United States

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.

EMNLP 2024

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

signaling game

communication

reasoning

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

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*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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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.

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.

Cross-lingual Cross-temporal Summarization: Dataset, Models, Evaluation

With the size and cost of large transformer-based language models growing, recently, there has been interest in shortcut casting of early transformer hidden-representations to final-representations for cheaper model inference. In particular, shortcutting pre-trained transformers with linear transformations over early layers has been shown to improve precision in early inference. However, for large language models, even this becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we propose Narrow Jump to Conclusions (NJTC) and Normalized Narrow Jump to Conclusions (N-NJTC) - parameter efficient alternatives to standard linear shortcutting that reduces shortcut parameter count by over 97%. We show that N-NJTC reliably outperforms Identity shortcuts at early stages and offers stable precision from all transformer block levels for GPT-2-XL, Phi3-Mini and Llama2-7B transformer models, demonstrating the viability of more parameter efficient short-cutting approaches.

Normalized Narrow Jump To Conclusions: Normalized Narrow Shortcuts for Parameter Efficient Early Exit Transformer Prediction

Large language models (LLMs) based on transformer are witnessing a notable trend of size expansion, which brings considerable costs to both model training and inference. However, existing methods such as model quantization, knowledge distillation, and model pruning are constrained by various issues, including hardware support limitations, the need for extensive training, and alterations to the model internal structure. In this paper, we propose a concise layer-wise structured pruner called $\textit{Layer Collapse (LaCo)}$, in which rear model layers collapse into a prior layer, enabling a rapid reduction in model size while preserving the model structure. Comprehensive experiments show that our method maintains an average task performance of over 80% at pruning ratios of 25-30%, significantly outperforming existing state-of-the-art structured pruning methods. We also conduct post-training experiments to confirm that the $\textit{LaCo}$ effectively inherits the parameters of the original model. Additionally, we perform ablation studies on various settings of $\textit{LaCo}$. Finally, we discuss our motivation from the perspective of layer-wise similarity and evaluate the performance of the pruned LLMs across various pruning ratios.

LaCo: Large Language Model Pruning via Layer Collapse

Existing auto-regressive large language models (LLMs) are primarily trained using documents from general domains. In the biomedical domain, continual pre-training is a prevalent method for domain adaptation to inject professional knowledge into powerful LLMs that have been pre-trained in general domains. Previous studies typically conduct standard pre-training by randomly packing multiple documents into a long pre-training sequence. Recently, some existing works suggest that enhancing the relatedness of documents within the same pre-training sequence may be advantageous. However, these studies primarily focus on general domains, which cannot be readily applied in the biomedical domain where the distinction of fine-grained topics is harder. Is it possible to further improve the pre-training for biomedical language models (LMs) using exactly the same corpus? In this paper, we explore an improved approach to continual pre-training, which is a prevalent method for domain adaptation, by utilizing information from the citation network in this challenging scenario. Empirical studies demonstrate that our proposed LinkLM data improves both the intra-sample and inter-sample referring abilities of auto-regressive LMs in the biomedical domain, encouraging more profound consideration of task-specific pre-training sequence design for continual pre-training.

Improving Referring Ability for Biomedical Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications worldwide, necessitating handling multiple languages across various tasks. We propose a metric called Information Parity (IP) that can predict an LLM's capabilities across multiple languages in a task-agnostic manner. IP is well-motivated from an information theoretic perspective: it is associated with the LLM’s efficiency of compressing the text in a given language compared to a reference language. We evaluate IP and other popular metrics such as Tokenization Parity (TP) and Tokenizer Fertility (TF) on several variants of open-sourced LLMs (Llama2, Gemma, Mistral). Among all metrics known to us, IP is better correlated with existing task-specific benchmark scores from the literature and thus better predicts such scores in a certain language. These findings show that IP may be useful for ranking multilingual LLMs' capabilities regardless of the downstream task.

Compression Parity: Measuring and Predicting the Multilingual Capabilities of Language Models

Current long-context benchmarks primarily focus on retrieval-based tests, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to locate specific information within extensive input contexts, such as the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) benchmark. Long-context generation refers to the ability of a language model to generate coherent and contextually accurate text that spans across lengthy passages or documents. While recent studies show strong performance on NIAH and other retrieval-based long-context benchmarks, there is a significant lack of benchmarks for evaluating long-context generation capabilities. To bridge this gap and offer a comprehensive assessment, we introduce a synthetic benchmark, LongGenBench, which allows for flexible configurations of customized generation context lengths. LongGenBench advances beyond traditional benchmarks by redesigning the format of questions and necessitating that LLMs respond with a single, cohesive long-context answer. Upon extensive evaluation using LongGenBench, we observe that: (1) both API accessed and open source models exhibit performance degradation in long-context generation scenarios, ranging from 1.2% to 47.1%; (2) different series of LLMs exhibit varying trends of performance degradation, with the Gemini-1.5-Flash model showing the least degradation among API accessed models, and the Qwen2 series exhibiting the least degradation in LongGenBench among open source models.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

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

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