Mexico

We introduce Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding (REST), a novel algorithm designed to speed up language model generation. The key insight driving the development of REST is the observation that the process of text generation often includes certain common phases and patterns. Unlike previous methods that rely on a draft language model for speculative decoding, REST harnesses the power of retrieval to generate draft tokens. This method draws from the reservoir of existing knowledge, retrieving and employing relevant tokens based on the current context. Its plug-and-play nature allows for seamless integration and acceleration of any language model, all without necessitating additional training. When benchmarked on 7B and 13B language models in a single-batch setting, REST achieves a significant speedup of $1.62 \times$ to $2.36 \times$ on code or text generation. The source code of REST is available at https://github.com/FasterDecoding/REST.

NAACL 2024

REST: Retrieval-Based Speculative Decoding

speculative decoding

llm acceleration

retrieval

### 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. 
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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Language models pre-trained on general text have achieved impressive results in diverse fields. Yet, the distinct linguistic characteristics of task-oriented dialogues (TOD) compared to general text limit the practical utility of existing language models. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods overlook the one-to-many property of conversations, where multiple responses can be appropriate given the same conversation context. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called DivTOD, which collaborates with LLMs to learn diverse task-oriented dialogue representations. DivTOD guides LLMs in transferring diverse knowledge to smaller models while removing domain knowledge that contradicts task-oriented dialogues. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong TOD baselines on various downstream dialogue tasks and learns the intrinsic diversity of task-oriented dialogues.

DivTOD: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Diversifying Task-Oriented Dialogue Representations

We explore the use of language as a perceptual representation for vision-and-language navigation (VLN), with a focus on low-data settings. Our approach uses off-the-shelf vision systems for image captioning and object detection to convert an agent's egocentric panoramic view at each time step into natural language descriptions. We then finetune a pretrained language model to select an action, based on the current view and the trajectory history, that would best fulfill the navigation instructions. In contrast to the standard setup which adapts a pretrained language model to work directly with continuous visual features from pretrained vision models, our approach instead uses (discrete) language as the perceptual representation. We explore several use cases of our language-based navigation (LangNav) approach on the R2R VLN benchmark: generating synthetic trajectories from a prompted language model (GPT-4) with which to finetune a smaller language model; domain transfer where we transfer a policy learned on one simulated environment (ALFRED) to another (more realistic) environment (R2R); and combining both vision- and language-based representations for VLN. Our approach is found to improve upon baselines that rely on visual features in settings where only a few expert trajectories (10-100) are available, demonstrating the potential of language as a perceptual representation for navigation.

LangNav: Language as a Perceptual Representation for Navigation

The improvement of LLMs' instruction-following capabilities relies heavily on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. Unfortunately, the current methods used to collect the pairs suffer from either unaffordable labor costs or severe hallucinations in the self-generation of LLM. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a scalable solution. It involves training LLMs to generate instruction-response pairs based on human-written documents, rather than relying solely on self-generation without context. Our proposed method not only exploits the advantages of human-written documents in reducing hallucinations but also utilizes an LLM to wrap the expression of documents, which enables us to bridge the gap between various document styles and the standard AI response. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing typical methods on multiple benchmarks. In particular, compared to the best-performing baseline, the LLM trained using our generated dataset exhibits a 10\% relative improvement in performance on AlpacaEval, despite utilizing only 1/5 of its training data. Furthermore, a comprehensive manual evaluation validates the quality of the data we generated.

DoG-Instruct: Towards Premium Instruction-Tuning Data via Text-Grounded Instruction Wrapping

The Euclidean space is the familiar space for training neural models and performing arithmetic operations. However, many data types inherently possess complex geometries, and model training methods involve operating over their latent representations, which cannot be effectively captured in the Euclidean space. The hyperbolic space provides a more generalized representative geometry to model the hierarchical complexities of the tree-like structure of natural language. We propose AdaPT a set of guidelines for initialization, parametrization, and training of neural networks, which adapts to the dataset and can be used with different manifolds. AdaPT can be generalized over any existing neural network training methodology and leads to more stable training without a substantial increase in training time. We apply AdaPT guidelines over two state-of-the-art deep learning approaches and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness through experiments on three tasks over 12 languages across speech and text. Through extensive qualitative analysis, we put forward the applicability of AdaPT as a set of guidelines optimally utilizing the manifold geometry, which can be extended to various downstream tasks across languages and modalities.

AdaPT: A Set of Guidelines for Hyperbolic Multimodal Multilingual NLP

Previously, non-autoregressive models were widely recognized as being superior in generation efficiency but inferior in generation quality due to the challenges of modeling multiple target modalities. To enhance the multi-modality modeling ability, we propose the diffusion glancing transformer, which employs a modality diffusion process and residual glancing sampling. The modality diffusion process is a discrete process that interpolates the multi-modal distribution along the decoding steps, and the residual glancing sampling approach guides the model to continuously learn the remaining modalities across the layers. Experimental results on various machine translation and text generation benchmarks demonstrate that DIFFGLAT achieves better generation accuracy while maintaining fast decoding speed compared with both autoregressive and non-autoregressive models.

Diffusion Glancing Transformer for Parallel Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

Image--text models (ITMs) is the prevalent architecture to solve video question--answering tasks, which requires only a few input frames to save huge computational cost compared to video--language models. However, we find existent ITM video question--answering solutions either 1) adopt simplistic and unintentional sampling strategies, which may miss key frames to offer the answer clues; or 2) sample a large number of frames into divided groups, which the computational sources can not accommodate. In this work, we aim at an efficient sampling method towards the few-frame situations. We first summarize a family of prior sampling methods based on question--frame correlation into a unified one, dubbed *Most Implied Frames* (MIF). Through some primary results and analysis, Through analysis, we form a hypothesis that question-aware sampling is not necessary, from which we further propose the other method *Most Dominant Frames* (MDF). Experimental results on four public datasets and three advanced ITMs demonstrate that our proposed strategies can boost the performance for image--text pretrained models, and have a wide application scenario in terms of model architectures and dataset types. Our code is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/Sealing\url{https://github.com/declare-lab/Sealing}.

Self-Adaptive Sampling for Accurate Video Question Answering on Image Text Models

Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has become the standard training paradigm for NLP tasks and is also widely used in industrial-level applications. However, there are still a limitation with this paradigm: simply fine-tuning with task-specific objectives tends to converge to local minima, resulting in a sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we first propose a new paradigm: knowledge rekindle, which aims to re-incorporate the fine-tuned expert model into the training cycle and break through the performance upper bounds of experts without introducing additional annotated data. Then we further propose a unified expert-guided pre-training (UEGP) framework for knowledge rekindle. Specifically, we reuse fine-tuned expert models for various downstream tasks as knowledge sources and inject task-specific prior knowledge to pre-trained language models (PLMs) by means of knowledge distillation. In this process, we perform multi-task learning with knowledge distillation and masked language modeling (MLM) objectives. We also further explored whether mixture-of-expert guided pre-training (MoEGP) can further enhance the effect of knowledge rekindle. Experiments and analysis on eight datasets in GLUE benchmark and a industrial-level search re-ranking dataset show the effectiveness of our method.

UEGP: Unified Expert-Guided Pre-training for Knowledge Rekindle

To protect users from massive hateful content, existing works studied automated hate speech detection. Despite the existing efforts, one question remains: Do automated hate speech detectors conform to social media content policies? A platform's content policies are a checklist of content moderated by the social media platform. Because content moderation rules are often uniquely defined, existing hate speech datasets cannot directly answer this question. This work seeks to answer this question by creating HateModerate, a dataset for testing the behaviors of automated content moderators against content policies. First, we engage 28 annotators and GPT in a six-step annotation process, resulting in a list of hateful and non-hateful test suites matching each of Facebook's 41 hate speech policies. Second, we test the performance of state-of-the-art hate speech detectors against HateModerate, revealing substantial failures these models have in their conformity to the policies. Third, using HateModerate, we augment the training data of a top-downloaded hate detector on HuggingFace. We observe significant improvement in the models' conformity to content policies while having comparable scores on the original test data. Our dataset and code can be found on https://github.com/stevens-textmining/HateModerate.

HateModerate: Testing Hate Speech Detectors against Content Moderation Policies

Accurate uncertainty quantification is crucial for the safe deployment of machine learning models, and prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of modern language models (LMs). We study in-context learning (ICL), a prevalent method for adapting static LMs through tailored prompts, and examine the balance between performance and calibration across a broad spectrum of natural language understanding and reasoning tasks. Through comprehensive experiments, we observe that, with an increasing number of ICL examples, models initially exhibit increased miscalibration before achieving better calibration and miscalibration tends to arise in low-shot settings. Moreover, we find that methods aimed at improving usability, such as fine-tuning and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, can lead to miscalibration and unreliable natural language explanations. Furthermore, we explore recalibration techniques and find that a scaling-binning calibrator can reduce calibration errors consistently.

A Study on the Calibration of In-context Learning

The proliferation of online toxic speech is a pertinent problem posing threats to demographic groups. While explicit toxic speech contains offensive lexical signals, implicit one consists of coded or indirect language. Therefore, it is crucial for models not only to detect implicit toxic speech but also to explain its toxicity. This draws a unique need for unified frameworks that can effectively detect and explain implicit toxic speech. Prior works mainly formulated the task of toxic speech detection and explanation as a text generation problem. Nonetheless, models trained using this strategy can be prone to suffer from the consequent error propagation problem. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the detection results of such models are much lower than those that focus only on the detection task. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ToXCL, a unified framework for the detection and explanation of implicit toxic speech. Our model consists of three modules: a (i) Target Group Generator to generate the targeted demographic group(s) of a given post; an (ii) Encoder-Decoder Model in which the encoder focuses on detecting implicit toxic speech and is boosted by a (iii) Teacher Classifier via knowledge distillation, and the decoder generates the necessary explanation. ToXCL achieves new state-of-the-art effectiveness, and outperforms baselines significantly.

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DivTOD: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Diversifying Task-Oriented Dialogue Representations

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