LLMs, thereby offering a thorough perspective on their sequential reasoning potential in economic contexts. Our benchmark dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/yinzhu-quan/econ_logic_qa.

EconLogicQA: A Question-Answering Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Economic Sequential Reasoning

Existing explanation methods for image classification struggle to provide faithful and plausible explanations. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a post-hoc natural language explanation method that can be applied to any CNN-based classifier without altering its training process or affecting predictive performance. By analysing influential neurons and the corresponding activation maps, the method generates a faithful description of the classifier's decision process in the form of a structured meaning representation, which is then converted into text by a language model. Through this pipeline approach, the generated explanations are grounded in the neural network architecture, providing accurate insight into the classification process while remaining accessible to non-experts. Experimental results show that the NLEs constructed by our method are significantly more plausible and faithful than baselines. In particular, user interventions in the neural network structure (masking of neurons) are three times more effective.

Faithful and Plausible Natural Language Explanations for Image Classification: A Pipeline Approach

Black-box large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various environments, making it essential for these models to effectively convey their confidence and uncertainty, especially in high-stakes settings. However, these models often exhibit overconfidence, leading to potential risks and misjudgments. Existing techniques for eliciting and calibrating LLM confidence have primarily focused on general reasoning datasets, yielding only modest improvements. Accurate calibration is crucial for informed decision-making and preventing adverse outcomes but remains challenging due to the complexity and variability of tasks these models perform. In this work, we investigate the miscalibration behavior of black-box LLMs within the healthcare setting. We propose a novel method, Atypical Presentations Recalibration, which leverages atypical presentations to adjust the model's confidence estimates. Our approach significantly improves calibration, reducing calibration errors by approximately 60% on three medical question answering datasets and outperforming existing methods such as vanilla verbalized confidence, CoT verbalized confidence and others. Additionally, we provide an in-depth analysis of the role of atypicality within the recalibration framework.

Enhancing Healthcare LLM Trust with Atypical Presentations Recalibration

Recent methods have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning tasks better when they are encouraged to solve subtasks of the main task first. In this paper we devise a similar strategy that breaks down reasoning tasks into a problem decomposition phase and a problem solving phase and show that the strategy is able to outperform a single stage solution. Further, we hypothesize that the decomposition should be easier to distill into a smaller model compared to the problem solving because the latter requires large amounts of domain knowledge while the former only requires learning general problem solving strategies. We propose methods to distill these two capabilities and evaluate their impact on reasoning outcomes and inference cost. We find that we can distill the problem decomposition phase and at the same time achieve good generalization across tasks, datasets, and models. However, it is harder to distill the problem solving capability without losing performance and the resulting distilled model struggles with generalization. These results indicate that by using smaller, distilled problem decomposition models in combination with problem solving LLMs we can achieve reasoning with cost-efficient inference and local adaptation.

Divide-or-Conquer? Which Part Should You Distill Your LLM?

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in hiring has led to legislative actions to protect vulnerable demographic groups. This paper presents a novel framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) for resume scoring, revealing significant issues of reverse gender hiring bias and overdebiasing. Our contributions are fourfold: Firstly, we introduce a new construct grounded in labour economics, legal principles, and critiques of current bias benchmarks: hiring bias can be categorized into two types: Level bias (difference in the average outcomes between demographic counterfactual groups) and Spread bias (difference in the variance of outcomes between demographic counterfactual groups); Level bias can be further subdivided into statistical bias (i.e. changing with non-demographic content) and taste-based bias (i.e. consistent regardless of non-demographic content). Secondly, the framework includes rigorous statistical and computational hiring bias metrics, such as Rank After Scoring (RAS), Rank-based Impact Ratio, Permutation Test, and Fixed Effects Model. Thirdly, we analyze gender hiring biases in ten state-of-the-art LLMs. Seven out of ten LLMs show significant biases against males in at least one industry. An industry-effect regression reveals that the healthcare industry is the most biased against males. Moreover, we found that the bias performance remains invariant with resume content for eight out of ten LLMs. This indicates that the bias performance measured in this paper might apply to other resume datasets with different resume qualities. Fourthly, we provide a user-friendly demo and resume dataset to support the adoption and practical use of the framework, which can be generalized to other social traits and tasks.

JobFair: A Framework for Benchmarking Gender Hiring Bias in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students' reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence-level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.

Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

Questions involving commonsense reasoning about everyday situations often admit many $\textit{possible}$ or $\textit{plausible}$ answers. In contrast, multiple-choice question (MCQ) benchmarks for commonsense reasoning require a hard selection of a single correct answer, which, in principle, should represent the $\textit{most}$ plausible answer choice. On $250$ MCQ items sampled from two commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we collect $5,000$ independent plausibility judgments on answer choices. We find that for over 20% of the sampled MCQs, the answer choice rated most plausible does not match the benchmark gold answers; upon manual inspection, we confirm that this subset exhibits higher rates of problems like ambiguity or semantic mismatch between question and answer choices. Experiments with LLMs reveal low accuracy and high variation in performance on the subset, suggesting our plausibility criterion may be helpful in identifying more reliable benchmark items for commonsense evaluation.

Plausibly Problematic Questions in Multiple-Choice Benchmarks for Commonsense Reasoning

Time series are critical for decision-making in fields like finance and healthcare. Their importance has driven a recent influx of works passing time series into language models, leading to non-trivial forecasting on some datasets. But it remains unknown whether non-trivial forecasting implies that language models can reason about time series. To address this gap, we generate a first-of-its-kind evaluation framework for time series reasoning, including formal tasks and a corresponding dataset of multi-scale time series paired with text captions across ten domains. Using these data, we probe whether language models achieve three forms of reasoning: (1) Etiological Reasoning---given an input time series, can the language model identify the scenario that most likely created it? (2) Question Answering---can a language model answer factual questions about time series? (3) Context-Aided Forecasting--does highly relevant textual context improve a language model's time series forecasts? We find that otherwise highly-capable language models demonstrate surprisingly limited time series reasoning: they score marginally above random on etiological and question answering tasks (up to 30 percentage points worse than humans) and show modest success in using context to improve forecasting. These weakness showcase that time series reasoning is an impactful, yet deeply underdeveloped direction for language model research. We also make our datasets public to support further research in this direction.

Language Models Still Struggle to Zero-shot Reason about Time Series

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). 
However, debates persist about whether LLMs exhibit *abstract generalization* or rely on *shallow heuristics* when given CoT prompts. To understand the factors influencing CoT reasoning we provide a detailed case study of the symbolic reasoning task of decoding shift ciphers, where letters are shifted forward some number of steps in the alphabet. We analyze the pattern of results produced by three LLMs---GPT-4, Claude 3, and Llama 3.1---performing this task using CoT prompting. By focusing on a single relatively simple task, we are able to identify three factors that systematically affect CoT performance: the probability of the task's expected output (probability), what the model has implicitly learned during pre-training (memorization), and the number of intermediate operations involved in reasoning (noisy reasoning). We show that these factors can drastically influence task accuracy across all three LLMs; e.g., when tested with GPT-4, varying the output's probability of occurrence shifts accuracy from 26\% to 70\%. Overall, we conclude that CoT prompting performance reflects both memorization and a probabilistic version of genuine reasoning.

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Conditioned Language Policy: A General Framework For Steerable Multi-Objective Finetuning

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