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Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning efficiency in language models. We introduce a trial-and-demonstration (TnD) learning framework that incorporates three distinct components: student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. Our experiments reveal that the TnD approach accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters, and we highlight the significance of both trials and demonstrations. We further show that the teacher&#39;s choices of words influence students&#39; word-specific learning efficiency, and a practice-makes-perfect effect is evident by a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and their respective learning curves. Our findings suggest that interactive language learning, with teacher demonstrations and active trials, can facilitate efficient word learning in language models.

NAACL 2025

Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations

efficient language learning

interactive learning

language acquisition

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

Humans are efficient language learners and inherently social creatures. Our language development is largely shaped by our social interactions, for example, the demonstration and feedback from caregivers. Contrary to human language learning, recent advancements in large language models have primarily adopted a non-interactive training paradigm, and refined pre-trained models through feedback afterward. In this work, we explore how corrective feedback from interactions influences neural language acquisition from scratch through systematically controlled experiments, assessing whether it contributes to word learning efficiency in language models. We introduce a trial-and-demonstration (TnD) learning framework that incorporates three distinct components: student trials, teacher demonstrations, and a reward conditioned on language competence at various developmental stages. Our experiments reveal that the TnD approach accelerates word acquisition for student models of equal and smaller numbers of parameters, and we highlight the significance of both trials and demonstrations. We further show that the teacher's choices of words influence students' word-specific learning efficiency, and a practice-makes-perfect effect is evident by a strong correlation between the frequency of words in trials and their respective learning curves. Our findings suggest that interactive language learning, with teacher demonstrations and active trials, can facilitate efficient word learning in language models.

poster

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Language models (LMs) can produce texts that appear accurate and coherent but contain untruthful or toxic content. Inference-time interventions that edit the hidden activations have shown promising results in steering the LMs towards desirable generations. Existing activation intervention methods often comprise an activation probe to detect undesirable generation, triggering the activation modification to steer subsequent generation. This paper proposes a probe-free intervention method **FLORAIN** for all attention heads in a specific activation layer. It eliminates the need to train classifiers for probing purposes. The intervention function is parametrized by a sample-wise nonlinear low-rank mapping, which is trained by minimizing the distance between the modified activations and their projection onto the manifold of desirable content. Under specific constructions of the manifold and projection distance, we show that the intervention strategy can be computed efficiently by solving a smooth optimization problem. The empirical results, benchmarked on multiple base models, demonstrate that FLORAIN consistently outperforms several baseline methods in enhancing model truthfulness and quality across generation and multiple-choice tasks. Our implementation can be found at [https://github.com/nguyenngocbaocmt02/EFI](https://github.com/nguyenngocbaocmt02/EFI).

Probe-Free Low-Rank Activation Intervention

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) faces significant memory challenges due to the large size of model weights. We introduce STaged parameter-Efficient Pre-training (STEP), which integrates parameter-efficient tuning techniques with model growth. We conduct experiments on pre-training LLMs of various sizes and demonstrate that STEP achieves up to a 53.9% reduction in maximum memory requirements compared to vanilla pre-training while maintaining equivalent performance. Furthermore, we show that the model by STEP performs comparably to vanilla pre-trained models on downstream tasks after instruction tuning.

STEP: Staged Parameter-Efficient Pre-training for Large Language Models

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely employed to ground responses to queries on domain-specific documents. But do RAG implementations leave out important information when answering queries that need an integrated analysis of information (e.g., Tell me good news in the stock market today.)? To address these concerns, RAG developers need to annotate information retrieval (IR) data for their domain of interest, which is challenging because (1) domain-specific queries usually need nuanced definitions of relevance beyond shallow semantic relevance; and (2) human or GPT-4 annotation is costly and cannot cover all (query, document) pairs (i.e., annotation selection bias), thus harming the effectiveness in evaluating IR recall. To address these challenges, we propose DIRAS (**D**omain-specific **I**nformation **R**etrieval **A**nnotation with **S**calability), a manual-annotation-free schema that fine-tunes open-sourced LLMs to consider nuanced relevance definition and annotate (partial) relevance labels with calibrated relevance scores. Extensive evaluation shows that DIRAS enables smaller (8B) LLMs to achieve GPT-4-level performance on annotating and ranking unseen (query, document) pairs, and is helpful for real-world RAG development.

DIRAS: Efficient LLM Annotation of Document Relevance for Retrieval Augmented Generation

Making large language models (LLMs) safe for mass deployment is a complex and ongoing challenge. Efforts have focused on aligning models to human preferences (RLHF), essentially embedding a ''safety feature'' into the model’s parameters. The Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) algorithm (Zou et al., 2023b) emerges as one of the most popular automated jailbreaks, an attack that circumvents this safety training. So far, it is believed that such optimization-based attacks (unlike hand-crafted ones) are sample-specific. To make them universal and transferable, one has to incorporate multiple samples and models into the objective function. Contrary to this belief, we find that the adversarial prompts discovered by such optimizers are inherently prompt-universal and transferable, even when optimized on a single model and a single harmful request. To further exploit this phenomenon, we introduce IRIS, a new objective to these optimizers to explicitly deactivate the safety feature to create an even stronger universal and transferable attack. Without requiring a large number of queries or accessing output token probabilities, our universal and transferable attack achieves a 25% success rate against the state-of-the-art Circuit Breaker defense (Zou et al., 2024), compared to 2.5% by white-box GCG. Crucially, IRIS also attains state-of-the-art transfer rates on frontier models: GPT-3.5-Turbo (90%), GPT-4o-mini (86%), GPT-4o (76%), o1-mini (54%), o1-preview (48%), o3-mini (66%), and deepseek-reasoner (90%).

Stronger Universal and Transferable Attacks by Suppressing Refusals

Modern language models (LMs) have significantly advanced generative modeling in natural language processing (NLP). Despite their success, LMs often struggle with adaptation to new contexts in real-time applications. A promising approach to task adaptation is activation intervention, which steers the LMs' generation process by identifying and manipulating the activations. However, existing interventions rely heavily on heuristic rules or require many prompt inputs to determine effective interventions. In this paper, we propose a layer-wise additive activation intervention framework that optimizes the intervention process, thereby enhancing sample efficiency. We evaluate our framework on various datasets, demonstrating improvements in the accuracy of pretrained LMs and competing intervention baselines.

Task-driven Layerwise Additive Activation Intervention

Language identification is used as the first step in many data collection and crawling efforts because it allows us to sort online text into language-specific buckets. However, many modern languages, such as Konkani, Kashmiri, Punjabi etc., are synchronically written in several scripts. Moreover, languages with different writing systems do not share significant lexical, semantic, and syntactic properties in neural representation spaces, which is a disadvantage for closely related languages and low-resource languages, especially those from the Indian Subcontinent. To counter this, we propose learning script-agnostic representations using several different experimental strategies (upscaling, flattening, and script mixing) focusing on four major Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam). We find that word-level script randomization and exposure to a language written in multiple scripts is extremely valuable for downstream script-agnostic language identification, while also maintaining competitive performance on naturally occurring text.

Script-Agnosticism and its Impact on Language Identification for Dravidian Languages

With the commercialization of large language models (LLMs), weight-activation quantization has emerged to compress and accelerate LLMs, achieving high throughput while reducing inference costs. However, existing post-training quantization (PTQ) techniques for quantizing weights and activations of LLMs still suffer from non-negligible accuracy drops, especially on massive multitask language understanding. To address this issue, we propose Low-Rank Quantization (LRQ) - a simple yet effective post-training weight quantization method for LLMs that reconstructs the outputs of an intermediate Transformer block by leveraging low-rank weight-scaling matrices, replacing the conventional full weight-scaling matrices that entail as many learnable scales as their associated weights. Thanks to parameter sharing via low-rank structure, LRQ only needs to learn significantly fewer parameters while enabling the individual scaling of weights, thus boosting the generalization capability of quantized LLMs. We show the superiority of LRQ over prior LLM PTQ works under (i) 8-bit weight and per-tensor activation quantization, (ii) 4-bit weight and 8-bit per-token activation quantization, and (iii) low-bit weight-only quantization schemes. Our code is available at Software.

LRQ: Optimizing Post-Training Quantization for Large Language Models by Learning Low-Rank Weight-Scaling Matrices

Mitigating the retention of sensitive or private information in large language models is essential for enhancing privacy and safety. Existing unlearning methods, like Gradient Ascent and Negative Preference Optimization, directly tune models to remove unwanted information. However, these methods often become unstable because they fine-tune by maximizing loss, which is the opposite of traditional loss minimization in learning. This reversal creates instability, especially on larger datasets, as the model struggles to balance unlearning with maintaining language capacity, leading to over-unlearning. In this paper, we introduce UnDIAL (Unlearning via Self-Distillation on Adjusted Logits), a novel and robust unlearning method. Our approach leverages self-distillation to adjust logits and selectively reduce the influence of targeted tokens. This technique ensures smooth convergence and avoids catastrophic forgetting, even in challenging unlearning tasks with large datasets and sequential unlearning requests. Extensive experiments show that UnDIAL is the first direct tuning method to achieve both robustness in unlearning and scalability, while maintaining stable training dynamics and resilience to hyperparameter tuning.

UNDIAL: Self-Distillation with Adjusted Logits for Robust Unlearning in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently use autoregressive decoding, which lacks parallelism in inference and results in significantly slow inference speed. While methods such as Medusa constructs parallelized heads, they lack adequate information interaction across different prediction positions. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Amphista, an enhanced speculative decoding framework that builds upon Medusa. Specifically, Amphista models an *Auto-embedding Block* capable of parallel inference, incorporating bi-directional attention to enable interaction between different drafting heads. Additionally, Amphista integrates *Staged Adaptation Layers*, which ensure a seamless transition of semantic information from the target model’s autoregressive inference to the drafting heads’ non-autoregressive inference, effectively achieving paradigm shift and feature fusion. Experimental results on Vicuna models using MT-Bench and Spec-Bench demonstrate that Amphista achieves substantial acceleration while maintaining generation quality. On MT-Bench, Amphista delivers up to **2.75×** speedup over vanilla autoregressive decoding and **1.40×** over Medusa on Vicuna 33B in wall-clock time.

Amphista: Bi-directional Multi-head Decoding for Accelerating LLM Inference

Training large language models (LLMs) heavily relies on distributed training strategies, among which pipeline parallelism (PP) plays a crucial role. As training sequences extend to 32k or even 128k tokens, current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including substantial pipeline bubbles and high memory footprint, greatly hindering training throughput and model scalability. This paper introduces a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method, named Seq1F1B, tailored for training LLMs on long sequences with high training throughput and memory efficiency. Unlike typical PP methods, which adopt batch-level pipeline schedule, Seq1F1B schedules the pipeline of training LLMs at the sequence level. It uses a computational strategy to partition sequences appropriately, significantly reducing pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. Compared to competitive PP baselines such as Megatron 1F1B PP, Seq1F1B achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint. Notably, Seq1F1B trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs without using recomputation strategies, a feat unachievable with existing methods. We have released our code on GitHub to facilitate further research and development in LLM training on long sequences: https://github.com/thunlp/Seq1F1B.

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