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Due to the continuous emergence of new data, version updates have become an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs). The training paradigms for version updates of LLMs include pre-training from scratch (PTFS) and continual pre-training (CPT). Preliminary experiments demonstrate that PTFS achieves better pre-training performance, while CPT has lower training cost. Moreover, their performance and training cost gaps widen progressively with version updates. To investigate the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, we analyze the effect of learning rate adjustments during the two stages of CPT: preparing an initialization checkpoint and continual pre-training based on this checkpoint. We find that a large learning rate in the first stage and a complete learning rate decay process in the second stage are crucial for version updates of LLMs. Hence, we propose a learning rate path switching training paradigm. Our paradigm comprises one main path, where we pre-train a LLM with the maximal learning rate, and multiple branching paths, each of which corresponds to an update of the LLM with newly-added training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our paradigm. Particularly, when training four versions of LLMs, our paradigm reduces the total training cost to 58% compared to PTFS, while maintaining comparable pre-training performance.

EMNLP 2024

A Learning Rate Path Switching Training Paradigm for Version Updates of Large Language Models

phonology

named entity recognition

cross-lingual

zero-shot

## 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

Consistency learning (CL) has proven to be a valuable technique for improving the robustness of models in conditional sentence generation (CSG) tasks by ensuring stable predictions across various input data forms. However, models augmented with CL often face challenges in optimizing consistency features, which can detract from their efficiency and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce Curriculum Consistency Learning (CCL), a novel strategy that guides models to learn consistency in alignment with their current capacity to differentiate between features. CCL is designed around the inherent aspects of CL-related losses, promoting task independence and simplifying implementation. Implemented across four representative CSG tasks, including instruction tuning (IT) for large language models and machine translation (MT) in three modalities (text, speech, and vision), CCL demonstrates marked improvements. Specifically, it delivers +2.0 average accuracy point improvement compared with vanilla IT and an average increase of +0.7 in COMET scores over traditional CL methods in MT tasks. Our comprehensive analysis further indicates that models utilizing CCL are particularly adept at managing complex instances, showcasing the effectiveness and efficiency of CCL in improving CSG models. Code and scripts are available at https://github.com/xinxinxing/Curriculum-Consistency-Learning.

Curriculum Consistency Learning for Conditional Sentence Generation

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incomplete knowledge, which which restricts their utility. Recently, Contrastive Learning (CL) has been introduced to Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), significantly improving the discriminative capabilities of KGC models and setting new benchmarks in performance. However, existing contrastive methods primarily focus on individual triples, overlooking the broader structural connectivities and topologies of KGs. This narrow focus limits a comprehensive understanding of the graph's structural knowledge. To address this gap, we propose StructKGC, a novel contrastive learning framework designed to flexibly accommodate the diverse topologies inherent in KGs. Additionally, we introduce four contrastive tasks specifically tailored to KG data: Vertex-level CL, Neighbor-level CL, Path-level CL, and Relation composition level CL. These tasks are trained synergistically during the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs), allowing for a more nuanced capture of subgraph semantics. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we perform a comprehensive set of experiments on several real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves SOTA performance under standard supervised and low-resource settings. Furthermore, the different levels of structure-aware tasks introduced can mutually reinforce each other, leading to consistent performance improvements.

Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Structure-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning

The massive parameters and computational demands hinder the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Network pruning provides a practical solution to this problem. However, existing pruning works for LLMs mainly focus on unstructured pruning or necessitate post-pruning fine-tuning. The former relies on special hardware to accelerate computation, while the latter may need substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP (Structured Optimal Brain Pruning). It leverages global first-order information to select pruning structures, then refines them with a local greedy approach, and finally adopts module-wise reconstruction to mitigate information loss. We assess the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families on 8 distinct datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SoBP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.

Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models

The black-box nature of large language models (LLMs) poses challenges in interpreting results, impacting issues such as data intellectual property protection and hallucination tracing. Training data attribution (TDA) methods are considered effective solutions to address these challenges.
Most recent TDA methods rely on influence functions, assuming the model achieves minimized empirical risk. However, achieving this criterion is difficult, and sourcing accuracy can be compromised by fitting errors during model training. In this paper, we introduce a novel TDA method called Debias and Denoise Attribution (DDA), which enhances influence functions by addressing fitting errors. Specifically, the debias strategy seeks to improve the performance of influence functions by eliminating the knowledge bias present in the base model before fine-tuning, while the denoise strategy aims to reduce discrepancies in influence scores arising from varying degrees of fitting during the training process through smoothing techniques.
Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving an averaged AUC of 91.64\%. Moreover, DDA exhibits strong generality and scalability across various sources and different-scale models like LLaMA2, QWEN2, and Mistral.

Enhancing Training Data Attribution for Large Language Models with Fitting Error Consideration

Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) constitutes a critical research direction in computational linguistics and serves as a key indicator of the encoding capabilities of embedding models. Driven by advances in pre-trained language models and contrastive learning, leading sentence representation methods have reached an average Spearman's correlation score of approximately 86 across seven STS benchmarks in SentEval. However, further progress has become increasingly marginal, with no existing method attaining an average score higher than 86.5 on these tasks. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of this phenomenon and concludes that the upper limit for Spearman's correlation scores under contrastive learning is 87.5. To transcend this ceiling, we propose an innovative approach termed Pcc-tuning, which employs Pearson's correlation coefficient as a loss function to refine model performance beyond contrastive learning. Experimental results demonstrate that Pcc-tuning can markedly surpass previous state-of-the-art strategies with only a minimal amount of fine-grained annotated samples.

Pcc-tuning: Breaking the Contrastive Learning Ceiling in Semantic Textual Similarity

Advances in dataset analysis techniques have enabled more sophisticated approaches to analyzing and characterizing training data instances, often categorizing data based on attributes such as ``difficulty''. 
In this work, we introduce RepMatch, a novel method that characterizes data through the lens of similarity.
RepMatch quantifies the similarity between subsets of training instances by comparing the knowledge encoded in models trained on them, overcoming the limitations of existing analysis methods that focus solely on individual instances and are restricted to within-dataset analysis.
Our framework allows for a broader evaluation, enabling similarity comparisons across arbitrary subsets of instances, supporting both dataset-to-dataset and instance-to-dataset analyses. We validate the effectiveness of RepMatch across multiple NLP tasks, datasets, and models. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that RepMatch can effectively compare datasets, identify more representative subsets of a dataset (that lead to better performance than randomly selected subsets of equivalent size), and uncover heuristics underlying the construction of some challenge datasets.

RepMatch: Quantifying Cross-Instance Similarities in Representation Space

Classification is a core NLP task architecture with many potential applications. While large language models (LLMs) have brought substantial advancements in text generation, their potential for enhancing classification tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a framework for thoroughly investigating fine-tuning LLMs for classification, including both generation- and encoding-based approaches. We instantiate this framework in edit intent classification (EIC), a challenging and underexplored classification task. Our extensive experiments and systematic comparisons with various training approaches and a representative selection of LLMs yield new insights into their application for EIC. We investigate the generalizability of these findings on five further classification tasks. To demonstrate the proposed methods and address the data shortage for empirical edit analysis, we use our best-performing EIC model to create Re3-Sci2.0, a new large-scale dataset of 1,780 scientific document revisions with over 94k labeled edits. The quality of the dataset is assessed through human evaluation. The new dataset enables an in-depth empirical study of human editing behavior in academic writing. We make our experimental framework, models and data publicly available.

Are Large Language Models Good Classifiers? A Study on Edit Intent Classification in Scientific Document Revisions

Table entity linking (TEL) aims to map entity mentions in the table to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base (KB). The core of this task is to leverage structured contexts, specifically row and column contexts, to enhance the semantics of mentions in entity disambiguation. Most entity linking (EL) methods primarily focus on understanding sequential text contexts, making it difficult to adapt to the row and column structure of tables. Additionally, existing methods for TEL indiscriminately mix row and column contexts together, overlooking their semantic differences. In this paper, we explicitly distinguish the modeling of row and column contexts, and propose a method called RoCEL to capture their distinct semantics. Specifically, for row contexts in tables, we take the attention mechanism to learn the implicit relational dependencies between each cell and the mention. For column contexts in tables, we employ a set-wise encoder to learn the categorical information about the group of mentions. At last, we merge both contexts to obtain the final mention embedding for link prediction. Experiments on four benchmarks show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline by about 1.5% on the in-domain dataset, and by 3.7% on average across three out-of-domain datasets.

RoCEL: Advancing Table Entity Linking through Distinctive Row and Column Contexts

Entity disambiguation (ED) is crucial in natural language processing (NLP) for tasks such as question-answering and information extraction. A major challenge in ED is handling overshadowed entities—uncommon entities sharing mention surfaces with common entities. The current approach to enhance performance on these entities involves reasoning over facts in a knowledge base (KB), increasing computational overhead during inference. We argue that the ED performance on overshadowed entities can be enhanced during training by addressing shortcut learning, which does not add computational overhead at inference. We propose a simple yet effective debiasing technique to prevent models from shortcut learning during training. Experiments on a range of ED datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance without compromising inference speed. Our findings suggest a new research direction for improving entity disambiguation via shortcut learning mitigation.

Efficient Overshadowed Entity Disambiguation by Mitigating Shortcut Learning

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entity pairs in a document and poses many challenges as it involves multiple mentions of entities and cross-sentence inference. However, several aspects that are important for DocRE have not been considered and explored. Existing work ignores bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. Also, sophisticated neural networks are typically designed for cross-sentence evidence extraction to further enhance DocRE. More interestingly, we reveal a noteworthy finding: If a model has predicted a relation between an entity and other entities, this relation information may help infer and predict more relations between the entity’s adjacent entities and these other entities. Nonetheless, none of existing methods leverage secondary reasoning to exploit results of relation prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (SRF) for DocRE. In SRF, we initially propose a DocRE model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module (incurring only an additional learnable parameter overhead) for relation prediction. Further, for the first time, we elaborately design and propose a novel secondary reasoning method to discover more relations by exploring the results of the first relation prediction. Extensive experiments show that SRF achieves SOTA performance and our secondary reasoning method is both effective and general when integrated into existing models.

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Curriculum Consistency Learning for Conditional Sentence Generation

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