United States

Deploying large language models (LLMs) on edge devices presents significant challenges due to the substantial computational overhead and memory requirements. Activation sparsification can mitigate these resource challenges by reducing the number of activated neurons during inference. Existing methods typically employ thresholding-based sparsification based on the statistics of activation tensors. However, they do not model the impact of activation sparsification on performance, resulting in suboptimal performance degradation. To address the limitations, this paper reformulates the activation sparsification problem to explicitly capture the relationship between activation sparsity and model performance. Then, this paper proposes CHESS, a general activation sparsification approach via CHannel-wise thrEsholding and Selective Sparsification. First, channel-wise thresholding assigns a unique threshold to each activation channel in the feed-forward network (FFN) layers. Then, selective sparsification involves applying thresholding-based activation sparsification to specific layers within the attention modules. Finally, we detail the implementation of sparse kernels to accelerate LLM inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CHESS achieves lower performance degradation over eight downstream tasks while activating fewer parameters than existing methods, thus speeding up the LLM inference by up to 1.27x.

EMNLP 2024

CHESS: Optimizing LLM Inference via Channel-Wise Thresholding and Selective Sparsification

planning

regularization

language models

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

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.

To study the requirements needed for a human-like language to develop, Language Emergence research uses jointly trained artificial agents which communicate to solve a task, the most popular of which is a referential game. The targets that agents refer to typically involve a single entity, which limits their ecological validity and the complexity of the emergent languages. Here, we present a simple multi-entity game in which targets include multiple entities that are spatially related. We ask whether agents dealing with multi-entity targets benefit from the use of graph representations, and explore four different graph schemes. Our game requires more sophisticated analyses to capture the extent to which the emergent languages are compositional, and crucially, what the decomposed features are. We find that emergent languages from our setup exhibit a considerable degree of compositionality, but not over all features.

The Emergence of Compositional Languages in Multi-entity Referential Games: from Image to Graph Representations

Zero-shot temporal action localization (TAL) aims to temporally localize actions in videos without prior training examples. To address the challenges of TAL, we offer GRIZAL, a model that uses multimodal embeddings and dynamic motion cues to localize actions effectively. GRIZAL achieves sample diversity by using large-scale generative models such as GPT-4 for generating textual augmentations and DALL-E for generating image augmentations. Our model integrates vision-language embeddings with optical flow insights, optimized through a blend of supervised and self-supervised loss functions. On ActivityNet, Thumos14 and Charades-STA datasets, GRIZAL greatly outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot TAL models, demonstrating its robustness and adaptability across a wide range of video content. We will make all the models and code publicly available by open-sourcing them.

GRIZAL: Generative Prior-guided Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization

The emergence of personalized generation has made it possible to create texts or images that meet the unique needs of users. Recent advances mainly focus on style or scene transfer based on given keywords. However, in e-commerce and recommender systems, it is almost an untouched area to explore user historical interactions, automatically mine user interests with semantic associations, and create item representations that closely align with user individual interests.

In this paper, we propose a brand new framework called **I**nterest-**A**ugmented **M**ultimodal **G**enerator (**I-AM-G**). The framework first extracts tags from the multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with, and the most frequently occurred ones are extracted to rewrite the text description of the item. Then, the framework uses a decoupled text-to-text and image-to-image retriever to search for the top-$K$ similar item text and image embeddings from the item pool. Finally, the Attention module for user interests fuses the retrieved information in a cross-modal manner and further guides the personalized generation process in collaboration with the rewritten text.

We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that our framework can effectively generate results aligned with user preferences, which potentially provides a new paradigm of **Rewrite and Retrieve** for personalized generation.

I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization

Iterative data generation and model re-training can effectively align large language models~(LLMs) to human preferences. The process of data sampling is crucial, as it significantly influences the success of policy improvement. Repeated random sampling is a widely used method that independently queries the model multiple times to generate outputs. In this work, we propose a more effective sampling method, named Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling (PRS). Unlike random sampling, PRS employs a tree-based generation framework to enable more efficient sampling. It leverages adaptive self-refinement techniques to better explore the sampling space. By specifying user preferences in natural language, PRS can further optimize response generation according to these preferences. As a result, PRS can align models to diverse user preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that PRS generates higher-quality responses with significantly higher rewards. On AlpacaEval and Arena-Hard, PRS substantially outperforms repeated random sampling in best-of-$N$ sampling. Moreover, PRS shows strong performance when applied in iterative offline RL training.

Preference-Guided Reflective Sampling for Aligning Language Models

Ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values is critical as they become integral to applications like translation and question answering. Current alignment methods struggle with dynamic user intentions and complex objectives, making models vulnerable to generating harmful content. We propose Safety Arithmetic, a training-free framework enhancing LLM safety across different scenarios: Base models, Supervised fine-tuned models (SFT), and Edited models. Safety Arithmetic involves Harm Direction Removal to avoid harmful content and Safety Alignment to promote safe responses. Additionally, we present NoIntentEdit, a dataset highlighting edit instances that could compromise model safety if used unintentionally. Our experiments show that Safety Arithmetic significantly improves safety measures, reduces over-safety, and maintains model utility, outperforming existing methods in ensuring safe content generation.

Safety Arithmetic: A Framework for Test-time Safety Alignment of Language Models by Steering Parameters and Activations

In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the phenomenon of hate against women on social media platforms, particularly through the use of misogynous memes. These memes often target women with subtle and obscure cues, making their detection a challenging task for automated systems. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in reasoning using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to generate the intermediate reasoning chains as the rationale to facilitate multimodal tasks, but often neglect cultural diversity and key aspects like emotion and contextual knowledge hidden in the visual modalities. To address this gap, we introduce a **M**ultimodal **M**ulti-hop CoT (M3Hop-CoT) framework for **M**isogynous meme identification, combining a CLIP-based classifier and a multimodal CoT module with entity-object-relationship integration. M3Hop-CoT employs a three-step multimodal prompting principle to induce emotions, target awareness, and contextual knowledge for meme analysis. Our empirical evaluation, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, validates the efficacy of the M3Hop-CoT framework on the SemEval-2022 Task 5 (**MAMI task**) dataset, highlighting its strong performance in the macro-F1 score. Furthermore, we evaluate the model's generalizability by evaluating it on various benchmark meme datasets, offering a thorough insight into the effectiveness of our approach across different datasets. Codes are available at this link: https://github.com/Gitanjali1801/LLM_CoT

M3Hop-CoT: Misogynous Meme Identification with Multimodal Multi-hop Chain-of-Thought

Large language models have emerged as a significant phenomenon due to their ability to produce natural text across various applications. However, the proliferation of generated text raises concerns regarding its potential misuse in fraudulent activities such as academic dishonesty, spam dissemination, and misinformation propagation. Prior studies have detected the generation of non-analogous text, which manifests numerous differences between original and generated text. We have observed that the similarity between the original text and its generation is notably higher than that between the generated text and its subsequent regeneration. To address this, we propose a novel approach named SimLLM, aimed at estimating the similarity between an input sentence and its generated counterpart to detect analogous machine-generated sentences that closely mimic human-written ones. Our empirical analysis demonstrates SimLLM's superior performance compared to existing methods.

SimLLM: Detecting Sentences Generated by Large Language Models Using Similarity between the Generation and its Re-generation

Watermarking enables people to determine whether the text is generated by a specific model. It injects a unique signature based on the "green-red" list that can be tracked during detection, where the words in green lists are encouraged to be generated. Recent researchers propose to fix the green/red lists or increase the proportion of green tokens to defend against paraphrasing attacks. However, these methods cause degradation of text quality due to semantic disparities between the watermarked text and the unwatermarked text. In this paper, we propose a semantic-aware watermark method that considers contexts to generate a semantic-aware key to split a semantically balanced green/red list for watermark injection. The semantic balanced list reduces the performance drop due to adding bias on green lists. To defend against paraphrasing attacks, we generate the watermark key considering the semantics of contexts via locally sensitive hashing. To improve the text quality, we propose to split green/red lists considering semantics to enable the green list to cover almost all semantics. We also dynamically adapt the bias to balance text quality and robustness. The experiments show our advantages in both robustness and text quality comparable to existing baselines.

Context-aware Watermark with Semantic Balanced Green-red Lists for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are pivotal in advancing natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their efficacy is hampered by inaccuracies and outdated knowledge. Model editing emerges as a promising solution to address these challenges. However, existing editing methods struggle to track and incorporate changes in knowledge associated with edits, which limits the generalization ability of post-edit LLMs in processing edited knowledge. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel model editing method that leverages knowledge graphs for enhancing LLM editing, namely GLAME. Specifically, we first utilize a knowledge graph augmentation module to uncover associated knowledge that has changed due to editing, obtaining its internal representations within LLMs. This approach allows knowledge alterations within LLMs to be reflected through an external graph structure. Subsequently, we design a graph-based knowledge edit module to integrate structured knowledge into the model editing. This ensures that the updated parameters reflect not only the modifications of the edited knowledge but also the changes in other associated knowledge resulting from the editing process. Comprehensive experiments conducted on GPT-J and GPT-2 XL demonstrate that GLAME significantly improves the generalization capabilities of post-edit LLMs in employing edited knowledge.

Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Editing

While summarization has been extensively researched in natural language processing (NLP), cross-lingual cross-temporal summarization (CLCTS) is a largely unexplored area that has the potential to improve cross-cultural accessibility and understanding. This article comprehensively addresses the CLCTS task, including dataset creation, modeling, and evaluation. We (1) build the first CLCTS corpus with 328 instances for hDe-En (extended version with 455 instances) and 289 for hEn-De (extended version with 501 instances), leveraging historical fiction texts and Wikipedia summaries in English and German; (2) examine the effectiveness of popular transformer end-to-end models with different intermediate fine-tuning tasks; (3) explore the potential of GPT-3.5 as a summarizer; and (4) report evaluations from humans, GPT-4, and several recent automatic evaluation metrics. Our results indicate that intermediate task finetuned end-to-end models generate bad to moderate quality summaries while GPT-3.5, as a zero-shot summarizer, provides moderate to good quality outputs. GPT-3.5 also seems very adept at normalizing historical text. To assess data contamination in GPT-3.5, we design an adversarial attack scheme in which we find that GPT-3.5 performs slightly worse for unseen source documents compared to seen documents. Moreover, it sometimes hallucinates when the source sentences are inverted against its prior knowledge with a summarization accuracy of 0.67 for plot omission, 0.71 for entity swap, and 0.53 for plot negation. Overall, our regression results of model performances suggest that longer, older, and more complex source texts (all of which are more characteristic for historical language variants) are harder to summarize for all models, indicating the difficulty of the CLCTS task. Regarding evaluation, we observe that both the GPT-4 and BERTScore correlate moderately with human evaluations, implicating great potential for future improvement.

Downloads

Next from EMNLP 2024

The Emergence of Compositional Languages in Multi-entity Referential Games: from Image to Graph Representations

Similar lecture

Layer-wise Adaptive Gradient Sparsification for Distributed Deep Learning with Convergence Guarantees