Singapore

Feature attribution scores are used for explaining the prediction of a text classifier to users by highlighting a k number of tokens. In this work, we propose a way to determine the number of optimal k tokens that should be displayed from sequential properties of the attribution scores. Our approach is dynamic across sentences, method-agnostic, and deals with sentence length bias. We compare agreement between multiple methods and humans on an NLI task, using fixed k and dynamic k. We find that perturbation-based methods and Vanilla Gradient exhibit highest agreement on most method--method and method--human agreement metrics with a static k. Their advantage over other methods disappears with dynamic ks which mainly improve Integrated Gradient and GradientXInput. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that sequential properties of attribution scores are informative for consolidating attribution signals for human interpretation.

EMNLP 2023

Dynamic Top-k Estimation Consolidates Disagreement between Feature Attribution Methods

top-k

agreement

interpretability

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

AAAI 2021

poster

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

The conference is held in person at the Resorts World Convention Centre in Singapore, and available on-line with the help of Underline.

For those in Singapore, I hope that you will find time to explore the exciting Sentosa Island, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore Botanic Gardens and the many other attractions unique to Singapore.

Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

To access the **EMNLP 2023** event page on Underline, you need to register for the Conference. 
Please follow **[this link](https://2023.emnlp.org/registration/)** for more details.

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

Despite the success of Siamese encoder models such as sentence
transformers (ST), little is known about the aspects of inputs they
pay attention to. A barrier is that their predictions cannot be
attributed to individual features, as they compare two inputs rather
than processing a single one.
This paper derives a local attribution method for Siamese encoders by generalizing
the principle of integrated gradients to models with multiple inputs.
The output takes the form of feature-pair attributions and in case of STs it can be reduced to a token--token matrix. 
Our method involves the introduction of integrated Jacobians and inherits the advantageous formal properties of integrated gradients: it accounts for the model's full computation graph and is guaranteed to converge to the actual prediction.
A pilot study shows that in case of STs few token pairs can dominate
predictions and that STs preferentially focus on nouns and verbs.
For accurate predictions, however, they need to attend to the majority of tokens and parts of speech.

An Attribution Method for Siamese Encoders | VIDEO

The scientific innovation in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and more broadly in artificial intelligence (AI) is at its fastest pace to date. As large language models (LLMs) unleash a new era of automation, important debates emerge regarding the benefits and risks of their development, deployment and use. Currently, these debates have been dominated by often polarized narratives mainly led by the AI Safety and AI Ethics movements. This polarization, often amplified by social media, is swaying political agendas on AI regulation and governance and posing issues of regulatory capture. Capture occurs when the regulator advances the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate, or of special interest groups rather than pursuing the general public interest. Meanwhile in NLP research, attention has been increasingly paid to the discussion of regulating risks and harms. This often happens without systematic methodologies or sufficient rooting in the disciplines that inspire an extended scope of NLP research, jeopardizing the scientific integrity of these endeavors. Regulation studies are a rich source of knowledge on how to systematically deal with risk and uncertainty, as well as with scientific evidence, to evaluate and compare regulatory options. This resource has largely remained untapped so far. In this paper, we argue how NLP research on these topics can benefit from proximity to regulatory studies and adjacent fields. We do so by discussing basic tenets of regulation, and risk and uncertainty, and by highlighting the shortcomings of current NLP discussions dealing with risk assessment. Finally, we advocate for the development of a new multidisciplinary research space on regulation and NLP (RegNLP), focused on connecting scientific knowledge to regulatory processes based on systematic methodologies.

Regulation and NLP (RegNLP): Taming Large Language Models | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited striking in-context learning (ICL) ability to adapt to target tasks with a few input-output demonstrations.
For better ICL, different methods are proposed to select representative demonstrations from existing training corpora.
However, such settings are not aligned with real-world practices, as end-users usually query LMs without access to demonstration pools.
In this work, we introduce Self-ICL---a simple framework which bootstraps LMs' intrinsic capabilities to perform zero-shot ICL.
Given a test input, Self-ICL first prompts the model to generate pseudo-inputs.
Next, the model predicts pseudo-labels for the pseudo-inputs via zero-shot prompting.
Finally, we perform ICL for the test input with the pseudo-input-label pairs as demonstrations.
Evaluation on 23 BIG-Bench Hard tasks shows Self-ICL outperforms zero-shot baselines on both average accuracy and head-to-head comparison.
Moreover, with zero-shot chain-of-thought, Self-ICL achieves results comparable to using real demonstrations.
Additionally, we conduct a range of analyses to validate Self-ICL's effectiveness and provide insights for its behaviors under different settings.

Self-ICL: Zero-Shot In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) assume that training examples (e.g., x-ray images) are annotated with high-level concepts (e.g., types of abnormalities), and perform classification by first predicting the concepts, followed by predicting the label relying on these concepts. However, the primary challenge in employing CBMs lies in the requirement of defining concepts predictive of the label and annotating training examples with these concepts. In our approach, we adopt a more moderate assumption and instead use text descriptions (e.g., radiology reports), accompanying the images, to guide the induction of concepts. Our crossmodal approach treats concepts as discrete latent variables and promotes concepts that (1) are predictive of the label, and (2) can be predicted reliably from both the image and text. Through experiments conducted on datasets ranging from synthetic datasets (e.g., synthetic images with generated descriptions) to realistic medical imaging datasets, we demonstrate that crossmodal learning encourages the induction of interpretable concepts while also facilitating disentanglement.

Cross-Modal Conceptualization in Bottleneck Models

Meetings typically involve multiple participants and lengthy conversations, resulting in redundant and trivial content. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-step framework, Reconstruct before Summarize (RbS), for effective and efficient meeting summarization. RbS first leverages a self-supervised paradigm to annotate essential contents by reconstructing the meeting transcripts. Secondly, we propose a relative positional bucketing (RPB) algorithm to equip (conventional) summarization models to generate the summary. Despite the additional reconstruction process, our proposed RPB significantly compresses the input, leading to faster processing and reduced memory consumption compared to traditional summarization methods. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method through extensive evaluations and analyses. On two meeting summarization datasets, AMI and ICSI, our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches without relying on large-scale pre-training or expert-grade annotating tools.

Reconstruct Before Summarize: An Efficient Two-Step Framework for Condensing and Summarizing Meeting Transcripts

While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of LLMs. To address this, our goals are to make model beliefs and their inferential relationships explicit, and to resolve inconsistencies that may exist, so that answers are supported by interpretable chains of reasoning drawn from a consistent network of beliefs. Our approach, which we call REFLEX, is to add a **rational, self-reflecting layer** on top of the LLM. First, given a question, we construct a **belief graph** using a backward-chaining process to materialize relevant model beliefs (including beliefs about answer candidates) and their inferential relationships. Second, we identify and minimize contradictions in that graph using a formal constraint reasoner. We find that REFLEX significantly improves consistency (by 8%-11% absolute) without harming overall answer accuracy, resulting in answers supported by faithful chains of reasoning drawn from a more consistent belief system. This suggests a new style of system architecture in which an LLM extended with a rational layer can provide an interpretable window into system beliefs, add a systematic reasoning capability, and repair latent inconsistencies present in the LLM.

Language Models with Rationality

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a multi-step reasoning mechanism. In this paper, we try to answer this question by exploring a mechanistic interpretation of LMs for multi-step reasoning tasks. Concretely, we hypothesize that the LM implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it. We test this hypothesis by introducing a new probing approach (called MechanisticProbe) that recovers the reasoning tree from the model’s attention patterns. We use our probe to analyze two LMs: GPT-2 on a synthetic task (k-th smallest element), and LLaMA on two simple language-based reasoning tasks (ProofWriter \& AI2 Reasoning Challenge). We show that MechanisticProbe is able to detect the information of the reasoning tree from the model’s attentions for most examples, suggesting that the LM indeed is going through a process of multi-step reasoning within its architecture in many cases.

Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

A crucial challenge for generative large language models (LLMs) is diversity: when a user's prompt is under-specified, models may follow implicit assumptions while generating a response, which may result in homogenization of the responses, as well as certain demographic groups being under-represented or even erased from the generated responses. In this paper, we formalize the problem diversity of representation in LLM generations. We present evaluation datasets and propose metrics to measure diversity in generated responses along people and culture axes. We find that LLMs understand the notion of diversity, and that they can reason and critique their own responses for that goal. This finding motivated a new prompting technique called collective-critique and self-voting (CCSV) to self-improve people diversity of LLMs by tapping into its diversity reasoning capabilities, without relying on handcrafted examples or prompt tuning. Extensive empirical experiments with both human and automated evaluations show that our proposed approach is effective at improving people and culture diversity, and outperforms all baseline methods by a large margin.

Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting

Neural language models (LMs) can be used to evaluate the truth of factual statements in two ways: they can be either queried for statement probabilities, or probed for internal representations of truthfulness. Past work has found that these two procedures sometimes disagree, and that probes tend to be more accurate than LM outputs. This has led some researchers to conclude that LMs "lie" or otherwise encode non-cooperative communicative intents. Is this an accurate description of today's LMs, or can query--probe disagreement arise in other ways? We identify three different classes of disagreement, which we term confabulation, deception, and heterogeneity. In many cases, the superiority of probes is simply attributable to better calibration on uncertain answers rather than a greater fraction of correct, high-confidence answers. In some cases, queries and probes perform better on different subsets of inputs, and accuracy can further be improved by ensembling the two.

Cognitive Dissonance: Why Do Language Model Outputs Disagree with Internal Representations of Truthfulness?

Animacy—whether an entity is alive and sentient—is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests indirectly, in the form of selectional constraints on verbs and adjectives. This poses a potential issue for transformer language models (LMs): they often train only on text, and thus lack access to extralinguistic information from which humans learn about animacy. We ask: how does this impact LMs' animacy processing—do they still behave as humans do? We answer this question using open-source LMs. Like previous studies, we find that LMs behave much like humans when presented with entities whose animacy is typical. However, we also show that even when presented with stories about atypically animate entities, such as a peanut in love, LMs adapt: they treat these entities as animate, though they do not adapt as well as humans. Even when the context indicating atypical animacy is very short, LMs pick up on subtle clues and change their behavior. We conclude that despite the limited signal through which LMs can learn about animacy, they are indeed sensitive to the relevant lexical semantic nuances available in English.

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