United States

With instruction tuning, Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their ability to adhere to commands. Diverging from most works focusing on data mixing, our study concentrates on enhancing the model&#39;s capabilities from the perspective of data sampling during training. Drawing inspiration from the human learning process, where it is generally easier to master solutions to similar topics through focused practice on a single type of topic, we introduce a novel instruction tuning strategy termed CommonIT: Commonality-aware Instruction Tuning. Specifically, we cluster instruction datasets into distinct groups with three proposed metrics Task, Embedding and Length). We ensure each training mini-batch, or ``partition&#39;&#39;, consists solely of data from a single group, which brings about both data randomness across mini-batches and intra-batch data similarity. Rigorous testing on LLaMa models demonstrates CommonIT&#39;s effectiveness in enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs through IT datasets (FLAN, CoT, and Alpaca) and models (LLaMa2-7B, Qwen2-7B, LLaMa 13B, and BLOOM 7B). CommonIT consistently boosts an average improvement of 2.1\% on the general domain (i.e., the average score of Knowledge, Reasoning, Multilinguality and Coding) with the Length metric, and 5.2\% on the special domain (i.e., GSM, Openfunctions and Code) with the Task metric, and 3.8\% on the specific tasks (i.e., MMLU) with the Embedding metric. Code is available at https://github.com/raojay7/CommonIT.

EMNLP 2024

CommonIT: Commonality-Aware Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models via Data Partitions

speech coding

efficiency

speech processing

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.

With instruction tuning, Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their ability to adhere to commands. Diverging from most works focusing on data mixing, our study concentrates on enhancing the model's capabilities from the perspective of data sampling during training. Drawing inspiration from the human learning process, where it is generally easier to master solutions to similar topics through focused practice on a single type of topic, we introduce a novel instruction tuning strategy termed CommonIT: Commonality-aware Instruction Tuning. Specifically, we cluster instruction datasets into distinct groups with three proposed metrics Task, Embedding and Length). We ensure each training mini-batch, or ``partition'', consists solely of data from a single group, which brings about both data randomness across mini-batches and intra-batch data similarity. Rigorous testing on LLaMa models demonstrates CommonIT's effectiveness in enhancing the instruction-following capabilities of LLMs through IT datasets (FLAN, CoT, and Alpaca) and models (LLaMa2-7B, Qwen2-7B, LLaMa 13B, and BLOOM 7B). CommonIT consistently boosts an average improvement of 2.1\% on the general domain (i.e., the average score of Knowledge, Reasoning, Multilinguality and Coding) with the Length metric, and 5.2\% on the special domain (i.e., GSM, Openfunctions and Code) with the Task metric, and 3.8\% on the specific tasks (i.e., MMLU) with the Embedding metric. Code is available at https://github.com/raojay7/CommonIT.

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.

This paper focuses on detecting clickbait posts on the Web. These posts often use eye-catching disinformation in mixed modalities to mislead users to click for profit. That affects the user experience and thus would be blocked by content provider. To escape detection, malicious creators use tricks to add some irrelevant non-bait content into bait posts, dressing them up as legal to fool the detector. This content often has biased relations with non-bait labels, yet traditional detectors tend to make predictions based on simple co-occurrence rather than grasping inherent factors that lead to malicious behavior. This spurious bias would easily cause misjudgments. To address this problem, we propose a new debiased method based on causal inference. We first employ a set of features in multiple modalities to characterize the posts. Considering these features are often mixed up with unknown biases, we then disentangle three kinds of latent factors from them, including the invariant factor that indicates intrinsic bait intention; the causal factor which reflects deceptive patterns in a certain scenario, and non-causal noise. By eliminating the noise that causes bias, we can use invariant and causal factors to build a robust model with good generalization ability. Experiments on three popular datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.

Multimodal Clickbait Detection by De-confounding Biases Using Causal Representation Inference

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a critical procedure for aligning large language models. Despite its efficiency, the construction of SFT data often struggles with issues of quality, diversity, and scalability. Many existing methods, inspired by the Self-Instruct framework, typically generate synthetic instructions by prompting aligned proprietary models like ChatGPT. However, such process suffers from stale distribution, resulting in instructions that are merely trivial variations of existing ones. In this paper, we introduce a novel bootstrapping approach termed KNN-Instruct, which incorporates KNN deduction to produce meaningful new instructions by effectively summarizing and learning from similar existing ones. We conduct an economical controlled experiment to preliminarily validate its effectiveness. In the further experiment, we construct a high-quality SFT dataset named KNN-Inst-12k*. Applying the dataset to Qwen-2-7B, we get a MT-Bench score of 7.64, which outperforms all 7B models on the LMSYS leaderboard, including Starling-LM-7B (7.48), OpenChat-3.5 (7.06) and Zephyr-7B-beta (6.53). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CrossmodalGroup/KNN-Instruct/.

KNN-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Construction with K Nearest Neighbor Deduction

As large language models (LLMs) rapidly evolve, they are increasingly being customized through fine-tuning to suit the specific needs of various applications. A critical aspect of this advancement is the alignment process, which ensures that these models perform tasks in ways that align with human values and expectations. Current alignment methods, such as direct preference optimization (DPO) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), focus primarily on alignment during training phase. However, these methods often involve complex and resource-intensive training processes, posing significant challenge for their implementation. Therefore, we propose \textbf{InferAligner}, a simple yet effective method for harmlessness alignment during inference phase. InferAligner decouples harmlessness from helpfulness. During the training phase, it focuses solely on enhancing the target model's capabilities on downstream tasks. In the inference phase, it utilizes safety steering vectors extracted from the aligned model to guide the target model towards harmlessness alignment. Experimental results show that our method can be very effectively applied to domain-specific models in finance, medicine, and mathematics, as well as to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) such as LLaVA. It significantly diminishes the attack success rate (ASR) of both harmful instructions and jailbreak instructions, while maintaining almost unchanged performance in downstream tasks.

InferAligner: Inference-Time Alignment for Harmlessness through Cross-Model Guidance

The current framework for sequence labeling encompasses a feature extractor and a sequence tagger. This study introduces a unified framework named SLGAN, which harnesses the capabilities of Generative Adversarial Networks to address the challenges associated with Sequence Labeling tasks. SLGAN not only mitigates the limitation of GANs in backpropagating loss to discrete data but also exhibits strong adaptability to various sequence labeling tasks. Unlike traditional GANs, the discriminator within SLGAN does not discriminate whether data originates from the discriminator or the generator; instead, it focuses on predicting the correctness of each tag within the tag sequence. We conducted evaluations on six different tasks spanning four languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Word Segmentation, Chinese and English Named Entity Recognition, and Chinese Part-of-Speech Tagging. Our experimental results illustrate that SLGAN represents a versatile and highly effective solution, consistently achieving state-of-the-art or competitive performance results, irrespective of the specific task or language under consideration.

When Generative Adversarial Networks Meet Sequence Labeling Challenges

This paper explores the pitfalls in evaluating multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, with a particular focus on Indic language scripts. We investigate the text normalization routine employed by leading ASR models, including OpenAI Whisper, Meta's MMS, Seamless, and Assembly AI's Conformer, and their unintended consequences on performance metrics. Our research reveals that current text normalization practices, while aiming to standardize ASR outputs for fair comparison, by removing inconsistencies such as variations in spelling, punctuation, and special characters, are fundamentally flawed when applied to Indic scripts. Through empirical analysis using text similarity scores and in-depth linguistic examination, we demonstrate that these flaws lead to artificially improved performance metrics for Indic languages. We conclude by proposing a shift towards developing text normalization routines that leverage native linguistic expertise, ensuring more robust and accurate evaluations of multilingual ASR models.

What is lost in Normalization? Exploring Pitfalls in Multilingual ASR Model Evaluations

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment polarity of a specific aspect within a given sentence. Most existing methods predominantly leverage semantic or syntactic information based on attention scores, which are susceptible to interference caused by irrelevant contexts and often lack sentiment knowledge at a data-specific level. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Multi-granularity Attribution Network (DMAN) from the perspective of attribution. Initially, we leverage Integrated Gradients to dynamically extract attribution scores for each token, which contain underlying reasoning knowledge for sentiment analysis. Subsequently, we aggregate attribution representations from multiple semantic granularities in natural language, enhancing a profound understanding of the semantics. Finally, we integrate attribution scores with syntactic information to capture the relationships between aspects and their relevant contexts more accurately during the sentence understanding process. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Dynamic Multi-granularity Attribution Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Visual question answering (VQA) tasks, often performed by visual language model (VLM), face challenges with long-tail knowledge. Recent retrieval-augmented VQA (RA-VQA) systems address this by retrieving and integrating external knowledge sources. However, these systems still suffer from redundant visual information irrelevant to the question during retrieval. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose LLM-RA, a novel method leveraging the reasoning capability of a large language model (LLM) to identify key visual entities, thus minimizing the impact of irrelevant information in the query of retriever. Furthermore, key visual entities are independently encoded for multimodal joint retrieval, preventing cross-entity interference. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms other strong RA-VQA systems. In two knowledge-intensive VQA benchmarks, our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance among those with similar scale of parameters and even performs comparably to models with 1-2 orders larger parameters.

Large Language Models Know What is Key Visual Entity: An LLM-assisted Multimodal Retrieval for VQA

Research on continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) is essential to bridge the communication gap between deaf and hearing individuals. Numerous previous studies have trained their models using the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. During inference, these CTC-based models generally require the entire sign video as input to make predictions, a process known as offline recognition, which suffers from high latency and substantial memory usage. In this work, we take the first step towards online CSLR. Our approach consists of three phases: 1) developing a sign dictionary; 2) training an isolated sign language recognition model on the dictionary; and 3) employing a sliding window approach on the input sign sequence, feeding each sign clip to the optimized model for online recognition. Additionally, our online recognition model can be extended to support online translation by integrating a gloss-to-text network and can enhance the performance of any offline model. With these extensions, our online approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three popular benchmarks across various task settings. Code and models are available at https://github.com/FangyunWei/SLRT.

Towards Online Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Translation

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely used in natural language understandings (NLU), they are still exposed to fairness issues. Most existing extrinsic debiasing methods rely on manually curated word lists for each sensitive groups to modify training data or to add regular constraints. However, these word lists are often limited by length and scope, resulting in the degradation performance of extrinsic bias mitigation. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a **C**ontinuous **P**rompts **A**djustment **D**ebiasing method (CPAD), which generates continuous token lists from the entire vocabulary space and uses them to bridge the gap between outputs and targets in fairness learning process. Specifically, CPAD encapsulates fine-tuning objective and debiasing objectives into several independent prompts. To avoid the limitation of manual word lists, in fairness learning phase, we extract outputs from the entire vocabulary space via fine-tuned PLM. Then, we aggregate the outputs from the same sensitive group as continuous token lists to map the outputs into protected attribute labels. Finally, after we learn the debiasing prompts in the perspective of adversarial learning, we improve fairness by adjusting continuous prompts at model inference time. Through extensive experiments on three NLU tasks, we evaluate the debiasing performance from the perspectives of group fairness and fairness through unawareness. The experimental results show that CPAD outperforms all baselines in term of single and two-attributes debiasing performance.

Mitigate Extrinsic Social Bias in Pre-trained Language Models via Continuous Prompts Adjustment

Unsupervised rationale extraction aims to extract text snippets to support model predictions without explicit rationale annotation.
Researchers have made many efforts to solve this task. Previous works often encode each aspect independently, which may limit their ability to capture meaningful internal correlations between aspects. While there has been significant work on mitigating spurious correlations, our approach focuses on leveraging the beneficial internal correlations to improve multi-aspect rationale extraction. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Aspect Rationale Extractor (MARE) to explain and predict multiple aspects simultaneously. Concretely, we propose a Multi-Aspect Multi-Head Attention (MAMHA) mechanism based on hard deletion to encode multiple text chunks simultaneously. Furthermore, multiple special tokens are prepended in front of the text with each corresponding to one certain aspect. Finally, multi-task training is deployed to reduce the training overhead. Experimental results on two unsupervised rationale extraction benchmarks show that MARE achieves state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our codes have been available at https://github.com/CSU-NLP-Group/MARE.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

Multimodal Clickbait Detection by De-confounding Biases Using Causal Representation Inference

Similar lecture

Importance-Aware Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning