United Arab Emirates

How can we protect the intellectual property of trained NLP models? Modern NLP models are prone to stealing by querying and distilling from their publicly exposed APIs. However, existing protection methods such as watermarking only work for images but are not applicable to text. We propose Distillation-Resistant Watermarking (DRW), a novel technique to protect NLP models from being stolen via distillation. DRW protects a model by injecting watermarks into the victim&#39;s prediction probability corresponding to a secret key and is able to detect such a key by probing a suspect model. We prove that a protected model still retains the original accuracy within a certain bound. We evaluate DRW on a diverse set of NLP tasks including text classification, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Experiments show that DRW protects the original model and detects stealing suspects at 100% mean average precision for all four tasks while the prior method fails on two.

EMNLP 2022

Distillation-Resistant Watermarking for Model Protection in NLP

trustworthy

watermark

knowledge distillation

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.

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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.

How can we protect the intellectual property of trained NLP models? Modern NLP models are prone to stealing by querying and distilling from their publicly exposed APIs. However, existing protection methods such as watermarking only work for images but are not applicable to text. We propose Distillation-Resistant Watermarking (DRW), a novel technique to protect NLP models from being stolen via distillation. DRW protects a model by injecting watermarks into the victim's prediction probability corresponding to a secret key and is able to detect such a key by probing a suspect model. We prove that a protected model still retains the original accuracy within a certain bound. We evaluate DRW on a diverse set of NLP tasks including text classification, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition. Experiments show that DRW protects the original model and detects stealing suspects at 100% mean average precision for all four tasks while the prior method fails on two.

findings / work in progress

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

While counterfactual data augmentation offers a promising step towards robust generalization in natural language processing, producing a set of counterfactuals that offer valuable inductive bias for models remains a challenge. Most existing approaches for producing counterfactuals, manual or automated, rely on small perturbations via minimal edits, resulting in simplistic changes. We introduce NeuroCounterfactuals, designed as loose counterfactuals, allowing for larger edits which result in naturalistic generations containing linguistic diversity, while still bearing similarity to the original document. Our novel generative approach bridges the benefits of constrained decoding, with those of language model adaptation for sentiment steering. Training data augmentation with our generations results in both in-domain and out-of-domain improvements for sentiment classification, outperforming even manually curated counterfactuals, under select settings. We further present detailed analyses to show the advantages of NeuroCounterfactuals over approaches involving simple, minimal edits.

NeuroCounterfactuals: Beyond Minimal-Edit Counterfactuals for Richer Data Augmentation

Transformer-based pre-trained models are known to encode societal biases not only in their contextual representations, but also in downstream predictions when fine-tuned on task-specific data.
We present D-Bias, an approach that selectively eliminates stereotypical associations (e.g, co-occurrence statistics) at fine-tuning, such that the model doesn't learn to excessively rely on those signals.
D-Bias attenuates biases from both identity words and frequently co-occurring proxies, which we select using pointwise mutual information.
We apply D-Bias to a) occupation classification, and b) toxicity classification and find that our approach substantially reduces downstream biases (e.g. by > 60% in toxicity classification, for identities that are most frequently flagged as toxic on online platforms).
In addition, we show that D-Bias dramatically improves upon scrubbing, i.e., removing only the identity words in question.
We also demonstrate that D-Bias easily extends to multiple identities, and achieves competitive performance with two recently proposed debiasing approaches: R-LACE and INLP.

Don't Just Clean It, Proxy Clean It: Mitigating Bias by Proxy in Pre-Trained Models

Natural language inference (NLI) is critical in many domains requiring complex decision-making, such as the biomedical domain. We introduce a novel semi-supervised procedure that bootstraps biomedical NLI datasets from positive entailment examples present in abstracts of biomedical publications. We focus on challenging texts where the hypothesis includes mechanistic information such as biochemical interactions between two entities. A key contribution of this work is automating the creation of negative examples that are informative without being simplistic. We generate a range of negative examples using nine strategies that manipulate the structure of the underlying mechanisms both with rules, e.g., flip the roles of the entities in the interaction, and, more importantly, by imposing the perturbed conditions as logical constraints in a neuro-logical decoding system \cite{lu-etal-2021-neurologic}.
We use this procedure to create a novel dataset for NLI in the biomedical domain, called \dataset. The accuracy of neural classifiers on this dataset is in the mid 70s F1, which indicates that this NLI task remains to be solved. Critically, we observe that the performance on the different classes of negative examples varies widely, from 97\% F1 on the simple negative examples that change the role of the entities in the hypothesis, to barely better than chance on the negative examples generated using neuro-logic decoding.

BioNLI: Generating a Biomedical NLI Dataset Using Lexico-semantic Constraints for Adversarial Examples

Conversations on social media tend to go off-topic and turn into different and sometimes toxic exchanges. Previous work focuses on analysing textual dialogues that have derailed into toxic content, but the range of derailment types is much broader, including spam or bot content, tangential comments, etc. In addition, existing work disregards conversations that involve visual information (i.e. images or videos), which are prevalent on most platforms. In this paper, we take a broader view of conversation derailment and propose a new challenge: detecting derailment based on the "change of conversation topic", where the topic is defined by an initial post containing both a text and an image. For that, we (i) create the first Multimodal Conversation Derailment (MCD) dataset, and (ii) introduce a new multimodal conversational architecture (MMConv) that utilises visual and conversational contexts to classify comments for derailment. Experiments show that MMConv substantially outperforms previous text-based approaches to detect conversation derailment, as well as general multimodal classifiers. MMConv is also more robust to textual noise, since it relies on richer contextual information.

Multimodal Conversation Modelling for Topic Derailment Detection

Construction of human-curated annotated datasets for abstractive text summarization (ATS) is very time-consuming and expensive because creating each instance requires a human annotator to read a long document and compose a shorter summary that would preserve the key information relayed by the original document. Active Learning (AL) is a technique developed to reduce the amount of annotation required to achieve a certain level of machine learning model performance. In information extraction and text classification, AL can reduce the amount of labor up to multiple times. Despite its potential for aiding expensive annotation, as far as we know, there were no effective AL query strategies for ATS. This stems from the fact that many AL strategies rely on uncertainty estimation, while as we show in our work, uncertain instances are usually noisy, and selecting them can degrade the model performance compared to passive annotation. We address this problem by proposing the first effective query strategy for AL in ATS based on diversity principles. We show that given a certain annotation budget, using our strategy in AL annotation helps to improve the model performance in terms of ROUGE and consistency scores. Additionally, we analyze the effect of self-learning and show that it can additionally increase the performance of the model.

Active Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

Memorization presents a challenge for several constrained Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), wherein the proclivity of neural models to memorize noisy and atypical samples reacts adversely with the noisy (web crawled) datasets. However, previous studies of memorization in constrained NLG tasks have only focused on counterfactual memorization, linking it to the problem of hallucinations. In this work, we propose a new, inexpensive algorithm for extractive memorization (exact training data generation under insufficient context) in constrained sequence generation tasks and use it to study extractive memorization and its effects in NMT. We demonstrate that extractive memorization poses a serious threat to NMT reliability by qualitatively and quantitatively characterizing the memorized samples as well as the model behavior in their vicinity. Based on empirical observations, we develop a simple algorithm which elicits non-memorized translations of memorized samples from the same model, for a large fraction of such samples. Finally, we show that the proposed algorithm could also be leveraged to mitigate memorization in the model through finetuning. We have released the code to reproduce our results at https://github.com/vyraun/Finding-Memo.

Finding Memo: Extractive Memorization in Constrained Sequence Generation Tasks

Traditional machine translation (MT) metrics provide an average measure of translation quality that is insensitive to the long tail of behavioral problems. Examples include translation of numbers, physical units, dropped content and hallucinations. These errors, which occur rarely and unpredictably in Neural Machine Translation (NMT), greatly undermine the reliability of state-of-the-art MT systems. Consequently, it is important to have visibility into these problems during model development.
Towards this end, we introduce SALTED, a specifications-based framework for behavioral testing of NMT models. At the core of our approach is the use of high-precision detectors that flag errors (or alternatively, verify output correctness) between a source sentence and a system output. These detectors provide fine-grained measurements of long-tail errors, providing a trustworthy view of problems that were previously invisible. We demonstrate that such detectors could be used not just to identify salient long-tail errors in MT systems, but also for higher-recall filtering of the training data, fixing targeted errors with model fine-tuning in NMT and generating novel data for metamorphic testing to elicit further bugs in models.

SALTED: A Framework for SAlient Long-tail Translation Error Detection

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging.
We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity.
The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences.
To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set.
We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

We introduce question answering with a cotext in focus, a task that simulates a free interaction with a QA system. The user reads on a screen some information about a topic, and they can follow-up with questions that can be either related or not to the topic; and the answer can be found in the document containing the screen content or from other pages. We call such information context. To study the task, we construct FocusQA, a dataset for answer sentence selection (AS2) with 12,165011
unique question/context pairs, and a total of 109,940 answers. To build the dataset, we developed a novel methodology that takes existing questions and pairs them with relevant contexts. To show the benefits of this approach, we present a comparative analysis with a set of questions written by humans after reading the context, showing that our approach greatly helps in eliciting more realistic question/context pairs. Finally, we show that the task poses several challenges for incorporating contextual information. In this respect, we introduce strong baselines for answer sentence selection that outperform the precision of state-of-the-art models for AS2 up to 21.3% absolute points.

FocusQA: Open-Domain Question Answering with a Context in Focus

NLP research on public opinion manipulation campaigns has primarily focused on detecting overt strategies such as fake news and disinformation. However, information manipulation in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war exemplifies how governments and media also employ more nuanced strategies. We release a new dataset, VoynaSlov, containing 38M+ posts from Russian media outlets on Twitter and VKontakte, as well as public activity and responses, immediately preceding and during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. We apply standard and recently-developed NLP models on VoynaSlov to examine agenda setting, framing, and priming, several strategies underlying information manipulation, and reveal variation across media outlet control, social media platform, and time. Our examination of these media effects and extensive discussion of current approaches' limitations encourage further development of NLP models for understanding information manipulation in emerging crises, as well as other real-world and interdisciplinary tasks.

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